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Chef AJ: Dating and Self-Esteem | Q A with Dr Dough Lisle
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you know the summit replay is this weekend it was last week but it did really well and i'm going to mention how great your talk was as soon as i saw it hey everybody and welcome to chef aj live i'm your host chef aj and this is where i introduce you to amazing people like you who are doing great things in the world that i think he should know about today's guest has been on the show before he's one of our more popular guests or most popular not that our other guests are unpopular she said he comes on a lot because he's always got something new and exciting to say and he answers your questions it's always best to send them in because then you get priority because whenever we have a doctor on the show in general but dr lylon in particular there's a lot of questions if you haven't seen his interview in the truth about weight loss summit we have a free replay weekend i'll put a link there you've got to see his talk because he he answers one question about self-esteem that he just goes into such detail even if you don't have a weight problem you have to listen to this talk and we're so honored that he's joining us today he comes on about once a month when he's available and he is the co-star of the beat your jeans podcast which is fantastic you must listen to it they have i think over 250 episodes an hour now he does that with dr jen hawk who also comes on the show when she can and he's of course the co-author of the pleasure trap which is a must read please welcome dr doug lyle i love you aj it's so fun talking to you it's like i i just i mean i wish we could have lial tv all the time i mean 24 hours a day would not be enough well we got the technology we survived again people don't know how incompetent i am with technology so aj has to like save my save my whatever i was going to say save my bacon but we don't do we don't say that for the vegan world and the thing is is you know you're not a disagreeable person but i i got to say that when it doesn't work it it does bring out that side of you you get very frustrated with it when it doesn't work very true that's the only time i see you not smiling is when is when technology doesn't work so my friend allen his where he is completely incompetent is in directions and so that he he can't find his way out of a wet paper bag and i can't make technology work so that i remember that time when you guys were coming to the conference in topanga it was really late at night and he got i remember he gets he gets lost oh yeah that's right nice right okay you know i'm not seeing anybody in the chat so i just i wonder if this is is anybody there usually we've got so many people let me just double check wouldn't that be funny well at least it's recording so you know that's good news but it's always nice when somebody says something wow there they are just a little bit of a delay hi karen hi oh boy okay all right good so anyway so let's jump into the questions and some of them are really interesting now this first one from mindy it's like i could have written this question so bless you mindy she says dear dr lyle i am a health coach and i hang on every word you say when i am counseling clients i always hear your voice in my head we must work harder on our environment than we do ourselves yet very few people seem willing to do this i actually had a client this week that said to me i would rather have gastric bypass surgery than to tell my husband he can't eat pizza in the house or buy my kids cookies how can i impart your wisdom that the environment is critical to success to my clients and why is there such resistance to cleaning it up and how can i help them want to do this i think that's a very good question um i think probably the first way you're going to do this is you're going to explain it as an experiment uh that's the only way we're going to get it you know past the husband and the kids etc so we're in and you may need to start with a small experiment and a legitimate experiment would be say two weeks okay so that's that's how we're going to i get them to take a shot at this and the truth is maybe they'll do it or maybe they won't so we say well why don't we try and experiment for a couple weeks and uh and just see if we can get the family on board it's like a little life adventure uh we're just gonna see it's gonna be we're gonna pretend like we've gone back to the the olden days before you know uh before mcdonald's and before bird's eye and before any you know anything like that we're gonna pretend we're in 1890 okay and this is what we're gonna do for a couple weeks and we're gonna just see how it goes all right at least mom is going to and so you know what what where dad takes you guys when i'm not looking that's not that's not my problem but in the house we're going to pretend like it's 1890 right so we can do a little experiment like that and obviously if we if we have a hostile environment that can't that can't take on an experiment then that's a whole different level of conflict in that family but um that's how i would try to coach somebody into sticking their toe in the water to see what it feels like to probably feel better and also feel the concept that they're making progress so they want to experience that i feel like that's the uh that that's the the chief architect of any of any uh long-term success is starting to get a little bit of positive feedback for your efforts and you need to go long enough that you feel it that's why you know the mcdougall program was always 10 days in in in-house and that's why the um that's why you know true north uh people are usually encouraged to to be there a week or two at least uh or a fasting escape couple weeks so we're we're looking at something on the order of a week to two weeks to run an experiment because if we do that uh if we do a good job of that a lot of times we notice some actual physical changes uh physically that that are then worth worth doing it again so that's how i would do this uh there was another part to her question uh that i have lost aj okay so there was she said oh sorry i moved it up um how how can i impart your wisdom that the environment is critical to success why is there such resistance and how can i help them want to do this yeah the there's a lot of resistance and that resistance is going to come for one thing they can be anticipating conflicts of interest with other people and they don't know how to negotiate those conflicts and so this is one avenue of negotiating conflicts is to make a short-term negotiation out of it so that the other people don't feel like they have to dig their heels in because they're facing a lifetime negotiated event so it's an awful lot easier negotiating uh your teenager over cleaning up their garage once and what you're going to pay them rather than a a five-year contract on how we're going to do it it's a five-year contract they're going to get very tough in the negotiations and so are we because we don't want to get stuck with a long-term contract that we don't like so it's way easier negotiating short-term contracts and long-term contracts uh and so that's that's why it is that we aim at that another reason there's a lot of resistance is that um the the pleasure trap by nature is very tenacious so let me explain to folks why the pleasure trap is so difficult to do so if you're a health coach out there trying to fight the good fight you should expect that the vast majority of the people that you work with that pay you money and are motivated to come and try to work this out will not succeed okay so now that sounds very grim uh but let me explain to you why and it's not because people are weak and it's not because they're stupid and it's not because they're unmotivated it's something else and this is you know i've been almost alone voice in the wilderness on this on this issue uh because it is not understood it is briefly acknowledged but it's not understood so now let me explain it in a new way i want you to imagine that i'm holding a piece of paper in my hand which you know what i've got aj i don't know i'm not sure that that we can we can see this uh hold on well we love your visuals especially when there's artwork okay well it's not much artwork we're doing this really fast this is going to be what i call the continuum of value okay and so on one side of it is terrible the other side of it is great and neutral is in the middle so i want you to understand that this is what your mind does is your mind is a device for evaluating your environment that's what it does so if you're uh if you're the prettiest girl in a small town and now another a really a one one notch prettier girl moves in that is not a good thing okay you did this there's maybe she becomes your best friend but there's a good chance that this is not a good thing for your situation value has to do with a specific uh problem of life and the problem of life uh is the reproduction of dna and so it's going to turn out that there are two sub-processes for animals in order to solve the problem of the reproduction of dna which is number one survive and number one reproduce and so all of human instincts uh and animal instincts are nothing other than um essentially subsystems uh that are designed by nature to help that thing happen so you're you're sneezing or an itch or hunger drive or temperature regulation or the the appreciation of beauty in the landscape the the the attraction the sound of running water the look of flowers you know the taste of an apple all of those things are positive instinctual feedback mechanisms to tell you that each of those things has a positive relationship between you and your survival and your genetic success if you are walking in the woods and you're a twig snap you have anxiety and that's because that's a that's a signal from the environment that that you could be in danger okay so this is what your life is is it's it's a it's an emotional system that is resonating to the continuum of value the most valuable possible thing might be i don't know the the the day your daughter brings home uh you know an award from school i don't know or the day you fall in love or you meet the love of your life the worst day is you know i don't know the you know maybe uh maybe you get a pathology report on a cancer that looks really bad okay that could be your worst day or something like that so in other words there's there's very good news and good feedback or good good indications uh uh that this is a good situation for you there are indications that it's bad and there's everything in between and when it's in between it's neutral so the truth of the matter is there's all kinds of stuff in the environment most of which you feel pretty neutral about so i could look around this room obviously everything is in this room because it serves some purpose but a lot of the times it's really pretty neutral so here i don't know what this is doing here it's a it's a washcloth and it's been on my desk for a little while i i don't even know why it was here okay the um i think it yeah somebody i was folding clothes here or something and that happened to be there and because it's brown it looks like the desk i i left it there and i didn't notice it i don't know why but it's pretty well useless pretty close it has almost no value so when i look at that i don't think oh my god that's dangerous or oh my god that's so exciting i don't look at it that way i look at it it has causes almost no emotional reaction at all okay now if it was something very valuable then i would have a pleasant reaction inside my nervous system if it was a picture of my cat aj sent me a picture of my favorite pen captain cat that i ever had and i hang it next to my fireplace so thank you very much aj i love that picture all right so that if i ever look at that picture that makes me feel good yeah uh if there's something uh if not that same cat has puked on the rug then that's bad okay the continuum of value causes your feelings to be what they are your nervous system if you are struggling with uh with eating behavior change etc your health coach and you're trying to work with people you have to understand that their life is operating on this continuum of value and that what they want is that they would like to be as attractive and presentable as possible that's the number one reason they're probably talking to you as a health coach they may tell you that they're talking to you as a health coach to improve their health but a big part of what they're probably trying to do is to improve their appearance okay now they also very well may be highly motivated to improve their health they may be scared to death about something or they may have some significant pain that they're trying to get rid of but one way or the other they they have some things that they are seeking and their brain says we need to execute some behaviors in order to accomplish that the problem is is that on the continuum of value there are the nervous system uh was designed for all animals to uh to try to get as much energy as they could from their food for as little effort as possible so therefore that means that they have sophisticated signaling devices for taste preferences uh they're going to tell them that the richest food is the most valuable food okay therefore on the continuum of value the the richer food is more valuable and therefore the nervous system's instinctual machinery is telling them that's absolutely the right thing to do okay so for all time that's always been the right thing to do and now today we're going to tell them no that's the wrong thing to do it's like wow oh okay i'm just going to do it differently are you kidding me that's like defying the instinct that says don't take don't take a sharp stick and stick it into your ear okay okay you don't need to learn that you that you know to not do that of course you can't start doing that if i told you oh no it's really healthy it'll solve your pancreas cancer if you take a sharp stick and poke it into your ear and really hard so you scream in pain you're like really i don't think number one that doesn't make any sense and number two that's extremely unpleasant and i'd say well you know yeah you've got better believe me it's a fiasco to try to get you to go directly counter to the instincts the instincts are super sophisticated unbelievably trustworthy signals of what's in your best interests they're incredibly trustworthy if you're walking in the woods near your twig snap your instincts are telling you stop right there turn and look and be ready and your heart starts beating faster okay just like that immediately it does that because it's getting ready for a very serious athletic challenge that could be the difference between survival and non-survival for you okay so these instincts are unbelievably sophisticated we don't just override them because we've decided that they're wrong you're never going to do that okay so what are they really up against they're up against doing something that is completely unnatural nobody ever had to change their eating behavior to become more attractive that is completely an utterly nonsensical concept makes no sense at all there's no connection in evolution between those two things okay the fact that we can learn that that's true because we've altered the food in the 20th century to the point where people are walking around with varying degrees of disgusting presentations because they're misshapen they don't look like human beings are supposed to look okay so they so therefore there's varying degrees of revulsion on the part of other people that's why that's why people stand a little further away okay that's why people don't want to hug you that's all these things it it's something now we're not i mean those are harsh words i'm using but i don't mean them harshly i mean these are basal instinctual processes that go on inside of people if they if they're looking at you you don't look like the instinctual human being is supposed to look if you're 80 pounds overweight and so as a result it's slightly off-putting and disturbing okay for all the stone age brain knows what's wrong with you is you're in a massive inflammatory disease process that could be communicable that would be a reasonable inference for the stone age brain to make it turns out that if you have a sore looking thing on your face i think of a centimeter in size if they'll put that on your face a darkened spot that looks like it could be some kind of a pathological process people will stand further away from you this has been done in psychological experiments okay so it's actually substantial it's like a foot you know this is amazing really interesting experiments that have been done on this so the point is is that you're uh you are getting a lot of this sort of negative feedback and you want to change that yes and do you actually understand why you're getting the feedback yes you do you understand that you got passed over for a job or not called back for a date or whatever it is all kinds of little feedback situations okay uh now and now your health coach tells you oh i've got the solution just go directly counter to your value system go not just not just somewhat different from your counter value system completely opposite of your value system i want you to go 180 degrees away from your value system that's about as easy as trying to teach somebody when they're in the woods in the dark and the twig snaps to turn and start running towards the sound whether you know what it is or not okay so if you're a health coach that's been struggling with this i hope you now understand possibly a little bit more graphically why you cannot expect success there's a a modest percentage of people that have uh both the intelligence and the motivation and the personality that they can actually take this information and consciously and deliberately grit their way towards going against their instincts for long enough to find out that their instincts are not doing them any good and in fact that they can get past them they can slip past those instincts and that they can get themselves onto a behavioral path that gains them some leverage that's why we're trying to run an experiment okay so essentially what this is if you're a health coach you're attempting to come up with one no pun intended just by accident palatable experiment after the next and so one way of making an experiment palatable to change your environment is to uh tell your spouse and your kids you're running an experiment okay so that's uh but you know there's i'll run into you know the person i'll give them an idea they won't do it they'll fiddle around it's the best idea i had i'll talk to him three weeks later they haven't done it we'll have to then unpack why it is that they didn't do it i said well let's what what was getting in the way there and then they'll tell me kind of what was getting in the way and then we try to problem solve from there and try to maneuver our way around that little obstacle but along but the entire uh process is is one of the central gentle patients and understanding that since you're trying to get people to go 180 degrees opposite of the genetic code we can expect that it's it's unlikely to be successful it's not likely to be easy and once in a while we're gonna have some successes we're gonna have a lot of obstacles in the way we're likely to have a lot of relapses and we will have some successes some people will succeed and they will succeed brilliantly and then we'll wonder why everybody doesn't do it this was mind-blowingly helpful dr lyle because i don't think you've ever talked about the value continuum before or actually address this question because i too wonder why why people don't do what to me is so obvious but thank you for explaining it very good great nice all right so now we actually are going to jump to a dating question this is sort of like a beat your jeans i love when i love when guys send questions because they don't send as many questions as women so this is a question from richard dear dr lyle i'm a 62 year old male who was widowed two years ago i am well educated successful in my career fit and told by others that i am a great catch i'm ready to start dating and the majority of the age-appropriate women 50s and early 60s that i have been meeting many have never been married and many are still living at home with their mothers is it fair for me to disqualify them based on this i don't mean to be unkind but i keep thinking that if someone is that age and has never been married and is still living at home then there must be something wrong with them are these legitimate reasons to disqualify someone or am i just being too picky thank you um yeah this is a really good and interesting there's a broader principle to this question and uh so let me let me explain what the broad principle is uh people behind the energy conservation mechanism people are looking for what we're going to call correlations uh so correlations are are uh correlations are are when things go together okay so so for example dark clouds and rain so dark clouds and rain are correlated okay so bright sunshine hot sunshine and sunburns are correlated so you're uh they're correlated because there's a causal connection between the two of them so what we want to do is as we learn and grow we can learn correlation coefficients now your nervous system has a lot of correlation coefficients embedded in it so when the twig snaps uh you know to feel fear and when you bite into the apple and it's sour it's less appealing than the one that's sweet those are correlation coefficients to what's good for you um so that's how that works or if you smell manure uh you know sometimes if there's something that looks like cat cube uh and i'm not sure if it's flat cat puke or cat poop but i'll lean down and smell it and then i can tell so the uh so that's uh your your nervous system is designed by nature to look for correlations and so what this man is asking for is uh are these life history uh situations with these women are these correlations that are in fact being caused by something that i don't want to buy okay so that's what it is that he's trying to to establish now the truth of the matter is is that those correlations may be they may have some truth in them in other words it could be true that people that have never been married have problems with them more often than the person that has been married that would make sense uh to some degree in other words uh some some doubt that uh all things being equal attractiveness wise someone that has never been married may be more disagreeable and harder to please okay so that uh so undoubtedly that correlation coefficient is legitimate the question is how legitimate is it and the answer is not very it's a little bit legitimate okay so it may may be responsible for making you slightly more accurate in your decisions if you're going to make 100 decisions that way and you have them coming at you very fast and all you had on a resume really quickly was ever been married or not been married then you might use that if you you know along with any other uh information and it's also do you live with your mother okay well uh the truth of the matter is some of the people might live with their mothers unlike right now i live with my mother well actually my mother lives with me but whatever you want to call it okay so uh so does that make me you know sort of a loser well maybe [Laughter] but the truth is it's actually out of compassion for my mother uh that that's true and so uh so that makes me potentially uh have some baggage uh that would be in the way of some romantic relationship that i might be entering because it'd be like well sorry uh my my humanity and my connections in my life history have me uh in love with this little lady and i'm not gonna ship her off to the little nursing home down the street i'm not gonna do it okay not as long as not as long as i can manage it so that i would hope would not be a rule out but it would be some it would influence the cost benefit of a woman on the other side of that equation looking at my situation and uh she might feel like wow what a nice guy and therefore that doesn't rule him out or she might think oh my god what a pain in the neck you know this is going to be this is going to be in the way of this relationship to some degree of percentage of time and energy so therefore i think i don't want to deal with it okay so what do we have to say about this uh don't be too quick to look for correlational shortcuts okay so don't do that in other words you can you can learn massively more about a human being by sitting across them in a starbucks drinking tea for an hour than you can by looking through any clues like this to try to help you make a decision don't don't try to look for clues like this just meet their humanity okay by essentially talking to them for a short period of time you have ingenious mechanisms inside your nervous system that have been built in there for millions of years to try to help you assess their personalities and so uh whether a woman has never been married and lives with her mother if you meet her and you really like her as a human take that as by far the most important information and uh let's don't be using a superficial shortcut like that now if the guy says to you ladies that um yeah i i i can't meet you this week because i got a big infection on my tattoos i got those tattoos when i was in the joint you know i just got released a few weeks ago if that's happening then you might the joint being the prison uh you might want to pass on that that's probably a pretty good set of correlations for you to uh to uh give credence to but uh not this so be quite open-minded and meet the person's humanity and let those instincts tell you uh what what you want to do about that possible opportunity okay terrific thank you all right uh but where did this one go this was about uh yeah okay this is from leslie uh dr lyle i've heard you say that you're not a fan of gastric bypass surgery i'm wondering how you feel about the newer non-invasive weight loss surgeries like the gastric balloon aspiration therapy endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty and gastric injections these are not permanent and carry much lower risk do you think these are of any use as a good idea to kick start someone's weight loss and affect behavioral change no i think they're a bad idea um i i i would i am open to uh you know if my friend michael greger tells me that he's just reviewed a bunch of research which he likes to do and he comes and he says okay doug it turns out that there's this or that percentages of this like okay i'll look at it but as of today i would categorically uh reject anything like that and by the way i don't know that michael's ever commented on anything like that so i'm just i'm just making a joke about about his research you know fanaticism the um i i stand open to the evidence and so i don't want to take a stand that i wouldn't be willing to reverse if there was evidence that was compelling to me um my my experience clinically with these things has been uh consistent feedback indicating a bunch of trouble and i think that the truth of the matter is is that i have confidence uh i i can think of i can think of a few cases i can think of one case in my career one okay so it's been a long career in this arena i can think of one case in my career where somebody that had absolutely exceptional diligence uh in her behavior was was able to at best get down to moderately obese that was an extremely unusual genetic structure okay and there are such people on earth so the uh those people number the typical numbers are on the order of one in ten thousand okay so they are extremely unusual uh characteristics this is the vast majority of people if they eat healthy diets uh if they eat a natural food oriented healthy diet they are going to lose copious amounts of weight and they're going to wind up at a very acceptable weight level uh so that that's how that works the um now for the outlier or true outlier that would be in that's an interesting question since i've since i've only had one that individual did not choose to do anything like that she was a highly intelligent highly conscientious individual and decided to just live with uh the results that she gets from doing a good job and that's that you know good good for her i respect that had she said to me you know what i'm gonna do one of these gizmo things and i'm gonna try to see if that'll help me lose another 50 pounds i would have said you know what not unreasonable i don't know that it's going to work we never know because we never know that the nervous system is so brilliant it's such a redundant system that if you start to lean on one system very often it's essentially treated by the dna like an injury and then it just starts weeding its way around that injury and then it compensates in some through some other subsystem and they wind up right back where they started okay so that is very uh characteristic of many people that have had many of these types of uh invasive processes take place so she is so she decided being well aware that that was a possibility but she didn't want to be doing either permanent damage or just wind up with a situation where she had temporary results for a year and then the system started to work its way around the impediment she didn't want to go through that merry-go-round so she decided you know what i'm just going to live with it and i complete respect for that uh also great compassion it's like what do you have to do you know but she lost she went from 360 pounds down to about 220 uh by doing her diet properly so that was a that was as good a victory as we get with an outlier so that's my attitude uh in other words these things are guilty until utterly proven innocent and i'm not going to believe any short-term feedback i want to see what that looks like on an individual five years after it's been used and i want to look for longer-term evidence of side effects and damage and the the entire cost so yeah i'm not likely to be changing my opinion anytime soon but i do stand open to uh particularly the use with with the extraordinarily rare outliers okay so everybody else my attitude is hey don't be monkeying with a precious system that was you know god-given system that it needs to be operated the way it was designed okay that that's our challenge and it is a big and difficult challenge but that is the challenge we need to be focused on i believe i think that's the right way to do it right thank you uh let's see you have so many nice comments cheryl says thank you for this great information dr lyle karen says i love that he is so sensible and kind i could listen to his logic all day that's why i said we should have lyle tv like just i'll just i'll sit here 24 hours and and talk to you so here's a this is a poignant question and uh i didn't want to start with it because it made me feel a little sad just reading it from joanne dear dr lyle if you have reached an age and a stage in life where it is unlikely that your dreams will ever come true is it best to stop pursuing them and just settle for the fact that this may be as good as it gets and if doing that is truly in our best interest how do we ever reconcile the sadness that comes from our lives not working out the way we hoped and planned to give you some context i'm a well-educated female approaching 50 who is still unmarried still overweight and not where i want to be in my career i find that trying to be successful in all three of these arenas only gets harder as i age and i'm afraid i'm gonna die alone yeah okay so let's see what we can learn from this the um unpleasant feelings um are particularly of this stamp you can have an unpleasant feeling because you've got you know bacteria in your stomach that are making you vomit the um but unpleasant feelings that of the type that she is describing are uh are the results of a discrepancy between what we think we should be able to achieve and what we are in fact achieving and so the the the nervous system is built essentially like a thermostat it's an emotional thermostat so so i want you to imagine if you are working at a job and then you find out that your friend works at a similar job at a different firm and he's being paid 25 an hour and you're being paid 18 an hour um so now you were okay with your pay until you find this out and now that you find this out you find yourself a little bitter a little irritated and motivated to go to the other firm or to tell your boss you need a raise and you feel kind of angry and assertive and frustrated okay it may even cause you to get passive aggressive at your work in other words a whole bunch of things start happening in your nervous system when you find out that there's a discrepancy between what you're getting and what you think you deserve there's a that is a natural state of the organism to be uncomfortable and feel frustration under the situation where the brain has evidence that it should be here in terms of its feedback from the village and instead it is here okay so that discrepancy is what drives that system uh sometimes we can do things about about it sometimes we can't so for example we might have um back pain and it made uh turn out that we've had we've been in situations where we didn't have the back pain and so there's a discrepancy between we know we know how we can feel physically and how we feel physically and is tremendously frustrating uh about that and we can we can get help and go to chiropractor we can uh you know i just learned that some back pain may be the result of some bacterial you know processes that are going on in in in the spine and that can that may be able to be corrected by various uh interventions so that's sort of a new idea i guess it's been around for a while but it's new to me so the point is is that there there could be things that you can do but if you've done everything that you can do and you still have the back pain you're still gonna be frustrated okay now the um so what i'm about to say is not magical because it won't necessarily like a magic one fix uh the what this person is describing however it's the closest thing we've got so now i'm going to tell you that uh how how the mind works that feeling of discrepancy of what it is that we deserve that that bar is set by rational processes of observing our environment and looking at what competitive people competitive to us have achieved and feeling like that's a reasonable target okay so if you are um oh i don't know let's suppose you're a bright young person with a degree and you've got your your uh dietitian and you feel like well i should be able to earn enough money to have my own nice apartment in tucson and uh and that i should you know get be recently respected by the little medical staff like these are reasonable expectations okay so if those things aren't happening for some reason then we should feel frustration until that thing gets corrected that frustration drives us to make efforts to try to close the distance between what we are getting here and what we think we should be getting but what we should be getting is set by very sophisticated comparison algorithms that that are instinctual in your head you look around and you see who can do what in the village and whether or not you can do it in the village and then you set your course accordingly so i didn't i never i never looked at the big bruising guys that were getting to wear the football uniforms around high school there were 220 pounds and i didn't say to myself well i should be able to be on the football team no i didn't i recognize that okay so i didn't you know if i went to the dances and i saw a few of these guys could just smoke up the floor because they had incredible coordination and they just had a self-possession and cool i didn't think to myself well i should be able to do that okay in other words we don't we don't all think that we're going to be burying manilow or joe montana or lady gaga we don't set our sights there we set our sights at what looks reasonable about what we should reasonably be able to achieve and this woman has undoubtedly set her sights at reasonable levels and yet she's here ah that's very important okay so now what our problem is that there's a there's a journey of achievement that needs to go to take us from here to here and that's a process and that process uh is it's not easy because the person has already tried and they have gotten a lot of failure feedback and they have not they have not been able to traverse that okay now so the the painful feelings of loss and frustration and loneliness and fear about all that that's all reasonable okay those are all reasonable feelings telling you they're trying to motivate you to cross that divide now so our job is to work on crossing the divide and that job means identifying the fundamentals that our competitors have mastered better than we have that have taken them to a place where they've been in a more competitive situation where they were then able to get better trading processes in work friendship romance etc okay so our job is to do that and as we work on those fundamentals what happens is that a very important part of our pain starts to fade so our pain our feelings actually come as a result of two different processes and this is going to involve the discussion that aj uh told people that we've had uh oh on the summit okay so this is now i'm not gonna recap the summit i'm just i'm going to recap a tiny portions of it that are important there are two different feelings that are super important with respect to our happiness one of those feelings is what i call self-esteem the other feeling is we're going to what i call self-confidence those are different things and people are sloppy with the language and psychologists are sloppy conceptually they don't actually understand that these are two completely independent uh phenomenon now so let's look at this self-esteem is what happens to us self-esteem is a feedback feeling that comes as an internal audience observes our efforts and gives us feedback on what it thinks of our effort not on our accomplishment on our effort okay so if our effort is diligent and excellent even if our feedback or our progress is not high or it's low or it's zero then what happens is we'll feel frustration and we will not feel a rising confidence confidence is an enormous level of happiness it's a huge lever self-esteem is a smaller lever but it's a critical one now the um the greatest pain that we're ever going to feel really is not a lack of self-confidence self-confidence is what happens when we know that our presentation and what it is that we have to trade is going to get the feedback from the village we know it's going to get good feedback from the village we can already tell because we're getting good feedback from the village or we can see that our presentation is just as good as someone else who is getting good feedback from the village so that feeling of confidence there's no feeling like confidence the confidence is where the rubber hits the road in evolution because real live people are real live giving us good feedback they're real live saying that they want to date us and they want to be with us they're real live telling us that they want to hire us that they want to hire us again they realize are saying that they want to be our friend and hang out with us there is no feeling like confidence okay that is not the same thing as self-esteem self-esteem is the feeling that comes with knowing that you did an excellent job you did your best okay if you work diligently at a project that you know is standing between you and the positive feedback that will result in self-confidence and the enjoyment of superior relationships if you work diligently at those fundamentals your internal audience will tell you i respect you okay i respect you well done okay hey it sucks that we may not be getting better feedback that we have inner peace of knowing that we've done the best we could when you don't have that inner peace you are really you're hurting three times as much i can tolerate negative feedback i can tolerate the frustration of not getting the feedback that i want to and think that i could get to i can tolerate that if i give it my best and they don't like it that much okay um i can live with it it's not doesn't feel good the uh but it but i can tolerate it i can give you an example as an author when i wrote the pleasure trap um alan being allen because he's inherently optimistic allen was like oh this is gonna be big this is gonna be big this is gonna it's like well the pleasure trap did not sell very well there's a pleasure trap had we been with a mainstream publisher they would have stopped the print of the pleasure trap within a couple of years man wouldn't have been worth doing now i gave that book my best and when i go back and i read it i have an experience it's like yeah yeah somebody got it right so the point is is i look at that with pride okay and when it was not selling well and it never did so well it sells better now than it ever did so it's had a tremendously long life as a book and it's now finally done what you would consider well thanks to aj okay thank you aj you you've probably been our bit our biggest and best promoter the um but the point is is that even though i could feel disappointment in the first couple of years after its publication um i i still had completely intact self-esteem about it i still had pride with my effort and what what i accomplished and the fact that the market was not biting at it it's like i can live with that i don't like it i wish that it had been more successful at the time i can remember that but it's like i can live with it okay and we went on on radio shows and we promoted it and we talked about the concepts and it's like listen these sir and alan i think it was alan that finally one day it dawned on him he said you know doug we are selling against the pleasure trap we're actually telling people if they work really hard and do something that they really don't want to do then they may get some benefit out of it that is like the ultimate exact opposite of the way you sell things what you tell people is that they can do something that they exactly want to do that's going to be really fun and tasty and that they're going to get all this benefit like the chocolate diet i think that was the day he said yeah it was it was the chocolate diet we would have sold a bunch of books okay and of course yes selling it's a pleasure drop is the toughest thing to do well so anyway the long the long answer to this is the following probably your pain is being tripled by the fact that we have not consistently done the diligent effort to earn self-esteem when you do that and you can do that you can start to earn self-esteem and see a change in a matter of days okay so the notion is to be an expert at learning how your own internal mind works how your how your feedback system how your feeling system emotion system works and the way it works is when you do a diligent effort even if you're bitter because you feel like you're probably not going to be successful but if you do the fundamentals as well as you can identify them as well as you can if you do them hard and do the hard things you will find that you feel better about yourself okay and that is the solution to that problem the truth is you can die alone a lot of people can buy a lot you can spend the last third of your life alone a lot of people spend the last third of their life alone but it will hurt three times as much if you didn't do your job we can't just be at peace and inner peace by sitting back and saying boy life hasn't treated me well i haven't had gotten a break you got plenty of breaks okay you got plenty of breaks you were born in the united states of america you're you're living in a free society whether you're born here or not you're here okay or wherever you're listening to this you're probably in a place that has a great deal of freedom a great deal of prosperity and you don't have to face the horrors of what people faced in 19th century and every time before your the world is your oyster you have great opportunity you have great opportunity for self-improvement and the beauty of the human mind is your internal mechanisms didn't set the goals so high they actually set them very reasonably your job is to do the inconvenient difficult and unpleasant process of working the fundamentals harder at what are standing between you and there okay the solution to finding a mate is to work on your on yourself on the deficiencies in your presentation to the point where you've made yourself into the best presentation than you can and then just act natural not gaming anybody okay you're you're you you become the best version of you that's what you do okay when you do that if the market doesn't like it and you can't find a partner you can live with that okay um but you can't live with the very well with the notion that you didn't do your part of it that you do need to do okay so that that's the solution to the inner peace is to uh to work on the things that are stopping you well uh i love listening to you i mean so like when you go to the academy well not when you go to the academy awards i've never been but when you watch them obviously not everyone wins and so when the actors say it's just an honor to be nominated did they mean that because they did their best work because it seems like they don't want to win absolutely and you'll find some personality differences and you know i've listened to some of those speeches and they're interesting i listened to cher said no i have to win that's like like good you know good for her and she won and all as well but um but the truth of the matter is um that is exactly how those people feel what a tremendous honor it's like hey at the end of the day you your uh john wouldn't have a saying and i won't get the quote exactly right but the saying was if you've done your best you've won it doesn't matter what the score is if you've done your best you've won and that's how we have to look at this so that includes fighting down and the imperfections that are going to come uh inevitably from fighting a thing as hard as we're talking about and and choking down the ego trap and doing your best you can uh and not just kicking over the table and if you do picking up your yourself again and trying again okay so uh you know that that's what we're here for we are here to assist you in a very very difficult struggle uh can't you know the geneticists will tell us that 80 percent of the variance in weight is genetic okay john mcdougall will blow his stack i don't think he's ever heard me say that but if he did he would block his stack for good reason because uh that is true and you can measure that in behavior genetic studies but that doesn't mean your genes are your destiny that just means that they provide a tremendous challenge and obstacle that doesn't mean that they are your destiny your uh your uh whether or not you are fit look good get in can essentially present your best self uh to the world in that romance arena that is actually up to you and that that is the the all the little tidbits of details and fundamentals that aj and i have been talking about for years okay that's what we do and we look for the self-esteem that comes with doing those along the way the thing that i want everybody to know is your self-esteem can change dramatically in a matter of days your weight can't but your self-esteem can and that's the the most important correlation coefficient for you to realize is that you the feeling of earning your own self-respect is the most important part of that journey wow i i've been googling john wooden quotes is this the one that you had in mind dr lyle the one that says success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you you are capable of becoming that sums it all up yeah nice great well um would you like to end now because uh uh what's our situation we have a few more minutes or no well for you we have a few more hours but i always like to respect the time um let's take another question okay so i i like i say normally prioritize the one sent in but there's this one live that has caught my eye especially because we started out talking about the environment and it's from carrie who says my 86 year old mom is a hundred pounds overweight and is addicted to ice cream she can eat a carton or two per day she begs me to buy it four cartons at a time which i won't do anymore and says it's her only joy in life and will be dying soon any suggestion yeah either the ice cream you know let's let's let's get realistic now so we we have our own personal goals and we have our own personal vision of what it is that we want our specific life to be and um you know the thing that came out of the women's movement i think in the 1970s is that you know we own our bodies okay yeah you own your body and they own theirs so her her mother owns her body so it's you know this is a this is a situation where at 86 years old she's not capable of driving to the store herself and buying it for herself so you know this would be a reasonable thing for us to do i would honor her wishes um and you might you might want to fiddle and experiment with her and see if you can get her to have soy ice cream instead uh because it might be just a little bit healthier but no i would not uh i would not be trying to uh uh any more than you've already done and try to influence that process wow see that i wouldn't do it and not just because i won't buy people animal products i mean i'd buy i would buy somebody crap if i had to in that situation but i wouldn't i just wouldn't buy animals i understand i understand that but uh but uh i would i would i mean i have great compassion for the animals but but your yours and my commitment to that as people will have is going to be on a continuum and uh i'm up there pretty high but i'm not at the same level that you are so that's why i would i'd roll my eyes buy the ice cream but i would try to sell them on the soy okay that sounds great well you're wonderful dr lyle thank you so much okay oh one more aj okay well okay we said we weren't going to get into political questions but there's a part of this question that's not political but if you don't want to take it you won't but it's it's from jen and it was how do you be friends with people who voted differently and it's not so much about the election but to me the bigger question is is how do you be friends with people that completely disagree with you that's what i'm seeing in the question why you know that's um yeah that's a that's a good question and um these uh we we will get into things like this uh jen hawk and i will talk about that you know on on podcasts and uh at a living wisdom library we do a couple times a month we do in-house uh in-house q and a's where we will take on questions like this so this is very interesting so let me try to give you a relatively quick answer your your instincts are actually uh were built for a different time so your instincts were built uh as uh were entirely built uh as hunter gatherers in sub-sahara africa and so that hunter-gatherer lived in small troops uh probably rarely more than 50 and so we we actually see some evidence that at 150 things start breaking apart uh in human psychology they don't like coalitions that large so in all probability these were relatively small coalitions 50 or so and those coalitions had to make decisions about how they were going to do things uh whether whether the men were going to band together and go to war from the on the other guys on the other side of the river whether or not we're going to go south uh when the weather changes or we're going to go to the east um that's how we're going to you know i i don't know other processes of negotiation how we're going to deal with the fact that we suddenly got a big strong would be alpha male who is harassing some females sexually or stepping over the line and he is he's sort of well liked and charismatic but he's a problem and now he's done something that that we that a bunch of us feel like he needs to be excommunicated but he's not going to go quietly okay so this is there are problems in the stone age village these problems are political uh politics is about how we how are we going to deal with the conflicts that arise out of living in the group the group is extremely advantageous to live in it's an insurance scheme it's a mating pool it's it's it's a way to trade and get uh benefits of exchange and and expertise uh you know one woman can can look after four women's kid while those four women go and harvest something that's difficult to harvest but they have to be around possibly dangerous situations and they don't want to bring their children there or somebody wants to go romancing with a lover but they need to have their couple of kids looked at while that's true so there are tremendous advantages of group living but the problem is is that there's conflicts and so how we resolve the conflicts in group living is politics that is what politics is about it's about what are we going to do what's fair we've got conflicts of interest here uh we've got rules yeah but now the rules don't seem like the right we need to change the rules so here's the problem in the stone age you were if you were an adult you were one of 25 adults or 20 adults in that village which means if you're one of the women you're one of the 10 women and if you're one of the men you're one of the 10 men okay not very many people you're related to a couple of them so one of them is your brother so you got your brother in the village and then you've got a sister-in-law in the village okay and some people in the village have conflicts with people on the other side of the river but you've got a sister on the other side of the river and two nephews okay you got conflicts now so it's going to turn out that in the stone age village you if you really wanted something to happen you probably had a lot of say in whether that's the way it goes down so and those those decisions were super important to your life it could be life-and-death kind of decisions and so you you were working your political capital and you let people know this is important to me listen i know you don't care about this you're my brother you're not into this but that son of a cheated my kid okay and therefore i want him out or i want him publicly humiliated or i want something okay because that's not gonna fly and if you're my brother you gotta freaking be with me on this okay so you see that there are within the group there are sub coalitions and there are factions that's how that's gonna work and they're shifting around they're not always stable okay some of them are real stable uh but you could have a husband and wife in a village and there they and their local little people close to them their their children or their brothers and sisters etc they are a big voting bloc in the coalition they comprise they control seven votes out of 24 that's a big deal okay so however you know nine years later that parabon breaks up why somebody cheated somebody that's a big issue and now that whole political coalition is in trouble now we don't know who's lined up with who and there's high drama so here's what this whole thing is about what i'm trying to tell you what i'm trying to tell you is your stone age instincts are telling you the political differences between people you know and like that are actually on your team in life political differences at the national level of the united states government those actually feel to you like they are very important issues in the village and that you must have solidarity and if you don't have solidarity you're freaking against me you're against me on something super important but that is an illusion okay that is a vast illusion national politics in the united states have absolutely almost nothing to do with your existence okay you think they have something to do with your existence they have little tiny pieces to do with your existence i've lived through i counted him at one point i don't know eight presidents what are we gonna go like i i was a lot i was alive in eisenhower kennedy johnson nixon ford carter reagan bush clinton bush obama trump biden third is that 13 presidents i don't know what is it i think it is 13 presidents have come and gone 12 have come and gone one of them is now still here okay what did i do is my was my knife really good when that man was bad with that and then good and that and then battling that because of national policy absolutely not okay the beauty of the united states and a democratic republic like this is that the government has become quite irrelevant in the lives of people okay now with covid not a big deal i guess it is you know there's like laws about what we have to do in the face of a pandemic but the truth is it's still not that big a deal by far the major factor in your life are the relationships that you deal with every day the people you trade with the people that are in your house your kids but your close coalition your stone age village and you are making a huge mistake if you think that the people in your stone age village need to be in solidarity with you about national politics that's a huge mistake okay so national politics national political figures a huge amount of what causes us to like or dislike people does not tend to be their policies or the implications of those policies because usually those things are unbelievably minor in your existence they have more to do with personality characteristics than anything else so now we're talking about personalities for god's sakes personalities that won't have any influence on your life at all so really this winds up being an argument among friends about whether or not you think you know whether you like brad pitt and willie miggs willie mays is the best player in baseball history no he's not like we're gonna argue about that what a shame to argue about that so for me political process is more for people that i agree with we enjoy each other's company talking about it because it's tickling to tickling stone age instincts to feel like yeah we're in solidarity not that it means anything as a libertarian every single one of my candidates has lost forever i have never won an election [Laughter] not once okay so i you'd like to to me i shrug my shoulders uh i'm i'm more interested in policies that come and go those are those are mildly interesting to me they're not very important okay they really don't influence my life very much the um so do i have feelings about it yes does it tickle my instincts yes do i recognize that i absolutely love admire and respect people on different ends of the political spectrum for me i better since i meet almost no one that agrees with me okay i got a few friends and we're not too different but i remember one of my good friends one day he hadn't even talked about politics once we started talking it's like oh he's disagreeing with me he's trying to school me that was hilarious and i just got irritated with him more for the fact that he was trying to school me rather than than the fact that he disagreed with me i understood why he disagreed like he had uh he had a misunderstanding about the nature of economics and i turned out i knew a hell of a lot more about economics than he did he thought he knew he's a little arrogant and over the years he's modified his position on a few things because he now knows better okay uh he wouldn't have known that i made a major study of economics in my early twenties and i was an econ major and i was inherently fascinated with it so my opinions were extremely well informed and his work okay but did we break up a friendship over it are you kidding what difference does it make what i think nobody in the world's governments anywhere cares and nobody's ever gonna implement anything that i would implement okay so for goodness sakes people don't let this instinct derail your life and mess up your relationships these people that you like and that you love have their own personality reactions to people in national government elections like this last one and those those feelings may be very strong okay but they have absolutely nothing to do with your life so for god's sakes love the people that you love respect the fact that they've got some some uh emotional connection to brad pitt or angelina or william is or or it's trump or it's biden or it's obama whatever i don't care i can respect the fact that that's the emotional connection that they have and look right past it and love them and that's what we should do wow um i don't even know what to say so all right thank you yeah you're anyway thank you so much dr lyle all right my great pleasure aj yeah should we tell people what what we're up to for next month to give them a little uh excitement here i don't even know what we're up to what are we up to okay well so next month instead of appearing with dr hawk she's going to do a solo and you're going to come on with dr alan goldhamer that's right and the reason is is because you are going to be the should believe it or not the show's almost a year old i had no idea i was going to be broadcasting every day for a year thanks to the pandemic and i thought well episode or season two who do i want for the first episode since i couldn't decide between you i said maybe we could have both of you and you both said yes and it was really kind of funny because i had emailed dr goldhamer and he he just he forgot that he was coming on with you and he said okay this is the powerpoint i said well are you sure you want to do a powerpoint if dr lyle's going to be there he goes oh i forgot i go maybe you guys want to just do something fun and he wrote me back and it said no fun is good and i didn't know if he meant that no amount of fun is good or no comma fun is good so i actually had to call him up he said he forgot the comma so he does want to do something fun with you that is that is so priceless uh a freudian would say that was no accident no fun is good that sounds just like alan well that's what i thought so guys make sure you mark your calendar for march 21st uh episode one of season two none other than kicking it off with my two favorite people so thanks a lot dr lolly really love having you on absolutely it's a pleasure aj thank you so much for having me it is my pleasure and thanks all of you so much for watching another episode of chef aj live if you're free in 45 minutes i'm doing a free cooking demo i posted the link and please come back tomorrow we have the dynamic duo from slave food dr columbus batiste and dr eric walsh thanks dr lyle bye
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