Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Chef AJ: What Goals Should You Set for 2021 | Interview with Dr Doug Lisle
an auto-generated transcript


To get a shareable link to a certain place in the audio,
hover your mouse over the relevent text,
right click, and "copy link address"
(mobile: long press & copy link address)
 


little blue line is moving along very nicely 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 you should know about today's guest i have interviewed many times he's a fixture on the show we're so thankful that he has the time to talk to us because he's brilliant and every time he comes on we learn something new and when i asked about six months ago who you wanted for the last show of the year a lot of people voted for wonderful doctors that actually won't be on tomorrow one was on last week but we decided since it's new year's eve and this is a time when many people reflect on the past year which for many people have been very difficult but for other people it's actually been wonderful they've made lemonade out of lemons and a lot of people make new year's resolutions that generally don't last more than a couple of weeks we thought we would bring him on and he could maybe discuss setting our attention for 2021 please welcome dr doug lyle so happy to have you here great to be here aj just grand you're the best i never you know even when you talk about the same subject say the pleasure trap you always manage to say things slightly different that i get something new every time and it's new year's eve there's no way to go so i even got dressed up for you even though i have nowhere to go all right well let's see now the it is a time for i think for all of us uh to to be thinking about you know a new year always feels like a new opportunity and even though uh the the illusion is that the opportunities there all along that it could we can turn our life around at any point but there's something about a new year where essentially we we get to let go of it it's kind of like uh it's like a new game you know if we had a if we had a bad game and we're an athlete it's okay it's behind us and now we can get a new game if you had a good game excellent now we're gonna do try to do two in a row the uh i have i have a few alter egos uh yeah in my life and one of them is bill murray in the movie groundhog day and so for those of you that haven't seen it um it it's considered by some people to be some people actually there's unfortunately a fight that broke out between bill murray and harold ramos about the movie uh remus they're both great comics and it worked together a lot but remus just wanted this to be a setup for a lot of great bill murray jokes and comic delivery and murray saw something in this movie that was way more important than that and so apparently this was quite contentious and remains a sore subject between the two men to this day which is too bad uh because murray was right and uh there was something great about the movie so is it as much as there's a there's a saying from uh oh gosh he's a british playwright and i i forgot that it will come to me in a second so and edward albee it's gonna know this is one of the big ones from early 20th century george bernard shaw yeah george bernard shaw good for you aj thank you that's that's true it's a relief george bernard shaw said uh if you're gonna tell the truth uh make make people laugh or they'll kill you and so one of the great ways to deliver a hard message is to deal with humor and uh it takes an art to do that and groundhog day is is got a deep message in it and it's uh obviously it's told with incredible talent in the humor department so it brings all of harold ramus's you know genius and comedy and bill murray's but it also brought something else and i'm not sure you know who is who is sitting at the wheels of the writing of this but murray recognized it and he wanted to play to it and he did and the story is this in a nutshell and that is that if you do the same old view things you don't get to move on to a new day okay it's when you give things your very best and it's actually amazing and chilling for me to think about this because this movie encapsulates my entire philosophy as a clinical psychologist and that is that the you finally see that when bill murray murray his determination to get what he wants but in fact what he does is he just does things he finally accepts that he's just going to do things to the very best of his ability and he's going to quit basically trying to get into i forget the lovely actress's name she's going to quit trying for her was it andy andy mcdowell yes yes and so he just you know he starts out like a typical the worst example of a typical guy you've ever saw self-centered out for himself just trying to con her like just the the uh quintessence of human conflict and then we move through a process where he essentially finally little by little he lets go of of that goal and his goal becomes becoming the finest person that he can be okay and when he does that that's when finally this this wicked puzzling frustrating uh spell lifts and he gets to move on to a new day and so that that is uh that's the that's the great message and so that's uh what i try to to uh share this it's not like i'm some master at this it's just that that a lot of people across history have recognized it and and we recognize how difficult it can be to break out of old patterns uh and to break out of old ways of doing things and that that uh but the but the answer to a better future to a different day of our life that our life experiences instead of repeating the same old things but they become something new and that we essentially are allowed to walk past the gate of our previous limitations and walk into a new place where we get to experience a new life and a better one and uh in order to do that um i have i have a woman i'm i'm working with now that uh it's it's quite a story obviously i'm not going to tell any details about this other than this part of the story um very bright motivated you know knows everything uh like so many of the people that call jen and i uh you you know so much so it's not like i can say oh you're making a mistake here or you're making a mistake there the the thing is is that she wants so badly to lose 60 pounds and she's embarrassed of her situation and it hurts her professionally and it probably isn't doing her marriage any good and you know and it's certainly hard on her just natural self-confidence and so the uh and so for years she is sometimes you know she'll say okay well what can i do i want to be you know 175 pounds by july 1st okay and my message has always been that's not what i want you to focus on i want you to focus on the feeling that comes with doing it right and we want to quit focusing on the outcome and focus instead on the process okay we have been around the block on that 10 times over the last actually 10 years and it was interesting in the last month somehow i i said it for the 40th time and i said uh you know she's sort of in a in a state as the new year approaches i'm feeling once again like another year went by nothing has changed she still has still has 60 80 pounds that is too much and it's embarrassing and she's frustrated and she made half-hearted little attempts and and it's the same year it's groundhog day and about about two weeks ago what i said to her somehow finally the penny fell and and i and what i try to explain is what's bothering you more than you know is your self-esteem your self-esteem is not the same thing as your self-confidence in the book that i'm writing with jen i try to make this distinction as clear as i possibly can in other words i'm making it extraordinarily clear i may be fighting a battle about in the human language that is a mistake there's other people that have done this where they have insisted that the language is being used improperly and they try to go into the t everybody's teeth and try to re-educate them and they fail and i may fail at this so i i don't i don't have a better term self-esteem is not the same thing as self-confidence they are entirely different self-confidence is the feeling that you can succeed it's the feeling that others are going to value what it is that you have they're going to want to be with you they're going to want to be your friend they're going to want to marry you they're going to want to hire you there is no feeling in the world like self-confidence self-confidence comes fundamentally from one process which is feedback from other people about what it is that they see so when other people see your resume when they see what horses you can carve when they see that you can dunk a basketball when they see that you're beautiful that they will give you positive feedback and that positive feedback is translates into your natural confidence in that arena that confidence can change in two seconds by the way the uh it's context dependent so many times i've felt confident with a bunch of guys on the basketball court where we're playing and then in walks a bunch of big tall young athletic guys into the gym and suddenly i'm like okay well i'm not so confident so your confidence is a is a process of your internal competition for the things that you're seeking and whether or not you think that you can get there um now and so it fluctuates but you can have a baseline of confidence based on a track history of that other people have sought you out that they like you that they want you want what it is that you have to offer and that confidence can stand up to a lot of short-term vicissitudes easily of course so it's it's a reputation with that you know that you have with your history in the marketplace that's self-confidence we want our kids to have it we want to have it that's what we crave and that's what this lady was craving the confidence that said other people are looking at you and say wow you look good and that's a great feeling and i'm trying to tell her and everybody that is not the most important of course it's important of course that's what we want that's bill murray trying to sleep with andy mcdowell in groundhog day of course he wants to she's lovely okay she is a great girl she's not she's not you know there's not one ounce of sleaze in andy mcdowell's character it is a wonderful person that you would want to spend your life with and he's tweeting it as a mark just just like that character was written okay and in it he never gets to go on to a new day because he's focused on the outcome and he doesn't have it all integrated properly and the lesson of the movie is focus on your internal audience what does your internal audience think of you how well are you doing this job are you being integrity in integrity are you being honest are you being decent are you working hard that's your internal audience and when you have done a mediocre job as this lady has done you know over this last year despite momentary efforts where she pushed for a couple days and got on the exercise bike we've all been there um it was always behind trying to get inspired to get to the goal at the end and about two weeks ago i once again went through the explanation where i said listen one of the most painful feelings that you have that you don't even recognize is your self-esteem mechanism your self-esteem mechanism is not happy with you your self-esteem mechanism has some disgust for you okay you also feel the lack of confidence that you know that you are not in a good place to present yourself however that is not where all the pain is a lot of the pain is coming from your self-esteem mechanism looking at your performance not at your outcome looking at your performance did you do what you knew that you should have been doing and the answer is no not very well and so the the c minus work that you did this year on healthy living is the c minus feedback that your self-esteem mechanism gives to you and it's that feeling of malaise shame disgusted unmotivated and kind of like giving up and what i try to explain to people is that the self-esteem mechanism is incredibly dynamic that's why i call uh gems and my's way of approaching psychology esteem dynamics that is not a fancy title for fun it's trying to distill to the heart of it how this approach is different than every other way that we look at psychology that the esteem processes that guidance are dynamic they are not static and they change very quickly they can and the self-esteem mechanism is the bedrock it's the gate that opens us to a better life it's paying attention to it rather than leaping over the fence and saying no i just want to get to the other side where there's better feedback where i get better results and people like me more because i know that that will make me happier yeah it will but it's not the same thing okay if we instead focus on uh doing an excellent job in front of ourselves and not caring about what happens to our waistline this week okay but our job is to do an excellent job if we do that then we're going to find something very interesting and that is within a week our self-esteem mechanism can start changing its signal to us instead of being disgusted and rolling its eyes and a bit ashamed of us instead it says ha that's pretty good yeah that you just look like you mean business within two weeks it can be almost exhilarated as it discovers that the shackles that it's been carrying around on how it is that you feel about yourself you were under an illusion you thought that the most important thing was feedback from other people your imagination told you that you had to traverse a distance between your performance and display now and your performance and display later at the end of this road when we put a gold medal around your neck of some kind of accomplishment the answer is no that is not what's going to happen if instead you work diligently today work honestly diligently and consistently you will find that the self-esteem mechanism will change very quickly in a matter of days and as it does uh which is happening to this client after 10 years best this is a client with uh natural ambition and impatience uh is a lot a lot of people are a lot of people that come to sha are people they're not bumps on a log they're people that are willing to pay prices in other words they are they're they're not lazy they're they're not just going to sit with the masses and just accept mediocre no they're they're finding us and they're also not listening to get rich quick schemes they're not on slim fast and sucking down chocolate shakes they are intelligent enough and discerning enough and mean business enough that they're they're ferreting out the truth but even then the natural desire is i want it over and i want it over now and i almost don't care how it happens i just want the self-confidence that comes with a better presentation and that is not the way of the way home is to start with the self-esteem mechanism two weeks in uh my girl is exhilarated okay she's my girl she's close to my age she we've known each other a long time we're good friends we've been talking for like more than 10 years maybe we're more like 15. and so we've been around this flock many times we've had momentary successes for a little short while but this is the first time that i have her understanding what i mean and she's watched her internal audience and watched what it feels like to do a good job and feels this moral cleanliness and excellence and is reveling in that feeling and is not obsessed with the outcome this is the first time i feel like we are hitting the first stepping stone in our journey i feel like all of the rest of it has been preliminary this is the person that knows how to cook she's cooked 100 of aj's recipes she's done an awful lot of things right she's got a lot of pieces under her fingers but she did not ever hit the first stepping stone she wanted to step around it which is so normal okay the uh so that that is the the lesson that i want to impart you know today for the beginning of the new year is let's start out and hit the first stepping stone let's get very clear about what that thing is that thing is all about the feeling that i'm aiming at for you if you are in a muddy feeling of internal self-regard you know and you're confused because you think that it's your frustration over the lack of positive feedback that you don't have a slim beautiful body or you don't have some other things you don't have some achievement to show the world that you're that you would be proud of okay and that you would get good feedback for those things are fine but they need to be the result of an excellent chain of effort not just getting there and it will turn out that everybody that has ever done anything will tell you that yes it's nice to get the applause at the end but there is nothing in this world like the journey nothing like it so aj can look back many years ago and can can think about that journey that she took okay and she'll never get to do that journey again okay it's like it's a you know revel in it enjoy the process you know it's like watch that feeling of your self-regard shift as you do an excellent job and you feel it in your bones like look at this because you're making a great discovery about the nature of how your how your uh your psychology is designed and it's it's really the most important discovery that you can make about yourself that you know what it isn't actually even though it's important what other people say and think about me the truth is is i'm in control of one of the most important things in my life which is what i think about me and you can't change what you think about you by staring in the mirror and saying positive things you can change what you think about you when you start doing an excellent better integrated job uh at working the fundamentals of the problem so that's now the story and then today what we're going to do aj for a little while is talk about some of those fundamentals but go right ahead yes i don't mean to interrupt it's just i just don't i don't want to forget to tell you this i might have told you this before but i want the audience to hear it and this is why it's so good when you repeat these principles more than once so if you remember dr lyle when i lived in la for about seven years i would run a program called the live ultimate weight loss program over four weekends and you would skype in you would be the guest one of the weeks and this was the first meeting of this particular group and there was a young lady in it with her husband and they were they were basically new to veganism and they really didn't have a lot of weight to lose was more kind of vanity pounds but they had been exposed to the health message and they were trying to be proactive not the usual person that i get and this was the very first night of the course and the young lady beautiful blonde lady who had some vanity weight she wanted to lose but no lifestyle diseases at that time said something to the effect of well dr lyle because the program was overwhelming if you're if you're seeing me for the first time and you hear like because it's basically gold hammers you know dogma no sos and it's like like what but the food was good that she was eating and she asked you said dr lyle you know does it matter if like you know once in a while i just go out and have pizza and beer and and you said no that would be fine and you were answering it from a certain i think like a health perspective and then you went on through the evening and you answered the other questions and you said wait a minute and you went back to that young lady and you said you know it does matter it matters to your internal audience and you started explaining some of these principles about how your internal audience can either feel proud of you or disgusted with you and somehow that clicked with her and what was really interesting i didn't find this out until a few weeks ago is she had been suffering from infertility for a long time and she was already in her 40s but she always she never gave up hope that one day she would have a baby but somehow by you saying that she adopted the most health promoting diet she could without deviation and it reversed her infertility so do you see what i'm saying how a little thing like that yes of course you know people you know it's not like you have to beat yourself up for a cheat day but cheat days generally don't work for most people and by setting her on that course that first night you really changed you really you know you really changed her life because she wanted a baby more than anything and for her this is what made her it possible so thank you absolutely and um i would say something else that there's a there's i understand why it's very clear to me why people believe in karma um i believe that people believe in karma because i think in our ancestral history we were in small villages and anything that you did all the little things that you did everybody is somehow watching and there's an overall calculus that they're not all gossiping behind our back about everything we do that we fight you know stick my fingernail between my teeth to dig out corn you know they're not saying oh can you believe he stuck his finger between his teeth and dug out corn it's not that they're watching every single thing that we do but over a lifetime they're they're seeing it okay and so and it's gonna turn out that so often are uh what will happen to us in important moments of our life and sometimes critical moments of our life other people's other people's um impressions of us will have big consequences for how something happens you know i'm sure we can think about we can think about i'm sure there's been a great movie made where uh and i i can't remember one but i you you know that there's been one where an innocent person of great character has been accused of a crime and it all looks really bad and it looks like they're guilty but they're not and because of their reputation they there's people that are tenaciously determined to look at every possible angle to try to figure out where are we missing a crucial detail and uh that's that's a great story actually that story uh is is played out in real life in a in a uh in a mystery of the south sea islands uh a murder that took place uh on the island of palmyra by in the 1980s um maybe maybe even in the 1970s uh and there was a woman that was accused of taking part in this and she was absolutely innocent and because of who it is that she was and all the little dots on the graph of her life vincent biliosi who is a brilliant attorney that prosecuted charles manson took her case and defended her in in the teeth of really really scary-looking evidence and she was she was found not guilty and if you read the book and the c will tell it it's a chilling book but it's also an amazing story of an attorney and a client and who that client is just reeks out of her pores because all the dots are on the graph this is a really fine human being that was in very very bad circumstances um so karma oh that this is the the story of this of this uh of your young lady who becomes fertile the uh it's funny if you do the right things over and again and you you work at you know you work at trying to stay true to principles that are important to you if you do that you don't know how good things are gonna happen you can't predict them you can't predict them but they will now that doesn't mean that good things don't happen to some real sobs in this life they do unfortunately so but the thing is is that if you're a good person working a good process good things will happen and uh and they'll happen many times from unexpected sources so she probably wasn't exact wasn't thinking nobody was promising her that a really healthy diet was going to reverse her infertility uh that that would be a false promise but guess what happens she does the right things and does them really well and an unexpected beautiful gift happens so that's uh that's why you know i i want people to uh with this journey this is a um helpful living and making making excellent changes to your health uh this is a difficult journey for reasons that that alan and i catalogued and talked about for 20 years um the and that is that we weren't designed to do it this way and so my colleague jen hawk now has a beautiful phrase and that is that it's not your fault because the world has stacked the deck against you it's not your fault but it's your responsibility it's like wow okay all right so it isn't my fault and it's not okay and it is i'm not supposed to have to face this problem i'm not supposed to have to do this uh we were not born with trying to make these choices in the teeth of all the temptation around us so uh however too bad okay it's our responsibility and so that's uh this is a good health and a feeling of being fit these are cornerstones of a better life and they're the cornerstones of continuing a good life and so that's uh that's why every year at new year's you know this is a time for us to rethink and think about how we can make you know improvements uh over what we've been doing in the past i'd like to talk a little bit about some of those things aj um and you can add to this because you talk to more people about this than i do but this is uh my my way of thinking about sometimes making substantive changes in our lives is is to what i call structural changes so uh structural changes to me are very important to pay attention to the uh and let me tell you let me describe what i mean by that so a structural change would be for example let's suppose that that we have oh i don't know let's suppose we are not going to be able to clean up our environment because we've got people in the house and they've got you know they've got their crap and they're they're not there's no way around this problem okay fair enough now the problem is is that their crap is always all over the refrigerator there's not room for our stuff when we open our our refrigerator we see all the gooey sticky self-indulgent stuff that they have it's a problem so what do we want to do we may want to do something like buy a second refrigerator and put it in the garage okay the that may seem ludicrous but that may be an important solution where we can now have a place that is beautifully organized with our stuff it might not even have doesn't have to be a big refrigerator it doesn't have to be a big side by side but suddenly we've got our own space it's clear of everybody's pepsi cola and whatever else is that they have and chocolate ice cream in the freezer so we've got a pristine spot and in that spot we can beautifully organize our food okay and so that that is a way that you know sometimes if there's too much crap in a refrigerator you can't even eat anything healthy because it's just it's literally the channel factors of getting in there and getting a salad organized out of that or too much trouble so that's that kind of a thing i would say for example if you bought an instant pot but you don't know how to work it it's sitting somewhere in a cupboard like a boat anchor okay well this would be the time this week or tomorrow to play with it learn how it works and get good at it so that that can save you time and energy and get you more confident okay the um another thing would be for example would be to get organized about the recurrent things that you're going to be eating a lot of so there may be oh for example i'm going to eat a lot of tostadas that i'm going to make so that means i'm going to have a lot of cans of black beans in the in the pantry and i'm also going to have rice that can be microwaved easily so i'm going to have those things and i'm also going to i'm also going to see at the beginning of the month is i'm going to have some uh healthy corn tortillas in the refrigerator so now i'm defended so the only things that i'm going to need to buy that i'm going to add to that are going to be avocados and lettuce so that just simplified my shopping list so i have very little to add to my shopping list in order to make something that i'm going to make recurrently probably five or six times in the month of january okay so the notion of uh uh also an ex an excellent storage system so that once again we don't have room to cook large amounts of things like a big pot of excellent soup and we don't have really good containers to put it in and the containers are too big or they're too small we want them you know maybe two quarts so they're a really good amount to put things in so that we can just put them put that container in the microwave and heat it up and we're done we don't even have to put it out on another plate and just eat it out of the container you can sort of tell them a bachelor but this is the way i might do things uh to keep things very easy and so that i've got plenty of space in my cupboards i've got my storage materials and i've got a refrigerator that has room and i've got the materials in the pantry and the refrigerator and the freezer that i need to bring to bear on these things the idea is make it easy you want things very easy because it's uh the key for most people is a thousand doses of wet starch in the next 12 months that is the that is the most important thing that we can do there are other things that we need to pay attention to and other things that we need to look out for we need to learn how to give snappy answers to our pushy negative relatives and think we're crazy there's a bunch of other problems but one of the most important problems is what i call the starch stream but if we just have a stream of wet starches that keeps coming at us that are have enough variance that we don't get bored then this is we want to get really good at it we want to get up the learning curve we don't want to be cooking at one meal at a time we want to be cooking at five and six meals at a time so that so that we restoring it we're gonna replay that very same food two days from now or three days from now the uh so that we've got a swirling cauldron of a river that keeps coming at us with some variety and simplicity and excellence because that that is going to be the chief uh architect of your success this year so structural changes to make that problem solvable uh that's that's what i would have people pay attention to dr lyle right i i'm sorry because i play a lot of jeopardy were you thinking of the movie maybe the fugitive the green mile or double jeopardy where people were falsely accused oh i was probably thinking of the fugitive which is a movie i loved okay yes that undoubtedly that was tickling my nervous system yeah double jeopardy that's that's an old isn't that the old scary one with uh way back that's double indemnity with barbara stanwick double jeopardy was a fictional movie with ashley ashley judd in it no i don't know yeah and the green green mile was the one in prison yes i haven't seen that so i've i've heard it's great but i i just never uh i've just never happened to see it so that would be a good thing for this year but but yeah the fugitive that's exactly what was tickling around my nervous system because obviously the harrison ford character is painted uh and beautifully played by a perfect casting of a man that comes across with great honesty and he has a great deep love affair with his wife and he's a man of high integrity and principle um and everything about him everything about him leaks but this is a superb human and uh in places in that movie you find uh deep in that there are people that know him that are absolutely know in their bones that he's innocent and they they wind up brent playing you know crucial roles in helping them and so that's a that's a uh a fabulous that that plays that that can't be done any better that that story that is a that is a karmic story uh obviously it is a tragedy that uh his wife is lost but it's the it's uh out of the tragedy the karma that he has earned uh comes full comes full circle so yes and speaking of speaking of karma earth i thank diane zalman and queen of aries for their super chat donations you brought me luck today very good all right you have any questions from anybody or is that possible well there is a question but it's it's one you've answered before and it's not exactly on topic but matt wants to know what you eat in a day i kind of typed what i thought you ate in a day right uh i'll eat typically i'll eat oatmeal uh in the morning and then i'm going to eat there's no telling what the next two meals are going to look like other than that they're extremely repetitive so uh there may be a big bunch of soup there could be tostadas i also cook myself spaghetti so i don't have a problem eating whole wheat spaghetti and i'll all use tomato sauce and then i use uh you usually frozen vegetables of some kind because i'm pretty lazy people uh i am not a cook so uh i i can uh i was talking i was talking one time with a uh a a gal that was was very into cooking and uh it was an inch and two conferences she sat me down and she says okay i want you to tell me what you eat and i said well pasta and then i'll sometimes i'll just steam up a whole bunch of vegetables in a big vegetable steamer and then sometimes i'll bake potatoes and i'll take avocado and i'll mash avocados in there and i'll make tostadas or a big pot of soup and she looked at me and she said so basically you know how to boil water and i said i hadn't thought about that but that's more or less all i know how to do is to boil water that it gets the job done that's hilarious so i guess you don't even know how to use your own instant pot no i i've got it i've got it sitting on so i'm talking big uh i i i have my routine so i don't i don't uh have to use that but other people i saw some gal make a fabulous carrot cake like oatmeal yesterday on and she used the instapot and this was she's going through all the instructions i'm like i'm already lost i'm not going to do it and the good thing for me is that i have a very simple palette so that i can just do what i do over and over again my the one thing i do have this a neat thing aj is i've got a vegetable steamer that's a double decker and again you just put water in the bottom and this way unlike the old steamers where once in a blue minute if i'd go off on a phone call i'd come back you know i burned a few pots in my time uh by burning through the water so the vegetable steamer ends that problem and so uh yeah vegetable steamer a pot to boil water in and um and that's in a pot to to boil to put soup in that's about it well you may have a simple palette but you have a very complicated mind so there are two more questions nat wants to know what you think of the my myers-briggs and somebody wants uh milady wants to know what you think about the raw vegan lifestyle huh um okay uh the myers-briggs was invented in the early 20th century uh by a daughter mother and daughter team and they they formulated it around around uh carl jung's thinking and personality and so they all they also had aspects of it that that uh wound up lending itself to being extremely popular the one of the aspects about it is that the dimensions that they used uh have no negativity in them now of course this is ridiculous so nowhere on the myers-briggs is sociopathic sob that's not on the myers-briggs yet that is in the human personality so the myers-briggs turns out to be um a legitimate attempt in early history uh 20th century before we knew very much about the nature of personality and that we were still learning uh about statistics and how to actually validate scientific observations so historians in psychology look back on the early 20th century as a really the birth of social science because so many things had to be figured out and learned about how to observe people how to actually test hypotheses this was not known people didn't know how to do this in 1915 and so the myers-briggs was was being formulated in a couple of decades past then so the people that were involved had no idea and did not understand the conceptual developments that were taking place in science so the myers-briggs is pseudoscience at this point so it doesn't have any validity at all uh it is it sounds good it sounds fancy it makes for great cocktail party conversation if you're ever at cocktail party which i'm not um yet uh yet uh it is not uh it has the little there's little bits of validity as there was little bits of validity and uh in carl jung carl young uh made a a big deal out of the introversion extroversion dimension and it turns out he didn't really think of it as a dimension he thought it was a type but it's a legitimate dimension in human individual differences but yeah the myers-briggs is not legitimate and uh the the legitimate way to look at personality is through what we call the big five and so if you go to the big five project for example or you go to any any test online the test the big five big five is a legitimate scientific discovery that first raised its head in the early 1960s then it was then lost for about 20 years it was uh i don't think it had enough data and somehow it didn't capture the imagination there was so much alternative thinking uh in the field of personality that it didn't grab anybody's attention it it resurfaced um in the 1980s when there was more computers and more databases and uh and more more uh psychologists in the personality field were more facile with the statistical packages and and the understanding of how personality might be discovered the underlying structure that structure was discovered and it's um uh and we now know it is the big five i call it the big five plus one because we add intelligence to the big five but the big five are the five major sources of individual differences in people uh this is also true in animals so this is characteristic of nervous systems in general not just people openness conscientiousness introversion extroversion agreeableness and emotional stability or neuroticism uh those are the big five and we can reliably look at this in dogs and cats so i've got three cats one of them is uh much more emotionally unstable than the other two he moans you might have heard him earlier he was slightly embarrassing i could hear him moaning from down the hallway he can't help himself the uh the other the other one uh uh my my big my big striped one is the more extroverted and we'll walk right up to you even if you're a stranger and start clawing your foot as she makes bread on your fine leather italian shoes she doesn't care uh the other two wouldn't dream of doing that so individual differences in personality are are uh essentially for all intents and purposes natural to the person and so they will be consistent throughout the lifetime and and they fall on those five dimensions yeah so the the myers-briggs like i said makes a good story because every dimension is nice whereas when we say something like a true dimension like conscientiousness notice what it looks like very conscientious versus flaky deadbeat unreliable you know unworthy that whoa that's a legitimate personality dimension not whether you're a thinker or feeler that's not a legitimate dimension all right very good aj and then we had another question yeah now there's a couple questions will you ever go back to true north and maybe give a lecture and the question is what do you think about the raw vegan lifestyle well a vegan lifestyle um raw vegan lifestyle is it can be done and if people you know people can do well on that the it's not that easy to do well on it the uh what we're skipping over is we're skipping over the big cooked starches uh which are that i believe are the foundation of basically the most sane approach uh to healthy living so can it be done yeah i suppose you could eat a lot of bananas uh which is a starch and you can eat those raw that would be one way to go about it um i guess a question that's coming with the concept of the raw vegan lifestyle is what usually comes out of questions about raw food aja is a is a a thoughtful concern about the notion of whether or not that's the best way to live and so people that usually ask that question are are uh inherently curious and open-minded and pretty sharp and they're thinking no well now wait a second why are we eating cooked food that is not consistent with any other animal in the animal kingdom and we are in fact an animal even though we consider ourselves on some higher planet and we are we're really super fancy we're the fanciest thing that was ever created but we are still an animal obviously it's no great pronouncement and so the raw food or enthusiasts are basically saying come on you're an animal what makes you think that you should be cooked food the answer is is that we have been eating cooked food for as long as you've been human the human the entire length of time that people have been on this earth who you could currently mate with and have an offspring i.e your species and your species goes back probably 300 000 years 500 000 years ago i'm not sure that you could have produced an offspring with a with a with our ancestors of 500 000 years ago you may have been able to but you might not have been able to a million years is exceedingly unlikely i'm almost positive that that would be impossible the 300 000 years i think is so and it's universally recognized that it would be certainly 180 000 years ago for the last three hundred thousand years i have no doubt that human beings have been consistently cooking their food there's evidence that that proto-humans have been cooking food for probably at least a million years so long before they were smart enough to use sentences the way you and i do they were already using fire consistently so basically what i'm telling you is is that cooked food is whole natural food it is as natural as grapes on the wine so don't be thinking that it's likely that there's some penalty in the digestion and metabolism of cooked food that is inferior to that of raw food i do not believe that's true okay so i don't think it's at all necessary to try to be eating a raw diet to optimize your health in fact i think the the help optimum is probably i believe that the health optimum is a um if yeah nobody asked this question but if someone actually told me okay doug there's uh we get to talk to god and so you get to put your hand on on a plate and and tell what you really think you don't even have to use words just what do you really think is the healthiest life possible for a human around their diet what do you really think it is and then if i'm right i get patted on the head okay here's what i think it is i think it's steamed starches not baked and steamed vegetables and lots of uh lots of and with those steamed vegetables a lot of steamed greens uh dark leafy greens and i think that it also includes um obviously fresh fruits and uh fresh raw fruits and fresh raw vegetables and and a few nuts and seeds that's what i think okay so in there we see a lot of room for cooked i believe we're going to find that steamed is probably infinitesimally better than baking have no fear i eat plenty of baked food and i don't think twice about it in other words i think the baked a baked potato is 98 as good for you as a steamed potato i think a steamed potato is probably two percent better that's what i think it'll be interesting to see if you outlive dr goldhamer i hope you do because i really don't want him to have the last word and at your funeral and say see it's because of that carrot cake oh that would be terrible aj yeah really terrible and you brought me another look at that forever though he deserves it becky conley thank you for your super chat donation so should we be making new year's resolutions is there any proof that those are effective i tell you what i would make one resolution go make one structural change think about a structural change that you can make in your life it could be in your kitchen you know what i mean it could be it could be uh that you clear out an area in your garage and you have some exercise equipment that you put in there that you haven't done that you put a stereo out there so that you can put on your favorite music while you exercise in other words or that you in other words try to do something that makes your life easier and more likely that we will do something positive in a way that we haven't done it so well that would be the new year's resolution because that resolution you can fix in the next 24 to 48 hours and so that that means that we change our environment so aj this is an encapsulation of something i've said and you and i have talked about a thousand times work harder on your environment than you do on yourself let's make a positive change in your environment right now because we're not even working on yourself we're working on putting you in an environment that's better for you so that you can do a better job and with that support your self-esteem and ultimately your success that's great i think this will be a beautiful note and then there's lots of other questions so guys join ffof because he's up on wednesday a lot of questions about whether personality was genetic all they have to do is listen to beat your genes podcast for the answer to that one yeah they can also uh we have uh on my website or mine and jen's website we have a place a special library called the living wisdom library that you can join cost three dollars a month and or you can get a lifetime membership for 99. that for three dollars a month you can go and listen to a series of lectures and jen does a lecture series just on personality and i do one on general psychology and motivation and self-esteem so those are those are all there for you and you can listen to your heart's content and i'll make sure i put that in the show note and we just got another super chat from angela thank you and you know if i don't answer susan's question she's going to keep bugging me will you ever come back to true north and give a lecture she wants to know oh i will someday sunday but uh it's a long drive and uh the problem is that true north you know with the mcduvo program is running then i get to double dip because true north uh john and john i think allen follows john around so they're within one mile of each other so it was always super convenient for me to to speak at the mcdougall program manager north the uh the problem now is is that that the mcdougall program is now virtual and so uh undoubtedly if the mcdougall program which i dearly hope comes back in real life in you know in some form at least a few times a year and if that happens i will definitely be back at true northbound the times when i'm out there well you know i have dr mcdougall on the show tomorrow i don't know if he's serious but he's saying he's loving doing the program virtually so much and the results that he says he's never going to do it and well it's my game because now i get to be in the program i know that i i love the i love the real live people and so no you just love the chocolate pudding in the lasagna i do i this is truth everything you say is true aj but i also really like it in person there's nothing like speaking to a group of people in person and getting to know them so i hope we do some of the some of those in the future and if we do i'll certainly be bi-journal okay well dr law thank you so much for all you do for everyone and coming on the show and talking to my people and your people make sure there's link in the show notes so people can listen to the podcast and join the living wisdom library because jen was on yesterday and was talking about how she's doing like like a webinar and you're going to be a guest it's very very affordable i'll make sure everything is in the show notes because most people just can't get enough of you oh it's a joy aj thanks for having me again this year and i look forward to a really good yearbooks youtube dr lyle and happy new year to everyone thanks so much for watching and if you come back at 2 p.m we have one more inspiring show we have chris wark who beat cancer and has a wonderful new book that will help you get through 2021. take care everyone thanks again dr lyle hi everybody
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist