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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Chef AJ: ALCOHOL AND WEIGHT LOSS, PSYCH MEDS FOR TEEN, SPERM BANKS MORE WITH DR DOUG LISLE
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hey everyone 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 before i introduce today's esteemed guest i just want to let you know that the latest version of the forks over knives magazine has hit the stands and not only do they have 76 amazing recipes but they did an article on a friend of mine and an article on my favorite product so check it out if you can't find it in whole foods sprouts or your newsstands you can actually get it on the forks overnight website so my guest today is a doctor my favorite doctor in fact and just so you know we do try to answer all your questions we do our best but the best way to get your question answered is to send it in to us and by that i mean when you're on my mailing list shift aj.com once a week usually on sunday occasionally on saturday we send out the guest list for the entire week respond to that email with the question then i can keep them filed on my phone very neatly and if they don't get asked one month they get asked another because anytime there's a doctor we get lots of questions and believe it or not some of the doctors want to see the questions in advance and won't answer live questions so to move to the top of the queue send them in that way you do need to be on my mailing list you also have to understand that you're watching this somewhere but i'm streaming to seven places so while you see the chat with the people on your platform my chat is seven times as big and it goes fast and after about five minutes the comments disappear that's why we really ask for you to please send your questions in events because today's guest gets lots of questions please welcome dr doug lyle you are a very popular guest doctor oh my goodness aj it's grand to be here yeah i'm so appreciative that you're often willing to come on once a month and we have some interesting questions i think dr lyle you know i'm a big fan of yours i listened to your beat your genes podcast which i think you have close to 300 episodes now so i really try to discern questions that aren't things you've answered before and i'm pretty sure that this first question i haven't heard you answer and because it was so unique we're putting it to the top of the queue now where the heck is it wouldn't that be funny ah here it is it's from and it's from sebastian in germany so a lot of the people know you very well and know your evolutionary psychology background and so some of these questions are like what does this have to do with weight loss well not everything is about weight loss guys if you want that come to feel fabulous dr lyle does a great job of unpacking it so sebastian says if we are primarily driven by our genes trying to be replicated wouldn't it be best to donate sperm to a sperm bank and then don't care for the rest of our lives yeah let's say uh let me that i'm trying to figure out i mean that's a that's a common sort of misconception and i'm trying to uh let me see if i can figure out how to um i've never really figured out how to answer this optimally i've never actually taken the trouble and i'm not going to come up with it today the the um it's more like this suppose that you had a uh a rocket that was uh that you had programmed to get to the moon and so when it got knocked out of kilter maybe a little a little uh meteor hit it and it got knocked off three degrees then it heads back just keeps heading towards the moon now you and i know that the rocket doesn't want to get to the moon it's programmed to get to the moon okay and that's how humans are humans don't want to reproduce their dna they are programmed to reproduce their dna so your just as the little rocket thrusters would go on on the on the moon rocket and it would you know if it gets knocked out of kilter it has a feedback system that suddenly and the little cross hairs of its radar the moon has now shifted a little bit so that means oh in that case we we reduced that thrust on that rocket engine and we increased that one so we tilt it back and now we're heading back a little bit that direction in other words it's an automated mechanism and that's how humans and all animals are designed they're they're designed with extraordinarily sophisticated guidance systems those guidance systems include the pursuit of pleasure and when we can just say that broadly we can say okay well it pursues pleasure there's certain things that when it interacts with the environment in a certain way it winds up releasing releasing dopamine well it depends on you know a great white shark says hmm you know a female great white shark uh seeks her dopamine by seeking out a male great white shark but you don't in other words you're programmed to be terrified of great white shark so the what you are is highly specifically designed as a human to have dopamine be released only under certain conditions so for example you're not going to have dopamine release if you chew eucalyptus leaves but you will if you're a koala bear okay and so you uh you are programmed so you are not programmed to want to have your dna reproduced you are programmed to want sex and romance and to be also really interested in little children that particularly look like you that's what you're interested in you're interested in making friends and going to a party and eating and have people laugh and telling jokes why because those are the types of circumstances where you meet mates okay so you like music and like to dance why would that be happening well because those are appreciation and love of music is an adaptive feature of human design that creates sexuality you are more likely to get laid listening to music and those who are not like imagine somebody who doesn't like music can you even imagine such a person i've never met one that you could in principle imagine somebody that really is just not into it doesn't care never listens to music how you can imagine that that person's psychology if it was built that way is probably 20 to 40 percent less likely to ever get laid okay the uh in other words they're just not going to go to the party where marvin gaye is is is is singing let's get it on they're they're just less likely to be in circumstances where where romantic feelings are going to be engendered so you can uh by putting your dna in a jar and giving it to a sperm bank that doesn't do anything uh to your satisfaction of dna reproduction because the satisfaction of dna reproduction is built as a guidance system inside your moment-to-moment preferences and your motivations so you're motivated to go to the party you're motivated to flirt with somebody you find attractive you're motivated to kiss them you're motivated to have sex with them you're motivated to build a life or romance with such an individual you're motivated to do these things that statistically are associated with dna reproduction you're not motivated for dna reproduction okay so you're not motivated to have your eggs taken out of your ovaries and then put in a petri dish and then inseminated with somebody's dna no you're not motivated to do that at all okay you're motivated for the sub programs that were built by evolution that guide you by giving you desires and satisfactions that's how it's built okay you're not design you're not designed to eat 2 000 calories a day you're designed to enjoy food as you chew it up if we fed you those calories in your iv you know you wouldn't be happy about it you'd want to be eating okay so that's that's the answer to the question so it's uh we think it's a useful shorthand for biologists to think in terms of the fact that you want to reproduce your dna in other words you can say okay well that theory of what you're saying about motivation doesn't work at all because that wouldn't lead to dna reproduction okay so the uh so that's why many theories about psychopathology or stress or trauma these things aren't true and the reason they're not true is they don't line up to how you would orchestrate an organism to optimize this dna reproduction so it doesn't they don't they don't fly with respect to any reasonable evolutionary theory and they don't and they're not true and therefore when you actually look at the evidence uh these theories don't don't don't wash they actually don't stand up to the evidence so that's the way to look at this thing the the thing is orchestrated to create thoughts feelings and behavior that are statistically associated in the natural history of the organism with increased likelihood of dna being on the planet so you are not designed to enjoy the feeling of being really cold or really hot there's some optimum temperature where your nervous system for you specifically feels ideal it's usually a range okay so i can i can feel pretty darn good if i go out of the into the in the morning sunshine and it's it's 64 degrees as long as i've got some clothes on it's really nice i also like it at 94. you get a little colder than 64. and now i'm gonna need more clothes on okay if i go out at 94 i could just go out in a you know shorts with nothing else and it feels super comfortable so that there's some range in here where uh where where essentially it's statistically identical whether or not i'm going to die uh according to my ancestors in other words my ancestors don't know the difference between 82 degrees and 76 degrees they just don't now if i start running hard and exercising now they know because now i'm overheating and they're like whoa it's kind of hot okay so in other words what we're really looking at is ideal ranges for my body temperature and my nervous system uh is is aware of preferences within those ranges so that those preferences are every bit is associated with dna survival as sex and rummage okay all of these things are associated with having statistical impact on the likelihood of my genes being on the planet in 100 years if i was obtuse enough to not have a high motivation and thoughts feelings and motivations like hey it's kind of hot hey i need to get there if i didn't have that in me it's not likely that i would have any dna on the planet in 300 years it was that if i was missing that chip in order to regulate that behavior then too many of my of my descendants would make too many mistakes and they'd be wiped off the planet and they'd be dominated in the gene pool by competitors that didn't have that flaw okay so that's a very long explanation to try to help people understand that you are not quote motivated to reproduce your dna you are motivated by subsystems which cause thought feeling and behavior that are associated with sub-goals which are them themselves then statistically associated when they are achieved with the likelihood that your dna will be on the planet later and that's how it works dr lyle we're not motivated to reproduce our dna what about that sperm bank doctor that literally fathered hundreds of children by by only giving his sperm to all the people remember that case he was a fat lazy sociopathic disagreeable dude that just wanted to collect people's money but he could have used he only used his sperm though he didn't want to go to the trouble of recruiting males he wasn't interested he was like no that's too much trouble i'm not going to pay a bunch of people and screen him and then put him in a booklet and write it no he's lazy that that's what that was that guy was just a fat lazy disagreeable low conscientious sociopath that's why it wasn't that he wanted to reproduce his dna he was just lazy i never thought about it that there you go i remember reading it in people magazine though well vicki says it was creepy it is creepy that yes wow vicky says dr lyle is just so informed about so many topics i agree well this question is a holdover from last month and i think it's really interesting from joanna she says dr lyle since in the past women didn't work outside the home most of the time does that mean that a heterosexual relationship has more chances of being successful if the woman is a housewife or is it the other way around should women always have a means of income in order to be in a position of power for whatever the future brings what is your view on the subject um this gets to be a tricky business because these are highly individual issues if you are a woman who doesn't have a means of support apart from your spouse like you don't have any knowledge or skill uh credentials etc then you are you are in a position of weakness okay potentially maybe you've got but now everybody's circumstances are different let's suppose for example that you are that you have parents that have money okay you have an old aunt that doesn't have any other descendants and and she would bail you out if you're in any real trouble okay so you've got actually ways to get through a transition period if such a period took place maybe you're extremely attractive and you get offers from high qualified men all the time who look right past your two little children that are in tow and and want to chat you up and so you realize hey i've got options and i've got really good options so my mate better not double cross me because i'm actually in a position of power okay so everybody's situation is different but a situation that is marked for possible trouble is a situation where a woman has has chill a child or children and she's in economic circumstances where she is literally highly dependent upon that man now that that doesn't mean that this is doomed for failure it just means that she is uh has put herself in a position of vulnerability so that's what i recommend to uh young women that are a child-bearing age and sort of looking at this question that that would be something that you would want to take care of in other words your and if you have a fear of that or some kind of intimidation about it or don't like the idea of working very hard etc the i've known of people who sort of stepped their toe out into the wild of the workplace found it a little unaccommodating and unpleasant and decided to just get shacked up and married and be a mom it's like well don't be so surprised if the the years in front of you aren't that happy because you may not be in the greatest relationship for all the right reasons okay so the um yeah maybe you get lucky and we would hope that you do so but in terms of the prescription about what is the best thing to do the um it's we can't say oh well you're better off if you're a working mom you might be because you you might be in a position where you're continually getting feedback that you're in a position of power okay and that may be a very important thing for you psychologically it may not be that important so for example another variable in this question is how how steadfast and what is the personality and the romantic dynamics of those two people so there are there are certainly situations where the the man is super into his wife and and they have children together and he makes plenty of good a good income that he can cover the family and she's got her hands full with with one or two or three or four children and they have an agreement that essentially this is the deal okay and they they are fine with it so there's many people where uh for whom that works um i'm i'm not i'm not concerned with um when it comes to like what structure works best um that there is no such structure because the things that make a relationship work don't have to do with the structure they have to do with the two personalities the two people okay so and so those things are essentially outside of our control those are those are you know given in the dynamics of the situation so they may have a very good relationship for two or three years and then they may have a bad relationship after that okay and so in that interim they may have had a child or two and it turns out ten years down the road they're not happy in those circumstances the uh if there's any thoughts of a disillusion or just the insecurity of in the case of the woman who may be in a situation where she actually feels financially um essentially mouse trapped then it is in her best interest to work outside of the home and get feedback from the world and develop her knowledge skills and ability in commerce so that she could feel like she could leave if she wanted to okay so it's not so much about prescribing what structure of a relationship is more likely to bring people happiness there is no such structure the the happiness or unhappiness of a relationship isn't in its structure it's in the personalities and the judgments of the two individuals per se you know so you could have the perfect structure but the truth is is that the one one person isn't into the other one or neither one of them is into the other one and it doesn't matter what the structure is okay the truth is is that they're not very happy and that's just the way that goes this is uh you know human relationships romantic relationships are are are the most slippery uh your it's the equivalent of juggling so if you have uh um if you're trying to juggle two two things you know that's kind of like a job or a business or a career it's like it's not that complicated to juggle that you've got a boss that you don't like too much you've got options of a different competitor you could go to you've got little certificates that you can go to that might increase your likelihood of promotion etc you can change jobs to a slightly different field more likely promoted whatever you want to work in kentucky you don't want to work in illinois all that's not that hard it's not that hard to do that friendships are maybe a little bit harder okay because there's more balls in here okay there's there's more you could you could get in deeper and more intimately with a significant friendship where there's sort of more on the line and therefore you know if it goes south it's more it could be more disturbing but friendships aren't even that hard they have some difficulties to them but that's my might be like in a tough time that's my juggling three romance is like juggling five okay that's uh that's like hmm that's just a more inherently complicated problem and so just like there you know there's uh no exhilaration probably as a juggler like juggling five and having it going it's like you know what pretty fancy you're you're you're out there at the outer limits of what a person is capable of doing romance to have to have found somebody and have a relationship where it's hitting all of these different neural circuits they're your best friend they are a super trusty trader person to trade with you are very attractive to them and they're attracted to you you got the two of you feel uh very much into each other so you feel a private universe of exclusivity around that that's a lot of things to have in the air okay so we can expect that it might be an exhilarating kind of a process but also potentially fragile that you know what happens one little thing goes wrong with the juggler that's juggling five and it's gotta stop okay and that's what will happen a lot with romantic feelings if something you know isn't working then the whole thing you know can go south and it can be you know sort of a compromising situation where we're still friends or this or that but it's not the same so the question is people seek relentlessly they seek the secrets to a romance working and they seek formulas for okay and that is actually a fundamental misunderstanding of the process the formula is embedded down deep in the adaptive unconscious of each of those two individuals and how they interact with each other you can't stop it from happening and you can't make it happen so you know two friends who reach married to spouses that are it's pretty good but it's not like they hoped they meet and they mingle and it turns out that the wife of one of them and the husband or the other one are like super into each other and those may become best friends because it's all kind of held together and pulled in and the truth is simmering under that process a very disturbing process is a great love affair and it's basically you almost can't stop it from happening okay that's because that's embedded into the adaptive unconscious of those two specific individuals okay so it's like stopping somebody from eating you know the cram nothing that they happen to really like it's like yeah there's seven other things out there on the counter you can have if you want but you're not supposed to have that because that's supposed to be for grandma tomorrow it's like well that's going to be pretty tough so you can't stop it from happening and you can't make it happen okay so when we the the real issues that i'm interested in is when you start to lose it or when it's lost when it no longer is working then what and the answer to that is oh you most definitely want to be in a position of power everybody wants to be in a position of power you want to be in a situation where you don't have to maintain this relationship for very important comfort and security reasons we don't want to have to be in that situation and that's why i would say the important thing isn't for for women to work outside the home it's to know that they could that's where you want to be okay that's interesting i've read somewhere that single women are actually happier than married women yeah but i mean that's a that that's like saying you know eighth graders are smarter than seventh graders and like well it depends on which eighth grader depends on which seventh grader like statistically that may be true but how much good does that give us um and so yeah that's how i look at that right um you know one of one of the things i've often asked you over the years is that the people in my program have a hard time cleaning up their environment because they're often married to a disagreeable spouse and isn't it often the case that if they could make their own way they wouldn't put up with certain things they put up with does that question make sense that's true and you know that that's a that's a a big dilemma of women having children and so you know uh lots of women lots of women have children because it's the thing to do lots of women have children because they just incredibly adore the whole process and it feels incredibly productive to them because it's just wired into their dna and other women don't want to have children so these are these individual differences and so for many women nothing you can understand in the way that the dna would engineer that system that the dna would engineer the system to be to for people to be differentially uh but to some degree extremely invested and interested in child raising process okay so you can understand just like men are interested in sports some men are fanatically interested in sports other men are barely interested in sports at all but you can understand why sports would be sort of part of the dna of humans because it has to do a tribal warfare and demonstration of athletic prowess they could be useful for hunting and protection so as we can understand why it's a big deal but we also understand there's a bell curve of interest and so the average guy is kind of interested in sports some people are super interested some people are not hardly interested at all same thing with women and children so you can see that a lot of women are pretty interested in being a mom and if they have kids they love their kids and they're pretty darn important you can also see as we start to move out to the other tail with velcro there's women that are fanatical about having children and they are fanatical about their children and they are designed by nature to be that way and you've got other women over here that may have a couple of children and they love their kids but they're not going to like tip over their whole life form okay and so this is the individual differences of people and how they are are psychologically constructed so you can understand why there would be women that would get into relationships and start to have children and those relationships may um turn out to be not the greatest relationship and yet they are so into their kids and for various incendiary reasons around that they have they are not working outside the home and they may have gotten into having children early particularly when they're really into kids and having kids a lot of times they do get into it early a result they might have three children by the time they're 27 and as a result they never like went to college never finished degree never developed any skill and now they're 37 and now they're in a situation where they're managing the raising of these three kids but they've got a relationship that's pretty arid and as and and now they're they're in a position of weakness so now they're in a position of weakness sort of economically independently and now they've got a disagreeable husband in a mediocre relationship but that guy is not going to be helpful at all when it comes to managing their food environment no surprise okay so that is uh that that is not a i won't say that's a typical story but it's not an uncommon story and so and when that is that's a hard place to be you know and uh and i understand that and so that that's why you know that's why we try to say hey sometimes there's only sometimes we have to begin back at the beginning so in those circumstances sometimes we have to begin with the prescription that says okay what kind of native abilities do you have that we can go back and get some education or some experience and get you in a position where you are now in fact working and are in a position of power and now we can start to change the power balance you know in that home behind that and sometimes we have to pay prices in order for that to happen and uh and sometimes we discover the fear and the energy conservation inside of women that they don't want to face it and uh and that's that's a cost-benefit analysis that they're running okay but sometimes to actually get to the heart of that solution there's some real work to be done and uh in order to put ourselves either in a position to leave a bad relationship or to push back onto a relationship and start essentially setting rules and guidelines about how you're going to live because you're now doing that you're negotiating from a greater position of power so those are just little perspectives on that kind of a problem that kind of problem by the way goes widespread all relationships under all conditions i.e position of power you want to put yourself in a situation where no one thing and no one person is the is the only place where you can trade because then they have a monopoly and you are at their mercy and that that's what can happen uh particularly with women under under these kinds of circumstances right kind of like when you play chess you don't want to just keep leave yourself open right yeah and you don't you don't want to get cornered yeah it's not great thanks before i ask the next question i just want to thank christopher mcelveen for his generous super chat donation and the next question is from jody i've heard dr lyle talk about never make a big decision when a small decision will do what is the best way to use this strategy and how is this not procrastination um is uh uh is certainly involved in that and that means it's a lot of times procrastination is a perfectly intelligent strategy there's conditions under which procrastination uh we're being lured into a mistake of inaction particularly for example around the ego trash so the ego trap can be stopping us from putting out energy pursuing a goal because we are feeling the risk that if we don't live up to expectations it's going to cost us status so a lot of procrastination that is maladaptive comes out of the ego trap okay yeah um also procrastination will also come out of other components of the pleasure trap such as energy conservation and pleasure seeking behavior so uh or pain avoidance behavior so we put off you know starting to wean down from morphine not because it's so pleasant because it's painful to come out of an opiate uh addiction or tolerance the um so there's there's that sort of situation but uh but the procrastination in general that you're we'd be questioning i'm slightly lost okay the question from jody is dr lyle talks about never make a big decision when a small decision will do what is the best way to use this strategy and how is this not procrastination right um best way to to use the strategy is and the reason why we would use the strategy is as follows the um probably probably the best analogy for this is going up at a really good analogy would be the world series of poker so in the world series of poker you got 500 people in there they're all really sharp and what they're doing is is that they're gambling on their assets versus your assets and they're trying to make decisions about what to do and what they're going to do is this is the ultimate of never make a big decision when a small decision will do so you're you're trying to uh essentially every decision you're trying to get the maximum benefit percentage-wise for uh energy in this case money invested so literally you you calculate pot odds you're trying to see whether it's worth it so suppose i said to you uh let's suppose we had oh let's suppose you're a young hotshot real estate entrepreneur and let's suppose you've got you know two million dollars of capital investment capital uh that you could that you could invest in something you might say you know what i'm gonna do i'm gonna build a really fancy house you know on this place where nobody else is built and we're going to spend you know two million dollars on it we're gonna hope to make a million dollars if people are wowed by the beautiful palm trees we're gonna haul in there etc and so what you do is you you make a huge decision on this thing now a better decision would be to buy 10 200 000 houses and fix them up okay now we've got much less to lose so if it turns out our scheme we're like well i'm going to buy a 200 house in an area that i'm not so sure that if i put some money into it i'm going to get a lot more money back but we get to test it we get to test the scheme okay so if the scheme doesn't work then it's like oh well we're out some time and energy but we didn't really lose much capital but in fact let's suppose it's a disaster and it turns out that we lose 40 grand it's like fine so we we lost 20 percent of our of our capital on that little 200 000 debt and it turns out we lost some money better to lose 40 000 than 400 000 because we went all in on the big thing and put in two million dollars and it turns out the most anybody will give us for that house is a million six okay so this is the value of running experiments and actually that's all your life really is your life is nothing other than a series of experiments minute by minute as you attempt to figure out what is the uh what is the best use of your time and energy in order to get the best what i'm going to call biological efficiency which ultimately translates into gene survival that we don't care about okay so we don't really care about gene survival but we care about the way the system is built uh in order to get the best feelings so the guy that you you know people the couple who uses birth control are still trying to have the most satisfying romance and sexual process that they can have that fulfills their life as much as possible even if we mechanically block the whole biological purpose of the fashion okay why because we weren't designed to be aiming at that we're designed to be aiming at the sub goals in the process in the same way so what we're doing in life is we are investing time and energy in these little biological sub goals that give us life satisfaction that's right that's how it works that is how life satisfaction works it works through the satisfaction of biological sub goals and so what we want to do is we want to get careful each biological sub goal takes a certain amount of time and energy to do it so for example i look at a cookbook personally and i'm overwhelmed and i have no interest i've cooked like three recipes out of the cookbook of my whole life why because it's just too much time and energy for me and i'm not into cooking in the kitchen and i'm a klutz with the knives and i don't know where the cutting board is and the whole thing to me is the fiasco so whenever i've done that the last time i did that was cooking alan's you know enchiladas out of a helicom promoting cookbook and it was like i had to go back to the store two or three times looking all over the place for the coriander or whatever it was like a massive hassle okay so i never did it twice now so what what's the point the point is is that we make investments and then we by making a little investment we see what the rate of return on the investment is okay so when someone comes to me and says oh doug what i'm going to do is there's this new oh i don't know cryptocurrency or it's a a gold mine and a sulfur mine in tibet that i think it's going to get go up like 300 this year my attitude is really you know why do you think so oh my brother-in-law is part of the commissar class in india or in tibet and it turns out there's an underhanded government deal and there's a certain amount of money that can go into it and everybody that gets into this thing is going to make 300 on their money this year okay so you can watch my nervous system wheeling and dealing and thinking maybe i should sell out of my retirement and maybe i sell my house take all the money i've got and put it in that sulfur mine in tibet because i can then go three to one big trouble okay you can of course you would calculate that and think about the great prize that if you're smart what you say is never make a big decision when a small decision will do and my other uh corollary is that if it's a great big investment then it'll be a great small investment okay but we don't then run the risk of a catastrophe which it very well might be and incidentally it often is i know it won them where that happened i i know of a scheme that went on it was so clever that these people had a huge office right in downtown wall street area a huge floor people crawling all over it fax machines brokers they had a huge operation and people would come and this was all about some mine in canada it was all going to be opened up soon and they had all the legal stuff and they got all kinds of people to invest in that and somebody came to my friend allen goldham and talked to him about it and allen told me about it and uh people don't know the guy's name is gold hammer that should tell you something about his capabilities and alan looked at it and he and his wife talked it over and they put a sum total of eight thousand dollars into that investment and i remember being scandalized i'm like alan why don't you put in like a lot more that sounds like an incredible deal he goes no no if it's if it's a good investment then i'll be happy about it and if it turns out it's a scam then i won't feel too bad about it and i'm like how could it be a scam this big prospectus and like something that turned out to be a scam that was a scam it was unbelievable the money invested in that scam was probably 40 or 50 million dollars to make that scam look like and they took a whole slew of money from people all over the world in what was an unbelievable con job but they only got eight thousand dollars out of dr alan goldhamer because he's smart as a fox okay so never make a big decision when a small decision will do if something looks like it's a good idea for god sake kiss the guy on the first date be careful that's all as far as we need to go you know don't move in in three weeks it's like let's let's make smaller decisions so that we get more information when you get more information you are essentially getting data on what i call the parameters the parameters are all the little elements that go into the cost benefit analysis okay so many times i've been in situations where somebody where i saw some deal on a time share or somebody's talking to me about some great thing and it's like okay well that sounds pretty alluring and then i hear a little more and singing and i hear a little more it's like oh that's and then pretty soon you're like well wait a minute uh i felt all that residual excitement when i thought that this was the deal but now that i see that this is the deal i don't know i'm feeling pretty cool about it okay that's what's happening to the adaptive unconscious as it starts to synthesize the evidence and really get the cost benefit analysis clearer okay so that's the solution as to how it is that we go about this when it whenever possible i'm trying to make the smallest possible decision the smallest possible decision will enable me to effectively have run a little experiment and get some data on the parameters now i can get a better feel for the parameters if it turns out that when people say oh no you have to attack this right now it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity i'm out okay then my attitude is you know what my life was just fine before this opportunity and it'll be just fine if i missed it the truth of the matter is if i am not allowed to make a small investment in this opportunity then i'm not doing it at all that's how you guard yourself against catastrophe okay you don't need home runs in a windfall what you need to build a good life in any dimension is you need to make occasional hits just keep hitting a single and a double and then once in a while you get lucky and you swing and you hit a home run okay but what were but you didn't even intend to so the idea is and that's exactly how the world series of poker is played the very smart players it's really about how can you avoid bad luck while you make better decisions than most people in that game can you actually analyze the efficiencies of the set of cards we're just we're you're not it's not gonna all depend upon three or four or five hands you're gonna get a hundred hands and how well you judge those your cards at the end of that hundred hands are gonna be about as good as anybody's cards so the question is can you make better investment decisions on those cards it's over and over again you keep making these investments decisions the very best players are the ones that wind up with the final table there will be some great players that get kicked out maybe sort of early just bad luck okay but that's the beauty of life is that there's another tournament next year so the truth is is that you don't need to be swinging for the fences and taking big chances the guys that win the world series are guys that make all kinds of very small very intelligent decisions they don't get greedy which is actually one of my sayings that goes along with small decisions as opposed to big decisions don't get greedy okay some guy that you know slobbers all over some pretty girl and puts a ring on her finger after two weeks he's got he just got greedy and you know what he's not likely to wind up with a lot of happiness out of us it's likely to be one unbelievable mess maybe you could write a book of all your great sayings like the other one is if it's a good idea today it'll be a good idea tomorrow exactly there you go i say that whenever i'm not to do revenge on somebody aj well you're bringing me a lot of luck because freddy just made a super chat donation thank you and katarina said you're the therapist of her dreams you know have you ever watched an auction house or like the bidding like at christie's like they don't they might open at a hundred dollars the second bid is it like ten thousand dollars yeah yeah yes they're making little yeah little decisions yeah incremental exactly not incremental very good we still have questions on psych meds for teens and alcohol for weight loss so i'm gonna go to alcohol first okay um i'm gonna it's really long so i'm gonna try to consolidate from sharon 58 cereal dieter all her life kept losing the same 30 to 50 pounds needs to find a sustainable lifestyle whole food plant-based she's at a healthy bmi about 15 15 pounds away from her goal but she's in excellent health no family history of cancer so her question is the food's not been a struggle but come friday night i really want wine and i enjoy it is there any advice beyond if it's working for me telling me it would further slow my weight loss doesn't help she basically she's saying she enjoys a glass of wine as part of her cooking ritual in the evening she moderates as much as possible skips many days of the week and um she says am i am i the only one who struggles like this is there and i guess the question is is there a place for moderate alcohol consumption with this lifestyle um i would say the following so yeah the answer would be yes but the how do we know if that means you and the way we know is by running experiments okay so one of the things that's happening is is that that she's trying to moderate and struggling with that which is a little red flag that's waving out of the side of my head and um and she's 15 pounds overweight and alcohol is you know high caloric density and it also sort of disinhibits consumptive behavior so therefore it may not be in your best interest with respect to making the best judgments about that and so one thing that i would would challenge an individual like this is exactly the concept that we just stepped through which is that why make a big decision instead of instead of telling ourselves well we're either going to do this or not going to do it and we're going to put our you know shovel in the sand and this is where it is that we're you know this is the day we take a stand on this for the betterment of our existence no you don't have to make that decision just make that decision for 60 days okay give yourself a fair chance to get completely away from the alcohol so that your your memory systems are not recalling it and that your habits effectively which are nothing other than the sets of circumstances that remind us of underlying cost-benefit processes that that's what you know so that three weeks from now when you've been cooking and you haven't actually had any uh wine while you're cooking it will it may flood across the adaptive unconscious and it may even arise in consciousness well hmm glass of wine would be nice right now but it won't be as insistent as it was three weeks ago and so what's going to happen is is that your mind will will essentially analyze the map of your environment from a different perspective because it hasn't seen any wine for example in five weeks so if it hasn't seen anyone in five weeks it's not looking for it in the same way that it was looking for it when it was two days ago when it last saw it this makes complete sense this is exactly how animal behavior should work yet farmer john has fed those chickens every day for the last six months coming out at 6 00 a.m then on the day that he comes out and doesn't feed it the second day after that the chickens are all still lined up but what if he doesn't feed those chickens for the next five weeks we go 35 days in a row he comes out of there at 6am and there's no feed for the chickens we're going to find that very few chickens are running over there to try to cost him after five weeks so the nervous system basically runs the statistical probability on a reward and if you don't reward it for about five weeks it's going to start you know it's going to occur to you less and therefore you are less in that sticky spot so now after 60 days we can see what life feels like maybe you're down three or four pounds okay maybe you feel a little sharp or you feel a little better then you may say you know what i'm gonna try to drink now you drink and you wake up the next morning and you're not quite as sharp and you're not as well rested and you're more indulgent with your food and it's like okay now i start to see the contrast okay so i'm not saying that everybody would have that that response i'm saying hmm if you're not sure it might be worth running an experiment so i know people that are going to say hey i'm going to have a few glasses of wine a month and i'm going to do that maybe on the weekend i'm going to do and i don't have any problem with it and i really enjoy it and it's i look you know i look forward to that as part of my existence fine i'm not i'm not nobody's fairy godmother telling them that that's a terrible thing to do not at all the question is if we're not sure okay if we're not sure then the attitude is hmm good time to run an experiment the whole notion of the pleasure trap and the problems with supernormal stimuli whether that's facebook alcohol you know gambling pornography no matter what it is if it's a super normal stimuli then it has the problem that is actually tricking your ability to run an accurate cosmetic analysis that is the nature of supernormal stimuli they are not natural and therefore they cause a an inability to compute the real life value very well and therefore they bias the system for its consumption of that stimulus and that you know to the detriment of the overall life experience of the organism so you know i think i mean that's a good definition of what addiction really is if you look it up in the dsm it's there's problems associated with it so we're not going to tell somebody that hey you know you're addicted to the lakers it's like well you're addicted to the lakers if you spend all your money going to laker games and it bankrupts you and you can't feed your children when you get evicted now that's an addiction otherwise it's not an addition okay so that's what we're trying to look at here is are you running a good cost benefit analysis on your overall best interest and it's i can't tell by the way the question is being asked there's no way for me to tell it's in the muddy middle though it's not so innocent that i could say oh no that's not a problem it's kind of like well i'm not so sure well if i'm not so sure then we go get some information you're not going to die of a lack of pleasure deficiency for 60 days of not drinking wine that i know okay so we and we may discover something valuable so that would be what i would tell people to do so the only way she would know for sure is to do the experiment either drinking or not drinking she needs a long enough period of absence to see if it makes a difference is that correct yeah if you go abstinent for a week you're going to be in enough cognitive dissonance and enough imagery in your head that you won't know what it would really feel like to not be doing it that would be like telling a cigarette smoker after four or five days and not smoking well this is what life's gonna be like if you don't smoke and they're like well this is hell because i'm in withdrawal okay but if you ask that same smoker 90 days out they're like wow do i feel a lot better i get up in the morning and i don't smell that like tobacco and my lungs are clear and i breathe better and etc so now we have to get away from what the thing is for long enough to experience what life is really like without it and so that we can really sense the value of the behavior as opposed to not doing it that makes sense because she's saying it's one thing to eat differently than everyone in your social circle but it sounds like her social circle is very much into drinking alcohol you know we had a very similar question when i had dr goldhamer recently to my group and you want to know how he answered it he said alcohol with seven calories per gram is almost as calorically dense as oil it lacks satiety feedback and is one of the most effective ways of getting fatter also the social disability disinhibition leads to poor choices in general the only question is how fat and sick do you want to be there you have it you see what i've put up with all these years that's how it goes there you go yeah well you know jump here has a saying are you fooling yourself or are you fueling yourself and i have not worked with anywhere near as many people as you but i find that for women that have been overweight alcohol is not figure friendly it's not a weight loss item you know it's not kale in other words it makes it harder it's not to say that somebody can't have it and not be overweight but it seems like it just makes it a lot harder yeah i think that's true great thank you okay so psych meds for teens i'm going to read the two different questions and then maybe you can talk about it just in general and then maybe these specific cases the first one is anonymous and it's a 14 year old saw a psychiatrist for depression the psychiatrist immediately prescribed meds the parents did not think he should have prescribed drugs as a first line of treatment but the daughter thinks the parents are quacks for not listening to the expert she she wanted to know what a suitable approach for educating teenagers about psych drugs would be that won't create distrust of the parents and then the second question is also anonymous and it is um i guess she's still 19 i guess that's not a teenager but she said um her daughter struggles with anxiety and panic attacks the first year away from home in college she thought it was due to covid but this year as a sophomore she still has anxiety issues when away from home does not struggle with depression and uh so she made an appointment with her primary not a psychiatrist so she could ask for medication like zoloft or lexapro she taught her the elbow pressing body exercise she learned from you and she doesn't want her daughter to go on meds but she's over 18 can't stop her any suggestion on the most benign medication if there is such a thing she could start with taking in a low dose daughter's not vegan thinks her way of eating is crazy so i mean just in general psych meds but especially people that are 14 to 19 is it effective is it a mistake make a small decision before a big one kind of thing um yeah this is a well let's let's i want to explain to people a little bit about how i think about these things so if if you were cold if you're standing out in the cold i i wouldn't give you a shot uh in your arm of a drug that made you feel better i wouldn't do that okay i wouldn't give you a shot that would dull your ability to feel the cold i would be like well you're cold for god's sakes that's a warning system a very sophisticated warning system to tell you that you're in danger and you need to come inside okay um i i wouldn't give you a drug to stop you from feeling thirsty okay i wouldn't give you a drug to stop you from feeling hungry although some people have done so and caused a bunch of heart attacks and deaths so the in other words i look at feelings as very sophisticated adaptive mechanisms if i'm walking in the woods i and i hear a twig snap i don't want to take out my beta blocker and swallow a beta blocker so it stops my heart from pounding and feeling uncomfortably anxious no i don't want to do that i want to be on full red alert because i might be about ready to be killed by a predator okay so the first place i begin this is with a deep respect for your nervous system that i'm thinking your nervous system is trying to tell you something so with depression it's trying to tell you that that you're you're probably receiving failure feedback from an important domain in life and that domain might be romantic connection friendship connection or productive activity okay which is what i call trade you know activity and some you're trying to do something that that the world would see as productive so if they could swap with you if you're a 14 year old kid that might be just getting good grades and you're you know doing a good job on your homework and working hard for your tests that's the productive activity that you might be doing and that's uh that's part of the deal you have with your parents the uh but it's productivity nonetheless that there is an incremental process of effort feedback effort feedback that tells the nervous system that it's not wasting its time that it's making worthwhile progress just as when you clean up your house or you plant a row of corn so the um so for 14 year olds depressed my first thought is hmm what area what arena or domain of life is the person receiving failure feedback i'm not looking at that kid thinking oh well jeez you know 100 million years of evolution to try to devise some very sophisticated feeling circuits now i think that stuff's dog it's not working what i need to do is give a powerful drug to go in there and mess around with the neurochemistry so the person feels different now that sounds to me like a really bad idea yeah the um so that's how i feel about that now if you've got some 14 year old that's hell bent on on taking some psychiatric meds it's not too much you can say about it in other words your these days i don't even know what your rights are you know i don't know how that works the um but the uh but the the medical industry has woven its way into the fabric of the law to the point where your kid can probably take that medication even though that kid has nothing even remotely close to informed consent so so anyway i could go on a rant about how outrageous and as far as i'm concerned immoral that is uh but this is all my the same objections that i have towards this as robert whittaker has as he wrote an outage of epidemic so with my 14 year old kid i would tell my 14 year old kid hey you know maybe you want to watch this video with a guy named robert whitaker because he tells a story about this or maybe you just say hey i've looked into this and i'm your mom or on your dad i don't think it's in your best interest but it's up to you okay and uh of course it's up to them now and i would say hey never make a big decision when a small decision will do if they're gonna tell you they're gonna put you on 60 milligrams of prozac why don't we start with 10 and find out whether it does any good oh the doctor says it won't do any good until we get it up to at least 40. well let's why don't you try to just see a little bit of the time and in that case the the the person might actually get a sense of some of the negative effects that take place and they might not like them okay and i would definitely want to cue the individual for looking for those side effects i'd say well some of the side effects are this and some of the side effects are that why because it turns out that people will see side effects even when the drug isn't causing them which isn't a bad thing in this case we're fighting against you know the big red machine people are they don't play fair they buy off congress they they get fda approval on things that they shouldn't get at the approval on this is clearly evident and now to be an epidemic as whitaker uh writes about how it is that they pulled that off so the bottom line is this i don't trust psychiatric medications i'm not going to tell you that i point blank know that they can't be of any use i don't know that i don't know that anybody knows because the truth is is that you can't get any honest research done so i know that i know that there are you know very significant problems i consider them to be essentially risky now how dangerous do i think most of this stuff is well it depends on what we're talking about we're talking about antipsychotic medications or bipolar medications i think it's pretty pretty potent if we're talking about ssris i think they're relatively mild okay so i think uh the relatively mild drugs relatively mild effects therefore probably relatively not that problematic uh and certainly i don't think they're very useful personally so so i would rather have my kid on some low dose of an ssri than on some low or medium dose of some antipsychotic because somebody thinks that's going to be really good for their anxiety which appears to be a little irrational right so anyway the um as a parent you know you're gonna know that your children are going to be seduced uh and they are going to be lured in to many things they might be lured into a clearly problematic romance which could be very expensive and troublesome and harmful and hurtful and evident they could be lured into drug use they could be lured into risky behavior writing in a car with a bunch of wild teenagers with the top down on a mountain road in idaho there's a lot of things that they could be lured into that we have to worry about and this is one more of those things and so all you can do is talk straight to your kids uh get have them on the lookout for the trouble okay i think that's that's fair to cue them uh for trouble so uh the uh for those things and then that way i would cue children that might want to take uh antidepressants or anti-anxiety notes or whatever it is they want i would cue them so that they're looking for the negative side effects okay and i would i would explain to them that no i i actually think there's a good chance that that your feelings are probably authentic and natural and real and that that we ought to respect those and the part of life is uh when you're if you go out and it gets cold at night and you feel cold that's a sign to tell you to get in the house and uh if you're if you're feeling a little overstuffed then maybe you ate a little too much and you better sit carefully and don't go running around now and going going you know swimming because you need to just chill out uh you know maybe that feeling of guilty and and a little guilty and a little embarrassed a little vulnerable going into your math final like well that that feeling is there for a reason you kind of made some mistakes and so feelings of anxiety and depression uh these are common warning signs uh that tell us that we may have challenges that we need to prepare for better so that we are in a better position so that we will feel these things less uh the girl that went away to school you know this is common thing that where some people are don't don't do so well being as that far from home and just because other kids are that way doesn't mean you are so maybe we need to respect that rather than medicate you so that you somehow don't feel it okay so that's how i look at this i'm not up for artificially changing people's brain chemistry i'm up for respecting the experience that the the neurochemistry is attempting to give you and then trying to figure out what we can do to be more adaptive in our strategies so that those so that those feelings are mitigated and we will find our cues by running little experiments and then getting feedback and looking to see if we're being successful that's how i look at that right well i think people should read the book like you say it's an excellent book you recommended it to me years ago i listened to it on audio yes absolutely anatomy of the epidemic robert whitaker that is uh that is my personal bible uh with respect to all the questions associated with psychophone yeah i had a psychiatrist on last week i don't know if you saw the uh documentary on netflix social networking about and her name is anna lemke she's a psychiatrist at stanford wrote dopamine nation and she's not really a fan of psych med because she felt like you're trying to change people when there's nothing wrong with them same concept so she and i are looking at it from the very same philosophy that doesn't mean there might not be times and places but i think that they are way rarer than are being prescribed i think uh if i had to give you a number i would say they're probably over prescribed by a factor of 50. okay so in other words once in a blue moon you've got somebody that that may be very haywire naturally in a given way and maybe psychiatry uh has enough tools that they might actually be able to make that person's life better but as a common run-of-the-mill process no way that that that's that's like taking antacids for eating shitty food it's like you know what get rid of the shitty food then see whether you've got an acid problem that's my attitude right and they're not always prescribed by medical doctors a lot of times i hear people just go in for an appointment to their nurse practitioners like oh would you like this you know you seem a little down yeah it's beautiful it's a beautiful scheme because physicians doctors etc and people want to give you something to fix the problem so it gives them esteem to do that and uh and then it looks they're the genius that has the solution this magical brilliant thing that has a name you know seven syllables long that you could never pronounce and it's like you know the real name to her for for the brilliant people that know what that is it all just sounds so fancy and so magical and it's the ultimate energy conservation like oh i don't actually have to face the fact that i'm struggling in some of these life domains and i'm not sure how to be more effective oh the real problem is i'm depressed until now i'm going to take the field yeah bad strategy just generally well there's still the thing is is they take the drugs and they're still struggling they just kind of don't care anymore yeah i don't i don't like the whole notion and uh i don't want to dismiss it wholesale of course right would you like to end there or do you want more questions i want to respect your time i will go one more question aj oh boy a lot of pressure to pick the best one but um okay again from anonymous has a 14 year old son adopted through foster care early life trauma shows signs of classic depression unable to attend school doesn't sleep since trauma and depression overlap so much um i can't say if this is due to trauma or depression but his eating habits have changed i've been plant-based i keep a vegan house with a few exceptions for my son like cheese to make a grilled cheese sandwich now all he wants to eat is junk i can't get him to eat vegetables or anything resembling healthy food if he doesn't get the highly processed dopamine releasing foods he craves he just won't eat even for days do you have any advice count the days down to his 18th birthday the uh the truth is the trauma doesn't have anything to do with what you're saying so the um his early life trauma is not relevant to what you're observing what you're now observing is the emergence of his native personality due to the genetic code okay so it's going to turn out that people eat the way they eat with rare exceptions i eat the rare fanatics that discover like if i were to eat according to my genetic code i wouldn't be eating as clean as i'm eating now uh because of the things that i actually learned the that basically people essentially eat the genetic code so if we know this from from adoption studies we know that adopted children do not wind up eating the food their adopted parents feed them for 18 years they they wind up heading right to what their their adopted their biological parents ate okay they also will look like their biological accounts so they will develop who raised them so you could be raised by you know you know i don't know allen and jennifer goldham and if it turned out that your your biological parents were very gluttonous self-indulgent humans that like to eat really rich food and smoke cigarettes and you know watch wheel of fortune then it doesn't matter that you grew up in the cleanest house in the united states with a workaholic you know quasi-tyrant it won't make any difference the truth is you are not going to be an industrious human that that embraces whole natural healthy food that's not going to happen so you're going to wind up on by your 27th birthday you know you're going to be working at a casino and you're going to be 100 pounds overweight and you're going to be smoking cigarettes at the cigarette break now that sounds incredible and it sounds like an unbelievable uh fatalistic way of looking at things that it is heavily true it's not 100 true though there's there's you know there's accidents and i think latent characteristics in people that the situation comes up and it makes it it brings it out okay so james garner probably would have never become an actor had he not had a buddy in the army that one that swore up and down he was going to be a talent agent okay and then uh that then garner was working in the oil fields or whatever it is he was doing around los angeles or there's a lot of oil and he was driving his car and he's pulling by a little strip mall and it says so and so so and so talent agency and that was his friend's name and he looked at it and he thought huh and he starts to look at it and some ladies pulling out and there's this parking space right in front and he goes what the heck okay so do chance factors make a difference yeah but was james garner destined to be some hard-working guy that was likely to be successful yes those characteristics were in there but was he going to be james garner of course he wasn't going to be james garner that was due to chance okay so chance factors make a difference but this child that you're finding is difficult self-indulgent growing up in a home with health healthy food this uh and he won't eat anything for days you can't starve him out you know he's determined to hey this is what you got okay so this is your yours look at what the child is love him for what it is that he is and understand that we're not going to change okay this is this is the creature we have and he will grow up and go the way that he's gonna go and he will become what he'd become maybe if he's self-indulgent disagreeably he becomes jackie gleason and he's wildly successful we don't know steve jobs was no day at the beach as a teenager for god's sakes so we don't know what this life will turn into we can sort of guess uh but that's all we can do and we can make educated guesses and and and they might be pretty good but we're not going to morph him okay and so the struggles that he has is insomnia why because he doesn't live in the stone age environment where he has to work all day to just to get to make a few potatoes and his share of the the carrots and therefore then he has to crash at night because he's physically exhausted no he lives in a modern environment where his mom's trying to get healthy food into him he doesn't have to do a damn thing and he could stay up all night look at his iphone okay so i'm not worried about his insomnia i'm not worried about his inherent self-indulgence i'm not worried about him at all he lives in an environment where if he can chew gum and walk he'll be employable and where he'll be employable in what capacity will be up to him it won't be up to you okay so my attitude is you know freedom in an unfree world he is who he is give him his space and you don't sweat it because your your anxiety about morphing him or you've also been miseducated and misinformed that he has this great latent potential to be a lot happier but he's damaged by something you know from trauma and we can make up for it and we still need to work it through that is entirely 100 okay that that is the of psychology uh and so that that is that that is a complete absurdity and it has nothing to do with what you're observing you are watching the emergence of that personality under modern circumstances would he have been a lot more a lot more together in 1772 yep no junk food nothing but hard work no electric lights and you better hope you know it's just survival you would have been working on a farm in kentucky you know et cetera and that would have been what it would have been but uh he is in the environment that he's in now it's very benign he won't be dead at 32 like he would have been living in kentucky and in those times so he's gonna be he's gonna live a long life in all probability it will probably be a troubled life and uh we we wish him success and some joy and uh in his his future pursuits but this ain't up to the psychiatrist to fix and it's not up for you to fix okay so just uh relax and give him more space and enjoy your life as much as you can wow thank you so i got i just i just love listening to you dr daryl woodruff is watching and saying doug is brilliant i think it sounds like there's no problem that you can't unpack and give some shed some light on i love daryl i'm glad really happy he's watching i'm glad he's he's uh doing doing fine that's fabulous daryl great to see you doc well thank you so much and please come back next month because people just really love listening to you fabulous aj thanks for having me thank you so much dr lyle and thanks all of you for watching another episode of chef aj live please come back tomorrow when my guest is gene stone he's the co-author of 72 reasons to be vegan thanks dr lyle
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