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Chef AJ: Q A With Dr Doug Lisle Dr Jen Howk
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you 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 guests come on about once a month when we're lucky and this will be the last time in 2020 that we well they will see both of them together that shall i say their names are dr doug lyle and dr jen hawk they work together and they have a book that they're writing together and they have a wonderful website and membership group that we tell you more about it is steamdynamics.com and we've got a lot of wonderful questions that have been submitted and if we get through all of them maybe we can ask answer some of the ones from the live viewers please welcome dr doug lyle dr jen hawk how are you guys love seeing you good good how are you yeah good thank you and i forgot to mention that they're the co-stars of a wonderful podcast called beat your jeans that it airs every other wednesday now at 8 30 p.m live pacific time but you can find almost 300 episodes now on itunes and stitcher and spotify and blog talk radio and if you're interested in evolutionary psychology it's a wonderful podcast and even if you're not it's really worth a listen so i just thought i would tell people that because i really i've learned so much from the podcast i sometimes listen to certain episodes once twice even three times cool and i still know nothing about it no just kidding no i i i love it it's really good you guys have such a great banter so let's get the hard question out of the way which is of course you know you know how it is with kova there's always got to be one question but this is a lot of people have written in and said are either of the doctors planning to get the covet vaccine well uh i'll go first and then uh because i might be more controversial i'm not sure i don't know jen and i haven't talked about it the uh i look at the vaccine the way a penguin and antarctica stands on the edge of the ice and what the penguins do is they stand really close to each other and they'll be walking back and forth and one of them will bump the other one into the water and then all the penguins will look down the water and see if there's a sea leopard down there eating them if it turns out it all looks safe then they all go in the water slowly to go fish okay so that's what i am i'm a penguin i'll move about as fast as a penguin moves and i'll be i'll be watching as the other guys get into the water what happens now so i'll be looking at two things number one uh whether or not there's any evidence of uh any any side effects that they were not able to fare it out in the testing because it hasn't been tested as long and as extensively as a vaccine normally would be and the second of all i'll be looking at and kovitz process and whether or not uh things wind up uh looking very good in the next you know 90 to 120 days as a result of the vaccine being rolled out so if it turns out that the world looks safe i'm perfectly happy of free riding on a bunch of other people getting the vaccine doesn't bother me at all i hate needles so i just might sit this one out however uh well if it turns out that that uh the vaccine looks very safe and kobe continues a low rumble of threat then i might consider it so that's uh that's where i stand as a as a standard free-riding non-needle loving natural hygiene oriented not so wild about the whole idea guy but i am wild about the idea for everybody else i think go ahead yeah free writing doesn't work as well if no if everybody else doesn't do it for you right right this is all about that you know all that kind of this is one of these like if a tree falls in the woods you know is there a sound hey if everybody else goes and gets the vaccine i'm in great shape so we'll just uh i'm just going to sit back and watch i certainly won't be first in line uh there's going to be people that are going to be thinking that way and there there may be good reasons for a person to think that way i won't be thinking that way so i'm going to hang back and i'm going to see what's in the water yeah yeah i'm in a similar coming reaching a similar conclusion through maybe a slightly different path although an overlapping path so i share many of the same concerns and coming from a similar perspective i i also i think i'm keeping more of an eye obviously if the vaccine turns out to have you know really high levels of adverse consequences that are that are unanticipated and it's causing a lot of trouble that that will will that will drive my decision-making process to some degree as well i don't anticipate that as much as i'm anticipating that the the other thing that doug is talking about which is that covid will be less of a threat so at that point the cost benefit on taking any kind of medication taking you know i'm i am in no way an anti-vaxxer but i am not a fan of medicating for anything that has a cost-benefit analysis that doesn't make sense so i've never had a flu shot for the same reason so i i'm not running a cost-benefit analysis that is detecting my risk of of the flu and of a lethal course of the flu worth the risk that could accompany that vaccine so that's just a personal decision that i have run it's it's it's having this in mind that you don't ever have an effect you have no you can't have an effect from a drug of any kind with without side effects there are there are consequences there are you're paying a price for that agent that you are ingesting in some form or taking into your body so i'm not a fan of doing that unless the unless it's it's reasonable to do so and there's a very high cost potential cost on the other side so if kovid continues to rage and presents a major threat for for quite a while then i may very well get the vaccine if it fades to something that is you know very very low presence in the population and and i remain in a fairly low risk uh group myself then my odds of of taking it at least in the first round or two are lower so i think we're sort of triangulating on similar positions there right okay well thank you so much i i want to add something this just happens to come up uh sometime in the last year or two we had a conversation about the flu shot i think it was with you aj with you and i and and i had and i had said that uh you know this was a real individual thing and that uh peter sultan at trinith you know always got a flu shot because he had this life-changing thing with the flu that turned out to be totally untrue i completely messed this up it was a i don't know if i already did this mia culpa but peter peter was watching and he he uh played that clip just so you know he saw he sees your work aj i know i i'm i'm like well by the way we edited that out but i'm like just honored i would love to have him on the show if you if you can reach him i don't have his email because it's never going to happen never going to happen he's too introverted so uh at any rate the point is it was totally wrong it was actually a different friend of mine a very similar personality both really nice guys both really smart both the same age you know what i mean they they even look kind of similar and i had just completely misrep misremembered this thing from five years earlier so peter's like what the hell are you saying about you say that that's what i would have said just what do you say i said theater i could picture it like it was yesterday we were talking he goes no we never had that conversation and i realized my this is an example of how memory works and doesn't work memory fills in blanks and suppositions it comes like i could have told you on the witness stand you know swearing you know on the bible that i was telling the truth that i had that conversation with peter sultana in the in the foyer of truman north health center in about 2013. that is not true that that conversation took place with a good friend of mine that dr greg young uh out in out in sacramento so there you go but anyway the long story is is that uh people very learned people can have very different reactions uh peter is is very reticent about vaccines in a way that a lot of a lot of my doctor friends aren't so this is all uh jan and i are somewhere in the middle towards less vaccine is kind of where i think both of us are uh but we're not we're not totally anti in principle uh alan's probably getting closer and i think i think allen is probably near peter allen may not be a hundred percent anti but he's pretty damn suspicious and concerned about uh not wanting to shoot himself in the gut you know playing around with that kind of gun that's how that's alan's thinking about that uh john mcdougall would probably think very differently i know he's he's uh much more closer to conventional medicine and so this is uh very bright people can have ver strikingly different sort of gut reaction my our gut reactions i didn't know where jen was at but our our gut reactions are i don't hold anybody's reaction against them these are bizarrely personal calculus uh i part of it is i hate needles i i'm willing to take a lot of risks to not get stuck and that that's that's not a trivial part of the calculus uh and obviously i'm also worried about winding up with some bizarre side effect 14 years from now that they discover after they've got done this for a number of years and that i did it to myself and i'm suffering i think i'd rather take my chances with my own immune system against an awful lot of things before i inoculate but you know like i said personal decision well this is an interesting question from joe who's watching live she says how do we know if the vaccine actually helps the pandemic or the pandemic is just naturally burning itself out good question you'll be able to see that by by the the nature of the decay functions on the curves so statisticians will be able to tell that actually quite easily so we will we'll be watching and looking for exactly that so they're they're now not surprised to be seeing surges as a result of thanksgiving um and so the the uh and the curbs you know have interesting little properties to them that make mathematical and sociological sense so i think that you will probably see a pretty decided influence uh not so much on on cases because you're going to continue to see a lot of cases but on fatalities so i expect to see fatalities uh very quickly in the next 60 days be just chopped way down as they get the vaccine to people who need it people this uh this disease is now raging through the society they believe like maybe 70 million people have had it um so but the problem the problem isn't the 70 million it's it's the 1 million that are susceptible it's it's our it's our oldest most vulnerable people those are the people that that the costs benefit if i had my mother in a nursing home which i don't uh she would be getting the vaccine so uh i don't have her nursing home she's not getting the vaccine we're just careful uh to not bring it in the house dina says do you know if the vaccines contain egg and egg and mercury because i'm allergic to all that i'm not taking it for that reason because i've almost died from you know flu shots so i'm just i'm just i'd rather just stay home got it yeah i don't have any idea don't know anything about it no i haven't looked into it at that level because it's not something that i'm actively contemplating doing anytime soon in part because there are a lot of people that would be in line in front of me but even if i were desperate to get it today there are a lot of people who are are in a much higher risk position than i am so it's not something i i get into the investigation for until market processes catch up with whenever i i'm in a position to be taking it and then i can evaluate whether there's a there's a vegan version or you know what what's appropriate but this is it's an interesting vaccines are always an interesting question on a number of levels but it is this one of the places where libertarian principles really get tested so doug and i have talked about this a lot where the sort of the right to individual freedom and collective responsibility are really like under the microscope here so you know what do you owe to the collective in terms of you know it taking on a slight risk to yourself to mitigate this great scourge of humanity um i'm i'm very very willing and happy to do that first for certain diseases i'm i'm vaccinated against all of the horrendous childhood diseases and happily so and and got boosters a couple of years ago when i needed to and um and so that's that's a trade-off that i'm really willing to make it's not clear that that's necessary for something like covid yet so we'll just we'll just keep our eyes open to the data and and decide when we get there wait and see great thank you so much so you know it's great when we have you guys on we by the way if you send the question in advance you're much more likely to get it asked just because we give preferential treatment we have so many guys when you guys are on the right so i think that's really cool so all right so first question uh from james could you please explain what a sense of entitlement is and how to deal with people who have one because my showroom is in beverly hills i get a lot of celebrity clientele some of them are very nice but the majority of them have this sense of entitlement and are very difficult to deal with they feel like they should not have to wait like other customers or get the work done more quickly or cheaply because of who they are they don't like to be told no and often say things like don't you know who i am and when you say no or that's irrelevant they get really angry what causes a sense of entitlement is it the same as narcissism and any advice on how to deal with these people turn this over to the zen master i mean there's a lot of things to say about entitlement i it's it's uh it's a person it's i mean this is as as many things are this is sort of uh something like a sense of entitlement is emerging from both who a person is innately and their personality characteristics in the big five and just how they came wired out of the factory um at a genetic level and their um their opportunity structure in life their their sort of what kinds of trade-offs are they facing what sort of what sort of uh learning processes have they gone through where certain kinds of behavior lead to certain kinds of outcomes and it's it greases the wheels to be more aggressive and to be more entitled and to be a little pushier so you have to kind of have this is this is very much like uh you know genes loading the gun and environment pulling the trigger sort of thinking where you have to have the predisposition for entitlement but that's it's necessary but not sufficient to be an entitled human to have that predisposition you also have to have a an opportunity environment where it makes rational sense for you to behave in that way or to be wired so much that way that you can't help it so that that can happen as well too but most people who are entitled are they they just they they came out of the genetic factory a little disagreeable which which is sort of we use interchangeably with narcissistic those two things are basically the same thing so you can think of disagreeableness on the big five personality scale as just a genetic measure of i'm so sorry about that i thought that was silence a genetic measure of of of how generally fair you think life is so are you kind of going through life thinking that you know when you get your 50 of the pie that's about right or are you kind of feeling like you really should have gotten a little extra 10 because you know you're just you're you're a better human and you're a little more entitled to it so that's just kind of the the wiring that you have so i think most people are are coming in that way and then they have had repeated interactions repeated learning processes including in childhood and and through their lives where it pays to be disagreeable it pays to be entitled and and they may find themselves in a situation say in a workplace like this question or um in a relationship where they they get into that pattern of behavior and the the equilibrium between those two personalities between a boss and a worker or between a wife and a husband it settles in on that person just being routinely uh more and more entitled pushing the envelope more and more and more to get more and more out of the relationship so um i think this this happens very often but you can take that person that same person who has that predisposition personality wise and put them in a situation that would humble them very much and that entitlement would dissipate greatly so you know if they got if this is soviet russia and they got thrown in the gulag they're gonna find out really quickly that acting like an entitled jerk is maybe not the best strategy to get what they want anymore because the environment has changed on them it doesn't make them less of a disagreeable sort of entitled personality but the expression of that entitlement is going to be very subject to the environmental incentives and the constraints that are on it at any given time yeah so we're perfect hold on i just want to add something to this that to underscore because this has to do with the celebrity context that the question was asked but like jen has got a completely comprehensive and complete analysis of this and she's got it all i want to point out a little study that was done 20 years ago that that underscores this and this was people waiting in a waiting room and they had they uh the people didn't know that it was a setup so they they were they were subject in the state to go into a waiting room and wait for something and um it turns out and they were either highly attractive average attractive or less than average attractive and it turned out that the average attractive and less average attractive people would be willing to wait for about i don't know eight to twelve minutes before bitching the highly attractive people waited less than three minutes now they aren't just because you're highly attractive doesn't make you narcissistic it just it creates as jen's talking about an opportunity structure in the environment that if you [ __ ] people are more likely to jump okay so they're up at the counter saying hey what's the matter like i'm you don't you know don't you know who i am like they're not you're not thinking that way they wouldn't they wouldn't necessarily know that an average attractive person wouldn't be feeling that they're just expecting for people behind okay and so that that's a that's a fascinating little social psychological study uh on essentially what looks like entitlement but it's actually just part of the person's learning history and uh and opportunity structure in the environment that's making them look entitled even though they're not genetically entitled if you add uh believe me i'm sure there's unattractive people they're up they're banging the little bell after 38 seconds i.e genetically entitled okay but this is uh but this is the intersection between uh environment experience and genes and so yeah perfect perfect layout and the thing to do with these people is you know be pleasant but lay down the rules and don't budge you know that that's that's how you handle them and uh if they get all upset they can go go to somebody else's store you know that's uh that's that's how we look at that right yeah since since we're since we're on aj and you know it's sort of things always kind of circle back around to the pleasure trap and all these sorts of things too it's worth pointing out on this question that that women um will i mean men men as well but it's a very common experience for women to be uh more agreeable if they're overweight and they they sort of feel less entitled to ask for what they want and to make demands um very much along the lines of this experiment that doug is talking about they're perceiving that they you know they're the the way that people are inferring their value in the marketplace is lower and so they they're going to express themselves more agreeably they're going to be more they're going to be easier to get along with and more um they're going to go along with things at the workplace and in relationships and if they lose weight they turn into [ __ ] you know so um because suddenly they they kind of come into their own authority a little bit so explaining my relationships with you and aj over the last few years as we lose weight we get bitchier i can i can absolutely absolutely personally vouch that this is true i used to weigh about 100 pounds more than i do and i was much easier to get along well you know what [ __ ] is an acronym for babe is taking care of herself oh that's great i love that absolutely we got we got uh we got some nice comments i'm going to find him because somebody's throwing a lot of love you guys away but until i can find it i'll go on to the next question and actually i'm very interested in uh knowing the answer to this one from jennifer because i feel the same way she says how do you doctors feel about cloning my current pet is the most wonderful one i've ever had and i feel like i won't be able to go on without her when she passes pet cloning has gotten fairly affordable do you think it's a good idea well let me let me uh i'll have a couple of comments about that but uh i mean the first comment i'll stay away from the fact that it's a little weird for me to even contemplate it so we'll just park that out to the side because i can sort of understand it but my understanding also is that if you clone an animal there's you're cloning a bunch of dna damage at the at the age of which the cloning has taken place so it's not like that so this poor little creature is going to be born as an embryo and it's going to start to grow but it's essentially like a human being becoming an old man in 15 years so i don't i i given that that is i believe the nature of the way plumbing processes take place uh that might give you pause even though someone might someone might feel like hey that's okay if i could only have my cat and live that that cat's life you know in four years instead of 14 uh i'll live with it but it's like oh man i don't know that that that starts pinging on ethical chips inside of my own head uh to have an animal go through you know very quick and early senescence so anyway that's just a clear default that i have about that so it's not something i would ever do yeah yeah i mean you're in love with mo so i am in love with mo i i know you're not gonna meet two people who are more um ridiculous around their animals than myself and doug i mean we both really i i love my dogs like they are my children and doug loves his cats you know it's like really we we are really crazy animal people um but i would never do it either and and um partly because for for those reasons um partly because i i just i you know i've talked a lot about my sort of um my tour through my buddhist history and and this kind of um you know i i'm very keenly interested in being present with mo as the as the dog that he is in malay too i love mali too i don't want to leave melanie completely out of this conversation good one there's a good one and a bad one i love the bad one but mo is my very special like you know i've had him since he was a pup he was a rescue from detroit which is why he's named motown um and uh and he is he's just a singular little being you know he's and he is there there is an environmental piece to how he became who he is that i can't entirely tease out and control for and replicate um so there is he's not purely a genetic little automaton i could never completely recreate him um i could never recreate my experience with him everything that we've gone through together um but my evolution as a human while i've been with him like it's it's been a relationship and it's been a very uh self-contained of the moment you know this this lifetime these two beings had this dynamic together and it can never be recreated and that is part of what makes it so exquisite and and so tragic at the same time so every day i know that he's not with me forever and that is part of why i love him so deeply and profoundly and and it's like so intense for me so um i it's you kind of have to take the the deep profound loss with the that just like unconditional love that you get from a from an animal um and i think cloning is an attempt to avoid that that by avoiding the the bad or trying to avoid the bad you're also avoiding the preciousness of it but isn't it true that when you clone your pet you it looks just like your pet but it doesn't necessarily have the same personality right right it's going to yeah this is the this is the montage of if you if you cloned albert einstein you don't necessarily get fear of relativity okay so it's a unique set of processes that go on you'll get something sort of acceptable or you'll get a one hell of a mathematician but you might not have ever been interested in physics because that might not have been something sitting in the horizon right there with with a big question to be answered that looked like it was answerable so yeah so this these are we are each uh us and all of the living things are a unique individual point of consciousness that's going to happen and then it's going to be gone as far as we know wouldn't it be fun to clone dr goldhamer just to see what we got one is enough one might be too much right no just i didn't say it i'm just kidding we love allen so here's a nice cut oh i was just going to say as an alternative cloning i saw an ad on instagram the other day because instagram knows way too much about me and what what i would pay money for but it was it was a service that will um make a stuffed animal out of your outfit yeah that would be a great alternative so if you know i i can very much see myself getting a life-sized stuffed animal version not a taxidermy version but but like a stuffed animal toy version of mo i could i could see myself wanting that and being comforted by that um so if if somebody sort of wants to go that direction the market has solutions for you absolutely and i get those too yeah how do they know so dr lam keaney says jen is always so energetic beautiful and so brilliant caught me count me as a top fan forever oh thank you i love the questions you guys have submitted this time so tony writes i know you guys like to look at everything from an evolutionary standpoint so i'm wondering what is the purpose of a guilty conscience i'm considered to be an honest person with integrity if a cashier gives me too much change i immediately return it even when a bank or a company who has billions of dollars makes a mistake in my favor i call them up and correct it even though i probably could get away with it but there is one area of my life where i lack integrity and i always feel guilty about it when i play words with friends i often cheat i never cheat when i'm playing with actual friends who i know but when i play with strangers or the computer and if i'm losing i will cheat if the cheating results in me losing the game i don't have a problem and in many ways feel better and rationalize it by saying well i was just using the cheating tool to improve as a player and find the best word but when the cheating results in a win i feel terribly guilty and feel like i should confess can you please either help me stop cheating or not feeling guilty when i cheat i think all game theory questions go to doug this is just complicated enough i'm not sure it's going to be that interesting to everybody but well this it's really a beach or jeans type question uh this is not ought to be submitted to nathan um but i will i'll give it i'll give it to you really fast jen you you put me on the clock okay fine all right don't let him get loose okay what what is is it's an emotion that is designed uh by nature to have you not get kicked out of the tribe so living in close quarters with other people there's many opportunities for cheating so somebody you know goes and collects a bunch of acorns and they have them in a little leather pouch and everybody's gone and you see the little leather pouch leaned against a tree that stands acorns and you look around and there's nobody around and you're like wow that took him like three hours to get those acorns if i took like a third of them i'd save myself an hour's work and it's only going to take me about 15 seconds to do it okay look to the left look to the right nobody there now i'm excited by the cost-benefit analysis what stopped it well what stopped it like all of us have done it and if you have never done anything like that then you're a very strange human maybe alan hasn't done something like that i have i always stole candy out of the store when i was kid always funny going in psychology school like signs of you know uh conduct disordered youth it's like well i had like five of the eight or whatever it is so the point is is that why uh but when you do such things you are warned and you're warned by your internal audience or what sigmund freud would have called your super ego i call it an internal audience it's essentially a bunch of people mythically watching you well why would you have such a bunch of people mythically people watching you answer because they might be seeing you from behind the bushes and you can't see them so if you're in that stone age situation you look to the left and you look to the right that you better be imagining that there's people watching you and that because that's part of the risk factor that if you steal and get caught you could get kicked out of the village the century could be tremendously high it could be extremely biologically expensive so your nervous system put a check in there called an internal audience with the ability to activate the guilt circuit before you've even done anything okay and so that's what this is about now i think uh um yeah i'll notice for example even though it looks safe even if you got the acorns in your hand you know if i got the acorns in my hand and i'm walking away from the crime and i'm 28 feet away and i'm just getting past the trees and here comes suzy up the walkway later on stan says hey who took my acorns and susie's like hey i saw doug leaving you know when nobody was around so even when it looks clear it's not clear so that this is why human beings in order to not basically rob each other and cheat the daylights out of each other to make group living more more competent when we got selected for honesty and part of that honesty mechanism was to to not just be you know abe lincoln that would never cheat anybody out of the nickel no the cost benefit's always there the question is is there a check on it and the check on it is the guilt system by imagining what's what other people are going to think if they saw you do what you did and they can reconstruct it from the logical operations of what happened in the situation as best they know it and therefore you should have a signal to tell you that you're about to do something dangerous uh and that's what the guilt is so when you cheat in the game you're running it like you're running a cost benefit analysis on who's going to find out can they find out what the whole thing is and of course there's always temptations to cheat okay so so sometimes you succumb to those temptations under certain conditions but it sounds like this individual um this individual most of the time is very honorable for the for the very reasons that they've got a properly functioning guilt chip that's keeping their behavior alive probably if there was money on the line and you were cheating other people you probably wouldn't do it but since it's just some status and some game it's like well i'll just go ahead and look a little cooler than i am i understand that nice thank you all right well here's another fun question this is from christy i live near a golf course and when i take my morning walks i always find golf balls usually in excellent condition i pick them up and i put them in a box in my garage i now have hundreds of golf balls and i don't even play golf why do i keep collecting them when they have no purpose [Laughter] i love it it's great go ahead go ahead i i have no idea it's it's tripping some little acorn circuit i mean there's there's really there's no rational reason that you would be doing that it's just something something is getting hit in your brain that it is resembling something that was valuable in the stone age you have a little accumulation chip that that you're assigning value to this thing um and at some point you you did it enough and now that now that you have a stash of them once you have a stash just like a big ball of rubber bands it's more valuable than it was when it was just a couple of rubber bands and so it grows in value as you add to the stash so uh yeah i think you you unleashed a latent compulsion that you didn't know that you had and and now it's with you forever i would add to that little thing it may not seem valuable to you but you are mind reading that it is valuable or people wouldn't pay money for it so the truth is is that even though you have no use for them you are inherently aware that they're valuable to other people so that's uh so that that's part of what's going on there so but uh anyway all cool speaking of that that's a great zen background jen is that is it is are you doing uh are you doing educational processes with that background [Laughter] that is uh yeah i set this up for my um for moments of zen with jen which i've been doing in december which is my sort of uh virtual coaching group that i've been doing and i'll uh continue doing that in january um called the virtual village thanks to the plug doug i appreciate that i was actually going to ask you do you want to talk about your your current and upcoming programs and how people can join yeah sure i might uh momenta zen is closed for december but you can still sign up for the january virtual village on on my website at jennhawk.com um and then i'm also doing for people who have pleasure trap questions and are looking for kind of a restart after the [ __ ] show that was 2020 and they uh a little bit into january when the momentum starts to wear off toward the end of the month i'm doing a little four day webinar series where um i've i have dragged dr lyle along so we'll be interviewing him along with dr greger just kind of talking about all of the all of the challenges and all of the ways to tackle weight loss and setting smarter goals in the new year that one's called review and renew so people can sign up for one or both um on my website so yeah yeah well the last time i looked i didn't see a time for one of the events for the four-day series but yeah we haven't set specific times because i'm trying to pin down uh the very complicated schedules of these two very important doctors so as soon as i have uh finalized those but it's not until the end of january so um if the dates are set yeah but it'll probably be early afternoon pacific time all right great uh ts was wondering if that's the same reason people collect rocks stamps coins etc somebody in the village may find them useful uh and so i think jen's right about a golf ball golf ball is a sort of a fascinating looking thing it's clearly it's got craft it's also you know completely you know spherical uh so it looks fancy and it also is mimicking food so the uh so there's a lot of little chips in there that are that i think are getting activated i think she's exactly right about that it's better it's better strategy to have a big pile of these than not to have a big pile of them just in case i don't really know what what it's in case for but i feel like it's gonna be yeah just in case in case you have that golf ball emergency right right you got it well people are saying the person should sell them on ebay give them to their husband so he'll stop buying balls so maybe yeah if you're if you're watching i mean yeah make yourself a national historic location for the world's largest golf ball pile you know like just make put it on a little tourist map that people when they're driving by on their road trips can come see and take photos in front of it so you could start a whole instagram related to that and have a little cottage industry going on you can actually when i was an activity director or retirement home we used to make poodles out of them we used to glue them together and make little dogs so hey you never know whole new business all right okay this is an interesting question and i've noticed this too from brett why is it that certain groups that seem to be on the same team still fight with each other instead of unifying for example the different factions of judaism or veganism the people who are vegan for ethical reasons are constantly criticizing people who went vegan for health saying things like if you're not vegan for the animals you shouldn't be vegan or things like not eating sugar oil or salt makes it so much harder for people to become vegan how do you respond to these lunatics well the good news is that we have an incredibly fancy political scientists right here with us the extraordinary dr janet hawk at harvard university who should know about why do people have infighting in groups to let those people study so i'll turn this over again well the irony of course being that political science as a discipline doesn't actually know that much that is that is valid or true about why there's infighting because they they're not grounded in what we call consilience which is the sort of unity of knowledge that informs everything that that we're talking about so in order to understand anything you've got to look through the lens of biology right you've got to look at this sort of evolutionary process and survival and reproduction is is a a competitive rumble that is not a collective process it's an individual process so you you were in the in the game of survival and reproduction you were out for yourself so you were to the degree that you were seeking to market yourself to the stone age village to get to get access to more resources to have a better life experience to get better mates all of the things that were critically important in our stone age history that is a that's an inside game that's an individual status game and so the club the more narrow you make your little in-group that just changes the frontiers and the parameters of where you're gonna look for your status advantage relative to other people so you may share great collective interests with with people if you cut cut it wide enough so you can you know split the united states roughly into the democrats and the republicans um but within that you just you just keep keep cutting that interest you know thinner and thinner and thinner and you're going to find people who have conflicts of interest because they're trying to differentiate themselves to claim more status in the stone age village to display that their genes are superior to someone else's genes that's really what is driving the whole game so you you you can narrow it down into a group of people that seem to have everything in common and lo and behold a conflict will emerge and bubble up um even even among people who are very much in solidarity on one issue because at the end of the day they're still competing with each other over the same resources and and that is always just going to be the story of humanity until the end of time so um that's that's why it can all look like fun and games until somebody starts to get more youtube followers than somebody else and somebody starts somebody's book cells a few more copies than somebody else and it all has to you got it you got to assert your importance and your value in the village separate from the other guy that's just that's that's life yeah six six six people all running for a congressional seat in uh in southern new mexico all in the democratic ticket all fighting with each other okay that's why even though they agree a great deal uh and their political stances on things at the end of the day it's an individual gene process there you go that's great fabulous jen but wouldn't it be better if the vegans fought their true enemy instead of each other well they started off that way yeah yeah but the uh what we're saying is is that that that would be it might be and truly be more effective but being effective as a group against another group is actually not the biology of the of life so that's uh that is a temporary biology of life very temporarily this large set of coalition might come together for a specific purpose but instantaneously suddenly everybody's out for themselves uh so that's i'm amazed that doug hasn't found a way to make a basketball analogy yet because this is this is an example that actually lends itself like i feel compelled to make the basketball analogy which is that you know on a basketball team you're much more effective if you be you you're cooperative even at the at the expense of suppressing your own desire to show boat but of course that's not what you see you see a bunch of dudes showboating and making spectacles of themselves in front of any women that happen to be watching so that's the nature of the species even though they would probably be more successful and more likely to win the game if they actually tamp down that urge and and pass the ball to the guy who's actually going to make the shot that they they just can't do it they have to they have to grandstand that's it beautiful do you guys think that it has anything to do with status because like i think about like because he had mentioned judaism and like i was raised jewish and like the hasidic jews looked down their nose at the regular orthodox who looked down their nose at the conservative jews who looked down the their nose at the reformed jews and it's sort of like you know in veganism well the raw food is kind of looked down at the sos free who you know i mean does status play a role in this at all well that that's what that is exactly what we're talking about so yeah everything it's all status it's all that you're you're literally put your finger on at aj we don't we actually are careful try to not use that word because people are so reactive to that word that they they sometimes don't think very clearly when we start accusing them of status mongering but that is exactly what's going on because you taught me early on that whenever there's a problem always look to status and and it usually has something to do with it yep yep there you go yeah this is this is why you see and you know it's sort of this is veering into more political territory but the the sort of um debates and identity politics right now there's this there's this thing known as the purity spiral so it's like you know my i am more pure than you are i have i have my my struggle is more more acute you know there's this kind of like everything is this everything that looks competitive if you really dig down into that if somebody is making some trash youtube video about somebody else they're not doing that for their health they're doing that to to make a display about how they are essentially superior that they they deserve your your attention your votes your friendship your your women all of that that is all that is that's what's going on at the heart of the species so status is the name of the game we when we use the word esteem that's really a nice way of talking about status because we have found that people kind of are allergic to that word and feel like we're we're accusing them of just being animals but you know that's what we are well thank you guys barb hayes says these are the two most interesting guests i could listen to them explain our human weirdness for hours well you've got about almost 300 hours then you could be listening to on their podcast because we love listening to them as well you guys are really breezing through these questions i have two more and one is on masks and one is on satiety any preference no just just give it just throw it out there aj we'll get involved okay so um all right let's get the mag of the covered ones always make me nervous because like you don't see what i see afterwards on the youtube page with all this divisive but uh so jj aj how many times do we have to have this conversation you don't understand i can't disable it because i had it for 10 years but i really i barely look i really do i have other people checking and but anyway but here it is so it is from p and doug stated hi why are you calling him doug huh dr lyle stated a few months ago that he thought the advice to wear masks was an overreaction he said he'd follow the guidelines but that he didn't believe they were helpful are these still his thoughts now um the the best data now there may be better data now but the last time i checked there was a a fairly large um a fairly large study was done i can't remember where it was down i think it might have been denmark uh but i can't quite place my in my memory where it was done but i do remember that the the size of the end was quite large maybe on the order of three thousand people wearing masks and three thousand people right now something like that there's a big enough number so that they could they can make an assessment of the efficacy of mask wearing so they had uh and then it turned out at the end of the the period i think the people that wore masks about 1.8 of them had gotten covered and the people who had not worn houses 2.1 so there there was a statistically significant effect but it was utterly trivial okay so that that was the last good that's that's the only good data i've seen now somebody else may have seen other data but that was pretty good data in other words i think it was a fairly long exposure it wasn't like in a little laboratory setting that didn't have any naturalistic you know basically validity this was a i think they went out and they said okay you people you three thousand people we want you to wear masks very fastidiously you know for the next two or three weeks and then they have the other people say don't bother okay don't bother wearing a mouse we're going to try to see what what happens and what happened was an extremely small effect not zero but very small so i think that that i think that you know when you hear a bunch of uh uh what do you call it a bunch of talk about about how important maths are i've yet to see evidence that slaps me in the face all i hear is talk okay i hear people talking about science but i'm not hearing and i'm not seeing any so that's the best science that i had determined as of that date uh i don't i haven't quite heard i know i haven't looked quite frankly because you know what that's a pretty good data set so do i think that it's there yeah i think it's there i think there's probably going to be effect there how big is it probably under most natural conditions where people would be close to other people etc and living their lives the effect is probably very small that's that's what i think the truth is so that that's why i said it then and that's why i would i would defend that now somebody can come back and say oh no they did another naturalistic study in alabama and it turned out that nine percent of people got coveted when they didn't wear masks and five percent of people got coded when they did wear a mouse i'd be like wow okay well that's a that's a bigger effect right now that effect looks like three tenths of one percent so that that's uh that that's why that's why i think the way well then gina says how do you explain super spreader events and why do doctors and nurses wear masks when they perform surgery well these are these are these interesting questions and and so super spreader events uh that's a that's a different issue than talking about whether or not you wear wear masks consistently in your normal course of events so and whether it's super spreader events whether you put mass on a super spreader event i'm not sure that there would be any substantial change uh in the outcomes of those super spreader events i think the fact that you got people close to each other where were coveted is in and around in an enclosed space i think that's the problem whether or not people are wearing masks or not so this is uh these are the kind of comments that you'll hear and uh these are you know like i said 1.8 versus 2.1 that's the last evidence that i have that's why you know i'm not terrified if i'm if i'm in some situation where i'm exposed without a mask i'm not thinking oh my god i'm being irresponsible okay not thinking anything at a time i'm thinking my risk just went from some very very small level to a very very small level plus a little tiny bit that's what i'm thinking and that's probably exactly what it is there's also the yeah i got my social scientist hat on and and thinking about the social processes and and sort of um some other things behind us so we were talking earlier about the libertarian trade-offs with vaccines and it's a little bit of a i think about it in a similar way like even though you know i'm looking at the same data that you're looking at and going okay well yeah there's not a big effect size here it's unlikely that this is going to make a big difference for me or anybody else but my if i don't wear a mask when i go out to the store it's causing a great deal of distress to other people that i might run into who are in high risk groups who are going to be very disturbed by it feel very like they're in greater danger um so i'm always sort of mindful of that process and then there's the other very real component of it which is the um the sort of cognitive shortcut that wearing a mask is constantly reminding you that this is not a normal situation is not normal here so it's going to stop you from touching your face as much it's going to it's going to remind you that you're in public and that it's pandemic times and keep your distance and it's it's just sort of a little bit of a a buffer against normal behavior um for uh to direct you in ways that could be more effective than whether or not wearing the mask matters like the social distancing piece which is the much more important piece um and washing your hands more often and not touching your face and um all of those things which are which are critical so you know it's it's such a marginal cost for for most people um that is not causing them harm so i that's my position has evolved and comes like triangulated around being more or less pro-masking in public for those reasons if if even if the data is not there to support it well as i said to dr lyle the other day what i love about wearing masks is it hides all my wrinkles yeah yeah and you don't you know yeah it hides your wrinkles you don't have to get you know you don't as my grandma used to say you'd have to put your face on before you go out in public you know you just get roll out and go to the store um plus you know it can be a fashion statement i have this collection of amusing and entertaining masks now so that's just another opportunity you even have a mask that matches your dog's scarf which i love which was a wonderful gift from one of my favorite people i wonder who sent that to me if you're going to wear a mask you may as well make a statement right all right one of these days i got to have the dogs on camera showing those off so yeah oh that'll be that would be adorable okay so dr i know that dr lyle you've discussed this to our feel fabulous group but i don't think you've ever answered this type of question i could be wrong to the larger population but it's from nicole and she says could you please explain what the true cause of satiety is is it mostly a factor of the type of food consumed or the calories in the food on saturday dr mcdougall said that starches to the hunger drive what oxygen is to the breathing drive and that if we don't eat starch we simply won't feel satiated i have found that to be true for me because when i dabbled with being a raw fooder i was mechanically full from all the fruits and vegetables and i was meeting my caloric needs through the high fat plant foods but i always felt hungry on some level and never satisfied until i brought back potatoes rice and beans i often hear people say that they can't follow a low-fat vegan diet because they don't feel full without the fat and i am wondering if it's possible that they're just not eating enough starch because they're still afraid it will make them fat according to the satiety index there is no food associating as a potato dr shintani who took over dr mcdougall's practice in hawaii once said that the reason people feel more satiated when they eat fat is because it has more than double the caloric density is carbohydrate so my question is this would people feel satiated on a low-fat diet if they ate enough calories or is there something special about fat that makes people think that they are more satiated maybe perhaps how long food stays in the digestive tract well this person has been thinking about this a long time and i'm going to explain the the most important place where we're going to start this explanation is with the the utter truth is that nobody knows that's where we begin okay so the second place we go is the notion that you would need starch to feel satiated and that is not true okay the uh you can the nervous system would not be constructed in that way that that that is uh an evolutionarily incorrect entrance now is is a dr mcdougall correct in that starch is an excellent way to be hitting uh the satiety mechanisms very effectively yes okay so uh so there's but it is not i mean he's he's trying to get people i mean let's let's see what he's up against the whole world disagrees with him you know what i mean i mean colin doesn't disagree with him but colin isn't talking about starches colin hasn't identified that as the central core of his argument even though fundamentally it is okay so uh same with essie so the truth of the matter is these guys don't disagree on what to eat john is the only person i know and he is certainly the the standard bearer for someone who is yelling as loud as he can saying the big problem is a is a essentially a natural starch deficiency in the diet the the diet is out of balance and what is missing from people's diets or the natural starches that is true okay uh and so he's basically and the other thing is is everybody's afraid of them everybody thinks that you're going to overeat get fat he's saying no they're like oxygen for the satiety mechanism it's like it's the perfect thing so he's trying to hit people over the head and sometimes when you hit people over the head you make a statement that is more extreme than is true okay so i i don't even know how to interpret that statement the truth is of course you can get full eating nuts i've done it okay so i've sat right there and gotten sick eating a whole slew of nuts no no starch in there okay can't tell me i wasn't full i was sick okay so so of course uh you can hit the satellite mechanisms now to the other question about uh there are people that will eat a very low fat vegan starch-based diet and however they don't quite feel full in in possibly a way that is even optimal because what they're doing is that they're leaning on the stretch receptors by basically feeling full up to the gills and they wouldn't do that where they wouldn't be eating those volumes if they were eating higher fat food which would have been consistent with our natural history so do i think so this gets to a question about is there some uh some specificity in in the digestive system's sensitivity to different macronutrients i believe that there is so i think that uh if you if you ate just steamed vegetables um you you would reach satiety but you'd be reaching satiety at a weird spot and you might not ever you might always be having a low-grade craving like something was missing because you're bumping along at three to five percent fat in the diet and the system is not really designed to be eating that so i think that um i i have personally counseled quite a number of people where the move that we made was to quit eating enormous uh amounts of raw food and wet starch and include some other food that has some high fat in it uh and that to essentially then see if we can quiet down a screaming uh circuit that may be feeling like it's fat deficient so for example i'll have people eat half of half an avocado on their salad and that that can make a big difference suddenly they're not needing to eat the nearly the quantities that they were needing to quiet their hunger drive down so you have to experiment with that and but the last part of my story would be there's going to be individual variation in human biology on this question so uh i know that that uh interestingly enough alan's wife would look at him once in a while and say i crave meat she wouldn't eat it but every once in a while she would snarl at him like hey uh and allen would say no you don't you just grade the caloric density and she's like no no that's not true i was right there it was entertaining to watch this uh alan has no craving of me neither do i uh but i am not going to argue that that is a human universal so uh so that i i would i would put that in the game but i would not be surprised at all if there's people whose uh neurobiology is slightly built differently than mine and that they are craving that texture and the caloric density of animal food in a way that i do not so uh that doesn't mean that they need to have it it just means that that feeling of the craving uh i i could absolutely see that that would be a biological variant would surprise me at all if further investigations in neuroscience demonstrate that that's true anything no that's perfect that was you five minutes or less to do it back that can't you didn't say back the camera if i was waiting i thought those were the rules of the drinking game that i issued ahead of time oh god wow you guys got to all the questions the one that keeps popping up and i was typing to jen in the chat is it okay to ask is they keep asking is dr lyle single and i just don't know if i'm allowed to ask that because i think you just did i've got i've got two two i've got two girl cats and a boy cat and my mother so i'm outnumbered in the house but other than that yes i'm single okay because they they i i mean i yeah but i'm not the only one well no they they just say they they seem to all kind of you know want to date you and whatever all right all good even very good all right all right well guys you thank you so much you did such a great job going through those questions so quickly i really appreciate it and uh i i know that we're going to see you again at the end of the year dr lyle on the 31st you're going to be doing the last show of the year and dr hawk we're going to see you on the 30th so it's not it's not the end it's it's but this is this has been wonderful and we so appreciate when you guys come on it's always entertaining and informative and guys don't forget to check out the beat your jeans podcast and all of uh jen dr jen hawk's wonderful classes i'll post everything in the show notes and don't forget they have a subscription group now that's like less than a cup of coffee and really you can check it out they do q and a's with members just like this and they're very very fun so thank you so much for watching another episode of chef aj live tomorrow we have on some medical students that go to a medical school that actually teach the doctors how to cook so please come back tomorrow and watch that thanks again dr lyle and dr hawk thank you thanks aj have a wonderful day bye
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