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Chef AJ: BACK TO THE FUTURE WITH DOUG AND ALAN - A 54 YEAR FRIENDSHIP
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hey everyone and welcome to a very special episode of 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 guest i want to thank everyone who ordered my book unprocessed if you've already ordered it or if you order it by midnight on sunday april 3rd pacific time we will send you an incredible amount of bonuses worth almost 100 that information will be in the show notes on how to get the bonuses if you're going to order in the next two weeks or if you've already ordered i thank you very much for making this book number 326 overall on amazon today and number one in three categories but more important is today's show i just want to say in case this is the first time you're seeing me i never intended to be a youtuber or have a show certainly not live and certainly not daily on march 20th 2020 our governor ordered sheltering in place and i am not very good with technology and i had purchased a new technology that would allow me to go live without having to use facebook and i pushed the wrong button so instead of going live to my private group i went live everywhere it went everywhere and there were like 600 people watching because people really appreciate it early on in the pandemic a sense of community and connection but it got pretty boring just me every day so i asked a bunch of my friends a lot of them you know from the show medical doctor chefs come on and a show was born i really didn't think i was going to be doing it two years but then people kept writing me from all over the world because they wanted to be on the show and now we book six months in advance we've done 913 episodes live i haven't missed a day in two years and today marks the kickoff of the third season of chef aj live with two of my favorite human beings well one of them's human for sure we know on the planet they are the co-authors of the really the best book i've ever read it's called the pleasure trap if you haven't read it especially if you're struggling with your health or your weight it's a must read they're the two smartest people i know they probably have a combined iq of higher than a perfect bowling match and without them i would still be what dr john mcdougall calls a fat vegan and we're going to get to know a little bit more about them today we're calling today back to the future with doug and alan please welcome to the show my friends dr doug lyle and dr alan goldhamer thank you so much for doing this special episode with me our pleasure aj this is going to be so exciting you guys have been friends i believe for close to 40 55 years now i mean that's incredible that's longer than many people have been in live people i'm not even 55 years old aj so that [Laughter] that's hilarious could you tell our viewers what is the secret to having a friendship last longer than most marriages pick a good friend okay you get me started it's gonna be it's gonna be a while so we better circle back okay well i'm curious if you two hadn't met each other and you were meeting today maybe at a conference do you think you'd still become friends yeah you're you ask questions like that and you're just asking for trouble alan knows how this goes [Laughter] just go take a break go ahead hang out hang out with jennifer for a while while i answer [Music] jennifer used to uh say that sometimes she wanted to ask me a question would i live with them and she'd say she'd have some appointment half an hour you know and 10 minutes away she'd be like god i want to ask him the question but he only has 20 minutes to answer i i don't think i want to get it started and that's if it's a yes or no question yeah yeah yeah but see it's not a yes or no question never you have to give me alternative choices of narrow no the uh that is a huge interesting question almost unbelievably interesting so the uh the what what the questioner thinks they're asking is do you guys have like spontaneous chemistry as friends that happen when you were young and the answer is no we did not have spontaneous chemistry to have it the uh it's gonna turn out that that friendship uh uh as all human relationships are trading processes so something is being exchanged okay so in in a romance uh and a family and marriage what's being exchanged is tremendous amounts of time and energy and your dna okay and so that's what that is those are the most intensive and important exchanges that there are which is why the stakes are so great emotionally the um in commercial trades there's still an exchange process going on but there there might not be any emotional process to speak of i just want to buy you know aj's book and this book seller wants to sell it to me and that's that it's no big deal it's a it's a it's a three second exchange process uh actually more of that's going on a certain amount of my time and energy is involved in getting that exchange and a certain amount of time and energy on their part to have it organized to do it but it's still an exchange process that's the quote relationship that we have the friendships are somewhere in the middle uh in other words friendships are very you know they vary from very casual minor friendships of which a little bit of time and energy is exchanged all the way to tremendously central friendships in a person's life were a great deal of time and energy and spam exchange so you you don't know from the jump that you're going to uh exchange a great deal of time and energy with a friend i mean you may see in a romantic partner the potential that you would be willing to or think and hope that you might do such a thing but you wouldn't even know that okay there is no such thing as love at first sight because you don't know enough about anybody to possibly know you would make such a tremendous deep exchange with them when you exchange you don't just exchange you don't just trade you actually make the best trade available okay at the time so you know you may buy for example um you know a ream of paper at a store that you're in like you're in fedex and it's 6.99 a ream and you're like yeah it's more than the 499 i saw at the at the store the other day but i'm already here so it's the best deal and i get it off my list so therefore this is the best exchange okay so the question is if alan and i met today you know at a conference would we would we become the kind of friends that we are well the the the likely answer is no but there's actually one reason why we might and it's not what anybody would think okay if we were to actually figure out why that would be true first of all i wouldn't even be at a health conference so i wouldn't know what i know if it wasn't for anyone so i wouldn't be in a position to appreciate who he is who by the way you know when we go on in this thing later on we've got plenty of time i know we've got more to drive i go i got plenty of time no this guy uh when it comes to health in the 21st century when the 21st century is written uh i may be the only one that would do this but this guy goes on mount rushmore i don't i don't know that anybody else i know goes on that but this guy would go on my mount rushmore and i'll tell you more about that later okay there's reasons why that's true in my judgment now when it comes to us being friends the reason why we would be friends today wouldn't be because of some spontaneous great chemistry but something uh the reason why it would be true today is the same reason it was true 50 four years ago and that is that we both have a love of basketball and so when we were uh we would not be the friends that we are today if it weren't for one for two people and some circumstances one of those people is a guy named chick hearn okay so chick hearn was the hall of fame radio announcer for the los angeles lakers the second was jerry west so jerry west was a handsome guy that played guard well guess who one of us is hands and the other does the best he can yeah the truth is is both of us played guard and we knew and we happened to both love basketball we didn't love tennis okay we didn't love bowling uh we didn't love uh uh football others we didn't love golf we happen to both love basketball and we happen to both be a well above average athletic athletically and so then basketball itself is a very interesting game incredibly unusual game and it's actually unique on any in any major sport and that is that it's unique in its demands for optimization of basketball playing uh it's it's unique in its demands unselfish cooperation okay so football does not quarterback you know could throw the long bomb and show off his arm but he's gonna get benched immediately and nobody will play with him if he does that he he has to play within a scheme the offensive tackle doesn't have any grandstanding that they can do they have to do their job there is no grandstanding baseball there is no grandstanding okay soccer there really isn't any grandstanding basketball is unique the guy with the ball can do a bunch of fancy stuff and throw up a bunch of shitty shots and get try to get glory for himself to show off for the girls uh he can do that and hurt his team in fact that is the the biggest problem if you're a basketball coach is that problem okay when alan and i uh met as kids we were both enamored with basketball and we found out early very early that both of us were extremely unusual i don't mean just a little bit unusual i mean extremely unusual both of us played the game with a long-term self-discipline vision of how to optimize the resources available to the team in order to optimize the team's performance nobody else did that and as a result both of us were disgusted with the other people that we played with which remains true 54 years later we go out on a basketball court and we play as on a team we always make sure we play with each other we're not going to take any other answer we're going to play with each other and then at the end of the game we're going to walk off disgusted you're going to walk out disgusted with the other three players okay uh a unique unusual levels of self-discipline in a long-term scheme does that sound familiar to anybody okay so that that is why today if i met him at a conference i would have to know that he was a serious ball player okay it also helps that we were similarly athletically alan's bigger and stronger and faster but i'm quicker and so as a result we we are very well suited and not only that i'm a natural point guard and allen's a shooting guard okay so we didn't play the same position and as a result this this all of those historical factors are the reason why they got us together and basketball like i said unique in sports allows not only are you interdependent on other people but you also in basketball it is an incredible workshop to find out about their personalities okay so there's nice guys i played with that play pretty good fine whatever unusual to find somebody incredibly disciplined absolutely thinking the same way you're thinking about optimizing the big picture optimally that and the self-discipline and and no ego involved there no that you're on you the promos never find that so if we went out today if i found out that he was a ball player at a conference and then we somehow were in the same town and we got together we played i would immediately recognize that this was extremely unusual okay and i'd be like hey you want to play next week you got a team and then this friendship would form again so i in some ways the statistical odds against this were very high um it's not like i met this guy and said wow what a great personality [Laughter] no everybody was everybody just gave alan 15 feet wide berth we were in the same we were in the same uh grade school yeah 15 feet wide berth though this was not a guy that was this this was about as warm and fuzzy as i don't know porcupine the teachers were afraid of this guy they kept their distance so that's true that's the story that's why it is that we are here it's because we learned and we learned it deeper and deeper and deeper the more we played we're both serious players we played all the way through high school uh and the uh and after and for another 50 years and so you know i i almost never run into anybody that thinks about the game the way i do uh and really from the psychological emotional personality aspect and uh and almost never meet my equal in that regard of how it is that people play the game so that is the reason we're we're friends and that's the reason why we would be friends again you had to ask that question to get it how about that al pretty cool well i no i yeah what he said i uh it's slightly different for me the basketball thing is absolutely true but i'm also uh really value value in other people and so and i knew even from the very beginning i was much quicker to recognize doug's value than doug was to recognize my value because doug was always very personable socially appropriate you know very popular kind of you know well integrated um that wasn't my the situation with me but i recognized that you know he was a lot smarter than the other people i i he was processing information in a more valuable way than me and so that was what got me interested even before i saw the basketball you know personality spilling out and that's really what basketball does you put people on a basketball court and you can tell who they really are really quickly they can't hide it you know you can hide it under social uh appropriateness you can't once you get on the basketball court you can see what the real personality is and so eve but even before that i recognized the value because he was processing information in a very efficient way it was very valuable to me and i recognized that so was willing to modify my behavior acceptably enough as it related to him so that i could become uh socially acceptable he paid a big price socially for being even in close proximity to me so i had to make myself valuable enough and be appropriated enough that the price he was paying wouldn't be excessively high and that's why it took a little while to kind of break that you know make that sale and break that one down but you know eventually it did and then as he pointed out um if you value the actual personality of the individual you're dealing with uh then it's just it's just a question of exchange if a person has a good enough brain and they're processing information in a valuable way so it makes you better you know they talk about some people on a basketball court that they play in a way that makes everybody around them better so they play in a way to accentuate not only their own skills but also to take advantage of the other skills that was really true in basketball doug has a lot of uh ability to handle ball and he's quick and he does all that that's not something i do well i got to kind of just have somebody else create the opening and then you know hit the shot or do whatever it's going to be and so whenever i play basketball i always played a lot better if i was playing with doug because he played in a way that that took advantage of the skills ahead and the same thing's true in life um you know we talk about when we we had this concept of the pleasure trap and and i came up with a name and he wrote the book and you know i felt like that was a fair exchange you know what i mean because i mean after all you know the title is like really important i wanted him to be able to participate and so you know him actually writing the book was was his contribution but in that way we were able to work together in coming up with a really valuable product that couldn't happen by hiring a writer there's you you couldn't hire a writer that would that would come up with conceptual development you have to have somebody that actually has to think those processes through he does that better than anybody that i've met and so therefore that makes that's very valuable to me so valuable that whatever personality deficits or you know characteristics you have that somebody else might not think is ideal doesn't even register for me i couldn't care less about any of that i'm only interested in in the in the gold at the end of the rainbow there that pot of gold all right when you guys play basketball are you playing against each other or are you on the same team usually when we're playing it in a game situation we're going to try really hard to always play uh together um playing against him defeats a lot of the purpose i don't get to take advantage of the fact that he's able to create the openings and create the situation where i'm able to do what i can do best it's very frustrating playing with people where if you do everything right and then they don't get the ball to you when you're supposed to get the ball to or they don't take advantage of the screen or whatever it is you put a lot of effort out without seeing the return when i play with doug i know what's going to happen you already know how it's going to going to work out and that's why we can play completely undermanned if if he and i are together even if we're completely under man we're going to be competitive regardless so it makes up for not being tall or big or strong or whatever it is you can make up for a lot of it with with um appropriate play interestingly enough that's actually that's actually what our love of the game is i love the game is actually we we actually know that i know to go on about this i'm sure we got a bunch of people that couldn't care less but these are interesting principles and that is that that are actually the joy in that game for us is essentially testing how valuable is our personality and intelligence uh relative to other people's superiority and size and strength and athleticism and it really is an interesting thing like just how how how much can we take advantage of effectively our our uh brains superiority and that is the that is the that's that's what to us i mean obviously we like to hit shots and make plays but the truth is it's can we out-think them and so al and i have been a a pair of people looking to out-think uh competitors forever and so that and that's uh that's a hell of a person to have on your team i'll tell you that you know and that really extends into this health field as well because we've been trying to figure out you know how to do it how to do it how to overcome the challenges and figuring out how to do it right how to communicate that publish that uh you know there's there's it's surprisingly difficult even when you're right uh being able to effectively uh communicate that because there's a lot of forces of evil out there and forces of self-interest that look to undermine it uh so that's really part of the challenge they're just like there's challenges trying to play basketball when you're not tall strong good fast whatever there's challenges uh when it comes to competing in the marketplace uh for information exchange and that's essentially what we're in the duke in the business of doing is coming up with ways of figuring out how to do something and then and then sharing that information in a way that's meaningful to other people dr lyle do you think he would have found your way to a plant-based diet had it not been for dr goldhamer not a chance there's no way there uh there's no no reason that that that ever would have occurred to me uh and so i i and quite frankly the um so much of the discussion around plant-based uh living doesn't have anything to do with well-documented science or or intelligent intelligently integrated theory and so there's no it is exceedingly unlikely that that ever would have happened so this is uh him getting that right and getting it right early was inestimable value to me that's great i'm curious what annoys you most about each other ah well the thing that annoys me most about doug is how consistently right he is and so you know i've learned over the years to just you know when he's arguing a point um i'm always trying to look for a possible weak link or a crack in the thinking or and every once in a while you know you get a little little chip in the thing and then just drill right into that little chip but it happens very rarely i mean i can remember the times it happens that's how frustrating it is very very difficult uh competing with somebody who's able to consistently process information rapidly and in a correct way dr lyle what annoys you most about dr goldhamer and i don't know if it was long i don't know if we have enough time yeah now i i'm trying to think about that um i don't really know the uh i think what if i really think about what has ever uh annoyed me i think we've had um we've had you know you're you live 50 years with somebody you're going to have some conflicts of interest and the um and so there's uh in those conflicts of interest you know you you end up uh you end up having that you you learn some things about yourself and you you learn some things about the other person you figure out what what conflicts are people in whether the marriage friendship or between you and your insurance company uh what they are is that the people uh have uh essentially they have they have conflicts of of how it is that they see what's valuable and so and how things should be evaluated these are conflicts of evaluation and and so uh so the it's gonna turn out like when i think back we've had i mean i don't know we've had a hundred arguments or 50 we've had um and i i would say probably uh not to be echoing him but there's gonna be times when i would say when i was um his position on something would be um socially uncomfortable seem extreme seem punitive to other people seem uh sanctimonious and unfriendly and i would essentially in those arguments be the champion of the common man and saying no you're out of line you're pushing it too hard you're you're being unrealistic you're being shitty about this in other words and i would uh i would sort of be taking on that uh the common man or woman's physician and we would and he would dig in his heels you know in other words you're you're not you find out uh people if you if you're if you're with them long enough through enough depth of enough conversations you you discover uh some things about how they're how they're constructed that you wouldn't otherwise know until until a lot of pressure is put on a point uh and alan is uh he has things that are very important to him and he doesn't uh he's not going to be persuadable by what the emotional consequences are that to anybody and that that is uh where i would say that is less true of me now we are you know i'm pretty tough and so you know the the the joke is that uh nowadays when i'm talking general psychology more than health psychology you know on beecher jeans that that uh you know i'm like dad and jen hawks like mom so you want the soft thing you guys jen you want you want it real you want it straight you talk to me so i i am no i'm no softy at all the uh bet but relative to allen i am okay i'm the softy between the two of us without a doubt and i can remember times when i felt like he was being too hardcore i can remember a few times that that were important well i felt like he was being too hardcore and uh in retrospect i think i'm thinking about an important one now when i was disappointed in a decision that he made and yet um it turned out that decision uh was part of an overall wider scheme and he was right now he he won't remember what this decision was it had to do with a good friend of mine that that really needed help but i wanted him to come to true north and it turned out that it would not have been the right thing okay and um and so that uh but this you know i remember being frustrated uh with how allen was managing that and yet when it was all over it's like damn i i can't believe you know somebody when when people are pulling at the at somebody's elbow want them to get them to do something uh no matter how much they plead you know be careful who that person is that's in charge i mean think about this for example with respect to any kind of leadership the the presidency of the united states or something of incredible importance and that is that that you better not be somebody that's very persuadable uh uh you know you better not no matter how loud the squawking is and how uncomfortable anybody is you better be have someone that absolutely sticks to high principle those better be what's guiding the decisions okay and so um i would say that that that is uh so it's not it's something that has periodically annoyed me uh certainly about uh allen's personality that you can hardly call it a foible and you couldn't call it a weakness you would you would just call it a moments of illumination as to our personality differences i'm inherently softer i'm inherently more more empathic with other people um that uh and sometimes those are gonna be better decisions tipping waitresses being friends okay i'm gonna make a lot of little decisions that are actually going to be better than he's going to do and he's going to annoy me when he's going to start to do it wrong because of some inherent low low dial on the sensitivity meter that he has he will have a point he's not going to treat anybody poorly because they didn't deserve it but if they deserved it he will and i'll be like why are you doing that you don't know the backstory of this person you don't know you know i.e those are the kinds of things that of the 100 things that have annoyed me there's been 80 of those um and that that if we if we had a judge and jury somewhere in the sky they would vote for me on those 80. on on the on on maybe 90 but on the 10 big ones okay on the 10 big ones um i would say that he was probably always right okay and that's because that's the difference in our personality on those those times when i would have bent and shouldn't have but that's because i'm more normal and uh so alan is unusual in his uh as he used to say irritated with other people not never said it to me but he said that person needs a steel ramrod rammed up their spine for god's well he was born with that he had he had steel in his spine so the uh so that that's what i would say about that all right thank you so much that this is so much fun okay all right what is the most important thing that each of you learned from the other person well instead that's probably the most important thing i learned was um was that i had vulnerability in in uh making decisions where sometimes my empathy could put me into a situation where i might make mistakes i probably wouldn't have known that had i not have not had such an unusual person so close to me involved in some of those decisions and then watching the consequences when he didn't make those decisions so that's i.e sometimes it's very tough to make tough decisions so that that's maybe one of the most important things i learned there's been many things go ahead i remember uh when we were you know when we were talking about what we were going to do when we were in junior high or whatever it was and i remember thinking well you you take somebody that's got a problem health problem whatever and you teach them how to get it right and then they'll do that and and you said well no they won't do that what they'll do is they'll do that until they're no longer motivated by pain debility fear of death whatever it is and then they're gonna slip and slide back to their old behaviors and the behaviors that are reinforced by the people around them and i said well that's ridiculous if you know why you got sick and you really understand and then you did something and got better that's it you're not going to go back and do the stuff that causes problems and you insisted no yes they will because they're going to forget and there's social pressures and there's this and i remember being so damn it that like how could you be so foolish to think that people are just going to do things even though they know that's not maybe the best decision and i was so shocked to actually learn no you were right and and the problem is you're right about a lot of those kind of things and so even though i was absolutely vehement no i haven't figured out this is how it is turns out no it's not that way and now i've learned oh okay just because i think people ought to do something like this or this is in their best interest that's really irrelevant in terms of predicting what decisions they're going to make so you have a different it's not that you disagreed with me about what would be in their best interest if you disagreed with what they're predicting of their behavior was going to be and you actually predict it much much much more accurately and so that's been and of course we're struggling now in our research trying to figure out what's the big issue we kind of know how to get most people that have most problems well so if they have high blood pressure they have diabetes they're overweight we know if they engage in this set of behaviors they're going to get a very high likelihood of resolving their problem may not be the only way to do it but it's a way that works we have it but then for some reason when people do that even when they're successful when they go home they struggle so we're trying to figure out okay what can we do to support encourage entice bribe intimidate whatever people so they can be more successful longer and it's this huge problem for me particularly because i don't really um appreciate how difficult it is for them to do it once the pattern's been established you've been a little bit more in touch with that but even you have trouble figuring out exactly what the best combination of strategies is to help a person be successful long term i know the problem with our research is that we can get them well but we got to keep them well to be impressive and so now we're trying to add all these education features and different things which are um not as easy as just locking them up and not feeding them or something um [Music] we have to solve that though if we're going to be successful in the long run which is to get people well and keep them well and that's really what the game was when we set it up was how can you get people well but more importantly how can you keep well how can we not necessarily focus on life extension because we already know that how long people live is largely determined by luck and genetics but how well they live now that's really where the the goal is how can we reduce stability but that unfortunately requires compliance and adherence um at first i thought well it's real simple when we bring them to the center they get well so let's just not let them go home we just keep them at the center indefinitely and i think that would work the problem is apparently it's not practical because you can't just keep everybody there and so now um i'm hoping that you'll come do a better job than we've been able to do it figuring out how do you get people that are well staying well by manipulating the behaviors charles we have some freezing here i can hear you aj i can't hear doug now can you hear me now yeah i think we had just a little zoom glitch okay thank you i'm so glad to when i go like this it means something's happening okay continue please doctor no i i'm saying you know dad what i've learned is that people make decisions on from complex means including psychological ones which are quite annoying that's great all right so what was it like working on this book together and i just want to say you can tell a lot about your personalities by the way you sign the book so dr lyle signed it a little drawing to aj you're one of a kind always a great pleasure and then dr goldhamer says beware of the pleasure troye that's actually really interesting that is exactly what you're looking at the uh alan actually when he in his last answer he he's pointing out a great example of a higher principle that that i just it's important in the whole discussion about uh who we are and how we've gone about things and that is that that uh human beings are are uh unique in their ability to try to predict what other people are going to do by by essentially putting themselves into the other person's shoes so they this is a critical part of human uh self-consciousness and their their ability to transport themselves into a different set of situations uh this there would be many reasons why this would be super valuable that i'm not going to get into here but the fact that we do it is obvious and it's it wouldn't it wouldn't be any good you wouldn't have any feelings watching a movie uh if you weren't transported inside the other person uh and then having feelings similar to the ones that they're expressing okay so uh and understanding the circumstances that they're in and therefore understanding why they're making the decisions that they're making etc um this is this is you know human nature now the thing is is that one of one of the really interesting things about human nature to me is that so you can imagine if you had a person that couldn't put themselves in other person's shoes then they would be often be very bewildered and they would make poor predictions about what other people are going to do because they wouldn't be picking up the clues and they wouldn't be having the feelings that the other person was having okay so obviously it's extremely valuable to have that characteristic however what nature did and as far as evolution got was to just plunk your own personality inside that other person's head and to just say well if i were them i would do this in those circumstances okay so one of the curious things about this to me is that in man-woman relationships that's what happens so men will plop themselves into a woman's head bringing a man's frame of reference that's why you get guys you know on dating apps without without their shirts on okay because they're like wow i'd really like to see the women without their shirts on so they probably really like to see me without my shirt on and it turns out it's not true okay so it turns out that that we don't actually have this male's good intuition about what's going on in a female's head and females don't have good intuition about what's going on a man's head you bring your gender bias with your uh with you um more generally this is going to be um what we call the egocentric bias and the author harry brown actually calls it the identity trap and that is that you are thinking that other people are going to be thinking and feeling the way it is that you're thinking and feeling okay the um and so that's what alan was actually just talking about and that is that alan being the really unusual personality outlier that he is couldn't understand why other people once they'd see the light they wouldn't know the light wouldn't stay on just didn't make any sense to him the uh whereas it made more sense to me since i'm not quite as much of an outlier uh it made plenty of sense to me to do what he said but it didn't make sense but it made sense to me i also had a better intuition about other people okay for that very reason so now today we find that uh quite frankly the pleasure trap is the biggest health problem in the world uh and it's it may be some total the most important problem with respect to human happiness there's quite a few problems with human happiness but notice the tagline the sec the secondary title of our book that alan also figured out um pleasure trap was good but that's a typical allen like two seconds it just comes to him they don't give him any credit for that that's just sort of that that just arrives you know without any thought but the subtitle he thought about very carefully and so i was grinding on that problem and sort of chasing my tail for a long time and alan finally sat down in focus for about 12 minutes and came up with that and as soon as it as soon as i saw it it's like no that's that's exactly right mastering the hidden force that undermines health and happiness now pay attention to that title because there's a tremendous amount of information in that title uh that that's not just some cutesy title pleasure trap already tells you there's something very scary and and fishy going on something pleasurable is luring you into something but it's a trap okay so okay so we already know that there is something there's something serious here and it's dangerous and then mastering the hidden force that undermines health and happiness okay it's a hidden force that's undermining the most important things that there are and this is book is about mastering that well mastering tells you you don't master something easily you master something that is extremely difficult okay so we're talking about the mastery of something that is extremely difficult about the most important things that there are that's what this book is about okay this book and the concepts i should say in this book hell with the book the concepts that we're talking about though remain the most unappreciated misunderstood concepts in all of health okay people think that they're going to tell their friends about the great news about plant-based this or that first of all identity trap right away you have no idea who it is that you're talking to you have completely different set of perspectives and personality characteristics they're nothing like you your daughter isn't anything like you okay your daughter who will not listen to you and is 50 pounds overweight and yet you lost that 50 pounds and you know you're 52 years old and she's 28 years old and trying to get on the mating market and can't get a husband and it's really miserable and unhappy and it's disgusting if you can't even talk to her because you try to talk to her 50 times about this problem and she won't listen and she's trying every other diet and she won't listen to you no matter how many experts you pound down her throat okay you are not understanding the pleasure trap you're making the mistake that alan made once he figured out what it was that he's like what is the problem you just do it and it's like oh no 40 years later it turns out you don't just do it it's a so pleasure trap uh we have come to understand more than we did 20 years ago when we wrote this thing okay so we we sat in green chairs till two in the morning over and over again going over every word every paragraph plotting out the next chapter you know etc the uh jennifer would you know go to bed put ear plugs in her ears like doesn't want to listen to it okay so 20 years after what we find is it's it's completely underestimated so people continue to believe that this is a simple matter of information it is not even close to a simple matter of information the problem is what it takes to help people attract the pleasure trap uh is pretty sophisticated psychologically it it takes uh it it takes a whole a whole sort of cinemascope of conceptual tools about psychology but that's not what anybody wants to do everybody wants to essentially tell the story here's the information uh and isn't it great and i you know i did it and go do it uh never gonna happen and we can see that people are listening to aj a thousand shows later why because they didn't just listen once get the information get convinced and then go do it and not have a problem it's it turns out oh no this is a mastery problem okay but this is like learning hip to her to hit a one iron into the wind at pebble beach right when you need it in the u.s open this is a lifetime of a practice and a lifetime of effort and a lifetime of knowledge seeking what seems like it ought to be easy isn't even close to easy so yeah to me you know i still i'm i'm actually quite uninterested and frustrated in talking about health issues health questions etc because i feel like you know what we know the answers here's the answer that you need the answer you need is all the little details and all the encouragement of all the the uh the social support and situational attention to detail to help you beat the pleasure trap that's what you need and you know what that's not learning the next cool thing to tell tell your friends or settle an argument about protein or beans or how much iron you need or anything like that no that's not the most important thing at all in fact we've created essentially a prison camp where people are can enforce those behavioral changes because we removed so many of the social issues by creating the true north health center where you come in and they say it's like a prison camp it's not true though because in prison they give you bread and water whereas it true north it's like you know just water you know you didn't get that we removed the temptations we remove everything and then the problem is people have to go home and that's where the pleasure track comes in at the center we've done our best to remove most of those issues so they can at least experience what it feels like to do it right but the trick the little catch is that then they have to go out and continue to live in the real world that's the hard part yeah dr goldhamer what was the process of working with dr lyle on the book like for you so the thing with doug that's a little bit frustrating for me because he's a very skilled writer but he's also a procrastinator so the trick is to corral him to get him in front of the actual computer once he's actually like got the distraction things in his life out of the way for the day and sits down in front of the computer he vomits up like 700 to 800 words uh an hour of really articulate interesting stuff that i couldn't wait to read but it was quite tricky getting him actually sitting down each night in front of the the computer because there was always like you know other people's problems and you know life and relatives and girlfriends and wives and all those other you know really distracting things and so pushing all that stuff else out of the way so that he would actually just write and what was really frustrating is every time he sat down he ended up coming up with really good product and so after two years the pleasure trap was really formed um it could have been done maybe in three months if there just hadn't been all that other life distractions have either of you either personally struggled with the pleasure trap or your weight because it's interesting that you know so much about it but i don't think you guys have this problem what problem well i don't think either of you have been overweight or obese or even members of your family or really struggled with the pleasure trap have you well no i mean once you understand the pleasure trap then you just do it you know create an environment that supports it and we've been really fortunate you know where we uh when we were doing the pleasure trap we lived in this on the same property in the same house we had in the same environment so there's certainly no distraction there and at the true north health center it's really easy because that's all there is there's health and food choices and you don't have to shop and chop and do all the hard work that everybody else is having to do so we had it relatively easy all we had to do was you know eat and work wow well the dr goldhamer the fact that dr lyle still has these indiscretions with carrot cake do you think he's more susceptible to the pleasure you know i know occasionally when you say indiscretions i think he's defined what he accept acceptable behavior for his particular health risks and whatever so if he'll indulge in some piece of vegan carrot cake yes i think it will eventually catch up with him but the problem is it's so limited it's going to take a long time i keep hoping though by the time we reach our 80s maybe our 90s he'll have aged out just a little quicker because we're about the same age and i'll i'll finally be able to beat him because and i'll of course attribute it to that piece of vegan carrot cake but in reality it's probably going to be more having to do with jeans the um yeah we then to answer your question more reasonably um the answer is no neither one of us has has had any significant problem with the bloodshed trap the uh we i i am inherently more open and and less disciplined essentially more normal of a human and which is a good thing because if if both of us had had been as unusual as alan we wouldn't have ever really understood the pleasure draft and had any intuition about it at all no so uh so it's a it's a good thing that that i understand uh what you know how that would work and how it does work and i understand the lure certainly perfectly well uh but no dan the answer is uh one of the reasons why we're able to stand over over to the side and be appalled by the pleasure trap is be is because and and not intimidated by it is because it is uh it is not so potent on us and yet we see to our to our horror how you know what what destruction it wreaks on human life we're at large and so that's that's i know we've had it a little easier than most too because i know i got started very young and so i never had the drink or had the coffee or had the alcohol or the drug and you don't miss what you don't know so somebody that's gotten him get involved in behaviors that now has to give up those behaviors they're paying a price for giving up even though they think the benefit might be good you know they'll be happier and healthier not drinking than drinking they have to give up the benefits they got the social disinhibition the ability you know whatever it is the the taste the the feeling the good the dopamine stimulation in the brain whatever there is a price that's being paid for giving up otherwise people wouldn't have continued to engage in those behaviors and so not having engaged in the behaviors you don't really have the price you just have the conceptual benefit so i think it's easier for those of us that start early than those that then people have to learn new behaviors you know when they get older i think it's a bigger challenge for them and i think some people's nervous systems are different than other people they're more reactive more responsive you know i remember you gave me that test about agreeableness and disagreeableness so um you i don't remember which which via vehicle we did but when we when he did this test it turned out that you rate people from zero to a hundred percent tile and a hundred percent taught me to be the most agreeable and zero percentile would be the least agreeable and he gave me this test that came out zero percentile and then you gave me a different test which was entirely different because that came out one percentile but apparently there's no zero percentile on that marking system and so as disagreeable as doug thought he was it turns out i'm even more disagreeable as far as the objective standards uh so yeah that was actually incredible because we we uh i never would have predicted that and yet i i watched down make the answers on that on that so i i've met super disagreeable people people that are far more disagreeable than alan um but but what we see that is the um but we see what the elements are of that same sort of cast iron sort of integrity that i talked about earlier i.e no we're not doing it that way because that's not the right way of doing it that's the that's where you see the uh the disagreeable and alan come out that's also something that a lack of that is what makes healthy living basically impossible for a lot of people a lot of people if you're if you're 80th percentile agreeable this is going to be unbelievably difficult for you unless you're surrounded by people that are super health health oriented then you'll be fine but if you're surrounded by conventional people that are in the pleasure trap and you're at the 80th percentile for agreeable you're unfortunately you know you're about sunk uh it's going to be almost impossible for you we talked about that in the pleasure trap the idea that you know socially appropriate healthy nice kind loving gentle people that care that whether people think have to work a lot harder and overcoming everything than people that really don't care that much what other people's opinions are because you know because this is so far outside the norm if you engage in these behaviors that are consistent with healthy living you are a standard two standard deviations out in behavior mode from everybody else and that makes other people uncomfortable and if you don't like seeing other people uncomfortable you're going to modify your behavior so as not to hurt them and not to make them feel so bad because you feel bad that they feel bad so now i'm recognizing that that's a characteristic and i don't hold people like if people are loving caring people i don't hold that against them i realize now that that's their personality and they just have to overcome it it's just one of those things that people have to overcome well do you think that someone should devise a test to see how vulnerable they are and if they know they're not going to succeed don't try no i think it's not about not trying it's just recognizing the amount of effort you have to put in is even more than the person that maybe uh like me that would be relatively easier for yeah well yeah that's accurate okay i just want to thank susannah angela [Music] and sandra for their super chat donations and thank you deb for these spells okay so uh the next question is i know you guys have a respect for each other and i'm curious if there's something that you found in the other where you're pretty convinced that they're wrong about uh i've now i don't think so i don't think there's anything i think i think if anything allen has has uh i think we've articulated that that he he learned that he was an outlier with respect to the self-disciplinary problems required to beat the pleasure drop and so he uh so certainly we we would have had that argument um i think strangely enough um allen is a really extremely competent business executive however if he if he were vulnerable to a mistake it would have been that he would have uh overestimated people's self-discipline and their intelligence in other words he would have thought that everybody would would flock to this um uh so had you asked him had you asked him uh uh you know i'm certainly no genius at predicting public demand but i uh famously just to just to go upside down on this uh i i was uh an original editor of the china study and i was reading it when i was living with allen and uh actually when we were we were engaged in even though the china study was published after the pleasure drop but we i was reading it while we were still working on the pleasure trap so i was reading the original manuscripts uh that colin and tom were writing and alan said well how is it i'm like oh it's really good but it won't sell at all there's no way this is gonna sell this is way too dry and academic and and uh it's too too long arguments are too long no this is a loser nobody's gonna read it now that that's me sort of uh again what am i doing i'm underestimating uh the public i think uh i think alan wouldn't generally overestimate the public uh in other words been been thinking that they would have they would have seen and grabbed this truth and seen its value because he saw its value very very early in life um so yeah but i don't know but in general right or wrong about approaches or or anything else no i think it's probably us uh struggling with uh with the with respect to the pleasure trap struggling with how it is oh i know i actually arrived at what i think we haven't uh possibly a disagreement and um and actually it has important implications career-wise and for what's happened in the last 10 or 15 years between the two of us and that is that uh there there came a time when i basically said you know what this problem is is way bigger than we thought it's way harder than we thought and in fact the people that we can help are way narrower with than we thought and so guess what al uh alan is it was in principle and still is in principle sort of out to get the entire message to the whole world in principle um i have in some ways abandoned that project and so yeah so you're gonna get a long answer uh for me sorry to everybody but this is how this goes so the uh i said um uh this will get to to mount rushmore issue so well maybe we'll get to that later but but alan um has has been determined that this was not only was it right that he had the right direction that but it wasn't only right but it was unbelievably valuable in fact it was the most valuable information in the world and so therefore somehow the world is going to see this and they're going to get it okay and i came to the conclusion maybe somewhere between 2005 and 2010 that i started to realize you know what this is too hard for the species that i'm now that i'm now understanding more fully that i'm now seeing my intuition is starting to tell me that this is that we're not talking about 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 percent of humanity that we can help we're talking about five okay and so that that actually shifted uh my own personal life priorities and so uh alan allen has been out to try to essentially get this uh to the entire the whole enchilada for good reason because every damn person this would be the most important information every damn person would ever get and so i understand that and so that that's we were largely on the same page but i was already in other words the dynamic tension between us around these issues goes to the difference that me having a little better intuition about the common man and woman than he did and so therefore he's a little more determined and a little more hardcore you know a little more like no they'll get it because they have to get it because it's the most important thing and i'm like by 2010 uh you can sort of divide my career into a couple of major major sort of major projects both of which are super interrelated so obviously it's understanding the human mind motivation decisions uh life experience happiness self-confidence self-esteem all of these things and so the the thing that alan brought to the table the information that he brought to the table it has enormous implications for all those things and it turns out that the problems that are associated with dealing with the pleasure trap wind up being remarkably complicated and subtle and immensely challenging and a tremendous amount of conceptual development was done in my career in order to address those problems by five years after the publication of the pleasure trap i'm looking at that thing and i think you know what i think i've said everything that i have to say and i think that the problem is so difficult that it's now about just preaching to the people who are already highly susceptible and interested but it's we cannot go after the whole enchilada it's too hard um alan meanwhile is like no you know one of the problems is is that they don't know enough and if you would get off your ass and be a decent research director then we're going to do this and we will shove this down the world's throat which by the way includes all the plant-based doctors that actually don't understand what alan understands so forget i mean those are great guys but the truth is they they don't know what allen knows and so the um so i'm like you know what i don't have the stomach for it and so there was a period of years where i'm starting to drift away and i'm we're no longer exactly going the same direction which remains true to this day and it uh and this is the the fundamental reason and i uh so i have sort of two things that i then start wandering into a new domain which is highly interrelated it's the same issues it's health happiness self-esteem self-confidence unnecessary misery except that it turns out that you can address unnecessary miseries associated with the mismatch between the modern world and the stone age world you can address those in pure psychotherapy and in concept that i can talk about and you know a few years ago you know a young lady wandered onto the property at true north named jen hawk who would then become dr gen hawk and what would she would she would be now my co-author of my second and probably final book so these two people you know if you're gonna start to talk about happiness and relationships and people and the other aspects of this you're going to have to have a chick like allen just isn't going to do it you know what i mean this isn't going to fly okay so what has happened is that we remain like alan and i whenever we talk about anything we have a tremendous integration of how it is that we think about the world and that that is you know that has never changed and never will but what's happened is that we've drifted off into two directions he now has a a top flight super smart research director who will who has done great they've done great work together and they and alan is going to shove this down the world's throat he will make them see that this is like he's going to do it the uh what whether you know we will see we won't we won't live long enough to see the implications of everything that he's up to okay but we're going to be able to see a lot of it hopefully if we live another 30 maybe 40 years we're going to be able to see just how much corn this guy winds up sprouting from all the seeds that he's planted yeah he's been plant seeds for 40 years he's gonna probably got another 40 years i know that that's what he's up to i have i have gone into um you know a related but somewhat different domain and uh so the book jen and i are writing we'll have the pleasure trap concepts in it people will sniff and they will see some of the same conceptual foundations uh but they'll be chick talk relationships love we're not gonna have al talking about love and friendships and stuff stuff like that no no no no so that's that's uh that's where that but that's where this goes and so he's got a team and he has it now takes a long time to uh to do to accomplish the kinds of things that he is now able to accomplish and and he will accomplish more but uh but but fundamentally you know uh what are we both dealing with we're dealing with with respect to the pleasure trap and all its related issues who are the people how many of them uh can you help and the ones that are struggling how many what would be the best way to help those individuals those are the most important questions in the field and they're the ones that that that very few people out there that are trying to help actually have anything close to the conceptual tools to try to address it optimally so we do the very best we can but i know this is a hell of a tough weeks at one year trying to assess okay what level of adherence do you need to sustain the results and how do we either select people capable of that type of adherence or how do you motivate people so they can improve their adherence and it's getting really um more difficult because now we're getting into all this behavioral stuff and personality stuff and social stuff it's a lot easier just looking at them locked up at the center than it is looking at them trying to manipulate the behaviors out there in the real world but i feel like we've gotten to the point now we know what behaviors they need to do the only big problem now is getting people to consistently do those behaviors and i'm sure aj that's where you get your frustrations you know for example if we're in the domain of weight loss we know how to lose weight there's nobody that we can't come up with this pattern of behavior that that'll be successful in losing weight but getting people to do it's a lot harder than just coming up with this is what you need to do actually doing it's tough it's tough business if you guys were writing the book today would there be anything you would change maybe take out maybe add um there's a few things that that we know now that we didn't know then the damn little quite frankly yeah i've been through it recently and i was shocked at what a good job we did of not uh stepping in the mud and saying stupid things and even though they're like you say we keep learning stuff and at some point we'll probably need to do an updated version that incorporates some of the new things you know add the some of the new things in there but right now it's remarkable how little i would change there's nothing i'm embarrassed by that and you know you can always find things to add but i i think it's a still real solid piece um yeah which is really shocking when you think about yeah it's been quite a bit of time and we were kind of you were reaching out ahead of the curve at that time and the curves kind of caught up to it so now what we're saying at that time was outrageous now there's some general ideas and maybe there's something to it this whole idea of the pleasure trap and the whole influence the dopamine has and the motivational triumph and i remember arguing with you on that because doug you know obviously enter pleasure seeking pain avoidance are things that you know would drive behavior but doug kept insisting that energy conservation was a part of this triad and i remember thinking oh no he's lost it on this one that doesn't make sense how could energy conservation be as a dominant of factors pain avoidance and pleasure seeking of course it absolutely is and it's a critical concept you know in hindsight now to understand why this is so difficult uh but you know it wasn't obvious even to me at that time and i had you know a chance to be bathed in this type of thinking and yet it still didn't make sense until you know we really really ground through it but for some reason i don't know exactly where that came from but you had that figured out right right in the very beginning right from some of the early conversations we had you had that motivational triad as being kind of the base yeah no i know where i got it i got it in a uh in a throwaway line an argument in the selfish chain by dawkins so i immediately recognize the the central and critical importance of energy conservation and and um it's going to turn out that uh in the book that jen and i are writing uh it becomes obvious that energy conservation is in fact the central motivating force in all animal behavior and not only animal behavior literally the structure of life itself so it's going to turn out that that and this is also basically this is not a principle that's understood even in evolutionary psychology so this uh this is the you know there's um there's a really cool thing about about the discovery and and that is that and it's a difficult thing in academia to have happen believe it or not and the reason why is that academia is the place where discovery's supposed to take place and yet that's it one of the more difficult places for it to take place because there's professional incentives and there's ego issues and more importantly people are siloed into their workplace there's a department of biology department chemistry partner psychology they are not all in the same building and they aren't all talking to each other so one of the well i feel incredibly fortunate that that allen and i did not want to do the same thing we weren't a couple of young kids that wanted to be doctors or lawyers we were we were different and so alan was a obviously an offbeat completely avant-garde completely gonna do his own thing and smelled some early truths about health and turned out his his instincts were dead on and so he was gonna do that meanwhile i was always super interested in in essentially you know emotional psychological confidence it's all had to do with being nervous around girls quite that's where this all came from by the way so the truth is is that those two those two things because of basketball and jerry west and chick hearn we became incredibly good friends and as a result of that those two different domains of interest cross-pollinate each other and then wind up with very interesting consensus conceptual developments okay the um and out of that one of the jewels that comes out of that is uh is my uh is my alertness to energy conservation and and then notice all the little things that that dovetail around this that one of the more painful things that can happen to an individual is to die and starve to death and therefore you wind up seeing animal behavior is going to be you know how are we going to not do that well we're going to eat okay well it turns out that's pleasurable oh that's interesting turns out it's more pleasurable when there's more energy in the food oh that's interesting okay and so pretty soon you started developing this unbelievably elegant uh idea about the motivational triad which is written nowhere else okay um and so that that frames like our that becomes our frame of reference for for integrating everything that we see with respect to the pleasure track and it it does so with in incredible comprehensive reach the uh so later um you know 15 years after that i'm i'm writing and talking with jen hawk about chick and it turns out that the we keep seeing energy conservation being involved in human dating decision making okay we keep seeing energy conservation having to do with romance conflict and partnerships you know all uh career decision making like everywhere you look you know in attempting to get your kids getting an award at school or having them do well well why is that everywhere we look it turns out we look down into deep biology and we see the principles of energy conservation are are are casting their their their uh they're pulling the strings of the motivational uh levers so yeah this and a court would with jen you're talking about somebody that's a political scientist and a chick that did astrology readings that's exactly the kind of cross-pollination that's useful so now alan is working with tasha meyer which you know i probably have taught alan everything that i know and now we have somebody else that is a big time i don't know molecular biologist or whatever the hell it is that she is but the point is is that that again cross-pollination so and alan is able now that true north to have people he actually sort of almost semi-consciously you've done that you you try to bring in people to pollinate uh the the the area to to make true north something that looks like what a university should be a healthy university should be and never is the uh and of course that happens that sometimes like i look at some of the people that are there i'm like what the hell alan that's bs we don't but that's part of the game when it comes to cross-pollination is that you you need to have exposure and enough openness and yet you need to also have a fundamental discipline and a search for a high principle that sits underneath it and uh that's what that he's do that's what he's doing with health and that's what i'm dealing with happiness and those two things still overlap immensely because the underlying principles uh are are consistent and now all we need to do is get you to be more disciplined and keep focused so you can get this damn thing written the stuff i've seen is brilliant i can't wait to to see it but you know chop chop yeah that's alan only knows one gear straight ahead all right aj what else do we have all right we have a few more questions and we can go as long as you guys like so if you guys were going to give the eulogy at each other's funeral what would the most important point you'd want to get across um wait a second now if i'm given the eulogy that means i won that's good that's good that damn carrot cake that's it that's it um yeah this gets uh down to my mount rushmore idea so the the um and and it comes to it's also this notion of this uh uh of this rare characteristic of of um a plan you know integrating everything in with a plan so certainly alan wanted to have a successful business so that he could be solid and you know financially and be uh secure but but this guy had the chops to have done that by the time he was 30 and some running his own law firm okay there there'd be no way that this guy would get stopped he belonged you know on wall street right in the middle of all the sharks and it turned out there'd be one a tougher shark than the guys that were already there would have arrived and there would have been a lot of half-eaten sharks all over walt so there was no way that that was a main motivation so the motivation was um the motivation was born actually on a backpacking trip where he failed to calculate how many calories we needed to hike in the sierras and i bitched about it [Laughter] okay and we were in the tent on about the fourth night out there and we were having to ration our food and i and and we were talking about what we were gonna eat when we got home and i was thinking um oh man i can't wait to eat a pizza that's what was in my head i was thinking about eating a pizza and um and alan was i remember the conversation he's saying there's something about this food thing this food thing is a really big deal okay and he goes when we get back i'm gonna really look into this food then okay yeah there was something profound about that in that trip he was like no this is serious business so the next thing you know he's basically quit high school telling him he's doing independent study and he's managing a local health food store the guy wouldn't even hire him but alan just he wouldn't take no for an answer and he went into the back and started doing all the work for free and the guy was too unassertive to kick him out and so within a couple of months this 16 year old kid is running his store see why i met about wall street wall street had no chance against this guy okay so so what happens so he reads every book on the shelf of the health food store and he ultimately runs into a guy there named steve plant i believe that guy's name is plant who had a horticulture degree and knew and knew about herbert shelton and hygiene and when alan read hygiene what he read and didn't know what he was reading with he was reading the theory of evolution so the theory of evolutionists applied to food and humanity and everything else and it was ringing all the the all the bells of of the truth the truth has a sense of integration to it that is unmistakable there's other writers there that are pretty smart you know there's books on the shelf that uh that were pretty good a lot of interesting ideas but the end of the day those concepts felt right it has a gravitas to them that it's like no this has to be the right way it is because it integrates too much information i remember thinking uh that you know shelton talked about the idea that health had a cause yes but it wasn't just random right and that the cause of health was healthful living and that healthful living involved diet sleep and exercise and that sometimes people got sick because of dietary excess and fasting was kind of a way of undoing the consequence of dietary access and it totally made sense well sure if you think about it a lot of the problems people have is because they eat too much or eat the wrong thing it makes sense if you don't eat at all the body would be able to get rid of some of the stuff that shouldn't be there and that sleep and exercising these basic principles would cause health instead of just worrying about what caused disease he was talking about how to make health happen and so that's where the interest got in yes yeah so the point is is that from a very young age he recognized this and then he went through the trouble of actually finding out whether or not it was true and took them to australia and took him to dr alex burton's place and then and then he knew so alan knew by the time he was 22 that he was right and basically everybody else was wrong that that includes our plant-based doctors now that relentlessly chase uh nutrition and ingredients and vitamins and minerals and stuff and say that those are going to be things that you need to protect you okay they are fundamentally wrong and you know i don't beat up on them too much because they're doing an awful lot more good than harm but the point is is that the try the point i'm trying to make this eulogy is that this young man had it right and he had it right way early okay the uh he didn't have the personality weaknesses and limitations of people like shelton or banish or or alec burton these are all wonderful people who who made wonderful contributions but what made alan unique was that from an early age he not only had the whole picture right not most of the picture had the whole damn thing right okay a lot of docs out there had a lot of pieces of the picture a lot of good advice a lot of good information they didn't have the whole thing show me the doc now that says the most important thing you need to do is shut your mouth and not eat and drink water for three weeks john jimmy okay that is politically incorrect in the extreme it is so unconventional it is so against everybody's intuition okay that even the people that we very highly respect don't actually grasp it okay and aren't sufficiently curious and not only that people will come to true north a lot of people a lot of talented people capable people business people medical people a lot of smart people and a lot of cool people come there and say wow what a really neat place wow you've really done something here now you have no idea they don't have a freaking clue what that took okay it takes courage to stand up and say intelligent things that are somewhat unpopular or unconventional that that's true and kudos to a lot of the the the major the major writers and educators in our field who have been immensely helpful and have helped tremendous numbers of people with their writings but but did you put it all on the line every day for your career nope you didn't put it all on the line okay allen could have been shut down at any time at any time he was asking to be shut down okay they they he was absolutely he was like i don't know a salmon in the middle of shark infested water trying to find a way to get up that was impossible i don't know how the hell he did this except that i do know there's there's three of us that sort of know two of us that sort of know what one of us that knows two of us that sort of know are jennifer his wife and me is best friend but the only person that really knows is out but we know because we were close how many decisions do you have to make with the optimization as the plan how many times you start at 22 making those decisions okay and you better never make a mistake better never make a big one if you make one you better be scared out of your mind people don't know nobody else had this kind of pressure who else has the facility operating right out for the god and everybody doing things that oh now it looks like it's not so weird now everybody talks about thousands now you know what's that guy's name at usc longo baltimore baltimore yeah so we got some guys to come out now yeah 30 years later thanks 30 years old good for you you did a little research there did you treat human subjects did you take on people that have litigious relatives that are ready to freaking hang you did you have people that were like out to say that you're a total quack and that you're a danger to humanity you ought to be shut down in freaking jail nobody else did that one guy that did it everybody could say wow wouldn't it be cool if there was a place yeah well wouldn't it be cool if there's a place yeah there's one guy that made a place one guy no committee could have got this done had to be somebody with a vision that day after day hour after hour made these calls and you know the kind of calls that he made the same kind of calls that i wouldn't have made remember those times when i said oh yeah well the person's pulling on the sleeves and the really nice thing to do now you had to have somebody that made all those calls right today he's halfway there okay he's got you know he's got 40 years left to get this thing done what is he doing he's attempting to get the most important information ever discovered in the history of health he's trying to get that information so that it doesn't die with him these other guys who were also pioneers with guts the information almost died with them alec burton what's left what's left of alec burton who is a wonderful and intelligent man what's left of alec burton is true hotel center it's the guy it's the young kid that he trained that turned into alan goldman okay what is already left of alan goldhammer we have the pleasure drought and we've got a bunch of research we've got it in major medical journals okay and there's more coming and what he's going to do and he knows he needs to do is that he knows that the next young doctors that come behind him that start to do this don't have his chops they will not take the risk that he did the bar was way too high it was way too hot okay he's now made the bar way lower for other people to do this somewhere out there in the future there are millions of people who would be suffering but if their doctor 60 years from now says here's our problem this is what it is that we need to do to fix it okay and you know what a good diet will help but it's not going to do the job okay you're going to need to do a water fast and you're going to need it's going to be shitty and you're you're you're going to you're going to it's going to feel like something curled up inside your mouth and died in it there's a whole series of stuff that alex says okay okay and they're going to say that and that person's going to live or they're going to thrive or they're going to recover their health and they otherwise never would have happened okay this is the biggest tool the biggest truth which is the reason why people are are in poor health is because things are out of balance in their body and the chief reason for that lack of balance is excess okay it's not deficiency people you know you can mat you can sniff my irritation with all of the attention and all of the glitter and all of the excitement and all of the questions and all of the intuitive belief that the solution is more of something okay it is not okay alan taught me early clearly and perfectly no that is not what it's about doug it's access access access access the solution is to get rid of it all okay and the body will heal itself okay this is what he did this is mount rushmore not of just plant based health this is freaking health who else has the information has discovered it and put it in a place where maybe it won't die with him maybe i'm telling you it's still not clear this should be practiced oh i know a lot of people that fast really you know anybody any doctor out there anywhere in the world that is doing pure water only fasting on extensive basis with huge numbers of people no you don't you don't what an unbelievable lack of ability of humanity to grasp this the potency of it is incredible you add this to a plant-based diet and you get it that's it no you're never going to build rockefeller center behind this because we're not full of huckster crap with a bunch of magic pills or anything that's going to supposedly fix it without effort no solution here is the self-discipline and an uncomfortable process and understanding deeply how it is that health actually works okay there's there's other people that are telling parts of it this is the heart and soul the story and this uh this this is what he's trying to get i'm sure it frustrates him that it's like you can't i know it does because i've heard the snide irritated sarcastic but underneath that is the frustration of can you believe how they practice medicine can you believe how they practice medicine what do we what do we see today with corona virus everybody wants to add something add vitamin d add zinc add vitamin c add a vaccine add add add everybody looks at that and they argue about what it is to add where do you have anybody saying what you all need to do is freaking water fast you know it's interesting we just finished uh a case report that we're writing up now we're just waiting for the follow-up we had a nurse who had uh long coveted so really debilitated uh happened to be a male nurse and uh have happened to have a very exhaustive research panel of testing done il6 tnl alpha all kinds of acute phase reactive proteins and markers had had that done in the beginning and it was highly positive we brought that individual in and fasted them for 40 days we re-fed them they've resolved their symptoms clinically we're waiting we have 27 more days and we get the follow-up exhaustive research panel well we kind of ran a few tests already just to check and they're already you know dramatically better so we're going to get this follow-up uh in 27 days and then we'll be able to publish a really nice uh the first case report showing long-term water only fasting as a means of resolving long covet and all the the symptoms to go along with it um there's a lot of people now suffering as a consequence of this we're also seeing a lot of people that have had unfortunate reactions to the vaccine particularly the booster vaccine where they've gotten um symptoms that didn't have any problems maybe with the first round or even the second round but then they developed these neurological symptoms and we're hoping that we can uh do things to resolve the inflammation with fasting there that will also be successful so publishing some of those things should really piss some people off and it's absolutely like you're saying it's about doing nothing just getting rid of everything giving the body a chance to reboot and now we're in a nice position because we can actually get it published in major impact journals because we figured out how to cloak and uh cloak ourselves along with colleagues that are at major institutions like the study we most recently published was with our friends at the mayo clinic and and you know when they see the mayo clinic come in they read it if they see you know alan goldhammer at the tune of the envelope may not even get opened but once they open it and then they read it we've been able to be successful getting published in some big impact journals we have a number of papers coming out this year so i think you're absolutely right in the sense that the key is getting rid of everything that's actually causing the problem rather than looking to sell some pillar potion to mitigate the symptoms yeah nobody else would have got it nobody nobody i've never met anybody that would have done this so this is the dude that did it guys it's up to you how long we go because everybody loves watching you it's just if you want to come back or you we have like six more people i know there's there's not anybody that we love listening more to than ourselves talk so okay then i'll go on with the questions okay no i told people by the way [Laughter] go ahead well it's good that you guys can make each other laugh i told people that we weren't going to take specific medical questions that they could have consults with the true north health center or the psychological ones with dr lyle personally but one of them i'd like just to ask for you guys to answer just because it's somebody i know very well whose mother is going through chemotherapy and they wanted to know if you recommend fasting before the in chemotherapy infusions during could you please speak so there is some evidence mostly stuff done by walter wongo looking at the effect that fasting might have reducing some of the damage that's done by chemotherapy you know he did an interesting study with rats they had 30 rats they're genetically bed rats where they induce cancer and they give enough chemotherapy to kill all the cancer cells but unfortunately all the rats die and that's one of the problems is with cancer you have to kill all the cells where they they grow back but if you kill all the cells the organism dies and so it's very difficult to get that you know perfect dosing we took the same rats with the same cancer and the same chemotherapy but he fast the rats before during and after the therapy all 30 rats survived dramatically enhancing cancer-free survival and what they realized there's this process of differential stress sensitivity and differential stress um factors that make healthy cells protected in the fasting state in this ketoacidotic state healthy cells are somewhat less vulnerable to the effects of chemotherapy and the cancer cells are actually more vulnerable to chemotherapy because cancer cells have a higher metabolic rate they don't do they don't compete as well in this high fat environment this keep ketone rich environment whereas healthy cells were designed and evolved with the ability to handle ketosis they had to handle it because when spring came late there was nothing to eat animals that didn't have that capacity to adapt to fasting didn't survive whereas cancer cells don't have that as effective ability and so therefore the cancer cells appeared to be more vulnerable to the the positive effects of chemotherapy so what bottom line was the use of appropriate fasting in rats made rats survive better and live longer with this situation he also pointed out to me that some of the biomarkers that predict cancer survival improve whether you gave chemotherapy or not just by doing the fasting itself and so that's being investigated further now exactly what combination of therapies and or fasting are our most optimum um and so i think lots of potential there what we do know is that there are some forms of cancers particularly solid organ cancer that just fasting alone is not going to be sufficient to resolve the problem and so it's worth considering what combination of therapies would be optimal on the other hand we've published some very interesting data in lymphoma which is a type of lymph cancer where just fasting has been successful in inducing remission in fact we've just now published uh we've just got a follow-up six-year follow-up on the papers patient we published in the british medical journal at uh over the last six years now so she's eight years from diagnosis and is currently cancer free does well well since then we've had a number of lymphoma patients come in including recently a patient with a large abdominal mass that you can actually feel going down during fasting and as we get these follow-up data because now it's not enough to just show they get well and fast you have to show that they can stay well in six weeks six months of the year as we get more of those back we'll be publishing these follow-up case reports and ultimately hope to do a clinical trial now that'll be where it gets disturbing in other words if we publish enough case reports where it looks like it's not just we got lucky so that you can justify clinical trial the clinical trial shows that it's effective which we believe it is now that's going to be very uncomfortable for conventional medicine because that means they're going to have to offer that crazy radical therapy as an option because with a well-published clinical trial that shows this is dramatically more effective than uh the current state of the art uh it's not going to be uh something that can be just ignored and so if we can manage to slip that through the system and get it published in credible journals you will see fasting opportunities being able to be offered in more conventional places and again that'll make a lot of people happy will make a lot of people really uncomfortable and that'll be fun yeah just put a big target on your back oh man well you know the thing is though every time we publish a paper in one of these major impact journals it makes us a little bit less vulnerable um because you know the fact is they're not all excited about publishing this kind of radical stuff in fact if you look at the british medical journal where we published our case report on lymphoma there's never been a paper published like that ever in the past or you know likely to quick in the future but once you start breaking those doors down then it gets a little easier and now we get a little better reviews and then people have heard about it and the chance of actually getting published is better than the chance of influencing physicians that are thoughtful is better and now you know that's starting to happen now where really it's a lot easier now than it was 20 or 30 or 40 years ago for sure cool really cool you know we talked about the fact that it might be really difficult to get this stuff published no matter how well we did it because there's so much resistance to publishing contrary information but one of the things that we hadn't realized at that time is that it's possible to affiliate with people that are inside the system and kind of sneak the data in all you have to do is make the principal authors one of the people that's coming from one of these conventional sources and then it's a lot easier and then once the data is in the literature it doesn't really matter who published it the data is there and so it makes it easier to plan and that's where we've been very successful this year people that are interested can go to our website at fasting.org and which is the foundation's um information fasting uh website and so all of the articles that we're publishing will appear there and you'll start seeing this year we have a number of papers that are now in review or have been accepted that are going to be coming out covering a wide variety of uh biometric changes that occur in fasting fasting safety issues fasting in relation to various conditions it's going to get really hard to deny because you know with the residents that train here they say the same thing over and over again wow it's the first time i've ever seen anybody with this condition get well because under conventional treatment you never get well they promise you if you do what you're told you'll be on drugs the rest of your life and you'll never get well they're very honest about it right up front they're saying they say we don't you can't cure hypertension because we don't know what causes it so you just take these pills with their side effects of chronic cough fatigue impotence and premature death and just accept your lot whereas our experience is very different now we're able to prove that and so show it safe show it's effective show where it's effective the big challenge is how do you get people after they're well to stay well and how do you deal with all that psychology crap yeah i just i'm asking it's that's a that's a question yeah well how do you deal with the psychology crap a book in 10 videos yeah we have so many nice comments i can't read them we can't read all the comments but a lot of them are dr lyle people love your laugh and dr goldhamer they say that you have an evil laugh [Laughter] there that's about right [Laughter] a.j i gotta share this with you i just thought of this we got um we submitted an article not not cloaked by one of our colleagues we just sent it straight from the center and we sent it to one of the big endocrinology journals and it was rejected the person said it was a well-written article but it was the most egregious violation of human safety standards that he'd ever witnessed in 25 years as being an editor of a journal because what we did is we took people they fasted for two weeks and then we looked at their body composition changes and they said they hoped that the victims of this abuse were not permanently damaged by this barbaric behavior and of course our our research director who's a phd postdoc from colombia was feeling like oh they think we're evil and damaging people and of course i'm thinking hey he said it we're number one we're the most egregious violation he's ever heard of and it never is a bad thing to be number one there we go never all right so this question is a scenario question and the reason i can ask this because i i think you both can answer it it's a story you've probably heard before where somebody can be very compliant in home they have a clean environment but they work in healthcare like a nurse where there's always you know hyperpalatable snacks and they fall off the wagon there and so they can't get it together what what do people do in a case where the they can't clean the environment because it's their work with a really good nurse and they're that conscientious they should immediately quit their job and come join us at the true north health center where you can do something worthwhile with your life instead of working for the evil empire [Laughter] oh my the uh all right now now we'll have the person with empathy answer the uh the i think that what that question is betraying is exactly what where we started today which is that this is way more difficult than anybody reasonably imagines so we're looking for some simple uh answer to this and we we already know that this we know that this thing you know is what would we say um what is your personality like how you know you have to be unusually motivated and you have to have an unusual personality to actually be determined here so there's stuff at your work so what are you motivated enough to pack your food okay are you motivated enough to experiment enough in your kitchen uh to to have things that are entertaining and interesting and varied enough that when you pack your food and you bring it uh or you know are you gonna be in a position to eat that right in front of wherever who else is gonna watch and then put up with the cross-examination okay this is what it is so the of course the actual technical actions that are involved here are very simple that the the psychology and the computation of the uh of the pleasure trap variables that are that underlie this make it exceedingly difficult okay because this species is designed by nature to uh seek pleasure avoid pain and conserve energy and so as a result of that you know they're finding just a little shift in the environment and now they're in trouble so um what what do we do you run experiments on preparation so if you're serious about this uh you have to get serious about you know uh preparing diligently and seeing how a week goes uh where you say i'm gonna run an experiment and i'm gonna be ruthless about this and whatever it is that comes up in my way and what tugs at me um i i can sure as hell get through five days five lunches or five afternoon breaks you know i have to prepare for what ten little interludes what's it gonna be so uh that's that's what's involved here you know i i have patients that are alcoholics that are working as bartenders and they're very successful and you know maybe that's not the first job you'd success you'd recommend to a newly uh sober individual but the fact is if i can have an alcoholic be successful at standing from alcohol and working as a bartender then i think that it's also possibly people that struggle with weight issues may be able to come up with a strategy to work in an environment like everywhere where they're basically trying to get them caught in the pleasure trap do you think some people use their environment whether it's the home or work environment as an excuse to not well i don't think it's an excuse i think it's a reason i think the the reality is if you're in an environment like doug and i work in where there's little temptation then there's little effort it takes to resist temptation but if you're in an environment where everybody's shoving stuff at you and it bangs on the nervous system in your brain because it's calorically dense food with all the scents and all the things that go along with that it's hard work i think it wears people down even if they're successful at not indulging i think they take a toll and that's why i'm only i'm not really joking when i say you know change your environment because it's it's a tough burden to play especially for a normal nervous system they have to constantly be put into that sensation it's not just the temptation of you wanting to eat it it's you and your thin body make them sick and they oftentimes undermine try to undermine your behavior by trying to trip you up because it creates cognitive dissonance and then you come in with your thin clothes and your perky smile and so they'll do things to try to make your life tougher and it's hard for people to put up with stuff like that wow thanks well more questions i've got four or we can you can come back we'll try to we'll try to knock them out okay here we go all right alan answer he he takes too long okay um you both have been part of healthy living since your early teens you've seen a lot are there any events peoples or discoveries that stand out for each of you yeah for me uh reading john mcdougall's book the mcdougall program was a very important uh because number one he was a medical doctor telling the truth and it became a popular book which meant you know there was other people besides us that thought it was good i think he played a really important role and he built on another really courageous guy named nathan pritikin who was really one of the first ones to kind of conceptualize some of this plant-based eating and and another one for me was one of my heroes which is t holland campbell who was a conventional scientist who wrote a book even though dr lyle didn't think it was going to be a huge bestseller we both agreed that he had done a good job of telling the truth and you know bringing his experience and his way of thinking about things uh into his books and so for me those are all really important probably the biggest effect on me though was reading and understanding pleasure trap you know really getting that how the motivational triad drove human behavior and all the downstream implications that uh came about you know i still even to this day it still you know surprises me how good a job doug had done conceptually really pulling all those different things together in a meaningful way i've never seen anything like that i don't think anybody else has done that good a job conceptually of trying to you know tie it all together yeah all good next okay so you don't you don't want to take us you don't want to answer that one doctor i'd be uh i mean we could add some other things we i remember uh i remember uh meeting uh dr seston and uh that that was very cool we we uh alan allen showed me an email like oh this guy's a big thing he's interested in us i'm like yeah yeah he'll never no he's too fancy they'll he'll know turns out we wind up very tight which was great so uh it's been it's been surprising for me you know even sort of meeting and then befriending people like mcdougal and campbell and esselstyn uh alan's inherently pushy and fearless so uh i i i would have been intimidated and wouldn't have felt like uh like we had anything to say that they'd be you know not that they shouldn't have listened to but you know i wouldn't think that anybody would listen to us we we used to be young aj we were really young once and the truth is we were really young with some really big ideas that were uh unconventional and so the uh so now i i didn't expect to uh to wind up with some some colleagues that that we respected and then wind up having that reciprocated so that that was that's been a cool thing i i remember being uh with burton in australia and i kind of manipulated my way into training with him i i approached him when i was a teenager and i said oh i want to be a doctor like you and he patted me on the head and he said well that's nice you go become a doctor and then come talk to me and then seven years later i'd gone through school and i'd gotten ready and i came i said i'm ready he said who are you i said i'm the guy you promised to train if i went to school and i just spent seven years going to school so i'm ready and he got a little white and he said well i gotta talk to the boss he went and talked to nesha and they agreed to have me come out and train but anyway we're out there and we've got this patient and she fast for 30 days then we had to break the fast because the potassium got out of line and we fed her and then we started faster again and she's still no better she's got lupus and she's got all kinds of symptoms and then we get through the second fast she gets depleted again and then finally i'm saying to burton i said gee you know you keep fasting her like you know she's not getting any better and he said that i should learn to keep my eyes open and my mouth shut and i might learn something and sure enough on that third fast she came good and ended up having a really good outcome but i remember him thinking you know just realizing he had this incredibly deep sense of confidence based on his experience and even though he couldn't tell me exactly when stuff was going to come good you just had to you know go by the principles and you know and and he had a anyway so i learned a little bit about keeping eyes open and mouth shut and how valuable that can be great thank you are there some things that you see as important changes in the future of healthy living well the biggest motivation yeah the biggest motivation we know is people are that are driven by pain ability and fear of death so i'm very confident there are going to be a lot of highly motivated people ready to adopt the principles of healthful living there may be some things there may be there may be uh new uh new tools new ways cartoons feedback systems uh iphone apps there there may be uh i've often said that that i could get people to eat better if we had a feedback system that could instantaneously give them a feedback about what what that did to their health so people would diet much more effectively if they knew that at the end of the day they could see that they actually lost 2.6 ounces of fat they would be like wow okay they would actually get used to what the truth is uh the truth isn't that you don't lose two pounds in a day that never happens you lose a couple ounces and then you lose a couple ounces the next day and a couple ounces the next day and then you eat a bunch of and then you gain an ounce so the point is is that i can see the possibility um i i don't think that human beings are completely defeated uh with respect to this i think with potentially accurate feedback mechanisms uh that that are essentially biofeedback mechanisms that are sensitive people can course correct this is no different in principle than the process of science so what alan is attempting to do now that i've abandoned is to actually get the correct information out in the world so that it starts impacting brains of all kinds of very intelligent professionals so that there's a essentially a chain reaction so that 50 years from now humanity actually understands what the hell to do okay if they understand what the hell to do it won't be humanity in general it will be the experts in health that understand and if an expert in health tells you this is what you need to do to get better and that expert knows that it's true and they're going to have the kind of confidence that alec burton had except that they'll have a whole matrix of information and a scholarship behind them so they'll even be more confident than burton was okay so the what i see coming is that the um uh new information is is the only agent of change and so um you know better information better ways to communicate the truth about what's actually happening in your body that that future has essentially unlimited potential um and a bit that we can look out over the horizon how far things go in the next 20 or 30 years they could go quite a ways uh with ai and sensitive uh machinery feedback mechanisms the ability to possibly analyze your blood just by waving it in front of a sensor without actually having to pick your uh prick your finger these kinds of things may give humanity uh in general a much better opportunity to find their way uh i know that that will be true for the the small minority of people with unusual personality unusual awareness and intelligence and motivation to do this it's going to get easier for us it's going to uh potentially uh be able to spread wider with with you know technological and educational tools in the future maybe we'll see great thank you all right as you look back on your careers have you accomplished what you set out to do and where do you both go from here well um i would say that that alan's in the middle of what he accomplished to do uh what he what he was out to do i think that that i think he can probably look back and say you know certainly succeeded by any reasonable measure he succeeded brilliantly um nobody would have figured alec burton wouldn't have seen a clinic like this and you know thousands of patients that have gone through and all the the scholarship that's going on and the success into the medical publication world no way okay so of course that's been super successful but i think the the real mission that he's that he allen's actually been after is to correct a gaping massive conflicted political um perversely incentivized misunderstanding about the nature of health and disease to humanity and so in that you know he's a very early pioneer and he is he is he is sort of uh he's paving he's he's cutting a a a path through the wilderness so god knows i mean god knows where how far he can go okay but the good news is you don't have to quote get there wherever it is to do a tremendous amount of good for the individuals with every day that passes somebody walks into true north health center and has their life turned around okay so the thing this is not a theoretical process this isn't an academic exercise it's a growing a live process that just gets bigger and wider and hopefully metastasizes to use an unfortunate mixed haywire metaphor but hopefully it it goes all over the world and all through human human understanding so that's good for me um i'm similarly halfway in the sense that uh i understand a great deal about how to remove unnecessary human suffering and uh i am out to try to synthesize those insights and to put them in a form that people can read and learn and listen to and understand same thing uh both of us are revolutionaries uh he's a complete revolutionary health and i'm a revolutionary in clinical psychology uh both of those revolutions have exactly the same roots they have uh their roots in the intuition that that it is the the deep biology uh is run according to you know evolutionary process and that if if your techniques and your interventions uh and your what it is that you want to accomplish and what's wrong uh and your analysis of what's wrong is ignorant of evolutionary process you are doomed to fail to varying degrees to no matter how far your theory and intervention goes away from from that understanding is going to be the degree of the unnecessary suffering that's going to go on so yeah it's interesting i haven't quite thought about this question but i've just been saying it like we we remain on parallel and integrated paths you're gonna feel a lot better once you finish this book you know because then you'll have you have permanently conceptualized you know at least that block of information right and and so until that's done you're never going to really find peace yes i'm well aware of that but uh but that's where we are aj i feel like we're uh it's kind of weird to think i think both of us feel i don't know about allen but but uh i i feel like we feel so healthy and we are and um i i don't think either one of us feels our quote age i think both of us feel this feeling that that i feel like we should only be you know 30 or 35 through this journey that's what it feels like to me um and so we have to we have to be careful to to make sure we use our time i think we're both aware that our time is more limited than our intuition tells us that we have to use our time super wisely uh to accomplish the things that we most want to accomplish i actually if i had you know another 50 years i would be standing right next to alan and tasha meyer and i would be grinding out and pounding uh trying to pound down and slither this information into the world and i would spend i'd be happy to spend 50 years um right next to alan just freaking doing this incredibly worthwhile uh a journey and vision i i felt the sands of time on me you know around 50 and it was like you know what if i'm if i'm going to do what it is that that burns in me most which is to reach further into the interpersonal dynamics of human relationships and self-confidence self-esteem if i'm ever going to do that i have to do that i have to get away from the health arena i'll never leave the health arena i'm integrated in it but i have to push myself away from uh that and swim you know out to another little island that's clearly the right decision too yeah that's the greatest good you have to do that yeah totally makes sense but you need to do it effectively and efficiently and not let life continue to distract you from doing you know the work the limiting factor think about it is if there was no distraction it's not like there's anything that would limit you from completing that task you know i mean it's not the conceptual stuff is there you don't need more time to to come up with you just need time to grind out the hard work of writing it out now people see why i moved out of your house that's how it is all right aj what else do we have we have one last question but i'm curious how long did you live together when you worked on this what took about two years to do the pleasure trap didn't it dad now i was there four years four years but it took about two years to do the pleasure trap you worked you worked for about two years of it and did he consume any carrot cake while under your roof not that he knew about no we didn't have carrot cake at the house that would have been out and we didn't go out very much so so dr goldhamer before we go to the last fairness though we played a lot of basketball too and you know one of the things about doug is he's really good at integrating information and figuring out how to do it better and recently after after decades of playing basketball he actually figured out how shooting works the act of shooting and it was able in i think one or two days i don't know maybe mostly in one day and and maybe a little bit of reinforcement was able to completely change how i do that now think about that i've done it a certain way for decades right thousands and thousands of hours of doing it a certain way completely changed it dramatically improved and has allowed me to continue to play basketball competitively because now i can shoot from much farther out accurately than i was able to do before now if i could have done that on my own i would have done it on my own you know it's not like i hadn't been thinking about it in fact the the very same stuff that he used to figure out how it works i had seen i was aware of but didn't he wasn't able to for whatever reason put it together that's the unique thing of him is be able to take that information and put it into into a useful form like the pleasure trap book and like learning how to shoot properly and by the way this morning went really well good grand but dr goldhamer i just want to make sure i didn't skip over you for that question did you set out to do everything you intended and you're not even close no i mean we're 20 years behind where we're supposed to be by now but we are making progress and i think that we'll catch up in the next couple years with what we should have done in the last 10 years there's been a lot of distractions that are not um voluntary distractions just honestly dealing with medical legal issues and dealing with the the challenges um have kept us from being as productive and efficient as we should be we're overcoming some of that and now hopefully we'll see a smooth stream of production and we have a really clear path we have certain we had certain things we had to publish like the safety of fasting and its efficacy we had to get case reports to justify clinical trials we now have an affiliation with one of the large health maintenance organizations that will give us an opportunity to recruit patients with at first hypertension and lymphoma where we can compare and contrast accurately what we do versus just the standard of care and showing whether or not in and in fact works a whole lot better proving the ultimate goal which is that we're right and everybody else is wrong so doug by the way i don't need everybody to adapt these principles i just have to compellingly and convincingly prove to every reasonable person's satisfaction that we're right and they're wrong it can be the next generation that figures out how to do all that psychology stuff and implements it and hopefully sees it spread or not just as long as we prove that we're right alan uh alan we have we had a we've had many entertaining conversations as you can imagine but one of them was i can't remember what we were talking about but i was gloating about us and i was talking about how good we were and alan said no doug we're really not very good it's just that everybody else is so loud [Laughter] so that that that he keeps he i don't even keel all right all right all right so this is um here's a great way to end it for both of you if you try to summarize the most important messages you have learned about health what might each of you want to say health results from healthful living you want to be healthy you have to pay the price that means eat a healthy diet our version is a whole plant food sos free diet get appropriate exercise bountiful sleep and recognize that fasting may be a way of helping you make up for if for some reason you weren't absolutely perfect all along the way well my my addition to that would be the compassionate psychological side of that which is that um healthful living is an awful lot harder than you think it is and it is likely to be filled with with temptations and weaknesses and traps and uh limitations of of your personality and your situation and so since you cannot change your personality uh you must change your situations and so that's uh that that is the story uh you you do what alan says and then when you when you try and you get stopped we have to learn our way around this uh because this is going to be hard wow guys thank you so much this was such a wonderful kickoff to season three you're both invited back anytime separately together i really appreciate what you do thank you so much thanks for having us hk the pleasure was mine and thanks all of you for watching another episode of chef aj live please come back tomorrow and we have two shows at a.m we have dr nathan bryan he is considered the world's leading expert on nitric oxide and he's going to be talking about why it's important and at 3pm we have food addiction expert dr joan ifflan talking about eight ways that processed food harms your cells thank you so much doug and alan and congratulations on your lifelong friendship thank you caj
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