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Chef AJ: ADHD, Infidelity, Lifestyle Changes and More! | Interview with Dr Doug Lisle
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hey everyone and welcome to chef aj live i'm your host chef aj and this is where i introduce you to amazing people like you who are doing great things in the world that i think you should know about my guest today is none other than dr doug lyle our resident psychologist and before i introduce him i want to wish everyone a very happy mother's day whether you're a human mother or a pet mom i personally am not a mother but i just became a grandmother because the hummingbird just had twins in my yard so that was very nice so how are you today dr lyle yeah just great fantastic all right so dr lyle we've had a lot of people write in questions and we have everything from infidelity to adhd to what to eat before you be be are executed so we'll we'll get started maybe we'd better start off well you know one of these questions you might think is silly but i thought it was kind of cute so i'm going to kind of start there and it's interesting because when you're the guest we get so many more men writing in questions which i think is kind of interesting and cool so casey says hi dr lyle i thoroughly enjoyed the conversation that you had with dr goldhamer on aj's one and one year anniversary and i was wondering which of the seven dwarves are you and which is dr goldhamer if i knew the seven dwarves were i'd have a funny answer but i don't yeah all right well they have names like one is i think it's happy sneezy dopey bashful doc um gosh who are the other two uh i can't remember there's seven aren't everyone if there's kind of grumpy yes there's one named grumpy allen's grumpy that's good and then there's one that's sleepy i think you would be doc cause he's the one that solves i think all the problems well i don't know about that sleepy that sounds like me that's good okay great all right so since it's mother's day we'll take the first question because it's about mothers and it's from melanie and she says happy mother's day seth aj since you are a nutritional mom mom is always right so listen to chef aj dr lyle to honor uh his mom would dr lyle tell us a positive mom moment of his mom oh my goodness there's thousands of them um i i can't even i can't even think of uh i can't even think of one i i i i mean there's so many one of them was uh uh my mom was always the easy touch and my dad was by far the tough one and my sister and i were out in the yards of course we we knew this you couldn't not know it and um my mom like never yelled at us like just never the uh and one day we're out in the backyard and we're supposed to do some work and we're like kind of whining about it just just just kind of like oh i don't know it seems like too much and my mom said fine she grabbed the rake and she raked the entire side of the yard and she looked at her watches she said four minutes [Laughter] that's funny that's 50 years ago and i could still remember that it's like she showed me look quit whining and just do it and that was uh that uh i never forgot that that's fun it's funny the things people remember not not everybody has such a wonderful mom you know oh something else that is fantastic all right so here is a question and they asked to be kept anonymous can you please ask dr lyle if some people want their identities to be their illnesses i have a close family member who has four autoimmune diseases bad joints sleep problems and is overweight constantly having to forego activities because of these ailments yet does nothing to try and change the situation it's not even up for discussion why would someone want to live their retirement years in this way um that's a that's actually a really deep interesting question and that that uh so let's let's let me tell you uh what it is that i think the answer is because it's a hybrid the the person does not want to be sick and they do not want to live their retirement years this way the uh however there are people just just like me at 10 years old whining rather than getting to the rake in other words the uh rather than actually take care of business um what there is when it comes to whining and complaining winning and complaining are uh are actually human instincts well you'll see the actual human instincts that's what that's what a baby bird is doing in the nest is they got their mouth open and they're chirping and they're whining they're indicating their stress and what they're attempting to do is to trying to get their parents to feed them and take care of them okay so uh whining and complaining these are instinctual processes in in humans and it doesn't go away when you when you turn 10. so it's uh the reason why it doesn't go away is that it still works so if you if you complain at 35 to your husband that he's not taking care of this or taking care of that there's a good chance he that he might take care of things and if you think about this deeply that literally one unit of effort whining may get you five units of effort out of it so therefore it's a it's a cost-benefit analysis that has shaped the evolution of whining and complaining behavior and just like uh just like any other instinct it's context dependent so it's going to be so for example laughing is an instinct but you don't laugh all the time you laugh when the conditions are uh that activate the instinct and then you can't stop yourself okay so the um complaining is going to be similar so there's going to be conditions under which complaining looks like it's going to be very profitable okay and so therefore i i can remember in some class in college when there was a paper due late in the semester and then there was a bunch of whining in out of the group uh about about this and i remember joining in you know i had i i i i didn't have any thoughts at all about complaining about this but i remember joining my voice to the chorus and watching the professor say well maybe we just won't have the paper then and you guys will just have to would you guys prefer to just have your grade on the midterm and the final because you know then you don't get the opportunity to to have a paper that would improve your grade and everybody's like yeah that's fine [Laughter] so the complaining in other words the little complaint instinct in me got activated when when it might be profitable to save me from a bunch of work now that's exactly what i was doing with my mom staring at the leagues same thing and so a person with a bunch of uh problems feels that they've got the moral high ground to complain because they actually are suffering and so it's gonna it's not surprising that it would activate a complaint instinct now the interesting thing about this is uh if you're watching this and you know what we know the attitude is be like gee would you rather suffer like why don't you start eating some healthy food now now we're looking at the price to actually remove the suffering and and the certainty that it would happen so the person has undoubtedly eaten half of an apple that you tried to force feed them and that didn't magically get rid of all the pain so it's not like they're confident that it's going to work now you might say well why wouldn't you take a shot at it well the same reason why you know a coffee addict you know procrastinates actually giving up the coffee uh they don't they don't really see how it is that they're gonna immediately be better off they're gonna wind up with headaches and they're gonna be tired and so in the same way why give up the you know the bonbons and the and the cheesy pizza in other words there's the pleasure centers the brain are being activated and we'd have to go through the withdrawal process of getting ourselves sensitized to healthier food when we don't want to do that remember the um the rats given that very same situation uh that were fed healthy food and then fed uh rich food for a month uh in a famous study published in 2009 those rats then went 14 days when they put healthy food in the cage and took away the junk food the average rat went 14 days without eating otherwise they'd rather eat nothing than eat the than eat the healthy food so that's probably about what it would take for your relative we'd have to starve your relative for probably 14 days on water before they would be willing to eat anything healthy and that's not going to happen they're going to continue this stream of rich food so when we uh so your what will then happen is uh so i'm gonna challenge a little inference that is starting to weave around uh your head in the way that you answer the question but it's an extraordinarily common inference in psychodynamic thinking the uh and that is is that the person quote wants to be miserable okay you must be there you must be doing that because you want to be it's quote your identity um let's let's piece those words apart very carefully the the psychodynamic logic there is not sound and it is not true the person does if they are in fact ill they locate a place in a social network of someone who quote needs help now they don't want to be there but they are there so as a result they they are in a legitimate position to complain and to get resources i.e people hustling around and doing things for them that they're not very well able to do for themselves and so so they are getting a benefit not from being miserable and sick but being a benefit from the fact that they live in a social group that because they are sick they have a legitimate position to activate the complaint instinct and to ease their burdens a little bit okay that doesn't mean they want to be there it just means that that that is a if we look at the overall cost benefit of the way they're analyzing the situation this is the best move that they can make just eat the pizza and okay and just spend the rest of your life eating the pizza and bitching until it all until you die and so you might look at that and say what a horrendous choice that is but you're watching the equivalent of a heroin addict okay a heroin addict you might say what are you doing you're 33 years old and you're a brilliant guitar player what the hell are you doing on heroin you have your whole life in front of you and you just you know you need to back off of this and have life and it's like mmm hard to get him to do it because of the pleasure trap they almost certainly will not get away from it the same thing is true of our uh you know essentially uh very badly compromised sick older person that doesn't have the energy or facility to get in there and learn how to put you know i don't know a healthy banana ice cream together it's like way too much trouble okay so that's the that's the answer to the story they don't want to be who they are but they are and because those they're in those circumstances they are uh they are being induced into complaining rather than recognizing and utilizing the responsibility that they actually have i'd like to point out the word responsibility i remember having this uh highlighted to me when i was reading a book i think it was called gestalt therapy by fritz pearls i was shocked when pearls pointed out that the word responsibility can be broken into two words response ability it's like oh what a fascinating concept in other words i actually can do something about it okay we've sort of slurred it over and called it your responsibility as if it's something that you have to do or should do no we've actually not seen it from the correct perspective this is something that you can do you have the opportunity to utilize your response ability to change your future that person is basically abdicating that option and instead doing the the pleasure trap uh the pleasure trap derivative of what seems like the best this is an example of how the pleasure trap works and sucks people's lives and undermines their health and happiness in other words it as alan says it induces them into short-term pleasure-seeking self-indulgent behavior okay and it's it is what it is it does this and it's a very uh has great potency to be able to do this so it's a it's a tragedy to watch it and you you stare at it and you realize well you can't talk it into it okay so uh you can't talk it into a man it is it is a quiet tragedy that this will be their existence rather than an alternative existence which is likely to be way better that's why we wrote that book dr lyle do you think for some people though like i remember my mom was very sick the last 10 years of her life and all of her children and grandchildren lives in other states and she seemed to not that she enjoyed being sick but going to doctors that's she got a lot of attention for being sick aj that there is no question that is uh that is an additional benefit that comes in other words so as you say she didn't enjoy being sick but she's designed by nature to get as many resources as she can out of the process i absolutely i mean i can think of like like the you know she had congestive heart failure and i think like in the ambulance she'd almost like brighten up when all the handsome paramedics were there and she'd like i'm at my best when i'm at my worst and it it was very interesting to watch right yeah great thank you so here's a question from matt thank you for taking my question my name is matt and i've been managing people for decades and i recently acquired an all-women staff of eight the women are extremely pleasant and overly complementary to one another until one of them is not present and then the claws come out and they gang up on the person and make rude comments about the individual behind their back and when the person returns to the office the women resume to being overly pleasant and complementary to the individual the issue is not specific to one individual when i address this matter in a group setting they look at me as if i'm crazy and must be talking about someone else i've never experienced this problem when i've managed a blended staff of men and women is this common and how should i address this matter going forward thank you for your response that is a great question and um i i think that that uh i i actually haven't read on this topic although i'm aware of it and so i'm not i'm not uh i think i've read vague references to it in the evolutionary psychology literature the so let's let's talk a little bit about it about why men and women would be somewhat different so the um men's motivation in a when we try to think about men and women and people in general what we're attempting to do is we're attempting to understand the behavior that we see within the context of the repertoires of behavior that exists in the organism naturally so effectively if you're doing dissection of a human you it's you don't expect to find the heart in in the forearm just it's not going to happen that way it's what there's an architecture to the way the body is built and it's very predictable what it is that you're going to find with the other with you know individual differences the same thing is true of the mind so the mind also has an architecture uh it has a motivational architecture so you're going to find some things are more important than other things and things will be organized in hierarchy etc in the same way that you can you know bruise your toe and it's not as important as suddenly being out of shock and out of breath um the same thing is true of of human nature and its motivational systems now the um so it's going to turn out that males as opposed to females are much more interested in being on the top of the dominance hierarchy so men are more hierarchical uh they are vertical so they they want to climb and be the king of the mountain the the reason why this is true obviously uh is that if you are the king of the mountain it is more likely that women will throw themselves at you and be you can have multiple mates as opposed to just one so this is absolutely what's going on inside of male psychology so males are are driven to see how much distinction they can place between themselves and their competitors because if they can put themselves on the top of the dominance hierarchy it's very likely that they could at any given time have two or three mates instead of just one okay so we know that this is true this is very clear in you know basically anthropological studies of hunter-gatherer villages the guys who are at the top of the food chain often have two or three gallons is going on at the same time uh they uh the men at the top of the food chain uh typically will have 25 children in their life whereas an average man of the pack will have eight okay so there's a three to one factor in how prolific they are genetically so the the characteristics that that cause men to want to drive up into dominance hierarchies are widespread common characteristics of the motivational structure of males now women cannot have 25 children and so women are if you have if you're a male with 25 children you don't stop to do a tremendous job at provisioning each one of them in other words your your psychology is more quantity over quality now it's not that you don't select your mates with some care but the truth of the matter is is that it is more about quantity over quality whereas if you're a female you're all about quality over quantity okay so yeah because you're only going to have a few children so you want to be very careful about it and so females are not so hierarchical they are actually more cohesive in terms of little survival packs and because the males and the females live together they live together in a very uneasy tension uh there's competitive there's competitive processes that are taking place within the village that they are they are problematic for each individual in the village so for example let's suppose that you're a very fancy female and you're mated to a guy who's pretty fancy and you're thinking ow well aren't we happy but inside of his brain he's thinking no i want to rise in dominance hierarchy so i can have relationship with you and somebody else on the side he's not going to ask for very many resources because they're so impressed with how fancy i am so it turns out you're not at peace with that situation okay there's a rumbling competition and the competition is not it's not a fight between you and your man it's a fight between you and the other females so and if you're a male the fight you have isn't with with females which is why you know all this talk in the culture about you know the males being the women against the men and all this kind of stuff it's like no people that's not actually how it works it's not the sisterhood against the brotherhood it's actually intrasexual competition that is where the competition is in human nature competition isn't between men and women it's between women and women and between men and men okay that that will you know help open your eyes so when you say oh no i see the men being shitty to the women in my company and they don't want them to rise no they're not they're shitty to everybody okay any given man is actually out to undermine his male competitors and he's out to undermine his female competitors now the uh so it is there you know undoubtedly there's been times when there's been boys clubs why because gee if we can if we can end mass basically get rid of a whole class of competitors as a group then we can kick a whole group out and then maybe then we'll just fight among ourselves that's a better situation so that has undoubtedly happened you know it has happened in history but that's not what's going on today and that isn't happening today so what's happening today is is essentially more classic uh as to what happened in the stone age village which is the men are competitors with men the women are competitors with women and so what's uh what you're going to see in this guy's little group that he's saying she's got eight women well trust me they're not friends they they they they depend upon each other and they are in fact part of a clan that's true so women women do actually try to deal with a very difficult problem and their their their psychology and their motivational architecture is built in a way to actually be very effective at keeping the village from flying apart okay because if it was just the man beating each other over the head trying to get hot higher in the dominance hierarchy then it wouldn't hold together so the woman smoothed a bunch of bruised egos and they are they are in fact important in massaging all of the competitive processes and attempting to have this thing be a piece while in fact there's a constant process of verticality going on with the men but notice what the purpose is of the verticality with the men the men aren't doing it to best other men they're doing it to best other men so that they can get more women which means that the women are actually having to make these mating choices that are actually trying to optimize each their own situation which means that every woman situation is a threat to every other woman situation right now so guess what they talk behind each other's backs okay this is how they go about basically trying to see to it that no one female gets too much social power that she doesn't put herself in a position to essentially gerrymander a coalition that she's going to be able to steal your mate and get away with it without consequences okay so there's all kinds of underhanded crap that is it's basically like the most complicated united states government check and balance system that you ever dreamed of which is why it is that this guy's mystified because you don't find something quite equivalent in males males need to duke it out right in front of the whole village and they'll just duke it out and have dominance higher conflicts and somebody wins and somebody backs down and we have a winner and a loser okay whereas women are instead constantly anybody gets a little too uppity the little group comes in and then grabs them by the by the the the knees and yanks them down three inches okay let's like keep us all on as even a keel as we can does this sound right aj i this is why i like being self-employed that is exactly right so this is actually what this uh this guy is observing is he's observing the differences and the instincts between men and women and how it is that each of them optimizes their location in a stone age what we're going to call a scramble okay so human beings live under scramble competition uh in other words it's not um it's not uh they don't do a lot of what we call contest so um in many species two males or like a couple of male stallions will duke it out in front of everybody males in in uh in in our in human natural history don't quite do it that way it's a more roundabout process and there's com competition everywhere in the hierarchy whereas in in uh super hierarchical species there's just one guy at the top that's the head of the harem and it's incredibly competitive and brutal to try to get there that's not the way humans are they're more of a scramble competition so if you can't if you can't be the big shot over here you can you can optimize your chances over here so but there's still hierarchical stuff okay there's it's still happening so the men are more openly competitive with each other the women are competitive with each other but they are but they're acting as a coalition to try to make sure nobody gets too high and that's what it is that this guy is seeing and he's shaking his head like what the hell is this and the answer is it's a different motivational architecture somewhat it's it's a somewhat different creature than the male is and that's that's why that looks that way you know a few clients i've had that work in large companies or a lot of women like when they've lost weight they've actually worn fat clothes to hide it because they didn't want to have to deal with the cattiness from their co-workers right absolutely that's you can you can just look through the lens of evolution and you realize let's suppose you were a 50th percentile female you know let's say you were 40 years old and so you're a 50th percentile female in that company at 40 years old for your attractiveness and now you're respected for what you do and so on and so forth but now suddenly you're an 88 percent attractive because you've lost 40 pounds and so now it's like uh oh what just happened you just blew away 30 of the competition that used to be a competitor and now you're threatening people in the top 20 percentile and you made no friends that were in the bottom 50th percentile who were already you had already out-competed and so now it's like who benefited from you going from the 50th to the 80th percentile answer the men did the men benefited you just became more attractive and now it turns out that suddenly you are a focus of attention of a la uh some of the fancier men that you were not the focus of attention before which means what which means some of the women that were the focus of attention to those men are now getting less attention because they've got a new competitor so basically you can sniff the dynamics as it changes and if you're a female you don't think that there aren't a bunch of females trying to band together and grab you by the ankles and yank you down four inches to stop that from happening that is of course what's happening which is comes to alan goldhamer's famous phrase which is that uh how does he say it aj he says something like well god forbid you lose weight then they're all going to call you a mate poaching [Music] there you go uh he also would say that people have a problem with you losing weight just as soon as you become a little bit thinner than they are then suddenly it's a problem and that's uh i think that you know that is so true because the people that attack me for being too thin they're always heavier than me for some reason i mean mary mcdougall has never criticized me dr rosanne alviera kathy fisher katie may none of them have ever told me how bad i look because i'm so thin isn't that interesting yes there you go well that that that speaks to the instincts that are involved in this really fine question yeah it is it's really interesting thank you you know not today but i'm thinking one time it might be good if we did a show because not everybody here yet watches or listens to the beat your jeans podcast which i hope they would so when you use words like perc you know i'm not sure they know all the lingo so maybe one day we could go over it yes aja you know i'm up for anything yeah like what the percentiles the sucker triad you know there's just words that we know but they're like what is he talking about because that might be an interesting show as well thank you so much all right so here is a question from david i am a 22 year old that has had adhd my whole life and i also have an extremely addictive personality and i have trouble doing anything in moderation drinking eating etc and i often find myself making impulsive destructive decisions and regretting them later also my thoughts just feel cloudy all the time as i'm just existing and acting or talking without thinking without medication what is the best way to manage this well um sounds like you've managed so far uh you're 22 years old and you've found chef aj for goodness sake so your your uh your your openness and adventurousness has somehow led you to uh to us which is good you've you've uh fared it out a good uh a good bunch of uh ore uh where there's an awful lot of good information now the uh the best way to to live for you is the best way to live for everybody which is to get yourself moderate exercise let's don't use anything that alters the brain chemistry of you in some unusual fashion i.e we uh we would stay away from drugs of all kinds the uh that that would begin with coffee uh uh with somebody like yourself the uh not that that would be any huge deal that we would go all the way from from coffee through any other kinds of mind altering substances and certainly all the way to psychiatric medication which we would never use the um we don't want to do anything to disturb the uh whatever equilibriums that mind can get to and how we don't want to disturb its ability to make good judgments the psychiatric medication can look like it works in the same way that if you have a very sword injured ankle and i give you a cortisone shot that might also make you feel better okay that is the reason why bill walton the great center from ucla and the nba that is why he is a crippled okay he is a because when he was a young man and he wanted to play very badly and he had very serious injuries in his feet uh the portland trailblazers medical staff knew that they had this great player and they wanted to win so badly so that they you know and and obviously some young buck wants to win really badly so he could play if they shot his feet full of cortisone and so that he couldn't feel the pain okay terrible idea so that's why he now basically can't walk and there's been a since he was about 40. so yeah you don't want to use medications that how do i do medications if i'm how am i going to manage if i don't have medications the answer the medications are out because we don't want to turn you into a mental okay so medications are out you've survived up to now if you if you haven't done something so stupid and impulsive is to jump into a shark tank that you know at the san diego zoo so far uh but by your 22nd birthday then you're probably not going to do it now because you're a lot smarter than you were when you were 14. so i'm not too worried about you so what do you want to do you want to do exactly what alan goldhamer would tell you to do okay eat intelligently get daily exercise get to bed on time don't use any stimulating or bizarre drugs that's what we do and uh whatever comes out of those things is what comes out of those things uh and undoubtedly you're surrounded by opportunity and temptation so we are going to expect that the pleasure trap is going to be a difficult thing for you to stay out of do the best you can and when you you consistently wind up into some kind of trouble you need to then attend to the environmental opportunity that is responsible for you for making that very easy and then try to do structural processes in your life to get yourself away from that okay get yourself away from them from the roommate who i don't know snorts amphetamine or whatever the heck it is we need to get ourselves away from the people and the situations that make it easy for us to do self-destructive things that's what we do and quite frankly that's all we can do yeah that's where the what that that environment keeps coming up time and time again yeah this is this is kind of an interesting question that i've actually wondered about myself and it's from ben he says dr lyle i believe i once heard you say you worked in a prison i had all i have always wondered where the idea came from of giving inmates who are about to be executed a final meal of their choice what is the purpose and significance of this custom if you are going to be executed do you even want to eat if i was going to die i think food would be the furthest thing from my mind yeah i don't even know if that's really if that's something that they do now i think they do i mean i remember seeing a documentary about it and and they they were like kind of assessing like what the people asked for some that said no meal you know it's kind of interesting but there's a whole thing about what what they choose and people have done art and exhibits about it because it's kind of interesting yeah it is it would be interesting the um i think it's a i mean certainly there's i can see reasons for it and it actually speaks something very interesting to me and that is it tells you how important food is they didn't say um and obviously sex would be important too but uh but sex would require us to have somebody else there and speak fiasco et cetera so the um but you can see what an enormous steel food is to human life how central it is and so it's a it's a moment of compassion which basically honors the fact that that life is finite and what a what a tragedy to lose it and um and so essentially we're going to give you one last taste of of some of the best things in life that that is that are and um and so i've thought about this because i've had friends with kovid and and other times just with age or strokes they can't taste anymore very well and it's like wow that's interesting like if you can't taste anymore or your taste is very very limited boy does that reduce down a lot of the enjoyment of life which is kind of amazing if that's true it isn't so amazing when you think about that essentially you're designed by the genes to survive and to reproduce and the number one survival problem is food and so it's not surprising that a tremendous amount of the pleasure of your existence comes from the simple act of eating it it would need to be so but it was getting those calories as an inherently competitive problem between us and other animals and other people and uh in nature and so finding them and then seizing them and utilizing them is is something that needed to be heavily incentivized in the motivational mechanism which means you've got a hunger drive and you've got pleasure it comes from eating uh good food so yeah so it's not surprising at all that human beings with the mirror neurons that they have in other words we have the capacity to mirror another person's experience in our own mind uh that's what essentially what it means to be human is to and the concept of humane is the notion that that we have feelings of tremendous compassion for other creatures and other people that are suffering and we can imagine putting ourselves in the shoes of someone who only has a few hours to live and and it's like wow what can we do for you you know what can we possibly give you we're about to take your life away because of the mistakes you've made this is the ultimate kicking out of the village so you've done some things that the society has deemed to be so heinous that we can no longer allow you to live however that doesn't mean that we don't have compassion for you as as a human and as a creature of life and uh and so therefore can we give you simply and uncomplicatedly without great without great pain to ourselves can we give you uh you know one more hour of enjoyment of this thing called life okay that makes sense to me uh that's the equivalent of the old thing of you know the old story of some guy in front of a firing squad getting a last cigarette okay so it's the same concept one more hitted dopamine okay so i think that that's uh i did not know that they did that uh the executions are so rare uh that that they don't get a lot of publicity or at least doesn't cross my i don't know that they've executed anybody in california for a hell of a long time i mean has this been basically gone off the table aj i don't even you know i don't know but i know that i've just read in the new york times there's a state that's bringing back the firing squad because they can't afford the drugs for euthanasia they can't afford that that is absurd that's what they said that that that is a country that can afford to you know put up a space station can't afford the drug that is ludicrous anyway so we'll argue about with those politicians and so there's too much testosterone and there's somebody some bunch of sadists want to shoot a bullet but uh but anyway south carolina it's south carolina that's bringing back firing squad executions because of shortage of drugs to carry out lethal injections shortage of drugs for god's sakes how many lethal injections today i mean it's ridiculous yeah but wouldn't you be i mean i i i'm a very anxious person anyway but even i can't imagine enjoying a meal if i know it's gonna be executed i'd rather like you know spend time with my dog or have another privilege is what i i mean it is what it is it's such a rare bizarre thing in human life i mean it's just such a uh it's interesting as a little kid i used to really worry about that um because in the california they had the electric chair and so when i was a five or six-year-old kid and i found out about this i i actually spent no small time amount of time worried about what it would be like to be executed in the electric chair and was all worried about it so you know these kinds of things um it didn't wreck my life or anything but it certainly made my childhood have many hours of unpleasantness uh as a result of that and and i think that uh i think our leadership doesn't appreciate that particularly the um and the press doesn't the uh but anyway what do i think about this i think it's a very interesting and humane uh custom uh as it were and uh then i can't remember what the rest of the question is oh no that that was it and then i was doing it like where it may be where it came from do you remember what dr goldhamer said when i asked him at one of the conferences if he was being executed for a crime he didn't commit what his last meal would be do you remember what he said i don't know brown rice bro what did he say he actually chose a fruit that has now become extinct because he figured they would never be able to find it oh isn't he clever that just a word to the wise don't ever negotiate with alan okay just just take whatever it is that he's uh what whatever it is that he's offering because you're not going to get it any i thought better was a great idea i thought that was a great idea very clever yeah all right so this next question that's a little poignant um it has to be anonymous dr lyle my job requires frequent travel and on the recent business trip my team finished their project ahead of schedule so i flew home a day early to surprise my husband and it was like walking into a scene from a lifetime movie i caught my husband in bed with a neighbor who purported to be my friend i tried getting the point with you but you're so booked up i'd appreciate any guidance you can give me today how do i ever get over the hurt and rage i feel especially since this woman is older than me overweight and not as attractive as i am i make more money than my husband and we have no children so walking away would not be complicated but he is begging for my forgiveness as is the next door i wouldn't even know how to forgive them or why i should and even if i could forgive them how would i ever be able to trust either of them again this is this is common i mean i can name like 10 people that this has happened to yeah um i would uh i would say have the following to say about this the um there was there'd be a great deal i could say about this uh and probably someday i will the um the let me think about how i think this person's specific problem in this specific situation i i would certainly say probably a good idea is to get on my docket in other words you can you usually get an appointment three to four weeks out and so i'm you know you can write to me and uh and explain a little bit about this and i will find a time in the next couple of weeks to see it okay so the um but to the bigger question of gee how can i ever get over this there's um the only way that we that we change our feelings uh in life for the better the only way that that happens is with the reduction of delusion and so delusion is uh or distortion in other words misunderstanding of reality so the the um so that that's how uh there is no uh um psychotherapy as a historical concept if somehow you were mother or father wrong and then we have to go back to some developmental stage where you were stuck in the editable stage of what something this is all crazy clap that has nothing to do with reality the the problems that you face in life have to do with the following issue they have to do with where you stand now and where you believe that you should be able to stand with respect to three or four major problems um there's just a few major problems in mind one of them is mating one of them is friendship one of them is trade or business one of them is familial processes and a final one would be your own personal health so these are the main problems of life and so if you feel like you should be able to get healthier but you don't know how then that sets up a tension inside of you it sets up a motivational system you have a motive the motive is to get from where you are now to where it is that you think that you could be and so you're designed by nature to attempt to do movements which by the way listen to movements uh take place when we they don't take place randomly motive movements have a motive the motive is the end point of situation that you seek that improves the situation relative to where you are now so if you have a hang nail on your finger and you go and get a nail clipper you are motivated to get rid of the hang hangnail because it's uncomfortable and it moves you into the bathroom opens up the drawer gets the nail clipper out then you sit down you get where the lighting is good then you manipulate the clipper as well as you can to get rid of the hang nail so that your now situation is better than it was before that is there's no in principle difference between that and the contemplation of the divorce from your husband who cheated on you it's exactly the same process the process is what are my circumstances now what is it that i think that they should be and i'm motivated to close the distance between the two okay now so what what happens is is that oftentimes what we think the situation is between us and reality is not the situation that it is so we think that we are in fact planning our 25th anniversary grand tour of europe after kobit because we've been waiting a long time for this and we just retired and the kids are all settled and we're going to go spend three months you know going down the rhine river and everything else into the sun so you feel like okay that's what we're about to do for the next three months that is true until your husband gets has a strange lump on the side of his neck that you notice and then it turns out that you go and you find out that he's got thyroid cancer okay so now it's like okay we are now going to change our motivational trajectory because we have we we were operating under a delusion that we were in we were in fact both healthy and that the best thing to do with our time and energy that we could figure out was to go toodling around europe for three months that's what we thought was true but new information has come to light which now changes what it is that we need to do we need now and you have a whole new set of information that we're trying to get him from dangerously unhealthy to healthy that becomes the most important thing so your motives are constantly changing and they're changing with new information the new information is a constant update attempting to help you make cost-benefit analysis about what you should be doing in life what is the optimal way to be spending your time and energy and movements okay in order to optimize your existence that's what it is that your life is so what happens is is that you're constantly updating your assessment as to the relationship between yourself and the environment the environment is an unknown but you can know quite a bit about it okay so for example a lot of you before you knew about chef here about this way of living you were scrambling around trying to figure out how to lose weight half the time not even bothering because everything you tried sort of didn't work and now once you actually tried this if you had good results over the first few weeks now you're quote more motivated to do what to close the distance between what your circumstances are now and what your circumstances are that you think that they could be and should be in order to improve your existence why for both your health and your feedback that you would get from the world about your appearance etc that's uh which would influence the opportunities that you would have with respect to mates i.e your mate would find you more attractive or if you don't have one that you would be uh more competitive friends trade all kinds of stuff okay now your kids might be more proud of you and be able to introduce them to introduce you to their fiance that they've been delaying because they've been embarrassed because you're 100 pounds overweight but now the last 30 your daughter is actually feeling more proud of you et cetera et cetera and you can see that that you are becoming more valuable as a coalition member as a result all kinds of things this is a very wide-ranging theoretical explanation as to how i now approach this problem right now so now we sit as a delusion has been that has been essentially enlightened okay so we already had the problem okay the problem already existed before you went on the business trip all that happened when you came back from the business trip was that we we found the problem it was already there right now so that's okay so now we found the lump in the side of your husband's throat it now constitutes an emergency because it's changing our motivational trajectory okay so our situation isn't what we thought it was it's now something different than we thought it was okay in this case when we find the lump in the throat and they say it's a thyroid cancer it's a negative thing so we have a bunch of negative thoughts about it we have a lot of monday morning quarterbacking about it like how did that happen why did it happen i thought we ate healthfully i just checked on the doctor last year did where we are responsible in some way okay and there's and what are we supposed to do about it that is precisely the kind of analysis that is starting to take place now okay so the husband is saying oh it really wasn't worth it okay i made a mistake okay the neighbor is saying oh we actually were friends and i do like you but that this was a mistake and shame on me okay so that's and now you're saying well i don't know if i can have any possible way to trust or you know the fact that you guys would do this quote to me okay well let's try to figure out what did they exactly do to you okay let's let's look at this it's kind of an interesting thing so this is us now trying to understand the actual processes here and why they would cause humans to be so upset now other animals aren't particularly upset some of them are uh but humans tend to be pretty upset about this sort of thing well let's talk about why that is now the way that what's happening is is that it's tripping instincts in you as if you were a child-bearing age if you were a child-bearing age and you were parabon to do a male then you what you want as a female is you want to be in circumstances where you're where your mate is not pursuing any outside interests because if he does he'll wind up impregnating outside interests and therefore his hunting the the his his time and energy that essentially he needs a certain amount of time and energy in order to make enough need to survive for himself but he has residual income okay residual income is precisely what women are interested in when they're selecting mates it's an extremely important feature of their decision about who to mate with are you capable of getting residual income can you produce more calories than the ones that you consume if you are big and strong and alert and athletic and have good judgment then you are very likely to be able to over produce the calories and therefore have residual calories for me and our children okay that is precisely why it is that women analyze exactly those characteristics they also analyze a couple of other characteristics which are critical which are and are you generous okay because just because you can over produce calories doesn't mean you're going to give them to me so i need to find out that you're generous that you would be willing to give those up and just not hog them for yourself and give them to other females and finally am i specifically incredibly important to you am i super important for your sexual happiness to the point where you're willing to come to me and not go to anybody else so the pipe dream of a female psychology is someone is tall dark handsome athletic smart well connected in the village honorable as hell super interested in me and not interested in anybody else good luck ladies that that was it represents the apex of the ideal situation for the human female the ideal situation for the human male is i'm so attractive that i can have all the most attractive females who are willing to be with me without any commitment okay that is precisely that is the opposite end of what is ideal we understand now looking at those two very different situations that those two people are inherently in conflict okay so where are we likely to wind up we're likely to wind up somewhere in the middle that's where we're likely to wind up so we're going to wind up that the human female typically is not going to be seeking to try to have two mates at once not typically if she is going to have two mates at once she's likely to be wanting to sleep up with the neighbor because the existing mate isn't as fancy as the guy who she could get who is in fact not going to provision her he's just getting some action on the side for free so that's why the neighbor next door neighbor lady isn't as attractive as you it's because she's willing to mate with your mail because he's fancier than she is and fancier than any other mate that she could ever get to commit to her so that's why she's willing to do that and that is basically an offer that she can't find herself refusing the fact that you're next door neighbors and that you've chatted a bunch and she knows that he's got a solid pretty decent character along with it this all just vets him out as a pretty good genetic specimen so her stone age brain says wow this is a pretty good deal and if i could get some of his dna i don't i won't even take grapes from him i don't need any provisioning just give me your dna because i can tell that your dna is fancier than my dna meanwhile i can tell that my friend is fancier than i am that's why that's who he's pair bonded to but remember what it is that he is as a male as a male he would just soon have a harem of a bunch of girls who look like angelina jolie for god's sakes 12 of them that he rotates like a pitching staff and all of them are just gaga over him and he doesn't actually spend more than an hour with any one of them in a given three days okay so you're like well doc talk wild men really back like that yes why do you think they're willing to go with you to the mall they're walking around the mall pretending they're king kong uh looking at all all the females and instantly imagining sexual relationships with them as if they're hugh hefner now how much of their brain is devoted to that and how salivating are they not too much it's just the common interior processes it's called being a human male now so what really happened here that opportunity uh basically met you know it it lined up in reality to your your where would he where would we think this relationship would wind up we would wind up in a situation where this male doesn't get to do what he wants and he's meeting you here and that means that he's thinking about other women but he's not doing anything about it and he's going on the internet and he's looking at him it used to be playboy magazine at the barber shop okay but it's the same process okay but he's not quote psychologically and mentally faithful to you because that's not his biology now is he still interested in you pair bonded to you giving you all of his extra calories pretty much yeah but not all of them he might even have a subscription that cost some three dollars a month some porn site we don't know but the point of the matter is is that pretty much his life is right here with you but he gets the opportunity to wind up being a little bit of a hugh hefner with somebody who is actually your inferior not your superior when it turns out that you're away on business okay and you come back and catch him and he's like oh man was that ever not worth it i'm so sorry okay but i'm actually designed by nature to be seeking more than one mate and it tripped over me that's how you want to look at this so you're instead looking at it as i would expect from the female perspective that says how dare you weren't you didn't you get the memo the memo is you're supposed to be a hundred percent psychologically and physically faithful to me till we're dead that's how that's supposed to work and he's saying god you know i mostly did but i didn't quite okay that's how you should look at this so now that that's the that's how it is that that i try to help people get through these things because all that has happened is this situation was never what you thought it was that he was always hugh hefner in disguise under the right set of circumstances those set of circumstances weren't going to happen because he didn't have 100 million dollars and he didn't have a porn empire and he probably wasn't as handsome and suave as hugh hefner and so and he didn't have a capacity to give a bunch of chippies blonde you know curvy chippies you know a break in hollywood that they wanted a bunch of narcissistic little airheads so as a result he couldn't be hugh hefner okay but one day things conspired to give him a little bit of opportunity to like like a a sort of a uh like my house got uh annalise annalise is pretty lazy awfully happy everything's cool but once in a while i'll see her run quickly after some butterfly she'll actually for once in a while once in a blue moon she's the lion in my living room she's a little lion and she turns into a little lion just a little bit uh if it gets a little scary outside she wants to come in she didn't want to go out there for too long in other words she's pretty damn tame your husband's in pretty damn tame that he's a little bit of a lion okay and so you know can you trust him well you can trust him to act on his own best interests and those best interests are not going to be perfectly aligned with yours okay and there may be in this lifetime times and places where it is that he is very tempted and in fact i would not say that he is going to be sworn to fealty uh for the rest of his life with you um he he is again an organism with his own biological programming and that biological programming is at odds with yours that doesn't mean that it is directly 100 180 degrees at odds with years it's just like you're a business partner with someone and your desires are very similar and you can make great benefit from your relationship but that doesn't mean that you actually see everything eye to eye and that you actually have 100 of the same interests you have an overlap of interests so what i want you to do is to you know after the shock of discovering this and having your female instincts slammed with a with a sledgehammer right on your big toe which is exactly what this is this is a hell of a way to find out that your husband isn't built of female psychology pair bonding psychology that is completely sworn guilty to you no he never was he said so on his wedding day but it was bogus he basically got forced there by custom and tradition and your expectations but he was never there okay that is isn't how they're built okay they may behave that way they may never have opportunity they may not have temptation that winds up hitting them in the face and they may very uh possibly never stray so an awful lot of women that are listening to this your husband's probably never cheated on you but they thought about it okay one of the uh a well done place in in the movies not a great movie but pretty good movie was mr holland's opus it was a deeply thoughtful and humane movie and a hard one uh it was uh what's the actor you know it's the richard dreyfuss richard dreyfuss a phenomenal actor okay and richard dreyfuss plays the story of this man's career as a as a music teacher and he wanted to be more of a musician and there's a moment you know he never kind of leaves his small town and i think it's his daughter is actually deaf so he doesn't get to pass on his love of music to his child for god's sakes and um and there's a moment in mid-career where there's a beautiful one young lady who there's a flirtation between him and her and it's inappropriate because he's like her teacher and he knows he's got he would really he's really tempted to run away from his family and just go to hollywood with this beautiful starlet in making he knows it's wrong but it's it's the fanciest thing he's ever going to run across and it's a tough one and it was a it was a heart-wrenching way that the story's told because as you look at that and and through the eyes of a great screenwriting and brilliant acting on all parts his wife him starlet everybody this is a-list movie-making all the way that that you you you realize there's no enemies here you know the driver's character mr holland is not being a to his wife he's being deeply tempted by a deep characteristic of human nature and what you're watching is a beautifully demonstrated concept of philosophy called the tragic nature of life the tragic nature of life is different philosophically than what is known as the utopian vision of life the utopian vision of life is the notion that if we all behave properly everything could be fabulous utopian vision of life is in fact wrong okay it sounds beautiful it has great political cachet it sounds fantastic and people get very militant and they want to force that political vision on the world that is incorrect it is actually it is actually a great tragedy that people are can be talked into that that is what the soviet union is soviet union is a utopian vision of life and so is communist china okay that is actually an incorrect vision of human nature and it is an improper political uh backdrop of how it is that life should be lived if we step forward the utopian vision is incredibly seductive because it's the notion is if we all just act the way we should and could then everything is going to be great better than ever before that is actually fundamentally wrong the truth of the matter is we inherently have conflicts with each other okay that does not belong in the utopian vision that doesn't belong in walden 2 by b.f skinner okay the f skinner did not understand that the utopian vision is actually fundamentally incorrect we have inherent conflicts with other people if you can't imagine how rough it is to have a beautifully free society filled with conflict you think that we can get everybody to agree that you haven't listened to this lady and her note to me because she doesn't can't even have a single really good long-term relationship without deep brutal conflict she can't even have a coffee friend with her next door neighbor that she really likes and is her friend without deep brutal conflict okay the tragic nature of life doesn't mean that it has to be a tragedy it means that it's one hell of a bummer that just by nature we do have conflicts with other creatures okay every young hunter who actually has the humanity to look at the animal that it just killed and feel like son of a gun how many young men actually it bothered deeply to do that and yet it was necessary calories for their village and for their own survival 15 000 years ago okay one of the reasons to the good things in my life about being a vegan is i no longer have to even think about that conflict okay i'm not in conflict with the living animals on earth other people still are and they haven't got their head clear about that but i'm out of that i'm out of that game i actually got out of that game i had always sort of rolled my eyes with michael clapper and his issues with shoes and you know walking around in his suit with his tennis shoes at conferences and until i sat next to a man that um on a plane that was miserable in this light because he was a mid-level executive for a weather company one of the largest leather companies in the united states that imported leather for cars for detroit for ford motor company and he told me about what goes on in brazil and how all these animals are are used for the leather and i that day at the result of that conversation i saw the conflict in that man's soul he hated it and he wanted to retire and get out as fast as he could and i said to myself i'm never buying another car with leather in it ever okay and ironically i got challenged because i was buying a car that year and it turned out the car with leather was a fancier car and cheaper than it had a deal on it than the subaru that didn't and i'm like well what are you gonna do genius right next door there's a better car for cheaper you're getting ripped off by i'm like you know what forget it i'm getting subaru i'm not doing it i'm not i'm not being a party to this okay tragedy conflict choices difficulty okay human beings are going to have problems and they're going to have conflicts and it's going to be tough and sometimes you know there's going to be unfortunate fallout from that this woman lived with the unfortunate fallout that human beings broken hearts and and and tragic uh conflicts have happened forever along this dimension all we can do is uh essentially look at a relationship like this and say let's listen to all sides let's take our time there's no reason to be to essentially you know know these people from the sound of it you know and the other the two other people in the park are not you know are not arguing and defending themselves and anything else they recognize we had a uh a conflict of interest with you and we selfishly and unfortunately did not compute all the costs very well and we got tempted okay think about that as you let some time go by before we make any big decisions because there's no reason to make any big decisions let these realities seep into you and realize that this is part of being human is that humans will have conflict with humans and sometimes they will do things to hurt other people that were not you know that they didn't want to hurt but they wanted to satisfy something for themselves it was deeply natural to them and that that is an unfortunate inherent natural conflict in human life okay if you can come to terms and learn a little bit about that then maybe this relationship survives maybe there's still far more benefit than cost uh in the relationship as you go forward wow i mean that's not how most women would think about this yeah i mean it makes sense what you said the why but but the how for the person if they decide to you know because just in general i don't know how people forgive people for anything just i mean that's a hard thing that's right and it's a process and you'll find out in you know we'll find out whether or not understanding more about this will change you may have a personality that is designed by nature to be very territorial and completely determined that it has to be all or nothing people are like that you know frank sinatra's you know one of his first great songs was all or nothing at all and in other words uh that that's how a lot of people's psychologies are built so i've had women who got cheated on and are pissed off and won't can't give it up and are still harping on it 25 years later and it's like you know what that relationship might have been better off just being broken up at that point because the truth is is that they've made the other party party miserable and they've been miserable might have been just better off in other words they may not have the chops to just let go okay so uh so this is an individual issue all that i can do is try to bring you a broader more more accurate perspective about human nature and men and women dynamics in general it is possible with a deeper understanding that you may be able to come to a much greater understanding and some inner peace about what it is that you've dealt with okay you may not but it's the only chance that i know that we have i think about gibson hell have no fury like a woman scorned there you go yeah this has been just great dr lyle thank you so much and there were a couple questions in the chat guys we have some good news dr lyle is actually coming back this month with dr hawk at 2 30 p.m on saturday the 15th of this month so i will save those questions uh thank you for this in this perspective absolutely my great pleasure aj great thank you so much dr lyle and thanks all of you for watching another episode of chef aj live we have two shows tomorrow and they're both culinary demos at 11am we have doctors rick and karen dina who were making some amazing salad dressings and at 2 p.m a new book coming out from alicia slattery take care everyone thanks again dr lau bye
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