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Chef AJ: Weighing Your Food, Infidelity, and an Unfulfilled Career | Chef AJ LIVE! with Dr Lisle
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blue is your color for sure oh good yep here we go 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 we are so fortunate to have today's guest come on not once but twice this month he often graces us with his presence once a month but we are so lucky that we get a double this month his name is dr doug lyle i'm sure if you know who i am you know who he is because he's one of my favorite people from whom i learned so much he has a wonderful podcast that he podcasts that he co-hosts with dr jen hawk wednesday nights at 8 30 p.m pacific time called beat your jeans he has his own little community called the living wisdom library which you can join for less than a price of a cup of coffee and he's just one of the funnest people i know please welcome dr doug lyle i just love having you on because i don't have to do anything thanks for having me it is so fun okay so we have so many questions we'll get to as many as we can and guys please get on my mailing list because the best way is to get them in the queue i have to give priority to the people on the list and all you do is respond to the email once a week that comes to you telling us who the guests are okay i find this question very interesting and i think possibly you will too this is from jeffrey dear dr lyle many people lose extraordinary amounts of weight on a low-fat whole food plant-based starch-based diet and then they go on to write books gain social media followings and start youtube channels only to gain all or some of it back i am wondering is this because weight loss and weight management are two distinctly different processes that require different skill sets i recently read a book called the talent code and i'm wondering if the reason most people fail at maintaining weight loss is because they have no experience at it and haven't wrapped enough myelin i've heard you talk about myelin before yeah uh it's a very good question and the talent code doesn't really have anything to do with this the the wrapping of myelin has to do with physical skills so for example learning how to type or learning how to throw a football or shoot a basketball or knitting that's how we wrap myelin sheath it doesn't have anything to do with high order principles like uh how how do i think through calorie density okay so uh it might have to do with it would have to do with for example chopping up a bunch of vegetables and making a soup in your kitchen because by the time you've done that 10 times you are more effective and more efficient as a result of some myelin wrapping uh that than you were before so but in general no the those two things don't have anything to do with each other the uh the fact is is that the the very same things that you need to do uh to lose the weight or the very same things you need to do to maintain it uh what what happens is that if we're trying to understand p uh behavior at all why people do what they do specifically why they ever change what it is that they do the reason is cost benefit analysis so the mind does a very sophisticated cost benefit analysis uh as it essentially runs a series of experiments uh so basically all your life is is one great big laboratory where you constantly try something and then see how it works so today i had an acai bowl the reason i had an acai bowl today i didn't i didn't i never had one five years ago i got introduced to acai bowls about three years ago um and since that time i've probably had a couple hundred acai bowls so every every now and then probably once a week or so i have an acai bowl why because it's in my memory and my memory knows what the experience is it's a little indulgent because it's pretty sweet and therefore i don't generally like to eat too much fruit sugar at a time uh but once in a while i will do that and so that's a so what what's motivating me there well multiple things um one of the things that we have for example is we have a part of our cost benefit analysis with respect to food has to do with changing it so by having a a essentially an exploratory openness towards a diversity of experiences around food that will cause you to be less likely to wind up nutrient deficient okay so the desire to eat a variety of different things is undoubtedly an evolutionary adaptation to uh to basically push people to eat a variety of different foods if they were available in the landscape in order to reduce the likelihood of any deficiency so there that's one of the reasons why i will go to a place on a market here that does a really good job on an acai bowl and i'll eat an acai bowl once in a while that's because the oatmeal starts to feel like nah i just don't feel like eating oatmeal today i feel like something slightly different now and that's probably what that is is that an algorithm built in the machine looking for diversity the um now so when we're trying to figure out why anybody ever changes the behavior pattern we look for cost benefit analysis and so uh there's different ways for in other words the cost benefit analysis must change so if uh if i was living in a cuban prison and every day they gave me some oatmeal with a banana in it i wouldn't one day decide you know what i'm not going to eat this because it'd be like you better believe i'm going to eat it it's all i'm going to get so therefore i'm going to eat it okay so as soon as i get out of there then i'm going to be looking for something different but the point is is that that it all has to do with the cost benefit that's in front of you so people change their diets behind cost benefit analysis so some people a few people it's not super uncommon they lose an awful lot of weight and so what they do is that they hear about this way of doing things and they've probably tried 40 other things one way or another failed uh ultimately and so they try this and some of the advantages of this are that you'll actually feel better physically than you will on a paleo or keto diet you'll also not be looking to limit your food intake in other words that you're eating the satiety so that's pretty cool if you're someone who's fought you know your waistline your whole life and you thought the way to lose weight was to eat less than you wanted you get to lose weight without losing your mind so you get to eat a satiety so that's a so people and that these they experiment with this and a lot of people that experiment with this will abandon it very quickly because they're they're in the pleasure trap and they're not willing to go from 1500 calorie pound food to 500 calorie pound food which is not well to do that's fine uh the promise of what might be in store for them over the horizon is not worth the current sacrifice and so their mind simply runs that cost-benefit analysis and keeps coming up with the idea that says no that's not worth it now once in a while somebody does and so if they stick with it long enough what happens is that their taste preferences go through an adaptive process where that 500 calorie pound food is very satisfying that's because it was designed to be satisfying in nature the fact that you were eating cheese pizzas and and chocolate chip cookies you know uh etc before and ham sandwiches you were eating those before you were eating 1500 carrot pound food and now you're eating potatoes rice beans soup um you know vegetable soup suddenly you you are able to not just tolerate but you're fine with eating 500 calorie pound type of food yeah if you if you are able to stay with the experiment long enough that's likely to be what many people will experience the um if they do that then they find something else out but a month later they're down seven pounds it's like wow i like the food well enough it wouldn't be as good as a domino's pepperoni pizza and a coca-cola in other words it wouldn't be as dope and dopamine intensive but it's good i feel fine and so um maybe they experiment with a domino's pizza they wake up the next morning you know with their mouth tasting all salty and dehydrated and they stink like pepperoni and they're like yeah i don't think i don't and their stomach doesn't feel good and they're like you know what i'm not going to do that so they run an experiment now they may go back now they're on a good healthy diet and the months go by and there's little enticements out there that they may partake of now and then but the truth is is that they pretty well stay on course and then they lose 100 pounds and they lose 100 pounds and it's pretty transformative for their life in fact they may get a youtube channel and they may write a book or whatever it is that they do so but now what happens is very often what happens is when people lost a lot of weight they they um but what will happen is is that the cost benefit analysis changes so now the cost of analysis to go from 250 pounds to 150 pounds that may have been spectacular but the difference between 150 and 152 is no big deal so now they start to indulge why cost benefit analysis is rigged in favor of the pleasure drop and so they're proud of themselves they keep getting good positive feedback everything is fine and now they start to slip okay well now they start to adulterate the the palate and now it turns out the healthy foods don't taste as good so now they have a little more now they're 155 pounds now they're now they feel for example a little embarrassed but nobody can still tell but now their self-esteem is hurting because they know they're being hypocritical and so at some point they they may essentially go on strike in full-fledged ego trap where they display to themselves that they're not trying so now they just like forget it i'm gonna just go and i'm gonna eat at old mary's southern kitchen and i eat that food that i know that i really like which is oh i don't know grits and ham and whatever that is now they go the other direction now they kick over the table and now they gain another 10 or 15 pounds and now they're like well now what's the point now they have to go back through the same process and now they try to hold the line and now they're in a mess okay so the reason why people lose their way oftentimes the reason why they changed their behavior is because of the cost benefit analysis has changed so they were they were in a very fine what i call a deep groove for a long period of time where they were continually doing an excellent job because they were doing an excellent job their self-esteem mechanism recognized that they felt very morally sound and right with the world they continued to lose weight they kept kept getting positive feedback this was a this is what i would call an achievement cycle so it just keeps it just keeps circling around and reinforcing itself when something goes the other direction and it starts to go go sideways it can be very difficult to reestablish that momentum okay so that's actually what happens uh to people is that that the difference uh when you go from 152 to 150 all you did was keep doing what you were doing uh under a self-disciplinary and self-esteem driven process and you kept you know it's just one in a long chain of positive feedback that came as a result uh i think often what happens to people is that when they when they hit an equilibrium so let's suppose our gal hits in equilibrium at 150. so now she continues to do uh the right things for three or four weeks and no more weight comes off mmm interesting so when that happens the cost benefit analysis starts to change doesn't it because part of the momentum uh because of the entire behavioral streak was that there was a feedback system that kept signaling to her you're making progress things are going well you're making progress things are going well finally a month goes by and she continues to do the right things and there's no more progress so you can now you can start to see wait a minute the cost benefit starts to possibly change and so now they nibble they're like well what's what's the difference then so now they start to nibble and if they start to nibble and need some junk they go on the scale there's no difference you can eat a lot of junk food before you can gain a pound you can eat quite a bit okay and you're gonna eat a lot of junk food before you gain three pounds of legitimate fat that would be twelve thousand calories overage uh at say overage of an indulgent overage of 500 calories a day that would take you three weeks 24 days to gain three pounds uh chomping away a lot of crap so you're not going to hardly notice that on the scale for a while long you know and by that time the pleasure trap has now adulterated your palate and now you're in a trap okay so that's a lot of the analysis of why this is a very difficult thing to do you have to sort of be mentally prepared for the fact that you're likely to hit an equilibrium at some point where they'll no longer be positive feedback from the scale okay so uh and god forbid that happens when you're still frustrated with your physique because if that happens that can really add to a what the hell attitude uh and a willingness to now start bending the rules and then get back in the trap so yeah complicated question and a lot of different considerations but whenever we're trying to understand anything we we look through the lens of cost benefit analysis and that's going to help us figure out what's going on so dr lau do you believe that weight loss and weight maintenance are the same process or different processes like the question are asked well they're the same process and i would say to do it properly you do exactly the same things to lose the weight as you do to maintain it the um the difference is is that you are you're doing that under slightly different circumstances because when you're losing the weight you're getting the additional source of positive feedback of continued improvement okay once you've reached equilibrium you no longer have that and so that's a that's taking away a bit of the profit out of the business okay so therefore it depends on where you land if you land in a place where you're not happy with it then you could be pretty frustrated if you land in a place where you're pretty happy with it then then that's fine it's not as big of a frustration so the the frustration that particularly you know a person who might be that vastly far overweight may have the genes that they may they may not get as felt as they were hoping that they were going to get and that could that can contribute to a shift in their motivation uh once they've stopped losing so that's a that's sort of an achilles heel of that process but no the the the process of losing in the process of maintaining uh it's the same behavior pattern under slightly different um reward circumstances that's that's that's why it's hard to maintain because we've reduced one of the rewards which is the feedback that says that you're continuing to make progress wow that's interesting so basically i think what you're saying is in order to maintain the weight loss the person has to do exactly what they did to lose the weight and not change the angle that's correct exactly yes i wonder if this applies to other processes other than weight loss it does i think that for example if you are if you are shaking alcohol or some drug addiction of some kind the um there can be a there can be a pride and extra edge of the pride as you get through certain milestones um and you can feel you can feel like okay i've done a year now or i've been six months now et cetera and part of the value of doing this was to essentially prove to yourself that you could do it that's an important component so one of the problems is is that that once that has been proven um then then a lot of times the value of continuing to prove it has dropped so the cost benefit can shift on you cost benefit can also shift just because some unknowing appointments offers you a drink you know man announce very quickly we have to run a competition and it's like well who are they what do they mean to me and what would it mean for me to refuse and then i have to i have to basically display the fact that i've got an issue with alcohol and i don't know that i want to do that so suddenly the person can be in circumstances where when they were in an earlier part of the process there may have been more incentive to prove to oneself etc that they could do this and now a little bit later on those cost benefits can change so yes i think similar that the overriding principle here is aj is that in any in any uh process of any achievement the the forces that are that are guiding the motivation are always in change okay we don't know when you have some kid that goes away to a university that one of the things that they are maybe doing is to just to prove to themselves that they can hack it so they may do a semester um and they may say that's it i feel i don't feel like going to school anymore but they proved to themselves they could do it or they could go and they could find out that they were way too chaotic uh it was just too exciting to do all the goofing around and and you know essentially uh young adult wacky behavior and they thought that they were going to go there and go to class but now it turns out that they're not so what was a good high school student under more structure is now a disaster under less structure why cost benefit analysis okay so we're all we're always looking at why people do what they do particularly with respect to change so we're all trying to learn more because as we learn more about things that are important to us what the learning does is it alters the cost benefit analysis so sometimes you learn more about something and you decide not to do it so you're thinking about buying this vacant lot in lake elsinore that looks like a really good price but now you find out that actually there could be a big you know water plant that's going to come in just two blocks down now you're not so excited about it in other words so your mind and your motivation is constantly in flux uh behind new information sometimes the new information facilitates action sometimes it deters it okay and so that's why that's why we have to look at that question when we see people struggle because there's something uh particularly if they're doing well before they're doing poorly now something has changed in a cost-benefit analysis and sometimes we try to figure out what that is great i don't think people realize how slow the weight loss process is because some of the means they lose weight it happens more quickly absolutely this is why coaching is why uh i direct people to this uh the your groups and uh for people that binge and so forth i direct them to justina frieza uh but that she's a great coach for this i tried to get people to places where it is that they can they can talk to expert people who can educate us in ways to do things more effectively and easily therefore change the cost benefit or also help us calibrate and understand what it is that we're up against so that we can be more effective at reaching the goals that we that occur to us would be worth doing great well this next question sort of fits in because you actually mentioned that with this way of eating whole food plant-based a little bit lower on the fat people can eat to satiety and it's a question from pamela and you did do a whole video once on weighing and measuring but this is actually a different question than what you covered in it she says dear dr lyle except for the plant-based educators all of the other weight loss programs and those designed to treat fruit addiction absolutely insist on weighing and measuring your food they say it's the only way to be successful obviously they know nothing about plant-based nutrition or calorie density but they insist that even non-starchy vegetables must be weighed because they believe people suffer from what they're calling a volume addiction and can no longer be trusted to even know if they're full they also say that in order to overcome food addiction animal protein is necessary to heal brain neurotransmitters i've searched the medical literature and i don't see anything to substantiate either of these claims so are they just making this stuff up why are these programs still so popular when almost no one can sustain them um good news about your bad habits so uh everybody would like to hear that they have to have some steak and chicken and some fish in there to in order to lose weight to improve their neurotransmitters so that was one of the great uh the great winds of eat right for your type you eat right told you oh well you're the kind of person that you need cheese oh you're the kind of person that needs steak you know based on your blood type so this is straight john mcdougall uh people love to hear good news about their bad habits the um no there's no truth in any of this uh there this is a i actually read i think uh who's the woman's name susan thompson uh i read in her book i i didn't read it because i couldn't uh but i i read a section of it where she basically makes the claim that people have lost satiety feedback signals somehow therefore they no longer function that's that's so ludicrous people the uh there's no evidence anywhere that anything like that even remote that is even remotely suggested uh that there's no there's no animal models that have ever shown that anything like that happens this is all just just made up okay so yeah whatever uh i don't know what on what on earth research uh there was no citation uh there in other words i don't know what it is that she's quoting or what it is that she thinks she's seeing uh no there's no there's no evidence that this works this way at all so throughout the animal kingdom uh just to just to bring the wide angle lens on this question the uh do we see any evidence that animals in the animal kingdom need to be deliberately blocked by people from overeating or else they're going to get obese no no so to the best of my knowledge the penguins aren't suffering from an obesity crisis and neither are the aardvarks okay and neither are the cougars and neither are the elephants and neither are the tigers and neither are the giraffes okay the best of my knowledge there's no species that is out there in the wild that is suffering from an obesity crisis nor do they when they run into an environment's a bounty okay they just don't they have society mechanisms that need to be working throughout the lengths of their lives just as you've got for example oxygen saturation mechanisms that are regulating how much you breathe so if you run up the stairs you are instantly in an oxygen deficit and then you'll breathe more okay if you are on a hot day and you're out there working you'll quickly become dehydrated and now you're going to get thirsty you don't need to think about getting thirsty and god forbid you don't need to go in and measure how much water you're drinking uh can you imagine these were important questions in the history of life on earth for animals in order to motivate them to balance their behavior optimally between various survival challenges and various reproductive challenges so every beaver needs to figure out well how more solidly do we have to make the beaver dam and uh how far from the water do i dare go to get a tree because i'm a beaver and i'm slow and therefore i have to be careful about how far i away i get from the shoreline in order to uh get the get the materials needed for the beaver dam i need the beaver dam materials because without that i'm not gonna have a mate without that amount of mate i'm not passing on my jeans um we need a place you know in order to to do all this etc etc okay so the the creature has to be running very sophisticated cost benefit analysis on how much time and energy it involves in going and getting food versus building a deep beaver dam versus how far you know how good of materials it should seek for the beaver dam uh literally they've got instinctual mechanisms as to how many how many children they will have okay they're not going to have twice as many or half as many that would be optimal how many eggs does a robin lay in other words it lays about the right amount of eggs given the features in the environment that indicate whether there's going to be enough food to feed those eggs so what i'm getting at is that animal minds are magnificent arbiters of conflicts of interest as they try to figure out how to optimally behave in an environment one of the most expensive things they do is to go get food so in other words it takes time and energy to do it and it takes time and energy away from other survival and reproductive problems so as a result of that you wouldn't expect a creature to have a mistake where it would systematically under read and starve it out there in the face of clinical food nor would you expect it to systematically overeat why would we ever suspect that it would overeat we don't suspect that it over breathes we don't suspect that it over sleeps we don't suspect that it overly drinks too much water we don't suspect that it drinks too little water we don't suspect that it can't tell when it's getting too hot or too cold in other words we recognize that an animal is exquisitely designed in order to respond to various and numerous different threats and opportunities to its survival reproductive success and it doesn't put its thumb on the scale with respect to any of them it balances them as exquisitely as possible according to uh algorithms that are built by the genetic code how could it be otherwise okay that's why if a mosquito is biting you uh and you look down on your arm and see it and then suddenly you know your doberman just got loose and you see him charging charging out of your yard you don't stop to slap the mosquito you instantly know that you've got other things involved not even having to do with your survival but you know the kid down the street survival in other words you are exquisitely designed to actually balance around your time and energy it's complicated sometimes you think well i should spend more time dancing and less time you know working at the factory okay it's different sort of an issue you are not designed to make a mistake on a biological process with very complicated feedback systems built into you to not make those mistakes okay if you have a little thing in your eye and you don't need to run away from a predator right now and your eye is bothering you then close your eyes and blink and try to get rid of it the pain in there will tell you this is serious business this is your eyeball let's make sure that we don't have you know tragedy and lose any of our eyesight that is more of a problem than a kink in your finger that's hurting you a little bit it instantly tells you whoa this is very serious okay the um now so there's be no reason for us to ever suspect that human beings would be miscalibrating the amount of food that they're eating and not getting it right the only reason why we would ever think that they would get it wrong would be is if we could somehow trick the mechanism with phony food that was somehow puffed up um you know would there be some way to do that turns out no brain is pretty smart and the reason is has multiple mechanisms to try to figure out how much food it's eating and so it's going to turn out yeah it's pretty hard to beat it with diet food it kind of knows that there's no calories in it the um but when you feed it overly rich food it was not designed to actually calibrate rich food in large doses consistently so it uh it has limits as to its accuracy and so when you overwhelm those systems with extremely rich food one of the main things it relies on for satiety is the weight and volume of the food and very rich food is very low weight it's very low weight very low volume per calories and it's unnaturally rich and so people will actually systematically overeat those foods the uh they're actually motivated to eat those very aggressively that's because those foods were rare in nature so that instituted an aggressive cramming instinct and so you would go ahead and eat those uh to the point of even past normal satiety incredibly uh that's because those would have been exquisitely rare opportunities for human beings to defend themselves against starvation and they would have added extra fat on their bodies as a result of doing that when they had those opportunities those opportunities would have been few and far between but when they did happen maybe a few times a year people would go ahead and choke it down aggressively the the notion that you cannot trust the satiety mechanisms during normal circumstances with normal cork density of foods is ridiculous that's like saying that you have to carry around an oxygen monitor to monitor the oxygen in your blood to make sure that you breathe more aggressively uh in the next two minutes because your blood oxygen level has dropped because you you can't you're not sensitive enough to it ridiculous you don't have to carry around a caliper to tell you how hydrated you are either and you don't need to carry around a temperature gauge measuring the temperature of your skin to tell you when to put on a sweater and when to take it off these things are all automated mechanisms and a tremendous amount of neurological machinery has gone into making them very accurate okay so the notion that you have somehow lost the ability to calibrate how much to eat uh in the modern environment through some mysterious process it's ludicrous uh the reasons why people are so much heavier now than they were in 1970 is because the foods that they eat is a lot richer that is the reason so people were heavier in 1980 than they were in 1970 they were heavier in 1990 than they were in 1980. this isn't having to do with neurological damage specifically in the stomach or small intestine this has to do with the increasing march of the pleasure trap as the food has become richer and richer and there's been less and less natural food in the diet so that's the the answer to that yeah don't wait and measure your food get the food right so this notion that the only way to heal brain neurotransmitters whatever that means for food addiction that that's that that's not grounded it's insane thank you i just noticed that you your kitty's in the background oh yes she is there's the there's there's the killer of the group i've never seen her actually catch anything and eat it but she does get excited if she sees a butterfly and i'm guessing she doesn't weigh and measure her food he does not weigh a measure of food great okay so we're switching gears a little bit away from weight loss to social media with a question from danica dear dr lyle many of the plant-based doctors and dietitians have large instagram followings which i'm sure helps them sell books and perhaps get clients some of them post very good scientific content but many of them do these goofy videos where they point to things that appear and disappear or even dance or eat or get very political i find this very unappealing and unprofessional am i just old school that i don't want to go to a medical professional who's dancing on tick-tock you know these are individual preferences though the modern world has now exploded um um uh into essentially a friend of mine a friend of mine was uh has been called the forest gump of technology in other words he he just kind of happened to be where all kinds of different things were breaking free so he was uh i believe he produced the very first uh broadcast uh on to the internet it was the golden globes in about 1997. i was done through the technology of the company called interview it was later bought out by somebody else and god knows what it is that it does now the the technology he he said he's uh he said to me 20 years ago and wrote an article that he had written in about 1996 i think that everybody's going to become an actor and a producer and director that is amazing i i read this uh i probably read this in it like i said about 2002. he said oh let me show you an article that i wrote and i'm looking at it and he said he goes just wait and see you're going to have little kids with cameras all over the world standing on their hands you know blowing bubbles and and making the bubbles look like hearts he says there's going to be no end to what it is that you're going to see and i just shrugged my shoulders and in 2002 i had no idea what was coming we didn't know that an iphone was going to exist and uh that wouldn't come along until i don't know 2010 or something incredible so what do we have now everybody's a producer actor director and so you're going to see everybody's personality is now going to start coming at you and so i'm not surprised i guess i am kind of surprised because the uh if there was a if there was an audience that i would think would be um if i'm if i want to listen to a plant-based doctor i want to hear the facts i want to hear hear nice careful reasoning i want to actually hear that you're you're not too wildly open because i'm concerned that the error of the movement the fact that it's so different than mainstream i want to know that you've got enough feet in the conventional world that you are that you're not just a wacko okay so uh and that that that would be my preference so i don't uh i don't i don't mind seeing michael gregorian ty okay he's pretty he's a pretty open pretty open character but that tie and his white coat tells me he's paying attention he's thinking he's trying to think conventionally at the same time he thinks openly and uh for example so the point is is that yeah my my preference would not be to see my uh medical experts act like tick tock stars but hey two his own yeah i mean i just can't imagine like dr john mcdougall dancing i just i don't know no john's not going to dance the uh neither is colin so the the yeah but this is preference uh some young doc you know expresses their personality in a different way and that may some people may resonate with that they may feel more comfortable they may feel like it's friendly and they may it may not uh it may not deter them from believing in that person's expertise so this is these are all uh everybody's an actor and a director and a producer aj and that's what uh that's what the world has turned into and and now we get to see what people do with that i mean i just can't imagine going to your doctor in person and them doing like for an in-person visit anyway thank you so much okay well you you talked about um the modern world and this question is about the modern world from jordan growing up when my dad would stop for gas the attendant would fill the tank and wash the windshield now we paid the pump we used to have to interact with the bank teller to do our transactions now everything can be done on the at the atm or online everything including groceries now can be delivered and if we do go to a store we can do self checkout my kids know no other world and i'm wondering if limiting all the interaction with fellow humans is affecting their ability to relate to others and to all of us in a negative way uh no i don't think so these are these are common sort of questions that are pondered by a lot of uh social observers and uh things things change in other words but so circumstances change and the way it is that we some of the patterns of interaction uh that go on uh in the world so for example i can remember when um when there was i mean so many things that we could remember but i can remember when there was no such thing as a as a store attached to a service station uh service stations uh used to be owned by individual operators not by big corporations and individual operators would have a garage in there where they would fix cars and so uh but but the idea of selling anything in there other than pins oil uh was ridiculous and it was that so things change and now now we don't need the mechanic or the owner operator of a of a union 76 station when we go into buy gasoline instead if we go in the little store it's not even a little store it's a big store and uh and we go in that store and that that person there couldn't know wouldn't know a distributor cap from a differential you know they don't know anything about cars so the world changes and uh your the interactions that you have with people the uh the types of interactions that you're going to have specifically are going to be altered behind that but the fact that you interact with humans isn't going to change and so and the and humans are humans and they will not change so uh you don't learn really social processes these are natural um these are natural uh evolved mechanisms so you are you are going to be you're going to look at the world and interact with people differently at 25 than you do at five uh you you you you are located in a different different ecological niche as a five-year-old than you are when you're 25 years old and um so i'm not i'm not worried about the social impact of any of this uh another another thing that i'll hear is everybody lamenting that oh my goodness the damage done to our children as a result of the kobe year there's no damage to end your children as a result of not going to school it's not damage it may be unpleasant and opportunities lost for enjoyment it's a big difference okay so if i have to sit in a you know you know if i was playing basketball outside with my friends and then a rainstorm comes and it crashes down and i can't play for three days and there's no gym open uh there's no damage done to me i'm just like bummed that you know my friends came 500 miles and we were gonna have this little tournament outside for three days and we're all gonna play basketball now we don't get to do it okay so the so life changes and opportunities change and so in the new as the world changes it's the nature of its interactions it's going to change the nature of the opportunities and it's going to change the patterns that people do but what people seek out of their interchanges with with other people will never change they're always seeking uh esteem related processes through romance friendship and trade and and family that's what they do and they always go well you say there's no damage done from covid but do you think any damage has been done for kids by these things because they they often don't interact with each other it's just through the phone yeah i don't think so in other words the once again well let's talk about let's talk about the difference between um lost opportunity and damage okay there's a big difference so so if a kid sits in front of the tv and watches gilligan's island's reruns for six hours that's done him any damage no hasn't done any damage at all he he he he would have had a better experience likely that he'd been out on the street playing hide and seek with his friends okay uh but you know he didn't so uh he's inherently lazy he's a tv watcher and that's what he wanted to do so he his nervous system following energy conservation dynamics um wound up with what i would call a a five out of ten for the experience of those six hours in other words it wasn't terrible he wasn't afraid he wasn't depressed it wasn't miserable um he wasn't terrified of anything he was mildly amused okay now would he have probably had a better experience if he tried to build a fort with his fort with four neighborhood kids and uh and then put little tunnels through it and everything probably probably would have had a better better experience but he ran a cost benefit analysis on that and his inherent sort of laziness and and and he took the easy five rather than the risky seven and that was derivative of his personality and so we all might say we think he made a mistake and we might be right but the the taking a five for the day was not damaging that's the important concept so we want to separate the notion of damage from less pleasant there's a big difference if i eat an orange that isn't very tasty that doesn't do me any damage if i ate an orange that is tastier it's more enjoyable but the difference in terms of its health support is so minor is to be irrelevant okay you're such a calm voice of reason you make people less worried about things i think yeah i hope so yep absolutely even just your voice okay well we are gonna switch gears completely here where did this go oh okay um another question on infidelity christian says i've heard you speak about infidelity from the male perspective but never from the female one my question is this since most women say that they would prefer a monogamous mate why do they cheat with married men when statistics show that they are more likely to be cheated on by a cheater and i googled this and it did to say that that's true yeah so i uh i'm see if we can figure out what the question is aj well it sounds like to me that he's asking um that you've talked about infidelity a few times on the show and you've talked about it from an evolutionary perspective but it's always been from the male point of view and if i'm interpreting the question correctly he's asking you to talk about it from the female perspective because most women i know say they would prefer a man that's monogamous i'm sure there's exceptions but you know oprah winfrey used to say if he does it with you he'll do it to you and i googled it just to see if the statistics were there but the statistics show that if like if you're if a single woman is dating a married man and he leaves his wife and marries her that he's the statistically more likely to cheat on her so i guess the question is could you explain infidelity from the female perspective and you know why if they don't want it done to them why are they doing it to some other lady would have always described it from both perspectives so i think that's a incorrect indictment uh so the the and from the female perspective here there would be multiple perspectives that we could be discussing we could be discussing is the female being unfaithful in her relationship that's one perspective why would she do that the other perspective would be if i'm a female and i'm in a relationship and my husband's being unfaithful that's another perspective third perspective is i'm a single female and i'm having an affair with a guy that's married okay that's a third perspective so we got all kinds of different questions and dilemmas that might where quote infidelity is a is a part of the picture so i guess we could look at all three so let's suppose that i am a female and i'm in a relationship and i am being unfaithful why would that happen that would happen uh largely because that usually happens females are usually seeking out uh males that are that are i.e we always go back to understanding anything we go back to cost benefit analysis okay so the um so the notion is they are running a cost benefit on that behavior and if we were to look if we were to look um very in a very narrow view we would say well why would they do such a thing and the answer would be well uh because the the fear the the new partner is in some ways superior to the old partner okay and so what do we mean by superior there there are features of the new partner that are that are subjectively judged by that woman to be superior to their old partner okay so what what could those be well maybe he's handsomer maybe he's wealthier maybe he's funnier maybe he's smarter maybe he's more more capable sexually there there are all kinds of reasons or for example it could just be that he's none of those things but my current partner isn't very interested in me and therefore i don't it doesn't make me feel attractive and wanted okay so you start to realize okay we're not exactly sure why the female would make that choice but certainly we understand that the reason why she's making that choice is that she's running a cost-benefit analysis and the cost-benefit analysis is telling her that it's worth it otherwise she wouldn't do it okay now is she right or wrong well how do we know she has to run an experiment okay so she's being compelled by the cost-benefit analysis to run that experiment and find out she may find out you know after one encounter no turns out the guy's way worse than my husband in bed or he's just lousy or or it's weird or he stinks or or i i really don't have that much interest in it or i just wanted some excitement and now i'm really not that interested who knows what may go on in her head most of the time if women carry on an extended relationship uh extramarital affair they are usually very interested in that partner and they are seriously considering switching partners if in fact the new relationship is solid which it usually isn't okay the reason that's true is the uh the woman understands that she's under circumstances uh where the male is well aware that he's not going to be able to easily without a fuss have a new long-term partnership after all she's married okay so part of the allure to him is that she's already shacked up and he doesn't have to face the the financial consequences of caring for her and being supportive so in essence most of the time this is casual mating strategy on the part of the male that's engaged in a relationship with a married female okay that means that he is looking short-term the female usually is not looking short-term she's usually looking long-term so this is a classic dynamic in male female dynamics where the males are far more interested in short-term casual non-committed relationships this isn't a hundred percent and i'm sure there's people out there saying well that isn't true wasn't true for me it wasn't true for my aunt millie who you know the guy was crazy about her and wanted to marry her and she just wanted to have a fling of course there's always going to be exceptions in any individual situation but if we were to look scientifically at the broad trends we will find that the broad trends clearly demonstrate that when married women are in extended uh romantic relationships with a with a third party though they are usually in love with those parties and they would like to have a long-term committed relationship with those parties okay and usually what happens is sometime in uh in a year or so of that if it survives that long there is a decision that's made okay so usually they are not able to remain in limbo indefinitely usually their psychology demands that they they either push this guy into a commitment and we have a big divorce process etc and then they hope that the new relationship survives or they push them and the guy pushes back and says no honey i really can't commit to you in that way so sorry to see you later okay which is what usually happens so that's the that is the perspective of the female in a infidelity situation where she is uh seeking an outside relationship out of her marriage the the second perspective is she is the victim of this and her husband has got some outside relationship well now the the woman feels you know she may have a variety of feelings she may not care okay because it turns out she may not be into the guy that into him anyway she may feel threatened financially or socially but she may not really care that much so uh that could be one reaction another reaction could be that she is terribly jealous that she is crazy about her husband that she is feeling that he's slipping away and that uh that he may establish a relationship with a new person and he may leave her so there could be great anxiety uh there could be a great deal of anger that could be associated with it because it feels like it's not fair the uh because she's committed so much of her life to him they've had kids whatever it is so there's all kinds of perspectives that could be taking place there there could be relief there could be a relief that says oh good well now that you're doing that we can get a divorce because i've been wanting one for 10 years okay that could be the reaction the reaction could could be um a fear that that she's going to lose her partner that she's she loves but she's not that into and he may not be that into her on the romantic level but that this would be a great threat to a partnership and a family and all and both financial and social integration that takes place between two lives uh and that may just feel like whoa that's scary i'm feeling the threat of that and i don't like that feeling okay so that that you know something is being threatened so there's a variety of perspectives uh and a variety of reactions that that a woman might have in those circumstances the um i guess the the perspective that you were uh coming to would be let's suppose the woman is single and she's having a relationship with the guy who is married um the why would the guy do that well he's designed by nature to essentially proliferate his dna you know in ways that he considers to be advantageous so he's looking for uh an individual that does that may have a variety of reasons why he may be feel very committed to and drawn to and and uh flattered and and in love with this new partner and he may be not interested in his wife anymore completely possible uh it could be that that he's still into his wife and they still have a legitimate marriage but he's seeking casual mating strategy on the side okay so the notion of if a guy cheated on on her to get to you will he cheat on you to get somebody else that is an extremely simplistic formula uh to describe patterns of human behavior the uh is there going to be some degree of truth in it of course there is uh is it going to be is it the notion of well if he cheated on you cheated on her to get to you will he cheat on you to get to her answer nobody knows nobody knows the cost-benefit analysis that he will face uh when he makes that decision will he have an uh an opportunity in a new situation that rivals the excitement of the opportunity when it is that he met you okay is your relationship uh as potentially arid as his relationship with his ex-wife answer we don't know okay so some some simplistic rejection of the idea that uh uh that he could be committed to you uh in the same way that he was committed to her but he'll dump you in the same way that is dumping her it's just simply ridiculous it's there's every single individual circumstances are different that's like saying a guy that got in a fist fight well i got up this fight once he's going to get up this fight again you know that that may be the only fist fight he gets into his whole life okay so the uh the situation now the fact that he got into this fight even once tells you a little bit of something about him okay how much does it tell you about him well we're not really sure how much now tell me if you if you had three of them suppose you have three fist fights you know between the ages of 22 and 32. three major fist fights in a bar okay what are the odds he's gonna have a fourth one pretty good okay what if some guy you know is a flirtatious swinging mr cool and he is he's married and divorced three times and cheated on all of them and now you're target number four now what do you think well now you should be thinking now you should be thinking okay i'm not so sure that this is very solid ground so that would be a little different situation uh than if it's than if it's a you know a potentially unique situation all right so i think that covers that pretty well well thank you and i know that you've covered this topic and casual mating strategy quite a bit on the beat your jeans podcast and there's over all close to 300 episodes now okay well this is uh this is a very poignant question from gary dear dr lyle in a recent show you seem tickled when asked whether it's better to be a has been or it never was the question made me ponder as i believe i'm in a worse category of never even tried raised on the east coast to an upper middle class jewish family there was no question that i was going to be a doctor the only choice i had is which ivy league school to go to i've helped a lot of people and done well in my career but now i'm in my mid 60s and i realize i'm completely unfulfilled the pandemic has gifted me with three extra hours a day where i don't have to commute or take an hour for lunch so i've explored a bunch of different classes i wish i could have done in my youth such as painting magic acting and playing a musical instrument i'm completely capable of living at or below my means but i'm concerned about what other people will think if i quit my job and i need an exit strategy and how do i stop feeling guilty that my mother will be turning over in her grave yeah you need to read a book called how i found freedom in an unfree world okay so this is the perspective that i would want you to have perspective uh and it's it it isn't a simplistic answer and i understand that it's complicated but that the um if there's one thing that is sort of bizarre and deeply troubling about human life if there is one thing it is the denial of death okay so uh this makes it difficult for people to run cost-benefit analysis that encapsulates the fact that they have a limited and permanently limited lifespan this is um this is why one of the most extraordinary transformations that can sometimes happen in a person's life is to get a terminal diagnosis and then to find out that it was wrong okay in other words they lived through a period of oh my god i'm down to the last two years and then they find out oh no it turns out a mistake was made so now they're like boy you just watched your mind put a whole bunch of things way forward and cast a whole bunch of other things to the side as you found out quickly what was really the most important thing okay i have done this kind of exercise uh in my head consciously and deliberately and one of the things that i thought about this i thought about if i had one day to live what would i do with it uh it's interesting what i would do uh my my day would be unique and completely different than your own but if i had you know 16 hours and i knew that 16 hours from now my death was certain it wasn't going to be painful so i wasn't have to have to scheme to be around it uh but i was perfectly able and competent to uh to to move around and do things what would i do okay well i can tell you some things that i wouldn't do i wouldn't hold a big party uh i wouldn't eat a bunch of indulgent stuff i wouldn't hire five prostitutes to have some wild thing i actually know what i would do okay it would i would spend uh of the my 16 waking hours i would spend probably 14 of them with a single individual okay so this is a a past romance uh but that person is currently my best friend so some people have heard the fact that some of her children come in and out and live in my house from time to time my garage is still full of a bunch of her stuff uh we talk at least two or three times a week we are very close friends i would spend i would spend about two hours uh with people i'd shoot a few baskets with alan and talk some things over so that'd be 15 or 20 minutes and that's no small thing when you've only got 16 hours left my friend forrest gump his name is larry uh forrest gump that we are very good friends uh we would also spend one-on-one time okay there would be select individuals then uh there'd be some people that i'd spent a few minutes saying goodbye to okay like aj okay so there's been some people some people there that i would want to say goodbye to and then i would spend 14 hours straight with melissa okay that would be it we would talk about our lives her kids the future what she was gonna do we'd go somewhere by a river you know uh uh probably uh in the sierras and we would just we'd have some simple healthy food and we would just talk about lives and all the things that we did and so that that is a that's an exercise that i go through to to let me know what's really the most important things for me okay and so i would how i found freedom and unfree world is a it's a cattle broad to tell you that look out for other people's expectations as they as they want to push and shove you around to get you to do things that you know you're doing to defend your status or what your mother wanted or anything else like wait a second wait a second that's because i'm not thinking of this thing as this is my time but i have this nervous system and i have this opportunity to create happiness inside this nervous system and i only have so long to do it it's kind of like if you went to disneyland anybody that's ever been there and you had you went to disneyland and you only had one hour in disneyland okay and you were gonna take a friend there that had never been there what would you go on and the first thing that comes to my mind is pirates of the caribbean and that's because my sister took me on that when i was about six or seven years old she was she took me to disneyland she was a few years older and our parents dropped this off my sister was older and wise so she knew how to maneuver and she very cleverly didn't tell me what was coming okay so we got in these little boats and you're on the water and it's really cool and then you hear this facing screaming and then you realize i never forget to this day 50 years later going down that first shoot in pirates of the caribbean as you screamingly go down in your wrath down underneath there and then underneath there's this whole fantastic thing and then it happens three times you go down three and uh that that was uh exquisite and so what what would you do there'd be certain things that i would do okay because then after an hour we have to leave so you don't have any choice you have to make those choices if we fiddle around you know bear country jamboree and we waste 28 minutes there boy did we make a mistake okay don't waste your time at bear country jamboree doing things that other people think are cool and you think are mediocre don't do it go write for what it is that you would love and put as much of that in your life as possible that's how to make these decisions and if you can live comfortably and not you know not have to go to work that much to do things that you don't want to do then don't do it how i found freedom and free world is a guidebook to try to extricate yourself from all the pressure of expectations that come from other people on your life yeah i read it thank you and it was really eye-opening but i think a lot of people are going to struggle with some of it because they feel guilty yes and it's it's the best we have for it's the best i have for trying to pull back and and reduce some of that guilt do you think there's still time for gary to wrap some milan if he chooses one of these other paths in the in the creative arts oh of course in other words they're the uh your there's a shakespeare uh quote i can't remember what it is that what's one is done and life's soul lives in the doing so it's a it's the process of making progress that actually causes human beings to feel good and so as you if you love to paint um you may love the idea of other people thinking that you're a good painter at which point this is not going to be such a great thing but if you actually really love the process of doing it then as you make progress it won't matter how good you get it'll matter that you're making progress okay that that's what will feel very satisfying so life needs a balance uh it's useful to have a balance that you are still productive to the community so maybe you work one day a week or two days a week or or you do something that the world finds valuable so you get that reaffirmed but we're trying to get these lives in balance and very often high achieving or successful lives are actually lives that are out of balance and one of the reasons they're out of balance is they don't actually have a very good calculation of their own mortality so they just keep feeling like i'm acquiring status and i'm acquiring assets but they're forgetting that the clock is running and you only have so much time at disneyland okay so if you're some little guy that can trade other tickets in the corner of disneyland and acquire more tickets and find people in the marketplace that will give you three of these tickets these are all just now you're talking about an old man that had a b c d e tickets the disneyland the e-tickets were the fancy ones but the whole idea is if you had some ability to keep acquiring resources but you only get three hours on the grounds careful don't acquire more resources than you have time to use it doesn't mean you want to die broke it just means you want to die smart okay don't don't don't have left a bunch of time on the table i would feel sick if in my final day i looked back on that thing and i frittered it around and talked to all kinds of people that you know were nice people that meant something to me and then i only had 15 minutes left for melissa be like ah not a chance is that gonna happen you know what's gonna happen is at most everybody else i don't even think i would give them two hours i think i would give everybody an hour and i divide that up i give my three minutes now my sister's a fine human we are tight but you know what it's not the same psychological connection as i have with melissa my sister gets three minutes she'll say good luck i'll take care of stuff i'll take care of mom et cetera good you know best wishes with everything etc i'll take care of some other things that you need taken care of all business we're all good see you okay go with god in your life and then boom the next time i'm i'm next to that river in the sierras and we're talking about our lives that's how i would do it and that's how i would encourage everybody to think about the time that you have left the only problem if you spend any time with alan he's going to tell you it's because you ate carrot cake that's true so let's not tell him you know if you're gonna go away that's right if i understand you correctly dr lyle you're what you're saying is don't waste time on mr toad's wild ride when you can be on pirates of the caribbean that's right that's that's exactly you got it aj unless of course that's the ride you prefer and you know what's interesting dr lyles since the pandemic began we i still am not allowed to do volunteer work because it's they're still they don't haven't had us come back yet so the 10 hours a week i was spending doing volunteer work i'm now doing my passion which is improvisational comedy and i can't tell you how many doctors and lawyers are in my acting classes because while they make good livings they're completely unfulfilled in their career yes very interesting balance aj the the modern world has has thrown us some interesting problems where it's very easy for us to get things out of balance okay so we we remember that in the stone age we we spent time careful a lot of time was spent on food a lot of time was spent on talking to everybody in the village talking about things a lot of times gossiping a lot of times there's romance a lot of times just kid raising and but there there was a it was very social with people it is that you knew and that you were close to and that uh a lot of laughter and a lot of goofing off and a lot of showing off okay and a lot of times we that's what you're finding but these these doctors didn't get to show off they didn't get to have the the natural showing off displays that would have been part of human nature okay and so the uh the guys that i meet with at the gym can't wait to get in there and show off to each other about what they can do on the basketball court that's a that right now i showed alan a trick with shooting and he is so happy right now and he just can't wait to show me what it is that he can do with it that's that's much closer to human nature than you know than than than i don't know an attorney figuring out whether or not we should sue or not sue that's a and so is that a useful and important part of society of course it is but this other part this interpersonal social uh sort of the stone ages process that is uh that's the part we want to make sure you know we don't spend too much time uh doing other things when you could be playing good that's a beautiful place to end well thank you so much dr lau we just love having you on it's just so fun hearing from you and i hope you'll come back next month and i hope all of you will come back tomorrow at 11 a.m pacific time if you've watched all week you know all my doctors have been from india but tomorrow we're going all the way to the united kingdom and for the first time i will have a plant-based hematologist on who even knew there was one fantastic thanks thanks dr lyle and goodbye
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