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Episode 105: Personality traits of alpha males, advice to women dating alpha males
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all right good evening everybody dr. Lyle how are you doing this fine evening good good good to hear your voice again Oh excellent well I was reading Esquire magazine and it's not an article about the big four companies they're dominating the tech world right now it's Facebook Amazon Apple and Google and so I'm brown this article about their business practices their tax schemes employees how they've managed to capture so much of the market yeah and as I get halfway through something in this article starts to sound really familiar I quote this article consumers aren't paying a thousand dollars for an iPhone X because they're passionate about facial recognition they're signaling that they make a good living appreciate the arts and have disposable income it's a sign to others if you mate with me your kids are more likely to survive than if you mate with someone carrying an Android phone in other words uh mating with someone who's on an iOS platform is a shorter path to a better life there you go very good good thinking whoever's writing that that's clearly jeffrey miller inspired thinking excellent yeah I don't have an iPhone X but I do have some sort of iPhone I don't know which brand but something my sister handed down to me so you know hopefully I got some chips for that yeah exactly I hear you I would if it wasn't for a very good friend of mine my best friend it just leans on me and beats me over the head I'd still have a flip phone so that I thought that was cool that was absolutely a play on the Star Trek communicator and I didn't really want to give it up all right all right oh I would be a quick question we got a couple of questions here about this is kind of the personality traits of an alpha male so dear dr. Lisle I was wondering what the personality traits are in terms of the big five of a dominance hierarchy climbing alpha male also what a male who's able to ascend these dominance hierarchies and a male who's in the top percentile in terms of physical attractiveness both be considered alpha males since both would supposedly have wide access to a wide array of females maybe for different circumstances or is it the ability to be dominant to the defining characteristic alright let's get a back up just a second and clarify there's there's no such thing as an alpha male in human nature so this is a this is sort of shorthand talk for the human to have now that the people have now adopted I think this is probably you know a few decades old leaking its way out of biology as we we became more more familiar and more comfortable it's been the last few decades where it's been increasingly comfortable to see humans as animals and to see see human even human social structures as having as having been derived from animal kingdom processes so in many animals the what there is is that there's actually a quite quite vertical hierarchy and every creature in that hierarchy essentially has a slot I've been told this and it may not be true so I don't I don't want to go on record as that this is that this is truth but it's my understanding that if you have chickens in a chicken coop you know you've got 25 of them they will find their slots and it will be the case that number 16 will push number 23 out of the bot of the pot 23 will yield in other words they everybody knows every binary relationship somehow somehow this is signaled the humans are not like this human humans status is actually not in a hierarchy it's a scramble comput and so this is different just in the same way that mating competitions in certain animals are most definitely a direct vertical hierarchy so you're going to see this in lions elephant seals things like this there is an alpha horses so this is this is not an uncommon pattern where it's it's absolutely vertical and there's there's a alpha male at the top and if you want to get access to the females you're going to get access to essentially all of the females and you are going to have to defeat all comers this is not true in humans humans have a different mating strategy and it's going to be what we call a scramble competition matings happening all over the place and there's a scrambling marketplace that is not being ruled by an alpha now of course we see in human history when people went when males have occasionally gotten unbelievable military dominance weaponry etc and got themselves organized they did arrange themselves in vertical hierarchies and they they essentially but this is through this is through bizarre completely non evolutionary means so a Genghis Khan who apparently is responsible for I think is DNA is in two percent of the people on the planet right now something like this this this guy obviously is the closest thing to an alpha that you're going to see in human nature anyway so just to get clear we use these terms and we use them in a sloppy fashion so what we really mean when we say alpha male is we mean a dominant human dominant personality that is that is going to get more than his share of mating opportunities and he is a customer that is difficult to deal with so probably want certainly size strength and disagreeableness just Shira aggression these are characteristics that we associate with what we would call alpha male however that doesn't necessarily mean who's in charge because it all depends on the circumstances about how the rules are set up and what the group needs most alpha could be you know the skinny little guy with phenomenal mathematical abilities that's going to try to get your rocketship home so anyway so we're now I'm going to try to go back and and retrace some of the questions that this person is trying to ask it sounds to me like one of the questions that that they're that they're bouncing around in their head is the issue of dominance of personality versus physical attractiveness and which seems to be quote the most important well it depends on for what if you're talking about access to two females it's probably going to be well there's there's going to be data on two sides of this question so I think it's a little messy and I don't think we really quite know the answer we do we've got modern data from from the internet dating world that shows that physical attractiveness is unbelievably dominant so but this is this is a world where we're not getting real real-time evidence of what's actually happening in other circumstances where other characteristics can be picked up now so we can see that the physical attractiveness is a gigantic factor in predicting how easy men find it to get mates the however if we actually look at how many children people have that that's where it gets interesting be there there's evidence to suggest that if you were to look at two different types of males one of which is handsome in a pretty way in other words maybe a little softer slightly effeminate but very quote cute you look at that versus males who are not not cute and don't have that kind of woo to the females but in fact our wider face strong little bulldog looking that sort of put folks the those it will turn out that the latter actually out reproduced the former by a considerable margin when it comes to actually having more children so I don't know and whether we know what this means about sexual access to females but it is in fact interesting because there could be more involved here that there there are more dominant personalities and therefore perhaps they are more successful financially just from sheer grit and push maybe they're more they're more dominant in embeds so they're more less likely to wear a condom because they don't want to know knows what is responsible for that sort of data but it's interesting that that that data you know at least was in play twenty years ago when this question was being considered by academic evolutionary psychologists what what we now know about this I don't know so this is a long mealy-mouthed answer to say that first of all there isn't such thing as a alpha male there is dominant higher dissension motivation to get more resources but this isn't through exactly a vertical situation as far more of a scramble competition for more diffusely located status and and the both physical attractiveness as well as this sort of ascension are both useful in increasing your access to mates but I think that it's a little bit impossible to tell us which is more important except you could somehow somebody could if they wanted to calibrate this and get it on use using standard deviation units which would be an interesting doctoral dissertation for somebody that you could say well let's let's go up ten percentile and looks and let's go up ten percentile in this sort of ascending dominance characteristics and let's see what happens to for example some measurement like what we would call extra pair copulation in other words if you've already got a girlfriend are you screwing anybody else on the side in addition and we could look at this decile by decile on each of these two variables and see which variable predicts better the that likelihood that is how we would solve this question or shed some light on it empirically I don't know that at this moment we have the answer we do have some vestiges as I'm recalling now that the the upper-body strength of the male is predictive of upper extra pair copulations so that's that's telling us that perhaps more than facial handsomeness that that could be I don't know I think that you have to separate these things out organism by deciles and then use them as independent predictors on on a on a dependent variable of interest like in this case might be extra pair populations or just sheer number of sexual partners etc so there's there's a lot of a lot to be ground through there and the answer is obviously both characteristics are speaking volumes to female brain or else males would not be extremely interested in worried about both which they are all right has enough of that yeah oh and the the very next question is on this same topic but it's from autonomous perspective so a few shows ago you spoke about the fact that alpha males are wired to be unfaithful and that's just how it is so dear doctor well do you have advice for the female partner of such a male how can a woman protect her interests in this situation and what kind of expectations would be reasonable in this kind of relationship as a woman I'm not interested in casual mating so I don't think I myself would be fate unfaithful although I think I'd be okay with my partner having physical flings on the side my biggest fear would be that he would fall in love and have an emotional affair I would like some certainty from him that he would not leave me for a fling although I know that's not a promise no one can make that anyone can make an advance how can the rules of this sort of relationship be negotiated in a healthy way and what lines could or should be set in stone with a mutual agreement that if they are cross your relationship ends ah very great question I'm not sure sense you know this is now that I've got a few people listening to me and then feeding back stuff like well when you said this and when you said that's like now I understand what you know some major celebrity feels like it's like wait a second what did I say quote me out of context the this is this is how when you're moving quickly and trying to speak in and to try to get points across you can say things that you know can be parsed and then people can misinterpret the so remember the answer to the last question no alpha males and humanity what we're talking about is highly attractive males are and they're not wired to be unfaithful they are they are it's just that depending upon their individual nature so males differ considerably in how para bond oriented versus versus casual mating strategy oriented they are now some of this has to do with circumstances in other words what kind of body do you find yourself in do you find yourself in an extremely attractive body where you could take advantage of casual mating well in that case very often the individual will in the other end and it could be that if you find yourself in a less attractive body then the system basically is discouraging of that and so it could be a flexible cost benefit analysis that's being run however that's not all there is to it there's literally individual variation personality that's involved so there are people that are extremely attractive males and could could essentially you know deflower every virgin in the territory but won't because they're monogamous pair wonders and so this has to do with apparently how much viz oppressing the male seems to have just by nature by nature of genetic variation and so if you have a hive is a person male evidently these guys are very para bond oriented and if you have low visa press and male then you've got a mister philanderer so this is that this appears to be you know possibly a single variable that dominates at least the sheer genetics side of the issue as opposed to the opportunity side which is you know part of the cost-benefit analysis that the program is undoubtedly designed to run but we are clearly aware of and there's there's more to it than that still so every every individuals circumstance is different so for example the you could have a male who's pretty pair-bond oriented but he happens to be in a para bond that isn't the greatest deal for him but it's a pretty good deal and he happens to be very attractive so he has a lot of potential mating opportunities with people that he would find superior to his existing mate but he's got some oxy you know oxytocin vasopressin pair bonding psychology so he's a little bit difficult to learn even with a lot of opportunity if you start changing around some of these parameters suddenly you can you can have wildly different outcomes so let's suppose that we have a very attractive male who's mate he considers even more attractive than himself and feels like you got a hell of a deal he still could find an awful lot of very interesting deals very easily but they aren't as fancy as his mate and so he he is actually in a different position as far as that goes and that's without even talking about the individual variation that's involved so this person strikes me as they are asking they're sort of looking at this question and they've got a sense that their male may not be some hardcore relatively rare monogamous pair blonder so it sounds like you might have some sort of typical male chips that put him in the middle of the bell curve and if he's highly attractive then he's got a lot of options for casual mating and she knows it and apparently she doesn't get the sense from him or from the world or from her own assessment but she is fancier than he is so she feels relatively over rewarded and so it looks like she's also has some other characteristics if you're if you're relatively over awarded depending upon your personality your your negotiating tactic could go one of two ways you could either become essentially obsessive in controlling and and threatening and edgy and therefore essentially terrorize any other females to come anywhere near this guy and and let him know that you're on red alert that's one way that that would be a a more emotionally unstable and more disagreeable personality and not very open that that would be which incidentally wouldn't be an unusual tactic for a lot of females to do that's a perfectly reasonable tactic the I'm reminded of a study that was done with some kind of a bird where the what the investigators did was there was loose females out out in the trees and the somewhere and there was a nest being built by the pair-bonded females with their mates and what the investigators did was that they moved the nests towards where the single females were and the single female started visiting and the in the pair bonded females hell and would essentially intimidate physically any single females that would come anywhere near their mates that's of course you know what it is that we might see in a given situation situation that this person is describing is that they are taking a different tactic and that tactic is essentially if I if I make life as good as I can possibly make it for this guy he may not choose to leave me and that that's a very gutsy very open and agreeable and requiring a lot of emotional stability to pull off that tactic that's a that's a rare female that would sort of take a deep breath and not be looking for any quid pro quo in terms of her own adventurousness simply she doesn't have it she's basically saying listen I know men I know this guy and I know what this guy has available to him and I have enough empathy for his circumstances and to understand the differences between myself and his psychology that I would be willing to let him live the life that is his ancestors lived which was what I call wipe wipe wipe chippie and that is that the that the difference in individually within species you can tell how much philandering was being done or how promiscuous a species is primate by looking at the size of the testicles relative to the body weight of the of the male and so we can tell that our species looked about like that like the male might have been largely in a pair bond but he's are we calm everybody on this earth is a descendant of a long line of males who got a little bit more than their share obviously and the males that got a little bit less than their share of their genes aren't on the planet anymore so she's recognizing the wife wife wife chippy psychology that probably resides inside of her eight and is trying to figure out what's in her personal best interest can she can she maneuver this thing and essentially beat her Jin's that would normally be telling her you know mate guard make it difficult and don't let any of the other females get near him without without getting a couple of teeth knocked out now the what would I say about this what I would say about this would be that that probably the only reasonable solution is to talk through what you think that you could stand and the notion here is for the person who is doing the accommodating in this case it's her it would be to have a discussion and say listen this is what I feel you know I feel like this is how our lives could could be I mean I could I could play the standard female tactic and sit here and cross my fingers and hope and be naive and hope that your own guilt over the fact that I might might flip out and divorce you or something else if I find out about an infidelity that we can play it that way but I'm not going to do that I'm going to play this more openly and I'm going to be more courageous about this and I want to have a discussion about this and I want to kind of hear where you're at and what you would like and I want to imagine what it is that I think that I could live with and be reasonably comfortable okay now those people might come to a decision about what they think an idea is hall-pass kind of concept and this is and there could be rules and so she's talking about rules but there's a lot of rules that go on in this game like you can only see a person three times you know that's it sleep with them three times and we're done the something on that that nature something like you know one one a year something like this so you could talk through ideas and then and one would hope that you could give your mate enough rope that they would feel satisfied without a matter oak and that they would not feel like they were chomping in the bit and that they wanted another you know six inches of rope and and the idea would be we're not sure what I can tolerate but this is what I suspect that I may be able to tolerate and and if that seems to work for you and it seems to work for us then it's something that we can do but this is a so this is an important principle in negotiating conflicts of interest and relationship that I'm about to describe and that's that any any accommodations that we think that we are willing to make we have to understand and agree that these are experiments that they are not negotiations that we are not setting the rules we are setting what we hope to be the rules okay we're out to discover what it is that we could tolerate we may find out that we thought that we were willing to do X and it turns out that our partner goes ahead and does X and then when that happens we freaking flip out and it's a it's a five-alarm fire and we have to say wait a second I thought it was okay with me but it's not we don't want to be in this position where the partner is like what do you all upset with me about I thought we had a deal okay so we don't have a deal we have a tentative exploratory experiment is what we have and that's how we do things in this arena and what we can hope is that a person like this with this kind of guts and this kind of courage and this kind of openness in this kind of a situation may be able to find that she becomes is remains in the so valuable to that male but that male gets the best of both worlds neither perfect in other words it's he he we thread the needle of the conflicts of interests between two people and we wind up essentially with the situation where she increases her value as a pair bond mate and makes him absolutely determined to defend that mates feelings with as he as he essentially you know very carefully tries to satisfy any any any potent needs that he may have for casual mating on the side so this is how we do things we are open we are courageous we keep the communication up and we try to be as honest and as dignified as we possibly can in these situations and as sensitive as we can and when we wind up accidentally either breaking a rule in hurting somebody or breaking a tentative agreement or the agreement itself turns out to be not good enough then we have to sit back at the table and say take a deep breath and realize what we're trying to do here is we're trying to do something difficult and we we may make mistakes but we have to course-correct if we're going to protect something as valuable as an outstanding pair of line so this is dangerous territory and the the females in the world are all different in different circumstances with respect to this so that's why experimentation and an open and non accusatory renegotiation needs to be the order of the day amazing and all right well we've got our on hold and we're ready to take this color so dawn welcome to the program where are you calling from from Las Vegas very good all right how is it there I go guys hey Don thanks for going in Soufan very good will tell us a story what's happening what are you working on and what are we trying to what are we trying to learn or get better okay well I want to talk about my family and my relation to them okay I feel like myself and my wife we become a little bit isolated in a sense most of them live in California we're out in Las Vegas and now for the last six years or so but do a major health scare a couple years ago we we end up switching over to a whole food plant-based diet and it really helped us out and kind of changed kind of changed our lives and we lost a lot of weight you know I had high blood had high cholesterol she had high blood pressure that all healed so um it worked out well for us mm-hmm we went to a family function and everyone saying wow you guys look great they couldn't believe it and some people even kind of standing next to me and recognize me yeah but there were some who for instance my little sister and I'm the fifth of seven okay and I'm 57 years old so I'm the fifth of seven my younger sister a few of my few of a more you know morbidly obese you know so she would she would walk past me and make a face and say you're too skinny I don't like it you know not like that you look sick sure that she would say mm-hmm you know it's weird like you know you can't say to somebody you know you know you're you're too fat you look sick but you can add that to somebody who lost weight right right anyway so I just kind of I kind of ignore all that anyway later on my mother my mother and father um who recently they you know they celebrated a 60th 20 wedding anniversary a few couple years ago but my mom had had a major heart about five years ago and she was in ICU for 46 days so she came really close to dying but she pulled through but she we had to talk to him we invited them out and we had him out for a couple months and we you know we cooked for them all the meals and then taught him how to cook taught him on a shop and then so they ate ate that way for for a couple months and my mom who was on eight medications she she got down to one-and-a-half medications and then my father was on three diabetes med meds he got off all his diabetes meds this was this was all done under medical supervision you know um they're from their doctors right anyway they feel great they go back and then you know they're getting compliments remember buddy my mom calls she says she can't believe you know everybody just talks about how they're glowing and she I haven't seen her that happy and you know in 20 years it was like she was 15 20 years younger she was I haven't seen her that happy because she's you know somewhat disagreeable I would say you know so anyway some time goes by we're very happy because when my mom showed up she look like she was 100 years old and when she left she was you know bouncing around when I talked to them after a few months I guess they I say well how you eating ask a to my father and he says well they you know the kids took us to a steak place and you know we didn't want to be rude so they sort of floated back into the way they ate before my father was is a little bit more on board he was still eating the oatmeal for breakfast and everything then I so I get on Facebook which I you know post maybe twice a year or something I basically just say happy birthday to somebody but and then I say I tell them what happened hey we got you know got everybody off their meds and you know here's how we feed them if you guys want any information call us we'd appreciate it if you wouldn't feed them you know meat and dairy and in any way that caused a lot of anger and it really made me mad because you know I I feel like almost out of right to me they're just feeding them steaks and you know bacon and eggs and sausage and you know whatever butter and pancakes and syrup you know back to the old way and then they get sick again so we had them back out again for about not even four or five days my mom shows up with a walking stick he can barely step up from you know into the house which is about a four-inch step yeah she can barely stand by the time she left she she had no pain and she forgot her walking stick she you know so when we write we say hey we did it again you know if you guys can treat them this way we'd appreciate it but I feel like everyone's kind of turned on us and kind of had a run-in with my sister say we're going to have a 80th birthday party for my mom and so they were asking for $300 from for each one of us supposedly for food so then I say okay I'll give you 200 and then I'll bring a hundred dollars worth of plant-based food you know so that I'll have something to eat you know mom and dad whoever else can eat that food right and then and then I got attacked and they all start attacking me saying that you know you're trying to push this on us and why y'all let's push this on us I said hey you call me an esper ask me for money what are you talking about yeah I'm not pushing it on you yeah and then I don't know so that that's kind of where I'm at then later there was another incident had to do with Facebook where somebody posted that someone was sick and I didn't know it was sick but I jumped on and was somebody who I liked it was my cousin's wife so I write on there and I say hey you know good luck to them then I say you know a lot of these Letta diseases come from food you know here's a good documentary to watch and so people start attacking me other cousins you know kind of a little bit under the control of my sister I would say yeah so and then my one cousin is particularly attacking and I say what is it matter so much to you and anyway it's her mother I said oh that's my aunt my aunt has has cancer I didn't know you know and then so so then we post well here's this here's an article that says that the American Cancer Society recommends a plant-based diet with people on chemo and after chemo it's uh it helps you have the fewest amount of problems with chemo in any way I post that and everybody just comes out of the woodwork and starts attacking us and saying that were rude and we we blame people for getting cancer and so that's where we're at now and so I just you know don't go on Facebook anymore obviously yes and I don't I mean I don't go on anyway I maybe post couple times a year and it's usually just something you know nice but I don't know there's like a whole group of my family now that's kind of turned on me and I'm upset because you know I we sort of proved like to my parents and to everybody that you know if they want to be healthy if they want to live longer then they can do this they can choose that but you know they go to my my sisters and brothers house and they get fed these meals and a lot of my sister brothers sisters and brothers are very very sick I mean they're very Apple my sisters had radical mastectomy 's and they're morbidly obese and it's just bad and it's upsetting to me that they don't want to put any kind of effort in right oh you mean for themselves or for your parents no for my parents if they don't want it I don't want to do it that's fine I don't but I I don't think that I push it on anybody I don't think I do yeah um when I go to a family function people you know you kind of crowd around us and say wow what are you guys doing so we give them a 10 or 15 second explanation then we change the subject sure we had a I had a brother-in-law who came up to me and was asking me he said hey I really want to do this but I stopped him for a minute I didn't think that um I thought he was just being polite but then later he come up to me and said listen my brothers both of my brothers died detects both of my parents died of heart attacks my other brother is in the hospital he's dying of something he said I have two stents and I have diabetes I'm going to die I want your help with my job oh okay you really do want my help Joe then we we stayed the night in LA went with him yesterday bought them a kitchen full of food bought them some you know pots and pans and cutting boards which they don't have cutting boards so I know they don't eat vegetables and try to get them going on it but I think he just kind of petered out like he did it for a few days and then he just quit so you know but I don't I don't I don't think I push it on anybody and I I don't know what to do I feel like I when I when I think of my parents and I think of the way they eat I know if I were to go and see my mom right now she would be walking around like a hundred year old woman right um and it just breaks my heart I hear you and so you know dawn your this is a this is a tough tough landscape to navigate there's there's so many you know there's so many things that I could say about this and there's so many different things to consider the the the others people cannot help but get disturbed when we do things better than they do them and the those things that we do require conscientiousness and so this they cannot help that infer that we are displaying our superiority to them and I they get that they try not to do it but I understand that I can hear and you believe me I've talked to I don't know 10,000 vegans in my life at least and I probably had ended digital conversations with 5,000 vegans and I have heard every kind of personality as they come about this problem and deal with it and you are not a disagreeable person and you are not emotionally unstable you are not sanctimonious you are you are honest and decent and helpful and you are doing what any reasonable person would do that has a backbone and a brain when facing a situation like this and unfortunately the there are there are character limitations in your siblings and and you know I can only imagine you know what it would have been like I don't know what Darwin's family was but you knew this guy was sweating bullets for for 25 or 30 years I think he I think he knew the truth about theory of evolution by about 1934 and he didn't rubbish until a gun got put to his head in 1859 or 1858 when right when Wallace came up with the same idea so he didn't want to face it he did not want to face this enormous you know a shitstorm that was going to hit him he just didn't it wasn't in him but he was tough he was a tough guy he was strong and stable and decent and you know more decent human being probably never walked the earth than Darwin the and so in the same way when we bring valuable new information that contradicts you know cherished beliefs we can expect that we're going to get trouble and you did and you were as gentle as you could be but you got it anyway you know had fate been a little bit different and your sister not been a conniving and problematic political animal then this thing could have been a really nice story okay but right you know had Hitler not been Hitler we wouldn't have had the problems we had so personality matters in these things and so we've got a mess and one of the problems is obviously that because your parents live closer to them than they do to you your parents you know in their 80s are facing the pleasure trap as neophytes and neophytes don't do well with pleasure trap you have to be at least journeyman if not a master to deal with the pleasure trap pleasure trap is no trivial problem and so there's no way your parents are going to face the pleasure trap in the face of this kind of you know political chaos so now all I can all I can say is they either come and visit you often or move nearby you or pretty much what's going to happen is what's going to happen okay yeah we we recently invited them out a few months ago and we wanted to sort of repeat the same thing and we said hey yeah you know they live in the mountains we said hey it's cold up there once you come out here and you know ya cook for you and everything but my my mom had doctor's appointments and what it seems like is she's her health is declined at a point where she can't travel out here now right so it's almost like to me it was like well that's that was the last trip out here yeah you know that's this is this is one of these things where it what's your dad's age 82 you know we have to look at it in in the following way and that is that these two people got the full ride Europe they really did 80 years if they're still ambulatory at age 80 they they got the full ride now you and I know that if they were to do something remarkable if they were to actually completely turn their lives around here they might have ten more years it on the table 10 Road decently Rojas self eating with that a healthy 10 years yeah they might now they might not yeah okay right so they might only have four healthy years left at this point you know you're so far out of warranty at age eighty particularly people that have looked conventionally so so we don't know what their future could be that's very speculative but what's what's much more likely to happen we didn't get sort of a miracle and the miracle would be that they had together both the personalities and the motivation to to take this information and actually run with it let me let me back up and just give you a little bit of perspective on this so that you don't feel like this was such an obvious and blatant opportunity squandered okay the and I don't know how much good this will do you but I do want you to get a perspective on this the I work for three of the most prominent change agencies in health in the world the mcdougal program true north and engine two and so we get you know we get people that are incredibly motivated they spend a lot of money and they travel a lot of miles and I would say true north is the most extraordinary because they're going to come there and they're going to water fast and they're going to get great sick to their stomach and vomit and yet and have a trouble sleeping and all for what some theoretical improvement in their health it's like wow this is a big deal you know mcdougal is expensive true engine to is expensive and you got to travel a long ways these are major sacrifices and many of the people that I see that come to all these places are not made of money they're not like wealthy people doing it for a lark they are middle-class hard-working intelligent highly conscientious people that want to get a hold of their health and they want to live they want to live the rest of their life and live it to the fullest and that means not to the most self-indulgent and those people come and they listen and they learn and they try to adopt things and I tell you what they fight it not from bad attitudes but they fight it from the inherent problem of the pleasure trap we are not designed to make the choices that you and your wife are routinely making in the face of alternative choices we are designed by nature to eat the richest gooiest most calorically dense most convenient food that's in our environment that is wired into the genetic code of all animals and for us to consistently go against that is heroic it is not easy and is not for the average human and so it takes either unusual conscientiousness or unusual motivation and often both to actually fight this fight so when you do it and you've done it and it seems relatively simple to you and you have heaped major rewards for it personally it is very difficult from your perspective to look at this thing and say for crying out loud I would at least expect me to be able to have my mother do it I don't love anybody more and there's nobody more worthy and I want to give it to her and for crying out loud if there's anything I could give back to the person who gave me birth it would be the information to help her have her final days be way better and you know what not very likely okay even the people that make the trip all the way to our mecca's what happens is is that they struggle and they have to join chef AJ's group and they struggle air and they fight it and they learn and they grow and they do successive approximations and they backslide and there are successes and there's quite a bit of people that have intermediate success so I'm not saying it's impossible but I'm saying even among highly motivated people it's difficult okay yeah I guess I guess what I was hoping before was you know I don't I know that everybody's not going to change but I thought out of a group of 50 people I thought maybe one or two would you know take an interest and uh and and then and then someone else would be I would have an ally right now that's what that's what I thought yeah even just out of sheer vanity yeah say wow you look great you look 20 years younger so even I hear vanity I thought yeah you know what I mean so I because people are always talking about it and they're joining Weight Watchers and curves and all these other nutty programs sure you know we did all those too so I'll tell people hey we did all those all those dopey things we there was one called Senza where you sprinkle this powder on your food and it's supposed to make you not hungry you know we did all the group of things of course and now we said hey we tried every dumb thing this is this is the only real thing to do it says and then you're we say we eat all we want the food is great you know like my parents tell them we were never hungry and the food's great actually you know so I just thought that would be appealing enough that somebody would it hasn't been that they're just kind of ignoring it it's almost a outright anger so yeah I don't that and that's what I don't understand is the entirety of the end as your your you are you are signaling your superiority right in their face okay don't expect the unattractive girls to be happy when the attractive girl walks in and sits behind a desk eight feet away from them they're not happy about it okay so this is a steam dynamic processes and this is difficult on human beings and you're like I said your siblings did not happen to have a combination of unusually strong character traits that enabled them to embrace this and and wish you well and learn so there you have it so you didn't yeah you didn't get what you essentially deserved you got what what the world gave you you had great marvelous Flair of success with your parents it sort of proved you beyond any shadow of a doubt that it wasn't just twice for you exactly okay but you know I think that what you have to do is what all of us have done in this space which is that we speak quietly and we we speak humbly and if people are persistent and wanting to know then we share and even then we shared carefully and we don't we don't really expect anybody to ever adapt that adopt this and they they probably won't and Allah in your lifetime which is probably going to be long and rich and healthy there may be ten so you may ultimately wind up changing ten lives and changing them much for the good with this information so whatever else it is that you do with your life and all the help that you give people as a normal member of the economy pulling your weight in the world you will also touch some lives that will also touch some lives and so you'll have an effect but it wasn't it wasn't where you might have most hoped and it wasn't as easy you know is much more difficult than you thought and or just quartering yeah I'll close with this that my very good friend since the time I was eight years old dr. Alan Goldhamer and my co-author of the pleasure drop and branch drop was really the story of just how extraordinarily difficult this problem is of trying to live healthfully in the modern world and you know 15 years later when we talked to each other now we say we underestimated it okay it's actually harder than we thought and so this is this is the takeaway from this you aren't quite recognizing the your unusual personality characteristics with you and your wife and your very healthy dynamic that enabled you both to embrace this and make huge gains from it that is unusual so that's what yet yeah probably wouldn't be able to do it without my wife you know ice this well and I think from here on in my strategy is going to be based on something that you said in an earlier podcast to kind of take the attitude uh yeah you know it seems to be working for me I'm going to continue to do it and yeah you know the people that recommend is you know I don't know I don't know if they know everything I don't know if they're right it's working for me now so to undersell it a little bit yeah that's going to be my strategy from here on in good all right we'll listen dawn thank you very much for calling very good call and I'm sure you know because I kind of live with a one-foot in that world we probably have a lot of listeners that have faced things similar and so I'm sure that this was valuable and thanks for calling thanks a lot appreciate it guys you bet
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