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Episode 112: Intervention overconfidence, Caller question, Alcoholism, Evo Psych in academia, advertising,
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all right good evening everybody it's Neji here along with dr. Doug Lyall dr. Lisle how you doing I'm doing good excellent well last week we had very interesting topic that fired up a lot of emails that I got and I'm sure dr. Lisle you got them as well about speech pathology yes we did and you know what you did a terrible job Nate you're not supposed to let me be stupid you're supposed to make me look good all right all right yeah let's start start this out because that that was an interesting little thing that happened we had a question about speech pathology actually forget what the question was was a grad student writing to us about language and I can't remember what else but for some reason I went on a little rant about speech pathology and but I have to deeply apologize because I was out of line and not very well informed about this and and so I offended a bunch of people which is it's all your fault and actually it's Jack's fault for that rant that got that that jingle makes me way too confident in myself so I am I am actually sorry of for hurt feelings in a sense the what I what I would like to do though it was interesting because I felt bad about it for a couple days and I was I was thinking about why it is that I actually said the things that I did and it took me a couple of days actually I was sort of in a confused about it and I said would go through the arguments about what I was thinking and I started to look up date on speech pathology and I can I can niche pick the research to support my position and I thought now that's really I'm not the slightest bit interested I have no ax to grind with speech pathology at all never even think of it and and I thought okay what's going on and after a while for a couple days something dawned on me about tried to get to what really was bothering me and what's bothering me or what has bothered me and does is a is a propensity in humans to have what I'm going to call interventional overconfidence or even arrogance I would call it arrogance in some conditions I would call it that in speech pathology the and I've been aware of this for a long time and it's been a it's been a personal frustration of mine for really all my adult life so the first the first intellectual investigation of any sort that really caught my imagination was economics and I started out as an econ major at UC San Diego and I was very very interested in it but it was confusing and it was seemingly very complicated and one day by chance I was in the library at UC San Diego and I wanted to take a break from studying and I just went looking on the shelves for some reason and I in the econ section I was actually looking for why I did this but I was just looking for something different than what I was studying and you know I have a tiniest bit of openness to experience but not much and I I saw a book I saw a book by an author that I was aware of the author from a different context and and I I knew that he was theoretically interesting and he was Harry Brown and the book was called you can profit from a monetary crisis and so I sat down and I decided to start to read it I just wanted to sort of get a different opinion and that book was a revelation the first I sat there in that library and read for about three hours straight just didn't move I remember I sat on a chair a comfortable chair when everybody was buzzing around and I was riveted and he took took me on a journey to understand economics in a way that was not being explained in in class it was magnificent and I walked out of there basically done with economics as a university study and I began to challenge professors with this logic that I sin started to read what is now known as Chicago School libertarianism and I became acquainted with Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard at Stanford and FA Hayek who at Chicago and a writer by the name of Henry Hazlitt who simplified many of the ideas of Ludwig von Mises this I read these works I became more and more confident that what I was learning in school was was seriously challenged to the point of being well let's put it this way it's not like the world didn't recognize the view that I was learning the Milton Friedman would women Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976 so what what Friedman writes about in a book called free to choose which is a jewel which is sort of lost the current generation is essentially a a treatise showcasing interventional arrogance on the part of government that where the government intervenes tries to do things differently it backfires and messes things up and the so I I wind up becoming a psych psychology major and going into psychology and I carried with me an irritation of the amount of poverty and waste that went on behind government interventions and I watched it with my own eyes a Jimmy Carter's mismanagement of the economy is legendary for people that are how are too young or would not know I want you to imagine what it's like to live in a real estate market where the mortgage rates are eighteen percent because that's what happened okay so this is this was an extraordinary mismanagement the economy it the Republicans are really no better there-there's Mesa's booms and buffs under different administrations these are not a derivative of free market processes these are derivative of government interventions that wind up causing bizarre distortions in free markets the last boom and crash that if you watch the big short which is a movie that I loved this was not caused by Wall Street so the Big Short did not tell the stories beautifully as it told the story of the individuals involved it was incredibly fun and I loved the movie but it did not tell the truth they blamed Wall Street greed and corporate greed it had absolutely nothing to do with Wall Street greed this was a derivative of the United States government and particularly Clinton administration and it was signed off also by the Bush administration after this about trying to have the lower-class citizens in our country have access to low-interest loans to to get houses and this doesn't make any sense and so when they signed these things into law they they made it inevitable that there would be a boom in the construction industry and the real estate industries that would inevitably not be self not being sustainable and it would crash the which it did spectacularly and brutally and tremendous is damage done to people's lives behind this kind of interventional arrogance so I was well acquainted with this concept even in my early 20s and when I went to grad school in clinical psychology I quickly observed that the same type of thing was going on in clinical psychology I would I would have to do assessments for the public the public would pay money to the University of Virginia for the grad students to do assessments for various and sundry reasons and these assessments were bogus and we were we were hand handed the the keys to how it is to tell the story about what judges ought to be thinking by giving people Rorschach tests and I knew that there wasn't scientific justification for this and I objected and I was nearly thrown out of school behind this so this kind of pushback and a few teeth that I've got in my head isn't new the I was disgusted with what is that I was seeing and you know I let people know that it was it was disgusting I had some support and as a result of that I didn't get thrown out of school but it was close the again arrogance interventional overconfidence like you know what you're doing and you can have people look at an ink blot test and then you can tell tell a judge what ought to be done depending upon inkblot tests it was insane anyway the that continues on to this day by the way so despite the fact that this has been absolutely shredded by science it continues the now so I I remember a conversation I had with dr. Alan Goldhamer some time in my grad school career when I was so thoroughly disgusted with many of these these things and I said this is the biggest ripoff and most disgusting thing that there is and Alan said it's not even close to what's going on in medicine so my next my next investigation of the world was what one would wind up being medicine and if you look at the problems in medicine and you look at the landscape of human problems you're looking at the number one and number two problems for for health in the United States are vascular disease number one and cancer and supposedly the the professions that are supposed to be there at the top are going to be the sub professions of medicine are going to be cardiology and oncology now what I want to point out is that my objections are never with the foot soldiers it's with the generals it's with the the way the thing is set up the policy the procedures the education the textbooks etc it's not the foot soldiers I have no I have no specific beef with a specific cardiologist who's doing what it is that he or she was taught however the today we know that the stents are useless and yet that's what people are still being pushed to do to have these things put in they put people's lives at risk by doing angioplasty on a routine basis and yet we know that there's no net benefit the it turns out that the statin drugs are pretty brutal and the the net benefit is absolutely not demonstrated scientifically and yet these are widespread pushed on everybody that's Cardiology it doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of good things in cardiology just as there aren't good things in speech pathology and just like there aren't good things in clinical psychology there are but the overconfidence the arrogance that goes with intervention can be extraordinary and you know cardiologists can put a pacemaker and they could save your life but a lot of what they're doing is they're putting in stents and angioplasty x' they're doing these procedures and the scientific evidence does is supported then we go to oncology all over oncology people are doing procedures getting mutilated getting irradiated getting chemotherapy and it turns out there's little or no benefit the and I know this because I've looked at the evidence myself so there there I am NOT overconfident my visit I mean I'm not blowing smoke I know the data the I'm not going to say every every condition every situation now I'm not going to say that but I'm saying in general way too much confidence way too much intervention arrogance so you go down the list and you find out that that this is a tremendous bias in human beings and the longer you look at it it's a little bit hard to try to figure out why and I actually wrote an article for Health Science magazine over 20 years ago called looking for help in all the wrong places where I explained that everybody's trying to do something when what they need to do is quit doing things that everybody is trying to add a procedure of Hil surgery drugs vitamins and what they need to do is get the crap out of their diet and exercise sleep and get some sunshine that's what they need to do and so the but the interventional bias is tremendous at that time I had actually read that it was difficult to condition a pigeon to peck a light if the light would go from light to dark in order to get a reward I was fascinated by this and it made me think that possibly in nature animals could have a bias towards action as opposed to inaction the longer I thought about this I thought about that that wasn't true I actually had thought it was true at the time and after after time I considered that to be a mistake I think that that was a quark pigeon psychology that that when light flutters on a bird on a bug then you know it's more likely that that's actually that it's picking up a bug as opposed to when something goes from light to dark so I think that that was a a bias specifically to that specific organism in that specific sensory event not a general bias towards action versus inaction the notion of a general bias of an action of action versus inaction doesn't make any sense evolutionarily and I dismissed it a long time ago the however what remained in me was an annoyance for what it is that I considered to be a very strong bias towards intervention versus inaction in spite of evidence that would go against it and I believe that I understand why and I believe that the reason is that you're going to find this all over medicine you're going to find it psychology you're going to find it to some degree in speech pathology I mean let's not single these people out for goodness sakes we're looking at human nature and we're looking at how people do things we're looking at politicians and economics intervention do something okay and I believe the reason is esteem dynamics I believe that that you are given more credit for having tried and doing something than not doing something and I believe that there's a steam seeking involved here and it doesn't this isn't something bad in human affairs but it's a dangerous issue in human affairs and it's a wasteful issue in human affairs and when there was scientific evidence against it it's a disgusting characteristic in human affairs and so I am well aware of this bias it I don't talk about it much it's a quiet little simmering annoyance that's been in my mind literally for about 40 years and it goes back to my puzzlement in irritation at the professors at UC San Diego in the Economics Department when they were confronted by me by the arguments of Milton Friedman were not kind to me and they were not respectful and I was feeding them the arguments of their position from a Nobel prize-winning economist and they weren't it or CID okay and so this is and and on it goes so we could we could go right down through the line the the pushback that I got at the University of Virginia for being an irritated scientifically oriented student when I wasn't going to buy and drink the kool-aid of their of the nonsense projected testing that they were having us do so this is so I carry with me a quiet irritation for this bias and across this stage a young student of speech pathology accidentally asks a question that trips this lever and that's what you heard so my apologies that I went off and I was irritated I mean and I went on a roll and you those poor folks just happen to get my shrapnel but that's actually not what I was aiming at because I never even think of them and their their their problems in fact whenever anybody has ever told me there was speech pathologists I know what kind of work that looks like and I know it's hard work and it's dedicated work and it's humanistic work and I actually don't have any negative feelings about it but if you hit me with this one of my the first things that come up is I've had a bunch of people that were sent to speech pathologists that didn't need it and I've had a quiet irritation about haha there it is intervention over confidence and so that that is the reason I apologize for that outburst but I don't don't but now I understand better where it came from myself and this is where it comes from it comes from my quiet personal annoyance that the world isn't using its knowledge more effectively to help people that they in fact in fact unfortunately human nature seems to have a limitation of the ability to use knowledge because they have a bias for attempting to get credited status by doing things when they should leave things alone alright well dr. Lyle thank you very much for that statement very good all right so let's move on to some questions and we'll get back to business and we'll all try to learn something all right fantastic well we've had a caller on hold here we've got to color so we're going to go with the very first caller called in Dan from New Hampshire welcome to the show very good Daniel good thanks what's up and what's happening dan hey well first of all I'd just like to say that I actually called in about a half a year ago and you had said something that was like very interesting to me about um you probably don't remember but I was wondering like what's the whole point of life if it's just you know gene reproduction and all that as a musician and you know all that stuff and you would you would put it in terms of try to have like as many kind of small victories on a daily basis as you can and don't put all your eggs in that basket because if it doesn't work out you know you're going to spend your whole time just oiling it away at some goal and in my not work out and even if it does it's just a fleeting been a pleasure instead of a sustained kind of happiness and that that's actually really changed a lot of my life and reading the pleasure trap has gotten me over a terrible eating disorder that I had for the past four years and I recently lost like 22 pounds probably since the last call so I appreciate all of that yeah um but that has nothing to do with my call today unfortunately all right so I'll just I'll kind of get to it um mine is more of a relationship slash anxiety type questioned um so I got on my first real relationship I'm 27 and just this past if four or five months I had been dating a girl who um while we were dating I had kind of been picturing well you know this girl isn't like me she's not um artsy and creative and all these things that I expected I'd have in a partner um but was still you know an awesome girl in her own right but for whatever reason I was just hung up on the the idea that she wasn't exactly like me or like this dream woman there you know create a player type thing that I had I thought I'd ended up with before I'd even known her I was holding her up to that that standard and so uh one day I told her that I even I told her I was like you know honestly I don't know if you're my type I don't know if this is going to work out and I think I really hurt her feelings when I said that and I didn't mean to but um I think I was just looking at like what a partner should be through such a different wrong lens at the time and then inevitably she broke up with me about a month later which was a few weeks ago um and about a week after she broke up with me it just hit me like a ton of bricks um how wrong I was about what you're supposed to you know having a partner it's not necessarily someone who's you know a female equivalent of you or whatever the scenario is gender wise that it's just someone that supports you and cares for you and all that she did have a lot of as I started thinking about a lot of great things long-term that I think could work out as like a life partner kind of thing and so the situation that I'm in now is that for Valentine's Day she bought us tickets to she'd surprise bonnets to go to Austin Texas which is a city that I'd always wanted to check out because it has a music scene and I had told her hey maybe I'd like to move there someday and she bought us tickets to go there and broke up with me a couple weeks before we're going to go and it's just going herself and so that's really when it hit me and I I'm kind of at a point right now where I think I I may have met out it's like a crossroads of life type scenario where I may have missed out on a you know this could have altered the way my life turns out that I screwed this relationship up with this amazing girl who could move to a place I've always wanted to move to and did all these nice things for me and I could have kind of gotten a wink where I am sure that's kind of lame and just not worried so much about the whole will I be a success musician or not it's an a basket kind of thing and I would have just been happy to go there new city new adventures every day could be fun with a girl that I could love now that I know what love should be and and so she left to go on vacation and before she did I tried to uh I actually wrote her a song and plated actually for in her driveway the more romantic gesture type of thing and she was was pretty receptive to that I showed up at her work and we talked another time and just we had kind of been trying to patch things up but then she went on this vacation anyway and I had mentioned and this is all again a couple few weeks after we broke up went on the vacation anyway and just told me during the vacation that she needs her time to think and and all that and but I was still pressing to go on it with her and she had said no she needs time to think and then what she was down there she started kind of making some posts that I own so Shiell media that I took as oh my god she's over me she's clearly looking for another guy type of thing just you know showing off she's at the gym that I'm making some vague statuses and she's not even dramedy so is it just struck struck me as she's kind of moving on so I panicked and I bought a ticket to go down there and uh which I thought could have been creepy so I didn't end up going I almost did but I had a panic attack last night for the first time in my life a very anxious guy and I and so I it was it was actually very scary I've never never had one but I had a panic attack in mid panic attack I broke down and I called her even though she had requested her space and I just told her all these different things like I realized how wrong I was and that I loved her and I've honestly never said that to anyone before and I meant it and I just felt so bad about what I said and so guilty about having told her she's not my type and just how dumb a thing that was and how I drove her away and this time she wasn't as receptive as she was when like I showed up at her work and played that song and did all that stuff and now I'm just I've thought about it from a lot of different angles and I know there's a lesson probably in there somewhere that I can I can take this experience and learn how to better handle myself for the next girl but truth be told I don't want a next girl like I think this one really could have been a special one for me and I was just wondering based on the info that I gave you which I know was long long winded um if there's any recourse you can see for resurrecting this or any strategy you would you would possibly suggest because I really do love this girl and I am really bummed out about it potentially not working out well I just can't imagine anybody saying things negative like that's anybody in insulting them alright listen here's where you're at where you're at is this discussion that you had didn't come out of nowhere okay so you're what's going on inside your mind is that your your you're not or your you're moving towards what I'm going to call calibration equilibrium you can't if you go into a new town and you don't know what the real-estate market looks like you're moving in Nashville and you've been in in Austin Texas and you move in you're going to Nashville and you start looking at houses first house you look at looks like an unbelievable bargain you know it's $280,000 and it's I don't know 4,000 square feet and your couldn't see anything like that in Austin so you're you're breathing heavily it's like oh my god we got to get this right now you you know that what you don't have is calibration equilibrium you have no idea what the market place is so just about the time you're ready to buy that thing your little birdie whispers in your ear you better go check through four other houses and make sure this one isn't actually overpriced so you can't be in love unless you have calibration equilibrium you have to the reason is is that you have to have knowledge of what your market value is and you have to have knowledge of what it is that you can reasonably expect to find and so a 20-7 it's hard to get there you can be done and sometimes a couple of Griebel people can find each other and feel like the other one's a great deal most of us struggle for longer than this because we're struggling with the problem of calibration equilibrium once we have we have reasonable equilibrium then then we've got to then when we find something that is in fact we are able to recognize is a very good deal it's hard to get both sides thinking the same thing at the same time there's reasons why for whatever reason so they they are subtle personality appearance all you know intelligence looks brains personality the whole package there's reasons why you were not thinking that this was some Screaming deal the and you gave that feedback to her and she heard it loud and clear and the now what has happened is after she essentially choked that down thinks it through and realizes you know what this is not a solid place for me I'm not I'm not valued that heavily I'm not valued heavily enough female needs to be valued a lot they need to feel like they're it otherwise they can sense that they're going to be loved and left and so she does a preemptive strike starts to move on and you do something that has been done a million times by a million guys which is you panic and we could call it the plan B panic in other words this this has been it this is a very very good plan B person or it that's what your nervous system was looking at it like and the it did not have the sense that this was it now that the rug got pulled out from under you this is a this is actually the the writer Robert ringer calls this a boy-girl theory and that is that when it gets taken away you panic and so this is this has been an ancient instinctual process now what do I think about how to handle this well the a reasonable way to handle this I mean you did you did what guys do god forbid I've done it panic Slava slobber all over yourself try to get the girl back that that gets you out of the anxiety you know that it's a fine person you know you love the person however problem is is that very often if you if you manage to be successful you may work very well fine within 30 or 60 days you're having exactly the same feelings that you had in the first place which is that this is not quite plan a okay so what I would suggest to you is that it's perfectly legitimate to try to get back in the relationship and see what happens it's her risk you know as you're going to risk your time and energy she's going to risk her heart and and you can try to Celeron it it's perfectly legit my strategy the main strategy obviously that comes out of the Stone Age you better panic fast because a a female that is loose on the loose is now shopping and may get a better offer than you and so you better you know obviously she's not chopped liver relative to your made value so someone that is as appealing or more appealing than you to her may come along and think that she's a great deal and at which point you're in trouble so you're feeling the anxiousness of the competitive problem yes you're supposed to okay you're supposed to this is supposed to motivate you to do the crazy things you do sing a song write a song perform a song and everything else under the Sun what I what I would suggest that you do is that you don't panic over the competitive problem and that what you do instead is what I call Chinese water torture and this is what I recommend that people do when they have an esteemed dynamic that is in trouble so if you and your dad of a falling out and there's bad bad blood for a while the and you want to fix it what you do is Chinese water torture you know Chinese water torture you drive people crazy by dropping water on their forehead like it I mean that's just Oh from the movies you know I don't know what it really is but I call this Chinese water torture in other words we're going to drip drip drip drip drip good feedback on people and we're going to drive them crazy with it in other words we're going to make it what we're signaling to them is you've got a steam with me you've got a steam with me you've got a steam with me you've got a steam with me you've got a steam with me okay and this is what we're dripping on them we don't have to go crazy we don't want to be you know you've already you know tried to strike bold and quickly to try to grab her back and drag her back it's turning out that's not working I'm sure she was glad to see it but she still she expecting that this is the equivalent of an extinction burst from an addictive or classically conditioned process which is more or less what it is and so what we want to do instead is be prepared for like a Roman siege ok where we're going to we're going to send her communications and those communications might want to be coming at intervals that make some degree of sense that respect some space and that you know about every week we're sending some kind of a communication that it says about how we were thinking about her what we were thinking etc and why you know why she's valuable it could be an email could be a letter a card with a you know a Hallmark card etc I don't know what else people do these days but that's all the only things that I know and so what we want to do is be patient look at it in this investment not as a panic city and we may lose okay we may lose we may lose for a while she may need to get some positive feedback from somebody else for a while they may they may shock up for a while then you have to know that almost no almost all new relationships don't make it 90 days they crash and burn somewhere along the line that's that's how they work and so if if this girl is truly is a great girl and it turns out that you have mysteriously managed to reach calibration equilibrium and if it turns out that you actually could be happy with her in the long run and she with you then what I suggest to you is that you look at this as a siege rather than as a grasp okay and just just use your creativity and always be at it be at it with humor and be out it would love and send those messages and we're going to see if we can wear down her very well considered defenses against you okay she is stealing and has been stealing herself against you because she feels like she doesn't qualify and it's hurt her it's hurt her pretty deep so what we want to do now is we want to we we want to not oversell it but we want to sell it sell it patiently sell it consistently sell it with confidence and that's what you want to do and but that's that's I think your best chance in the long run and the best chance for if you do reconcile that it's the it's reconciling not out of a panic but out of two people coming together after they've had a bit of time apart to reflect on what the real situation is and see whether or not they want to give it a try so you don't want to be selling like your it forever oh my god you know I swear up and down here no forget about it that's panic City and that's over selling let's fact that we have considered and we have thought about who she is and why her strengths are so great and how how happy they make you and let's keep selling those things where that she now understands why her esteem is higher to you now than it was before and that there's a reason for her to possibly trust that it's worthy of another try that make sense yeah yes it does oh god my only my only hang-up with that is that again mid panic attack I did like call her and like test my love and just go overboard so I feel like that's already kind of out of the out of the barn it doesn't matter it doesn't matter that that happened that's fine that that happened this is I'm looking at this as a much longer project so I'm looking at this is a you know two to six month project that may go through many you know a serpentine path here so be patient and yeah you stepped in it you know I've been known to do that so yeah no panic no panic even though yeah panic I've panicked before alright that's done that's fine it's fine note no worries now we're going to settle in and we're have some resolve and we're going to make an investment in this girl and we're going to see see if we get another chance okay okay yeah I just and I feel like what you say makes a lot of sense because I have listened to other like you know there are people that are like specifically mating dating type coaches and a lot of the advice that I've heard from them and others some other friends are like do not reach out to her again until she reaches out to you but yeah I did explicitly tell me um I know you think she did one of the last text she sent me was like I know you think this is a movie or something but like I you need to respect my space and that was before I called her up when she was on vacation and I feel like now at this point any further me reaching out to her it's a catch-22 because I do want to respect your space and I can tell it upset her when I didn't respect her space by call her tell her that but I also like you said I know that there are threats looming and just based on kind of some of the stuff she was like posting I was like I feel like she's letting it know that she's single again and I don't want to wait I want to just know how you know should I yeah I was thinking we should have CrossFit for example and which so I was thinking maybe go like as a creative way to show her that I value our on going down and like paying for a CrossFit membership without going now here we go listen down okay here's what you're going to do you're going to have to deal with the fact that you're going to have competitors and she's going to need to market test you're just going to have to deal with it and I don't think it's I disagree with anybody that says oh don't don't call her back if she calls you back now you don't need to do that the but what you do need to do is to look at that calendar and stare at it and realize you're not going to contact her for you know you're going to give it like a week okay nothing yeah radio silence you're not doing this to game her you're doing this to display that you've got some emotional stability and that you are respectful of her space that she asked for okay a week from now you don't have to call her up you can send her an email don't send her a freaking tome okay send her to her grapple yeah no don't send her on senator Warren piece okay yeah Center a paragraph that says a modest-sized paragraph that explains you know that that you've been thinking about her and her strengths and how wonderful she is blah blah and hope hope you can meet up again sometime soon just to say hello okay done that's what we're gonna do okay and then we're going to do it a week later and then we'll do it a week later after that okay so in fact even if she doesn't get back to you this is Chinese water torture okay so we don't we don't need them to do anything we keep landing esteem cues on them and we see if we can crack the coconut open okay yeah that's we don't know no gestures like in as far as like how I what type of signals I should be giving off like for example like on my social media or whatever like it's cool to like don't be posting songs about how sad I am about her know god sakes know yeah move on with your life otherwise your job is to invest once a week a really really good drop of love and esteem on her head that's what we did yeah okay after about three weeks you know first we do that if she gives you the cold shoulder behind those things and there's no contact you certainly don't pick up the phone and panic on it you're going to wait a couple of more weeks we may we're just going to do Chinese water torture I would I wouldn't be picking up a phone to talk to somebody for six weeks that would be indicating a lot of respect giving them some space not crowding them letting them do their own thing okay so that that's what I'm going to recommend okay listen I'm going to move on to some other questions this was a very good call and thank you thank you for calling good question Dan thank you very much phone call and for the great question all right so we got we got room for maybe of one or two more questions I'm listeners okay dear dr. Lyle I have a dear friend who is addicted to alcohol drinking every day all day begins in the mornings most days with straight vodka she's also doing other things like cocaine pain pills I'm watching him start to slip up more and more he collapsed recently and was taken to the ER they fixed him up fluids back to normal hydrated and they told him he'd better stop drinking because his livers in trouble he's only 36 years old anyway six months ago he began admitting to these addictions he says he knows he has a problem but he just can't stop this was encouraging to me as the past as in the past he I could never discuss the subject with him isn't this a good sign he won't go to rehab he's attended a couple AAA meetings but he didn't really want to continue he says he's going to try ayahuasca which I've heard positive things about concerning overcoming addiction he can't even stop drinking long enough to detox and prepare for that ceremony my question is what do you do when you see a friend slipping away like this he has a young boy and is running a business I don't want to see him getting the drunk driving accident and hurt someone especially his son what's the best approach to attempt to help your friend in a situation like this and is there anything I can do Wow very good question heartfelt letter well considered and I when you hear situations like this there there isn't a lot of hope and I don't really know anything that I would say would be mm-hmm would be essentially giving direction where I have no idea where to go on the compass then neither does anybody else by the way in addiction a major addictions are exceedingly difficult to defeat and that's when you're super motivated and you've got a lot of resources and so I have I have helped many people through major addictions and every one of them was a fight and every single one of the people that I ever helped gave him a helping hand to pull out of that was bright capable motivated had a lot to live for in other words even with all of all of that on the line and all the resources that they had on the line it was still touch-and-go many times in a long battle this person is way down deep in the hole and the if you are a if you are a statistician handicapping this you would say no there's there's no chance that doesn't mean there isn't a chance it just means that this is very deep so I don't know what is the question is what's the best approach I really couldn't tell you any approach you know that I mean this person they've heard of a a they can walk down to an a a meeting and maybe and maybe get some support there that might be helpful if they have health insurance they can they can go talk to somebody and make a twice a week out of their schedule to go talk to a counselor that knows something about how to support people out of this and hopefully some person can pull them in a positive direction the issue with him driving and and his and their son etc hey this person is a danger and if they're driving drunk which they're they probably are who knows if they are not I mean they're they just are and I don't know there may be people listening that and in law enforcement that might say hey this is what you could do you call and blow the whistle on them I don't know I don't know what to do about this this is a big mess and so I'm sorry to say that this is this is just a tough one and it's it's heartbreaking to watch people that otherwise are fine fine human beings that are in the grips this is what I call the pleasure drop so when there are substances now that we were never designed to experience those effects and so certain people are highly susceptible to the influence of this and and it creates for some for many people that get in the clutches it's a trap that they never escape so all I can say is direct them towards up towards professionals who will do their very best to help and but this one this is one where we we may need to we may need to realize that what you can do is limited and and you need to need to respect that with your own time and energy Wow okay everyone all right one more question same topic dear dr. Lyle can you explain what's going on genetically with how some people can drink moderately or even heavily without being an alcoholic while others cannot specifically I'd love to hear your take on how you define addiction as a disease obviously people who have alcoholics or addicts in their family are more likely to become an alcoholic themselves this seems to really play into the nature versus nurture debate is it due to the poor environment of toxic relationships poor coping skills etc that this gets passed down generations or just visit just the dopamine and serotonin response that is so strong to alcohol that one's genetic variation yields inevitable addiction if this is the case is there also a genetic component to which supernormal substances someone might get addicted to or someone with the genesis with the genes of an addict just going to be an addict regardless of which super normal stimulus they get exposed to this is a very very good question I believe that that the reasons why some people get addicted and other people don't or genetic I haven't looked at the evidence in a good long while but that's what was looking like to me the last time I looked the I am confident that what you have is genetic differences to specific chemicals so there's people that are highly susceptible being cocaine addicts and people that are not and in fact it's probably most people are not and it's also true that most people are not susceptible to being alcohol addicts even if they didn't drink a great deal of alcohol and are exposed to it and they develop tolerance in other words they can they can be physically addicted to it but they don't have out of high use rate but they don't have the same kind of bang that happens when you're a genetic alcoholic so those two things might not be functionally all that different if someone is a consistent heavy drinker and there's people that are highly responsible conscientious quite emotionally stable people who are genetic alcoholics and they can struggle and have a lot of turbulence in their lives around their intermittent problems with alcohol but they they sustain life being as reasonable as someone who is just a consistent pretty heavy drinker that doesn't have those genes but there's a difference people that are alcoholics are that our genetic alcoholics are fighting a tremendous fight this isn't a matter of convenience and choice this is a this is like a raging fire and if you light it it makes there it is extremely difficult for them to control what they're doing so it's not fair it just happens to be a tricky back door into the nervous system the you know let's face it the world and life is made out of chemicals our nervous systems are made out of chemicals our feelings are made out of chemicals so it's no surprise that out there somewhere in the world there was an ability to put chemicals together to bang on human nervous systems in a way that that is extraordinary and disturbing and distorted and unbelievably selective and not every nervous system is susceptible there there probably isn't a single individual on earth that would be highly susceptible to cocaine alcohol methanol mean you know darvocet heroin etc in other words probably nobody the is susceptible to all of them there's people that are susceptible that they're susceptible one and I've had many people that were for example just susceptible to cocaine and and that that would just sort of drove their lives nuts I've had many many people who were just susceptible to alcohol and that that's what that was what wrapped their life around its little finger so forget the final part of the question I think that's what it was that that right there I don't I don't believe that there's such a thing as quote just a flat-out genetic personality I think that what there is there's people that are more open and experimenting and people that are lower in conscientiousness and people that are more emotionally unstable all of those things are going to make them more impulsive and if you add that to the fact that they've got some genetic susceptibilities that that's a that's a addictive personality but it will not cross the gamut of all substances it will be they will discover in their openness they will try at all and they'll find out that they've got intense favorites and that's what they'll wind up being addicted to so that's that's the name of that tune Wow all right so it's a tough battle in this modern world very tough very tough very very much not fair and this is one of these deals where talk about being the jeans you have to you have to beat the trap the modern environment has maybe set for your specific genetic code and you if you find out that you've got an Achilles heel you you know one of the smartest things you can do is respect your limitations and understand that probably the very best thing that you could ever do is walk away from that and never look back
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