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Episode 155: Dilated eyes, Friendships, Romantic excitement, Live caller
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this is a question about humans versus animals which are the humans and other other animals humans are animals dr. Lao humans are one of the few animals that have intercourse while looking into each other's eyes and when we look at things that appeal to us our eyes dilate well my ex-girlfriend would stare deeply into my eyes during intercourse and her eyes would dilate wider than I've ever seen in anyone even in a bright room interesting now my current girlfriend barely looks at me during sex and when she does her pupils aren't dilated of course they dilate a little more when it's dark what's going on here through the lens of evolutionary psychology do you think the ex thought I was more attractive than her which caused her eye contact and dilated pupils while the current girlfriend may not think I'm fancy enough to look at during sex or maybe she's fantasizing about somebody fancier it is just a personal preference maybe intimidation to look into a lovers eyes or maybe that some people just have smaller pupils while other peoples are often dilated off drugs who wider pupils indicate people who are scanning the environment for potential map may add mates or threats wait I don't know a lot about the you know the individual differences here there could be and there probably are considerable individual differences in how how easily and how wide you know pupils dilate the so I don't that this is one of these things where yeah it's a it's enough of a reflex ped that you'll see these poker players the World Series of Poker wearing sunglasses like they don't want they don't want to give away any clues and that's one of them that are it's apparently worth looking at now I've heard about pupils in their dilation for all I don't know since my teens so that's going on a long time and I've I've never seen anybody's pupils dilate so that's probably because I just didn't you listed it ah the the point is is that I it's strange to even be looking that's just not I suppose that so this this person you know has had this experience of this sort of deep staring that will sometimes happen that people will do intimately and and you know had somebody whose eyes dilated that's all good but I wouldn't I mean this is people are also looking for something that they said there's a habit or a fascination that people have with secret you know secret cues to look for look for the real you know what the person is really feeling so you know if I look at them I remember a big thing back in my day when I was being trained some of the hooker people were all interested in NLP so they're interested in wow if you look up to the left that means this and if you look up to the right it means that like looking for the magic clues as to what somebody is is thinking about or how they really feel uh I have a better way as a relation I'm all ears yeah what do they say to you okay how do they act with you how much do they like to touch you how much do they like to be close to you how much do they like a plan to have a weekend away with you how interested are they in having sex with you what are they interested in what you're thinking about what questions do they ask they'll I want to walk along the beach with you they want to plan future things with you that's how you tell don't worry about looking in somebody's eyeballs for God's sakes just follow that the masses amounts of clues that are leaking out all over the place in the relationship that's a better strategy and as far as you know somebody looks in your eyes or don't look in your eyes people are are their sexual psychologies have pretty great diversity pretty extremely wide anybody that's been around the block a few times knows people are hugely different in their sexuality and so I wouldn't be reading too many too much clues into any specific characteristic of a partner you know look at the entire range of activities and interchanges that take place between two people that'll tell you where you're at so there no magic is what you're saying you know burr weekly this bitch is what they really feel okay yeah I'll tell ya II think does not be honor this is actually talking to people acting here is actually is that there's actually even more to it it's a good question because we just tripped over an important concept and that is a person is an integrated set of all kinds of independent neural circuits so they've got all kinds of different feelings about you and so to hone in on anyone there's no one that's the truth there's that you're looking at you know essentially a hundred different judgments that the other person has of you so they don't have one and whether or not they're in the relationship or not is an amalgam of an overall CD that they have if that overall CB is iffy then their sexual interest in you is tend to be iffy and their talk about the futures iffy and how much they're willing to you know help you change your oil and your hot rod is iffy everything's Fe okay whereas if the CB is really good if 90 of those circuits are saying this is a great deal five of them are telling them it's a so-so deal and five of them are like a boy I wish we were a little better off here but hey you know what the best deal we've seen in five years so we're pretty damn happy okay so if the overall CB is strongly positive it's leaking out in the behavior throughout the relationship so we're not looking for quote one magic trick that tells us about one characteristic or the response to one component of our value proposition we're looking for an overall orientation that the person has towards us and so you know nothing like when you haven't seen somebody for you know a few days and you see them and there's a huge smile that tells you why were they happy to see you that the biggest clue that there is yeah I can relate to that that's a that's a good point because here here at the fasting escape I people are always asking me you know oh is bell pepper good for you or is this particular food bad for you and it's it's the same thing I have to go back and say well it's not just one thing that's going to be good or bad there's magic you know magic bullet for one food it's kind of a whole picture of what's going on so right would make sense that the same thing is true in psychology sure all right next question we're gonna eyeball staring question oh by the way there was actually a really interesting study I think I've told you about it before where I think it David buss did this where he had undergraduate stare in each other's eyes and if they had to do it for like I don't know five minutes or something really weird they just wanted to see what would happen and it turned you know just how people felt and you know get all bunch of self reports it turned out that caused a bunch of relationships to happen I'll be damned okay it was a totally unintended effect of the study and and so what I believe happened is that that kind of staring is essentially a huge signal that I find you super interesting is super valuable and so it hey it caused some cause some some people to tripped a few levers and it worked so I think I'll try that out next time out okay if all the dogs I load comes comes comes down yeah good the the dugs the get dug gaze it's there stare down oh you know what we can call the air bag winger they're down at the salad place I like this we all right yeah yeah they always make sure it's two sides of the salad bar mmm yeah alright let's go on a download and Lyle linger never that's it we got a you know better hmm alright dr. Lyle what level of interest would a person who's highly intelligent and conscientious with some of X we can have in terms of seeking friendship bonds and socializing you've mentioned in past shows that you wouldn't expect highly intelligent people to have a lot of friends as they wouldn't find much value in friendship relationship with most people as there wouldn't be any brains worth harvesting with someone who's highly intelligent conscientious and slightly extroverted appear to be introverted as a result and so how would you then determine if it's the high intelligence or level of extraversion that is resulting in a lack of friendships huh pretty interesting question um let's see well one thing that we can see is is that loneliness is a feeling that tells the person that it would be wise for them to invest in in relationships so it's an indicator of a deficiency so if a person were highly intelligent and conscientious and let's say in the middle of the in the middle of the bell curve for introversion extroversion that they are all things being equal they would likely have have similar needs for affiliation as anybody else it's possible though and depending upon where they're employed or where they're located in sort of the social economic niche it could be that they have a difficult time finding people to trade with in other words the their CB tells them that it's not that good a deal and so they may indeed wind up passing on on opportunities that are just not good enough that they don't seem like they're worthy of the investment and so as a result they're they would likely have some loneliness lurking around in the system essentially counterbalancing this judicious --mess so that's the way I would look for the terminating factor is if a person is it doesn't have very many friends but it's not in fact lonely they don't feel that that mechanism going off then they're just an introvert that doesn't have a lot of need for a lot of social affiliation if however if that's a if that's a circuit that goes off fairly often then you're looking at a person that is perhaps in some ways alienated from their from their current social environment see I grew in a fancy term from like mid-century existential alienated alienate yeah I threw it in there just to just let people know that you know I've read some of that stuff haha yeah and that have actually alienated I was joking yeah yes it's exactly what it was so it's the notion that wasn't somehow cut off from other people or oneself or whatever the but in truth the you could be you could be in a situation where you're you've got independent neural circuits inside of you telling you one of them says they're not worth the trouble and the other one says you're kind of lonely okay and so that that's how that's how I would look for that if you are that individual you can sort of look inside your emotional life and find out you have repeated signals that are telling you to seek more social affiliation or do you not and even though you don't have very many prints or much connection that the existing individuals may suffice and you may not be willing to put somebody in your boat unless they bring you know a substantial value proposition and one of the values that people bring is both knowledge and ability they're both calibrated or correlated with IQ so a high IQ person with a lot of conscientiousness may very well indeed look like their introverted to the outside world but in fact just be running a CB that says you know what I'll just keep those spots open for a while and I'll fill them when somebody comes along that it has a that has a decent trade fascinating okay yes I mean is it a zero-sum game when it comes to friendships as in the more friends you are if you have more friends someone else it's kind of out of friends basically well if if you every friend brings with I'm not sure what you're saying but every friendship brings both benefits as well as costs and so the the cost to an introvert is greater to bring somebody into your into your system just because an introvert would just soon have the time all to themselves and not to have to put up with the stress of interacting with other people in the conflicts of interest to come with that so the so that that's how this is going to work so that that's why the answer the question is to look inside the loneliness apparatus and see how you know how active that is and if it's not active you've just got an introvert that's at equilibrium if it's active but you have an introvert that is still staying away from seeking social affiliation it's because they stick their nose and they take a sniff and they feel like it's not worth it so it's kind of like let's it's not a bad not a bad correlation here not a bad representation but suppose you have a very attractive female that that is you know it is fresh out of it at the moment worthy dates so she she may feel a little bit of loneliness her amount of loneliness will dictate whether or not she's willing to go down a couple notches just to spend time with somebody or not and so the so you could actually see actually an introversion extroversion or a need for affiliation here which are not exactly the same thing but I'm sure they're correlated though you could see those things running in parallel with a similar choice that yeah you could actually you don't even have to make her that attractive it's just the attractiveness runs up and down the chain and females could trade down more Rattle readily if they're if the loneliness ship is going off in the same way okay so and if you are if you are more introverted the attitude is hey why bother okay I'm not and we could add another factor in their sort of libido so an introvert with the low libido it's like why bother okay don't don't come don't come to me unless you're bring a full house okay maybe four aces and so this is uh this would be the same kind of discernment the same CB calculus would be going on in friendships 'as would be going on or potential romantic situation incidentally I have no doubt in fact this does the same calculus runs through romances so I in my career I have run across women that have never spent a night alone which is just incredible to me since I spent my whole damn life alone okay so the they don't spend because they're always in a relationship because they have anxiety about spending the nights alone so you can imagine that there the bar for getting into that relationship with them is a hell of a lot lower than it would be with somebody who is naturally has much less need for affiliation and so yeah this is a sort of an interesting calculus interesting problem that this person's questions scratched but it's a major one in in understanding why it is that a specific individual lives their life the way they do very fascinating now this is kind of a signal we can get genes on sale sometimes doll right yeah yeah always looking so these are the shock all right dr. Lisle from another listener and Heather thank you for staying on hold we'll get to you in just a bit mm-hmm okay dr. Lovell this listener says dr. Lappe think maybe around a five or six but I tend to consistently only be attracted to girls who are 8 and above now simply don't get excited prospects present themselves who are more in my mate value realm I know this consciously but I can't seem to change my nervous system you mentioned on a recent podcast with the caller that our nervous system is constantly evaluating availability in the market and if we are undershooting it gives us cues the problem is that I seem to get these cues from girls who I think I should not be getting and I think should be exciting prospects for me are there outside influences contributing to this or is this normal I'm not I'm not sure what he says there at the end but let me they try to guess at what he's saying so what is he saying is that he's a twenty five and a six and he's attracted a tune up he's a button between a five and a six that would mean a 5.5 and he's attracted to AIDS so that would be 25 percentile higher that puts in exactly typical for what they've seen in internet dating so it's interesting that that that there's an extraordinary reach that a lot of people have you know that most of us have that is typical for the species that the typical member of the species is trying to reach pretty high and obviously you're not trying to reach nearly as high if you're in the upper 10 or 20 percentile because you can't reach that much higher but for people in the middle of bell curve or on the low side of the bell curve it yet it's it's interesting to see that of course the theoretical reach would be much higher and in this situation this person is reporting this sort of subjective assessment of his own calibration system is basically saying hey I want 25th percentile you know better deal and that that is a very honest direct self-report that looks like it falls smack in the middle of the bell curve in terms of fussiness as what has been demonstrated in in with the online data so that's all fine so now I think he's lamenting over the fact that since he can't get those people why is it that if we're updating information on what's what's happening and our nervous system is recalibrating how come it won't recalibrate its way down as I in the previous podcast probably what I was talking about is that it would calibrate its way up very quickly so you can you can see kind of why this would work if it turns out you can imagine that if you were if you were being under if you're truly being underpaid you would you would recognize it very quickly it you would however you could mistakenly and narcissistically believe that you should be paid a lot more and then you would find out you know over the long haul but that wasn't true and you keep reaching okay but if it really were true you'd find out very quickly because the system is designed by nature to try to get a better deal so if you are temporarily underrating yourself it's not going to happen for very long and pretty quickly evidence will come up that's why if you're in a relationship which is beneath you we're going to find out probably pretty quickly that pretty soon you're going to get bored and pretty soon what's going to happen is there will be competitors for your mate that will be fancier than your mate that will will signal to you that you qualify for them and so if you're in a situation where you are over rewarded in a mating situation you are usually walking on eggshells and you are you are worried about that very situation happening and you're probably right okay it's very likely that it will happen or at least there will be some rough trading process that will take place in that relationship term some money time energy childcare or whatever the heck it is that gets traded there will be you know there will be prices to be paid for that Delta the now where were we so we're back to our guy so it turns out that our guy as far as I can tell he's I think what he's saying is hey how come my nervous system won't Ratchet itself down and have me happy with six and hey the that's kind of a it's a it's actually a curiosity of human nature and the this is true and it it isn't so it shows you actually it shows you many amazing things about people I I don't know that that something similar happens in the animal kingdom but this is a remarkable characteristic about how extraordinarily fussy people are in their mating behavior and it it speaks to a species interestingly enough that has a strong pair-bond proclivity the you you wouldn't have such incredible fussiness on the parts of males if if the species I was not strongly pair-bond oriented the if they were if there was casual mating species all the way there wouldn't be much beauty detection preference mechanisms inside of males so while we are frustrated about this on the one hand we see the hand of evolution telling us that males invested heavily in offspring that's why they have such extraordinary extraordinarily acute and fussy and hard bargaining when it comes to trading on the on the looks dimension now what's what's to be done about it not much this is the this is the sort of dilemma of our time and the job as a male in general is to bring everything that you've got to these trades to make it possible for you to get enough where your nervous system feels sufficed and obviously the people sort of in the upper 10 percentile even 20 percentile might roll their eyes at this and that's because they do not have an intuition about the difficulty of this Delta but this guy is writing to us about its difficulty and he's being open and honest about what a difficult problem this is and it is a hard problem this is you know there's a there's a beautiful line in the movie almost famous where where the forget Lester Bangs the guy who plays Lester Bangs the guy he's the beautiful actor that died of a drug overdose I can't remember his name I love the guy he he's telling the young kid who is Craig Cameron Crowe the young Cameron Crowe hey Oh most of the great art is about this problem okay a lot of greatness of male achievement of the world is about this very problem it's about the problem of the five and a half trying to get to the eighth and the way they're going to do that is become doctor lawyer Indian chief you know bass player accomplish things whatever it is that you can do and do the very best that you can and make the most of your abilities while you follow your heart to do something that is you know intelligent and interesting and ethical but try to do well in the world as well as you can and that puts you in a position to possibly compete for the magic Delta that you know can make your life good so that's the story of that but there's no way that I know to ratchet yourself down and have you quote be happy with what's available to you your your nervous system surprisingly is not is not going to buy that from the top down edik it's a it's a bottom-up system the system has to will tell you with a thousand little assessments whether or not this is a good deal for you and whether or not you ought to be excited and it's going to tend to be the case that it's going to be you're going to be reaching up and you're going to be impressing somebody with with what it is that who it is that you are and what you've accomplished that's how that works and dr. Lila I'm assuming that in the same way that if you practice all seed and you know put your all on the field and you're some team still loses that in that same way you still you still feel slightly disappointed but but you don't feel ashamed in the same way if you try your hardest and you yeah you try to accomplish as much as you possibly can essentially earn a lot of respect from your internal audience and you just ask you just come up short with finding you know what what that is 25 percentile higher I mean just what we're talking about with this Dean diet with with setup move-in esteem by demyx right the heart of a scheme dynamics so this is exactly what it is that I tell people along all kinds of problems so and that is that that of course the thing to do is to be diligent enough about pursuing excellence in your in your daily practices in life but what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to hone the fundamentals of whatever that the competitive nature of the problem is and so that you put your best foot forward and the and in it what you are absolutely doing is you are earning the respect of your internal audience and that that is the nature of the self-esteem dynamic and you don't you don't get to earn it and walk away from it it's sort of a daily process or internal audience is constantly monitoring whether or not you're doing a good job it doesn't mean you have to be unbelievably driven you don't have to be Steve Jobs you don't have to you don't have to be Laurence Olivier but what you want to do is you want to work hard enough and invest hard enough in the processes that you know are associated with the competitive evaluation so other people are going to have towards you so that you are you know you are not leaving a lot of capability on the table and so that what this is about is it's about being ready if you spend your life ready to to meet someone terrific and you never meet that person fair enough okay you're you're it's it's unfortunate but you know Dan Marino never won a Super Bowl the guy was phenomenal it's absolutely phenomenal unique quarterback and dot I think got the Super Bowl twice I believe in lost both times it's a way it goes the sono you know you can't you can't guarantee that you're going to get the outcome that you want which you can be is you can be ready when the opportunity arises and along that process you have a peace of mind that says I'm ready you know if the right thing crossed across the year and you you're not going to say you're totally ready you're never totally ready but you can be largely ready and you can know that as you look inside you have not wasted wasted the opportunity to be ready and so that's what you can do that's what you can control we can't control what happens in the game of life we can only be prepared for you know opportunity and you want to be prepared fasting okay dr. Lauer we're going to get to a caller right now we're going to take platter occasions about the wandering mind and apology we're due next week so we got to welcoming program Heather from Portland Heather welcome to the film hi thank you so much for taking my call oh I had her how you doing I'm doing great hey dr. Lyle George I listen I've listened to everything you've ever I'm such a huge fan but I had a question for you from something that you said on chef AJ's healthy living with chef AJ has she interviewed you a lot which I love yeah and so you had talked about well there were two things that just I have to ask the first is that you said that food addiction is not as serious as other kinds of addiction and I'm just wondering why you think that when it affects and you know frankly kills probably more people over time that was one question and then the other one was just about emotional eating so it's related and this is my question so I heard you say that trying to fight your pleasure trap instincts of survival you know you're driven to eat the most Klerk food in your environment right what crying trying to fight that all the time to consistently fight that all the time is akin to trying to climb Mount Kilimanjaro with a sprained ankle I love that because that's been my experience and yo anyway so what I'm wondering is I would think that that would take a tremendous amount of conscientiousness and like um you know just focus so what I don't understand is you sit when you said there was no such thing as like emotional eating isn't that explained by evolutionary psychology in that it's you know sometimes when we're going through trauma or we're going through just stress you know that we it like puts a chink in the armor of the conscientiousness and it's not that we're eating emotionally it's that word that we just don't have the strength I guess you know to put toward the huge amount of conscientiousness that it takes and just want to hear your opinion yeah just you got a lot of things sort of swirling around there so but yeah the yeah my my stance on emotional eating is there's you know as Aristotle would say before we argue we should define our terms and so I will first define the the biggest thing that I'm objecting to that that I'm trying to help people understand and that is that people are mystified about why it is that they are self-destructive with respect to their diets so they they learn that they'd be a good thing for them to eat more whole natural foods and they don't do it so they're eating Cheetos and they're eating chocolate cake and they can't figure out why and they they know they they know they like it and they learn that it's got addictive qualities to it but then they still stumble fail repeatedly and struggle for example with the let's let's set this up and let's not talk about it apart from other other major concerns we're not going to isolate this and just say we're worried about eating junk food for our health but we're going to get real and realized that the overwhelming majority of interest here has to do with weight loss so with weight loss being the number one personal goal people in the United States so people will learn that if they were to eat properly whatever that means but we certainly know that that means an awful lot of unprocessed natural vegetable material whether you include animal in there is a matter of you know entertaining debate but let's just say in principle we're looking at a whole bunch of unprocessed plant material and we're not talked about Cheetos ice cream and you know Cinnabon now the question is why is it that people have a difficult problem staying out of ice cream Cinnabon and pizza instead of eating the whole natural foods if they know that they should be eating if they're going to try to reach their weight-loss goals and other health goals now the on one side of the discussion what you're going to have is you're going to have psychodynamic oriented theory in other words why is it that you're being self-destructive what is the underlying problem that is causing you to do this destructive thing well maybe you've had destructive things happen to you you've had traumas in the past and those traumas in the past cause you now to have this problem because you've got loneliness or upsetedness about the way you're mistreated twenty years ago in your youth and that's why it is that you're doing this okay that's very typical when people go into eating disorders treatment you can't believe the cross-examination that they get about their parents and their relationships with their parents and this is a total waste of time the and the notion of psycho dynamically analyzing why it is that some persons a hundred pounds overweight today and their 35 years old and we're going to go back to their childhood and look for where it all went wrong that's a total waste of time the reason why people have these problems is not some deep traumas that is not the reason the so this is the the heart and soul of emotional eating theory sits there the reason why I can say this definitively is because there's been a great deal of research on the most difficult traumas that there are and what you do not find is a fallout is any increased statistical likelihood of obesity overeating eating disorders or anything else it's not related so when people have these problems their problems are stemming from other causes and the pleasure trap is a document that explains what those causes are the probably the easiest way to describe why the pleasure trap exists is to simply look at animal behavior so any experiments run with animals will always wind up with exactly the same behavior that you see in humans so if you if you put junk food in an animal cage the animals will always eat the junk food and they'll ignore the healthy food if you put junk food in the animal cage exclusively and what happens is is that the animals get fat they get sick they get hypertensive they get you know coronary artery disease they get diabetes and then if you try to feed them healthy food they go on strike and in fact the in a recent experiment done in 2009 once exposed to conventional American diet for 30 days the rats on average when they were Rieff fed healthy food would not eat for 14 days totally on strike okay so why is that because their nervous systems are running cost-benefit analysis saying we've still got extra fat on us we're fine we're going to run cost-benefit analysis we're not that hungry we you want the richer fitted and I don't want to fill up my stomach on this food that is 1/3 the calorie density when the really good stuff may be coming that's effectively the CD that those Brent's did and the average brain did that for 14 days until they lost a lot of body weight and they got back down to a normal body weight at which point they started to actually get into deprivation for calories you know an ideal balance and now the nervous system said okay this is all that's going to be here we're going to eat the healthy food again so this will explain why it is that people do what they do the what you're describing you're describing sort of a second level discussion about what it is that you would call emotional eating that's a little different so the the and we could debate about this and talk about how big of a factor this is going to be so for example you are accurate that in order to do something that is consistently against your instincts like eating healthy food when rich food rich processed food that hyper stimulates the dopamine pathway is available to make those choices are that is a stressful dilemma inside the nervous system and as the nervous system gets fatigued and it could get too Teague in a variety of ways for example I'm amazed at a friend that had a that had a company that all it did was basically customer service and I went in to listen to consult with him and he and I listen to these 30 people in this boiler room doing customer service it was unbelievable I could not believe how unbelievably smooth and even-tempered and and pleasant these people were in the face of people basically yelling them and and and threatening them and want to talk to their supervisor and how come you didn't send me this back and etc it was is amazing to watch and at the end of it I said I don't know how you people do it and he said we we actually only hire one out of 100 applicants this is one out of a hundred applicants seems to have the temperament to do it too amazing to see for me at the end of an hour of doing that kind of work what would happen is I would be feeling you would have burned up a lot of neural action inside my head there would be fatigue and in that fatigue now I would have less stress tolerance for making healthy choices if you tempted me there's no question about that so from that standpoint if we want to call that emotional eating fair enough we can call it that how much of the variance is involved in in self-destructive eating patterns with respect to that not very much the the truth is is that we have a long list of culprits to to to essentially understand why it is that people have a hard time stay on a healthy track so let's let's just list these in our minds eye for a minute and take a look at this so in science what we what we do is we in statistics what we attempt to do when we're trying to understand a phenomenon is we we understand that that things are multiplied determined usually so there's usually multiple factors so if we're going to try to find out why you know crime is higher in Washington DC than it is in in you know Memphis then we're going to look at a variety of factors like how close together are the people and you know what what is their economic situation and how what are the employer situation and you know is the weather worse and etc as the police force you know less effective there would be all kinds of factors and we could build a statistical model that would be a predictive model based on multiple factors to try to understand why is that we see the differences between those two cities in terms of criminal behavior the same thing would be true if we're trying to understand predict whether an individual would be criminal would be like okay well let's look at there intelligence and their income and their you know situation with their family and whether they've got kids and how old they are whether a male or a female etc etc so we would have multiple factors that we would put into a prediction equation that each one of those factors it wouldn't be all equal some factors would be hugely determinative so for example if we're going to try to predict whether or not a person is likely to be incarcerated for violent crime the number one factor that we would put in the equation is sex whereas a male is vastly more likely than a female to have a violent crime the next thing we would have would be age of the male so the sex and the age and then the next thing would be the male's intelligence okay so those three factors would be huge factors that would help us determine whether or not somebody is likely to commit a violent crime there would be five or six other factors as well that we would put in there so that's called a regression equation and so if we were to build a regression equation of essentially self-destructive eating patterns we would find that the main culprits would be what I've identified in the pleasure trap in fact the pleasure trap is if a concept even though we when we speak of it often we're just talking about the hyperactivation the dopamine pathway with drug like results supernormal stimuli on the pleasure trap more broadly I define it as pleasure seeking pain avoidance energy conservation so three the three major motivational factors in in animal behavior we have to look across those three and see whether or not the food behavior that we that you know the food challenges that people have in the modern environment are actually you know are they being pulled on by each of these three factors I have to tell you how they're I believe they are so I believe that it's not only the supernormal stimuli which has absolutely nothing to do with any emotionality or and emotionality of the persons facing the supernormal stimuli by itself is a huge sermoning factor second is going to be energy conservation so whether or not the food is easily available in the environment or whether or not a healthy food is easily available in the environment these two things if you if you live in a place where you're surrounded by by a situation where all there is is healthy food available then then it's going to turn out and there's no unhealthy food available it's going to take a lot of hassle to get it then suddenly your behavior is going to be far more compliant I we all yeah we all live in an environment where the exact opposite is true ok so it's going to turn out that the pleasure-seeking and energy conservation are are both huge determining factors that they're like they're like the age and the sex of our criminal massive factors the third factor is going to be social pressure so this is what I call panel agents so there's different kinds of pain there's physical pain and there's emotional pain and it's going to turn out that one of the biggest things in humanity is they don't want to get kicked out of the group they don't want to be seen as weird it's a problem and so there's going to be a lot of social pressure getting together families even within your own families there's going to be pressure to go along with other people ok so now when we just look at these three factors pleasure-seeking social pain avoidance and energy conservation I think that we have the massive lion's share of the variance already accounted for ok but there's more there's more there's more things I've talked about yeah yeah I can all go on for a couple more minutes there's also the ego drop so it turns out that if you set the bar too high in trying to get an out of addictive trap and you fail then very often you just kick over the table it turns out to be a massive countervailing force that gets in people's way and trying to trying to get clear so you know there's the ego trap there's the pleasure trap um there's also the can I ask something about for bread yes is that what makes people have what they causes there's a psychological term that I think is hilarious is that what the hell the effect you know like ah I already ate off plan today so what the hell all the bets are off I'm going to eat all the things because I'm going to be back on plan tomorrow is that is that what that is is that kind of Italy yeah it turns out yeah the ego trap is the the the process by which we believe that others believe that we should be able to do something and it when it turns out that we apparently can't do it we will we will blatantly sabotage ourselves in order to indicate that we are not trying because if we are not trying then we really haven't failed so this is this is the Alcoholics mantra I'll start tomorrow you can't judge me today by what I'm doing because I'm not trying and it's going to turn out that the ego trap can be sprung from two sets of social processes that can be sprung from the outside by other people that actually are putting pressure on you that they think that you should be able to do this and also it can be from the internal audience so other people don't even have to be involved you can just believe that they would expect you to be able to handle a problem and then when you find out that you can't handle it you kick over the table and just say I forget it Gail trawl start tomorrow I'll start some other time so this is you know I have to say that when I look at the problem of trying to essentially set a course and to do an excellent job in terms of managing a person's you know diet in the modern environment I just see it as an unbelievably difficult problem and it's it's not insurmountable but it's close and as a result of that what I what I've also found people are can use as all get-out about why it's so hard and so what they what they then do is that they turn to shrink ologists who then say well the reason is you had problems in your childhood as if there's something wrong with the individual that needs to be uncovered and then we'll all be fine and we'll be able to do this that's not true yeah they're looking for the solution in the wrong place okay so that's there's more but the but what we can do is we can learn a tremendous amount from animal behavior that we see how hard the animals fight this okay and then when we look at people we see the same thing they're fighting it really hard and so we don't need to infer that the reason they're fighting it hard is that there's something deeply wrong with them in fact what I see is that everything is working properly when I see somebody a hundred pounds overweight eating two two ice cream cones I'm just looking at an animal that's doing exactly the way what it was designed to do so the fact that you know if I tell it hey if you do this you're going to have a better outcome it's going to look at me like really for how long okay and what is what is it going to be like they have an addictive process that they have to go through they're essentially and they've got a have Lobby and conditioning process they have to go through that they have to actually unwind to get to the other side of it resent ice tastes serves everything else it's unbelievable when I look at this thing I can't believe anybody does it I actually can't I mean I'm just astounded at how much success people have which shows you you know that a lot of people are motivated and they're conscientious and they're smart enough and they get themselves organized and they're probably disagreeable enough okay and they push back on other people and just say now I'm not doing it your way you can go to hell and live without you so there's just enough you got to have enough cuts in this and you got to have enough motivation and you got to have enough social circumstances and you got to have enough brain you got to have enough of this and you got to have enough of that and water for you to go against us so the I don't believe that there's very much value in analyzing the quote emotional parts of this I believe that this the failure to do this well causes tremendous emotional upheaval okay I believe that the Indigo trap and the frustration of the loss of self-esteem and the loss of a scheme from struggling with weight issues is immense okay I believe that this is a tremendously emotional problem but I believe that the cause and effect a relationship with the problem in the emotion has been deeply misunderstood okay that's why the the tagline to the pleasure trap is mastering the hidden force that undermines health and happiness the hidden force that undermines health and happiness is not deep emotional pain from trauma okay we'll find that in neo Freudian thought and the wrong okay via the hidden force that undermines health and happiness is the innate machinery that was built by evolution for an environment of scarcity and when we put that machinery in an environment of abundance this thing goes absolutely ass-backwards backfires and blows up in everybody's face okay and so that that's my you can tell you talk to a veteran of that question and yeah and I just want to say I really want to say like one thing that I have to thank you about because I was a person who I was over 436 pounds so I've taken on over 250 pounds and and I'm a really agreeable person and unfortunately like it's been it's been difficult for me so what I wanted to tell you is how much of a relief it was to hear I always thought that I was broken and that I was you know I'm just like flawed because everybody else can live in this world and not be struggling like I was struggling and Yahoo told me no here's you're working exactly the way you were made to work you're just maybe an overachiever and just reframing that may it be like alright I can do this and it's not my fault and I'm doing exactly what I was intended to do and I'm just too efficient at it and it made all the difference because it took away the shame and the it gave me like the hope to try again I just wanted to say thank God for that my great pleasure and I just you know you couldn't have said it I couldn't I couldn't have expressed that any better I'm very happy and now you we still have you still you know obviously the stressors in life can still pull us you know yank Asst but it sounds like you're doing you're doing just spectacular work that's just great Heather thank you I really appreciate it
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