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Episode 225: AGEs, evolution and diet, self esteem during recovery, finding your coalition
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dr. Lisle dr. Hawk you know we we've had a little bit of turmoil in the last you know a week or so I'll and so would you last time we comment it you commented on it and so would you like to say anything else about the current events going on well I mean I think first of all obviously we could talk a little bit more about Corona etc the best terms terms the Pitt current political situation that I think is a very touchy raw area I think there's an awful lot of light in fact there is tremendous light that evolutionary analysis will shine on this and actually Jen Hawks insights into this are instrumental to sing clearly and probably there there may be very few people in the world that can actually see through this thing clearly at this point but we all will be able to when Jen and I dissect this later on but we're not going to do it in the middle of the war we're going to do it afterwards when heads are cooler and we can all step back and get a a nice objective look and sort of look at look at our causal analysis of this one brick at a time very calmly and methodically and see if we can see our way to some very interesting insights but until then just sit tight and we'll I think we should it's more productive for us to look at other things yeah that makes sense yeah unless you're ready to jump in it's uh I think that's fair I am have definitely you know I've been discussing it with some clients here and there who have been curious it's definitely come up in some consults and I've said a few things on the record about it that people can can read about and I will I'll be making a video we're writing about it really very soon on our website so if people stay tuned at esteemed dynamics calm I'll be I'll be publishing something or another they're either just something that I put together something that both of us put together because there is there are obviously a huge number of evolutionary insights and political bringing bringing it all together in a political analysis that I don't see reflected anywhere else than the analytical space that so I think we have some value to contribute we just want to make sure that we're covering all of our bases and doing a really thorough job so but yes they do value value do a few nerds out there that's the kind of business that were in that's good I I didn't I didn't realize you were ready to I think about this soon but hey I'm do it that way I think so I think it's it's a you know I don't I don't want to say next week or anything but I think it's you're important yeah like like you're saying we don't want to join the just the thread off ania voices yeah um we're it's not it's not contributing any sort of academic analysis but I think we do have important things to add to the conversation so we don't want to we don't want to completely take ourselves out of it but we want to make sure that we're doing a good job yeah there you go political scientist Itchy she's got a little itchy finger on the drawing board [Laughter] our listeners and I are patiently waiting for when such a time is the right time to do to do such an analysis all right Nathan what do we got well our first question mm-hmm dear doctors looking at a list of the foods with the most AG es in them fried or high-temperature cooked high protein fat sugar foods it almost seems as if humans can in fact taste these advanced glycation end-products specifically not just the increased caloric density from removing the water the caramelization actually tastes better without necessarily making it much lower effort calories why should the products of cooked fats and protein especially in combination with each other and sugar taste so much better to humans than those same products mildly cooked or uncooked cooking fat doesn't make its calories more available or make high protein meals as proportionally more pleasurable as the increase in calorie density well you know here's the problem that I don't know and so I don't know and there's things a lot of things about nutrition that I don't know and Jen do you know the answer to this I am NOT an expert on this particular topic I'm not an expert on nutritional topics in general and I don't know much about AG ease I've read some things and I've watched some videos out there in the space but I personally I can't contribute much hmm Nathan do you know the answer to this you know yeah I've kind of learned that when I don't know that we got a consultant expert in nutrition and and yeah well that's that's typically what I do I'm here with my mother so my mother's not an experts already no she doesn't know Nathan you don't know Jen can can you help us here do we have any way to answer this question I have I have a I have a friends who might be able to contribute let me let me see if I can ring him up did someone say expert in nutrition oh my god is that is that John Michael Greger this is Gregory you just got a rub the rub the lamp and I will pop up to answer any nutrition questions you may ever have Wow how handy is that all right well Michael welcome thank you so much for joining us I don't know by what kind of magic you're with us but hey you're here that's fantastic yes it's a it's a magic lamp wishes we can ask him three questions yeah you just got to look into a mirror and say broccoli three times in a row and I pop right up there's there's no oil in this lamp I'm assuming my first answer our first answer our question for us what do you have to say oh well the the questions little confused carmelization is actually a different process there are number different compounds created by high dry heat starting about 300 degrees Fahrenheit thermalization is when your the the pyrolysis of sugars when you're burning off sugars there's these Maillard reaction products which are created with a by the combination of dry heat plus sugars plus amino acids the constituents of protein and in the late stages you can create these advanced glycation end-products he's aging easy so called glycotoxins and and that's a combination of both lipid the fat and sugar and amino acids and it should be no surprise that we have developed a taste for cooked compounds because cooking increases food safety particularly for these kind of products animal products as well as improves the digestibility of many other foods and so developing a a an attraction to two cooked flavor compounds seems to make evolutionary sense to me unfortunately they're not particularly good for you and that's why I would encourage one of the reasons why for example stewed meat in a soup is healthier than braised or broiled or or baked or barbecued aha fantastic Michael thank you thank you very much hey what uh what do we say we met Michael you've you been super busy and obviously you're you've been you know I know something about what it takes to to put a book together I've never put a book together of the magnitude of the book that you just published yeah just give us a feel for kind of what some of your thoughts have been now in these last few months as you've been working on this and things we ought to be looking for and thinking about you mean you haven't written a 600-page book with 3,500 scientific citations in six weeks saw lacquer either how to survive a pandemic out now in both audio book and ebook out in August in physical copies and of course all proceeds I get from my books donate directly to charity just want to have everyone to have this access to this life-saving information I think one thing that that my book my contribution adds which is being really neglected is you know the the best way to survive a pandemic is really to prevent it in the first places of the bulk of the book actually centers around tracing the origins of the couple of Toronto Varsity what we can do to prevent even greater infectious disease threats in the future you know over the last few decades hundreds of human pathogens have emerged at a rate unprecedented in human history say wait a second emerged from we're mostly from animals the AIDS virus is blamed on the butchering of primates and the bushmeat trade in Africa mad cow disease is because we turn to cows and the carnivores and cannibals SARS in covent nineteenth have been traced back to the exotic wild animal trade you know but our last pandemic swine flu in 2009 arose now from some backwater wet market in Asia but was largely made in the USA on pig operations in the United States now thankfully swine flu only killed about a half a million people but then next time we might not be so lucky as difficult as Coppa 19 has been it may just be a dress rehearsal for an even greater threat waiting in the wings of chickens according to the CDC the leading candidate for the next pandemic is a bird flu virus known as h7 and 9 which is a hundred times deadlier than kovat 19 instead of one in 250 cases dying 8 7 and 9 has killed 40 percent of the people in fact the last time a bird flu virus jumped species directly to humans and caused a pandemic it triggered the deadliest plague in human history the 1918 pandemic which killed upwards of 50 million people that had a 2% death rate what if we had a pandemic infecting billions where death was closer to a flip of a corn but the good news is there's something we can do about it just as eliminating the exotic animal trade and live animal markets may go a long way towards preventing the next coronavirus pandemic reforming the way we raised domestic animals for food may help first all the next killer flu the unprecedented emergency 7 and 9 and 10 other bird flu viruses newly infecting people around the world has been blamed on industrial poultry production you know when we overcrowd thousands of animals and these cramped filthy football-field-sized sheds the light beak to beak or synapses now to top their own waste it's just a breeding ground for disease the sheer numbers of animals the overcrowding the stress crippling their immune systems the the ammonia from the decomposing waste burning their lungs lack of fresh air lack a lack of sunlight put all these factors together and what you have is really a perfect storm environment for the emergence and spread these so-called super strains of influenza that's why the American Public Health Association the largest and oldest Association of public health professionals in the world is called for a moratorium on factory farming the bottom line is that it's not worth risking the lives of millions of people for the sake of cheaper chicken I would think so Magnificent Michael yeah dr. Greger thank you so much I've been reading your I've been listening and reading your book at the same time and it's quite quite remarkable I've learned more than I thought I could about a metamorphosis of viruses and and transmissions and you know soon to be learning about kovat yeah fabulous so Michael this obviously you didn't just you didn't cook this up recently so this was actually your intellectual focus earlier in your career is that correct yeah the first half of my I mean people know me for my work in lifestyle medicine but first half of my career was in public health particularly emerging infectious diseases most of my peer-reviewed publications in that field so yeah but I was of course shouting it from the rooftops along with other public health professionals completely ignored nobody wanted to hear but finally we have this this opportunity people people right are paying attention to the risk of pandemic disease thankfully we got off so easy dodged a bullet with this one and but it was just bad enough to wake people up to the potential of a truly devastating pandemic that may be coming down the pike yeah well this is the this is the notion if sometimes the worst thing that happens is the best thing that could happen that that obviously this was a tragedy for a lot of people in a very expensive process but maybe just maybe we will we will make some super super important changes fabulous thank you thanks for that for helping us all right Nathan what else we got going dr. Greger thank you so much for coming on it's just a true honor yeah we're not kicking them off either stick around stick around and see if you can chime in on any of these these are the questions that we have the problem is they need to eat better that's all right let's go Nathan let's see what else we got all right dear doctors I understand that adopting a whole food plant-based diet is a way of beating our genes that hasn't caught up to our hyper stimulated modern environment if we were to continue forward without adopting the diet wouldn't our genes eventually catch up obviously this does nothing for us in present society and may result in a substantial loss of life but I'm wondering what that future would look like from an evolutionary perspective well I'll go ahead and answer this Jen the better day this is a common question this is a version of this question a lot and it's like yeah the evolution doesn't work on this kind of timescale right right evolution evolution also works on a particular problem which is the statistical increased likelihood of successful reproduction so it doesn't really care quite frankly evolution doesn't care once you're 50 you evolution could care less so yeah the three of you are still alive but I've been dead for ten years yeah just tell my look at me I'm an evolutionary dead end okay yeah so this is the the story is that because the the food does not wreck people's ability to survive and reproduce it what it does is it wrecks the second half of their life and through debility and then premature death so that's that's what unhealthy habits do and evolution is not working statistically on that problem so the answer to the question is no no we are we're gonna we will remain with the needs of a stone-age body and we will remain with a stone-age brain that actually wants the richest food that it can get and when we provide it with the kind of food that that makes people like dr. Gregor roll their eyes and and be frustrated people are going to continue to circle around heading for that food and they're going to continue to have the kind of disability and deterioration in later life but not enough early in life to make any difference on evolutions process at all so there you have it that's it good question and move on well maybe dr. Gregor can comment on I remember a long time ago I read an article in chemical census journal and it they were studying the effect of meat consumption on body odor attractiveness and it's not that when when they when when they smelled when they took a bunch of men and they had them where axillary pads so collecting their body odor for you know a few a few days and then for the final 24 hours after being two weeks on either an on meat diet and with no alcohol and a meat diet with no alcohol they found that they actually smelled more attractive to the women who were rating them on several different scales so so why are you my god this question you should be asking me this question like cancer I've got a large sample size yeah what's the verdict oh yeah there's there's a big difference at least at the firt for my the my genetic impression is that I find non meat-eating individuals much more sort of attractive in ER personally in that immediate kind of ephemeral pheromone sort of sense and I'm sure I can replicate it by sniffing t-shirts yeah there's sort of a it's it's but I think it probably has a lot to do with you know the compatibility of the respective microbiomes I'm not sure that it would be I'm not sure you would see the same effect with vegan women that you would see with meat-eating women you know people who sniff a more compatible microbiome similar to their own diet might have more built-in attraction whereas my microbiome is a little alarmed by a meat-eating diet oh but but yeah it's a it's interesting there there have been several studies that have come to similar results interesting I didn't know this but Michael you must know it you must have known this and this is secret that you were telling of course I do body a competitive edge back in 2007 I did a video on it yeah not only are the odor of meat-eating odor donors ready to secretly more attractive more pleasant but they said that they had a lower perceived body odor he Donna city meaning pleasure so vegetarians smells significantly more pleasurable evidently same masculinity by the way but less smelling more pleasant and significantly judged as more attractive so the one liner takeaway if I remember my video correctly is that meat is the pits because there's all sniffing armpit pads oh I'll go ahead and put in here a pitch for nutritionfacts.org since Michael might not do it on his own behalf but there's there's all these they don't you know you see these memes about with with Donald Trump how there's always a tweet people will go back and dig into the archives and find a tweet that he is issued to describe the current moment or that contradicts the current moment and with nutritionfacts.org there's always of video there's almost nothing that we can talk about that would be idly interest to us that there wouldn't be that that hasn't been documented in pithy video form dating back more than a decade now so people should avail themselves of all of the information that they can find over there oh cool and a forth dr. Greger dr. Lyle dr. Hawk thank you you bet not that this ever helped me get a date you know this promise out of the vegan world about how things are supposed to be so damn rosy sure all right a question for the doctors I have a side gig teaching whole food plant-based nutrition to women in recovery in sober houses in the Boston area I've been teaching via zoom these past few weeks the program was developed by an organization in recovery based on the work of Nathaniel Branden six elements and they have merged this approach with plant-based nutrition to develop a specific program around wellness designed to support women in recovery with the knowledge to make better food choices it also addresses stress management and other wellness topics the curriculum addresses everything from food addiction and the pleasure trap mmm to stress management to exercise to meal planning and recipes in the groups which meet weekly for two hours over 10 weeks the women always almost always start out extremely cynical but by the third or a second or third week I usually have them coming along with me on the ride and opening their minds a bit attendance is mandatory so they have to be in the group and because of that I employ a very non-threatening approach share the science lots of recipes how it worked for me personally etc there are always some women who are completely close to the comp concepts but I focus on those who are curious and want to learn my question is around the self-esteem content and the best way to integrate the two topics I'm quite comfortable with the nutrition aspect as I've done some training but I feel like I could use a deeper understanding of how to support their development of self-esteem given their history of addiction to alcohol or drugs I'm wondering number one how the doctors feel about dr. Brandon Brandon's work and number two if if they have any specific suggestions for supporting women in recovery with self-esteem and number perhaps number three any thoughts on how to best integrate the two topics well sure yeah I'm not as well versed in Nathaniel Branden as you are Doug so you can speak more specifically to him and and you know what that approach would look like from this perspective but as someone who has been in recovery and embraced a whole food plant-based diet I have some things to say about this and the first is that you know people in recovery people in early recovery I think I would be very mindful about overloading them with information and overloading them with there's this sort of this feeling when you're in very early recovery you're you're really relearning how to take care of yourself you're relearning everything about how to live your life you you may have bypassed the whole process of adulting depending on when you started to use and and you're really kind of stuck in this permanent adolescence when it comes to taking care of yourself to feeding yourself to paying your bills to um you know practicing good communication in your relationships like all of these basic things that that you miss out on you miss out on the exposure to those processes if you're deep in an addictive process from a very young age with which most people who get into trouble with recovery are do get themselves into so I I remember when I was early in the process there were a lot of there's just so much literature there's so much information and I really I have the kind of personality with my openness and my conscientiousness particularly that where I I felt I had that drive in that notion that the more information I could get the better that if I could better understand myself and better understand how to perfect this recovery thing then I would I would put myself in a better position going forward and it's almost the flipside of the the way that you're living your life in addiction is this absolute abdication of responsibility and this sort of removal from sovereignty over your own life and a lot of people in recovery it's not just me I've seen this in in all kinds of different recovery programs and in 12-step specifically and in group therapy there's this kind of there's often this inclination or this turn toward perfectionism among the the more conscientious people so I I mean I'm sure it's a beautiful program and it's you're you're dealing with really important themes and self-esteem is is critically important for these women to understand and to begin mastering but it's it's like this is really baby steps at the beginning and the most important thing is that you know they're not picking up or they're not using and they're learning really basic habits with the with the whole plant diet to nourish themselves which you know this is like addicts are notorious for just eating absolute crap food sometimes to the point where especially with pretty advanced alcoholism it's really all they can keep down and it's it's all they can successfully digest or afford or whatever it is but there's not not a lot of people in advanced advanced process of processes of addiction that are nourishing themselves with good foods so I would just really dial this strip it down to the basics you know this is how we cook a really healthy basic one pot meal that's very starch centered you know including some veggies incorporating some of you know Michael's daily dozen recommendations and other you know improving as you go but not trying to overload yourself all at once with getting it to perfect not letting perfection be the enemy of the good in other words so I think that's a really important notion but for the self-esteem piece I don't know about Brandon specifically but I think that this is just beautifully sort of naturally and integrated in the one-day-at-a-time recovery model that is that is going to be ascendant and really any recovery program that you don't want to be looking too far into the future and future tripping about whether you're gonna stay sober for the rest of your life here you're dealing with the process of today and you're building your self-esteem with the feedback that comes from your internal audience from doing a really good job today whatever that looks like within the program so it's it's making yourself three square meals of really nourishing starch based food today it's getting yourself out for a walk and some sunshine spending some time with friends social distancing permitting just engaging in those sort of basic techniques of what we might call for lack of better word just kind of self-care and just just parenting yourself and learning how to adult and and having having a system for that that your internal audience is able to kind of check off as you accomplish those goals everyday and give you the feedback as you you slowly improve your daily existence through just learning how to take basic care of yourself that's that's generally how I would approach it with mindfulness to that your brain is the primary thing that is in recovery you know I tell people all the time that for me it wasn't until about the third year of sobriety that I felt like somebody turned the lights on in the room and cognitively I was able to integrate a lot more information than I could for those first couple of years it's really you're you've done a number on yourself physically and mentally and depending on the program spiritually and emotionally as well so you really got it you have to give yourself a lot of time and a lot of compassion while you crawl your way out of that so very slowly one day at a time one good square meal at a time I think is the way to approach that fabulous excellent the yep I want to comment on a couple things the this has to do with what what Jen wasn't addressing which is the the issues of Nathaniel Brandon's approach Nathaniel Brennan is a there was a forerunner in thinking about self-esteem and he much of what he said was right on target as consistent with the way that I think about it however there's also large components of his thinking he was as much as he wouldn't have wanted to be he was also a product of the mid twentieth century and as a result he he's very steeped in psychodynamic thought now he himself in his writings would would say that he had rejected both psychoanalysis and behaviorism but it turns out that he didn't really do that and so he didn't have the conceptual understanding that we have about the the primacy of genetics and personality and he wouldn't he he would have thought there's this thing called self esteem that can be damaged in your youth and that you have permanent scars and that we need to go back into childhood and think through relationships with your parents and possibly siblings and family dynamics etc and hurts from past relationships and that that essentially that that that process needs to be essentially resurrected and examined and needs to be sort of healed this is incorrect and so that the program to the extent that it emphasizes the components of Brandon's thinking that you have essentially emotional repression that is now unconsciously buried that is causing you to do self-destructive processes this is a fundamental mistake and so what we want to do is we want to take the positive notions of Brandon which are consistent with what we talked about which is that self-esteem is actually a process where where our internal audience observes us making excellent efforts and then give us us feedback that is positive about that okay the Brandon will when you do things poorly and you actually have internally negative reverberations about that that is not coming from your history and a damage to your nervous system in in fact what that's coming from is that's coming from either in a neatly hyper conscientious internal audience or it's coming from a completely reasonable internal audience that has observed mediocre execution of behavior okay so that this seems a little technical and a little overly detailed our website will be will be updated very soon and there will be a detailed explanation of how self-esteem processes work they're actually not super complicated but they are actually quite different than the common status quo and thinking about self-esteem and that includes Brandon so I would give Brandon an A and some marinas and an F and others and so our job now is to take the a work from his thinking and minimize in your program anything that has to do with ancient history childhood or any other thing because that's a that's a waste of time and it's a red herring and it's actually counterproductive mm-hmm now dr. Lyle dr. haka I noticed that my life is that you know when my when my self-esteem mechanism is working appropriately I'm I'm more agreeable I feel more stable I feel like I just I just feel like my personality is just a tad bit more conducive to to life and it's incredible as I've watched this happen and so my question is is how do we really know what somebody's personality is until we actually get them to the point where they are proud of themselves and their self-esteem mechanism is full power full power go ahead Jimmy genuine chime in oh well I'll let you continue on that if you took Titan with with the brand and stuff yeah well I think the truth of the matter is is that that your personality didn't change that you're just the same person that is in better circumstances so if we looked at across the big five or any any other way of measuring personality we see that nothing has changed you're just in you're essentially the same cat but we put you with a new owner that's better okay and so when you're under better circumstances then every you know the your whole life is better and so you're gonna be for example you're probably like going to be more stable you're probably gonna be more agreeable etc and so you get this kid to sleep better at night so you take anybody and you put them under various stressors and they're functioning is going to look a little different than when they're when they're not not as stressed and self-esteem when we have the there's a reason why Allen gave the pleasure trap the tagline mastering the hidden force that undermines health and happiness that that was not that was not grand yes that was very carefully thought through that the pleasure trap is a hidden force it's hidden because it's it's not understood it's completely unnatural to all species to have anything called the pleasure trap pleasure trap is specifically artificial process stimulation that will cause the individual to be self-destructive because it's trapping a motivational system that was built for another purpose and so it is the hidden force that undermines both health which we all know but happiness and a huge way that it undermines happiness is that when you're in the throes of addiction you are you know you're doing counterproductive things that you're wrecking your existence but you have an extremely difficult time not doing it no matter how intelligent conscientious you are and so and what happens is the internal audience watches this process and it's just befuddled and disgusted and everything else under the Sun so as a result there's a lot of negative feedback that's coming legitimately from the internal audience as it observes the self self-destruct behind the pleasure trap okay and also that you're going to find the ego trap the self is going to look at the internal audiences expectations and say well the hell with this psycho I'm just gonna go drink or whatever else that is going to be we're just I'm going to go eat you know big chunk of chocolate cake forget it it would spot the ego trap and the pleasure trap are a twin set of snakes that are really out to wipeout you know are very potent when it comes to trying to get people on any kind of healthy groove in the face of the pleasure trap or any any kind of challenge of that magnitude the the reason why I'm speaking at lengthen to this individuals a question is that any any attempt to have a program that is trying to address these things and is trying to include what they believe is a comprehensive perspective which would include childhood pain adverse childhood events experiences etc that have done damage to the quote self esteem this is actually fundamentally right at its root wrong and it's actually a destructive process I believe I can't prove that scientifically but it's obvious when you have people spending a great deal of time and energy suffering and moping and reanalyzing and digging in the wrong place for the treasure they're not going to be as effective as if they know just where to look where we want to look is in the nature of how the self-esteem mechanism works and when we work there and we when we put our lever in the right place we can start to move the person's world okay and they very well may look like they have quote personality changes secondary to that but really we've just put that same personality under better circumstances ie we've increased the person's effectiveness and their happiness Wow thank you my grandmother used to tell me she says 25 percent of what you eat is for yourself and 75 percent is for your doctor and so I wonder if 25 percent what you say to a psychologist is for you and 75 percent is food for them oh yeah additional psychodynamic therapy absolutely and III again I mean I've talked about this before but I have this unique perspective coming out of early recovery and seeking out psycho dining under every Rock for a psychodynamic explanation of my troubles that I could find everywhere except oh I have a genetic predisposition to alcoholism and you know the the way out is to stoke the self-esteem process and to and to start feeling proud of myself and pride in my own life and my and my progress toward competitive goals which has to start off really really small when you're coming out of deep addiction like you this is a moving target you're not you're not coming out of a decade of major addiction and immediately setting you're setting those competitive goals at the same level that they're going to be in another ten years it's a iterative process as you learn to you learn to trust yourself you build more self-efficacy and you just get healthier in your in your your brain rebuilds itself over that period of time so it's a it's a huge process for people and it's incredibly incredibly difficult for people to go through and so it's great that you're offering this this program for these women who are going through this but we don't want to completely take them take them off the path by giving and these these excuses and these childhood stories that are like like Doug is saying put them in the wrong direction in their own in their own self-improvement and their eventual competitive success yeah this is good though this is like one of the better approaches that I've heard yeah I think it's I think it's excellent I think it just probably needs a little bit of pruning and a little bit of direction from what did we do with its Team Dynamics and they probably have you know you know something that could be very potent excellent now dr. Lyle and dr. hawk I remember hearing for somebody that they went to us not this particular type of seminar but it was a seminar and and they were they were trying to do this you know this type of let's go back and look at your childhood trauma and whatnot and there was part of the group didn't want to do that and part of the group just wanted nothing just wanted to do nothing but that so what would you say to a facilitator like this asking us the question about the people who you know they want to focus on that and that's all they want to do and they get quite disagreeable about it wow they're watching they're watching bell curves in action I mean you're gonna I'm gonna find that everywhere yeah the problem is is that this is going to be hearted soul about what Jen and I will be talking about in detail over the next you know few years this is the this is the the biggest single mistake sitting in the middle of personal transformation any kind of therapeutic process at cetera is is this this is the biggest fundamental mistake and so there are reasons why as Jen would put there are fascinating perverse incentives that make this continually popular despite the fact that it is is fundamentally self-destructive but that's okay we'll get to it we will explain and we will understand and hopefully when we're all through the world will be a little bit a little bit brighter as a result of having light been shown on this problem and as a provider if you're if you're leading a workshop you're going to like you're guaranteed to have that that distribution of responses in any class that you have so any group of people you're gonna have some people who are more resonant with you know what we call the source code of evolutionary psychology and the the truth of taking responsibility for your life and others who are more resistant to it and who want to stay mired in the muck that's just gonna that is going to play out in any large group that is up to anything in the world so that that is very much like you're not in the business of making those people who want to stay stuck in the muck feel good about that you're you're in the business of giving them the truth and and giving them the tools that are going to be most effective for them making really meaningful change in their lives so you don't have to be shitty about it but you you you want to be in enough of a position of power in your workshop or in your training program well you don't have to kind of surrender and kowtow to the demands of disagreeable people who want to stay mired in those stories and who are really resistant to hearing the truth about their process so that's that's just sort of an overarching principle that can ensure and protect you from having to accommodate that sort of that's that particular strain of personality cancer yeah yeah and and - and generally I would be the first to say that an awful lot of people that are naively and interested in trying to figure out the route and have a lot of self esteem chaos basically echoing through their nervous system and are confused and if you're being told that the reasons have or because you were victim 28 years ago it it's as you know experts are telling you and that's what the whole world says it's an echo chamber of ignorance and so the as a result you know we're going to be we're going to be kind but firm as we understand that the truth is different than that and it's entually try to direct people clinically to something that's going to be much more useful all right all right we got one more question okay okay dear doctors I'm a thirty year old junior doctor and longtime fan of the show I'm highly conscientious fairly introverted open agreeable and a bit unstable in my short life I have been a metalhead drummer a skateboarder have studied classical piano and physics and am now a doctor I have spent countless hours on each of these pursuits I have at times been very happy and lucky in love and at other times miserable and alone in my early 20s I suffered a terrible two-year long depressive episode that I was only able to escape by completely overhauling my life with a major shift in values and a new single-minded focus on making intelligent decisions and working hard to slowly improve my happiness over many years a reentry oriented my life away from exploration joy and growth towards basically doing everything I can to make sure I don't get depressed again I decided to enter medicine in order to have a high paying high status dependable job even though it meant five six years of living on a very low income studying something that I actually find quite boring unfortunately I have now been finding it increasingly difficult to relate to the people around me and I've been floundering in social situations both at work and outside work I don't have a relaxed easygoing attitude and I can't fake it any longer I also have been single for two years and now have few remaining close friends I think this is partly because I have lived a pretty extreme life and have pushed myself very hard through some tough situations which makes it hard to relate to others but also because a fairly extreme and openness and conscientiousness Department what advice do you have for improving my social situation I know dr. Lisle recommends fishing where the fish are but I'm struggling to find my fish well what do you feel like Jen yeah well yeah let's let's see so I would say the more this sounds like a very rarefied personality type yeah so you've got an extreme personality type which is just who you are so you've had this you know crazy history of all of these different experiences and it has cost you some some social connections and it's made it more difficult to find people to connect with and that's just what it is so we can't change who you are we can't change what drives you and what kind of relationships you're seeking and so the the fish where you fish our metaphor is sort of like you just have to hate I hate to I hate to expand upon such a non-vegan medal you just have to it's a numbers game if you've got a very rare personality that just means that you have to expose yourself to that many more potential candidates for coalition than somebody with a more average personality or more an easier personality to find coalition members so this is going to apply to people with all kinds of distortion in there Big Five just as the the more difficult it is for you to find similarly built humans who are going to enjoy the same kind of things that you are and we're gonna see in you a valuable insurance policy that is represented by their friendship by your friendship with them which is what friendship really is if you're you've got to be providing value to them just like they have to be providing value to you and you know useful to each other when things go poorly in the future if they do and so in your case with with the sort of personality type that you have it's gonna be tougher it's gonna be tougher to find those people it does it they're out there just like you're out there but it is a it's a matter of exposing yourself to greater numbers of people who don't qualify for coalition and getting more discerning about you know moving quickly on from those people once you rule them out of coalition candidacy and just hoping that the hoping that the the Lords of fate bestow you with people who do qualify for coalition and and then nurturing those connections when you win and if you do find them and they're rare you know I I have an unusual personality it's not I don't think it's as as distorted on the dimensions that you're talking about but it is distorted on several and it's it's been difficult for me to find people who qualify for coalition but I stumble across them once in a while but I'm also extroverted enough that I I talk to a lot of people and I vet a lot of people for potential friendship and coalition that ultimately don't make the cut and so you have to you have to just kind of embrace that process and hope that you get lucky would be the way that I would look at that with with friendship with romance and with anything else and then and then when Jen had good things happen and she dumps her friends to be true jeans that's my number one coalition member all right now like the I want to add a few things this is just just beautiful all right on the I would say this that this I hear something interesting happening and that is that the person had a had a major depressive process and they're a little intimidated about that because it's a little bit mysterious and they found that by getting productive and having some kind of moving forward that they got happy again so let's talk just very briefly so we're under understand clearly what happiness and depression are these are this is sort of a cleaver of a continuum of quality the qualitative feeling of emotional experience and of course those qualitative feelings are actually nothing other than analogues for the underlying probabilities of genes survival that are sitting under those experiences so obviously an orgasm under the right conditions with the right person should be about as good as it gets for human beings which we would expect that it would be because that's how the genes are going to get reproduced and those would be the genes that you would want to be reproduced on the other hand being tortured or some other such thing when you're about to die that's about the worst thing so the feelings are met are an analog map of gene survival probabilities and so therefore depression is is it maybe mysterious to this individual but it's actually not mysterious at all if we were to analyze it from this perspective we would realize that the Depression was failure feedback and so knowing that depression is simply failure feedback and understanding that we don't have to work frenetically to avoid failure feedback we just have to understand the nature of that feedback and then map our way around that failure you know domain more effectively and so success leaves clues in those arenas and so we have to just be smart about that and i sounds to me like this person has not had any serious trouble in many years and we wouldn't expect them to ever have trouble again the the what Jen was talking about was you could you could think about life as a giant a giant smorgasbord people so in that smorgasbord are your happiness is dependent upon are you going and getting you know really good food that you like repeatedly that's what it's going to be and so the there's going to be a certain amount of novelty that's that's necessary you're not going to want to just have brown rice and broccoli every day of your life even though it might be adequate at some times so you're going to want to have some novelty and but you're in order to get the novelty and get your coalition to to meet a lot of your different potentials for activating your moods happiness there's going to be some trial and error and inevitable short-term failure that's the way it works the so it's we look at this life this is a young person but life is really a process of it's a journey of self-discovery and that means that sounds highfalutin but it's not meant to be it's essentially you've got a personality or a genetic characteristics that your preferences fundamentally will never change there the job is to figure out it's basically like a pinball game that if we we know where the points are scored and how to do it then we can hit those circuits more often and more completely and have a greater life satisfaction it's it's not fundamentally that hard very often when we're unhappy and we're frustrated the the answers are not that far from the surface they are in relationships that are causing us difficulty in this case the person is not very happy about their work they have done a tremendous job in putting themselves in a position where they can be financially flexible so go find components within that career that are exciting or if they're not you can always work that career part-time and if you desperately want to paint and be a van Gogh then you can do it because you can work two days a week and spend the other five days a week as van Gogh if that's what you want to do so your nervous system leaves you Clues just as success always leaves clues anywhere in the marketplace it also leaves clues inside you've had experiences of happiness there's a pattern to those find out where to spend your time and energy where it hits those circuits and scores those points we shouldn't have to live this life the slightest bit with other than short-term discomfort given the hand that this person has there's all kinds of people and all kinds of very interesting and citing things to do dr. Lisle dr. Hawk and dr. Greger thank you so so much for joining us this evening and for answering these questions for us and enlightening us to some of the secrets of beating our genes very good thank you Nathan thank you Michael for sharing this hour with us honored to be on anytime I gotta say one more thing just for people that now may be heard Michael for the first time that there's a the thing that any people that do any speaking in the world in the in the arenas where Michael speaks we all know something about this and that is you don't want to go in front of Michael and you definitely don't want to go behind Michael you don't want to look bad because you're going to if you're ready we're there so it's a joy to have you with us Michael but let's make sure that I never have to speak at front or behind you let's just keep it keep a little distance for me but thanks for coming I would just be happy to be back speaking at a conference period Oh actual real live event
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