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Episode 238: Calorie budget, baby vs adult talk, russian women, heritability, corporate jargon
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dear doctors i have been a proponent of wholesome eating as the guarantee of good health and optimal weight the approach has worked great for me but i'm still curious to know if eating high calorie dense foods within a strict daily caloric budget is detrimental to one's health i have no cravings or addictions of any sort it's almost an academic question mostly concerning socially inflicted foods like barbecue wine cheese etc ah academic question go ahead jen you're the academician yeah well there's a couple of different questions nested inside of this question so um the the first is you know this assumption that you've got a strict caloric budget every day that you can i've this has been a topic that's been coming up a lot with clients so i just will take a little minute to talk about this so this you know you've you've got some program some website that tells you yeah according to your height in in your perceived activity level you should be eating 176 63 calories a day or whatever it tells you so this these things are such general estimates and it's it's there's so much noise in your little calculators of your strict calorie budget when you plug in oh i had an apple and then i had two slices of bread and i had a bowl of oatmeal you could be off by hundreds and hundreds of calories depending on how ripe the apple is and how like the particular processing of any kind of item even if you're only eating processed food with specific ingredients and nutritional facts on the back and you're plugging that in directly that's still subject to a lot of error and a lot of noise so the idea that you're within this exacting calorie budget and and by following that you're you're going to be successful long term is really sort of just a generally confused notion and that's part of why when we talk about you know long-term success on a whole food plant-based diet or just a whole food diet in general you really want to be moving more toward the what you're eating rather than the exactly how much and trying to measure it through the arbitrary system it's not that calories don't matter of course calories matter but your perception of exactly how many calories you need and exactly how many you're getting is likely to be off by quite a bit most of the time so that's just kind of just compartmentalized number piece number one there um the second is that your of course there are there's a there's a difference between eating high calorie high calorie dense foods and the kind of things that you're talking about so you're listing barbecue wine and cheese so the barbecue wine and cheese are different kind they're going to have different effects than something like a lot of walnuts or a lot of avocado or a lot of you know sweet potatoes or depending where you draw the line at calorically dense and what we mean by that so of course there are detrimental effects associated with specific foods and some of the some of the most detrimental things are going to be things like alcohol and dairy and processed meats and we i don't think we we need to get into all of the ways that those things can harm you on the show in fact there's a very helpful resource on the internet for that my my dear friend michael greger's website nutritionfacts.org has a compendium of videos that you can watch that'll tell you all about everything that you could possibly need or want to know about the detrimental effects or the positive effects of any one of those substances so for any particular thing that you might be interested in consuming that we would identify as calorically dense there could be all kinds of externalities and detrimental effects associated with that food so plenty of good reasons not to drink alcohol plenty of good reasons not to eat cheese apart from the fact that they are higher in calories so that's that's my general rant on that just kind of stick to whole foods that would have been familiar to your ancestors and you're going to be mostly on on the right track right all good all right thank you okay our next question dear dr lyle i love your show i have a question my girlfriend often slips into baby talk and it grates on my nerves but i don't know how to stop it do you have any suggestions huh they're asking you so um yeah that's actually a little bit tricky because um obviously this sort of comes naturally to this person and the and it i can understand there there'd be a number of reasons why it might grade on your nerves uh but let's let's talk a little bit um hmm let's talk a little bit about where this may come from the uh i i think i'm remembering the guy's name right there's i think the the guy's name is eric byrne he he was a psychoanalyst you know writing i think of the 1950s and 60s and i believe that's the father of transactional analysis so jen if you got a cell phone there look it up make sure i'm right the uh but uh and transactional analysis when it came out it was pretty big hit in the sort of self-help communications movements in the 1960s and 70s it was it was sort of bordering it was moving away from psychoanalysis and sort of moving into uh humanistic psychology so i think i think burn was sort of halfway in both camps so this was a very hopeful interesting instructive hands-on way of looking at human communication now i think it has a lot of merit and you know at the time anything that even remotely said the word child or parent you know when i was in grad school i just rolled my eyes and ran the other way and this was not talked about in grad school but it's talked talked about among clinical psychologists or it certainly was at the time i don't i think it's sort of out of vogue now the uh although people do talk about quote the inner child and that sort of thing but uh this was uh the transactional analysis in retrospect you know probably you know much later far far after i became acquainted with ep uh probably a decade after that i i started to realize it dawned on me that transactional analysis had merit and it it would it would uh seem to be possible that you could have essentially uh identifiable categories of relationships that the mind would economize its computations and reproductive computations in light of what is the nature of this relationship so for example if it's parent child the child is aware and or can read cues that they've got a lot of leverage over the parents they are extremely important and therefore for example complaining would be a very good thing to do because you're likely to be able to get resources that way and you'd run a benefit analysis on on those complaints and you'd also have a memory system for how those complaints were were addressed uh that would be important as well so you could modify it but the fact that you would you might essentially in be able to infer a category of relationships i.e parent child and what you could expect to get out of that and therefore would alter your communication style that actually seemed to me to be very possible in terms of human instinctual programming and so uh what byrne did was he had little graphs and it's pac parent adult child so essentially saying that your communication is coming from one of those three roles so in this show everything that happens is adult adult so even though people may ask us questions so they're asking for advice it's still adult adult so that's how we're talking so uh but a parent child uh communication is different so a parent child is like listen you know a child is like hey i need your help and the parent is okay let me tell you what you're gonna do or you need to do this you need to do that and the parent is inferring some responsibility for outcomes etc children i've actually watched people like in my office over the years they will slip into child mode in order to try to get me to get in a parent mode so that i'll take a bunch of responsibility for their problems and fix them okay so that in other words i'm i'm by the way and like i'm like iron man i like i'm made out of steel there's no way that that's gonna happen it was as soon as i sniff it happening my hackles go up okay it's like uh-uh this is you're not slipping me into the parent mode and i i remember a therapist that i that i respected had a little had a little carving one of those little wood carvings that you can buy and you know with a little thing painted on it it said a lack of planning on your part doesn't make an emergency on my part yeah okay very common okay around the land that's right and that's exactly how it is that i feel as a psychologist so if you come to me in an emergency i'm listening carefully but i'm going to talk to you like an adult it's like okay what are we going to do about this tell me this tell me this in other words i'm consulting we're problem solving together it's eyeball the eyeball if you slip into crying on me it's fine i i i relax and wait i don't panic the way i did my first you know year as a psychotherapist was like oh my god my clients crying oh my god i'm failing i'm never gonna be good at this this is a disaster every young therapist has this after a while and after i understood that crying was a was an instinctual mechanism in order to try to get uh support i.e drawing that there the therapist or the listener into a parental mode and therefore an altruistic mode once i once i understood that conceptually i relaxed and so now when people cry if they ever do it's like i'm completely relaxed i'm just letting that essentially instinctive manipulation tactic wash its way through the system and then we relax and then we say okay well now what are we going to do about it let's let's look at our options and we go right back to adult mode and everything's fine okay so the now so baby talk well i it just so happens i had a relationship like this way back in the day and it wasn't good in other words uh the the uh my girlfriend also had slipped into baby talk and that was an absolute romantic sexual deal killer there's just no way in other words that what you've done is you've shifted the relationship from adult to adult to child parent so you pushed me into the parent mode and you know if parents are are not weird they're not interested in having sex with their kids okay so this is uh so the fact that this person this questioner is having a uh it didn't grate on me it just sort of like i did recoil uh it kind of it was a troublesome i didn't like to hear it uh it was friendly in other words i understood that it was friendly and it was kind of sweet but it also was like uh uh this is anti-sexual and i didn't understand at the time what was happening uh the the role i was being put in so um i would again this depends upon the nature of the relationship and how long the person's you know you've been with the person what you know about them all these there's all kinds of details uh in in relationships we sometimes play what i call very open uh very very good good relationships or relationships with excellent people you can play open you can talk about uh the essentially evolutionary roots of different issues and conflicts and you can sort of talk your way through and plan as a as a team how we're going to work our way around the inherent conflicts that exist in relationships that's that's like a plus four star way of trying to solve problems other way to solve problems is to just to try to manage them unilaterally and so so i don't know how long this relationship is how invested what the person feels like about the other person in all these different ways there's too many too many uh parameters that i don't know the answers to in order to give you know sort of blank advice i can't do that uh but what i can say is that your your feelings are very understandable the the other person's tendencies are sort of i'm not sure what's eliciting it in other words what in their personality or what in the situation could be eliciting that behavior out of them but in other words why are they slipping into the child mode is this something that comes very easily to them or is there something in the nature of the relationship or their personal situation that is causing them to slip into that um but in in general i'd like to play open and say hey listen just let you know that that sort of slips me into a parent mode and that doesn't doesn't feel good you know what i mean it doesn't feel good to me so i it's kind of sweet but i saved this for my cat you know what i mean the um uh the yeah the the other thing to do is to be kind of um a gentle version of sharp angling where which is what it is that i do in therapy so i let it pass and then i don't respond to it in kind in other words it's i don't let it pull parental behavior out of me like i sharp angle and like hey what are we going to do it's like boom like oh we didn't get the oh let's see what we can do to help you uh uh you're not going to get that kind of uh paralinguistic action out of me i'm not going to make those kinds of soothing uh i'm responsible i'll take care of your sounds it's not going to happen what you're going to get is you're going to get pleasant but adult to adult communication and possibly a few doses of that might wake the person up gently and realize oh that's that's kind of not not allowed here and so that would be the way to do it if we weren't playing open so if we if we didn't want to let them know conceptually what was happening and why it bothered us well thank you dr lyle yeah all right at first when i heard this question i thought it was about baby talk as in the girlfriend wants to have babies but now oh it's not about that right oh you've got it god no oh yeah i don't nathan your worst fear nathan there you go that would more than great on your nerves it's interesting though like it you know it's um incest is such a taboo right it's such a taboo but it's a taboo for a good reason it's for for these evolutionary and genetic reasons and i think that we have a lot of built-in little mechanisms that can kind of flag that alert in our nervous system to let us know this isn't somebody that we should be having a sexual connection with um and so you'll you know there's the wonderful studies of the the um the kibbutz the israeli kibbutz where they all grow up together and they they're too close to each other and they're all supposed to you know get together as adults and have families but they can't because they think of each other as siblings um and probably a lot of that was encoded in the way that they spoke to each other and everything else so i think some of this i mean what you're what you're relaying about your own experience in your own relationship is that it does it it can it can throw that little switch and that's sort of that that um you if someone is approaching you from that child to adult position it's it's disturbing for good reason it's tapping into very well-evolved anti-incest mechanisms brilliant god that is great jen i don't know that anybody's ever had that thought in evolutionary psychology fantastic god that's great terrific no no i can't i mean that's it in other words the i was just saying hey well i sort of tripped over it in other words the parent parent child yeah i basically heard you yeah i heard you say yeah i just feel like i was saying what you were saying a different way but um yeah that's that's what it seems to be getting at the heart of for me is a little protective little protective mechanism to keep you from mating with your children yeah god that's great terrific yeah eric byrne probably didn't realize no i don't think so it's all right that's all right all right what else we got nathan all right dear doctors thank you for the podcast i'm wondering why we're having so many beautiful women in russia but much less handsome men is there any explanation that that's it jan can answer that i'm sure she knows i love i love some of the questions that come through is like you just gotta kind of wonder yeah i've actually i've traveled quite extensively in russia so i can speak to this directly um i think you're probably looking at specimens under very different conditions of life experience and self-presentation so you're you're probably you know you've got equally attractive genes um because i agree with the anecdotal observation that the women are beautiful and the men are less beautiful but i think if you took a male and a female of the same age and the same sort of exposure to the difficulties and vicissitudes of of a rough life in russia that you would you would find them of some vodka vodka and cigarettes yeah yeah vodka and cigarettes in particular i mean the epidemiological data on men in russia is really brutal they they're they're sort of the shortest lived males in in certainly i mean it's there's always in civilization whether we're calling russia the the developed world or not but um but yeah i mean they these are hard living men um and it's mostly self-inflicted and so if you run into a male in russia who's you know older than 18 he's he's gonna have subjected himself to um to some some really difficult and brutal aging processes and and the women do too to some degree but you know you're probably not and your your vision of a russian female is of the 19 year old model it's not of the 50 year old grandmother because you're not seeing images of her in the media you're not um you're not you're just not that's that's not what what comes to mind when you think of russian female beauty um and so but the young men are probably you know before they run into all the vodka and cigarettes and um hard living and military service and everything that they put themselves through uh are genetically similarly situated so that would be just my general take on it that it's it's got a lot to do um with environmental exposure and and just your perception is more skewed than you realize that it is because you're looking at russian adolescents when you're talking about russian women these and and you're looking at the you know most americans the only russian women that they're coming into contact with is images of models and obviously that's the nines and tens anyway um and there's just not the equivalency with the the russian men that you're going to encounter in most pop culture forms yeah i mean because there's russianbrides.com and you can look at pages and pages [Music] but you know i've never looked at russian husbands.com yeah yeah yeah yeah not the same kind of market oh my i could tell some stories we'll save those for the member q a oh good oh my goodness all right nathan what do we got all right our next question dear doctors on page six of blueprint robert plummen states that the heritability of weight is 70 is this statistic a byproduct of our modern food environment and therefore an explanation of the obesity problem how would the heritability of weight differ in a stone age environment how would it differ if we measured a cohort from say chef aj's group that word heritability is also confusing please explain yeah well you got good reason to be confused uh there's so there's there's a few few too many things in here in this question to explain them all so let me let me try to uh let me try to simplify and get give some degree of clarity here the heritability what that word means is how much of the variance in a population's phenotype is due to the genotype okay well what do i mean by that in other words in any population there is variability on whatever it is that you're measuring so let's say suppose it's height so in the united states the average female is about five foot four standard deviation is about two inches so it's actually more like maybe two and a half or three inches so that would mean that that um about 70 percent of women are between five one and five seven so there's that that's the the variation now we would say okay well what what is responsible for that variation now you you could imagine uh if the species were somehow different or nature was somehow different that it could have been for example gee how much protein did you eat in your first two years of life uh that it might have been if you ate a lot of protein that made you a five foot eight eight inch female and if you didn't have hardly any protein at all it made you a four foot eleven inch female so it might have been that protein intake was the variable or was the the causal agent that was responsible for the variance that we observed if that were true let's let's suppose that it were entirely uh what was involved then that would mean that that that the heritability coefficient of height was zero and the environmental influence was a hundred percent of the variance in other words basically you could simply find out how much protein did somebody eat in the first two years of life and you could say ah well that young girl is gonna turn out to be five foot six because she had you know a 70th percentile intake of protein in the first two years so that's so heritability is about how much of the outcome of something that you see is due to genetics as opposed to due to environmental influences now we know for example height is due overwhelmingly to genetics so it's um it's not entirely due to genetics because if in fact you do starve children when they're young they're not going to grow quite as tall so in environ there is environmental influence on on height but not very much now interestingly enough if we were to go back 150 years we're going to find out that environmental influence on height was more than it is today and that's because back in the day some people had there was a lot of malnutrition so some of the variants that you saw in height 150 years ago obviously the most of the variants that you saw was genetic but not all of it so there was a substantial portion of the variance in height had to do with childhood nutrition now that's not going to be true now and the reason is is that now there isn't anybody that is is starving in the united states worldwide there would be but not in the united states so in other words young young children from ages 0 to 12 they're all getting plenty of calories there is no macronutrient shortage of people in the united states as a result that means that the genes are now far more a greater percentage of the variance in the outcome of height than they ever had been before so if we were to go back 150 years it was probably the case that the genes were 75 responsible for your height but environment had 25 percent of an impact in other words it was still a substantial impact you might have been very tall but it turns out oh you only wound up a little above average because your garnier starved to death uh that that was probably a fairly common occurrence in 1850 so that is not true today so over time we're going to find out that the environment has a less effect and the genes have more okay now in that case now we could also find out that it could go the other direction and i think it has so the it's going to turn out that um so if we were to look at people's let's not look at their weight um i'm not so much interested in people's weight plumbing it's easy to measure weight um but it but the problem is is that saying that genetics have they said 70 if you look later in the book it's actually 80. so that's because it's 70 percent over over the lifetime on average but guess what if we wait long enough and we wait till you're 50 or 60 years old it's going to turn out that the heritability is actually 80 now what uh why is that uh the case hmm sorry jen i'm i'm wandering i'm trying to uh sort of explain a complicated statistical problem here the uh yeah so um the the reason is that uh well first of all weight and genetics already have a natural relationship because taller people are going to weigh more than shorter people so there's already a correlation coefficient to probably 0.2 or 0.3 that just has to be in the game that has nothing to do with how fat anybody is so we're not really that interested um so that that's a slight of hand that comes up in paul uh plumbing's reports here that you can get a little confused about and kind of not separate out so uh the fact that over time 80 percent of the variance is associated with genes uh of 20 or 30 percent of that has to do with your sheer physical size of the humans so now we're going to get down to the fact that what is the correlation coefficient between genes and excess fat stores on the organism okay now that's probably going to be 50 60 70 genetic it's probably going to be 20 30 40 environmental it's going to be a lot genetic in the sense that two people of equal basic size uh eating exactly the same diet if that diet is uh naturally a very rich diet one of those people is going to be 40 pounds overweight the other person might be 10 pounds overweight so the genes are going to be responsible for the difference between those two the environment however is uh taking those two different people uh two people very very similar genetically one of them eats a very rich diet the other one eats a very lean diet one of them winds up 40 pounds overweight the other one winds up zero pounds overweight that's environmental so the question is when we look at the population statistics of the united states uh if we look at the genes and the way we can tell the impact of the genes is by looking at monozygotic twins in particular so if we took take two identical twins and we watch them go we're going to find out that early in life they may their their fat storage differences between them may be pretty similar but not super similar so they might correlate for example the genes might be responsible for 50 or 60 percent of the variants by your 20th birthday and so everybody says well the environment has a huge effect it has half of the half of the variance but it's going to turn out that if we watch these people for succeeding decades by the time we reach 60 years old they're going to be extremely similar and how much excess fat they have on their bodies the reason is is that their diets are going to be very similar finally over time in other words pretty much everybody is eating a very similar diet and so it's no surprise that if people are eating a very similar diet and you have significant genetic diversity in the population about fat storage that the that the excessive high fat high calorie diet is going to essentially make a very profound difference or it's going to spread out the scores in a stone age village the difference between your thickest person your thinnest person might be say two women it might be 15-20 pounds because they're both eating a very a diet that's appropriate for the species and therefore their weights are staying within a very normal healthy range one of them a little thicker than the other but if you superimpose on those two different genotypes an extraordinarily rich diet one of them wine may wind up zero pounds overweight fifty years later one of them may wind up a hundred pounds overweight so the uh the extraordinary diet over time will cause a further dispersion and therefore it's going to be more of the genetics of the situation are going to look even more powerful is what's going to happen so i just realized at the end of this diatribe very few people are going to be able to probably follow all the parts here so that's i i knew it was a tough question when we started but i not realizing how tough it was until i'm done the uh so the the answer to your question is this that the genes are enormously determinative of people's weight but that doesn't mean that they have to be okay they are scientifically because the pleasure trap and the modern food supply is so ubiquitous and so forceful on human behavior that pretty much everybody in the population winds up eating a very rich diet with a very rich diet the genes really reign supreme when dictating the variances the person who's 150 pounds overweight right now is not behaving much differently than the person who's 25 pounds overweight those two people are eating almost exactly the same foods but the genes are causing an extraordinary dispersion under a bizarre set of circumstances that they were never designed to face those two people eating a similar diet in the stone age one of them they would both be very healthy and fit one of them would simply be 20 pounds heavier than the other one so uh in the modern environment the the the genes are looking like a this is why when even though we explain that the genes are have enormous influence on your weight it doesn't mean that it it is not genetic determinism in the fact that you can't escape it it just means that the influence of the genes is profound and therefore you have to do you know quite extraordinary things with your diet i.e get your diet completely away from the norm in order for you to not be captured by that by that mathematical tide well thank you dr lyle yeah it seems like the crux of this question just lies in the definition of what heritability is would you be up for discussing the definition of heritability dr lyle there's actually mathematical definitions but the uh you know there's a way that it's calculated out of data sets but that's beyond this discussion hopefully people get get a feel for this from that answer yeah ploman gets into that pretty in depth as well early in the book usually describes what is precisely meant by heritability and why it's you know it's not as simple and straightforward as it seems so people are really interested this this wasn't enough of a deep dive for them they really should just go to the source and yeah read blueprint because it's worth doing yeah all good nathan all right thank you our next question dear doctors what's up with corporate jargon things like could you action this item end quote buzz words like synergy being told to quote think outside the box and all the needlessly fancy job titles and the like i realize it's bound to be several things maybe conferring status cheaply trying to motivate by conveying positivity obfuscating to avoid concrete promises and cover asses trying to sound smart adjusting language use to match the in-group am i mistaken or missing anything where does this jargon come from is it perpetuated by business schools or the fanciest companies am i penalizing myself significantly if i don't go along with all this bs this is a good gen question oh my god i love this this has given me ptsd from all of my various uh jargony environments that i've been part of it's not it's not just the corporate world i think corporate jargon has its own little you know yes some of those terms are just barf inducing like synergy think outside the box put a p let's put a pin in this and come back to it later like there's so many of these things um but they are just as uh just as common in the non-profit world when i worked you know for years in the nonprofit world it sort of has its own overlapping set of jargon um and of course in the academic world too it's even worse so the academic world is um okay just got its own language and certain sections of it have their own their own specific sub sub-language this is part of what gives post-modernism some of its magical power to to confer this kind of it's it's such a high bar to speak post-modernism fluently because it's such an insane bizarre counterintuitive way of of talking about and thinking about how things fit together that this questioner is really starting to tap into a lot of what's going on here is that the the power that you feel of the the mystical access to being able to converse in this this insider language is very much an in-group signal so i think that's probably the main thing that's driving the proliferation of this kind of language across different spaces um just you know whether it's corporate or non-profit or academic or anything else um the other thing that you're touching on in the question that i think is a very big deal is the obfuscation and the the the um were were avoiding any kind of explicit commitment and we're not going to call things by their actual names we're going to agree on these proxy names that we can give it which relates to the indirect way that we're we're really in the business of perpetuating the idea that we're trying to solve a problem we're not in the business of solving a problem we're we're creating a market to perpetuate our job security and by doing that you can't speak about things directly by their actual names or you risk actually solving the problem and you can't do that if you want job security so in all of these areas those those are the main things that i think are going on the the status conferred by insider group status um and the good village feelings that accompany that and the and also the shortcut and the cognitive shortcut to identify who's not part of that group so yes you are um you are putting yourself at risk of signaling out group status if you're not playing along i've been in environments where i've been sufficiently disgusted by the jargon and sort of determinedly like refused to use it and it does get you in trouble they it's it's probably never going to be brought up against you explicitly in a job review like oh you know jonathan why aren't you why aren't you using synergy in our staff meetings you know that that's one of our favorite words we really want to hear you say synergy more it's going to be more like it just seems like you're really not on board with our culture or you're you're really you're you're sort of it just seems like you don't have a great attitude about what we're trying to do here and all these different ways of raising a fuss about how you're signaling out group so yeah i think you're you're definitely touching on the main components and if you want to survive in that world and you want to play by their rules you have to use their stupid language there you go now dr hock would you mind talking to us about the personality differences between people who might do extremely well in a corporate environment and people who maybe don't like the corporate environment at all oh openness is probably a big oh yeah i'm gonna just make a personality in france i think the person who's gonna chafe most in any environment that is prescriptive like that um it's unless they invented the language themselves it's gonna be it's gonna be openness and um they're they're gonna be in exactly the same situation that i was in which is like you don't give me compulsory speech in any form i don't i don't want to be told how to think about something i don't certainly don't want to be told how to speak about it and if you link me thinking about and speaking about something specifically in some specific language to my success within that particular realm uh yeah i'm out of there i'm going to go start my own cult thank you very much it's not it's just not going to work so yeah i think the main the main thing that would be driving uh you know the the successful corporate citizen is going to be not very open and and very conscientious that's just gonna kind of work across the board for anybody who's operating in a system that is not their own invention yeah well i smelled uh i sniffed this in psychoanalysis psychodynamic thinking uh it it's its own language much more so than the cbt people who in principle are trying to be very direct and clear and so uh yeah that was a that was a reason why i uh turned away from it in other words i i want to be clear direct understand and not have you know secret hand signals uh and and subtle intimidation uh that goes on with this sort of thing so it's uh hey not my thing oh it's a serious aspect to it i mean my most the most experience i've had is in the academic world where it really is like a huge part of being successful in academia is that kind of deflection and you know it's it's also if you don't really understand what you're talking about or writing about the more obscure and specialized you can make the language the less susceptible you are to somebody engaging directly with it and leveraging some meaningful critique of it so if you if you really want to you know perpetuate an academic career lean into the post-modern crazy you know i mean if people don't have direct experience with this they should really sit down and read some of this just amazingly purple prose that comes out of some of these critical theory disciplines i know dr lyle's read some of it and been just equally disgusted as i have and i'm in this really unusual position because i am fluent in it you know i did in my early undergraduate days i found it really attractive because i kept thinking there's got to be something here that i'm just understanding you know there's got it it's so different and it's so enticing and these people speak of it you know when they when they are fluent they speak with such authority and such conviction and it's yes yeah and so i'd go to these seminars that were you know like critical critical feminism seminars or critical any any if critical is in front of the name of the seminar yeah it's going to include this kind of bizarre double speak full of these these vague power infused um messages in this language as a general rule and i would sit in there and i would i would desperately like try to parse what was being said and i had this feeling as an undergraduate that if i could just get it then then i'm i'm i'm on the inside and not only that but i would have access to this this you know amazing level of knowledge and information that just is not accessible to the outside world and that's a really really powerful compelling place for somebody who's status deficient to be striving toward and so i think that's how these you know how these things are perpetuated and how they capture the imagination of successive generations and it took me a long time sort of once i was in it and i did i sort of understood what was being said it then took another long stint of wandering around that to realize how empty it was and how there really is no they're there and everybody's talking in circles and everybody's you know as soon as you start to get close to talking about something substantive it slips away into some other very abstract critique and it's just this constant um this yeah this this this reproduction of empty knowledge that happens in that particular academic realm and i saw that in the nonprofit world as well and i've not spent time in the corporate world but i imagine it's very similar yeah all right dr hawk thank you so much all right our final question slash comment uh this is about dr lyle your answer last show a couple shows ago about the alien abductions dear dr lyle i was appalled to hear such an unprofessional answer to the alien abduction question i couldn't believe dr lyle's dismissiveness and complete disregard of anyone who may have had this experience i was deeply concerned that a doctor would so callously denigrate an entire group of people by saying there's a good chance these people do not have very high iqs calling them morons and idiots and that anyone who would make such a claim is seeking status had dr lyle done any research he would have found that the vast majority of people who claim to have been abducted are reluctant to come forward many keep their names hidden for fear of being ridiculed as dr lyle so clearly demonstrated with his contemptuous comments i don't ever comment on or about podcasts however i felt obligated to address the abusive attitude that was displayed in this episode by a psychologist a little more maturity intact would have been appropriate coming from a doctor dr lyle would say you well you might have to seek another podcast because uh i'm not gonna if i don't have enough maturity intact for you then then there's more pain to come the uh the uh the truth of the matter is is that first of all i don't know what they mean by professional so i don't have a professional relationship with this person they're not paying me i'm not their doctor uh i'm i'm making uh comments about what i believe to be true about the world and you can listen or not and that's that's what we're here for uh we're here to to try to pick apart and understand human nature and human life as i recall this question was a comment about some harvard psychiatrist that had done a long-term study of these individuals and then it found that there wasn't anything special or remarkable about them and i think my point was you know what a fool like why do a long-term study because you can tell pretty quick what the deal was and this person makes a comment that quote the vast majority are worried about coming forward really like that that's a heck of a statement i'd like to see them uh defend that empirically if they wanted to the uh send me the evidence that the vast majority are worried about what other people are going to say i don't think so how about shine the camera on me let me tell all my friends let's get around the campfire and i'll tell you about the time how the that did they come forward anyway so i i think that's uh i don't think so so i i i stand by what it is that i said i think obviously i think the average iq of the average alien abductee is probably no better than average and probably below average so the uh you know we could we could look that up how many let's see just how many phds in physics are are among them okay how many mds how many ivy league educated lawyers okay let's just find out uh just specifically what the iq is and what the iq distribution is if you're interested so now i think that uh uh you know i don't know about calling people morons maybe that's a little ra rough but the truth of the matter is is that i believe that it's exactly as i stated it that anybody who is reporting that they've been abducted by aliens is overwhelmingly likely to be lying okay that they are attention seeking brows that that is what this is are there some individuals who had some fugue state after they did a bunch of mushrooms or that they were sleep walking in an altered state of consciousness that they're that they're susceptible to and thought that they were abducted yeah maybe okay so there's a probably a few people out there with highly open minds that actually had some you know all other worldly experience for a few minutes one night etc anybody reporting in broad daylight this never seems to happen when the people are in the middle of their workplace from eight to five sitting behind their desk does it okay it's always at night okay it's always at night right well it's more likely to have happened with somebody in some kind of bizarre little altered state of consciousness a little sleepwalker with a big imagination so anybody would then believe it the next morning after you wake up and then is gonna tell anybody under any circumstances you know what i think okay low iq storytelling open to experience and completely unworthy of any scientific investigation past the most obvious uh look at the fact of who are we looking at why are they saying this yet you show me the you know i don't know that you you show me the guy or the girl with a phd in any hard science you know show me three there's always one wacko okay so you show me one of them and we're going to find out that they also spent 10 years studying the dalai lama and you know doing i don't know peyote somewhere in the middle of the desert for a few years but show me the one that isn't show me the one that's intended personally attacked yeah okay show me the uh sorry about that show me the show me the phd in physics that's at the university of iowa and is a 10-year professor and you tell me that that guy comes forward and says that he was abducted by aliens no okay that's not who's making those reports isn't that curious that that's who's not making those reports so now i'll stand by that and if that's unpalatable oh well can't please them all yeah i mean other than just my general sort of defensive openness but i i already uh went on the record with that with the original question but i would say that the one this counter claim that you know if you've done your research you would have found that the vast majority of people who claim to have been abducted are reluctant to come forward so that it's i just wanted to pick on that for a second because that's the kind of thing that will be promoted as as counter evidence but if you look more deeply at that you recognize how sort of imperiled the data point like that is by its own assumptions so the vast majority of people who come forward say that they're reluctant well by definition we're looking at people who have come forward they've self-selected into you know they are coming forward and saying i was abducted i didn't want to tell you but i felt like i had to well that's an impression management right you know of course you're going to have some serio some significant percentage of those people are have enough conscientiousness and enough sort of sensitivity to what other people think about them that they're not it's it's not the right thing most of the time to be like oh my god i was abducted by aliens and i'm really just i just can't wait to tell the world about it and let me you know where is the national enquirer because i want to tell my story no you're gonna signal that you know this was so weird and so unusual and i really don't i'd really prefer not to talk about it but um you know i feel like it's a significant enough event that i i am i'm forced to believe it to be true or not but yeah but that is something that needs to be put under that critical lens yes like okay that the this is this is part of human impression management it's and it's a selected sample that has that bias built into it the only way that we could really get at the the if the truth is out there the only way that we could really know and you're sort of you're getting at it when you're talking about like let's look at the let's look across the swath of you know high status individuals high iq individuals but if you do you know not a retrospective kind of stuff like that it's going to be you know putting out a call for everybody who's been abducted to tell their stories but a prospective study where you take a bunch of kindergarteners right and you you take all of the all of the all of the hypothetical personality and iq and whatever circumstantial traits that you could catalog and you trace those individuals throughout the course of their lives and then you see are there patterns in the data that are some of those children more likely to report being observed or not so that's how you would actually answer the question but there's no funding for that kind of thing because you know this is not not uh a high value location for scientific research sure so it is that's where that's where it stands here's here's where i stand here's where i stand with a lot of these things if i get abducted i'll tell you about it i'll tell it to you straight [Laughter] and then i'll believe it you
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