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Episode 55: Discussion about vicious cycles, listener emails, callers welcome
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hey dr. Lyle how you doing today good good to see an aide here you good good to have you back so so yeah last week we talked with the lit you talked with Olivia about vicious cycles virtuous cycles how was that yeah good very good I felt like that went really well I felt like she felt like she had some confidence in this in the strategy and so I hope that went well for but it gave us the it gave her the best shot I know mm-hmm yeah and you know it was really interesting was was what you said was you know I've never actually seen this fail before you know and it's like I think I've really ever heard clinicians say things like that except for except for like with the extreme diet lifestyle changes for reversal of diseases you know right right so that yeah that's good yeah it is it's and and actually for me clinically the the there's a reason why I call this esteem dynamics and that is and that is that that these are these are the processes of how essentially human life is almost everything about human life that means anything to people other than their health obviously is is going to be a steam signaling between two people or it could be between a person and their cat like I get a lot of a scheme for my cats so that's that's very cool the but the point is I should got yeah yeah it's good for you make it makes you look like it might be good husband material one day you know one of my friends like was joking about having like a dog walking business simply to stir for him to look better when you and he meets girls on the street you know there's no question if you can meet a girl on the street the dog is a good way to do it but yes what what human life is mostly about is steam steam signaling the receiving and and transmission of esteem signals and so when relationships are in trouble the the root cause of the trouble is is something in the esteem signaling and our nature our the the genetics of the human being was designed by nature to defend its own status in the village with a whole host of essentially rhetorical instincts that are the best strategies that the nervous system could come up with for defending its defending itself when it was under attack and so essentially is a pretty loaded gun in human discourse and so what we want to do is we want to actually beat the genes by stepping outside of it seeing how it works and then realizing that the the core of the disagreement is going to be in the esteem signals and that if we can put our finger right on top of those circuits and push really hard it's unlikely that it's not going to work to some degree and so it just turns out in my in in my career ever since I've identified this I have never seen it fail when I plotted it and so when I want to carefully plot it with a client I've never seen it not work I've never seen it not work with couples right in the in the room with me I have seen it not managed to repair a marriage that was not repairable so I've seen it not work in that way so it's not magic but it is it is effectively magic when it comes to unwinding a dispute between two people where where the dispute is not fundamentally necessary where what we can live with is a well-considered and relatively dispassionate and a highly respectful conflict of interest okay that people can live with they live with that all the time what they can't live with is quote in in the words of the day being dissed or disrespected that that as soon as we hit those circuits were in trouble so flooding the circuit dr. Lila I think let's see well let's check I think dr. Lyle may have gotten disconnected hello can you hear me dr. Lyle yes we're about your back thank you good very good okay excellent so I don't know what I was blathering about but more or less what I was explaining was that the the the instincts are not well designed to solve the problems of argument and so if we understand flood the circuit and crystal clear and we use those we can we can step outside of the instinctual strategies and improve our ability to resolve conflicts yeah that's a really good point about flooding the circuit because I when you know this was we put the episode on last week but I think we had done it a week ahead of time so for any listeners who are just you know curious about doing a session with dr. Lyle you can email me and we can arrange it that it doesn't have to be completely live so but what was interesting is after we had recorded and I was listening to and I thought man this is this is really good information well I was playing poker with some friends like late late on a Saturday night or something like a couple of days after or a week after so and there was a guy we were waiting for the car at the valet and there was a guy there who was clearly drunk he was trying to start a fight with somebody so he I was the guy he decided he wants to try to start a fight with he starts making comments about my nose and this and that and I thought okay I got a flooded circuits and see we can turn this from a vicious cycle to a virtuous cycle and of course I started you know using your tips on humor and taking away status for myself and in like three little like phrases he was like what you're serious you're making fun of yourself this is a waste of time and eternity on trys to go pick a fight with someone Wow yeah very good very good just just great yeah I used to tell the guys in prison because I worked for 10 years in maximum-security prisons and I used to tell them that the the magic words we are told you know as kids or please and thank you but the really magic words are you're right and so you know when you're in trouble you want to immediately give the other person status and in prison the fastest move that you can make is say you're right and then you know obviously because those people are so facilitated and there's so much status on the line and they're very dangerous and so that will immediately get you out of trouble and you have to know that that's there and then the next thing you're going to say is I really I see your point so now we're starting to defend our own logic just a little bit but in no way threatening to them so if as if we now see what that they have a point and and then we can go from there okay but those are that the basic concept is when you're in trouble you better hit their circuit really hard either giving them status or taking it away from yourself and so you're right I see your point now or now I see your point I see what you're saying these are ways to very very quickly make some concessions give them status which is exactly what happened with you in the drunk and has just within seconds we start to see his nervous system changes its strategy yeah it was funny because you had told you you've said that before you know you're probably right or you're right it he's making fun of my nose because I have a big nose and and he and I said yeah you're right it is kind of big I wish it wasn't that big right you just like stopped and looked at me like are you serious man you you really like making fun of yourself so thank you yeah there you go you see you I you saved me from a fighting beautiful that's beautiful that's it that's a great crystalline example for people that a famous sales trainer that was the number two salesman door-to-door salesman for Kirby vacuum cleaners in the 1960s and 70s was a man by the name of Al Tomczyk and Al Tomczyk had a rule and the rule was always agree no matter what they said Kirby's are terrible they're the worst vacuum cleaners in the world I agree and I understand what you're saying okay he actually found that that when people would would be the most disagreeable with you surprisingly they were surprisingly vulnerable and that if you would if you would essentially stroke in our in our language stroke those egos in a way to essentially be threatened them they'll very often come right around and so this was that's why Tom sucks Tom's ex rule was always agree find a way to agree as fast as you can and that's how we're going to get out of trouble very interesting kind of an interesting character I met him and he was I've met you know some of the major sales people in the country at that time I was very interested in sales psychology and he was he was the oddest one of the group Zig Ziglar Tom Hopkins J Douglas Edwards all these guys were very sort of interesting people al Tomczyk was the most unusual in his almost very kefflin psychology this was a guy who never lost his cool and he dead demonstrations where people would insult him and insult his product you know as as as creatively as they possibly could and Tomczyk would just be completely relaxed and agree and you would watch the people become diffused within seconds so very very interesting and you you lived in Al Tomczyk moment right there very good hmm no so is is this something that can be trained or they just happen to be the most stable you know personalities out there well of course I many I just my personality where we found out I'm not that stable the truth of the matter is is the lot of this is trainable and so of course a lot of it is natural so there are people but it's probably almost better to be trained than to be a natural because when you're a natural when you're a natural and you hit your limit you're going to default to the genes and so I watch the way them through yes like what do you mean like you know default to the genes yeah if you if you're a natural if you're naturally emotionally stable and naturally diplomatic when and you've really never learned these principles you just sort of live them so well because you're you're a 90th percentile diplomat that the problem is that if you ever get challenged and you're in trouble and you're actually hot under the collar you won't default - you won't head to a very diplomatic place you'll go we've simply found your moment of being disagreeable at which point you're just going to be as hysterical and out-of-control as everybody else when they're angry though this is this is exactly what nice people find in their lives nice people basically get along with everybody and when they're around some pushy disagreeable they'll concede okay and then you get pushed around a little more and they concede some more and they can seek some more and they concede some more and they concede some more but finally if they're a 20/80 trader and the disagreeable jerk wants eighty five percent said eighty finally they cross over our agreeable person's line and when they cross over the line the agreeable person becomes very disagreeable hostile you know insulting out-of-control and ready to walk away from the relationship entirely okay so they they are they're just as out of control as anybody and the reason is you don't see it coming they're overwhelmingly justified but they're not gifted at actually resolving conflicts because they don't they don't allow conflicts in their lives because what they just concede so this is why it's actually better is a more effective way of living to actually know you know have had these things happen and then learn how it is to deal with them and so so this is this is why that's why a sort of normal person or even a disagreeable person who has been taught some good conflict resolution techniques they will then get practice because they're disagreeable and then what will happen is they will get facile at moving out of those conflicts so when they get into trouble they knew they now have a learned strategy that is different than their innate strategy so that's that's why that's why I would say this hmm very interesting yeah yeah this reminds me when you when you are when your emotions are you know are firing up because you're very angry and the other person is is essentially attacking your status and so your stone-age brain says no that I'm not going to stand for this I'm going to now attack your Seles because the the smartest thing that I can do if you if you attack my status is to attack your credibility so that's that's exactly what happens and so people rely on their instincts at that point and their instincts are not terrible they're just not good for optimal outcomes and this reminds me you know when that when the young the young staffer quarterback Andrew Luck I had been in training cap with the Indianapolis Colts for the first you know couple three weeks he was shining and doing really really well and and you know probably thinking pretty high on himself even though he's an unbelievably bright humble guy it would have been hard to not be proud of yourself as you're doing really well in your first pro football practices and everybody's impressed except that then the defensive coordinator says okay it's time we're going to dial up an NFL Blitz okay Andrew had no chance okay he was they didn't want to destroy this rookies confidence in the first week but I think it was probably the third week of training camp and they dialed up an NFL Blitz and it came and it overwhelmed him and they said do it again and they did it again and they do it again did it again and the kid was like holy some Oaks he has no idea what he's doing he'd never seen anything like that in college and and so then they said okay now you know why we're going to teach you this and how much you don't know and so they took him into the film room and he watched and he watched and watched and they're pointing things out he's like oh I'm starting to get it divided very confusing complicated thing that's why you know it's very difficult for a rookie to step in there the anyway the same thing is going to be true of any human under conflict that know the things that we talk about here because they're not obvious and they don't come naturally but now that you know them always agree you know yeah I see your point you're right I understand what you're saying Bam Bam Bam yeah yeah you're right my nose is big oh well you know my mother's my mother's fault I didn't have anything to do with it yeah I ever water we got you oh good good yeah go ahead oh I remember watching a video of some guy who's trying to teach people how to be confident around strangers you know when you're when you're just out and you know his audience is just people are super nervous and shy yeah and he was going out with a you know a ridiculous outfit you know like a shirt with like three of the top buttons unbuttoned you know he had whacked out his chest he just it looked funny so he goes out and he's talking to a couple of girls and one of the girls challenges him and she says yeah did did you shave your chest like oh you know you're not manly cuz you shaved your chest and he because he said his response is no my mom shaved my chest yeah actually I'm gonna I'm going to share with the audience there what what this guy is is demonstrating is it is another great technique that is counterintuitive and it's what I call extreme agreement so extreme agreement is when somebody insult to you you actually you you take their insult and go right off the cliff with it and so in that way this takes a little bit of practice but actually if a person practiced it even with their friends for like 15 minutes about four times in their life they would it would start to canalize inside their nervous system and they would get it okay so if they if they say the best I ever saw at this by the way is a mutual friend of yours and mine and mate which is dr. Alan Goldhamer dr. Alan Goldhamer cannot be insulted I challenge anybody to drive okay so if you say this place is this place was lousy to second rate he says really I thought it was third rate so he's immediately gonna go yeah okay like well your business doesn't like like it's going very well oh it's terrible yeah we're probably gonna have to shut down all right yeah the entire four actors aren't any good they're not real doctors yeah they're it's worse than you know they're pathetic yeah I remember any time yeah yeah he was telling me a story at his Help Center where people go to to get better and the police came because they somewhat of a relative of the patient staying there thought it was some sort of cult so he they came in that can we see it he goes oh yeah follow me by the way you want some kool-aid there you go yeah he wouldn't have missed a beat okay so if anybody says you know anything about the center like oh gosh did you do water fasting there it's terrible he'll say yeah but that's nothing compared to what happens when we strap people down okay so just one thing after the next he's going to no matter what Curia curious insult or anxiety etc and in fact interestingly enough even with his patients which I've watched him for years people will be will be very worried and he will he will tell them if they'll say well I don't know is that is this diet okay you'll say oh no it's terrible it's terrible you're going to throw up you know your tongue is going to felt like something died you know in your mouth in other words he'll just go off and what will happen is very interesting and that is that people will laugh and they'll roll their eyes and they'll realize it's not that bad and so the behind that it will actually defuse a lot of people's anxiety so that's a actually uses that that's why he got so good at extreme agree is because he was essentially using it as a technique to defuse the anxiety of patients but then it an ancillary benefit to get your mind wrapped around extreme agreement is that if anybody ever insults you you just go off the cliff with it so yeah lar no psychologists aren't real doctors right it's like no joke you know it's a degree out of a cracker jack box what do you expect now I remember want a wet introduction remember one of your introductions was like you know someone asked your mom if you her son's a doctor and she goes no yeah but not the kind that helps people or something like that ah exactly there you go so always always going the other direction is annexes this puts us in a position that we're trying to get to with respect to all kinds of life problems which is a position of power and so in a position of power is position power is a psychological location that we get to when we when the worst case scenario no matter what it is we have made peace with it and so in extreme agreement what what is happening there is that you instantly get to a position of power you basically said okay you just insulted me now watch me insult myself all out to the most extraordinary level that you could possibly get that's it's it's 300% further than you just tried to get and I'm going to say it myself and shrug my shoulders like I don't care so therefore there's nothing you're going to say to me that's going to be worse than I just said and there's tremendous amount of signaling there because it's signaling to the entire anybody that's watching that you obviously couldn't care less about what that individuals saying and you're not even going to bother to send it which is a tremendous signal of a position of power it's a it's a signal that you know what I'm not really going to bother with the process of defending my status in this situation and it is a massively more effective technique than to actually defend your status to actually contradict them and say no you're out of control no you don't know what you're doing okay so then then we're in a fight and the and then then the notion is from any onlookers that the truth may be somewhere in the middle and then we're in a vicious cycle so instead a position of power is we go all the way to the floor board with with whatever they're they're critical critique is and now we just sit there and relax and there's nowhere for them to go and we've actually contradicted them but we have not we haven't actually insulted them directly we've just said I'm in a position of power with respect to any attacks on my status and I'm not even going to bother and it's an extraordinarily powerful position to be sitting in it obviously takes a little bit takes some getting used to to make your mind work differently than it was built because it's not built for that kind of sarcasm but you can learn it and when you learn it it's very effective mm-hmm yeah you know and since you mentioned vicious and virtuous cycles I've been kind of I've been trying to see them everywhere I go so for our audiences in the States President Trump just did a speech yesterday and for a lot of the times the the press is just you know him and her the press have been battling well yesterday after yeah theast it was like it seemed like the press was starting to turn this into a virtuous cycle they were praising him saying was a presidential speech whatever the politics are what were the truth is but it felt like it was starting to turn into a virtuous cycle rather than a vicious cycle so yes yes and I saw the curation is he you know few months down the line for any traction yeah exactly yeah it'll I expected you know this political process being what it is it's short last but the point is is that you did you did in fact see that and it was very interesting and and so yeah Donald Trump's general strategy is is if you if you discredit me I'm going to discredit you more and so he absolutely you know his strategy is the hard vicious cycle and then he'll go the other way so if you are if you were praising them and then how crazy it is like he's a very very animated version of the basic human instincts it's like I'm to go a lot worse yeah it's evade sort of very interesting to watch it but yeah I saw that and I'll be I'll be curious myself as to how how the different individuals in the press sort of take that and whether or not they then for themselves virtuous cycles with the president or and who continues to spin vicious cycles and that's how this one's going to go to be interesting to watch mm-hmm yeah and then yeah you you did say at the beginning to show that that this is uh this is very useful for arguments that are fundamentally unnecessary whereas we don't want to create so you're suggesting are you suggesting that we don't need to create a virtuous cycle with a you know a values argument or an argument that that's that needs to be made that needs to be add well here's the thing there are there are people inherently have conflicts of interest every animal on earth is fundamentally in conflict with every other animal on earth there's some resource that they've got that we would just soon have so the the the truth is though is that our our avenues or are the reasons for cooperation can be very very high and so human beings are inherently competing with each other for many of the world's resources that would be valuable for the survival and reproductive their genes or in the case of the human for their own personal happiness there's a lot of houses out there that I've seen that I'd rather have than one that got okay I got a nice house but there's nicer ones I just soon be in somebody else okay there's cars that are better than my car there's watches that are better than my watch there are there are there are fancier girls than the girls that I'm dating which is exactly zero so therefore that's not hard to do so point is is that there's conflicts of interest now the thing is also there's profit from cooperation there's tremendous profit from cooperation and so cooperative instincts are also part of human nature the so cooperative versus competitive and conflictual problems those those two things sit side by side inside the human nervous system with a whole variety of instincts around trying to try to figure out under what conditions should I be combative and on what conditions should I be cooperative the the so there's going to be situations where people being what they are there's sort of a they're a fancy souped-up chimpanzee and there's this tremendous animalistic and even though they can be very clever their their reasoning is not is not overpowering and their their grasp of reality is not necessarily that great so there's going to be a lot of people that you come in conflicts of interest with who's who are not reasoning things in the way that you would reason things and we're going to assume from the standpoint of reasonable argument but the people that are reached by this broad podcast are not average okay we are talking at a high level we are talking it at a solid university level here of concepts and as a result the people that we're talking to are way above average the people on earth are not they're average so there's going to be conflicts of interest with all kinds of people where they see things differently than we see them and they see things differently and they're wrong okay they're just flat-out wrong and there's even smart people a lot of them that have it wrong on whatever the issue is and once in a blue moon listeners we are wrong mean where are you we're rarely okay now the point is is that what we're trying to do here is that when we when we see conflicts you very often will feel you will feel anger as you is you start to feel the conflicts of interest rise you can just sense it in a board meeting where somebody is about to say that there should be more resources directed towards his project than towards her project or who's going to get the corner office or who is up for the promotion or etc in other words there's no end to conflicts of interest or who's going to get credit for the ad campaign and whose name should go first or how big should my name being what letters etc etc okay so there's no end to the conflicts of interest and so you can start to feel the turbulence in people as they disagree and so the question is you know in a famous phrase I don't know who said it I think it is probably a blinkin that we can be we can disagree without being disagreeable and this is can we do this well it's a fine idea but the question is how and the question of that issue is we have to we it believes us to understand the biomechanics of our own mind to know when we are starting to become disagreeable and that we what is happening when we are becoming disagreeable is our instincts are firing up a vicious cycle that is in fact what's happening and we have hormones that respond very very quickly and our feelings are all ready to win this argument really fast so that the six people that are milling around the Stone Age village that are given this half an error are going to be siding with us we essentially win the little battle we threaten the other person out of the poker pot and we win that's human nature and so the the the reasoning and fairness behind us are out to the wayside because we've already determined that we are being treated unfairly or we wouldn't be angry okay if we've determined that we're guilty and that the other person is right and we need to concede then we feel guilty but that's not what the problems are the problems are never when we say oh gee I'm sorry you know I'm in the wrong no you're right now those aren't those don't escalate into dangerous problems the dangerous problems that people face are when we escalate into arguments and you know hurt feelings anger vicious cycles happens and couples happens between friends happens between business partners happens between parents and children happens everywhere and and we we wind up you know we wind up with a lot of essentially arguments and hurt feelings etc that were not necessary and they weren't necessary because had we taken the time to step outside of the vicious cycle we would have been able to discover that there were conflicts of interest that didn't know we're there the I had a very interesting thing that happened in a therapy case recently you know I will speak very broadly so nobody under the Sun could ever know what case I'm talking about who the person is person had a situation where they were being arrested what's that then we'll take a call we've got a call yeah then we'll tell we had a call person was being requested to for a particular proceeding to take a test and they they did not want to take this test and all the people involved were saying this is very very important that you take this test and they were digging in their heels to the point of what it looked like it was going to be a very self-destructive process to not take this best and the person was sent to me and I sat there and listened and it was very careful I knew that there was something about taking this test it was going to be a very big deal but I didn't understand what it was so I at and I fiddled and I talked all around it and then I eventually started to hone in like sort of a shark circling victim I was trying to figure gently trying to figure out as I moved my way took me but like 45 minutes I I could have asked the questions in in 35 seconds but I didn't okay I waited just sort of circled and circled and and allowed ourselves to be distracted about everything under the Sun I eventually moved to the test and what I heard was a gross misunderstanding of what the whole thing was about and there was tremendous potential theoretical embarrassment for the individual that nobody had talked to them about because nobody had asked nobody understood why the person was resistant and angry and upset nobody asked and so very often people think they know okay so they think they know why a person is upset but that the problem is is that you don't know tell you know and you're going to find out when you use crystal clear so only when you ask enough questions and then you can feedback to the person so what I'm seeing is that you're feeling this way because this is what you're thinking and they say yes that's it that's when you know right so when you get to crystal clear then you're going to know why your wife's really upset why your husband's really upset why your mom's upset why your kids upset why your boss is upset why your subordinates upset when you take your time and ask the questions carefully and then feed that back and make it very clear that you're really focused on trying to understand them when you get there you get to crystal clear and surprisingly a tremendous percentage of human conflicts will melt away when we actually understand what this what the rear the conflict is not all conflicts not all conflicts will go away that very often conflicts are massively reduced when we get there all right I've got a caller okay yeah we've got a caller and then we've got a couple of emails asking about flooding the circuits and then shedding some light on on you know a child being picked on so ring taker caller here and then the next couple of emails we'll have so caller welcome to the show what's your name hey Nate and Doug this is Rob Nate quick question for you real quick are you a fan of ben shapiro at all yeah I've heard him yeah he's got some fun points yeah because I remember clear weeks ago you made fun of the feminist rally so I figured you might be afraid of it might be okay to ask you if you're forgettable Thank You Cara but you know it in the kinds of wonderful people who I know some wonderful people who attend feminist rallies so you know but just it was just a you know it's a bet I lost go to one yeah right now hello a nice friend dr. lout said he told me you did say that that if you go to a famous rally you're not allowed to hit on the girls though so yeah what part of the vet what when when doctor al said a couple weeks ago that uh he reads great minds like in specific subject you're going to read a knowledgeable mind like you read Richard Dawkins on evolution well Ben Shapiro was the one who kind of got me out of my liberal bubble and kind of convinced me to gather not to say that I'm a right-wing extremist now but he kind of really opened my eyes and he's really intellectually destroys people with his arguments so uh but I do have a question for dr. Lao yeah can not not to make everything a little political Doug but um a continuing continuing on with what I just said I am I kinda become so embarrassed by the far left and in liberals or whatever and I know that's a wide term and stuff but like in the sense of and then all you have all these atheists and and technically I am an atheist but in since this is a evolutionarily like psychology podcast that's the whole point right I do believe in evolution but um I've been come I been so turned off by the left and I'm just I kind of have a respect for you know just normal nonviolent regular religious people I don't think all they're so stupid because they're religious so my question to you is now as you have this on your website before I think it was called what's you know living your life purpose or what is your life purpose and you really respond to the question of if I because people will say oh evolution well you're just a naturalist so everything is just all about propagating DNA and spreading on the genes and it's all everything just means nothing and we just it's all about your naturalist and your materialist so would you respond to that um I have several responses some of the things that you're saying so I want to make sure that I'm sort of hitting on the things that that you're trying to get to so correct me if but if I wander too far off the the first thing is the issue about certainly respect for for religious people and as you're as you're observing sort of the vitriol that has come from the left on this election cycle is they're very disappointed and upset and if we actually actually know I've had a great many conversations with people on the left that post this election who are surprisingly they're not quite what it is that I thought that they what I thought was going on we have some very legitimate fear and strangely enough of course I don't because I look at I look at the United States government like a huge battleship that's very very difficult to damage it and so nothing about nothing about any election really causes me a lot of anxiety or upset the that but I have people that are very upset to the point of frantic because they actually they think that somehow that they or the country or the environment or the children or the whomever is in great great danger and so now I can't believe that that's what all this is about and I don't think it is but some of it is secondly from the second standpoint there is there is nothing about a person's beliefs about the the nature of nature in other words you know how we came to be where we are here how we're created etc there's nothing about this that is correlated with a person's character and so there so that particular belief is a how you believe the world came to be and how you believe you came to be this is sort of a set of causal propositions that that a given mind actually integrates in a certain way and sees contradictions and other things and doesn't see a set of contradictions in the set of propositions that they see and therefore their brain says this is what we believe this appears to validate all data and contradict none and that's what the process of reason is and so you can you can to you know the people can absolutely believe things that are wrong or that I should say wrong has got a pejorative sound to it that are incorrect that are mistaken and and I can recognize that but I can I can be completely respective of their character because they're there there's nothing in their character that is anything other than the complete totally respectable whether I agree or disagree with them about any proposition in nature so I've never had a problem living in a country where almost everybody that's walking around disagrees with me about what on earth their life purposes okay so they would have no idea as a as an uneducated souped-up chimpanzee they would have no idea that they were designed by evolution in order to reproduce genes they have not a clue neither does any animal in nature have that clue only a very very few human beings have ever figured that out and most of them most of the great ones have never figured it out so Isaac Newton and Aristotle you know an Alan Turing you know there's people that probably even recently that didn't figure it out so I have no problem with people of different persuasions as what they think about that the now what would they think of me in other words what would people think of a person who thinks that this is all you know an orchestration of literally the the transformation of energy into nucleic acid and that's what light is so what would we make of such an individual well the truth is is that if they would hear superficially what it is that I seem to think than it it looks dark and Nietzschean and essentially empty and awful what's the purpose and godless and and maybe the devil who knows what they think but the truth is is that they stand because of who they are and what their education and background is they stand in the dark they their minds cannot reach or haven't you know are not able at this point to be able to reach to where it is that I'm actually sitting so and I don't I don't mind that I it's not pleasant to be to be misunderstood I have great compassion or living things including humans and and I believe that the life journey of the human being is is a potentially unbelievable spectacular event that is that is fascinating beyond any other animals life event because of all of the complexity and the social processes that are involved and the subtlety of feelings and attachments that can take place so the to me as you see on my website even though when I talk about the purpose of life I explained that the purpose of life is the reproduction of genes that is the fundamental biological purpose but from the standpoint of a of an individual living today there is no longer a savage that is essentially not simply and completely guided by instinct the way most human beings have always been we recognize that there is something else that this light can be about which is the pursuit of happiness and the core of the pursuit of happiness is earning a steam in the right way from the people that matter and really quite frankly doing that well and doing that to the best of our ability is as in exalted a process as that I can imagine anybody anybody conjuring up in religion the idea that we essentially rise above our DNA and try to do the very best job we can to be the best person that we can that's that's the fundamental of the of the apex of a human ethical standard and we certainly absolutely do not need religion to educate us about ethics at all the fact that religion can be used to educate people about ethics in parables and in sayings and perspectives that's fine I have I can respect what is that's done there but it is absolutely not necessary and and I stand as an individual that that makes the highest moral pursuit of my life you know my life's goal is to do that and with a completely devoid of any religion but from that perspective I can be completely respectful of other people who who disagree with me and in my in my educated opinion they disagree with me out of ignorance but it's an ignorance that I that I have compassion for and I have understanding for its limits that make sense yes absolutely brilliant nailed it very good thank you thank you very much for calling Rob great question yeah Rob thank you very much for the call so yeah dr. Lee I was thinking you know Rob identifies more you know can can see more compassion on the on the conservative side just do you think that has anything to do with what you said in our politics podcast of conservatives being a little bit more conscientious through critical scores and all the rest and so he's just gravitating words towards that oh yeah I think that that's true and and so certainly this is this sort of an interesting thing it's people's politics are kind of an interesting thing because the you can you can oftentimes but not completely but you definitely can see correlations between the big five and people's political persuasion and but you can see where where some unusual people can be caught in a no-man's land where where they feel a little bit homeless and so you can see that if they are very open minded about the the all the different perspectives in in in the world about everything under the Sun then you could see the openness of their mind pulling them towards liberal thinking in many respects at the same time you could see that you can see where the any hint of lack of conscientiousness in there or any kind of shall I say emotional stability instability that could be associated with this all kinds of other things can enter into the equation and people can could be feeling much more at home with what the the with the inherent fairness of the fact that that there are you know individuals and individual family units and individual units in general that are is appropriate to seek their own interest and that they are in a competitive process with other people and other systems at which point we wind up at free enterprise and we wind up with fairly unmitigated free enterprise in probably an optimal situation for for straight economic net benefit to all all citizens and so we wind up with a libertarian perspective so a lot of libertarians libertarians are a split group we're the ones that are you know Christian libertarians are going to be far more right-leaning than there are left-leaning libertarians that that cannot swallow the the religiosity of the right and so they wind up being more liberal but they're usually all-in-all a most most libertarians are not quite at home in either party and and that's because those parties carry with them some limitations in their own integration of understanding of reality mm-hmm very cool okay so Rob thank you very very much for the call we really appreciate you calling and just chiming in I feel free to call back any time thank you all right so are we have a couple of emails from from our listeners so the first one is actually has to do with last week's last week's episode number 54 this is the on-air session with Olivia and dr. Lyle okay so our listener here has a question about flooding the circuits it's question if how do you do this with somebody who is still in love with you without leading them on in any way my ex-wife and mother of my child and I are in a vicious cycle even though it's cooling down she still slanders me in any way that she can and I'd like to find a way to get her to stop flooding the circum seems to be the logical solution but I don't want her to make her think that there's any chance of us getting back together any advice is greatly appreciated yes great really good question somebody's really paying attention and they're NMS okay so what we want to do there's more than one way to flood the circuit we can also flood the circuit to other people so in fact that can even be more powerful so we tell people that they are going to be talking to that we sing their praises to those people and those people will will transmit that back and so it's it's a very you know big lever that we have there's nothing like the fact that we are gossiping in somebody's favor okay there it's one thing to tell them that we think highly of them and it's quite another to tell somebody else that means we're telling the whole village and so that at that point our value to them goes way high and so they don't want to lose that good opinion now with respect to the the wife and the fact that she would want to get back together the this this goes under on my website I have a series of little five-minute answers to life's problems and one of them is I think the crazy girlfriend or crazy boyfriend and this is all about I was about one a few times yeah well some people told me about you naming them they said that they needed help for you that wasn't that's quick I was trying really hard alright so what the issue is is that what we're the standard strategy which the I roll in in pop culture will be oh how obvious and stupid is this but it but it works and it's legitimate but what we're going to say is we're going to say essentially it's not you it's me this is the story we're going to tell we are not going to tell them but they didn't live up the standard okay no way any any signals that they have what we're going to be saying is you know I've just got so many issues I'm I'm on a journey you know I got a lot of things I have to work out period okay you know I'm just not all all it's not square with me all you know I'm on a journey I'm having to work a lot of things out I'm you know that's it this is how we talk to people so we flood circuits as best we can and when they make any overtures at all any any batting of eyelashes any indications at all that they want a relationship we we make sure we let them know you know I'm just not I'm just not there you know I'm I got issues and I got I got to work on my issues oh we can work on them together now you know I just things I have to work out for myself I got a lot of lot of issues and we keep it right there and we don't say what they are and when they cross-examine we never tell anybody why anything is happening this is this is how we we just keep sending people in a circle never being specific about what those issues are that we're working on but we got issues and that's why we can't be in a relationship that's how we do it hmm would that potentially turn turn friends or family or you know people close to you off like oh this guy's got shit going on like maybe he's on unsafe prospect the truth of the matter is is that people can actually read your mental and psychological state very well so even if you so I've had a few times as psychotherapists where people had to stamp their foot at me because they had unusual emotional signaling characteristics so they would tell me hey I'm really in trouble and I'm looking at them and everything about them their body posture facial expression voice tone eyes everything said they're fine I'm like not I'm not taking you seriously I've got to have a hard time taking you seriously and and then it would have to escalate and I can tell you this has happened maybe maybe on one hand in 25 years so it's happened a few times where for some reason somebody was a very unusual signaler of their emotional state and I actually did have to get hit over the head by them and I had learn wow you just use signal way healthier than you are and so in any event the truth is is that people are reading signals pretty well and so your family and friends even if they you hear yeah I got issues I'm working on it's like well whatever we don't know what that means that's a little bit new age we didn't talk like that in 1955 okay so any chance people don't even know what we're talking about but they see that we're we're happy we're doing well we're making progress we talked about the little the little love projects and goals of our life everything's fine but when we're talking to our X or our X is trying to hit on us what do we got issues that we're working on that's what we've got okay I've got lines yeah yeah everybody else can read between the lines but your your X is given the softest possible rejection that we can give them mm-hmm great yeah well okay Nikki need to sing their praises okay oh we're get to one more email and then we'll then we'll we'll finish for the evening okay so this is a listener here who's got a kid so my question is about how to deal with the child being picked on at school my son is 12 years old and wears glasses and he recently made the school basketball team and some boys that didn't make the team are now making fun of him he's very sensitive dammit and has withdrawn and quiet and started any advice on he greatly appreciated okay not not exactly sure the the first thing that I would tell you is that and this is not the easiest thing to tell a parent is that this is not a crisis that but now now the kid is you know facing an interesting social truth which is that we've got conflicts of interest with other humans and those other humans particularly if we are going to excel and we are going to essentially impose costs on them from our competitive superiority but they're not going to be happy about it and they're going to find ways to attack our state and so that that appears to be what's happening here so you know if this kid was a shy kid and getting picked on for nothing in other words he he didn't have any he wasn't imposing any costs then this would be a true bullying situation and at which point you know it's it's a little different set of cards and a little different chess board so the one that we're dealing with and there be all kinds of number of things the week that we might do to address that situation this is a little bit different okay so this is a situation where this child is actually ascending a dominance hierarchy and we've got some other kids that are upset about it and so they're finding ways to try to chisel his status and the and I think that a these twelve years old the discussion that that to understand this clearly and understand that this is this is sort of you know part and parcel that when when we start to pull ahead of people you will you will find criticism and and in fact so in some ways to as a dad my attitude would be hey it's not pleasant and this is this is essentially part of the game and it's an unpleasant part of the game that when sometimes people are not good losers and they are they're not very grown-up and they're not very they're not very good people and so when good people don't lose that they do nasty things and and so you know they have now exposed themselves as people who are probably not you know they're not going to be people that you're going to want his friends fair enough okay and and you'll you know this this will pass and they'll get over the loss and and will move on but you know what this is this is sort of part of growing up and it's it's one of the not fun parts that your success can cause other people some distress and then get nasty about it and it is and I and I will tell you very briefly is we have just a minute to go about one of the more costly nasty events where something like this took place in the world of sports the it was probably about in the early 1990s the Detroit Pistons were a superb basketball team and had won two NBA championships in a row and probably would want a third had Isiah Thomas not been injured in the NBA Finals preceding the two the two victories that they did have so they were an extraordinary team and they had a reputation as being the bad boys just because they were tough and very physical and etc and they they had a nemesis on the rise a young Michael Jordan who is putting together you know a team that was going to become you know the most dominant team of in the last 50 years and finally finally I believe was the seventh year of Jordan's career that he finally beat the Detroit Pistons in order to get to the to the finals which he would then win and the so at the end of the Eastern Conference final and I believe it was in Detroit and Jordans team beats the Detroit Pistons the the leader of the dirt Roy Pistons who was Isiah Thomas walked off the floor while the game was still being played it was it was totally and he encouraged his his buddies on the team to do it with him so they walk off the court basically giving the finger to Michael Jordan saying we disrespect the fact that you beat us we don't dis matter to us we don't care this is not real we do not consider this to be legitimate okay it was an extraordinarily disgusting display of sportsmanship and that would come back to haunt Isiah Thomas when the dream team was formed and the dream team is all about Michael Jordan exposing him to the world at the Barcelona Olympics and Jordan said if Thomas comes on not coming and Michael Jordan Isaiah Thomas was better John Stockton who would who would be the point guard that would be on that team talk Stockton is a Hall of Famer and a great player but Thomas was better and everybody in the league knew it and Jordan said too bad okay if that guy comes I'm not coming and that's the end of the story and you know what that's exactly what happens and so this is payback and since that time 20 years later Isiah Thomas goes out of his way to try to play praise Michael Jordan and you know what it's not sticking it's not sticking the one you know one moment like that of exceedingly bad judgment where you essentially insult somebody like that no you don't get to take that one back so this is a John Wooden the great basketball coach said that the game doesn't build character it reveals it and it revealed a you know whoever Isaiah Thomas is and what his strengths a weaknesses are I'm sure he's well in the middle of the bell curve maybe above is a human but at on that day and under those circumstances we found his limits as in his character when it cost him and it's unfortunate that that happened and he hasn't appropriately really made up for it not not enough and and so that's the problem so this this young man now has has stepped on some some other kids status and it's unfortunate that they are resorting to a base base essentially animalistic and poor strategy for recovering their status but it won't be the last time and this young man needs to to recognize this and be supported by his dad and say you know what this is okay this is part of the game and we have we've revealed something about their character and you're going to be fine but this is we need to know about this because this is part of who it is that we inhabit the planet with fair enough mm-hmm Wow okay fantastic dr. Lyle thanks very much as always and we'll talk to you next week my pleasure
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