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Episode 66: About Dr Doug Lisle
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good evening everybody welcome to the beat your jeans podcast every show you're gonna actually hear me have a conversation with dr. Doug Lyall about various topics near and dear to me like love sex dating relationships parenting personality things of course which I'm completely clueless in and then most interestingly how do we find happiness in the modern world will read some questions from our listeners listeners if you have a question you can email me at beat your jeans at gmail.com sometimes we'll get a live caller and then every once in a while we'll have a session with one of our listeners in a pre-recorded show that we play during the actual show time but speaking of emails I got an email from one of our listeners asking me to talk about my background and how dr. Lisle and I met so here's basically how I got into this I am an electrical engineer that's my background and after I graduated I was trying to get healthier I had a life-changing health experience and I ended up finding out about a place called The True North health center where dr. Lisle was a staff psychologist and he would lecture there every week about health and how to look at life some of the stuff we're hearing here in the podcast and I heard one of his lectures that would just made a lot of sense to me but I thought nothing of it but I ended up purchasing his book at the health center called the pleasure trap it seemed to make some sense I mean I probably didn't read the whole thing but but most of what I read made a lot of sense and I couldn't wait to hear more so I eventually ended up changing my career into health care and going to the True North health center and asking the director if I could intern there and learn more about their approach so I was able to get an internship there and I eventually ended up working for the True North health center for several years so I started listening in on dr. Lyons lectures kind of popping in every once in a while when I could and just hearing how he thought about things how he answered questions from the patients that were there it was just fascinating all kinds of things that didn't didn't have to do with health in my mind but they had to do with happiness and how to live life just to give you an example one of the question-and-answer sessions the center he would pass around a list and by the time he got there to lecture there would be all kinds of different questions on any topic and he would basically start the lecture and say ask me anything and I can answer it and it was basically all the patients that would tried their sit there and try to stump dr. Lisle well one of the patients was a very clever guy you know flirting with everybody really really just a friendly fun person but he was there for several weeks to reverse some heart disease and his main question he sat in the center of the room I remember it like it was yesterday and he asked dr. Lisle he said what is love and of course here I am kind of thinking you know this is the first time I heard him entertain questions other than health most people were asking him questions like okay how do I get back into the real world and eat healthy or how do I explain to my spouse that I don't want to eat processed junk or how do I explain to my boss that I'm not being antisocial when I don't eat the company donuts things like that so he was helping navigate different problems but this question about what is love was the first time I had heard an actual explanation about love he broke it down into mathematics and not just mathematics he broke it down into biology physiology psychology complete explanation it finally made sense to me and a lot of the questions that I'd had are on my own less than successful Danny life just started to become clear I remember thinking to myself holy smokes not only does this guy know about health and wellness but he knows about life so I kept attending his lectures every week as much as I could and asked him as many questions as I could I probably pestered him more than anybody else and I kept thinking about his main theme which is that our job in life is to optimize our life experience however our biological job in life is to reproduce our genes and sometimes those two goals don't meet so if we're smart enough and we're lucky enough when we can find out what our genes are trying to get us to do we can sometimes be able to use our reasoning skills to figure out if that's going to optimize our life happiness and that really made sense to me and so it's been a journey trying to do that my entire life ever since I've heard all these ideas and dr. Lyle and I have kept in touch ever since I stopped working at the center and I am on my own now my own practice in Southern California but we kept in touch and one day I called him and said hey I have an idea for this podcast it's based on your your idea of beating your genes what do you think and so far we've been doing it now of almost a little bit more than a year we have something in the realm of a little less than 90,000 listeners which is phenomenal because it's really just a garage operation if you guys can't tell with some of the audio problems that we run into here and there but but that's how that's my background that's how I got into this and that's how I met dr. Lyle but enough about me let's go on with the show this week on our podcast we're actually going to learn a little bit more about dr. Lyle the man the myth the legend I'm gonna play a clip from an interview that dr. Lyle did on another pot can spud fit podcast spud fit podcast is created by Andrew Taylor Andrews got a really inspiring story after after struggling with his weight his entire life and then trying all sorts of different diets and health programs all with really little success he actually decided that he was gonna eat only potatoes for an entire year just in hopes of breaking free from what he found was the addictive nature of modern processed foods and he did this for a year surprisingly the results were just stunning he got back to an ideal weight range he lost about almost 120 pounds over 53 kilograms his depression anxiety went away and he was healthier than ever before so what does this have to do with dr. Lyle and evolutionary psychology well let's listen in and find out [Music] here we are with dr. Doug Lyall we ran in our friend Linda's place and there's a bit of a party going on in the background so we might have you might hear some other sound issues and we'll see what happens anyway we do what we can so welcome dr. Lyle thank you pleasure thanks very much for joining us yeah it's a it's a real honor to be able to have this time to sit down and chat with you so start things off the question I ask all of my guests to answer you can answer it in a complex way or a simple way yeah well I'm I'm psychologist and I have a my best friend from childhood with dr. Alan Goldhamer who is the the head of a true North Health Center in Santa Rosa California where we specialize in water only fasting I think I'll probably just air the interview no but yes yeah I spoke to him on Tuesday mornings Oh terrific and it's some day now for the people listening so yeah yes so we we started out as kids in California just doing our own doing our own California thing and then my father actually was always pretty curious about about a number of things and he would just read books and sort of take off on a tangent for a while usually never amounting to much but when we were in high school he picked up an interest in health and so there was several big health books in the world at that time Adelle Davis had a book called let's see right to keep fit and and then my dad ran into a book called psycho Dietetics they want yes was resting nine yes it was a story of essentially hypoglycemia and so it blamed refined carbohydrates for all of the world's psychological ills and he became convinced that this was you know gospel and so I read it or I didn't I didn't read the whole thing but I read part of it enough to felt like he was very authoritative and I was about 17 at the time which point started lecturing to everybody you know inside it was already a preachy lecturer a health preacher was born and so by friend Alan of course Alan had to was subjected to this and one of the interesting things about it was I had then stopped eating all all refined carbs and and so I did this and then Alan of course had to take up the challenge and I can remember to this day it's like it was yesterday he called me on the phone and said this is tougher than I thought you know there's cookies in my mom's cookie jar and he keeps looking at them and but Alan then before too long he became just as dedicated and then more dedicated than I am and because he's more of a fanatical nut this is how it is and so he so we then began this journey and that he sort of took this on more personally to learn more and he started working in a natural food store and then he started reading the books on the shelves in the natural food store and eventually he came across natural hygiene and natural hygiene then became the philosophy that that then guided our careers in this whole arena eventually we found other people we found John McDougall and then Colin Campbell and Caldwell Esselstyn and and these and these characters so we we picked up you know heroes along the way but the beginning started with with that beginning from psycho Dietetics and then on to hygiene and then from hygiene we really haven't strayed that far from those basic early principles all right Allan actually talked about it being part of the raisin was about trying to improve his basketball game you know that may be true he didn't tell me this at the time yeah so I I wouldn't be surprised to get an edge over you without you knowing wouldn't surprise me at all your into your psychologist now so how did that progression happen from that's that's the part of I'm most interested in of course nutrition but this whole journey for me has been more about psychology than nutrition so I'm interested in that from yeah I think psychology has started out in my with my frustration about girls you know so yeah this started out I was probably 19 or 20 and I had he become frustrated I was on my way to be an econ major and a lawyer just like my big sister and about half way into this I just got I knew it wasn't me and so I dropped out of school and I didn't know what I was gonna do and I wound up working for Alan Alan actually had a little sprout company Alan was going to school yeah he's gonna go he was going to Chiropractic College up in Oregon and he so he started a little sprout company that was successful now I came up to work in his sprout company and I delivered sprouts I was gonna say you're not talking about like a small company like as a metaphor sprout is a small company that's growing growing sprouts I have to tell you it was a beautiful operation already put together and the and it it worked and you'd paid his way through school and paid several employees and he had a real growing concern yeah and so anyway but while I was there doing nothing watching my friend go on to get a doctorate and me spinning my wheels as a dropout I was I was you know searching for something and through some accident a book called the psychology of self-esteem by a Nathaniel Brandon came into my possession and it was a listening I'm just yes so we talked about I'm gonna try to find them and put links to them in the show notes which you can find on the website sorry to interrupt you yes so anyway I the psychology of self esteem was actually pretty hard to read it was complicated reasoning and and somewhat intellectually maybe a little pretentious and and a little bit high-handed and but I read it and I was trying to understand and I can remember thinking you know if I could just grasp what this guy is saying I could really make it you bid this this feels like the kind of problems I'm really interested in helping people in since I was having these issues myself and so then I went on I actually met the author and joined a little therapy group that he had for a few weeks and and then I decided I wanted to go back to school to become a psychologist and so that's what happened so I then I returned to the University after a couple of years off and went all the way through my I was determined to to become a doctorate in the field and so that I went on to get my doctorate in the field and then from there then a lot of things happen that took me a lot of different directions away from sort of conventional thinking yeah all right so that I read a little bit last night I've read the pleasure trap before that was when I was first introduced to you we'll get into my thoughts on the pleasure trap later but I before last night all I knew of you was the stuff I've seen I'm from a red sari in the pleasure trap and stuff I've seen on Tru North's website right and I saw you speak last week and but then last night I decided to do a little bit more reading about you and I found your website a same dynamics calm right or it will be it's dot-org right and uh and I found the whole idea of evolutionary psychology really really fascinating and lasting so can we talk about that a little bit more I could talk forever about this this is this is my life and so the there's no there's no greater joy and no no better purpose that I have then to explain to the world evolutionary psychology yeah and so it turns out that the pleasure trap is just an important little slipper an application of evolutionary psychology but for your listeners let me sort of describe what this is and it may seem obvious to you hearing it for the first time but actually if you're anywhere in psychology or you've had any exposure to conventional psychology this is a revolution yes you know I have had a little bit of exposure i minored at university in psychology so I obviously know any what your background is but I do have you know I studied Freud and right other guys yes I do have a little bit in it and then I might as well explain the introduction so yes early last year I was doing my YouTube videos and I made one particular video called it was called it was about moderation my thoughts on moderation and I thought the idea of eating everything in moderation was stupid yeah and after I made that someone wrote to me and said hey you should read this book the pleasure trap so I got the book and of course the first chapter I read was the moderation myth right and that was I was so happy when I read that because it made me made me realize how these here's two guys that are genuine experts in what they're talking about and it made me realize that I was on the right track with the way I was thinking about psychology so right so yeah that's the lead-in I guess - yes what you've got to say about the pleasure trap and yes sorry anyway yes so what this is is the following concept and that is that the if you look at a giraffe the giraffe has a particular anatomical structure so there's effectively a Grey's Anatomy of the giraffe so it's kidneys in a certain place it's livers in a certain place at heart its heart has to be unusual because it's a giraffe it turns out giraffes have extraordinarily high blood pressure the reason why they do is because they have to have the heart pumped up blood all the way up to that head so okay so there so each kind of creature has its own specific issues that it has to deal with because of its anatomical structure so a giraffe faces different challenges essentially engineering challenges then does a water snake they've got a really different set of problems yep and each kind of creature has its own threats in the environment and each of them has its own opportunities so for a giraffe the opportunities are you know eucalyptus leaves up in the tree and and the threats are going to be any predators that would come along etc and snake holes and things of that nature yeah so each kind of creature has its own what we're going to call adaptive problems and if we look at its physical structure what we're witnessing is the best design that that natural selection came up so if it turned out that they were better off being a few inches taller than they got a little bit taller if it turned out that it they were better off not getting any taller but having their legs get a little bit thicker and the knees changing a little bit because it's a little bit better designed for the landscape then things would change in other words things shift and modify in a way that shapes the adaptive challenges of that genetic lineage of that species yeah so that's why a giraffe looks like a giraffe and a water snake looks like a water snake and a gorilla looks like a gorilla so essentially the the giraffe that was a little bit taller was more likely to reproduce and therefore have kids that were a little bit taller yes and that's how it spreads through the population yeah that's exactly right in other words that the characteristics of these organisms part of their physical characteristics are genetic part of them are as a result of wear and tear so one giraffe limps around but it's not because it has it's not gonna pass on the limping to its son because it must it was a defect of its knee if it got injured it doesn't you don't pass along injuries yeah so the so yes so the genetics is basically explaining why the giraffe looks the way it does and in this way each giraffe has it's each kind of species has its own specified anatomy structure physiology and something else that's very important to understand it has a brain and that brain matches its body and it's basically like a perfect glob out of an Italian glove shop that fits perfectly for that hand so the the brain that is in a hippopotamus will not fit in a rhinoceros yeah won't do the right behaviors even though they're pretty similar and then they're all both big it's not the right set of behaviors and so each kind of brain is actually a a device for managing the behavior of that type of organism and that is going to be give rise to what we're going to call their nature so giraffe has giraffe nature and rhinoceros has no rhinoceros nature and the great white shark has great white shark nature and what's fascinating is that in the 20th century the dominant view of of academic psychology is that there is no such thing as human nature they had a theory this is known as learning theory and then becomes known as social learning theory or socialization that is the dominant theory in in psychology and the dominant theory in anthropology and in sociology it's the notion that human beings are do not have a brain that is specialized as a human brain they have a brain that is so naturally flexible and it's just a big complicated Association of that it can become anything okay so in principle already blowing my mind yes so in principle on this theory even though they don't they don't articulate it in this way but this is actually the baseline theory of academic psychology that you could become a giraffe okay all we would have to do is teach you to do giraffe things and then you would be like a giraffe yeah and or you could become a lion or you could become a hippopotamus or a porpoise okay so in other words the human brain is infinitely flexible and that it is independent of its biological lineage having been a vegan for quite a while I have met a lot of people who think they're lions yeah so anyway the bottom line is this that this is a this is a catastrophic mistake and there's reasons why they made this mistake and one of the reasons is that human beings have a do have a phenomenal capacity for learning and because they can learn so much they can learn chanel number five they can learn what a BMW is they can learn and name so many details in the world that people forgot that there's an underlying human nature that cannot be changed so this is and in fact we are so close to that nature that our own nature is like water is to fish like they can't see it they wouldn't know what you mean by water yeah and human beings are so close to their own natural history it comes so automatically to them that they don't even see it and this is what too of our greatest psychologists today john tooby and leda cosmides this is what they call instinct blindness the human beings are so close to their own instincts that they don't see them so let me show you what a few of our instincts are and as soon as you start looking for human instincts you'll find them everywhere but if you're not looking for them you'll never find them ok ok and so academic psychology has not been looking for human instincts because they expressly didn't believe that they existed so now watch ok yep it's gonna turn out that from this view human beings evolved on the African savannah and they evolved with an adapted psychology that is adapted to this savanna life in small hunter-gatherer groups and so it's going to turn out that human beings like to look at a landscape and they like to look at a landscape that's full of greenery because they like to see greenery because greener indicates plant life and also animal life in the environment they like to look as yeah they like to look at broadleaf trees more than they like to look at conifers and that's because broad leaves indicate that there's more sunshine and warmth in the environment that's conducive to this particular primate yeah it's gonna turn out that they like to look down on a scene they like to actually have a gravitational advantage over predators and competitors they it turns out that if you look at paintings all over the world of landscapes in any art gallery in anybody's house in any office you're gonna see that the gravitational epicenter of the painting is below the level of the observer yeah so see that painting right there we are slightly above the gravitational epicenter that you can see that we are looking from vantage of about 7 to 10 feet higher than the gravitational epicenter so this is gonna be characteristic of every painting that you're gonna see all the paintings in this room and that yes looking down on the same scene even if there's mountains in the background the gravitational episode of the scene you look down on the reason is as humans like to look down because of that gravitational and perspective advantage yeah it's gonna also turn out that they like to look at water and they like to look at water because you're not a desert animal and you need water so that's why houses the looking over look water people like it yeah it's not that you just like the look of water you like the sound of because it turns out that the that water that's moving is less likely to have bacterial contamination yeah you also got a little fountain in the middle of True North and I love sitting next to it and just listening to the trickle of the water it's also true that we like to look at grassland sort of landscape with intermittent trees and we don't like a tremendous amount of trees because you can't see through that jungle and there could be predators you can see you'd like to have intermittent trees as you look at a landscape and you don't want to be too far from these intermittent trees because you don't want to be caught without being able to scramble up a tree to survive so it turns out that you can show people stylized pictures of environments or actual pictures of environments with trees that have different circumference --is of the trunks as well as the branching structure how high it is and they will not like the look of a picture where the trunk is too wide or the branches branch out too high and they can't get up that tree now they can never tell you why they don't like that picture but they like the picture where the trunks are such that they could climb them okay so they feel safer looking at that so if you if you actually discover what human beings like they love trees because trees protected them from the African Sun they gave them a gravitational advantage over predators and competitors they gave them an escape route from predators they gave them a place to get perspective and actually see things and they also potentially fed them and they were a sign of water in the landscape literally trees are tremendous friends to humans and so that's why if you go into attractive new homes you don't like the look of it because there's no trees there yeah yeah okay when you go into a neighborhood that's mature you like it not only that you don't like attractive homes where the roads are straight you like it when they're curvy yeah it's the only thing in an adaptive landscape for a human that that looks like a curved Road is a riverbed and a riverbed a sign of water was in this landscape yeah when you actually think about how badly you don't like a landscape that is desert or a landscape with no trees when it's completely flat you recognized it if you were in the middle of that landscape a predator could see you from 600 yards away and there'd be nowhere to hide yeah so this is this is an example this is just one example of human nature and so if you were a gopher you would like you would like basement apartments more than you like penthouse yeah yeah so all of these things we start to see everywhere the human nature is clearly part of the design and it's not something that any other theory of psychology ever considered yeah okay totally fascinate in in theory if you grew up in the middle of a concrete jungle like Los Angeles you should have pictures of Los Angeles and concrete jungles and and 711s on your wall you know this is supposedly what you associated with good feelings of going to 7-eleven and eating a candy bar yeah but that's not what anybody wants to look at everybody wants to look at these beautiful landscapes they pay a fortune to get two golf courses and put their homes on a golf course so they can overlook what is in fact a stylized beautiful environment consistent with the African savannah yeah and even when you do say paintings or pictures of like Manhattan Island you're still always looking from that upward angle aren't you yes you're looking from the upward angle and your there might be a few pictures where it shows you you know Tony's Italian restaurant it's sort of like a feeling of being there yeah but it's not beautiful yeah I guess that's why all the apartments around Central Park are so expensive that's exactly right that's precisely why yeah amazing all right I'm struggling to come up with another story I was if you've got more you want to talk about I'm happy to just sit and listen but your next interest was in how it relates to food for you because yes a big part of your work is in talking about food like at the conference we're at today and last week this is of course everything so that you're going to now understand the problems that people have with food very easily when you realize that there's an innate human nature and human nature is designed by nature to look for concentrations of sugar fat and salt in the landscape it's designed to do that salts an essential nutrient that you have to have for the sodium potassium pump and other biological functions and then you're going to have sugar and fat are going to be essential nutrient sources you also like the taste of protein or the more like texture probably a protein yeah so essentially the three macronutrients as well as an essential mineral like salt these are critical for human survival so essentially what's gonna happen is that our our natural history wired in a pleasure circuit between your tongue and your brain and it's basically says our job is to look for the highest concentration of these chemicals in the environment so the foods that have the highest concentration of those chemicals are going to be the ones that we should be eating we see this same bias throughout nature so it's gonna turn out if you look at grizzly bears in in Alaska where there's the salmon or running you will find that they will grab a salmon and bite its head off and throw the rest of the the fish away and that's because the brains have the highest concentration of fat in a salmon you will see chimpanzees in the forest will strip a tree or a shrub of leaves the way a kid would wreck your shrub and they just they'll take their fingers like this and just strip it and they'll have a whole stack of leaves in their fingers that way yeah and then they'll eat the tips off of it leave the tips because the the new growth chips have the highest nutrient concentration all right so then they'll throw the leaves away yeah so you're gonna find that throughout nature animals triangulate that they also have sensors in their tongue into the pleasure centers of their brain that that inform them of the highest nutrient concentration yeah so it's grizzly bears you're talking about they were only looking for berries when the salmon are not there yes that's great yeah that's absolutely yeah so it's gonna turn out my buddy Howard Lyman the mad cowboy told me listen to me talk on this once and he said came up to me and he said you know Doug the cattle that I used to have there's a certain kind of grass in Montana that is richer than the other grass and when the cattle would go there they'd eat they would completely clean that grass off of the acreage before they'd ever touched the other grass so anybody that's had a pet knows that that cat likes the fancy food that's all rich and syrupy rather than the dry crunchy food yeah so this is all about calories per unit of energy expended and these are essentially what what living form is what life is is it's the transmutation of caloric energy into DNA yeah that's all fundamentally what life is so that means what animals do is they are very strategically built in order to have incentive systems built into their wiring that guide them like it like a like a like a laser-guided missile they're they're directed towards getting the most bang for their buck that they can possibly get this means that this all works beautifully and and increases the likely to survival for all animals on earth with this strategy the problem is is when human genius comes along and makes pop-tarts chocolate shakes and french fries which are completely unnatural and of course they are extremely popular because they are artificially concentrated sources of these chemicals and of course the organism doesn't know that this is self-destructive the instincts are saying I'm doing exactly the right thing give me another box of the same stuff and coached a few people now very few yes one of the things that I always tell the people then they're usually obese people that one of those weight and one of the things I've always been telling them is that to not worry about things being broken your body's working perfectly maybe better than everyone else because you're seeking these high-calorie foods yes and I tell them that if we went back to hunter-gatherer times and people like me and the people that I coach found happened to find a doughnut tree in the savanna yes then we would be the best in the tribe at learning how to find more donut trees and learning how to cultivate them and therefore we would be the best at building up our fat stores and surviving droughts and therefore producing kids yes and the problem is that the donut trees are always in season these days yes is that an appropriate analogy that's actually a fantastic analogy that I never thought of so it's great I never thought of the donut to react that's a nice imagination the yes but you're right on target andrew is absolutely right yes thank you so so now you're working with food and psychology and yes and do you coach people and like as a psychologist help people that are overweight that need to change their relationship with food absolutely there was that coach all kinds of people whether it's weight loss whether it's eating disorders yeah certainly probably the biggest thing that goes on it just so happens that I talked to a lot of people about food but not everybody I'm talking about it's about food yeah so I talk about romantic relationships I talk about self-esteem yeah at the heart of so many of things even when it's we're talking about relationships to food and we're talking about people that are trying to lose weight is the issue of self-esteem yeah so self-esteem ironically I come full circle all the way back to my roots when I was almost 40 years ago reading the Fanueil Brendon we're coming all the way back to the problems of self-esteem that I now understand more clearly than I did then and much more clearly than Brandon could have understood in 1969 yeah so we now have an understanding of esteem processes and that is extremely useful to try to help people feel much better about themselves when when they're facing sort of repetitive struggles in these sort of areas that are very costly for them interpersonally and even costly for them just personally in terms of their health that one of the biggest costs that is involved in these problems of what I call the pleasure trap is the toll that it takes on people's self-esteem and so that's a big thing that I wind up doing is sort of coaching people through the process of building their own internal self regard for me wasn't something I expected I was clinically depressed before I started my Patera challenge yes after a couple of months I noticed that things were much better and that was a surprise to me and then I started learning about it and lots of people sent sent me to a book called potatoes not prozac have you heard of that no I haven't heard of it okay yeah I've got the book now but I told out on the other day as well I just haven't had time to read it yeah but I was hoping you'd read it now anyway back in time then - when you first started practicing psychology yes and working with people who needed help can you remember your first big success with a patient or do you call impatient yes quiet yes success story early on that made you think right I've got this this is this is the thing that I want to do because that was awesome when this person told me it how great this their life is now yeah I can remember one yeah I can remember what happened to me was it was actually at my final year of grad school I was off on an internship and just by chance another book falls into my hand and it's a long story but you had no business getting into my hands but it did and the book was called The Selfish Gene by the Oxford professor Richard Dawkins yeah and and I had heard of it vaguely and I and I opened this thing up and in the first page he had my full attention and two pages in I realized that this guy was confident almost arrogant that he actually knew the solution to a problem that I knew that psychology didn't know the answer to which was incredible and that was I had now I was a few months short of a PhD from a major university and no one had ever explained to me that the motivation of organisms was to reproduce genes this was a completely novel idea okay so I had learned all the other theories and I'd learned sort of what people thought and it's all sort of muddy thinking and it doesn't match and now I read two pages of a deep thinking evolutionary biologist who says quite clearly this is exactly what it is and I immediately recognized that he was right yeah okay I had been searching It was as if you know that feeling when you look into a kaleidoscope where suddenly the rock shift and it Springs clear okay that is exactly my brain had been fuzzy fuzzy fuzzy looking for a theory to understand human nature and I desperately wanted to know one and cognitive theories didn't fit everything psychodynamic theories didn't fit learning theories didn't fit and I think that everything had contradictions and contradictory evidence all over the place so I people would ask me well what's your orientation gonna be and I didn't know I'd say well cognitive because it was sort of it was classy but the truth of the matter is and I wasn't one of those dynamic people that they're too creative and deep and troubled and awful and yeah you know what I'm saying so I wasn't gonna go there and so I didn't know what to do and what to think and when I read Dawkins it was the lights went on and the band started to play it was like this is it yeah and so it would be a few years as I would read I would read his three main works very quickly in succession I would read The Blind watchmaker and then I would read wasn't probably for a couple years later that I took on a very difficult book called the extended phenotype when I read that was everything that he had written at that point other than scientific papers but I wasn't even going to try to read yeah and so yes that's a very interesting book but this is but the real key to his career is The Selfish Gene the blind watchmaker and the extended phenotype he after that he doesn't do anything this particularly novel its iterations of the same thing yes yeah and so I this is percolating in my brain for a few years as I began to work as a psychologist and then at one moment I was supervising some some people in the court system in Dallas and a colleague of mine said there's this there's this there's this probation officer whose husband has dumped her and she's devastated and I knew the girl is very pretty girl and and they said would you come over talk to her she's a mess and I thought well sure of course I would now I'm be called in on an emergency it's like every psychologist wants to hear this thing dr. Lyle dr. Lyle report to emergency I go over there I sit down with her and for the first time this is my first time ever I start to explain to a client that's in deep trouble the evolutionary process of how it is that her relationship works as I explained casual mating strategy versus pair-bond strategy etc etc this is all things that have been buzzing around in my head since I had read The Selfish chin and I so I'm explaining to it and I'm as I explained the dynamics what was fascinating this girl this girls self-esteem was naturally high and she's naturally stable and she was also very attractive and by the end of an hour and a half this gal was like got it understand not a problem yeah this is a divorce okay this is she's been married for three or four years known this guy for six years this is a guy that she was thinking she was gonna have children with she's 28 years old okay this this would have been a full-fledged major crisis in any psychotherapy office in the world okay and I sat down and talked like a scientist stepping this woman through the logic of why it is that the husband made the decisions he was making what was actually transpiring what the whole dynamics were and I said this is how it is and she said no problem and was done Wow okay it's amazing and I checked you know two weeks later she said no we're fine we're friends not a problem it's good we're good to go Wow okay and a year later she was having the time of her life dating somebody new so the point is is that that was my very first moment where I tested this evolutionary logic yeah I and I found that the that the nervous system is craving accuracy yeah it wants to understand and as soon as it understands it knows what it's dealing with it's fine yeah it's when it's confused that it's under distress yeah okay and so it became clear to me that as I then continued on over the next few years I could start to see I knew that I was having successes that were not typical in the field yeah and so today it's not even close so today now we're 20 some years past that point 25 years God where's the time gone 25 years later yeah and two or three thousand patients later I understand that the that my understanding of evolutionary psychology is of course grown yeah and my ability to manage the the different kinds of problems that come to me is now much broader than it would have been that was my very first one that I tried I'd had other clients before his training in grad school done what everybody told me to do yeah take out the little cognitive things three-column what do you think what do you feel what's your behavior etc I've I had certainly trained in cognitive behavioral therapy I've been introduced to dynamic therapy etc but this is this is clearly a different animal because it's coming from a different perspective which is human nature yeah there's a human nature and the better you know human nature the better you can understand it struggles and the roots of its suffering and when you do you can engineer strategies that are much more successful than conventional strategies for reasons that conventional thinkers would never even think of
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