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Episode 86: What is a middle-of-the-bell-curve person like, braces, alcohol addiction
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all right good evening everybody good evening dr. Lyle how are you doing today good good how you doing doing okay I was very sad news in the last week and I just wanted to send our deepest condolences to the victims at the Las Vegas shooting that happened on Sunday pretty terrible tragedy incredible yeah my heart goes out to everyone that is lutely you bet yeah any any thoughts on well we really don't know too much about this guy anyway so I will just let them sort it out yeah apparently I just heard today that he had been prescribed anti-anxiety medications earlier in the summer oh and which is interesting and we will we can't pin anything on that but it's we would know that that psychiatric medications are going to D stat destabilize brands and so it could be you know particularly problematic when you have a brain that's already very close to the line on something so we may learn more about that or they may hush that up we'll find out yeah there's a interesting book I think you recommended to me a while ago called anatomy of an epidemic that it goes over a lot of this information about what these psychiatric drugs do to the brain yes yeah it's actually yeah we're not going to make a case about this particular case here obviously this guy had a lot of wires loose but but the the psychiatric medications definitely destabilize brains and cause tragic things other it's more likely for tragic things to happen at least that would appear to be the case since I believe the research evidence says that suicidal ideation doubles when you put people on antidepressant medication so I don't think they've tracked real carefully whether suicidal behavior specifically increases it's hard to it's hard to pin that for sure I believe because you know it's you can't get a random assignment to condition on on something like that so but it would certainly be suspicious that that would be the case given what it is that we do now so who knows you know I whenever I hear about some tragedy usually we find out we're often we find out that the psychiatric medications were not too far away from the scene of the crime and in this case I believe that's true but you know we'll find out we'll find out more it's always disturbing to see anything like this where were you sweep around the person's existence for what it is that you know this guy was a smart guy he was he had money and so he you know we may find that the autopsy may determine that he had a brain tumor who knows but the fact that his father was a was a sociopathic kind of a character uh certainly lets us know that there was a you know a genetic influence involved here we just don't we don't know enough about the other pieces of the puzzle but I you know all be I'll be interested to hear what it is that we do learn mmm yeah all right well with that said we're going to go in with some of the questions that we didn't finish last week and continue on the question we ended with last week was about people who exist that sit in the middle for all five personality traits so this guy who the shooter was was most likely you know on certain outlier and certain part characteristics but the question you have today is what do people that sit in the middle for all these five personality traits like what would be like to meet such a person would they be successful would be alluring what could you tell us about somebody who's smack in the middle they would be very very unremarkable in other words if you notice and you look at these personality traits the which are they're probably going to have a mate they're probably going to be successful as far as that goes the just just because they don't have anything that's that's so disturbing or unusual that that puts them as an outlier on some dimension the but this is a this is a very unremarkable person if you look at the all six personality variables the big five plus intelligence you can see underneath here there is very definitely advantages and disadvantage or preferences that we have for these people on different places so more more intelligent people are more valuable than less intelligent people in principle all things being equal more open people are more valuable than more closed for the very reason that they have survived more adventures and they have more to tell us and they probably have learned more about the world and it's it's extremes and so if there's still if they're still functioning and haven't done brain damage to themselves then they are interesting they're much more interesting to talk to that a person who is very closed when it comes to conscientiousness obviously a highly conscientious person is more valuable to you than a low conscientious person an extrovert is more valuable than an introvert all things being equal they know more people they're better connected person is more agreeable is more valuable than a disagreeable person in general under most circumstances and a more stable person is more valuable than an unstable person in general so you realize that these things are not value free yeah evolution has sort of put these things in bell curves and there are prices to be paid when you are on the valuable side because people will be attracted to those characteristics and they will potentially exploit them and they also they also may serve as advantages for the holder of those characteristics however it's also the case that the people on the other side of the bell curve amazingly are just as adaptive for various and sundry reasons disagreeable people out negotiate agreeable people the unstable people invest in more invest more energy in low probability successes than very stable people and therefore they exploit opportunities that wouldn't otherwise be exploited the low country people renege on debts and essentially wind up also in an exploitative situation relative to conscientious people so you can see that amazingly that's why they're in a bell curve now there's a question what would somebody down the middle look like well they wouldn't they wouldn't be particularly strong in anything and they wouldn't particularly be weak in anything so nothing would stand out to you as as seeing that this person was particularly valuable they wouldn't have a significant liabilities so everything about them they're like the secretary in your typing pool that is in the middle for speed and she's in the middle for mistakes she's in the middle for how many days off she takes for sick days she's in the middle for physical attractiveness she's in the middle for how much social sniping goes across her desk and how much many complaints she raises in other words she's an average employee and she's not you're not looking to be excited about her to promote her neither is she going to be kicked out so that's how I would look at somebody down the middle of bell curve not too interesting so that that's what we would say interesting we wonder how many people we've met like this or from from what you're saying is we probably wouldn't even remember if we've met people like this yeah you would remember them you wouldn't be like wow can't wait to get get together with them we're not very polarizing when it comes to the right how they right okay yeah they're just a little they're just a average human with an average coalition with an average life and they're not going to be generating a lot of feelings one way or the other in anybody so that's more or less how it is so they're their family and their cats and dogs will love them and that's that's good okay all right let's go all right our next next question is about braces dear dr. Lyle I have less than perfect teeth not extremely unsightly but bad enough that I dread smiling and photos I never got dental braces as a child but now I'm 24 and I'm heavily considering getting them in the next months but the idea scares me not intimidated by the financial cost or the potential for pain my concern is purely social I do work that forces me to speak face to face with many people including strangers each day fortunately under a happy long-term relationship so no dating concerns but I'm still mortified by getting strange looks from everyone I meet for a year or more so much so that I told myself I would never get braces but objectively I feel that getting braces is best for my long-term happiness I'm having trouble coping with the potential embarrassment what are your thoughts oh to be 24 listen whoever this young person is get the braces for goodness sakes face it the truth is you will habituate very quickly to to any looks or cross-examination there'll be minimal people won't really think hardly about it hardly at all and I would say even if you're right in the middle of a mating market you were trying to score I would still say get the braces this is a this is nothing to live with if you can if this is a an embarrassing issue that you can live without then by all means pay the price and and get it behind you so no that's to me that's a no-brainer just face it it is not it will not be nearly as bad as you think it is that's how that works so just in general people are this is to tie this back into evolutionary psychology and esteem dynamics this is a conscientious individual who is overestimating the worst-case-scenario so they're they're overestimating the social costs that are going to be involved here and they're overestimating them by quite a bit and so the so therefore the right thing to do is to go against a little stone-age circuit that's overworking itself and grit your teeth and then find out that it really wasn't any big deal and then we going to be really glad when we take those braces off a couple three years from now and you've got you know beautiful straight teeth for the rest of your life well worth the investment so I have a little challenge question for you yeah how is it that you know that this is overestimating the worst case scenario that's that's a very good question let me think about that I would say that I have held people's hands through some pretty extraordinary potentially embarrassing processes and I would say that the surprise to me if there is one is to find out how self-absorbed everybody else in the world really is and so we think we're self-absorbed but everybody else is just too self-absorbed and so it turns out people don't really care that much about what on earth is going on with you and and so the the truth of the matter is go about your business and your you know the most exciting thing that you could do to the village would only be news for about four days until if something else happened so I've just been this been through this too much with too many things like oh my gosh you know I'm deeply religious I couldn't possibly get a divorce it would be I'd be drummed out of my church blah blah and it turns out none of the nothing of the kind happens it's like it you've done without screaming and done without fuss you can you can do things and people will just sort of shrug their shoulders and there may be a few a few social relationships that are modified or lost but basically you can pretty well do just about anything you want so yeah this is put it this way this isn't even this isn't even 1/100 of what it takes to come out as a gay or lesbian person and yet those people get through that and most of the time it's enormous ly liberating and they wind up most of the time at least these days very successful at achieving is that they were hoping to achieve so so anyway this is this is a no-brainer we just face it and we get through it and it's not you know well worth the trouble mmm and so on the same theme about overestimating this worst case scenario how would you go about talking to this particular listener for essentially I think a couple podcasts back you you mentioned something about worst-case scenarios and how you do the down-arrow yes this seems I agree with you that seems like a simplistic example but in general how would you go about what walking through somebody with this you know with this type of worst-case scenario over estimation well it's it it's actually really interesting it depends on you know I'm assuming that I could just bully this person into doing what they should do which babe by the way that's fairly often yeah but if it turns out that the person is actually much higher anxiety than a normal individual and they're actually under great trepidation about something like this then we find a way to run an experiment okay so my plea I would resign er yeah yeah I'd have yeah get a retainer and then wear a retainer around and let's see what happens and so in this way you could you can test market some idea and then find out that it's it's nothing to worry about mmm-hmm can you tell the listeners the story about the lady who came to you while ago and said she was depressed so you had to run a bunch of experiments yeah this is a this is a good example of how extraordinary the worst case scenario can stick around in an individual this is a very old case so you know usually I'm not taking telling cases of any detail with anything that happened in the last ten years so this is we're going way back it's it's doubtful this person is still alive in fact I'd bet almost everything they're not so this was early in my career and a woman came to me that for to do some weight loss because she was you know portly she wasn't very overweight but she was overweight she was 50 pounds overweight like every grandmother you'll see and she was probably uh-uh 65 I would say and so that was 25 years ago so you know this is a long time back and she she kind of sat there she's very very introverted and she sat there for about four or five sessions you know basically moping about her weight and I tried to explain to her a few things and tried to get a little program together and it was nothing doing there's just no there was good there was no action and the woman was clearly to me quite depressed and I keep asking her about how you know that that issue and how she felt and was what else was going on in her life and she was very resistant you know which I don't blame her I'm this young young kid and I'm prying around trying to get her to to tell what what's on her mind etc you know she's coming to me because she knows I'm health oriented person to try to get some healthy weight loss well nothing's happening and so finally I'm not one to to actually sit around week after week or month after month and therapy take people's time and money and and not do anything I can't stand that just goes against my grain so after probably four or five sessions I said well you know that's about all I know about this topic and so you know here's the basic plan and and so you know that's that's what I can do and I really don't know anything other way to help you so but if anything does come up when you're trying to work on this and you get stuck then feel free to come back in and I'd be glad to see you ie I'm not interested in talking to you next week okay so I don't make a follow-up appointment that's the best to read between the lines so she then said well there is something I want to talk about my con that's interesting and she said I said well what's that she said I'm depressed of course and I'm thinking well of course you're depress us obvious that that's true but I am saying haha okay and and what he depressed about well I'm just depressed I said well you know how long have you been depressed and she said my whole life now I'm paraphrasing now but this is pretty close and and she's and I said uh-huh okay so your whole life and she says yes and I said in and oh actually it was a little different I said how are you depressed all day what would you know etc yes I said okay when you get up in the morning are you depressed and she said no which is amazing and I said really okay when do you start to get depressed and she said when I look in the mirror and I said what do you what are you thinking when you're looking in the mirror and you're depressed she said I'm ugly and I said you know she was not ugly she was very average looking one I said what makes you think you're ugly and she said my rosacea and so she her cheeks were a little bit red but was completely within normal limits there was nothing unusual about this at all and I said what makes you think so well I just think so looks terrible etc and I said how long have you been thinking this and she said my whole life and I said really so when you were 30 this is what you thought she said yes I said and when you were 20 she said yes I said when you were 10 she said no I said well what happened between 10 and 20 and she said well when I was in high school I got really bad acne and I never got a date and never went to the prom and nobody ever wanted to be near me because my acne was terrible and I said what happened then and she said well a few years later it kind of cleared up and then I met my husband and then that's it and I said so that's it you that's your last 30 40 years of your life that's how that goes and so you're still thinking that everybody thinks you're ugly she says yes I said you have any friends she's yeah I said what friends do you have she goes well I play bridge play bridge and I said so you got a friend at Bridge and she says yes I said okay what's your friend's name will marry you think that Mary thinks you're ugly yes I said I'm telling you right now Mary doesn't think you're ugly and neither does anybody else but my input isn't going to fix this because what's happened is is this error it's mistake about what other people think of you has been stuck in your mind for 40 years since high school 50 years and I said we have to get it out of there the only way we're going to get it out of there is we've got to prove it to you that you're wrong said me telling you isn't going to do it you're going to have to get evidence I said what let's talk about when you are if you ever see have you ever seen anybody that's really disturbing to look at like a burn victim she says yeah said how do people behave well they take a quick peek at them and they look away so that's right and then they look back because they were like mortified so I said so you would be thinking that people are doing that to you yeah I kind of think so I said yeah I don't think so so what you're going to do is you're going to go out when you leave here today is your your job is to watch people very closely that you have an interaction with and then I want you to see if you catch them peeking back at you a little little while later you're going to start the secretary at the front desk yeah they're in my office you're gonna see whether or not she peaked has a little funny-looking peek was she's staring at you staring at your face because I guarantee is she's not but you just you're going to find out you're going to tell me and then I said you probably think that your your face looks you know like it's almost dangerous or infectious and that people want to stay away from you because it's weird she goes yeah I kind of think that I said uh-huh so what I want you to do at bridge is I want you to put your hands put take your hand up to your face and touch your hand to your face and say Mary I got to tell you something and then scoot a little closer to or then reach over and touch her on the floor arm and if you do that if she is thinking that you're diseased and weird she doesn't like you it doesn't like your ugliness she's going to pull away and she's going to be free but if you do that we're gonna find out if anything happens so you come back next week and you're gonna tell me what happened she came back the next week and she said you were right I gotta tell folks out there any young psychologists out there I got to tell you this is a really cool thing so I said really I'm so surprised you know said so how do you feel she goes I'm not depressed I said really not to press she goes no so she told me the story she I had told her intentionally to crowd people a little bit by a couple inches including her friends Tonya Mays touchdown Jenner uh nothing but nothing but good feedback nothing bad happened at all so that woman now yeah that was gone that that worst-case scenario was literally out of her head she stayed stayed around for a couple three more sessions to work on the weight of course nothing happened she didn't care because she was no longer depressed looking in the mirror so that's an example of how how dynamic the esteem processes are so that woman was inferring all kinds of things about esteem signals from other people and it turned out that she was mistaken and we needed to design an experiment in such a way for her to face firsthand and very clearly you know the truth and and so you know I knew what the truth was was obvious to me so this is you know sometimes it may not be obvious to you now the case of our person here with the braces it's obvious to me so if anything somebody may think the purse is kind of cute ah look at the key now you got some cute braces they look cute that's why the worst thing that is going to happen to this person as a result of putting our braces at 24 all of us have seen people with braces at 45 and 50 in other words we've seen people in midlife take a deep breath and say I'm going to put these damn braces on because I always wanted to have a three-piece treyton and people don't think anything other about it than positive so this is this is no issue at all and if we need to if we need to run a little experiment with a little retainer on there to see how it goes that's what we do but this is in principle how we do things is we set up experiments in order to check the worst case scenario and we set them up as as convincing as we possibly can and in other words we we don't pussyfoot around this thing and we're not trying to rig it in our own direction we we can you know we go right into the heart of the lion and when the people survive the heart of the lion they feel tremendously empowered and free and that's how we do it fantastic all right we've got a got a caller on hold right now but I want to get to one more question and then we're going to take our callers after that so call if you can just hold on for a little bit and then we'll take you after this question so so on the same vein of improving yourself we had a lot of questions people emailed me about how to talk how to how to quit alcohol so we're going to read the first question and just so everybody who emailed me I got your emails and this is just we've got so many that this is the one question we're used to answer it so dr. Lai if you can talk about quitting alcohol every time I think I quit I fall off the wagon and I wonder if I understood it better if I would have a better outcome maybe and I think that a better understanding in people that I've worked with with drug and alcohol problems and dietary problems a better understanding can be extremely useful and so I will I'm going to walk you through some of the logic and then I'm going to send you to a webinar on MacDougal diet webinar webinar series where I this last month I posted this webinar called the condition cram done with dr. Gustavo Tolosa and so I took people through slaw sighs of what I'm now going to tell you the that the the biggest problem with alcohol or any drug is the fact that you become classically conditioned to it and so you have two problems that are that are setting this mess up problem number one is that whatever the substance is it what it does is it it actually knocks your brain out of homeostasis in a way that is very pleasant but it is actually disturbing to the to the neuro chemistry so the brain effectively is aware that it's been assaulted and what it does is it begins to defend itself so the first time you catch it by the surprise but the second time it's not so surprised and so after you repeatedly use a drug what will happen is the brain is engineering defenses against this and which is the reason why people end up having to generally use more and more of the drug because the defenses wind up essentially neutralizing the drug now that that's part one of the problem and that's sort of interesting and there's the drugs have an allure to them if the drugs didn't have any downside if they weren't damaged then we would say well what's the problem but they do do damage these are these are things that are that are causing assaults on on the you know neuro chemistry and so as a result the system has to defend itself against these assaults and it does now the four people that tinker around with this stuff and most people for example only one out of 20 people appears to have the genes that would ever cause them to have actually a real alcohol problem so there's going to be a genetic substrate here that's going to make some people much more susceptible than others but if you are one of those people and one in one out of 20 is a lot there's 300 million probably adult Americans so that's it that's a lot of people that's 15 million people we got probably 15 million alcoholics in the United States a lot of people now a lot of suffering going on it all kinds of different levels okay so we have obviously extreme dysfunction and we have intermediate level dysfunction but you know it's a problem and so there are multiple problems that can be associated with this now so our problem number one is that it's a highly rewarding dopamine rush that the system essentially it is signaling that there's been a big reward that has been gained it's mimicking rich food and sex is what it's doing so it it feels to the nervous system like like it is a win the problem is if you happen to have the genes for addiction we're in trouble and that's that it's going to be it's going to be difficult to stop at any sane and reasonable point and what will happen is that repeated use is going to cause us to start the brain is going to start figuring out when it's likely to be drinking so it's going to be looking for all kinds of cues time add a location etc and so even events that take place like person always starts drinking after they go play rugby okay so the this is so the brain is actually looking for these cues because it's attempting to anticipate when it's going to get assaulted so it's got to get ready now if it turns out that when you try to stop drinking you do not drink even though the cues are there then the brain will engineer its defense and that defense will be very uncomfortable and and that's that defense what we call a conditioned compensatory response that's there to help you that that response will be uncomfortable enough that we actually call it craving and so then if you drink you neutralize the craving I you neutralize the conditioned compensatory response with the drug that it is designed by nature to neutralize and the to meet in the middle and you get a neutrality and through that neutrality you are in relief it's like somebody just shut off a jackhammer that was you know the back y so suddenly there's inner peace so that's very rewarding and very reinforcing and so now we're going to do it next time now so that's the basic paradigm of drug addiction and alcohol addiction now what we have to understand is the following that that you get conditioned to this so that means your brain is anticipating this and if it's anticipating this and then you don't drink then it's going to be very frustrated and it's going to throw a tantrum and it's going to try to get that resource and it's going to be really uncomfortable physically dependent upon you might be a little bit uncomfortable or might be a lot uncomfortable depending upon the nature the drug and how much you use but you're uncomfortable and if you drink you're going to be more comfortable because it will be neutralized now what you have to know is that that process of being uncomfortable and frustrated that process will go away it will pass it may pass in an hour it may pass in two hours but it's going to pass and then tomorrow when the same situations come up it's going to rise again and then if you don't if you don't reinforce it it will pass and this process goes through what we call an extinction curve and the first part of the extinction the first few days that you don't drink are the hardest ones because the system is freaking out it has a big bad compensatory response that's ready to neutralize a bunch of alcohol and when there's no alcohol it feels uncomfortable so what can you do eat walk go bowling get distracted you know it'll come in waves and if you if you stare it down it's not going to tear you apart it's not that bad all you have to do is get through this the first day you get through will not be the hardest the second and third and fourth days will be the hardest because the extinction curve doesn't just go drop off it actually goes up it gets more intense before it gets less intense that's called an extinction burst so this is like a cat think of alcoholism as a the neighbors cannot eat cat that comes over to your yard and you don't know it but it's actually beating up your cats and crapping in your yard you don't realize that it is because it it's a sweet cat apparently and it's cute and so what happens is you're feeding it now comes to your back sliding door and you feed it okay and then it comes again and you don't know it it's doing damage it's crapping and beating up your cats but you don't see it and now you comes again and you feed it again and then you feed it again and then you feed it again so now you fully conditioned this animal so every night at six o'clock it comes by and it's it's yelling at the door now if you find out that this is not such a good thing and you shouldn't be feeding this cat and it's beating up your cats so it comes to your backdoor if you don't feed it it's going to raise hell okay and it's going to come the next night and it's going to raise hell the next night and it's going to come the next night and it's going to raise hell the next night after that but finally what will happen inside of that animal brain it will start to realize it's probably not going to get fed so it won't come around as much and then it's going to quiet down and then pretty soon you won't see it for weeks at a time now every once in a while that cat is going to stop over there and he's going to meow it's your back door that's called spontaneous recovery it was noticed by Pavlov more than a hundred years ago okay so this is a very clever mechanism built into animal brains that says if you were used to a resource and then suddenly gets pulled away fight like hell to get that resource back that's the extension extinction burst and then after you keep getting frustrated start putting out less energy to try to get the resource and then finally don't put out any energy at all to get the resource that's called extinction and then once in a while go back and check and see if you can get the resource that's spontaneous recovery now you can imagine if you if that cat comes back three months later and scratches it your back door for a little bit and then you feed it of course it's coming back the next day and when it comes to that back the next day if you don't feed it it's going to scream bloody murder and it's going to be back three four days in a row so if you use once you are very likely to use now sometime in the next week this is what makes alcohol getting a control of an alcohol problem so slippery so even if a person grits their teeth and gets through an extinction burst and gets clean for a couple of weeks and this thing starts to go into extinction and it gets much quieter they might go to three four months and then what happens is some little Q comes up they get a spontaneous recovery if they drink now they're in trouble now they've fed the cat and now the cats coming back tomorrow and it's going to be yelling okay the most important thing that I can tell you about fighting any problem like this is isn't is not the obvious which is to once you get through the extinction burst never reinforce a spontaneous recovery that's very very pleasant armchair psychology to say that and that's fine obviously that would be the ideal thing but that's not the most important less than I have for people the most important lesson that I have for people is that if you relapse there is no reason for this relapse to go on and derail your life for the next five years what you have to understand is that right in the early parts of a relapse the first few days this is where you need to jump on this thing's neck you are not fully conditioned again you are it is it isn't as if you've drank 100 times in a hundred days and we've got a fully conditioned organism what we have is you are partially back into the conditioning curve and if you jump right now on top of it you will not have to fight a major extinction burst and so the the price that's involved here to get back on track is far lower if we move very very quickly okay so that's the you know take a few days off or go camping in Tahoe change something other words change the change the game very quickly get it you know and change the pattern because we need to we need to move now now if we do this it's useful to think of it this way very mechanically and not personally not about personal fail and all this kind of stuff like forget about it this is a this is a twin set of learning devices number one the device that says go after things that are highly rewarding and alcohol for example is super normal stimulus so it's hitting circus harder than anything natural except sex okay so it's it's it's really nailing a system really hard and so as a result the system says this is a great reward and then second you're fighting something else which is a classically can clasp condition mechanism that gets used to reward and therefore craves it okay and so the it's useful to know that these things are actually pair of devices that you need to be kind of aware of both of them and that once you are aware both of them is very much depersonalized as this this gets to be essentially people that work that work with me on these issues we talk about these things pretty much like it is it's not us it's it okay it's a system we are attempting to to neutralize and to outsmart and when we struggle with it and it outsmarts us we don't catastrophize over it we roll up our sleeves and we go back at it so that's that's the story of how we work on that problem all right excellent oh okay caller what else to me yet oh yeah go ahead what's your name where are you this is Naz I'm in yes that's very good show oh thanks for letting me old man interesting conversation here ban jacket I got all questions uh yeah one is really easy for the doctor and shorts and the second one I think will be a little odd but I wanted to hear what he thought our first one would be you know since this is something that you deal with I don't so I don't know how far outside I am on this but as far as uh Maslow's hierarchy of needs is that something that's kind of been turned away from and looked at as kind of you know old thing has been approved it improved upon or is that still something that's kind of valuable and kind of worth measuring uh you know in population I gotta tell you that's a really good question you have no idea how what a beautiful question that is coming from you because that's a that's a that's actually a significant theme that I'm writing about in in my book and so Maslow was a pioneer in thinking about the up side of human psychology and so he was he was along with Carl Rogers well Maslow was probably the most sophisticated humanistic psychologist that there was in the in the 20th century and he he was very interested in the up side of human happiness and how it would work and he studied healthy people and he was trying to understand them and so this guy you know this guy I have a lot of respect for him now his his thinking was outside of mainstream science and so it wasn't like you could really test his ideas his ideas were very broad and and a lot of his ideas of course ring true because he was a very good general observer there's some there's some aspects to his ideas that are that kind of are now now seen from the vision of evolutionary psychology there they're going to be weak and they're going to be kind of in trouble and they're going to need to be revised so but in general I would say this that the the Maslow's vision for really trying to focus on human happiness and how it seems to be attained and I would say his his description of what he called self actualized people even though it people immediately turned into this competitive hierarchy about how I'm actualized and you're not bitch is always hilarious to watch watch a bunch of psychologists chase their tail around this one the I there was much there was much truth and deep truth and what he was attempting to convey which is that that that people that had mastered a lot of the problems of life were more focused on essentially their self-esteem and being proud of themselves for doing things to the best of their ability and they had a resilience about whether or not that best was good enough for anybody else if anybody else would like it or not in other words you know what I'm going to try to learn how to be a painter and if nobody likes my painting I can live with that but I'm going to try to learn how to be the best painter it can be and that's that so the that sort of resilience and that sort of focus on on personal essentially the internal audiences judgment of one's efforts that is the way that I would put it is something that Maslow was sensing and attempting to describe when he was describing really the the happiest people that he could see so yeah not a not deeply respected by science because the ideas were too general but but respected by everybody I think in his in his attempt to look at sweeping motivational problems that aren't aren't narrow and we're not talking about rats in a lab and we're not talking about conditioning of alcohol we're talking about something much more broad about how people approach their lives and the goals that they approach so Abe Maslow had much interesting to say ok thanks a lot and the second question is a little more clumsy and a little more difficult yes but I feel like this is one you know I don't think people will tackle but I listen to God speak and you were talking about the test with the lady with touching their face which sounded amazing by the way you know overcoming something so I wanted to ask do you have in mind or you do you think you could come up with a test for black people too actually figure out racism in the workplace and figure out hey maybe I'm paranoid in this particular situation that person has not even raised that was my own uh you know paranoia speaking is their way do you do you think there's a test that that could you know help in that aspect boy that's a good question and it's you know being a white psychologist in white areas I just I've rarely dealt with people of color of any other race and so this is just not a problem that I've ever had to think about I can actually remember a couple of cases early when I was at the University of Virginia I had a young black man who was clearly frustrated with some racism he was feeling on campus and you know I'm a young student and I'm I'm kind of lost he I didn't know how to help him and I certainly could understand where he was coming from the Charlottesville Virginia of course of all places so your question is is is fabulous and I have I'm wondering if if there's other psychologists that have looked into this there's been some really outstanding thinking in in the in these areas of stereotypes and the damaging of stereotypes Claude Steele was a a pioneer in this area and some research that he has done it's there you know there there is prejudice there are problems and and sometimes they're very quiet and so it's you've got a great question there it's like you're you're not paranoid if it's true you know that's the old joke you're not paranoid if they really are out to get you so and I and I think that that that that's probable is probably so subtle and people people with people with any kind of ability in life can can be so careful about their behavior and treat people superficially well that they can cloak these issues so well that really for all intents and purposes they're not there until the rubber may hit the road on some very important decisions okay so that that's a little bit yeah yeah I don't I'm sure that there is our tests that we could devise and we could we could probably come up with something but I would I would say this that in a lot of cases that that I've seen in the work workforces that I've been and I've been in a lot of different different kinds of jobs over the years that I do see people you know often naturally segregate in other words as much as we would like to think that things are fine things can work fine but there tends to be sort of a natural a lot of natural segregation that takes place and people seem to know that they kind of have to live with it a little bit and so I would say that if you're in a situation where you're in a job where it feels like the deck is stacked against you there's a good chance it might be and we we might need to find a place where that hierarchy doesn't look like it would be so that that's the advice I would give to to someone a person of color with ambition that was feeling like the deck might be stacked against them and I would say do your best and and see what happens and if it looks like it's not fair maybe it's not and we may need to look hard at another hierarchy to go to if we if we feel like it is so anyway okay I don't know what your answer meant I'm gonna look up Claude Steele and try to see what the information they have but you know more than yeah I was just figuring out just trying to figure out who to oh boy and seeing yeah I'm just making sure that I'm correct in my assessment and and not just being paranoid and assuming something so yes thanks for your answer man I'm pretty soaked honest you know that's worth the shot after that brilliant facial test you talked about so it was worth a shot Java good not all right very good thank you Naz really great questions really appreciate you calling in thank you very much and have a wonderful night thank you for listening all right and have another question that is really a question yeah go ahead let's get another one really yeah all right we have another caller calling in all right caller what's your name where you calling from hi this is AJ from Sherman Oaks AJ yeah this one won't be tough it's about sex because I've always wanted to ask you this but whenever you're speaking on nutrition it doesn't seem appropriate so my question is specifically about pornography and prostitution when did they become a thing I'm four on my forum both oh okay are you alright now go ahead go back up a chair just pulling gin go ahead oh no seriously like I can't imagine people engaging in either in the Stone Age and because they don't perpetuate our genes so what is the purpose of prostitution and pornography and when in the timeline of human history did people start paying for sex and paying to watch people have sex because I don't really get either of them to be honest okay both of these things have their roots in the male casual mating strategy so AJ be in it being a chick unita mean isn't going to have a lot of insight into this okay so that that's where the problem starts with your ability to understand so the so what's going on here is that the male brain is vastly more predisposed to casual mating strategy than the female brain not that they're not that we can't get wires crossed and a guy being very monogamous pair bond not interested in a variety and never wouldn't be interested in porn is that possible yes okay so that guy exists as well does the wildest chick that you've ever seen so both of those exists but as as population distributions if we were to look at behavior we're going to see overwhelmingly that the female mind is much tamer than the male mind when it comes to novelty and variety and the motivation for that and so what pornography is is pornography is a super normal stimulus that is basically is telling the male brain through the essentially through the magic of video and vicarious experience because we've got mirror neurons and therefore when we watch people on a screen we can put ourselves in their place what can happen is you know that's that's the only reason movies work is that we're watching people and we can we can imagine their emotions because we can see their facial expressions and what the drama of the situation is so we can essentially experience something of what they're experiencing and so in this way pornography puts men in a situation where very attractive females are interested in in casual relationships and there is nothing about this story that indicates that this is a pair of bond and so and it all happens you know they meet at the first 37 seconds of the video and two and a half minutes later they're already got their clothes off and they're having sex of some kind so this is in the male brain this is like kind of as good as it gets okay so that's that's what you're seeing there with pornography prostitution is again the there's various angles to this but this is a situation the a classic situation is a five get to ten okay in principle so my ie a male can even the score between the differences of the sexual attractiveness between to people by by making it economically lucrative for a female to do this now this is nothing this is nothing other than a a projection or an extrapolation of the very basic trade that takes place with females and males generally so the general trade between males and females is that the male will give that female he will sleep up the 7 male gets an 8 female who trades down yeah in human mating only because this is a pair bond situation where she's going to get a tremendous amount of resources from him ok so if you think about it mathematically and the way the genes would have shaped these brains over evolutionary time is that the female is attempting to optimize the amount of resources she gets per sex act and the male is attempting to minimize the amount of resources that he gives her per sex act okay and so the two of them are diametrically opposed to each other in terms of their motivations and then we're going to throw a third variable into the problem and that that variable is the gene quality of the individuals that it's involved I either sexual attractiveness so when we throw this into the mix what we're going to get is males attempting now you might say well sometimes males sleep down with prostitution but that's also because they are the female is within their threshold for willing to be sexual with the female but they're attempting to minimize the total cost in other words there's no there's no implication that there's going to be any long-term investment in the female so this is this is essentially the male brain saying I want to take one shot at getting you pregnant then I want to get the hell out of here and if I'm successful which incidentally in the Stone Age the success success of unprotected sex between fertile people is is 5% % per copulation that is very high okay when you really think about it so that means that the female is going to do if you think of all the work that it takes to to raise a child divide all that work by 20 and that sum total of those hours of effort that is what in a sex act costs a female human that is phenomenally costly so you would expect the human females would be damn choosy about their mates trying to get not only resources for males but the best genes they could get now if they are going to relax the gene quality and they're not going to get long-term resources there's only one trick left and that is to get as much short-term resources as you can get so prostitution is going to be about you know females today that do this or you know there's a lot of reasons why they're desperate they're drug addicted but not everybody sometimes they're being very very careful with what it is that they're doing and they're trying to exercise as much made choice as possible while they extract as much money as they can possibly get their hands hands on for sex act so this is nothing other that the very same calculus that women have been doing since the dawn of time we're just moving the parameters over a little bit this is the famous I forget who it was it was probably up it wasn't Oscar Wilde because he was gay but I can't remember I don't think it was Winston Churchill but the famous who the famous joke between was no no it's not Coolidge some famous discussion between some fancy Englishman and some woman at a party and she says and he says well would you sleep with me for you know a million pounds and she says you know no would you sleep me for me for me for ten pounds and she says no and when he says would you sleep with me for a million billion pounds she says yes or then he says ten pounds and she says well what do you think I am and he says well we've already established what you are now we're just Pickering over the price okay and so that's that's in principle all it is that we're looking at is we're just moving around to all the parameters that are in play and one of the things that comes out of that is prostitution another comes out of that is is sugar baby sugar daddy relationships so that's another variant of this same thing that where the the females are exercising considerably more choice than they would exercise under prostitution and so therefore they're not going down as far in gene quality and they're trying to get as many resources as they can for population and we're not quite as disgusted about that as we are about prostitution because prostitution seems like an incredible sort of bizarre thing to do for a lot of us not for all of us so so any rate that's that's how it works Wow but we would have money for the right money how to have existed in the timeline of human history first right no could have been meat for meat for sex coconuts okay anything that that that females would have valued the protection the words females absolutely would have been willing to trade their sexuality for any resource that it would have been in a game so you didn't have to did start 10,000 years ago it started a long time before that Wow I knew you'd be able to explain a face dr. Lyle there's nothing you can't chance it sometimes there is all right all right Thank You chef AJ I really appreciate your call of course I know dr. Lyle speaking speaking about sugar daddy sugar baby relationships I always prefer the diabetic beware where it's like a sugar daddy but it's sugar free yeah so
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