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Gustavo Tolosa: Getting Along Without Going Along, New Book, QA, Part 2 Dr Doug Lisle, Special Guest
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there are times when that's going to be a legitimate thing and you're going to have to realize you're going to have to sacrifice some rapport to get there and i've done that a few times and i realized you know what i i'm gonna i'm gonna say it i'm gonna be as reasonable pleasant but i'm not going to uh uh basically be super soft about this because this is important and this is a i can feel like this is a life-and-death kind of situation lingering out here in the next 36 months you're in trouble and you need to know that there's a way out and three more stents and a bunch of statins is not going to get it done no and so uh so as a result there's been a few times when i've been more assertive and of course you know that that's that's legitimate but that if anybody there is under 50 you know what i'm saying in other words that should be pretty well saved for people that are in serious trouble if your niece is 50 pounds overweight and you just you know can't wait to tell her that you know she's she should be potatoes instead of steak keep it shut you know what i mean keep it shut if you're gonna do anything you might tell her hey you know you might send her or you know direct her to four forks over knives or some short speech let somebody else do your talking for you that's what we always say just defer because you have no credibility unfortunately yeah i have in my life talked to four or five people in my family that i really worry about yeah and um none of them follow what i said right i mean sure my mother and my aunt and my partner yes those are three enough but but the people i have people that i really care in my family and i and i you know but i did that because i wanted to say that i did it and that i didn't keep this secret uh for me and i did it in a very compassionate and nice way and but it didn't work i mean they didn't listen anymore you do the best you can and we we call it a day that's all you can do yeah well uh dr lyle to to talk about um the same topic but maybe more uh to a specific situation here someone um sent me an email to ask you this person say it says my biggest problem is having relatives living in the same house and eating lots of processed food i have tried separating shelves but it is in my face and it is hard at times to look the other way any suggestions how to deal with this i think it's very difficult when you live with people very difficult i don't know how it would happen we're pretty tough i i think that um i think that all you can do is you can make sure that you are disciplined enough about making sure you've got two things available to you not only healthy food that you like but that it's also got an ease of operation okay so uh if there's a if there's it can be it can be a hassle if it's a hassle literally getting your getting reaching to the back of the refrigerator to get your apples and you have to reach past their chocolate cake uh and their cheese this is actually a problem so i would say strangely enough part of my um prescription for you goes right to the heart of what i called earlier the channel factors that uh think about channel factors as as um you know i if you've ever sled in appliance like like i have like slide a refrigerator across a slick floor uh and it'll have either feet that are smooth or it might even have little rollers the um or if you've ever obviously rolled anything and you can roll something and then it'll hit a tiny little rock or a tiny little pebble or something you could literally stop it so a like almost a grain of sand on a slick surface could stop that refrigerator you know a decent-sized grain of sand depending upon what the oh it's this is the physics of how it is that things stop and so uh i tell a story about a lady that came in the mcdougall program and she shared this with us that she had come to the program and learned about how important that the ease of operation or what i call energy conservation uh or what we would call also channel factors in other words uh how important ease ease of operation is it's a super big deal it's a way bigger deal than we generally appreciate the um this is why for example when mcdonald's instituted the drive-through in the late 60s it quickly sold 70 percent of their sales which remains true to this debt in other words it's too much trouble to go across the parking lot just you know we could just sit in our car and not actually have to get out that's going to be a big deal the um so this lady had was raising seven sons of all things in the midwest and she uh she had listened to us about making things easier for them to eat healthy foods so she she dedicated a a colander to grapes so she went home and she put a bunch of grapes in the colander and rinsed it and put it in the refrigerator and thought well that's going to be easier than them having to get into the refrigerator get into the bag grapes pull it out themselves one at a time where you're going to have it right there available nothing 24 hours goes by nobody ate any grapes and i don't know what moved her to do this but she just did this is one of these things that that happens uh based on the same principle she thought you know i wonder if it's too much trouble to pull the grapes off the stalk so she pulled the thing out of the out of the refrigerator set a bowl down picked all the grapes off the stock had them in a bowl put it back in the refrigerator and they were gone in no time it's like wow but your teenage boys were too lazy to actually take a branch a branch of grapes off the stock and you know that that's a story i haven't forgotten and there's been many other such stories including one of my own so i can remember at some point you know 15 years ago thinking that you know when i look at an apple and i'd buy some of them i look over at them and i think gosh you know i don't know just the idea of my teeth you know one of them got kind of damaged my front teeth got damaged you know and got banged up and i think it's about 80 percent solid and just a little worried about biting into it it's a little bit stressful and then you get a big old bite in your mouth and it's got some edge of the skin that could maybe it'll be uncomfortable in your mouth and then when you start chewing it or it might spurt out at you you know when you bite into it get on your shirt maybe on your chin a little bit and then then you know if you're chewing you might get some skin caught between your teeth and like literally and for what an apple 300 calories found pretty good but i mean you know this isn't chocolate cake for god's sakes and so i find myself just sort of passing over it and i thought one day about that i thought it caught my attention at some point that somebody had used a horror and i remember as a kid i would always use a core for pears and apples and um and i actually made a comment about it um on on a show of aj's you know probably i don't know how long ago and like two people sent me his apple quarters and um and anyway it makes a difference because if an apple's cord now i don't have to chomp into it and have it spurred i it's actually less likely to have the things skin stuck between my teeth i can ease eat a dainty amount that is easily handleable and i can just sort of leave the rest there and it's still it's not weird that i took two bites out of an apple and set it on the counter no it's cord there and other people you know in the house would feel free to take a little uh chunk of one of those eights of the apple it's like it's a better way to eat an apple okay now well yeah yeah yeah and so this is the thing that then goes back to to really to energy conservation even though it it's silly to see things that but but if it's easier and i use less energy i'm more likely to do it yep yeah i was making a big deal about this with alan um and alan uh was resisting against it because he's too he he went when he wanted to talk about the pleasure trap he wanted to say pleasure seeking paint avoids fledgling pandavoids because it's nice and simple and in the idea of saying pleasure seeking pain avoidance and energy conservation is like ah so much more to say it's more complicated no it's like the very principle itself was acting against it and so i kept hitting him over the head with it and then one day he said you know i have to admit when i come home i'm going for the easiest food that there is because i don't want to go to anything where there's any trouble and he goes i am noticing that consistently i i have to admit that you're right as much as it pains me and so that's what i would say to this person and that is that the best thing you can do we we can't we can't hypnotize you and have you not see the the junky food around but what we can do is you know make sure that you understand that the probably the most important thing that you're going to do is to get organized enough and up the learning curve enough and have enough pleasant space you know where your stuff can be where you have easy access to things that you like that are competitive that is the best chance that you're going to have for making as many good decisions as possible under that environment that environment is a very difficult environment to succeed you know people people don't believe me but it's true if i lived with a group of people that that somebody brought home um donuts it'd be a disaster you know they worked at a donut shop and they brought home half a dozen donuts every day and you know when they got off work and someone were chocolate covered or maple covered or delays would be like i've eaten a lot of donuts it would be disgusting and uh and that's because they'd be right in my face if they brought home a ham and cheese one i wouldn't eat that because i'm the vegan but i would eat the maple bar you know what i mean and they toiled well there's some animal egg in there like well i can't see the egg so that's vegan that's vegan well you know somebody said something here that that i've done before and it's um you know we do this with other things like if i go to a clothing store and i see i don't know i i don't know a tight tank shop or something you know and that i that i would not wear or i don't know a cowboy hat even though i like cowboy heights but i'm not gonna wear it and so i tell myself well that's that's not i don't wear that i don't and that's not my clothes yeah so but we don't do that with food and someone was saying here that when they are tempted they open the refrigerator and there's some kind of junk food they tell themselves this is not my food or i don't need that and for some people it it may work but i don't know if it works for everybody i don't know i i actually did an interesting change uh for me i had a couple of adult children uh moved back in with me and one of them was getting married so she was gonna stay here for about six months and she's a little militant you know used to be vegetarian i.e and now she's not because it works better for her like whatever i i don't care i'm not going to argue she she's that she's the argumentative of the clan um and the animal food in my house doesn't tempt me at all uh donuts would tempt me but animal food does not tempt me in a slice and so my attitude is no i don't care what you have in the house but what happened was is that all of her steps like all over my refrigerator and it's in the way and now suddenly it's a hassle for me to get to my food and suddenly i'm finding myself what i watch for gustavo a little thing and obviously this is different than getting along discussion but what i watch for is i watch for tiny little changes in my proclivity to do something because of the ease it's actually really interesting and and i i just i this brings back that point that i learned 15 years ago from talking to somebody you know that knew about internet advertising that it was becoming extremely important to write code carefully for internet advertising because every click that it took to get it sold reduced your sales volume by 50 so some sloppy code where you have to click two more times it's like whoa you just cut your sales by 75 so i i heard that i was like that is amazing that this tiny little bit of a information and i know i am that way like oh yeah come to our website oh just fill in this thing like i'm filling in nothing people there's no way like i'm not going to stop here and have several seconds and then have you emailing me things like no i'm not that interested but like how many people do they lose behind that i mean if people are like me they're losing unbelievable numbers of people so the uh anyway what i did was after about a month of this i was getting frustrated and um and i decided you know what doug you i don't know how long she she is she says she's going to be out of here in five months but who knows so i decided to buy myself a little refrigerator and stick it right in the kitchen and so uh it was money well spent i i very quickly got used to that that's my refrigerator i told people you can't put anything in that madrid so if you can go in there and take a few things out you know i don't mind you eating some of my healthy food if you want to that wasn't a problem nobody did that but i said you're not putting anything in my opinion and that what happened very quickly for me was that i actually forgot the big refrigerator was there i just yeah it doesn't even occur to me like that's where my food is it's in my opinion well that might be a really good solution interesting idea for people if there's any space at all like i just commandeered a space and wasn't a large space it's like hey there's no reason refrigerator can't be there i'm just going to stick with you and it's turned out to be a very pleasant thing to have is my own unique space right right okay all right tell us dr lyles people want to know this i don't know if you can tell us yet but we people know that you and dr jenny hulk are writing the book yes and so is it going along do you know when it might come out does it have a title oh yes it's got a title the uh the uh that the the book of course was uh was was due out in the summer of 2021 the um now the the where's kind of secret about uh secretive about this book um this is a this is really a major work this is not this is not something uh this is a word a book that i've been working on for um more than six years and so this is a this is also and then integrating jen uh into it and and uh bringing what you know her sort of unusual talent and knowledge into it and integrating it this is quite a process and so the uh you know we we actually thought that we were going to be done and have a book in our hands last summer um i i would say my best guess is i think we're going to be done this coming spring and i think we'll probably have a book on our hands uh by the fall in other words we'll the way we write in the way we do things by the time we're we think we're done we are probably far more done than most authors in other words jen's basically has been edited a book editor before and so people we're very perfectionistic so by the time we're done we are probably very close to done and then yes just about uh it's a it's about we have an artist that we're working with there's going to be a quite a bit of art in the book and and um it's going to be it's really it it's special it's completely i i hit upon the idea like i said uh many years ago i had been searching for um what i was gonna write next and i had had hundreds of titles and a thousand pages of notes uh i've been taking for for all the years after the i was after the buzzer trap at the first drop i probably took a couple years off and didn't know what i was going to do next and then uh these ideas about about self-confidence and self-esteem these things started to started to sort of percolate in my head some of the some of the ideas that you'll see in the pleasure trap certainly you start to see the seeds of it in this chapter you're getting along without going along is very much a psychological chapter about human relations um later on in the book you'll see uh that the reason jan hawk even found me was because of a footnote so i uh in in a footnote in the back i can't remember which chapter it was but i described and i as jen now tells me which is common among academics when you come up with an important new idea she calls it you plant the flag like you're a conqueror you know that's what she calls it and uh and i planted a flag and i called the phenomenon the ego trap and uh and i knew uh actually that that the ego trap was a very very big deal but but it it sounded a little too cute because you just wrote a book called pleasure crap and then it's like oh so you're the guy that with the trap pleasure dropped ego trap like that that's how you it's like well actually the truth of the matter is the pleasure track and the ego trap you know 20 years later after naming it the truth is is that there isn't a third one there's other there's other traps we could talk about where we're being deceived into interesting mistakes but the ego trapped is a giant motivational problem for people it's where for interesting reasons the bar gets set a little bit too high and now we we may succeed for a while and then when we start to fail we feel embarrassed and we feel intimidated and then we quit and so i told that story in a footnote uh about a hunter who gets successful on a hunt i'm more successful than he deserves and then he wants to shy away from hunting again and he pretends whatever he's hurt his foot but which is trying to hold on to his status or esteem as long as he can and that avoidance of doing your best is a self-destructive process but may be useful for your genetic code in other words it actually may be genetically profitable this constitutes an extraordinary conflict of value uh in that the human confronts and anyway the point is i don't even know where i'm going with oh yeah it was that little comment that that jen hawk read and she recognized that that was central to her problem in finishing her doctoral distribution she realized that that in in one paragraph i had described a dynamic that was literally central to her life and uh so she filed that away and then finally called me one day and then we we had our very first discussion and i have notes from it and i was like who the hell is this if anybody of you have ever listened to jen hawk you realize that that it's like a basketball fan seeing michael jordan for the first time it's like the guy just jumps higher than everybody else so i uh it's not like i haven't been around sharp interesting people in my time i had my my friends are capable people and i admire them and then this was a lamborghini uh-huh we're all a bunch of good solid camrys and they're reliable and they're solid but when a lamborghini blows so the uh so jen hogg's thinking uh needed to be integrated with a major book that i had already been working on for a long time it's tricky to do that well and tricky to uh feather that in and uh we were a little bit overly optimistic but but to let everybody know uh it's uh i i'm immensely proud of this book uh it's it's it's special i think it's the best thing that i will ever do uh in my career i can't imagine that there would be uh something else that i could do in the future that would equal this so uh you know it takes time and uh and it's gonna it'll get here when it gets here wow it's totally majorly on its way it's mostly finished uh but we have some we're not gonna rush it to finish it we are gonna we're gonna do it to the very best of our ability right and does does it have a title that you can share and tell you uh we're going to release we're going to release one chapter so people will actually know what this because we're going to release one chapter to our living with some library people just uh because they have in fact they've actually pre-ordered the book and so they're tapping their hands and they're like where is it we're supposed to be here so we're going to let them know actually a little bit about what they pre-ordered so that they so they find out that i think they're going to be very excited and fascinated it's not a normal book folks it's very different and so uh you're gonna any of you in the living wisdom library will get a a tantalizing taste of what this thing is very soon okay all right great great i just want to mention that everybody or anybody can can go to your website steam dynamics and um and book a session with you or dr hogg and i can't recommend it highly enough but we're all waiting for this book and of course uh i want to at some point feature here in the book club um well dr lyle i just want to ask you one more question this is probably an easy one for you but somebody asked um what is a person to do when on top of constant battles with the pleasure traps there is also well this person say says an eating disorder i don't i don't know that's what we can call it and it says in our case obsession with chocolate that destroys all efforts um and then he says plus anxiety and depression so i don't know if uh you have anything to say about that yeah i would say i would say that the following is true so most people aren't going to have anything of this nature so if i i don't know how much chocolate is being eaten and just how um just how problematic this is so it can be so there's people that that can be swallowing enormous amounts of chocolate uh in my pleasure trap talk i point out that chocolate is the number one food craving in the world um it so the chocolate has a chemical combination that is literally uh or depending on how it's put together and how it's all you know how it's all processed together the chocolate is literally the biggest dopamine hit for buying food that exists in in the human diet so it's hardly surprising that once in a while we're gonna find somebody that chocolate can take their life just completely off the rails doesn't happen often it's rare uh mostly it's just the pleasure trap in general it's not it's not something so specific that will uh that will you know drive people into the river but if it does um and that is a that is a literally a major challenge for an individual which it could be if that's true then i have to tell you that we have to look at it in exactly the same way that an alcoholic would look at alcohol so that means um it doesn't mean we go to chocolate anonymous it means that most people for example that have alcohol problems that get better do not go to alcohol in other words it what they do is a set of circumstances come up where they they they are repetitively reminded that this is a they're in a trap and that this is a this is a uh a bad deal and they make repeated efforts to get out of the trap and eventually they succeed uh because they're highly motivated and of course the success is essentially i'm not going to say always but it is very very close to a rule uh we cannot say that it is an absolute rule but it is close that abstinence is basically the only option so the uh so in the same way anybody talking about a major problem with chocolate or anything else um i don't know maybe it's fried chicken you know it's you you could you could have some you could have some specific taste with a specific individual it would be just essentially having a drug addictive like process if that's true we have to respect it as if it is a essentially a drug and if it's problematic enough so it's not just you wanting a couple chocolate chip cookies a night no it's like you know you've gotta you're eating a pound of chocolate you know or damn near close to it daily it's out of control and if it's at that level uh where this is a very serious thing then we have to look at it as okay there is no in between if we're going to be successful you know we're going to have to be absent and that abstinence means cleaning out the environment getting yourself in a situation where nobody's bringing chocolate into the house and we have to knuckle it okay there's no there's your your mind goes through a decay function when you stay away from a stimulus and you will begin to forget so after 15 days of abstinence day 16 will only be half as hard as day one right it'll be there and it's still reminding you and still tickling you and half is a lot and it can reel you right back in if we wander into the wrong place at the wrong time and we get weak and we get hungry and we get self-indulgence so then we're back on the trap again but you can get out of this trap and my lecture on uh that i did with gestavo it's online somewhere probably on the gustavo site it's called the condition cram if you substitute cramming and you substitute in your own mind chocolate with that lecture you will see the seeds of the solution which is in understanding the decay functions and the learning curves about how they work it can be very inspiring to to understand that your job is you know the first three or four days of of getting out of an addictive trap is by far the hardest because we go through what's known as the extinction burst right and uh and so that that lecture uh is an underrated lecture and un you know it's just like one too many things all the stuff we talk about it's supposed to be so simple it's not simple at all it's complicated it's a complicated upside down inside out motivational disaster is what the pleasure drop is and so we are surprised actually when anybody takes this information and runs with it and does well it's like i expect you to be going through a minefield for the rest of your life and my job is to be reasonably successful so that our health is pretty well protected and we have a pretty good life that's that's a good outcome the the condition cram and the information that's inside of the condition cram webinar is actually uh completely on point with all of the all pleasure trap processes and afternoon like it does it doesn't have to be crazy it's chocolate like ah learning curve reinforcement you know spontaneous uh recoveries you know uh uh what do we call it extinction burst defenses it's like oh man your nervous system doesn't want you to forget about a super normal highly rewarding unbelievably valuable stimulus for an organism that was designed for an environment of scarcity so you're you can bet that you're in a hell of a challenge and all i can tell you is that challenge gets significantly easier though not trivial with abstinence right that is the solution well yeah yes and um i was looking at some of the the comments here but total abstinence it's uh i think it's the only way in this kind of situation that kind of case i think i think aj was here earlier or is here and she was saying why be normal because you said that nice answer that we can expect from herself oh my goodness aj aj is one of a kind you know this is uh there are these we've got icons out there that show us what's possible and uh and that's unbelievably valuable for people to see what's possible uh it's important to realize that we can't always replicate what they do sometimes we can approximate it and that's right that's where we need to aim our ship right yeah well um thank you very much we very much appreciate this wonderful lecture and i will include the link to that webinar that we did um it is it's not on a website but it's in my youtube channel but i'm gonna when when this replay goes out i'll include it there so people can watch it right it's very good very good well thank you again dr lyle always a pleasure to have you here absolutely and thanks for having me no no thank you all right everybody thank you all for being here and uh we'll see you next week for our next session of the book club okay bye bye bye everyone have a great week you
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