Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2020-08-08
an auto-generated transcript


To get a shareable link to a certain place in the audio,
hover your mouse over the relevent text,
right click, and "copy link address"
(mobile: long press & copy link address)
 


there's like a lag and we're figuring it all out thank you for your patience when we tried to go live on the link that you had that we sent out there was just a big yellow screen and you could hear us but not see us um and so I think some people are gonna miss us because this is not the link that was sent out it's a different link and it's a public link um but we're just doing what we can with the technology that we have so let's see okay all right so I've got chat up on this laptop so I can view the chats we have okay all right what's happening do you think we can view the chat here oh Doug's got a system I've got a system to fix the camera yeah okay all right that's good okay hopefully my phone has enough charge to pull this off okay so we can see your live questions the uh questions that were sent ahead of time are unfortunately yeah if they're determined to participate they'll figure it out yeah all right okay I'm so sorry we tried to do this right and send out the link ahead of time that the we've been having technology issues that the podcast is also plagued with technology issues this week so maybe this is the price that we pay for being in Paradise so we're reversed on depends on Whose camera that's probably because the phone is different oh yeah how would we care it's also weird that this is on a lag so we're watching like we see ourselves afterwards okay I think there were some questions on my notepad here so okay let's but which we can either look at those or let's see thank you for your patience everyone all right you just want to jump in with a question I don't see any questions in the chat box yet so okay we had a lot of pleasure trap questions that were kind of left over from last time um so we're going to tackle some of those and uh and then there's a couple of others interspersed but we'll just see what comes up so there was uh this one this is just a general um kind of internal audience question so I've had an ongoing intermittent problem laying off vegan junk I saw some YouTube videos on the ego trap and now over the past few days I can lay off the junk because I now think eating junk will make me take a hit on my self-esteem how it works I noticed I would often hit the junk when no one's around to witness it but now I understand that my internal committee is always watching it's like Santa Claus um and I hit on my self-esteem is inevitable is it probable that I'm on to something here and then I may finally succeed avoiding the junk in the future or am I kidding myself I feel like I'm on to something I'm so excited uh I'm very uh watched a lot of videos goes on for a while but that's that's the heart of the question so yeah yeah it basically does now that you know that the internal audience is taking notes and watching everything that you do is that going to be enough to stay out of crap I wish it worked that way I wish it was I wish it was that easy um I mean I can I can talk a little bit about it um I mean it's it's part of the battle so I mean the reason that we talk about it and that we want people to understand the internal audience is that it's it's definitely one of the most important Tools in your toolkit for beating beating this problem so if you can't stay out of junk food whether it's vegan junk food or just standard American crap whatever knowing that the internal audience is keeping score and that your job is primarily to impress the internal Audience by doing a really good job of being compliant and just a good job in general that that's part of what you ultimately need to be successful but it's not everything because you're dealing with supernormal food so you're still in an environment where you're you're up against the siren song of substances that you did not evolve to consume so getting in a Groove and building self-esteem through impressing the internal audience on an ongoing basis is is the best defense against the addictive power of the supernormal food that it's it's not um it's not a cure-all like you're still you're still in an environment with something that is going to be calling your name all the time but there's really no other apart from keeping your environment super super clean and keeping the crappy food out as much as possible from your awareness and from easy access that combined with the process that you're talking about with diligently impressing the internal audience over time is is really the best defense so yes you are onto something but it's not it seems very easy when you first Discover it and you first start out but be prepared for repeated battles and occasional defeats and getting back into battle and it's it's a lifelong process for most people that's how I would take that on anything perfect good I don't want to make it too easy all right okay we got lots of questions so let's see what else is oh good grief okay uh okay Meredith is asking Dr Lyle talked about no such thing as a plateau but rather an issue of equilibrium what about people who are following an A plus diet but stalled weight how do you burst the plateau equilibrium um well the let's talk about what I mean by that there's no such thing as a plateau but there's an equilibrium so the the equilibrium is going to be um a biological phenomenon that's going to take place when there's a triangulation of multiple variables number one is a specific genotype that's U that's not going to change okay number two though it's going to be your age with respect to that genotype so your uh your your biology changes over your lifespan so as a result uh even though the genes are are in charge of that process what you are biologically a 20 is going to be somewhat different than what you are at 60. so that's another Factor then it's going to be not just that the the brilliant Dr Michael Greger has just solved it it's giving us a technical assist catastrophe thank you thank you so then also what's going to happen is uh to some moderate degree what are your exercise habits so the exercise issue is a minor but not not zero factor in your weight and your Fitness the um and the third is going to be the calorie density of the food so even though you are a uh you yourself are are eating what you consider to be you know this excellent a plus diet there's a range of calorie density of a plus diets so one A Plus diet can be a lot less calorie dense than the next and it's very likely that a lower calorie density a plus diet is going to have you at a lower equilibrium with respect to your fat content on your body so that's what I would tell you so if you've reached an equilibrium that you're not happy with but you believe that it's an A plus diet we can't change your age although I've heard that you can buy some years you know five grand a year my little 87 year old mother is not happy with the fact that she's 87 and I tell her way for the Fountain of Youth yeah yeah write a check that's right no so we can't change our age okay and you can change your genes um if your exercise habits are excellent then then you is probably maximize what you can do in that department so the last thing is going to be calorie density uh and so that trust me if you change the calorie density of an excellent diet you will lose weight you just may not you may not want to do it and so you'll have to run a cost-benefit analysis uh through experimentation about what that would mean so I've had friends of mine who were raw fooders who who had been huge before they were raw fooders and then when they became raw fooders they became extremely thin so the the uh Allen goldhammer has said that P if he ever needed to get real thin for some reason um he would just eat massive quantities of raw food and a bunch of steamed vegetables you know if there was if there was if he was in a prison and he needed to wiggle through a little I'll take care he needed a hole a Gold Hammer he's a great escape if he needed to do that then then that's how you could do it so yeah you are you're just simply at an equilibrium with respect to a number of variables but you uh you are not at a plateau yeah okay and I would add to that too that it's um we talked about this I think the last time we did we were both on AJ together that it's um that calorie density shifting that equilibrium is also more genuinely in line with what you would have probably been eating as a stone age diet you wouldn't you wouldn't have necessarily had access there's there's nothing unhealthy about a sort of a starch forward diet it's a very healthy diet but the the availability of a of a lot of potatoes in in a stone age environment would not be the same that it is now so it's there's sort of just because we have we have access to a lot of biochemically very healthy food that that's going to result in a slightly higher equilibrium for a lot of people than it than it would have if they were scratching around for twigs and berries in the Stone Age and very lucky to find a potato when they could doesn't mean that you shouldn't eat a lot of starches um it just means that you might have an extra five or ten ten pounds because you're eating more starches oh two little details from this last three days that did I show you no that does show me my mom's bowl no oh yeah so I we I had uh to survive on the plane I had uh four sacks of Trail Mix um but had raisins and nuts yeah and so we had four sacks and we got through one we got through one and the rest of them came here with us so I put them in a bowl uh oh no or and all of it in a bowl and I came back about three hours later and all of the nuts were gone and all the raisins were still there I would do the same but I don't like raisins very much yes that's hilarious yeah she's a pure animal oh yeah and then we have a little animal here a little stray cat named hissy because it hisses at me whenever I try to feed it and so I've got conventional cat food and then I also have treats because I'm you know I don't have any children so I try to adopt these little kids around the world and so this little thing uh uh now now when I put the treats out it it won't eat its regular food [Laughter] literally a wild animal out here at the verge of starvation is now turning up its nose and conventional calories a feral cat in in like rural Hawaii in no time okay so this so that means that it's it's exceedingly likely that your diet although it's it's outstanding uh hell and health promoting an A-Plus diet it's likely to be if you're 10 pounds or 10 heavier than you want to be it's probably 10 more calorically dense than would be ideal to put you at that other equilibrium so look look hard at at what the calories are made of and experiment with drifting down the calorie density all right all right we've got some comments that it's um harder to hear you oh so yeah I'll just yell this is my personality anyway yes yes all right so we've got that um we have this should be a this should be a pretty quick one this is just a um concern about the expense of this person is in Europe and uh organic produce is very expensive in Europe and so is the question is is there any sort of uh problem with eating more conventional or all conventional instead of organic no no I think that's that generally really overstated um concern and it's the the you want to be if if the only fruits and vegetables that you can find and afford are conventional it's better to be eating conventional fruits and vegetables than it is organic um you know processed food is is essentially and and the whatever balance you and your environment and your budget can strike um just do the best that you can but don't worry about it too much don't cause a lot of stress for yourself freaking out about it and worrying about it just um you know they're the the sort of working with what's available to you and what you can afford and I know that I've noticed that in Europe as well that organic is very pricey relative to the US so um there are a lot of times it's no different yeah here are sometimes Organics even cheaper depending um so we uh yeah we actually just had the experience and also yeah I would be remiss if I didn't talk about local too so we just directly had the experience where you know instacart from Safeway here you're paying two or three times what you're gonna pay for this same local arugula or mango or whatever it is so we subscribe to a community sustained agriculture share at a sort of a joint Farm conglomerate that delivers a big produce box of local local Goods to us which was much cheaper sort of for for local fruits and veggies so you could look into that and see if there's something something available along those lines or just farmers markets that you could go to always cheaper especially if you go toward the end of the farmers market day when they're trying to offload stuff but they don't want to take back to the farm you can drive a hard bargain with a lot of stuff that way so those are those are the core tips if you're really devoted to finding organic food a lot of small farms also can't pay for the official Organic certification even though their food is technically organic it's not technically certified as such and so they can't they're not they're not legally allowed to label it as organic even though it's functionally totally organic so um talk to talk to your farmers and ask questions [Laughter] um all right so that's I want to sort of you want to know about meds about meds and uh yeah the question was something like why why is there not a sort of a psychoactive solution for an eating disorder is the only way to cope with disordered eating or really any any issue um through just kind of gritting your teeth and dealing with it through the cognitive behavioral therapy-like techniques that we talk about or otherwise yeah I'll just speak a little bit briefly about psych meds in general and whether we were talking about dealing with an eating disorder we were talking about depression or anxiety or anything else uh I'm my comments would be similar the uh in in principle the there isn't a reason why the meds medications might not be helpful in the sense that if you damage the brain in some way that winds up being useful for you yeah yeah I might want me to yell yeah okay if you have a brick fall on your head in just the right way it might improve your life because maybe you'll do a little bit of brain damage and you will maybe you had a little hyper anxious circuit about spiders and for some strange reason that yeah you hit the spider circuit and now you're better off okay so the uh psychiatric meds are a mess and they have a horrendous track record and so uh if you are if you or someone close to you is contemplating this as a way of improving their life then I would recommend that before you do such a uh such a bizarre thing as to take a chemical that's going to go in and alter this Extraordinary Machine uh that that is so complex it's it's many orders of magnitude beyond our current uh level to understand how how it works we understand how the brain works in principle uh but but the notion that we know how to go in and improve your life with the medication is is science fiction and um it's lucrative science fiction so that's why you've got 40 million Americans on psychiatric medications uh but if you look at the outcome measures and you really look at whether or not people are being helped you're going to find out that the answer is on on across the board the answer is no uh so this has been examined by Robert Whittaker in a masterpiece called anatomy of an epidemic and so by the time if you're you know I've had many parents write to me what about you know my my child was hospitalized for her anxiety and depression and so now what what should we do everybody's going to feed it medication well of course everybody's going to feed it medication everybody's terrified by the medical legal consequences of not doing it if you're a psychiatrist in the United States and you don't medicate the Daylights out of somebody but looks like they're in trouble you are wide open to lawsuit because you're not doing the standard of practice however that's why as a consumer uh you are you're in trouble because you're you're walking The Gauntlet right into where everybody is heavily incentivized to tell you that the thing to do is take these medications uh this is why if you are you know less than than an 88 percentile uh IQ you're in trouble because it requires that level of intelligence to read Robert Whittaker and to understand uh the arguments and grasp what it is that has transpired here uh in modern Psychiatry but if you do have those kind of chops if you got you know got to college and you were able to get a B in some class if you can do that then you can you can work your way through Whitaker's book or you can look at his videos listen to other people like Peter getsy online you can get the message uh that this is no way to go so if you if you care and you're deeply worried which I tell people you know they'll ask me well what would you do and I'm like listen I'm not going to tell you what to do I'm not a psychiatrist I'm not a medical doctor doctor I can't prescribe medications what I can tell you to do is get educated okay and I can tell you what my opinion is my opinion is it's dangerous as hell okay so uh and potentially lifelong damaging to the brain depending upon how long and what it is that you're taking so the uh so what I would tell you is get educated once you become educated once you look at the whole picture then decide you know this is called informed consent and nobody that's walking into an office that's getting a roll of pills thrown at them is getting informed consent uh and that's not necessarily because the the doctors are are are actually hiding the truth they don't know anatomy of epidemic is the extraordinary story about how this fraud has been perpetrated uh literally from the top down uh on on to the psychiatrists and medical doctors of the world to the point where they are unwitting handmaidens of an extraordinary lucrative scheme this sounds outrageous and like it's impossible but it's not impossible and once you read the book you'll see how this took place the principle if you don't get an effect without a side effect is just I mean you have very little control of the the snowflake that you are and what that side effect looks like so you may have a short-term really positive effect from something but you especially after you've read this book and you've um integrated what he says the the potential side effects are tremendous and that's that's true for anything that is going to change your brain and give you a different perception of reality um so that's the reason that even with my openness hippie chickness I don't do psychedelics because I don't I don't want to mess around with the Machinery in there it might be fine but it's not not worth the worth the risk even to see the the true fabric of reality and to commune with the Divine um we have so many who made me crack up saying that the pterodactyls are drowning us out oh oh my goodness we do we've got some impressive impressive birds around here there's um I've seen at least like five distinct types of large birds yes yeah yeah we've got in addition to the I've got the whole food chain with with hissy and yeah dogs and the pterodactyls I think those pterodactyls could take hissy down yeah um we've gotten this one um we were at about an hour so we'll start wrapping up soon but this one I know has been in the queue for a couple of weeks and she just asked it live too I prefer grazing to eating full meals three times a day but I've been informed this will negatively impact detoxifying and healing is there any evidence for that statement that grazing is more detrimental than eating um any anything like this this is what I call majoring in minor things so any evidence that you're going to see on this is probably going to be um not replicatable and uh so I wouldn't worry about any of this the these these types of experiments about uh putting meals into small amounts the first thing that I saw in this was done the work was done at the University of Toronto which showed that it was actually beneficial so all you know people even eating crap if they eat it in 17 meals a day instead of three they wound up having their cholesterols drop and all kinds of other blood fractions looking better just because you weren't overwhelming the system all at once uh the bottom line is this that your ancestors sort of ate catches catch can and they also had a strong tendency to eat a large meal at the end of the day that that is going to be unusual in the animal kingdom and it was a derivative of the fact that for the last several hundred thousand years fire uh was a was a major feature in changing the human food so at the end of the day people hunted and they gathered and they they dug root vegetables and they needed to cook those things and so they cooked them at the end of the day they weren't going to light multiple fires during the day they were going to light one and so as a result the higher density calories were eaten at the end of the day other more of the raw foods were foraged throughout the day and that that is going to be non-systematic it's not going to be three meals it's going to be whatever's in your face so the the notion of worrying about how to go about your eating is really not the problem the the issue is what and I can remember a famous book that that made exactly the opposite claim and sold a lot of copies you know the notion is it's not what you eat it's when and how you eat it uh that was I I believe on the cover of Fit for Life by Harvey Diamond you know 40 years ago uh that uh so the the notion that how it is that you know how is it we eat whether we eat with chopsticks or not and when we eat Etc like this is some big deal this doesn't make any sense at all with respect to uh biology in general and it's going to be if if there's any effects there these effects are going to be minuscule uh the real issue is what are you eating and don't worry about don't worry about any other details yeah I would say even if there are you know more than minuscule effects which uh yeah there there is some chronobiological evidence to that effect that it matters much more what you're eating so it doesn't yeah it doesn't you you don't you can't hack the chronobiology by having uh you know 2 000 calories of Twinkies in the morning and just because you don't have that for dinner it's gonna be fine so I wouldn't I wouldn't do that so um and for the detox I think there's whoever informed her that it has like it's gonna it's gonna affect the detox process um I think you've been subject to some bad information there just sort of that sounds like somebody trying to sell you something there's the the the transient nature of any of those variables is going to be essentially diluted over time this the organism has stress tolerance so when when one thing looks better in the short run because of a way that it's been done that doesn't mean that it's better in the long run uh all that's happening in those situations is some micro measurement is being made and some stress tolerance is not has not been hit over the line and there's no damage done that's why you're never going to see I'm sure there's no evidence now of any long-term issues uh that would affect for example mortality in the objective measurement like that so bottom line is don't worry about it pay pay very close attention to what you're eating and the rest of it let it go yeah all right I think you want to wrap it up or you want to do it one more all right we've got we've got a variety someone's asking what the best resource for more information on psych meds is it would definitely be anatomy of an epidemic that's the that's the number one book that we would suggest I don't know if there's even another resource that we would recommend on that question getsy Peter getsy if you're interested uh organized crime I think and um then uh Marcia Angel also but but this Whitaker is all you need yeah this is a big question I don't know if we want to tackle this now or sort of save this for later it's an interesting interesting idea she's wondering if we can think of any long-term consequences to infants with people wearing masks and therefore the infants can't pick up on the facial cues and the expressions and form those correlations early on in life and I would I would I'd say that's an interesting source of potential future research for for many researchers to discover that they're ultimately I I would hypothesize there will be no long-term lifelong effect from that because of the the learning process of the children as they grow up and less unless we continue to wear masks forever and they're never able to pick up on facial cues and expression cues that would have a single generation effect but there's no mechanism by which that would transmit epigenetically into future Generations that's exactly what I was just talking about stress tolerance to the organism so the the truth of the matter is is that the the genes are in charge of that whole thing and uh I I would uh uh the experiment will never be done but I would be willing to bet that you could you could hide those faces for five years and probably not find an effect okay so uh any any minor effect just because there's there's all kinds of things I mean you've had to only in the most extreme cases of deprivation in early life have there been shown to any had any long-term effect and even those weren't controlled for ginger behavioral genetics yeah I mean I remember when I my dissertation research there's definitely like you know children of autistic parents who are not as expressive have more trouble you know reading Expressions later in their life but they have the same genes as the parents you know the same this so maybe they're not diagnosable as autistic like the parents are but they've got the same kind of difficulty with the with expressive recognition right this but on this question the answer is no it's also not going to be long term enough likely long I mean I I would have trouble envisioning a future not to say that it's impossible all things are possible but that it would it would have that much of a significant effect on an entire generation if everybody's wearing masks all the time they never have the chance even at home to mirror with a parent and and you know see their expressions being mirrored back to them and all of the all of the little important things for the little developmental your organism you're reading official Expressions is a natural phenomenon so it's it's you you don't need to learn that those are actually inherent to the organism uh so those instincts can't be can't be put out to pasture by a lack of by a lack of practice so no worries yeah these are the kind of things though you're going to see all kinds of discussion oh yeah about how million dissertations right and how these uh how these terrible problems have that we have with coven now or you know changing people and they're going to have these big impacts no they're not okay so so human nature hasn't changed any for you know hundreds of thousands of years uh it's the same genes it's the same actions it's the same reactions it's the same innate value system to the organism and the same kinds of situations that release those thoughts and feelings are the same ones is that they've always been when you really think about this you don't have a feeling uh that in you and you never had an emotional experience that hasn't been had by you know 50 000 of your ancestors so you you are a long line of generation of neural circuits that work in a certain way and uh doesn't matter what you expose a little kitten to if it's never seen a string and you pull it out and you start pulling it it's chasing it that's how it works oh we got someone here and then in the Q a is pointing out that um there are other cultures that cover faces for cultural religious reasons and it doesn't seem to have a long-term effect they're also their literatures on you know the the um the doomsayers around TV and violent video games and how those things are going to fundamentally change the species and study after study has uh you know put you know absolutely yeah zeroed out any effect on those things um so yeah no matter how many violent video games children play they don't grow up to be more violent themselves once you control for predisposed behavioral Tendencies and everything else one last just one last comment on this just sort of a broader comment because the question obviously we overkilled it for a reason because it's theoretically interesting and what's interesting about it is and the reason we are we're so fascinated about this recent Revolution and understanding uh the revolution obviously started in the mid-1980s with the first Publications in Behavior genetics the uh even we we were looking at David buss's textbook even the Third Edition and which was maybe 2010 or so and in that Third Edition he's still he's still sort of saying okay there's uh there's this there's the socialization or learning part and then there's the behavior genetics part he's still seeing it uh that way uh that's David Buss who had been wide open to the evidence the the the notion and the realization that there's no environmental variable uh that is that is accounting for any significant percentage of any variance at all that that the only quote environmental effects that are found in any of these studies are essentially in Mass environmental effects meaning junk uh in other words it's uh completely unpredictable and it's nothing other than measurement error uh there that's what they are they're observing when you're looking at personality you are looking at the only systematic thing in there is the is Gene variation this is incredible and this is uh this is one of the most important uh discoveries in history in the history of science it is also going to be fought tooth and nail it Stomps all over all kinds of politically correct thinking it actually runs counter to a great deal of human intuition and uh but slowly but surely in the next you know 20 to 30 years it will finally have to be absorbed because it is true and and the utility of that truth is huge and we've we try to utilize some of the we try to find some wisdom in this knowledge uh with Jen Hawk's concept of the Potted Plant you have to understand that you don't change but you can change your environment your environment doesn't change you it just changes your experience if you're a potted plant put yourself in conditions where you thrive don't try to change your plant who it is that you are in some way in order to to fit the conditions that you're in as best you can figure out how to place yourself in in a in a social ecology and a physical ecology that's consistent with Optimum function for you uh that that in that that's a huge uh realization and it's the major derivative uh useful idea that comes out of behavior genetics unless you're trying to manipulate people for for votes or sales there's an amazing article in the New York Times this weekend about the highly sensitive child I don't know if you saw this but um this guy has this concept that that he he there are three General types of children according to him there are orchids which need a very specific environment in which to thrive the highly highly sensitive they're a pretty small group then you have dandelions who can grow anywhere they're very robust very resilient also a small group most people are somewhere in the middle they're tulips so he's like describing the bell curve of essentially emotional stability right more than anything else other things in there too um but giving it this whole psychodynamic overlay of uh how it's all all the function of the he he does the review gave a little bit of a tip the hat at the the genetic component of this that gave more value to how you're raising the child oh yeah well New York Times yeah totally enamored with uh that whole area the Northeast is a hotbed of psychodynamic thinking for over 100 years and in lives on in that kind of ignorance there you go yes all all flowers need the right soil not just orchids so even if you're a dandelion you can't you need to take care of your environment as well so um yeah so I had somebody correct me and say that I had said it was an hour and it wasn't quite um I what I meant to say was it's on the hours it's about half hour we normally um to answer the second part of the question we normally do these q and A's for 30 35 minutes not for a full hour and if you were watching this it's just general housekeeping but if you're watching this live and you're not a member of our website you got lucky this week because we had technical difficulties normally this is a members only um Affair that you can become a member of our living wisdom Library by going to esteemdynamics.com and our membership is three dollars a month or 99 for a lifetime which also gets you on the list for our book which will be coming out next year which is why we are in Hawaii finish the book um so uh yeah we had a couple of questions about about how we're liking Hawaii and I mean it's okay yeah it's not bad except for the pterodactyls you got it yeah all right anything else all right folks good enough for now we'll see you soon yeah thank you for your patience with our technical difficulties so um we will try to get that fixed for next week or next next time we do this the the other thing people ask us all the time is what the schedule is for these q and A's and it's sort of whenever roughly twice a month and we try to send out the link ahead of time except for today which we the link was broken so all good all right all right everybody we'll see you soon figure out how to end it on the phone maybe like that yes like that
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist