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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2020-12-03
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foreign foreign all right I think we're in business how exciting is that yeah it's always nice when the technology doesn't you know fail a hundred times before we can even get started how are you how's how's life across the pond good good not bad at all it looks yeah that looks uh nice and warm and sunny just like I left it nice and warm and sunny yes indeed yep turning the chat on to see what we can see we got um as usual a couple of questions submitted ahead of time so I'll just give folks a chance to kind of catch up and I'll see what I have here got it um I will go ahead and uh so a lot of you I don't know how many of you who are here today have signed up for my moments of Zen which was conceived as a group coaching sort of thing but has quickly had so many people sign up that I don't know what it's actually going to look like so um there are a lot of people from the membership who've signed up and I haven't wanted to turn any of you guys away uh and limit it so we'll just have to kind of play it by ear and see how it goes I may for those of you who are signed up um when we will have our first meeting tomorrow afternoon evening depending where you are and we'll see how it goes and how many people are there I may in following weeks split the group up into a couple of groups so we have a little more of an intimate experience but we'll just we'll have to see how that goes but I'm excited that so many of you are excited and want to participate definitely I I tapped into some kind of latent demand here so that's uh I know a lot of people are just going through a lot of crap this time of year so um hopefully we can we can have some productive time with that so all right I see no questions but happy to be here people saying hello hello uh good afternoon all right okay well see what we've got I know we had a we had a lot of pleasure trap questions submitted ahead of time that seems to be in the uh in The Ether at the moment so uh let's see so this one this one just came in um hi doctors I live in not so Sunny England um and I've been following you for a couple of years now it's all very well that folks from glorious California and I presume also Hawaii uh eating salads every day shopping at the market for 15 types of potato but if it's cold drizzly and blowing a gale for eight months of the year the urge gets stronger to stuff oneself with fish and chips we simply don't get that variety of fruit and veg that you do please advise an English wilting Rose yeah well let's let's face it uh is I I believe that there's all kinds of uh variety of vegetable matter in England as far as I know I also know that for myself I only eat about 10 different things so I think I eat uh corn and carrots and potatoes and green beans and Brussels sprouts and broccoli and uh some cabbage and uh then I've obviously rice and beans so um come on the truth is is that uh oh and then I eat some uh apples and some bananas and some oranges so the for myself what I eat there there are the basics and um the and certainly I've been I also eat some spaghetti with tomato sauce so all of these things I believe I can get just about anywhere in the world certainly somewhere halfway civilized so the uh I don't think there's gonna be any problem in England now the uh you may not have pineapple and avocado and I don't I don't know what other things uh certainly could be missing out on but uh yeah I think that that probably another issue here is that you there you need to learn what agrees with you in terms of your taste preferences for spices so there's probably about half a dozen different spice combinations that that work for me they don't work for me seven days in a row they need to be rotated around so I like a little bit of Indian food uh and their spices I like Ethiopian I also like Mexican food I also like uh Chinese food thai food Etc these are all sort of spice problems they're not so much food content problems it's the same rice beans potatoes oats and then vegetables Etc so I don't really see the problem and the craving of fish and chips seems to me to be a very different issue that uh then variety issues so also I would say that um Jeff novik would encourage people to use frozen vegetables uh there's not no and frozen fruit for that matter there's no reason in the world not to be using uh frozen foods and those things you should be able to get just about anywhere uh and increase your variety so I think that's kind of what I would say on that how about yourself Jen that all makes sense yeah that makes sense I mean when I first found this way of eating I was living in Anchorage so I was I was not anywhere sunny or anywhere that has any kind of abundance of fruit and vegetables except for you know one month a year when the big Harvest from um the the Alaskan glacial valleys comes in which is very impressive but I I remember doing most of my shopping at Costco um which you know I'm sure you have some sort of equivalent there but it's produce from all around the world that was available year round um and uh yeah I kind of had to trade that um exciting local variety of 17 kinds of lettuce and the kind that I get in the produce box that I I have here I mean it's really it's wonderful if you can get it but it's perfectly you can definitely find a good variety and stay on track and create a diet even a slightly more open than dogs dog eats basically like a like a picky 10 year old boy I only like you know like white things you know like pasta rice and it's not that bad but I I yeah I'm a big fan of frozen vegetables I still eat a lot of frozen vegetables here I um have one of my favorite snacks to make all the time is some type of Frozen veggie in the air fryer so if you have an air fryer it's nice to have around for that purpose rather than you know sort of dehydrating higher calorically dense things like potatoes although that has its place too but it's great to pop in a bag of I love to put edamame in there I love to put frozen broccoli in there and you just stir that up with some some hummus or some mustard sauce or whatever whatever is interesting and it's a nice snack so um yeah I think this is mostly a mindset issue and a personality issue with openness and you're you're looking at your situation as a burden that it is not necessarily it's just a it's it's maybe not as pleasant as you might hope there you go all right all right um On a related note as long as we're sort of doing pleasure trap stuff um or uh I think yeah someone's asking um about salt is it okay to add salt so we can sort of cover that briefly I think we talked about that not too long ago within the last couple of weeks but then um somebody is also asking because they're new if we can do a quick explanation uh overview of the cram circuit and what the cram circuit is um she's she's asking specifically if you can do it so I will yield the floor yeah okay uh cram circuit actually saw from the Grand Circle can go together yeah that's true the uh the app after you've eaten to society you have essentially this uh I just found out from Jen right before we started she said she made a quote about what she expected me to say today she said back the camera up and [Laughter] apparently I say this a lot and I was sort of oh not not very aware of it so we're going to do this we're gonna back the camera up and start from the very beginning oh from the beginning all right so here we are we're only three minutes in and I'm doing just what she said I was gonna do that's just outrageous so anyway I'm gonna back the camera up and start at the beginning so the reason why any creature does anything is that because it's running cost benefit analysis so if we uh so we're always going to start our analysis of why something is happening from that perspective so the why would we have a habit of systematically overeating the answer is there must be a cost benefit analysis disturbance in other words the system that's designed to run the cost benefit analysis on eating must be being tipped out of kilter so uh so supernormal foods are the are the cause of cramming after you're already full there would be no reason to do to do so otherwise that's why people are not cramming on lettuce they're not saying oh boy I'm really full for my nice hearty you know minestrone soup and now now I just feel I just can't keep out about three heads of lettuce Dr Lyle you know between 9 00 p.m and midnight I just found find myself gnawing down three heads of Romaine never never happened so what is happening nobody's gnawing down five pounds of carrots so this five pounds of carrots uh are less calories than a pint of Haagen-Dazs but lots of people have shouted out of kind of hards but and so let's figure out why because it's super normal and what that means is it's giving a tremendous signal of biological success in other words a great value has been attained uh by consuming something that is very very rich so the cram process we understand it it begins with rich food that's what's going to be crammed now the um so now the question is why is it happening so habitually well the Mind runs a cost-benefit analysis um you know after it it figures it's done eating it it notices around and tries to figure out is there any rich food left anywhere in the environment this evening before we go to bed and if there is any if there's any in there if there's graham crackers granola uh you know Clif bars a sack of a sack of walnuts dried fruit um whatever it might be there's a peanut butter and Ezekiel bread uh we can we can jam and some Ezekiel bread and some preserves we can expect you to be looking for it and that's because your mind is running a cost benefit analysis to basically say what's the most useful thing that I can do right now uh can I go out and change the oil in my car no oh it's 9 30 at night I'm not going to do that how about start some project at work you know from my desk it's going to take an hour and a half no that would be a good thing to have done too but I'm not going to do that I'm tired and I've done enough work today well what on Earth could I do it would statistically increase the likelihood of my Gene survival answer make sure that I haven't left any rich food unattended in the environment that I could possibly consume that would be a very important part of the checklist of of a human animal anytime in the last two million years let's make sure that that the group which may have gathered in some rich food and everybody's eating their fill let's make sure there's none left over because that's really valuable resources and let's cram it in so that's what people will do they will cram after dinner now the problem is is that you weren't designed by nature to cram every night you're designed to cram once a month when there is a big kill okay so of course you're designed to cram in other words eat past normal satiety but you only need past normal satiety under under very rare conditions number one there's rich food in abundance and number two um I forget what the number two is if there's rich food I it slipped my mind well I mean the rich food and abundance and it's available so I mean your uh you're you're not going to have koala bears also cramming eucalyptus leaves because they they're uh they're a single mono eater and the food doesn't uh doesn't vary with respect to its calorie density but humans are an omnivore and therefore what they eat has vast variants all the way from lettuce at 100 calories a pound to nuts and seeds to 2500 so the the caloric value of human food which is the most important value of food is it's calories there are other nutrients but it's by far the most important issue and it's the way where all your pleasure centers are triangulated on that is a 25 to 1 payout when it's nuts and seeds Okay you can make it even richer if you turn it into chocolate you can make it up to 3 000 calories a pound if you turn it into butter or Earth Balance or corn oil you've turned it into 4 000 calories a pound which is as Rich As It Gets that's pure fat so by by making the food Super Rich we make it unbelievably valuable to the Stone Age brand of you and every other person and as a result of that you're very likely to be motivated to cram it in even once you're full now if you do that repetitively which most people do they do it very consistently most nights of the week what happens is is that your nervous system gets conditioned to the fact that that's what's going to happen and so even after you are completely satiated at your dinner with appropriate food within an hour or so after that the nervous system anticipates that it's going to get 500 or 1000 calories of very rich food as a result it actually starts the engine by with classical conditioning it begins to prepare itself for what it's going to get this is essentially the same process as the nervous system preparing for a cigarette that it expects to get about once an hour if you're a smoker and so that preparation uh sudden preparation process uh is essentially a a biological preparedness for what it's about to get hit with and therefore it actually starts to defend itself against us and the defense against what you're going to get hit with uh feels like craving in other words it's an uncomfortable State and then once you get the cigarette you are relieved because the biological preparedness in the cigarette meet in the middle and it they defuse each other in terms of the biological tension uh that's in the nervous system in the same way that you will start to Crave food that you're not hungry even though you're not hungry you will crave it anyway uh and it will be uncomfortable because the nervous system is actually preparing for the digestion of a bunch of very rich food and so then once you eat it you feel much and you feel satisfied and relieved and relaxed this is now a pavlovian paradigm and this is what we call the conditioned cram okay so in order to undo a pavlovian paradigm uh you have to grit your teeth and go cold turkey in this case and just do it now by the time you go through a week where you don't cram on day eight you will be feeling Cravings vastly lower for this it they're probably gone uh and all what's left is just a little bit of memory circuits of it's the same memory circuit that's always there like hey is there any rich food in the environment that's unaccounted for that I can cram in there that's just the basic circuit that's in the system uh so this is why you know we talk about uh you know Chef AJ makes a number one and important rule is the most important rule is is that the environment needs to be clean can't have a bunch of rich food around the environment if you're trying to break apart a cram circuit so that's we got to get rid of it and make the environment so that it's just way more hassle to get your hands on supernormal processed food and then it hopefully just isn't worth the bother so that's how we deal with that okay make sense yeah yeah I don't think I could possibly add anything to that um the the camera go back far the camera went back so far there's just nothing to contribute um did we want to address the the salt as part of that or um salt and it's essential nutrient and so you're designed by Nature surprisingly it's so important that your nervous system is very sensitive to it and it wants you to you find Salt extremely attractive uh it's not going to come in nature in the quantities that you're going to be able to get it in the in modern food supply so as a result when you salt food up uh it's going to uh essentially enhance your motivation to eat so uh very many people will systematically overeat because they're salting up their food they will cram because uh they're gonna salt is going to drive a motivation to cram uh they will also sometimes maintain a sort of binge cycle you know whether it's cramming or they're even more seriously binge eating disorder uh can be significantly exacerbated by the use of salt in the diet now I'm no big anti-salt fan Alan goldhammer is John McDougall isn't that's because all of us have sort of different experiences uh clinically and we we're just sort of paying a different different uh attention to aspects of this issue so John's attitude is listen we can get you know so many more people willing to eat a healthy diet if we're not so fastidious about salt that is true uh Alan's position is yeah yes but sometimes there's an individual but if they salt their food they're they're just in in deep trouble because they can't stop themselves from systematically overeating that is also true but that is not typical so uh so this is now uh this is now you learning about yourself I can have a nice moderate sodium diet at you know 2 000 milligrams a day or so uh the the basic I don't even know how much salt sodium I eat I I have never so the best of my knowledge it's probably been 20 years since I picked up a salt shaker so I would never use salt exogenously but I'm not gonna I'm gonna get salt in sauces that I'm going to buy at the store Etc things like that that doesn't bother me uh and it I'm not some salt fanatic uh that that is going to use prodigious amounts if you if you're wanting to use sodium be careful of two things are you number one trying to lose weighting having a hard time and eating a bunch of food that's salted up uh or do you have a binge eating issue and or do you have a um high blood pressure issue if any of those things are true then you should be looking to back down your sodium if you don't then we don't have a problem with it yeah the same same for added sugar basically I mean this is I mean both things can be pretty detrimental in very high quantities salt in very high quantities has all kinds of problems associated with it but um as long as you're not gratuitously shaking it onto things all the time and you're staying in that sort of you know uh yeah two thousand-ish range or less a day I think that for most people unless you've got um other complicating factors that's fine it's it's just really about navigating your own situation and whether you know I'll talk to people who um they're they're eating again to to go back to uh pick on the air fryer a little bit they're like oh I'm just eating potatoes I don't know why I'm gaining weight or I can't lose weight and they're air frying the potatoes so they're dehydrating them um and uh they're salting the heck out of them and then they're dipping them in some sort of salty ketchup or sauce or something like that so you're just making something that's already quite palatable more and more palatable as you go along the example I always use is one of my favorite snacks is um the roasted chickpeas and when I first went plant-based of course you know all the recipes for roasted chickpeas on the internet are like you toss them in oil and then you salt them and then you cook them and with a bunch of spices and they're delicious and it's no big deal to eat a 400 calorie can of chickpeas if you've done that to it whereas who's going to sit down with a fork and a can of chickpeas and just you know shovel the chickpeas in but the more palatable you make them through this dehydration and particularly the saltine process it's just a lot easier to get those calories Down the Hatch so if that's a situation that you're in and you're you're struggling with that then looking at Salt is a very it's it's a helpful place to go but it's by no means necessary for most people like stone soup yeah yeah I just salted up put a little oil in there that's right that's right uh someone is asking um if there was a beat your jeans this week there should have been it would have been a repeat last night because we're doing this this week so we alternate weeks with new episodes and repeats um but maybe there was a technical issue and it didn't get posted on time or something like that but there there should be um but there wouldn't be anything new so just to clarify that um let's see what else we've got here we've got some sort of amusing questions coming through so uh why this is a totally different topic why am I annoyed and irritated by loud flashy men who prominently display their wealth status when these things are supposedly attractive to women oh that's very interesting um yeah yeah the the bad individual you know has a personality that is uh that's that's making a bunch of inferences uh and that that's actually quite interesting so let's let's sort of walk through that just for our own entertainment so the um if you're if you're loud and flashy um that that that's going to mean there's probably a few things that go along with that one of those things is undoubtedly casual mating strategy so that that's that's one thing loud flashing in a wet display wealth cues yeah the obnoxious and Wealthy yeah so so sort of you know hi hi testosterone trying to fake high status out there in the world I'm very sympathetic to your disdain for that type of dude by the way so well we'll let Doug back the camera up and then I can chime in with my own discussed with this particular number of the species yeah um it's interesting the the um you can you can see if you are uh if you're a parabond oriented female you can you can understand that that's a that that's a very casual mating strategy uh Associated display the uh so that's one issue you can also possibly infer that the disagreeable uh and extroverted nature of this is potentially dangerous in other words uh somebody like this is much more likely to if you are in close proximity with them uh so your sexuality was close to their body you know even 10 feet away you can you can start to feel that they are such an individual personality is probably 10 times more likely to be a rapist than an individual who's very pleasant okay now when I say 10 times I mean very few men have that in them but you know even if it's a very very small number 10x is 10x and so your your nervous system should be alert to signs of essentially loud forceful uh disagreeable and and the the showing nature of such an individual is indicating a narcissism so that they they believe they deserve they believe they're deserving of the attention uh and they are they there's there's only two reasons uh for anything fundamentally one of them is survival and one of them is reproduction they're definitely not being showy for survival reasons so they are definitely being showy and forceful and Loud for Reproductive reasons so so when we now look at this what are we seeing uh we're seeing a potentially irritable forceful uh and androgenized um you know disagreeable individual with a lot of energy this is making a lot of noise okay and so as a result of that this individual is uh quite a bit uh it's probably if we if you took in your I I don't know in your mind style you had John Boy Walton yeah probably too many of our viewers don't even know who that is but if you have some you know a James Taylor in other words a really soft spoken really nice person and you put them next to the the Brash individual with that kind of uh arrogance yeah it's at least 10x it's probably a hundred X okay so uh if you go on a date with John Boy your odds are getting raped or probably you know one in a hundred thousand uh if you go on on a date with uh that that other individual it's probably one in a hundred okay in other words uh some rape in some fashion so as a result it's it's on the order of maybe a thousand or one so your nervous system is picking up on those cues which tell you this is not entirely safe okay um so I think uh I think that is probably I mean there's probably some other things in there too but that to me the the sort of revulsion uh and discuss and basically wanting to put a distance between yourself and that individual I think that that Pro you know when we look at what probably would be the number one source of that uh it would probably be uh the the threat to your sexuality is probably the latent issue the uh for myself I would have very much similar reaction and that's because I would feel that they are allowed aggressive competitor for the females and and and also dangerous in other words that individual is again a hundred or a thousand times more likely to uh to to put me in a physical altercation with them than John Boy Walton John Boy Walton and I would would never have a fight okay we would never even raise our voices about anything okay uh if I was with uh my uh my wife or my partner and he just felt felt that he had to compliment her appearance I might be a tiny bit annoyed but I wouldn't feel super threatened and I wouldn't feel like it was a dangerous situation okay uh whereas if uh I uh in in the movie Casino some young guy compliments uh the uh the casino magnates uh wife and he goes and and you hear Robert De Niro's voice narrating it and he says can't believe the balls on this guy I fired him the next day okay right away those those threats are being read uh by that sort of uh that's sort of assertiveness so I think that's the main issue uh that's involved though yeah my response to that when I come across that in the in the wilderness is that it reads as this kind of um status deficiency which is inherently sort of unstable and disturbing so you know somebody who is that kind of um in that overcompensation you know trying to prove China essentially Bluff who they are it's it's it's hinting and implying that there's not much substance there that if they have to kind of display ostentatiously that they're they're overcompensating for a lack of actual character and quality and and that my my parabond would not have to do that um and so there's there's a lot of that that kind of swirls around my head in addition to everything that you're talking about um and and I think for the you know from the the female psychology there's also the perception that he's um he's you know competing for attention with you you know like you're supposed to be the flashy thing you're supposed to be the you're the display he's supposed to be just the quiet sort of parabon support and so there's some of that um but yeah I think it's mostly just that disagreeable instability uh you know he's he's willing to do anything for attention and that's disturbing so that's really interesting um you know that's not curiously enough Jen this is an interesting um an interesting difference in uh we would have something to learn about the following and that is that in um the cultures that you and I come from essentially northern European Standard American culture the the uh I believe the main the the main uh theme in terms of fashion or or as far back as we know I don't know that much about what was going on in the year 1000 or the year 500 uh or what was happening in Rome at 1 A.D but certainly as far as we know it has been men dressed sort of drably and understated and women are showing attention with with shiny finally okay that is uh I mean there's certainly been exceptions and Beau brummel I suppose you know the uh there's there's been uh but I think that that that's a long-standing tradition and and uh the nature that that we've seen now in Africa I'm aware that that there is uh that there's a there's certainly evidence that the males will dress very flamboyantly and um and so this is uh we're not sure how this all plays out and necessarily what this means but I think certainly where you and I sit and where this question is coming from the a male that is dressing uh to to attract a great deal of the attention loudly uh personality-wise Etc is certainly sending some very very big signals uh about his personality that makes him an outlier and makes him an unstable and problematic and conflicted outlier I think that's exactly right yeah and as so many of these questions do I mean it really you you the questioner is annoyed by it for your own unique personality reasons because this is on balance a really successful evolutionary strategy I mean there's a reason that you know you've got guys in gold chains and muscle cars and that this is a this is a successful thing on average across the population and it bugs you and it bugs me and we can kind of pin down specific personality and IQ and stability and conscientiousness reasons for that um including sort of the the the cultural heritage of you know what your answer what what sort of how subdued your ancestors were um but uh yeah fundamentally it's you're that's just not your cup of tea and I I totally relate to that even though it's uh very very successful in average for the species so God bless all right all right let's see what else we've got here um [Music] sort of flashy and disagreeable always go together yeah interesting probably not always but certainly High correlation High correlation yeah with women too males yeah yeah definitely um I'm looking there's some other really interesting questions but there was a follow-up hello goldhammer and a gold gold chains never gonna happen yeah can you picture Alan in like a lifted truck you know just it doesn't quite work um all right well yeah I can't find the one that I'm looking for so here here's another one that's kind of related to what we're just talking about is testosterone the origin of competitive donation nature in the main domains of life and can it be altered hmm um I believe that it is it's probably we're going to discover that it's not the only thing in other words uh the the human mind remember competitive nature is this is the cost benefit analysis about uh and how how the organism runs a CV with respect to conflicts of interest um with respect to other uh with other people so that's so there's going to be a range of conflicts of interest uh and so there's going to be different strategies uh for dealing with those conflicts so a person with extremely low testosterone is going to be less inherently competitive but they're not going to be without competitive uh so I I don't think I mean it's an interesting question whether testosterone is if you've literally sucked it out of the organism of course the organism probably could not survive so if you entirely blocked all testosterone in a female I it's possible that literally that organism didn't survive I I do not know whether that's true or not the um the uh however it is certainly the main Governor as far as we can tell in other words if there's one little little screw in the carburetor here uh it uh in terms of competitiveness testosterone would appear to be the main the main uh mechanism so the can you change it well yeah yeah if you if you want to get more competitive and start shooting up steroids and apparently you can become extremely disagreeable and aggressive and wind up in jail for assault okay so this has happened to a number of professional athletes uh the uh many of them have altered their personalities and become ex you know extremely disagreeable and unstable and problematic and jailed uh as a result of this the if you were to block somebody's testosterone which I'm not sure why anybody would do that but they could uh you would for example by by the they've done that with a sec uh chemical castration uh for sex offenders for example uh attempting to basically block their testosterone so that they have uh so they have far less sexual impulses and assertiveness of depo-provera I think is called so I'm not sure what the effects are Etc it's you know it's just one way that the world is is trying to scheme their way around that problem the um yeah it's sort of uh yeah so realistically is there any way to change it no I do not believe there is um I think that I think we know that males at 40 don't have as much testosterone they do at 25 and male sub 55 don't have as much testosterone as they do at 40. in other words so uh males in general are calming down and getting less aggressive and less problematic uh as they age uh not that men in general are problematic it's just that they're more likely to uh they're the exoskeleton of the village uh they're designed by nature to defend the village interests and their families interests and they they need to be sufficiently disagreeable uh in order to make sure that that happens and so there's nothing in principle wrong with it when you get a lot of it you're more likely to have border skirmishes and a few deaths that's true the uh but no in general uh we're not trying to modify that and if you've got somebody that you feel like has too much oh well um I don't know did I ever tell you the uh I had a clinical story about a a gal who man we're going back a long time I had a gal that that uh it was in a relationship with a guy that didn't have enough testosterone and she after after a while she finally gave up and she just said I can't I can't do this so then in a classic human fashion she rebounds with another guy whose bullets have straws that turns out that this guy was not just full of testosterone he was a spectacular human he he really was a I would I remember him well he was he's a fabulous uh it was a fabulous human being however way high on the testosterone to the point where uh romantic just did not in anywhere enter this guy just all elbows and teeth you know what I mean elbows teeth and muscles that's all there was like you know if he if he'd bring flowers for her birthday you know he might knock into her with his elbow there's just there's just no way around and I and so I joked I said I tried to normalize this uh because actually a wonderful couple and and uh character logically outstanding both of these people so they were really trying to work at it but we're staring at a testosterone problem and so I was trying to coach him you know which is no no easy thing to do to coach a man about how he ought to treat his wife so I said now listen uh there's the deal in in my profession the thing is if you manage to have two testicles before you graduate from psychology school they have to remove one I said in my case it wasn't necessary I just came became nice guy naturally because I got your I got your missing one [Music] see this is the kind of quality content we can only offer our membership ladies and gentlemen this is this is why you pay us the big bucks uh it was so it was so it was a great interlude because he really was wanting to try and he was willing to take a little Direction and uh I I don't I don't remember I know that he was tried I don't remember what happened and they went in their in their semi-mary way but that was an example of you know these range of testosterone and how it is that we can't change it uh the best you could possibly do if it's a problem is try to do what you can do to beat your genes over it then we we tried yeah it's uh all right we're just we're just really going off the rails with this we didn't know this conversation was going to go in this direction but um I I think I've talked about this before my my real education on this came when I I dated um a a trans man so I dated someone who had been raised female so he he actually was XY at Birth but had been raised as a girl because it was sort of the the style at the time to babies that were born sort of with ambiguous characteristics in the 70s the doctors were like oh it's easier just to raise them females so so we're gonna pump this kid full of full of hormones and and treat them like a girl even though he really he was a boy um and so it wasn't until you know he was in his mid-20s that he sort of figured out what had happened and had identified up until that point so it was a very Butch lesbian you know and then was like oh no I'm actually I'm a male and and I've been suppressing my my characteristics all this time and so started to go on supplemental testosterone to to kind of like catch up with with existing as a male in the world and he was a very interesting you know we'll talk about these talking Lab Rats that people can be sometimes when they are very curious about their own their own experience and very self-reflective and very self-aware and very intelligent and he was very self-aware of how much his personality had changed as a result of starting to take testosterone and had sort of the parallel experience of living in the world as a as a female a testosteronized female but still a female um and then you know changing that with this with this chemical hormonal Edition in his life and he said it just it you know it made him very aggressive he said he understood rape for the first time and like why why men would be moved to rape women um he was prone to fits of Rage that were new to him like all these things that happened to um to athletes who were doping as well so really just I mean that that really opened my eyes to what a powerful drug testosterone is um particularly when it's used in a supplemental fashion so yeah yeah it it can definitely be at the root of competitive aggression and all kinds of social problems but we wouldn't we wouldn't survive without it so what are you going to do I like the characterization of um of men as the exoskeleton of the village you know and this is something that women don't often appreciate about about males um and the extent to which we're free writing on this characteristic of males as much as women like to lament it and you know blame it for all of the problems and the you know all the wars and all the conflict and all the trouble in the world um it's also responsible for civilization and and your the your ability to thrive in the modern world in the way that you do is is all on the on on the backs of these competitive males you know competing for female attention and affection so we uh should be a little more appreciative it doesn't mean we can't critique it from time to time all right so oh interesting follow-up regarding this discussion any relationship between testosterone and people who want polyamorous relationships or open marriages Etc um I would say that's more personality characteristic than a than a testosterone driven characteristic mostly with openness yeah yeah yeah I've I've encountered all sorts of people who are seeking that sort of dynamic in their personal relationships and I I wouldn't I I don't see testosterone as a very high correlate with who is attracted to those ways of doing things definitely there is an element of disagreeableness and and a willingness to kind of buck societal norms and Trends uh I.E Jeffrey Miller you know his kind of testosteroneized disagreeableness is definitely part of of what makes him um more more uh public about his polyamory and you know sort of um daring the world to challenge him about it but I I don't think it's necessarily driving the um the desire or the preference to begin with so yeah all right so we have a long we have a question about you know somebody saying they submitted a long question and they're wondering if we're going to get to it this time or next time and then they're repeating it here so I'm wondering if this this is the question so I'm just going to go ahead and answer it in general if you've submitted a question it goes in a big bucket I have a whole giant Google doc of questions and often we will answer one that's sort of an aggregate of others and so we don't necessarily get to every specific question if we've kind of covered that general area um and uh they all go to the the podcast queue as well so you kind of have to listen to all sorts of things and we we do eventually get to everything it just may not be word for word the question you answered but it is sort of encompassing of the themes that people are asking about so this one it's another sort of pleasure trap um holiday type question this is a this is a really common kind of thing we get um I listened to one of the podcast episodes and Dr Lyle said to be a quote secret agent and not let anyone know that I'm following a whole food plant a whole plant food way of lifestyle if someone asks tell them it's an experiment I'm doing and it's working well and then change the topic I've been doing this way of eating for about four years I got my husband and mother to change and eat this way too they are now both drug-free and healthy I became overly enthusiastic and started spreading the word to people who complain about their health most people are nice when I give them that info but I was mercilessly put down by some family on Facebook a few months ago one even said they wanted to punch me in the face sounds like an overlay testosteroneized family member they also attacked my education this is not a big issue as I am highly educated and my husband said this is mostly jealousy since then I got two plant-based certificates from Dr Campbell and Dr Barnard's program I gave free presentations to low-income families when I am at a family function or in front of friends or strangers and they mention their health issues it kills me to keep quiet and not bring up the possibilities of how eating plant-based can help should I continue to keep quiet and be a secret agent I feel guilty that if I keep quiet I am just selfish trying to preserve my own well-being it does not bring me happiness to keep quiet what should I do and why do I feel this way yeah um you feel this way for a a sort of a variety of reasons so one of those reasons is that you you essentially are are wanting to farm and harvest um a a tremendously profitable opportunity in human nature which is to educate other people in the village so one of the really the chief reason for human dominance over their domain on Earth is the ability to share information once it's been obtained the uh sharing information and receiving information through communication uh is is extremely efficient in terms of time and energy so a person could spend a lifetime learning something and then pass that on and the secrets to it in 10 minutes so that that has led to an accumulation of knowledge that is impossible in the animal kingdom so we are the exclusive uh animal that knows how to do this and so the the potential for being able to do this um it has not been wasted by evolution so it is let uh it has come along with a raging teaching machine so human beings love to teach they also love to learn so as a result those two things come together and it's not an accident it is a highly incentivized uh emotional mental CB constellation algorithm inside your head so you very much when you see a discrepancy or a a distortion in other people's thinking it activates inside of you and understanding that if they were to be undistorted this would be valuable for them and if that if the value that would be associated with this um would be let's suppose it would attack five years onto their life and it would take you 15 minutes to explain it you recognize that that trade is astoundingly good and so as a result um you are you're feeling compelled to make that trade the the so it however this is not altruistic so the what what's driving the teaching Gene is the fact that if you in fact show somebody something that is extremely valuable to them then two things happen number one they become more competent as a result of the information you've given them and they are also in your debt okay so as a result they are you you pick up the only money that there was in the Stone Age which is esteem there is no other currency in the Stone Age they can't say well I'm going to give you 500 coconuts over the next three years for that information that you just gave me they're not going to do that okay in the Stone Age so what they're going to do though is they're going to say wow you really helped me tremendously I'll never forget it and as a result of that they will be on your side and part of your Coalition and part of your general insurance plan for the rest of your life so this is why you feel a compulsion to help people that are in great need uh particularly if if helping them would not be in a huge sacrifice in your part just enough sacrifice on your part that nobody else wants to do it okay so this is why young bright conscientious individuals want to be doctors they want to be doctors because they want to save people's lives if you save their lives that mean that's the most esteemed that you could possibly get there there would be no greater esteem uh that you could achieve than by literally saving someone's life so that that is why medicine is the most respected profession in the United States and has been the most respected profession for at least 50 years since since as long as they've been taking data okay now the um so now we get to the reason why it is that you are feeling this you have a genetically built algorithm that that can notice the discrepancy between what they think is true and what is true and the value that it would have for them to be distorted and the fact is you've got the information and it would not take you a tremendous amount of time and energy to impart that information that information if they used it they would consider it a godsend and therefore that they would be indebted to you therefore this was this is worth a stone age Fortune okay now there's the problem the problem is is that this is not like telling some struggling Young Artists where they need to advertise their beautiful works and they're not making a living and all they need to do is put it over here on Facebook and then suddenly their whole world is going to change now no that isn't what it is you're telling people to go against the the most powerful signals that there are in their biology you're telling them to do exactly what it is that they don't want to do that's different than telling somebody no don't advertise on Craigslist advertise on Facebook it's ten times more effective for what it is that you're trying to sell that would be like really and it's like yes really so put that 400 for the advertising budget over there let's see what happens oh they do it and they're like oh my God it's 10 times as successful okay now what do they think about you oh thank God that person came along and told me that next time you tell them something they're all errors right that's not what this is this is telling them that what it is that they think is right and what is it that they want to be right and what is it feels right to them is all wrong and everybody that they hear and everybody that they talk to including their doctor they're all wrong okay and now you're going to face that no your your uh compulsion inside of you that is a is an understandable algorithm that wants to get that message out that's all I hear from Colin Campbell and John McDougall got to get the message out gotta get the message out what's bothering them is the Delta or discrepancy in outcomes that are as a result of what what they perceive as ignorance but it's it's vastly beyond ignorance it's not just ignorance you're you're going into the teeth of the nature of motivation of animal life and so the problem is vastly more difficult than you know and your success is vastly less than you would ever anticipate so as a result it's not the low-hanging fruit that you think it is and it's and it's worse than that because it's not only is it not the low hanging fruit that you think it is there's a backlash that you've now experienced okay so you're actually telling people if you don't do this you're stupid low conscientious and self-indulgent okay and you deserve the physical debilitation that you have that's what you're saying it's sanctimonious all right so so that's why it is that you need to be careful that's why I tell you to be a secret agent if you have somebody that's puzzled you might mention to them you know I actually saw a film that that kind of made me you know convince me to change the way I do things a little bit it's called Forks Over Knives yeah I'll I'll send you the link yeah take a look at it if you feel like it item there might be something to this for you don't know if there would be that's the extent of what it is that I would do um so the rest of it hopefully that will explain to you why you're so frustrated uh but you are actually distorted in your own right you are completely misunderstanding the inherent resistance to this information uh for every unsolicited attempt that you make uh there's going to be not only some percentage of backlash but I would say probably less than one in a hundred people that you would ever approach with this information unsolicited that you would uh earnestly try to convince them probably less than 100 would ever make any substantive change so once you grasp that that's the realities uh you you have a misunderstanding that very close to home you've got some success those are unusual situations to people who are more pliable as a result of their approximate and intimate relationship with you and anybody else it's one in a hundred okay so keep that in mind so that you you even though you are you can't you are not capable of understanding this because of your own egocentric bias because you made these changes this is a vast misunderstanding of the whole plant Foods vegan people that are running around the world trying to show the world that this is it they they see the profit in the in the in this information and they are desperate to try to harvest the esteem that comes with being the the uh the person that shared this information however they misunderstand number one the they are vastly overestimating the likelihood of any useful uh information transfer and they are also underestimating the irritation that they have with everybody else uh that has to stand up and deal with the sanctimonious uh unwelcome information okay so that's how I would look at this so I'm not scolding you I'm trying going to essentially clarify for you what it is that you've experienced and when I say one in a hundred I'm not joking okay I'm not joking I have I have been closer to the serious attempts of more people attempting to make uh serious changes then probably anybody else in the plant-based community I don't know that there's anybody that has been as close to the action as I have been okay there are speakers there are knowledgeable scientists that they are not working clinically with literally thousands of people that I have worked with okay when I talk about serious sacrifice I'm talking about 15 000 people having come to True North over the years and do a water fast which is no day at the beach followed by a whole plant-bids diet they are extremely motivated and yet we know what happens when they leave an extremely high percentage of people will have a full recidivism okay the McDougall plan people coming spending huge amounts of money for an absolute Cadillac program that I don't believe could possibly be better okay and yet when they leave they struggle mightily you can't get people any more indoctrinated or believing and yet the ability for them to follow is very very difficult these are the most motivated patients on Earth that I've seen probably between 15 and 20 000 of them and I and I know what happens and I know what the struggle is are there successes yes the successes can be utterly spectacular okay are they heartwarming to watch yes do I get esteem sent to me from those people that have been successful yes I do is it great to get it you bet it is okay but you're not me you're not going to see twenty thousand okay and the people are coming to me willing to make tremendous personal sacrifices uh to to wind up in my Orbit and yet the success rate is very low the struggles are great okay the pleasure trap is immensely underestimated as a motivational force it winds up with people believing that the reasons why this is a problem is that they've got underlying traumas and issues from childhood and motivational blocks and everything else Under the Sun this is this winds up being the discussions that wind up taking place why do I have such problems Dr Ohio why I have issues with my childhood I have emotional eating I have emotional and resolved issues no you don't you've got a problem called the pleasure draft then we can put every animal on Earth in and wind up with the same result okay we can get an addictive process taking place as soon as we hyperactivate pleasure Pathways in a cricket much less an aardvark or a moose or a human okay that is the issue that is why it's difficult if you've been able to beat it you are an unusual individual and you have a distorted view of the likelihood of success of anybody making this uh work much less somebody that you're trying to approach unsolicited so let's hope that this helps you understand what what your journey has looked like okay yeah very timely advice for people getting ready to go home and lecture their families over the holidays which is a very common activity this time of year I think it's like in addition to this the specificity of the pleasure trap around this this kind of compulsion this teaching Gene compulsion this is just a good principle for people to be aware of that you know you kind of have to be a little bit of a um investigator of your own emotional response to when you're trying to share information with other people so I would say anytime that you feel that kind of that that charged investment in whether they take your advice or not you're in the wrong business you're you're trying to convince somebody you're trying to essentially sell them on on giving you external esteem back um rather than sharing the information altruistically because that's just what you want to do and of course we're many of us are often you know we're sharing information we're hoping for people to kind of Take Our advice and and have that reaction but when you're in that particular there's a there's a there's a line that people will cross where they just get very very like why won't this person do what I want them to do um and if you're in that spot whether it's with telling them about a whole food plant-based diet or um about some new uh some new program that you heard about that covers any sort of area of life it's just that's a good moment to kind of pause and pull yourself out of that and ask you know what what are you really doing who's esteem are you really trying to hold hostage here um it's it's uh you're you're getting further and further away from the process of creating your your own self-esteem if you're that involved in whether somebody is taking your advice and and acting in a way that you want them to act and that's that's very often a losing proposition in all kinds of areas of life so we just extend that to include very good yeah yeah so I think we're we have we have other lingering questions but we're over the hour just really quickly this person is asking what what is the book about what is the new book about um what is it not about I I keep saying it's like half um half self-help book half textbook you know it's sort of like we're we're giving the overview of of human nature and why things work the way that they do and then we're really trying to give practical advice for how to manage and respond more effectively to Life's most common dilemmas and problems and and situations so um it's really encompassing of of everything that we talk about including pleasure trap issues but also motivation and self-esteem and relationships and family and kids and it's it's really covers a lot of ground so we do have there's a little description on the website um the book has its own little page so we there's a short description there and we will be sharing excerpts as we get closer to publishing too yeah so it's about the nature of happiness yeah so it's about it's actually about understanding the uh what what we can learn about the nature of life in order to make sure that that we do an excellent job of living with whatever our circumstances are so that's uh yeah that's just me but in my local perspective but it's everything that Jen's talking about yep it's about about everything all right well I think that is that is it for today we will wrap it up so yeah thanks for coming everybody and we will see you next time very good all right and I'll see a lot of you this weekend in our are to be determined sort of collaborative Adventure all right all right all right bye
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