Dr. Lisle lecture notes (TrueNorth 1/27/23)
On 1/27/23, Dr. Doug Lisle visited TrueNorth to guest lecture.
He hadn’t been to TrueNorth in quite a while, so it was a treat to hear him lecture in person.
I first saw Dr. Lisle during lunchtime, while I was interviewing a job candidate in the employee dining room. Dr. Lisle and Dr. Goldhamer walked in since Goldhamer wanted to interview the candidate too. So we had lunch together, but the conversation was all focused on the candidate. Lots of jokes made though and an obvious deep camaraderie between our 2 heroes.
After lunch:
The lecture, which only has a time-slot for 1 hour, went on to about 2 hours. Lisle said at the beginning that it's open Q&A. Someone asked him to explain food addiction, and he spent the remainder of the lecture answering that 1 question. He said he'd start from the very beginning, which turned out to be explaining the 2 categories of life forms - plants and animals. He said he wouldn't get in the weeds of what a virus is ;)
Dr. Lisle’s infamous whiteboard drawings and notes. These diagrams reveal the structure of life.
The robot-looking cube in the center is a human being, a computation machine.
The lecture was super wide-ranging. Classic Lisle style: drawings, anecdotes, tangents. Talked about all the terms we Beat Your Genes fans know: C/B, supernormal stimuli, Jimmy vs. Horace, etc. He almost said something that is book-exclusive, but because the lecture was being livestreamed he didn't.
I was impressed by how non-politically correct he was. It's one thing to hear Lisle say on a podcast "Humans are NOT born with equal value," and quite another to hear him say it in a room full of strangers (many who are probably "woke") with emphatic gestures and a loud voice. He said things which made me cringe inside, hoping that nobody would start to heckle him. For example: saying there are definitely only biological males and females, that we want our team to win in sports because we're supporting our coalition and in the Stone Ages the coalition that won would get to rape and pillage villages, that a tire mechanic and white collar office worker do not have equal value. All normal to hear on the Beat Your Genes podcast, but more startling to a newcomer.
He did mention how everyone has yelled at him for 7 years to finish the book. He said that just this year he learned new insights on the human brain - such as that it makes over 1 trillion computations/second - which have greatly changed his understanding. He said that justifies his delay - plus, that he's just lazy ;)
Now, notes on the lecture:
The question was for him to explain food addiction. Some interesting parts to me:
-It is not possible to beat addiction. We can only manage it.
-Addiction is to be managed lifelong. E.g. Dr. Jen Howk has managed her alcoholism, and in doing so not 1 single friend from her past made the cut.
-2 ways to try to manage an addiction: abstinence or moderation. Lisle can personally do moderation, but he recommends people be abstinent. It depends on the personality.
-Addiction itself causes issues, issues don’t cause addiction. Addiction sits inside the "universal value system" (Lisle might have defined this term before in lectures, basically it's all the values a human is born with, it is not learned).
-Personality is individual variation in the universal value system
-When we abstain from a substance we're addicted to, a neurotoxin (e.g. alcohol), our bodies produce "antidotes" to the neurotoxin. The antidote is supposed to neutralize the neurotoxin. So if the neurotoxin isn't in the body, the antidote lingers around there and makes the person very uncomfortable. Hence the person eats to neurotoxin to relieve the discomfort
-He found it interesting how some of his alcoholic patients relapse - they won't order the drink themselves, but if offered a free one they'll take it. The free aspect changes the C/B
-Nobody ever beats their addiction - if they stop craving something after 6 months of not having it, they will still get addicted to the substance if exposed to it. Lisle gave the example of 1 famous actor dying after trying a drug again after 20 years being off it - he got addicted to it. Time makes no difference.
-What it takes to manage an addiction depends on a lot of factors, including the personality. Lisle said he's recommended someone move houses and stop living next to a junk food store. People have had to ditch mates, friends, etc. Again, after she got sober, Jen Howk had none of the same friends anymore
-Just 3-4 weeks of abstinence is enough to make the MEMORY of the addictive substance go away. Convincing the nervous system that the substance (e.g. food) is no longer in the environment. DDL gave examples of how since he no longer lives near the cafe that sells the carrot cake he was addicted to, he no longer eats it nor thinks of it.
-Therefore, if you relapse, don't beat yourself up over how long you were off the substance. It's not more or less of a failure to relapse if it was after 1 month of 3 years of abstinence. IT DOESN'T MATTER in terms of how long it'll take to get "sober" again. Just get back on track and abstain from the substance for 1 month, and the craving will go away (incidentally this is the exact same message Dr. Anna Lembke, who wrote Dopamine Nation, preaches).
-The sight of something (e.g. wine bottles) typically won't cause an addicted person to break down and relapse, but the smell of it will.
Assorted facts
-Wild game = 3-5% fat Now meat is about 50% fat, made with SOS, so it’s supernormal stimuli
-We ate animal food to try to avoid early death by starvation. Long term consumption of animal food over the years causes cumulative damage on body -Time & energy are the most fundamental resources in life
-We like crunchy food because in the Stone Age, fresh food was crunchy
And that’s it! Hope these notes were helpful :) What were your takeways?