John Gray Wants to Know if Your Brain is Inflamed

Relationship expert and best-selling author, Dr. John Gray, joins Jason Hartman to talk about research studies and Dr. Gray’s new work, “Boys to Men.” Dr. Gray talks about how his observations have been backed up by and further explained by brain studies, showing obvious differences between men and women in brain function and hormones that affect health and behavior. He offers a deeper explanation of these differences based on scientific research showing how activities particular to each gender, diet, and an increased existence of xenoestrogens in our environment play a significant role in hormonal balance and imbalance. Dr. Gray discusses the proper use of supplements and the dangers of pharmaceuticals. This leads into his new work regarding healthy male development and his upcoming new book, Boys to Men, a look at how boys have been affected by today’s culture, showing a higher dropout rate than girls, lower comprehension, and higher instances of boredom and depression. The high carbohydrate diet we consume plays a big role in this trend, and he cites inflammation in the brain as one factor in decreased comprehension. He describes activities, diet and supplements that can alleviate inflammation and stress and bring about optimal health in both men and women.

John Gray, Ph.D. is the best-selling relationship author of all time and the most trusted voice in relationships today. He is the author of 17 books, including The New York Times #1 Best-Selling Book of the last decade, MEN ARE FROM MARS, WOMEN ARE FROM VENUS. His 17 books have sold over 50 million copies in 50 different languages around the world.

John is a leading internationally recognized expert in the fields of communication and relationships. His unique focus is assisting men and women in understanding, respecting and appreciating their differences. John‘s advice can be easily used to improve relationships at home and in the workplace.

For more than 35 years, John Gray has conducted public and private seminars for thousands of participants. In his highly acclaimed books, videos and transformational seminars, John entertains and inspires audiences with practical communication techniques. John’s purpose is to create a world where men and women understand, respect, appreciate and ultimately work together.

Summit Entertainment (Lionsgate) has purchased the rights to John Gray’s bestseller “Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus” with the intention of creating a feature film and TV series. Summit has hired Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan to adapt and direct the title into a romantic comedy, with BermanBraun’s Lloyd Braun and Gail Berman producing.

John Gray is a popular speaker on the national and international lecture circuit and often appears on television and radio programs to discuss his work. He has made guest appearances on such shows as Oprah, The Dr. Oz Show, Good Morning America, The Today Show, The CBS Morning Show, Live with Regis, Fox & Friends Weekend, Good Morning New York, Larry King Live, CNN and Company and many others. He has been profiled in major publications across the United States. John Gray lives with his wife and children in Northern California.

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Start of Interview with John Gray

Jason Hartman: My pleasure to welcome John Gray to the show. John Gray is a very well-known author of many, many books. You may remember him from back in the old days when he wrote the very well-known Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus and all the subsequent books that came out of that work. And he’s got a new book coming out entitled Boys to Men and so we will talk about the broad spectrum of his work and it’s just my pleasure to welcome John Gray. How are you John?

John Gray: Well thank you so much, it’s a pleasure to be on the show with you.

Jason Hartman: My pleasure to have you. So first of all let’s talk about maybe some of your older work first and how you became interested in writing about the male-female dynamic and kind of sum that up but then I’m very excited to talk about your new work coming out, Boys to Men as well.

John Gray: Well the interest I had back 30 years ago when I started understanding the differences between men and women is still a present in my life, it’s still amazing as a marriage counselor. So much of the time women just don’t understand the way men think and they really need to understand and it helps them feel more relaxed and make some extensive men. Men don’t make sense of women and when I help men to make sense of women then they go okay and then all I have to do is this and that and it didn’t mean that or this and it just helps them reconnect so much better and it creates a context in which we can go okay, let me tell you about myself and the other person can hear and creates a context where we can have sort of what we want and the person’s response is not like well that’s an unreasonable request, or that’s really not so important why even bothering me with that. So understanding what’s important to women, what’s important to men and it’s really a fascinating subject. It’s always curious to me. I am always learning about it and I guess in the last 20 years it has been so much research in universities with a brain scan machines, and all the progresses in hormone understanding and so forth. There is just a massive amount of research backing up all the ideas that I’ve served a long time ago which at that were very controversial and now they are much less controversial because we can even back it all up with brain scans showing how men’s brains are different from women’s brains, men’s hormones are different from women’s hormones and I have to say even that new research which is done on the body, putting it all together try to make sense of it even helped me understand myself and men better and women better.

Jason Hartman: Well, John, this is really interesting and I suppose when brain scans you are referring to the new area, the FMRI or functional MRIs, which I think are going to lead to just amazing discoveries about us, but what was interesting is you are saying that these scans probably with FMRIs backup the things that you already noticed many years ago, right.

John Gray: Exactly I mean that’s the great thing. It’s like oh that explains why this and that explains why that. Let me give you an example with a brain scan they can measure blood flow to certain parts of the brain and activity how much activity goes on and there is something on the IPL on the left side of brain and the right side the brain. And it has a completely complementary function and for men the IPL is much, much bigger on the left side and much more active and for women the IPL is much, much bigger on the right side of the brain and way more active in a woman than a man. And so here you have this distinction and you start looking at what activities stimulate the left IPL. Driving a car, for example, stimulates the left IPL. Looking at a map does, planning a trip does. So basically it has to do with time and space, what direction are we going, how much time will it take, how much energy will it take, what will the reward be. So when you’re anticipating getting a reward, to be motivated your left IPL lights up and this is kind of a world that men live in that women don’t relate to. In essence it kind of simplified and be playful with it even is that it kind of represents an aspect of men that I observed a long time ago is that men tend to only do what they have to do.

From one point women think that’s lazy but really it’s prioritizing and men also have a different energy supply in their body, the hormone testosterone gives us energy and it runs out very quickly in men. Men need to make 30 times more testosterone than women and so we are sort of always going through a cycle of activity and rest activity and rest. Whereas women are not just testosterone oriented, their other hormones, oxytocin, estrogen, serotonin, these are like primary hormones that allow her to burn fat as a source of energy. And fat has way more energy than muscle, it’s a sustained energy and men have more muscle mass, women have more fat cells 25% more fat cells. So really they have enough energy to keep going on and on all without resting until they are stressed and that’s what’s happened to women today.

Women today have twice the stress levels of men. The stress hormone is now measured twice to four times higher in men and this is just in the 15 years these big changes that happen, so that was a big investigation for me, but we come back to the brain difference of the IPL we see as the right IPL is much bigger in women and the right IPL all has to do with nurturing, has to do with relationship, it has to do with what you think of me, what do I think of you, how do you feel, what do I feel, what should I eat, what are you eating all these aspects that really you can see here an industry which is primarily suited towards women are focused at women like fashion and food and I think men are not interested in those things, making babies and marriages and so forth. Men are interested in that. But the women’s brains are way more active and way more connected in those areas than men are.

And women have feedback loops that when they’re in a nurturing situation, it actually lowers stress for women too much of a nurturing situation actually raises stress for men and exhaust men. Too much of a testosterone situation actually give energy to men, lowers stress for men but raises stress for women. So these are like amazing observations that all these studies have done and it kind of helps us make sense that okay nothing is wrong with my partner and it is not like we can ever fit together. We are actually wonderful complements to each other as long as we can have a nonjudgmental perspective of the differences when they show up.

Jason Hartman: You know that’s very interesting. Well John, any other things you want to share just on how men and women can get along better and relate better because I’m very excited to talk to you about your new work and I want to make hopefully, most of the interview about that today.

John Gray: Okay, well this is actually a good foundation for that. But what I’ve seen is you know people ask me if that men and women have become that different in the last 20 years since I wrote Men Are From Mars, relationships between men and women are dramatically different, but our brains are still exactly the same, that hasn’t changed. Our hormone structure is still the same. It is been that way for long, long time. It’s a long evolutionary process, but suddenly we’ve changed the dynamics of the relationships and that is a huge shift where women are doing a more traditional male work, men are doing more traditional female activities and suddenly everybody is more stressed out than ever before. And the answer is not going back in time, but the answer is being able to lean to find the appropriate balance in our life.

What I see for women as they tend to go over to their masculine side, their testosterone hormones, which inhibit the female hormones and they have to make sure that they have balance in their life, to understand what are those most important female hormones and how can they not take hormones, which is what women are killing today, to try to remedy their problem, but how do certain behaviors that will stimulate those hormones. Ultimately if you take hormones you may get symptomatic relief, which for some women just feels like they’ve gone to heaven. It also has huge risks that go with it that are still not completely defined, but they are there and there is no long-term research on giving people hormones. Ultimately when you give someone hormones, your body stops making the hormones and if your body is not making the hormones in the first place, there is a problem you need to address and so by taking hormones you are not really addressing the problem and it gets worse. So I’m into teaching women and men how to do those behaviors to actually stimulate the right hormones to stay healthy and to maintain a positive mood in a relationship.

So that’s the challenge for women and the challenge for men is twofold. One is if you are in a relationship with a woman who’s more masculine it tends to make you more passive. Because she’s so busy doing everything and you’re like hey, we don’t have to do everything, so just relax, chill out. But on another level, that has nothing to do with women. Our environment is so filled with what’s called Xenoestrogens, pesticides, plastics, pollution, toxicity, all these types of things have the effect in the body of estrogen. So they are called Xenoestrogens and estrogen for men is not a good thing. It suppresses his testosterone and low testosterone for men, it creates a highest risk of heart disease and irritability and grumpiness and lack of interest in sustaining relationships, inability to make a commitment. So we see a lot of problems happening for men that have nothing to do with the relationship and so we have to counteract those. That leads me into the new book which is which you want me to talk about. I am happy to talk about Boys to Men.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, absolutely. We are going to talk about hat. John, before we jump into that and I know this will be, you know it will be related, but I’ve read and you know seen news reports for years about the way the two genders are changing and the things like birth rate and male sperm count going down and I hear these commercials all the time for you know low T, low testosterone for men and then about women becoming more masculine and men becoming more feminine and how and now this may be totally anecdotal what I’m saying here, but I seem to just keep noticing and hearing a lot in the media about this kind of stuff and you know when you called for our interview today, just before we kind of went on the air here, I was distracted because I had just heard about an attack in my neighborhood where three girls attacked another girl and beat her up and what is going on out there. Are the genders sort of like moving to the middle, you like in politics where they’ll say well this is politician is moving to the center because the polls. You know it seems like women are just becoming much more aggressive and of course this is a massive generalization, I know that it’s a stereotype. And men are maybe becoming more docile, is this happening in our society. These Xenoestrogens that you mentioned and all the environmental pollutants and so forth, what’s going on out there with this.

John Gray: Well I would have to agree, I mean with everything you just said, it is not really moving toward the middle, it’s moving all the way out of balance the other direction and I wouldn’t say even before we’re out of balance, we are just at a state of evolutionary development where women were women and men were men and we are complementary and as our consciousness rises, greater self-awareness, greater introspection and we can see this even in our children today. They are so much smarter than we were. They are so much more aware than we were and there is research that even shows that just even with the internet the amount of information stimulation that is going into people, the amount of increased consciousness is happening, awareness of information increases our self-awareness. We have access to so much information, so quickly, we are being stimulated so much. On one level this can cause stress, but on another level it does increase our self-awareness and with increased self-awareness women were going hey, you know I have masculine abilities as well, I don’t want to just be feminine and so they went towards the masculine and men, growing in awareness, said you know I like the — I can be more whole and complete within myself as well. But the problem is when we go too far out of balance it’s like you’re walking a tightrope and you suddenly swing out of balance – you fall down. You’ve got to be able to come back into balance. You’ve got to go back the other direction.

And so what I teach women is you know how to use your relationships or your personal life when you’re at the workplace, how to have a personal life where you swing back to that actually stimulates the life-giving happiness hormones that can only be produced if you are a woman if you are nurturing your female side. For a man if you don’t have the masculine hormones, the testosterone stimulated and supported you are going to have low energy, irritability, passiveness in many cases grumpiness and so forth. So there is the – you hear all the testosterone things being recommended and so forth. Many doctors are actually giving men testosterone which is extremely dangerous and irresponsible in my opinion. There are steroids and certainly you know they see sometimes they see some immediate benefits where men feel alive and great because they have just taken a hormone. It is very different from taking a hormone than taking one of these herbal supplements that actually help your body to make testosterone more effectively. There’s different pathways that herbs work and one of the herbs that I prefer and I recommend to people the time, particularly to men or women with low libido is Tongkat Ali, it is Tongkat Ali from Indonesia.

Jason Hartman: Can you, John. Do you care to spell that maybe for the listeners? It’s quite a mouthful.

Jason Hartman: That’s Tongkat T-O-N-G-K-A-T, Ali, A-L-I and most of these all the libido products area, the problem is that it is so popular. I mean it is the most powerful of all of the libido herbs and testosterone herbs because, so the people are diluting and they are adding other things. They are ripping it off to make it cheaper to increase their profits. So you want to make sure you get the pure stuff, but the reason that particular herb is so significant is the pathway in which it works is that when your body has high estrogen, it seems paradoxical. So take a moment to explain this, but historically, there’ve never been all the xenoestrogens in the environment. The only time a man would ever experience high estrogen is if his testosterone levels were consistently too high and then the body can, when the testosterone in a man goes to hide the body converts testosterone into estrogen and then now you have high estrogen. So the body thinks oh, I have high estrogen, then I must cut off the production of testosterone. So there’s just this physiological response that when estrogen levels are high in a male body, testosterone production stops or goes way down and as the pituitary gland sends a message to the testicles, to stop making testosterone. Well the herb Tongkat Ali will the pathway that it works on is not a hormone; it’s just a messenger that tells the brain to send the message down south to make more testosterone. So that’s something that’s so relevant today because one of our biggest problems today is the excess estrogen in our environment.

Jason Hartman: So what about HGH.

John Gray: Okay human growth hormone, so there was that phase about five years ago, for about five years. It went on where a big rage was giving older men 70 and 80-year-old men injections of HGH human growth hormone.

Jason Hartman: I saw that and hear commercials about them all the time on the radio.

John Gray: Right, right, and so they did some real studies in the gay people. These injections and men started getting younger their muscles started growing, their libido came back and basically you’re regenerating your body with HGH. That HGH is how your body utilizes food, basically to regenerate cells. The problem with taking these things, if you’re 70 or 80 you just want to – you don’t mind what you do if you’d live another day. So it’s fine, but for younger people, we don’t know the long-term results of adding these substances to the body. What we do know is consistently the way the body works is if you take things that actually are the substance your body makes, then your body gets the message that it’s too much and it shuts down. The same thing happens with — and by the way your body can make HGH or body makes it, and yes your body makes less of it as you get older, but your body doesn’t have to grow as much as you get older. You have to keep that mind as to growth hormone and the key to why people are so low at HGH is we eat so much. Basically every time you eat there is a process your body goes through, you digest the food, insulin goes up, transports the food to the cells and then when insulin goes down, that triggers the brain to release growth hormone and the body utilizes the nutrition to regenerate the body, but today because we have so many carbohydrates in our diet our insulin levels never go down. As soon as they start going down, we eat some more. So you have to have a period of time, at least three or four hours after a meal, where you don’t eat anything. So you get a chance for the insulin levels to drop and the growth hormone to be released. So that’s another aspect of you know just a natural way to create more growth hormone, is don’t eat so much all the time.

Jason Hartman: Yeah follow maybe the more European method rather than the American method which I think would have a lot of other benefits, probably to write.

John Gray: Well it’s hard for people to do that when their food isn’t nutritious which is why you know my website, I recommend all these particular supplements that I found to be effective for people. But you know we are making huge advances today. I don’t be critical of anybody, but you know we have Parkinson’s which is another big, big deal and what they do if they give them L-Dopa, dopamine and then as you take it then the Parkinson’s, ultimately gets worse and worse. Your body habituates to the dopamine and that’s caused by receptor down regulation. So you don’t have any and then nothing works. So the drug itself works, but you have to keep using more and more and more. And it is not even a drug, it’s a bean, Lacuna [00:21:21] that’s high in dopamine. Well another scientist in Chicago realized the same concept I’m talking about, if you give your body a huge amount of something, then your body stops making it and so if give a lot of Dopa to somebody, what happens is your body stops making the enzymes that convert phenylalanine and tyrosine and tyrosine has all these other functions in the body and your body stops making serotonin. So if you just supplement with other supplements while you’re doing the dopamine and then suddenly you can get a dose of L-Dopa and you don’t have to keep raising the dose and the Parkinson’s doesn’t get worse, this is like a huge breakthrough and then what he found is that same formula of taking some extra tyrosine and some five HTP to make serotonin has a dramatic effect in helping kids with ADD and ADHD. Literally in a few weeks your child doesn’t have ADD and ADHD I mean it’s amazing that the discoveries out there, but you won’t hear about them anywhere.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, John is it just a big pharmaceutical conspiracy because it seems like everybody is just taking drug after drug – prescription drugs of course I’m talking about. You know nowadays they’re just want drugging people up, it’s really scary.

John Gray: It is very scary and conspiracy always create the word then suddenly discredits what you’re about to say, but I could just say it’s business. It’s business – when you have a product, you want to sell it and the most profitable product on the planet right now is healthcare and to make money off of people being sick, if you actually healed everybody then you wouldn’t make any money and that’s not a very productive business. So just the whole concept of making money off of people’s health is pretty challenging and particularly if they are sick. But taking another step away from that and just go into you know the markups on pharmaceutical drugs sometimes are 2000 times. You know on a supplement of it’s – you know it’s like it costs $50 you know the health food store gets it for $50, they probably sell it on sale for $75 and they make up not even a hundred percent markup. So there’s just so much money in the industrial complex, the pharmaceutical companies and then there is a whole system. They then pay for all the research to be done. They then determine the curriculum for our doctors who many people think doctors are health experts and they’re not. They realize they’re not trained in being healthy at all and quite often they’re not healthy themselves. Unless they are naturopathic, holistic doctors who studied naturopathic medicine, homeopathic medicine they don’t know very much about being healthy. They know somewhat, but they don’t understand all the value of the supplements and they think it’s like talking witchcraft and then we even have laws that say if somebody gives advise you’ve to go check with your doctor and what does he know.

Jason Hartman: The doctor doesn’t know anything about it.

John Gray: Well he knows. I don’t want to minimize it, doctors know. But they don’t understand all these new developments in the supplements and so forth.

Jason Hartman: Yeah I agree with you on the doctors, I know why. I don’t think they are any example of good health. It seems John that the Western medicine idea is just cover things, cover up symptoms rather than deal with symptoms. And we don’t have to go too far a field with this whole thing, but I’m sure we both agree on that.

John Gray: Well we certainly do and we can come right back to you know my new book which is and I know you wanted to talk about it which is, it is not out yet, but its Boys to Men. There is huge crisis in boys and girls have their own crisis, but the boys are sort of overlooked and most people are not aware of it, but just some of the symptoms of it are right now in colleges there is two women graduating to every guy. So it’s two to one and high school there is two girls graduating every boy. There are four times as many boys committing suicide in their teenage years than girls. 90% of all children with learning difficulties are boys. What is going on?

Jason Hartman: What is going on?

John Gray: That says that you know it’s just everybody is going, what’s happening, what’s happening? Still what we see on another level as many of these children who have learning difficulties or close to learning challenges, they are diagnosed with ADD and ADHD, Attention Deficit Disorder. Now if you have Attention Deficit Disorder and the teacher is teaching you, you become bored very quickly. If you have ADHD, you’re so bored you become restless and you become distracted. So these are two really big problems and typically boys are way more vulnerable to ADD and ADHD. Their research is saying you know there is 4 to 1, 4 boys to 1 girl with ADD and ADHD. And, however, my own anecdotal experience talking to teachers, usually 9 out of 10 kids who have ADD in schools are boys and a lot of it goes undiagnosed as well.

But what you can just look is just the grades and the outcome is the number one ingredient that you need for good grades which is a measurement of that we can compare to 10 years ago, 15 years ago boys have gone dramatically down and if comprehensions, to be able to comprehend, to be interested, to not be bored, to stay focused and to comprehend, this is our intelligence and is being restricted for some mysterious reason.

So my book, I explain and very simply for parents to understand the various causes of it, it’s not genetic. This is a whole thing which is nonsense. The thought that semi and epidemic comes out in the last 10 years and its genetic, children have a genetic tendency to have different types of ADD, ADHD but the cause is pretty much the same and there is variety of causes, but the main, most common cause is our high carbohydrate diet or the high carbohydrate diet of the mother when the child is pregnant. If you have high blood sugar, blood sugar when it spikes causes inflammation in the brain and inflammation in the brain inhibits brain function.

So there was a one of the most popular supplements in Europe for the last 50 years for arthritis and arthritis is inflammation, one of the most popular supplements is something called grapeseed extract. It is very inexpensive, too, grape seed extract and they found in some studies that just it takes over the inflammation in your elbows and your arthritis and your hips and everything it also takes your inflammation in the brain and this is the — this is the major cause of ADD, ADHD symptoms in children and adults. And so if you take grapeseed extract along with vitamin C, suddenly symptoms of ADD and ADHD go away very quickly. Even for myself as a kid I with ADD. When I look up look back it, the tendency of that and I go where did that come from. I drank two 16 ounce Cokes every day – that will do it. And so you know I did okay. I didn’t have the extreme symptoms kid have today, but I still had symptoms I now recognize them. And now when I’m you know I am 60 years old. Occasionally I will be reading something and my mind kind of goes over it again and again or I am not absorbing it. That means I’m stressed and I am not comprehending and that means there was inflammation my brain or I am fired. All I have to do is take some grapeseed extract, about 300 mg, 600 mg of vitamin C and within a few minutes, I go right back to the book or the magazine I am reading and my brain grips it, I absorb it. I comprehend it, and this is why kids are missing today.

Jason Hartman: Amazing, really amazing. John, when I heard you on another interview recently, talking about your new book, you talked about I think about the employment prospects and what’s going on with men in the workforce as well or young men particularly. You know you talked about those graduational rate some of that stuff is really, really mind blowing, and I assume that when you talk about statistics like that, we’re still producing about the same equal amount of boys and girls as they are born, right so.

John Gray: That’s right as an equal amount of boys and girls, and twice as many girls who are considered educated, and education in our society today quite often is the prerequisite for getting a job, and even once you have a job for getting job promotions. I mean you can actually in some, some jobs you can be very confident that you didn’t have the degree, so you can’t get promoted where somebody else who has the degree has the opportunity to get promoted so that’s one huge injustice and challenge for males today, but also just simply getting a job if you don’t have an education is so much harder and so suddenly that becomes this huge challenge of men getting work. The next aspect of men getting work is women and whatever reasons we want to attribute to these are often willing to come in a lower pay grade than a guy so a guy looking for work has to look for a job where he feels he’s going to be able to support himself and his family so he really has sort of a higher requirement, and companies know this. You can hire women for less money even though from a realistic point of view a woman with a child has huge needs for greater money, but she tends to be more willing to accept the low paying jobs so you got the high paying jobs taken by the women because they have more education and you have the low paying jobs taken by the women who don’t have the education.

Jason Hartman: So it’s this middle ground where men are just losing out. Now, I want to comment on that as an employer because I remember I had a girlfriend years ago who, who was rather had feministic leanings for sure and you know she would always complain about how women statistically only make 72% or 73% of what men make and complain about how unfair that was, but I will tell you though John, I’m not so sure that’s true because as an employer who has hired hundreds and hundreds of people over the years when I would put in an ad out for a receptionist for my company women would apply, men wouldn’t apply, and when I would put an ad out for outside sales men would apply. And I think there is a self-selecting, a self-sorting that goes on.

John Gray: There is. There’s a place now what often that will say with that figure which is so many disputing figures, and it is a big debate, but it’s really an inaccurate figure. It’s just the one that suits everybody on the news. There’s actually debates going on about it. Here is another figure which is completely accurate by the U. S. government which is single women make more money than men for doing the same jobs. Now, that’s an average like a say $0.13 more on the dollar something like that, that women are actually if they are single so they have another aspect to it. Then you have the double concept of when you go into the detail and there is a whole book written by a friend of mine which is why men earn more. You know married men do earn more than married women. There is a reality there. But then you say well, what work are they doing? Is it for all the exact work, and that’s for the details come in very significant which is the details if you’re both heart surgeons who is been a heart surgeon longer that’s going to cause you to make more money for the same job. That’s A, B who comes in on the weekends and works overtime for the same job that’s typically the male because the female would typically not want to work overtime because she has children at home, and she doesn’t you know she feels that there is a responsibility. The male often has a wife will take care of his children so he can have that opportunity to compete more and make more so there’s lots of factors.

Jason Hartman: There are a lot of factors, and certainly should be noted that many women leave the workforce for five or seven years to raise their children which is great, and that plays into it too. I mean –

John Gray: It does so. It does.

Jason Hartman: Men have five to seven years more experience on average if they are 40-45 years old by that time, right?

John Gray: That’s exactly right. So you come back to where the study it says women are making less. They are basically saying a woman doing the same job, but they are not comparing a woman doing the same job who has less years of experience so it’s a really challenging aspect. I have actually done a study of 100,000 men and women and you ask the phrase to women, are women appreciated in the workplace, and 80% of women say no. So and you ask men are women appreciated in the workplace and 80% of the men say of course. If I was to ask you do you appreciate those women you hire.

Jason Hartman: I certainly do.

John Gray: Absolutely. That’s good, that’s why we hire them. I think I talked to bosses all over the place. They think the women are great, and they’re fantastic, but this women actually will say in a survey I don’t feel valued and appreciated and so I’m also working at a book called Gender Smart Workplace where we close the gender gap where men can understand why women are not feeling valued in the workplace. It’s not about the money that women on a personal level I’ve never heard of women say I don’t feel valued because I’m not making enough. That’s just some political feminist statement kind of a thing. On a personal level, women will say things like I don’t feel included. I don’t feel valued. Men walk on egg shells about me. They have their own club. There’s all kinds of issues that do happen in the workplace that are really, that can really make the workplace better if we understand how men and women are different. How does the women feel appreciated – even in my own life when I was just had a accounts in practice I had this great assistant Helen, she is still a very good friend and she wanted to quit. And I say why? She said she didn’t feel appreciated. Now I’m going to emphasis she is a great assistant. I’ve got out my lucky stars to find her. But the way I communicated to her didn’t say to her that she was appreciated so I said to her why would I, what would it look if I appreciated you. She said you’d know more about what I do. And this is the real key thing. Men feel appreciated when you just acknowledge the results of what they’ve done, and you pay them well for it. They go look what I did, but women don’t feel valued unless you really understand all the work they put in, the struggle they put through, the angst they go through, the experiences they have, the highs and the lows, and we’re not talking a therapy session here. We’re just talking a few extra minutes every day to listen and ask questions to know more details about what she goes through, then women feel very much like now you know I stayed up really late for that and I had to call this person 13 times and they were jerk. If you understand what they go through, then they feel, ah, you really value me. Because if you don’t know what somebody does how can you value them? And that’s the perspective women have. And that is again we come back to brain differences that’s the right IPL that says, see how I feel, see what I do, and then you can value me. But for men it’s the left IPL, see what I did in terms of the outcome of what I did and what I accomplished and that’s where men feel vaulted.

Jason Hartman: Yeah interesting stuff. John, tell us a little bit more about your new book. First of all when is it coming out?

John Gray: Well, I don’t have a publication date. We’re still in the editing stage so it probably next year would come out.

Jason Hartman: What else are you covering though? The title is interesting From Boys to Men. I mean may be a little bit more about the title and what it’s about? I mean you explained this problem with the learning disabilities, the suicide. I mean that’s just awful. The education situation, very grim, the employment situation grim.

John Gray: And ADD, the ADD situation to ADHD situation. These are with practical solutions to help, and its also helping parents to understand their sons, and what their sons need, and a big part of what sons are missing today is happy mothers. This is a really key thing as the boy gets the message of his own sense of worth if he can’t, if he sees his mother not happy or the father not being able to assist the mother in happiness. He doesn’t get a clear message that he has the power in relationships to be successful. So that’s a real key thing for mothers to become aware of and ways they unknowingly cut off communication with their son, so I got into a lot of communication, their skills where mothers will ask too many questions. Mothers can also be too empathetic that too protective particularly with boys. Boys need to have a greater sense of risk taking in their life and mothers, there job sort of is, oh yeah you can go there, but look at this could happen and this could happen, and this could happen. She is kind of like the doorkeeper that hold you back and there is a value to that so kids don’t do crazy things.

The father is the balance to that which is kind of like well, try it, see what happens. You know, he wants to climb a tree, all right I will watch, go ahead, climb, be careful. But the mother is like you’re not old enough to climb that tree and dad says well, I’m going to be here. And there’s a whole dynamic as well of the role of the father that we talk about in terms of sons. Some research has shown that kids who, when parents divorced if the child goes with the father, if the boy goes with the father versus goes with the mother, there’s a much more positive outcome for the boy if he goes with the father or has, you know if its both mom and dad its even better, but if its one or the other, the boys that go with their fathers actually end up better in life and right away what we find is just boys who grow up with mother, single mothers with boys have a much higher percent of ADD and ADHD problems whereas the boys who go with their dads don’t, and this is in the influence of dad.

Dad is just the presence of men with mean increases testosterone and increases dopamine. And ADD is a condition of inhibited dopamine function so just boys being with fathers in control of their lives has a huge effect of setting boundaries which helps to stimulate dopamine in the brain of boys and you can see in the child they’ve actually measured that when a father comes into the room, a different brain chemical gets produced and that’s dopamine.

When the mother comes into the room, a calming brain chemical gets produced serotonin so with children need a balance of mom and dad and if they’re going to get a divorce they need to make sure that they still have that balance and make peace, and provide a network for those children, contact with both. I mean these are the ideals. We have to know what our North Star is to navigate the ship. Life is not perfect, but at least we can know how to move towards it. May be just the dynamics we go into.

Jason Hartman: Yeah that’s an amazing level really John of detail there in those dynamics. I mean the presence of the father, the presence of the mother and the future holds I think with technology is such good things in terms of us continuing to understand more and more about this. But your work and your research has certainly been on the cutting edge. Tell people if you would where they can learn more. Give out your website.

John Gray: Well, thank you. They can certainly more at marsvenus.com is my website and all these sort of supplement they can help out. I have a little store there, and I have a video in each one to show people explaining greater detail how the brain works, the body works while we need certain things today or why someone might need it, but you know one of the thing I want to point out which I think is dramatically I wonderful to question every parent has how much time should my child sit on the video game because it turns out the video games are just as damaging to the brain as cocaine if you spend too much time on them. The same part of the brain lights up as with cocaine. Now you become depended upon excess stimulation that’s called addiction. And the normal stimulation parental approval, parental motivation the desire to please your parents that certainly has no power over the child, so parents gain less power over their children to lead and guide their children the more they play these games. It also actually interferes with brain development it’s too much.

So this is all been theory and speculation, we could see it. And certainly it was an addictive thing. If you take the video away from the child they get upset just like you take away that drug. Now we got research showing that when the child is playing a video you got the middle part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens where there is a lot of pleasure gets stimulated. There is nothing wrong with that. That’s then connected to there is a blood flow from there to the front part of the brain which is to the executive center of the brain. For the first hour of the video game there is that connection between the middle brain and the front brain. After about an hour the front brain just turns off, and the middle brain continues to be stimulated. That’s not good. That’s the addiction setting in. That means the child is actually gaining less control over their life making decisions, and they are more to just kind of a conditioned reaction state, more like a conditioned animal, a monkey that you can train them to do something. That part of the brain is actually called the monkey brain – condition brain – as opposed to the front part of the brain it is stimulate through education where children learn, set goals, achieve those goals, behave responsibility, explore morality and so forth. That’s part of the brain actually turns off after about an hour except for the first hour they were any good skills, so that’s a nice study because it kind of says that the parent all right, don’t worry about for an hour, but after that its too much. It’s kind of like with the vitamin pill you know it’s good for a certain amount, may be take too much. It can make you sick.

Jason Hartman: Yeah most certainly. Well, what you’re doing in the way of supplementation and products. I see on your website you have products and so forth?

John Gray: Well, they are not my products. A few I design because nobody else had them, but what I do is I’m kind of consumer. I test all this stuff, and see what works through with my clients and test it out see what people work, what’s really working out there, and try to find the best deals for people and recommend things. And so I have like a little 10 minute video things for depression, particularly relationship oriented things depression, anxiety, mood disorders, energy levels, libido, passion, hormone balance, menopause, I mean these are product there that I imported from Korea. And I got RX for women and that does my picture on it because they market it there with my picture because I’m kind of well-known there, but that one in three days women’s hot flashes stops. I mean it’s just amazing. Women would have bottles of it just because imagine something you take if you have hot flashes there’s only herbs, and all those symptoms of menopause go away in three days. I mean it’s a shocking amazing response that people have. And it’s actually double-blind study is showing that hot flashes will go away and all those other symptoms, and it’s not actually taking hormones, but its herbs that helps send messages to brain to balance your hormones. Those are the kinds of products that I recommend to people they are kind of relevant to their sex lives and so forth, so it’s quite expensive kind of things that are under the sheets people don’t talk about but I do.

Jason Hartman: Well, John I’m looking forward to your new book and the title again Boys to Men.

John Gray: Boys to Men thank you so much.

Jason Hartman: Fantastic. Thank you John and I got to ask you one final question before you go. How did you ever think of the title Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus? What a great title.

John Gray: It took two years of looking for a way to talk about gender differences without people suddenly getting upset because this is back 30 years and I had seen in 1984 I saw the movie ET, and in my talk I happen to say women just imagine your husband is ET, and they all laughed and I thought this is the perfect way to talk about it like from different planet and some women even that I talk to where’s my husband from? And I said Mars. Now it’s that everybody laughs. I said this is it. This is what I have been looking for.

Jason Hartman: Good stuff. Well, John Gray, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.

John Gray: You’re very welcome. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Narrator: This show is produced by The Hartman Media Company, all rights reserved. For distribution or publication rights and media interviews, please visit www.HartmanMedia.com or email media@hartmanmedia.com. Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own and the host is acting on behalf of Platinum Properties Investor Network Inc. exclusively. (Image: Flickr | kenjimori)

Transcribed by Ralph

 

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