Dhru Purohit Show - Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth, Manukora Honey, and Aqua Tru. Political and social discussions have become increasingly divisive today, often leaving little room for nuance or open dialogue. Differing viewpoints are frequently shut down, met with hostility, or dismissed outright, despite the fact that real growth comes from curiosity and engaging with opposing perspectives. Today’s guest joins us to explore the courage it takes to question our beliefs, understand where they come from, and embrace complexity in a world that often demands rigid certainty. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with cultural commentator Kaizen Asiedu to explore the importance of understanding our beliefs, where they come from, and the courage it takes to question them. Kaizen shares his personal journey of challenging lifelong beliefs and embracing alternative perspectives. He also discusses how this willingness to question ideas is often missing in today’s political climate, where fear of dissent has led to tribalism and dehumanization. Additionally, he shares his insights on the MAHA movement, health and wellness discussions, and the concept of antifragility. Kaizen Asiedu is a cultural commentator dedicated to empowering people by simplifying complex political and social issues into messages that leave listeners informed and appreciative of nuance. After earning a philosophy degree from Harvard, he entered the gaming industry, ultimately becoming Head of Global Esports Events at Riot Games. While leading the League of Legends World Championship and winning an Emmy, he felt a growing restlessness—a desire for a deeper, more personal purpose. Today, he helps high achievers who feel burnt out or lost transition from unfulfilling careers to meaningful work, whether as entrepreneurs or in roles that excite them as much as playing their favorite game or reading a beloved book. In this episode, Dhru and Kaizen dive into: Recognizing that you are in the “Matrix” of living a life expected of you (00:00:25) The ideas Kaizen was called to question (2:50) Fear-based conditioning and morality (7:40) RFK’s confirmation hearing and steelmanning concerns about his positions (20:20) The discouragement of open conversations and the rise of cancel culture (30:10) The rejection of humanity and the divisions it has caused (40:36) Red flags that indicate we are stuck in tribalism (44:36) Kaizen’s views that diverge from the current administration (47:46) Kaizen’s personal journey and the significance of "kaizen" in Japanese culture (54:16) The role of psychedelics, mindfulness, and shifting belief systems (58:56) Engaging with people as they are in the present moment (01:07:46) The intersection of lifestyle choices and systemic issues (01:14:46) Respecting alternative viewpoints, embracing different perspectives, and the concept of antifragility (01:19:16) Final thoughts (01:34:46) For more on Kaizen, follow him on Instagram, X/Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube. This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth, Manukora Honey, and Aqua Tru. Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com/dhru and use code DHRUP. Upgrade to the creamiest honey, packed with antioxidants and prebiotics. Just go to manukora.com/dhru to get $25 off the Starter Kit and boost your energy, immunity, and digestive health today! AquaTru is a countertop reverse osmosis purifier with a four-stage filtration system that removes 15x more contaminants than the bestselling water filters out there. Go to dhrupurohit.com/filter/ and get $100 off when you try AquaTru for yourself.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone, Drew Prote here. Today's guest is thought leader and life coach Kaisen Asiadu. And he's here today on the podcast to talk about making nuance cool again, breaking free of tribalism, and escaping the thought matrix that many of us will find ourselves in at some point in time in our lives. I came across Kaisen's videos on X.com, formerly known as Twitter, and I was deeply impressed at how he approached the topics of very complicated health, political, and social issues. And on today's podcast, we discuss many of these topics and his layered views. For my conversation and emails with many of you, I know that even though this podcast isn't a political podcast,

naturally, this podcast has followers across the political spectrum. That includes Democrats, Republicans, and independents. And I know I have a good chunk of people who listen to this podcast, who don't really care for politics much at all and would prefer that I really don't bring the topic up. I acknowledge that because in today's interview, we talk about the current political landscape and how Kisen's views on many topics changed over time.

But we don't discuss politics, just for politics sake. We discuss politics in the context of important themes that can be applied to all aspects of life. Kaisen's key theme around his content is making nuance cool again. How can we discuss all sides of an issue? How can we declare our own personal biases on something? How can we still land on our views about a particular topic without having to always feel like we're a melting pot of ideas with everyone else? And most importantly, still respect other people when they have different viewpoints than we do. That's the theme and that's the focus of today's podcast.

And I encourage you, regardless of your views on any of the topics we discussed today, to please listen to the full end of the podcast with Kaysen. Because I think you'll be surprised about Kaysen's approach and come to the conclusion that there are many people that are out there that have different beliefs than you might have that are well-respected, good people who want to make the world a better place. With that being said, let's jump into my interview with thought leader and life coach, Kisen Asi-Du.

Kaizen, welcome to the podcast. A pleasure to have you here. You know, you once said, people talk about the matrix. What the matrix actually is, is being in a web of expectations and conditioning that feed on your fear and cause you to do the safe thing rather than the real thing. So I'd love to ask you, how does someone begin to recognize that they're in the matrix? And more importantly, how do they escape? I don't even remember saying that. That's a banger. I got a bunch more.

Oh, I love it. You know you're out of touch with the truth when things are not working. That's how we know that we're working with the truth. Like if you're building a rocket and it explodes, then you're out of alignment with the truth of what's needed to get the rocket to fly in the air and go to another planet. Similarly, in our own personal lives, we know we're out of alignment in the truth in our health when we're dealing with health problems because there's something that we're doing or some way that we're relating to the environment that's hurting us. Or if we're having trouble with

our relationships, well, there's some way that we're interacting with other people that's getting in the way and we're not seeing the truth of something that we need to see. So when it comes to this idea of the matrix, this web of expectations and ideas that are preventing us from being in touch with the truth, the first thing to do is look at our own experience and see what's dysfunctional there. And often, particularly when we're talking about abstract ideas like political concepts or cultural norms, it can feel so difficult to discern what's real and what's truthful that we say, oh, it's just all your truth, my truth, it's all relative. But that's not actually true. I mean, there are things, there are standards, there are beliefs that are more effective at producing lives that people want to live. So the way that you get out of the matrix per se is to look at what relationship do you have with reality?

as you're living it, and is it creating the results that you want? And if it's not, then there's clearly something dysfunctional about your worldview. And then when you look at that, you realize, okay, I have ideas that I've inherited from authorities or my parents or schools or my peer group that are getting in the way and implanting these ideas that are causing problems in my life. And then you look outside of yourself like, oh, where did I get these ideas from? That's how you start to see the matrix around you. That's how you got to see the ideas that were implanted in you that are causing dysfunction

in your own life and in society you're at large. You've been pretty vocal about some of those ideas that you were implanted, that you are given, and we're all given them, especially on the social media website X, where you're most known, although your following is increasing on Instagram as well too. Give us some of those, give us an idea of some of those ideas that you've been given. that you felt called to speak about? Yeah. I think one of them was this idea that

there's such a thing as unbiased information when it comes to the news. That was probably the first thing that I realized was distorting my own worldview and not causing me to see the political landscape clearly. So to give you a little bit of background, I was a lifelong Democrat and pretty much Democrat by default

because I'm black, I was born in New York. I worked in tech. I lived in California. It was just Democrat reinforcement all the way around. And I never had to really think deeply about my beliefs. It was just socially reinforced and passed along to me by my parents and everyone around me. So when I started seeing the New York Times or CNN or many of these mainstream news outlets who I just trusted as sources of objective unbiased information, say negative things about Trump. I just took them at face value. I was like, okay, if they're reporting these negative things about Trump, they just must be true.

Because when I look at news, I was like, oh, well, this is, what do you mean? It's bias. It's the news. It's just information and then we get to choose what we do with that information. As I started to realize that this entire idea of objective people was itself a fantasy, I started to realize that the idea of objective institutions was itself a fantasy. So everyone has a perspective. Everyone's a walking perspective. We only have the interiority of our own experience and our own beliefs and ideas that we come up with.

So even if you're trying to not be subjective, you are still subjective. It's the same thing with institutions. I don't think the New York Times was necessarily trying to demonize Trump intentionally, although I think they kind of are now. I think they just had a perspective on what the world should be. who's a good person, who's a bad person, and they distributed that perspective to everyone else, including New York Times readers like me.

So once I realize that, oh, I have a default assumption that these other people are objective, but they can't be because they're people just like me, then I started to gain a more nuanced perspective on the sources of information that I was consuming, and I realized, oh, I've just been taking everything I've been told at face value.

I've been taking everything I was told about Trump at face value. And rather than considering that, a perspective among many perspectives and trying to reconcile that with other perspectives that I heard, I had just been locked into one perspective and saying, oh, this is the truth and there's nothing else. And to make this like practically understandable, I mean, like, we're here in Santa Monica. You were to go out in the street and one person was wearing a shirt and they said in New York Times and they told you a fact, you wouldn't just automatically believe them because it was very

clear that a person gave you perspective. But for some reason when, the label New York Times or CNN or whatever three-letter acronym is put on an information source and a website on the internet. We're like, oh, well, this just must be a fact, which is silly. And I get why we all default to just believing in objective sources of information because we're all subject to so much information. We just want simplicity. Like we don't have time to verify our own facts and do our own research. We just want to move along and put food on our table, take care of our families, get our career on track, all these things. And there's nothing wrong with taking other people's word for

things. That's how humans have operated. That's how we scale our understanding of the universe. Like we can't all be scientists and verify everything. But the problem becomes when we come emotionally attached to our beliefs, it makes us really susceptible to manipulation. And it causes us to be attached to things without even understanding why we're attached to things in the first place. So I think one of the first collapses of the paradigm that I was in was this idea of objective information or objective news sources. And even if you think about the ideas like new stories, they're stories. So they might be based on facts, but the arrangement of the facts is what creates a story. What facts you choose to highlight versus what facts you choose to marginalize. That's a subjective decision that people

are always making all the time. So once I started to look at the news that way, it helped me just become more flexible in my thinking and start to question a lot of the things that I took to be true. When you look at the world today, politically, socially, and especially a lot of the conversations that are going on in the space of what health means, where do you see these forms of manipulation or people having the strongest sense of maybe this, this fear-based conditioning that's running the conversation. COVID. That was a big wake-up call for a lot of people.

Unfortunately, actually wasn't a big wake-up call for me. But in hindsight, it was really useful. So back in 2020, again, I mentioned my background, default Democrat. I worked in tech. So I was an employee, right? And at that time, I didn't actually feel afraid of getting COVID. And I saw this dissonance between the headlines and all the fear that was in the headlines versus my day-to-day experience just walking around. I was like, I just don't actually feel like this is a pandemic.

This is not like the bubonic play with people dying in the streets. This is something that I'm being told is coming and we need to prepare for it. What I did feel fear around was the amount of tribalism and social propaganda around what it meant to be a vaccinated person. Because essentially the battle lines were drawn at either you're vaccinated and you're a good person or you're unvaccinated and you're a bad person. And when there's sort of like moral importance attached to a decision that people are making about their own personal health, it distorts the conversation and it's no longer about health. It's about morality. It's not a conversation about, hey, do I need the vaccine because it's good for me and I have risk factors that make me susceptible to COVID. It's instead a conversation about, hey, am I going to be respected?

by my family and friends and part of the tribe if I choose to not get the vaccine. So for me, there wasn't much of a questioning process. I just got the vaccine out of default because all my friend groups were doing it. I worked at a company and to even not get the vaccine at the company was to risk getting unemployed as well. And I think many people, they're in similar environments where there's so much social reinforcement that the decision is pretty much predetermined for them. So when we think about manipulation, usually with manipulation, there's some sort of element of fear.

Like, oh, if you don't follow the narrative, then you're going to be excommunicated from the tribe. And you're going to have all sorts of other problems. And especially in complicated topics like health where we're learning new things every day. I mean, we used to be told the food pyramid is eat a bunch of carbohydrates. And now we're updating our view of like what actually real health is. People just default to who they trust. Most people don't actually have a capacity to do the science themselves. So they say things like trust the science.

But even the term like the science is kind of incoherent. Like what is the science? The science is not an institution. The science is not a body of knowledge. Science is a process of inquiry. Right? So it's dynamic. It's always changing.

But the way that we were approaching the vaccines was dogmatic and actually unscientific. Not saying that there weren't scientists doing real research on, COVID, but the social propaganda was very much, don't do your research, don't ask questions, don't seek to understand, just do this thing, otherwise you're a bad person. And that's one of the most acute examples of manipulation when it comes to people's personal health. When you were going through that period of time, what gave you the confidence that I'm not going to be worried?

I'll just share from my own perspective is that even being in the health space, there was maybe like a few week window in the beginning where even people that I felt that I looked up to individuals like Peter Atia or Rana Patrick in the health space. I was even feeling like some of those people were saying, this thing is going to be really bad. So you start questioning your own self and there's a little bit of uncertainty that's there. What gave you the sense of confidence that, hey, this is. isn't the bubonic plague, I think we're going to be okay. You know, as the winter chill sets in, there's nothing better than curling up in ultimate comfort. And that's exactly where cozy earth comes in. Whether you're looking to stay warm or create a relaxing sanctuary at home, cozy earth has your go-to essentials for this season.

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because I did get the vaccine ultimately. I did capitulate. But what I noticed was that there was this trend of me being told, I need to be afraid. And then when the actual thing happened, it didn't seem as bad as what I was told it was going to be. So I'll give you an incident that's related around the same time, George Floyd. Right.

So at the time of George Floyd, I was living in L.A. I'm black. There was this incident involving a white cop and a black man, right? And I remember seeing the reaction from everyone around me being, oh my God, black people are being so oppressed. And there's so much police brutality toward black people. I remember thinking to myself, I have never had a negative experience with a police.

person in my life. And I had friends like asking me about my experience and I almost felt like there was this expectation that I buy into the narrative that there's this oppression and I've been subject to it on the basis of the color of my skin as well. So that was one of the early wake-up calls that, hey, okay, what people are being told is going on doesn't necessarily match my own experience. And that started to create a general default of more skepticism toward narratives about what was going on versus what was actually going on. So when we see that. say confidence, I wouldn't say I was confident because I, I'm not a scientist who was verifying the information for myself about the vaccine. But when I thought about this just from first

principles, I thought, okay, well, this is something that we've known about for months, right? It's been happening in China and then it was happening in Italy and we're being told it would come to America. Now we're being told it's happening in America, but what we don't have is some situation where there's incredibly high mortality, right? It might have high reality, but it's not necessarily high mortality. So at minimum, we can start to ask some questions about, hey, do we actually understand the mechanism of action of this thing? And do we actually understand who's at risk here?

Those are, I think, basic questions that any regular person should ask. But instead, the narratives seem to be expected. A severe winter of illness and death, right? That's what President Biden literally said on the whitehouse.gov website. And that's not at all what happened. So for me, it was less about confidence. it was more about, hey, is there a dissonance between my personal experience and what I'm being told to expect? And anywhere I see that kind of gap, then there's an information gap that's not being bridged either by me as an individual or by the authorities who are telling me to believe something.

Yeah, I felt like that was a time. That was a big period for a lot of people to go through this experience of, hey, my personal experience and literally what I'm seeing with my own eyes is different than what I'm. hearing. Maybe there's something else going on to the story. Yeah. And that should be the attitude anytime you see incongruence between what you're being told and what you're seeing, right? Like, again, to give the example of you go on the street, if someone on the street tells you, hey, there's a deadly virus coming and everyone's going to die. Well, you would start to look for evidence confirming that fact. Like, do you know anyone who's dying? Do you know anyone who's falling deathly ill? If you don't see that, then you're going to

start to doubt the source of information who was the person on the street. But remember, by the time that the vaccine came out, we had been in lockdown for like a year. Right. So we had had had a long period of time where you could see in your own personal experience where things impacted. And at least in my personal experience, like, I didn't know anyone who was dying. I knew people who had gotten it and gotten over it. So by the time that the vaccine was available in 2021 for me, I'd had like a years worth of data and it suggested that this is not as bad as we originally told it could be. And to be clear, like there was a period where we just didn't know, right? Like in March of 2020, no one knew.

So it was reasonable to think there was a non-zero possibility that this is something like the bubonic plague. Of course there is. But as time goes on, you need to increase, you should increase confidence in your hypothesis by getting more data that confirmed the original hypothesis, which was that this was to be a severe winter of illness and death. And it wasn't the truth. It wasn't the case. So, yeah, I mean, you know what I think is going on is, and this is, it particularly bothers me when we're talking about people's health, is people are being told to ignore their own experience,

to ignore their own senses and own discernment about what's going on in the world, and instead listen to what an information source is telling them. And it's causing people to just abandon common sense. and common sense intuitions and ask questions and really like form their own worldview. And that I think is perhaps the most dangerous part of this information ecosystem that we've now formed. It's overly reliant on expertise and authority while abandoning intuition and common sense. One area where this has shown up very significantly recently is we just went through the Senate hearings for now Secretary Kennedy. Secretary Bobby Robert Kennedy. And what did you notice about the discourse through those Senate hearings prior to them

and now the current discourse around the fears around Secretary Kennedy and the Maha movement as large? Yeah. Well, one, they weren't hearings because no one was hearing anyone. It was like an interrogation. Honestly, it was the first time that I ever watched a Senate confirmation hearing live. the Kennedy hearing. And one of the first things I noticed was there was just a lack of genuine curiosity

on the part of the senators who were questioning him. Because you have Bernie Sanders go up there and show baby onesies and talk about the baby onesies and how they're evidence that he's an anti-vaxxer when RFK is saying, hey, I'm not even a part of that organization. I can't control whether they sell these onesies.

And then Bernie Sanders is like shouting him down. Do you denounce the? these onesies, the entire tone of the conversation was an interrogation. It was punitive. It was like, let me catch you on something and confirm my existing belief and show everyone that I'm right and you're a bad person. I'm a good person. Similarly with Elizabeth Warren, I made a video on this of all, pretty much all the hearings and like some of the most vitriolic moments, literally shouting him down and just cutting him off before he answers a question. Before he answers a question. And what it showed me was, oh, okay, these people are not actually interested in the

truth. They're actually convinced they already know the truth. And what they're trying to do is appear right, rather than be genuinely open to having their views updated. So it's no surprise to me that now that RFK is actually in office, this is continued. Because when people are so convinced that they're right, it clouds their opinions and makes it impossible for them to even consider the idea that they're wrong. And then when you layer on financial incentives, incentives to need to get elected, incentives to get clicks on the behalf of news organizations, it becomes very difficult to even have an honest conversation. So yeah, the confirmation hearings, they're just political theater. I suspect they've largely always been the case. But this particular

set of confirmation hearings, not just RFK with Tulsi Gabbard, Cash Patel, Pete Heggseth. The tone was particularly emotional if you even compare it to the last set of hearings for Biden's candidates. Because I think it's always been the case that both Democrats and Republicans were trying to beat the other team. And I think that's just kind of how politics operates. And there's a inherent level of tribalism that we're probably never going to be able to get rid of entirely. But this felt more like a holy war, like a crusade. Like this is a bad person and I'm going to show you they're a bad person. And nothing can change my mind about that. And it's strange to me because it's like, well, hopefully we can all agree that the state of health in this country is unacceptable,

especially for a first world country and a superpower, and it's only getting worse. Like the chronic disease burden is only getting higher, kids are getting fatter, we're putting kids on Ozempic and all these things that we don't understand and are really surface-level band-aid solutions to deeper problems. And it would behoots to try anything differently. But when we see something genuinely different come along, we're like, no, no, no, not that. Let's not do that. Rather than being humble and demonstrating some intellectual honesty and recognize, well, what we've been trying isn't working. So maybe we actually need to risk over

correction in the other direction while we find the actual middle. But there's not even an openness to that. So yeah, I think we're going to, we're going to see this happen over the next four years, this level of like dogmatic commitment to a position. And I, I, I actually was hopeful that after Trump's election, like, things would die down because now there's not an actual national decision to be made about what direction we go ideologically. But it's pretty clear that a lot of these people are just going to be kicking and screaming to the very end. You know, you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast. You are a blackmail for anybody who's listening and not watching on YouTube or on X. You have been a lifelong Democrat.

if you had to, let's say in the case of specifically, you know, Bobby Kennedy, Secretary Kennedy now, if you had to steal man the Democrat side of what they were looking at and where their fears came from, what would you share with the audience? And the reason I ask you that question is one of the things I do, I think you do so beautifully in your videos, is you not only state your own biases and where you're coming from, you also state what are legitimate points that the other side might have, even if they might be missing the mark or coming from a place that doesn't ultimately end up leading to the right result. So if you had to steal man the side of concerns around somebody like a Bobby Kennedy, what would you think that the Democrats who were pushing on him would say? Yeah. So I think there's there's a cultural argument. There's a scientific argument. And then there's an argument about public trust. I think the cultural concern is that someone like Bobby Kennedy, although he might have some points that he's correct on, introducing him into this system threatens an entire system that has worked up to this point of vaccines and preventative menetin and allopathic medicine that has gotten us this.

far as a country, right? Because if you look at it, it's like we're not collapsing as a civilization. So evidently what we're doing, some of it works. And people have pointed out like the polio vaccines, save millions of people and RFK is creating vaccine skepticism that is being broadly applied to every vaccine, not just the COVID vaccine. So the strong argument would be, look, maybe he's right about let's say 1% or even generously 10% of vaccines, but what about the 99% of vaccines? But what about the 99% 90% of vaccines that are helping us and have gotten us to this point as a civilization. He's creating a culture of dogmatic skepticism that is an equal and opposite reaction to scientific dogmatism that he's trying to correct for.

So he's just swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction. And if we had had him around during maybe the polio vaccine, maybe he would have made this argument and then millions of people wouldn't have gotten the polio vaccine and died. So that's part of the cultural component. Part of the scientific component of this is he's not a scientist. right he's someone who speaks a lot about science he's someone who's interacted a lot with scientists and scientific institutions but there's genuine questions about whether he has the scientific discipline and training to actually evaluate some of this stuff on first principles and there's a difference between

being a creator and a critic right so you can be a creator of novel scientific solutions to problems which is very hard right and people spend their entire lives just trying to come up with one novel solution to a problem that's plagued as forever. It's much easier to be destructive. So you could argue that RFK, he's doing the easy job of a critic, which is just to critique flaws and fallacies in what is overall a functional system. So that's also part of the concern. He's not actually in a position to evaluate the science directly himself. The third concern would be about institutions more generally. Ultimately, all nations rely on a social contract and rely on a level of trust. You just can't have a functioning thriving civilization if you don't have a basic level of trust.

Because as I mentioned earlier, trust is why people believe things that they do, not verification. So why do I believe that, you know, the vaccine schedule maybe is generally good for kids? Because that's what scientists and scientific institutions have told me, not because I verified this myself. However, if we now have a default skepticism about everything the government says, everything institutions say, everything scientific bodies say, then we can't coordinate anymore. And if you don't have trust, then you need a bunch of rules or you need conflict every single time we're trying to make something happen. And you simply can't make progress that way. And what it'll do is it'll actually, rather than correcting the system, it'll just cause a system to come to the screeching halt.

So that is what I would say is like the steel man argument against RFK. He's spreading a level of skepticism that is just as dangerous, if not more, than dogmatism. He is not a scientist and not in a position to evaluate scientific claims on a first principles basis. And he's eroding trust in society most generally. And that's getting in the way of coordination and it's contributing to polarization. I appreciate you mentioning those things. And I have some commentary before we go into like the next topics. The first commentary that I have is somebody who also most of my life, you know, immigrant to this country.

My parents immigrated from Kenya. I was born in Nairobi. came here when I was three years old. So, you know, didn't have to do any hard work to become a citizen, just got naturalized through their own efforts, not too different than you talking about being a first generation immigrant growing up in the Bronx from parents who immigrated from Ghana. So being somebody who largely grew up in the East Coast of America did well in school, hung out in certain circles.

It was natural that I also ended up falling into more of a large- liberal camp, Democratic side, and I voted Democratic in pretty much every election except for a couple maybe local elections back in the day when I first started voting in the state of Delaware. So mentioning those things, I want to say that where I started to shift my own mind, and I've been transparent with my audience on this podcast, is when I saw that those are very, those are points that you just mentioned. And I found that with both COVID and other topics, in the space of wellness and even some topics politically, both national and local, some groups of individuals, largely those people who align with the view of I'm a Democrat, would discourage

me from even discussing those topics on either side, on the podcast. Or when I would discuss it, people would say, how dare you talk about this other information about natural immunity when I first did some of the early episodes on the topic of natural immunity with some experts, that we're on here, a couple that actually got flagged and put me on probation on YouTube in the early days. What I do appreciate about this sort of next wave, and I don't know what camp you find yourself in, I consider myself to be an independent now, is that no idea should be too precious that we can't discuss it.

No person should be so precious that we can't have a dialogue about that topic. And for each one of those things, there are a lot of really good views. on both sides. Ultimately, I'm over the view, just to chat about some of them that you mentioned. We've had multiple heads of HHS that were not scientists, that were also lawyers like Bobby Kennedy was. We have had many individuals that may have perspectives on certain topics, maybe not as what somebody might deem to be as extreme as Bobby Kennedy, Secretary Kennedy's now. But the fact that he's been willing to debate people, have a conversation about it, share his perspective, I feel like, you know, we are a country that spends the most per capita on health care. And yet we're in the space where not only are we the most medicated, but especially when you look at the poorest of the populations here in the United States, they have the worst life expectancy that's there.

So, you know, there was a funny tweet by Vinay Prasad, a scientist out of UCSF who has been bringing some really incredible nuanced thoughts on this, you know, and it's like the nation that has the lowest life expectancy for where our capita is, is worried that somebody's going to come in and like do something to destroy it. It's like it's pretty bad right now. But I think the larger point is, and the reason that I'm glad you brought it up is I think that sometimes people listen to this podcast. and they think like, how dare you talk about this person in a favorable light? And I think that we should be able to talk about everybody in any light that they need to. We just have to be willing to have the conversation and bring people on that have different perspectives. This episode is brought to you by Aquatroup, my favorite at-home water filter.

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I don't know, decade, maybe two decades, this anti-free speech culture has been developing. And maybe it's because we're like nearly 250 years from the founding of this country. I don't know why, but people have seemed to lose touch with the real value of free speech. The value of free speech is not demonstrated when everyone is saying things that are true. The value of free speech is demonstrated when people are saying things that are false and other people can counter those false things in public. So you counter bad speech with good speech. You counter hate speech with loving speech.

You counter misinformation with real information. But instead what's been happening is people have been saying, hey, don't talk to this person. How dare you platform them? How dare you talk to them? How dare you entertain their views? How dare you be associated with them? Which is silly, right?

Because you can't have a good faith dialogue if you're not curious about the other side of that dialogue. How do you know that you believe what you believe is true if you're not talking to people who believe what you believe is false? So we just need to believe that the truth is good and the truth always wins. And if someone is spreading falsehoods, all that needs is contact with the truth in order for that to be exposed as a falsehood. But instead what's been happening is we've been canceling people. We've been shunning people. We've been removing people from the public town square. But it's not like those people go away.

They go into the alleyways and they preach in the alleyways. And they gather their adherents who are only hearing their views in their echo chamber outside of a town square. So I'll give you an example of this. Recently there was this incident with Kanye and he went on a racist rant on X. Did you see this? I saw it, yeah. Yeah. So he went on this racist rant about Jewish people and, you know, just straight insane stuff he was saying.

And a lot of people just dismissed it as the ravings of a mentally ill man. And there's something to that. I mean, it was completely unhinged. That said, he's been saying a lot of this stuff now pretty consistently for about a decade. And the fact that he's getting louder is actually emblematic of the fact that he's not the only one who believes the things that he's saying. But before what we did is we tried to just silence him, right? He got banned off of social media. He lost a bunch of contracts.

People just tried to remove him from existence. That didn't work. Instead, his views were moved to a fringe, and that fringe is only grown. So this is what happens. Like, if you silence people, then they get louder. And if you try to completely silence them, then they can get violent, first with their speech, then with their actions. So the way that you deal with bad ideas, like the ones that he's been spreading,

is you need to actually talk to him in public, in full view of everyone, and show everyone how ludicrous the ideas are. Because otherwise, other people who actually might agree with him in the background don't have their ideas exposed to tension and healthy pressure. So they harbor those ideas and they go secretly, go follow that person. So no matter how heinous or odious the idea is, the point of a culture of free speech is that free speech is a counter to, bad ideas. But instead we seem to have forgotten that and we want to shame people for even

talking to people who disagree with them. Or we want to label people as a conspiracy theorist or anti-this, racist, that, misogynist, whatever the term is. And it doesn't actually kill the ideas. It actually gives them more power, just it gives them power in a place that we don't see. And then when massive hateful movements start to rise, we wonder, where the hell did this come from? Well, because we shoved it out of the town square, it festered elsewhere and not's overwhelming the town square. So, yeah, when we go back to RFK, for example, you know, originally what they tried to do is silence him, right? The Democratic Party, they engage in lawfare. They basically tried to shut him down in a bunch of states so that he literally could not win the presidency, take him off the ballot.

it. The news media tried to cancel him, deem him the conspiracy theorist, bringing up stuff about bears in Central Park and all this stuff. And fortunately, that didn't work because I personally believe that he's actually providing a really healthy counteraction to what's been going on in the country. But there's many people who agreed with RFK. And what happens is when people agree with him and they see him being mistreated in the public, they don't stop believing what they believe. They actually double down on their position. And they're like, you know what? Screw these people.

We're just going to dogmatically believe what we believe now because you guys weren't even willing to talk to us about it. And as a result, you get dogmatism on both sides. And both sides stop thinking clearly. And that's how you get tribalism and conflict. So no matter how much we disagree, we have to have dialogue. That's the only way that we can actually mutually arrive at the truth. But I think many people have forgotten that and we've become so unaccustomed to you.

difficult conversations that we would rather label the other side as bad people and hateful and crazy than engage with them and see, okay, what is there that they're saying? That actually is a useful contribution to the discussion. That is the only way real healing can happen. And that's the only real way that tribalism can end because it's not about one tribe winning over the other. You know, I shared one of your quotes at the beginning. There's another quote that I wrote down that I really liked, another banger, if you will. He said, if you're not in touch with your own humanity, you'll reject someone else's humanity. Absolutely.

Talk to us about that. Yeah. I think my biggest critique of the left is they're often too emotional. But my critique of the right is they're often not in touch enough with their emotions too. So if one side is too much heart on the left, I think the right is too much head. And both sides need each other to a degree. And I think the truth is we need to go more and more rightward because I think we've swung too far leftward, but both sides have something to learn from one another. The reason I mention this is because the tendency I see on the right is to dismiss and dehumanize other people.

And when we think about, you know, the way Trump was treated, like being labeled a fascist and Nazi and this is the next Hitler, I think that was massively hyperboized. but there's not nothing to it. It's like just like when people called Kamala a communist, I don't think she was strictly a communist, but there's something to it, right? Because she's on the left side of the spectrum. If you go left enough, you reach communism. Trump is on the right side of the spectrum.

If you go far right enough, you do reach fascism. So often a mark of the fascist movements that people are concerned about, like Mussolini, Hitler, and so on, is that they dehumanize people who disagree with them. They ignore them. They treat them as, essentially subhuman. And it starts with the ideas and then it starts with the personhood.

So part of where this comes from is, I think, a lack of connection to one's own heart. Because if instead we viewed people who, you know, on the left and maybe are deranged, some of them at least, as scared, confused and feeling disenfranchised from the direction that the country is going, I think people would take a softer approach and that will actually be more effective for the governance of the country. And actually it would be an effective way to recruit people to a vision of America that I think we can all benefit in. Like, I think Trump getting elected is going to be good for all of America. And I also recognize that shouting at other people and calling them names and humanizing them and treating them like their lesser people because they believe

something else is not going to be effective. It's not about right or wrong. It's like, do you want to be effective or do you want to feel right? And there's two different strategies that you take based on that. So yeah, I think being in touch with one's own humanity is recognizing like, oh, okay, well, maybe people on the right, they felt oppressed and dehumanized and mistreated for the last 10 years. And I think they very much were, right? I think there was a large part of America that felt like it was left behind during the Obama years. That was, I think, especially among like white people, I think there's been like an anti-white movement. I think there's been an anti-male movement in this country as well.

So I think there's a lot of people who feel like, yeah, you guys just treat it as like shit. So we're going to just treat you like shit. But if we do that, we just keep on swinging the pendulum and everyone has their turn feeling oppressed and then everyone else has their turn feeling like a victim and then someone else is the victor. And we just keep on doing this over and over and it's exhausting. So yeah, I think being in touch with one's own humanity is recognizing, hey, look,

there's people just, they're afraid. They don't understand what's happening in the country. They feel like they're personally unsafe. or people that they care about are unsafe. And the opportunity when you're in the position of power is to listen to those people and help them feel safer. You don't have to agree with them. You don't need to tolerate bad ideas from them,

but you need to make them feel like, hey, same team, we're not gonna just like run roughshod over you. We're gonna help you be a part of this awesome stuff that's gonna happen too. You know, it's often easy for people to identify other people as being conditioned or stuck in tribalism. It's easier to see it on the outside.

But it's much harder to see it in ourselves, including for myself, and I'm sure you would say for yourself as well, too. What are the biggest red flags that someone, especially someone who sees himself as rational or independent, might still be stuck in tribal thinking? Well, I think first we need to start with the assumption that we all are stuck in trouble thinking. It's just a matter of the degree, right? we're all brainwashed. It's just a matter of the degree. So we need to, that just needs to be axiomatic, right? And none of us came up with all of our beliefs around the world. Like we're all raised in an environment and we take on ideas from, again, our parents,

our school system, our media, our government. And we run that software throughout our lives. And some of it just works. And we don't have to think about it that much about why it works. Some of it doesn't work, but we run it because everyone else around us is running it too. So you can't see. your conditioning until you accept that it's there. And you might not know what conditioning you have, but if you're at least willing to see it,

then you can see it. So me, I know I have conditioning. Of course, there are areas where I'm being influenced or tribal or incentivized to not disagree with a certain group. So right now, the risk for me is that I am tribal on the MAGA movement, right? Like, I don't consider myself MAGA. I consider myself Kaizen, but I realize I'm more politically aligned with the right right now. So the way I need to look at myself is, okay, where do I feel afraid to say certain things?

Am I afraid to criticize Trump? Am I afraid to criticize Elon? When I see them do something that I genuinely find reprehensible, am I willing to speak out about it? If not, why? Is it because I'm afraid of losing followers? Am I afraid of losing money? So it's just a constant act of like auditing oneself to see, hey, where is their fear? And usually mind is easily diluted.

right it's so porous there's so many ideas that can come in it can be really hard to know what ideas are are true without really careful examination and talking to people on the others aside but you know when you're afraid right you can tell when you're afraid oftentimes people mask that fear with anger and they just get bigger rather than like slowing down like okay i'm afraid why am i afraid oh okay because i believe that if i say this view and it goes against a tribe then i'm going to be excommunicated now i can see okay so what is this preventing me from even maybe admitting to myself about how I disagree with a tribe. So I think I'm not someone who believes that emotions are a bad thing. I think our lives are emotionally driven. Like every logical goal that we

have or every log, all goals are emotional in nature. We all want to experience something and we use logic to help us achieve our emotional goals. So if at least we can acknowledge where we are emotionally, then we can see where maybe we have some logical fallacies to look at. Are there an examples and for context for people that from my audience that may not be as familiar with you because they're not spending as much time on on x you've been retweeted by Elon Musk a number of times i don't know exactly how many but a number of times he's found your videos on the nuances around the new administration doge and some of the uh political appointees that have taken place um i think he's found great value in the layers that you cover by also

steel manning the other side and yet also showing why your perspective might be different than theirs. Have there also been areas that you felt that there might be, whether it's the Trump administration, Elon's influence, that has been different than what you think might be helpful. And I know that the presidency is still young. It's only a few weeks in. Yeah. But has there been anything that's come up so far? Absolutely. You know what's interesting is that we're living in such an algorithmic age. So even when you do disagree with someone, if your audience is generally leaning in one direction or another, when you disagree with someone, it doesn't get as much visibility as when you agree with them. So for example, and the times that I have criticized Elon, I get like a fraction of the viewership on those. So even to the extent that I've criticized Elon or Trump, you probably don't see that as much. You see the stuff that my audience blows up because I generally more aligned with them. But yeah, there are several things. One, I think a lot of their rhetoric lacks emotional grace and intelligence. And what I mean by that is I think they're directly right on a lot of stuff.

I agree with what they're doing with Doge, with dismantling bureaucracy. I agree with what they're doing with removing some of the excesses of DEI, which sometimes was just masking race-based quotas and affirmative action that was really damaging to social cohesion. I think a lot of what they have been doing with U.S. aid. like shutting down a lot of what we're doing overseas has been really healthy. But a lot of the time I feel like their rhetoric is unnecessarily combative and dismissive of people who disagree with them. And I like to think that what people like about me is I don't feel dismissive of other perspectives. I like to show that I understand them, even if I disagree with them.

And I'd like to see that a bit more, a lot more from our commander in chief. And Elon to an extent too, because, no, there are times where he's dunking on people on X and it's like, oh, this is a like unnecessary and actually just creating more more division than there actually needs to be. And also I recognize they're humans, right? And they have their own way of doing things. And this is kind of the downside of them doing things. So it's like, I'm not sitting here thinking that they're perfect. I never had an expectation that they were.

And I'm okay with them being more correct than incorrect. And I think they're much more correct than incorrect. But yeah, there are times when, for instance, Elon, he'll like retweet something that's not true or repost. And, you know, for instance, you talked about immigration and someone posted the stat saying it effectively demonstrated that Bush and Clinton did more deportations of illegal immigrants than Trump did, but it's not actually strictly true because that number included people who were turned away at the border was not really what we're thinking when we think deportations. We're thinking of like, you know, going into the interior of the United States and removing people

who are here and ushering them out of the country. So like I'll correct him on that or when he did that hand gesture at the inauguration that looked like a Nazi salute to a lot of people. In my video, I mentioned that, hey, even if it wasn't a Nazi salute, I think it would have been a good move of leadership from him to just acknowledge what it looks like, because I think it would have helped a lot of people in the country feel safer. With Trump, I mentioned that I think the way that he dealt with California's water issues was unnecessarily forceful, or at least it looked unnecessarily forceful, to give you a little bit of context. When the LA fires happened, there was all this commotion about fire hydrants being

dry and reservoirs being dry and stuff. And there were legitimate issues. And I've been very, very critical of when LA local leadership around this. But then he announced that he sent the military into California to quote unquote turn on the water. And he signed an executive order doing that. and just a mere appearance of I'm going to use the military to force through my goals in a state that disagrees with me. It's a bad look from a leadership perspective. It creates unnecessary fear. I get that maybe in campaign mode, you need to be like kind of a strong man uncompromising. But there's a difference between how you run a campaign and how you run a country.

So, yeah, I think I have plenty of criticisms. They're mostly about demonstrating more a grace and emotional intelligence than it is policy. and I like to think that if they do something that's really egregious, I'll speak out about it. But, you know, there's also fear, right? Because, yeah, as you said, Elon has been retweeting me a lot. And obviously when one of those influential humans on the planet does that, that helps me a lot. So if he stops doing it, that's something that I'll suffer. But I like to think that my internal peace and my internal congruence and integrity is more important than that.

So that I'll say what I need to say when I need to say it. I want to shift for a second to that topic of internal peace now that we've talked a little bit about the politics of everything, which I enjoy that discussion because even though we don't really talk about politics on this show, it's something that largely I'm very fortunate. And also I celebrate the fact that health and wellness has become truly bipartisan, at least from a standpoint of people caring about it. I'm not talking about the political side. Like I probably have the same number of listeners that are Republican. as Democrat, as are independent, and then maybe a smaller group that maybe, you know, doesn't care about anything related to that. And I love that. I love that so many people are waking up to wellness. And I also am not a subject matter expertise on the topic. But one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is that largely I find myself

agreeing with how you talk about things in the nuances of it, except I don't have the expertise or maybe the eloquency as you have. to be able to articulate it. So I just want to acknowledge you for a moment to say that I appreciated about how you talked about it. Thank you. And for my audience that's listening, we're going to pivot here to talk a little bit about

your background and some of the things that impacted you because in addition to talking about politics, your primary content prior to this period of time was all in the space of personal empowerment, self-development, philosophy, self-reflection. So I want to start off with this. your name is Kaysen. Yeah.

This means continuous improvement. It's a Japanese term. I know it's not your original name. That's there, but it's a name that you've chosen. What does this concept mean to you beyond just self-improvement? How does it apply to a way that you think, break down content, help people process information, and personally evolve intellectually? Yeah.

So I think for some context on how I even got this name would be helpful. For most of my life up until I was 30, I was very in my head, constantly chasing achievements and validation, achieving things and not actually feeling better and feeling pretty empty. And I didn't really feel much emotion. Like I felt pretty much just frustration or anxiety or the only things I felt. Not much happiness, very rarely peace. Suicide auditation was pretty regular for me. When I turned 30, I had quit the tech industry.

I was working the video game industry. And I got into a point where I felt like I wanted to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. That wasn't about doing something impressive to other people. So I quit my job and that was also 2020. So social distractions were removed through COVID and work distractions were removed because I quit. So I had to just like look at myself and spend a lot of time with myself and I realized I was really unhappy. That was when I decided. okay, clearly something about the way that I'm conducting my life is not actually giving me

the level of fulfillment that I want. So I need to change something. And that's when I just became really obsessive about introspection and my own personal growth and understanding my mind and understanding like, why am I unhappy even though I keep achieving things. So around that time, I had experiences with plant medicine that really changed my life. And I came out of that feeling good and feeling peace for the first time in a long time. And I was reading a Tony Robbins book, I Waken the Giant Within. And a book.

Well, I didn't even finish it, but I got this out of it. I remember reading one page of it, and I talked about the word Kaizen. And I've been familiar with the term Kaizen because of the business world. It's like a development of philosophy. But Tony presented it in the context of life more generally. And he's talking about how in Japan,

it's like you have a kaizen of your relationships, like how do you constantly develop your relationships, because of your spirituality and your wealth, in your career. So it's more of a general disposition of always seeking to grow and improve. And when I saw that word, it was just like, this is so beautiful. And I've always loved Japanese culture. And the word just like continued to reverberate my consciousness for months. And then I was like, I think this is like my name. So I went and I legally changed my name to Kaizen. And my birth name was Derek. That's not my middle name. Kaizen is my first name. Now I forget

where the original question was, but I wanted to get some, at least some background on that. And you tell me if you got your answer. No, I love the background. So in addition to your resonating with the name through the inspiration of Tony Robbins' work, how do you think it applies to the way that you break down content and the way that you think of yourself evolving intellectually? Yeah. I don't know if this is a humble thing to say, but I think it gives me intellectual humility because if my commitment is to the process of evolution rather than any predefined point, then that requires a commitment to, oh, I'm going to be wrong about things. And that's okay, because that's what it means to evolve.

Like you need to shed old skin to gain new skin. So the way I approach my content and everything I talk about is I might be wrong and I know I'm biased and I know I have a perspective. I'm here to seek the truth and understand it as best as I can, understanding that in life, it's always a point in the future. You never arrive at absolute truth about everything, or at least I'm very far from that. So, yeah, for me, it's like, it's a philosophy of curiosity

as opposed to conclusions. It's like, okay, if I'm going to analyze any issue, I'm going to give my best interpretation of it at the time, recognizing that in a week, in a year, I might look back and say, oh, wow, there's so many things I see about that that were untrue. So, yeah, it's like a philosophical commitment to growth and change as opposed to like a static arrival point at, you know, truth. You talked about psychedelics, and you've spoken before on a few podcasts about the profound impact that psychedelics have had on your personal transformation journey. What did those experiences reveal to you about the nature of the mind, identity, and the reality of itself?

Yeah, to give that a little bit more color. So, yeah, I've had a lot of experience with plant medicine. Ayahuasca and Bufo, which is 5MEO, D&T, Aboga. I think the most recent insight that I've had is just how much we're in our heads. Like genuinely, I think maybe it's a Western phenomenon in particular, but just how much we literally spend our time just in our own thoughts rather than in our senses and actually present. You know, people talk about like mindfulness, right? This movement of like, everyone should be mindful. And I actually think, I know it's just a word.

but we need to be more mindless. We're so full of mind that it prevents us from connecting to our other ways of perceiving life. And your mind is not the only way that you perceive life. It's like your senses and your physical experiences. And when people talk about common sense, that's like your sense, your sensory experience and like your intuitions rather than your concepts and ideas of what reality is supposed to be. And I think the thing that plant medicine is really done for me is help me get out of my head. It's like get out of my head and pay attention to my moment to moment experience more,

which I guess you could just call presence, rather than trusting every wayward thought because I have a mind that's very, very active. And it's like a full-time job to try to quiet it and like pay attention. Like what's going on right now, not what are my ideas about who I am and what I'm supposed to be and all the things that I did wrong. And yeah, it's hard to imagine getting to this point without plant medicine for me in particular. Now, and somatic work, a lot of somatic work as well. I'm sometimes kind of skittish talking about plant medicine because I don't want to

view this as an advertisement for it. And I've had a very non-conventional path, but it's not so much about the modality as it is the value. And the value is just like getting out of our heads because so much of our thoughts are just fear, like fear of the future, fear about who we are, fear that we did something wrong in the past. And I think that's why we have so much dysfunction right now. We've been very fortunate to have had some of the early researchers in the plant

medicine space on this podcast, including Dr. Roland Griffith, who was on here a couple years before he ended up passing away, rest in peace, rest in power to Dr. Roland Griffiths. And I think one of the things that I'm most excited about under the new administration, in particular, Secretary Kennedy, is I know that he personally was very against a lot of the work in plant medicine originally because he thought that it was often a gateway connection to maybe other drugs or could get people involved and further addiction. And he struggled with addiction in his youth. And then I believe it was one of his sons.

He mentioned both on a hike that we went on one time, as well as on a few podcasts. I'm not sure anything that he personally hasn't said that actually showed him and said, Dad, there's something real here that has a therapeutic impact. And it feels that all of our institutions who do study this, like Johns Hopkins and other places, have talked about the powerful role that things like MDMA can have when it comes to healing trauma, PTSD, as well as things like psilocybin when it comes to end of life and some of the research around there about removing fear for terminal cancer patients, potentially even in some these plant medicines, helping with smoking cessation and other addictive things that are there.

So I look forward to the time that the budgets open up for that research and that we can actually deploy these very powerful small percentage abused, very small percentage, but very powerful things that could end up shifting humanity towards the better. Yeah, me too. And you know Peter Crone? I do. Yeah. So I was listening to him. I respect him greatly. I did the first podcast with Peter Crone. No way. Yeah. Peter's great. I was listening to a conversation that he was having with someone where he said, yeah, a lot of real health makes sense, but not dollars. And that's the real issue. you. Like the financial incentives to have medicine that actually just works and works once and doesn't require you to take it for life is just not there. And that's why I'm glad RFK is around because it just

takes a degree of moral clarity and courage to say, hey, we're going to do this thing, even if it doesn't enrich other people. Because we care more about actual health and healing that we do industries and companies enriching themselves. So yeah, I'm hugely in support. Obviously, there's potential downsides. And as someone who's been on a lot of spaces that are very plant medicine friendly, I can also see what happens when it's, people are basically just treating them as drugs without the proper set and setting and integration. So I get why there's some fear, but there's so much tremendous potential for healing. And it's funny to me to hear, you know, I think RFK was a heroin addict, as you said, it's funny to hear like some of these like drugs like ayahuasca considered

at a gateway because I'm like, no, once you do these medicines, like those become less appealing because you actually get in touch with a thing that you're using those drugs to address. So I think it's absolutely fantastic that he has a plant medicine friendly agenda. Of course, there's ways that we need to structure systems so that it's used responsibly. But I think that can be hugely transformational and even go deeper than helping people who are in extreme scenarios like drug addicts and PTSD. I think just helping people can call it evolve their consciousness or just be themselves or be more at peace internally. Because I wasn't in some situation where I was like, I need to break some massive addiction.

I was more, I guess, mentally ill in the way that everyone is mentally unhealthy to a degree. And I think it can help tremendously with that. People fear changing their minds because it feels like losing a part of their identity. How do you view the ego's role in preventing people? from updating their beliefs and where have you found plant medicine to be helpful in this? Yeah. So I think one of the earliest insights I had about myself was I'm not my thoughts and I'm not my mind. I have my mind, but if my mind changes or my mind has bad beliefs, it doesn't make me a bad person. It's okay to change your mind because you're not your mind.

and the mind is where the ego lives, right? The mental construct that we call I, that's ego. So when people have to change their mind, they view that as ego threatening. They're not literally thinking that, but it feels ego threatening. It's threatening to the I, this thing that we hold on to your ideas, your concepts, and then that becomes even scarier when your eye has a role in your tribe. Right. So again, we talked about being a life.

I flog Democrat, if the I, who is a Democrat, changes to independent or, God forbid, Republican, then I risk losing my status in the tribe that I had before. So that's why changing mind is so hard because it feels ego-threatening. And only when you get touch with a sense of self that is prior to any ego identification, like the real you or you call the highest self, authentic self, your God self, whatever you want to call it, can you create enough distance between you and your ego to be willing to change your ego or abandon your ego temporarily? Now, I'm not sitting here saying I've abandoned my ego entirely. I'm not sure that I really believe in this idea of total ego death, but I at least have enough space between me and my ego to not feel

so attached to changing the beliefs of the ego. Because I recognize that's not actually me. It's, you know, you think about the term person, right? Persona comes from the Greek, a Greek root, which means mask. So person, persona in Greek, that's mask. So it's just a mask. It's not you. It's a socially constructed identity. And the mask can change. But you, you want to call it your soul or your true self, you're there. And there's no, none of your beliefs can change your fundamental value. But in practice, that's harder, right? Because it requires courage to be yourself. because being yourself means being rejected by other cells. And that can be really hard, right? Because we live in relation to other people. Like, I'm not going to sit here and say, you know, don't give an F about anyone else's opinions. Like, of course you're going to care about other people's opinions.

But the goal, and again, I think plant medicine helps with this, is to just get in touch with the real you that is prior to any identification with groups or beliefs. and recognize that that you is going to be there no matter what. And you can fall back to that without having to be wrapped up in this more contingent you that is the ego. Have there been any mental models or philosophical frameworks in addition to your experiences with psychedelics? Have there been any mental models or philosophical frameworks that have had an impact on how you make decisions and interpret the world? Yeah.

So I studied philosophy in college. And it's kind of funny thinking of my role now. It's like now it's coming back. Because for years, I didn't really use it. It's like, I studied philosophy and then I graduated working video games. Like, where is the philosophical part? I wasn't a very good student. I spent a lot of time playing video games in school.

But in the few philosophy classes that I went to, one of the philosophers I really resonated with was Kant, which is like not that special. And a lot of people resonate with Kant. But one of the things that made Kant so brilliant was this idea of the categorical imperiless. which is don't treat people as means, treat people as ends, right? If I treat you as just a way to reach a goal of mine, whether it's, I don't know, to have more podcast followers or whatever, then I'm not actually interacting with you, Drew, the human. And that's what dehumanization actually looks like.

It's not necessarily something as extreme as like racism or dismissing entire ethnic groups. It can literally just not see, be seeing the humanity of another person and treating them as an end unto themselves. So lately, I'm on a social media break right now. And I mentioned that part of the reason I'm on the break is because I felt like I need to focus more in my relationships. So I was just really caught up in social media.

I realized that I went through this kind of flip in the last week. I was like, wow, I feel like people who focus on people are the wealthiest people. It's like achievement is cool, but I had been, for last eight months so full. focus on my online presence and getting my message out. And it was cool and made really massive strides, but I still felt this emptiness that likes couldn't fill. And likes are not the same thing as love.

Like, everyone needs love. And love can only happen when you're actually engaging with people as ends, not as means to something else. So, yeah, that's been one framework that's actually coming back as really useful for me. Like, stop trying to get past and onto the next thing. And to, on to the next thing, and onto the next person, on to the next status symbol, like really focus on being present with people as ends into themselves. Another is John Rawls, another philosopher, Western philosopher, and he has this idea of going to mess this up, but basically reasoning behind a curtain.

So rather than reasoning about your political beliefs and beliefs about how civilization should work from your personal perspective, which is inherently going to be very biased, because you're going to be looking at things in reference to what's good for you, not necessarily what's good for everyone. Try to reason as if you don't have a persona at all. Like if I wasn't black man living in California, named Kisen, and I was just like this

person, like identityless thing, what policies and politics and structures would I want, that would benefit the whole? So I think that was a really revolutionary concept when I was. introduced to it because it's like basically is being more impersonal when reasoning about the world. And that's very difficult because, again, the ego is attached to itself. So abandoning that can be scary because you're like, well, what if my needs aren't going to get met if I abandon this way of reasoning? Because everyone is self-interested. I don't think that's a bad thing. I think we can all have enlightened self-interest where we look at our interests and we try to

coordinate them with the interests of other people. But I think it's extremely useful to be able to reason without reference to your own personal identity. But it requires finding a level of safety in oneself to do that in the first place. You talked about your social media break. What have you been doing during this time? And what have been some of the vehicles, tools, practices that have allowed you to let go of the persona that you have online and connect back. into you as a human being?

Watching TV. Watching White Lotus. I started with like season two. And I was like, this is really great. It was like two years ago. So now I went back and watched season one and the first episode season three. That was good. Yeah, just doing fun stuff, man.

Like hanging out with my friends, hang out with friends I haven't seen in a bit. Going on walks with my dog. I think it's, you know, like coming back to oneself sounds like this high flute and elevated thing. thing but just like do shit normal human stuff without trying to get somewhere um and then i i'm a big fan of yoga i'm not like really on a path to get better at it i just like love going to hot yoga i love how it feel acupuncture is great for me meditation is really important for me but for me the way i tend to veer is like anxious and like always need to be doing something it's like a compulsion So for me, it's actually really important to do things that don't have a point.

Like, just eat food I like. Don't worry about whether it's the most healthy, optimal thing. Like, I like orange chicken. I'm going to eat orange chicken. Or, like, not try to optimize my sleep hygiene. It's like, yes, I know I should go to 10. I should go to sleep at 10 p.m. But I always do that.

I actually want to stay awake late for fun just because it feels like. It's like being like a kid again. kids operate with very little agenda i think that's one of the things that makes kids so pure and innocent and endearing to us so letting myself just like let loose more and um yeah even after my social media break i think it's important for me to have more of that playful disposition toward my life you talked about health i want to come back to some aspects of uh of health um you've been pretty vocal about the American health crisis in your

tweets. Do we have a better, do we have a new term for tweets? Post. But it's just, it doesn't hit the same. It doesn't hit the same. Yeah. In your tweets and you've pointed to toxins that are in our environment, things like the presence of glyphosate and food as a big problem and other things like that.

What's your thought right now about how much of this crisis that we're in right now is caused by individual lifestyle choices versus issues that are broader that people can't easily control. What's the balance between systemic issues that are there, the toxins in our environment, microplastics, et cetera, and the individual lifestyle choices slash personal responsibility? Yeah. We can't control many things, but we can influence anything. So in our personal lives, you know, there's the things that we can control about like what we put in our body.

But we can't control what government policy is. We can't control what incentives Monta Santo, Montanto is subject to, but we can influence them. And the way that we influence them is by choosing to even be aware of what's going on, choosing to be curious and then saying something. So there's a personal decision we make about our personal life and health and food. and all that. And I think that's fundamental. Like, without doing that, America's never going to be healthy. Like, there's nothing that any one politician can do to make everyone healthy. That is a choice.

However, I think choosing to commit to one's personal health can coincide with choosing to commit to being an influential person. And it doesn't mean you need to be on social media doing what I'm doing, but even being willing to have a conversation about this stuff. like, hey, is fluoride in the water good? Do vaccines cause autism? Is glyphosate on our crops good? Is red 40 good for us?

Having those conversations even within our local communities, with our families, with our friends, that's influential. And unfortunately, I think people feel so disempowered that they almost feel like their words don't matter. And we get told to avoid controversial topics in America. Like, don't talk about politics. don't talk about religion. And what's lost there is our ability to influence the minds of the people around us.

And if you influence enough minds, then you might not be able to control something, but as a people we can. And ultimately, our governments which are setting our policies, which influence companies, they serve at the behest of the people. Like, we could stage essentially a legal insurrection, which I think is what basically is happening with Trump. I don't even think of him as a Republican. I think of him as part of a popular.

populist movement that then took over the Republican Party. It's a different thing entirely. So, yes, no matter what the policies are, we as individuals have to make healthy choices. And I think a degree of freedom is good. Like, we don't want to have a world, I don't want to have a world where McDonald's can't exist. And we have to get the policies right. But in order for the policies to be right, the people have to be talking about them. And I think many people feel like, oh, it's just too overwhelming. It's hard to even know what the truth is. you don't need to know the truth. We just have to have enough curiosity to ask the right questions. Questions are way more important than answers. We'll always have, we'll always have questions, right?

It's like, Hitchhackers Guide to the Galaxy. Have you read that book? Yeah. Yeah, it's a great philosophy book, actually. It's basically a book about the power of curiosity. And this goes back to what we were talking about way at the beginning. I think we have an, like, an incurious culture that we started to develop of to like trust the science, trust the experts, like say what they tell you to believe. And we should listen to the experts, but ultimately we need to pass everything that we're hearing, whether from experts or not, through our own critical lens filter, compared against our own experience. And when we see a dissonance between our experience and what we're being told, question that so that we can collectively arrive at the truth.

But yeah, personal health. I mean, I think personal health is foundational to even thinking. clearly. Like if you're dealing with a bunch of toxins in your body and you have all these parasites in your gut and bad bacteria in your gut and that's influencing your thoughts, it's very hard to think clearly. So I think that's a precursor to actually thinking as clearly as possible. And once we're thinking clearly, we need to speak clearly. And even when we're not sure, we still need to say something, but we don't need to become so attached to what we're saying because we recognize that the question is more important than the answer. One of my favorite things is I actually like when I respect somebody on, let's say, one particular topic.

I look up to somebody maybe in the category of business. And now they're sharing their thoughts about a completely different subject. And maybe as I'm starting to hear them share their thoughts, I'm like, okay, actually this person has different views than I do. If I respect them and I continue to let them talk if it's in person, I'm actually just so curious about what makes them think the way. that they think because I know that I've changed my mind at times in my life. So is there something that I could benefit from that could actually have me evolve my thinking on something because maybe I have a limited perspective on something? Or does it actually strengthen my understanding of why I feel the way that I do?

Because I better understand a perspective that I hadn't heard. But even though I don't agree with it, I've now heard it out clearly. my idea becomes anti-fragile, I guess you could say, right, from being strengthened by hearing. And then the third component is that I'm just curious about human beings. And I don't take myself so seriously, and this has been a tough thing over many, many years. And it sounds like this is something that you're committed to as well. I don't take myself so seriously that somebody's opinion that's different than mine about something is enough to upend my. entire sort of relationship about them.

Yeah. One of the earliest examples that I had about this in my life is that when I was in university, I was starting to make a little bit of money because I was, I had a business that was on the side, but I was very poor at my management of money, keeping track, balancing the checkbook, paying everything on time, et cetera. I had a lot of fear and conditioning around finances and largely I think, you're not going to came from putting my dad on a big pedestal because he was just great at that. And I never saw him make a mistake.

He's also a CFO by background. And so I just always had this narrative in the back of my head, this story that was like, I'm going to get something wrong and I'm going to mess up. And it would completely sabotage my approach. Anyways, as part of unwinding that story, I realized I actually needed practical tools and I needed like help in the process. And I randomly came across the work of Dave Ramsey. I don't know if you know about Dave Ramsey.

I don't know him well, but I love him. So he's a financial teacher, author, kind of guru in that space. And, you know, he's from Tennessee and largely his views as a lifelong Republican. And I don't know if he's a born again Christian or just a Christian. A lot of his perspectives, maybe his social conservatives, conservatism was different than mine. And yet I was at this intersection of my life being a young student in university, getting so much value from somebody. and yet feeling like, oh, is it okay to get value from this person because I also disagree or have different viewpoints? And the obvious answers, of course, there's so many people, if we even think about it in our own lives,

could be parents, could be, you know, neighbors, family members, et cetera, people that we love, that we don't agree with every aspect with them, but it doesn't prevent us from having a relationship or even sometimes hearing them out. I don't. It's probably happening more and more that it actually does prevent people from having a relationship with those individuals. But I think that that's actually one of the saddest things you could do is if somebody's in your life and they're a good person and they have a different viewpoint than you that you decide to write them off simply because you feel that your ideas are too fragile to be around somebody who, as long as they're not a mean-spirited person or a negative

or a toxic individual to you, you know, why should we be writing these individuals off? Yeah, yeah. And how tragic it is that people are cutting off relationships because of political views. It's like politics is supposed to be how we are humans together. And if we're just cutting other humans out of our life because of political views, that we're kind of have things backwards. It's one of the things that really saddens me about seeing people do personal cancellations in their life. Like I get that. One might, one might, want to hang out with people who have similar values. I think that's normal. But, you know, I've personally had experiences where I've experienced hostility from someone who personally knows me because

of our opinions about people, neither of us know. It's like, you could disagree with me about Trump, but you know me. Like, you know who I am. We've collaborated or I've helped you and like, this is how you're behaving. And that's when we realize, that's when it's very clear that people have inverted the priorities. And we're forgetting that the point of politics is to support our lives, not be our lives. And I say this as someone who talks about and thinks about this stuff all the time. And yeah, it's like, I've had so many cases where someone who I respect said something that was very discordant with me. And originally I was like, oh, God, like, how is this possible? Like, how do I reconcile this? And then either I just broaden my perspective, like, oh, okay, like,

they just have a different perspective and I can see where they're coming from, even if I disagree, Or, oh, wow, they've actually exposed something that was dysfunctional about my view. This actually happened with Peter. So I remember when I was following his work really closely when I first came across and I was like, oh, wow, this guy's great, so brilliant. And then he came out with a lot of resistance to the vaccines. I was like, oh, my God, how can someone this brilliant, like not get it? And then I realized like, oh, I'm the years later, I'm the one who didn't get it.

And I am glad when people like him who I respect for their views on another area can at least expose me to an alternative view and help me sharpen my own thinking. And yeah, I think that just requires a level of humility for everyone and a genuine interest in growth. And it sounds like you exhibited that with Dave Ramsey too. One of the areas that I'm also excited about in how health, science, politics also kind of comes together is that now having done the podcast since 2018 and it being a top, you know, a top show on a Apple, like top 30 for health, and pretty popular on YouTube too, I would start to be able to get

a lot of guests that I was very interested in getting, especially in the space of science. And one of the tough things was always when you had a researcher come in and you had genuine curiosity and questions because I'm not the subject matter expertise. I'm just trying to ask good questions. And you could see the battle that they were facing internally. This has happened maybe about five or six times where before the interview started, they would just sincerely say, listen, I like your interviews. I like your interview style. I want to talk about everything. I just want to let you know, like these topics I cannot talk about. And I can't talk about them because maybe some of my work is NIH funded. And if I even discuss the conversation about autism and what contributes to it and what I talk to about parents about. vaccines or this topic or that topic or whatever it is. If I even discuss it, I'm at risk and there's so many individuals at my university or lab or institution that it could just immediately be taken, clipped out of context.

I have so much more to lose than I have to game. So I have to just keep it super safe. And I'm just asking you if we just don't touch on that. And obviously, I'm not a got you. I'm not a journalist first and foremost. I'm not a gotcha journalist or anything like that. And I want to respect my job at the end of the day as a podcast host is to present my guests in the best light and talk about the things that they want to talk about that are there to be able to educate the audience. And privately, those individuals have shared or I've referred maybe patience to some of these individuals who have said, you know, I'm so glad that and I'm so excited that we might be able to actually start to be talking about how layered this world is.

You know, just to address something that you talked about before, you know, not saying that this is what you believe, but since you had mentioned it, you know, they would say things like, listen, it's too simplistic for people that are out there, even if they feel that, you know, Bobby Kennedy has said this before, if this is not his stance currently. It's simplistic to say that like vaccines cause autism. But what the nuances that we are not having the context and conversation around is that are there vulnerable kids who are born and then. their gut health is so messed up, or they're genetically predisposed to not having great mitochondrial function. And when I get a parent like that, or the mother has really bad gut health and has suffered from other things that are there, or I know that the data and stats that the family, you know, had a lot of phallate exposure in their life because they regularly eat out of canned foods. And there's documented evidence showing that if a mother's BPA levels at or at a certain level, it's a greater correlation with the child who's born on the autism spectrum and

this individual or pediatrician knows this data, they'll say, listen, I'm going to do anything that I can that is not going to throw the immune system into hyper-reactivity. And so I might put them on a modified vaccine schedule. I might say stay away from this one for right now because we don't need it when the child is young, but these are okay and largely there's strong evidence for them. And this one I'm not sure about it. It's really up to you as a parent to decide what's your sort of confidence. I'll present you with both sides. Like, that's the conversation that people actually want to have. They want to have that personalized conversation and know because guess what? So many aspects

of life are like that. Even aspects of how we treat adults with medications are like that. They're nuanced and you weigh the pros and you weigh the cons. I just had one of the world's top researchers and experts on hormonal birth control. And one of the biggest things that she's trying to sound alarm on is the fact that birth control given to the adolescent woman does seem to have permanent changes that happen in the brain. And there is data that's there that is correlated. There's not enough data. So this is, you know, the data that exists that it looks like it could put. potentially predispose them for depression later on in life or other aspects that might be there.

And her answer was, still as a researcher who has a young daughter, I know that the most damaging thing for a young woman is an one of the most damaging things for a young woman is an unintended pregnancy. And there's not a lot of great other options that are there. and am I going to leave it up to my daughter who's a daughter and young and she didn't say this, but kids are horny and other stuff and might have a boyfriend or this or that or whatever? Am I going to leave it at a chance or am I going to put her on it? Well, I'm probably going to put her on it because I just don't want to risk an unintended pregnancy. So these are the dialogue that I think that the public is craving. They want to know all aspects of this.

And my hope is that for our audience today that we've, at least touched on how you can step into being a person that is ready to receive these types of conversations. Because if we're not ready to receive it, we're going to reject it when we come across it in any subject. And the other thing is we'll not seek it out when it can be something it could truly benefit our lives for the better. 100%.

And that matches some of my intuitions about hormonal birth control, by the way. And I think there's societal implications for having young women. and be on medications that modify their biochemistry from a young age, right? Like there's social implications, there's implications for how likely people are to even get in relationships and be committed to each other and the family unit. So there's a whole bunch of conversations that we need to have. That's one of them. But if we're not even willing to have that conversation, we can't have all the conversations

that happen after. So I think we just need to be okay asking questions, any question, and finding out what the answer is. But when we shut down questions because they're too politically charged, then we don't get the right answers. And then we become very confused about why so many things are not working. So to go back to the vaccine and autism relationship, the assertion needn't be that vaccines cause autism. No, the assertion should be, we need to ask good questions about what relationship, if any, exist between vaccines and autism. And the answer might not be vaccines cause autism.

The answer might be vaccines interact with a bunch of other negative things in the environment and they co-contribute to autism. But we're not even willing to ask these questions. And as a result, we end up in situations where we are not even willing to do research to get to answers and people are sick and they're suffering as a result. So, yeah, I mean, I hope what people walk away from this conversation with is an appreciation for curiosity and nuance. Because everything that you just said, which is so beautiful, by the way, we can't compress. press that into a 10-second statement. Right. So that's why you go to a Senate confirmation hearings and it becomes, are you pro-vax or

anti-vax? Which is like, that's a binary that we should be rejecting entirely. The question we should be asking is, hey, in what situations do what particular vaccines cause what particular beneficial or negative effects? And for each individual vaccine is the risk tradeoff worth it for this particular individual? Like everything in reality involves new. And I think there's very simple truths, but often when we have a bunch of different factors interacting, that's when things get complicated.

But if we're not even willing to entertain that complexity, entertain that multiple people have different pieces of the answer, we're never going to get to the answer. So I think that's a real solution to the information swamp that we're in. It's, I think for so long, we kind of harbored this delusion that there's like right people and wrong people. and there's sources of information that are completely true, and source of information are completely false. And I think as humanities, this is part of the conscious evolution, is like we need to expand our consciousness to harbor and accommodate multiple differing views that seem to conflict with one another and see, is there a reconciliation of them all?

And then also discover which ones are just mostly false and which ones are mostly true. And recognize that that's a process. It's a process that will forever be going through as a species, and it can be fun. Like, I genuinely enjoy having discussions like this or discussions with people who completely disagree with me. Like, I talk to my friends who are, you know, friends I really respect, really smart, and are like very staunchly liberal and like voter for Kamala. It's like, why did you do that? Then I get to share my views. And then we might not walk away agreeing, but we walk away understanding.

And I think that's even better. Well said. Kisen, this has been fantastic. I want to just talk a little bit about what you're up to, you know. What's this world that you're building? Are you going to go back to making content? You know, I'm catching you in a break. Yeah.

And any insights about, you know, stuff that you want to get involved in in the future from your break that you've taken? Yeah. Thanks for asking. This is a good time to figure out what have I learned this last week. Definitely want to continue using my voice to spread messages and help people make sense of what's going on. I realize that it's weird. Like, someone asked me, who else is doing? what you're doing and I couldn't name someone, which I guess is good for me because it means

I'm doing something that's unique to me, but I would like to see more people just engaging in nuance and thinking out loud and not being so attached to the conclusions and just being a stand for curiosity. So I plan on dropping even more content along those lines. I also feel passionate about not just talking about politics, but cultural events too. So hence the Kanye thing that I mentioned, that wasn't a political thing. That was a cultural issue. And I think there's important sensemaking that needs to happen with these touchy issues that can help us breed understanding and get to the right solutions. So I want to talk more about cultural commentary and who knows, even pop culture maybe. And I also want to influence Gen Z more. You familiar with Charlie Kirk?

I am. Yeah. Not super familiar, but I've seen him in a distance. Yeah. I believe he collaborated with one of my, some of the friends in the, in the Maha movement, conservative commentator, podcaster, right? Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I don't think he even need to agree with his views to recognize the value of him talking directly to people who disagree with him of a younger generation and trying to influence the youth.

And I would like to do that too. So that's something on the agenda. I'm not sure what form it will take. Maybe this is college campuses, having conversations with people. but just helping people think more clearly and be comfortable in disagreement. And I think, at least in the medium term, if I accomplished that, that's a really good use of my gifts. Where do people go to also work with you? Because you are a coach who supports people and helps them step into this world of being more brave with their ideas and not

being afraid to own them. Where can they go to find you on that? Yeah. So on all socials, that's Kaysen. And there's a link in my bio if you're interested in working with me. And as you said, I like to help people be courageous. Because I think until people are courageous enough to say out loud what they believe, then we're not going to get quality beliefs.

So I just want to empower more leaders to use their own voice. And it doesn't need to be about politics, just things that they actually care about. Because it's interesting. I've been on this healing journey for the last several years, and you mentioned the content that I used to do, which is more about personal empowerment. And I actually view what I'm doing right now as the continuation of my inner work.

Like talking about these sensitive topics in public is helping me to know myself and trust myself even more, and I care about helping other people do the same. Well, you're doing it well. And I just want to say from the outside, when I see you cover very complicated topics, and I encourage our audience to check them out, we'll link to a bunch of them below when you cover complicated topics like

D.I or immigration or even some of the health stuff that we've talked about today. I find the way that you approach it, it's very, it's not only incredibly knowledgeable and it really feels that you've spent a lot of time putting it together because you're sharing both perspectives from both sides, but it's also a great video to share with somebody who feels confused about it because it's very disarming. It's less of you telling people how to think about something. And it's more being like, hey, here's the lay of the land. And let's look at the things that are important. Let me tell you why I think this way, including the biases that have me thinking this way. And I find that to be a very helpful for people who are trying to make sense of the world.

So I just want to acknowledge you for the work that you do. Thank you. And thank you for being on the podcast. Hopefully we get a chance to do this again sometime. This was really fun. So thank you. I really appreciate the depth and the intentionality and the level of research that you did going to this conversation. It's been one of my favorite conversations. So thanks for having me. Thank you.