HealthyGamerGG - Dr. K Talks With @PirateSoftware (Full Interview)

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

In this interview, Dr. K and Thor (PirateSoftware) discuss motivation, how to handle criticism, ego and ferrets! Check out more mental health resources here! https://bit.ly/3xsk6fE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I know that you are in the field of computer. But if you're, oh, there we go. If you're struggling, I can use my racial bonus to tech support. Oh, is that what you get? You get a racial bonus to that? Nice. You know, I'm the kind of person who, like, I've just gone through life and I've never, like, gotten proficiency skill in computers. I've just been riding that racial bonus.

That all makes sense. I don't know what my racial bonus is. I'm just, like, generic white guy. So, like, what do I get? I mean, your name is Thor. That is true. I think you have racial bonus to axes. Nice.

Racial bonus to hair. That's true. I do have that. I have that bonus. Racial bonus to axes and hair. Possibly drinking. Maybe. Yeah, I do have a high tolerance.

I just don't use it. Yeah. So that's... It's... What is all? Hey, you've been, man. So you're doing good. Yeah.

Doing really good. In fact, I've been able to execute on pretty much all the things that I wanted to over the last, like, when was the last time we talked? How many months is it been? It's been a while, but I absolutely loved our conversation. I have no idea what I don't remember what we talked about, but I remember just thoroughly enjoying it. Yeah, it was super awesome, actually. A lot of the community pops in all the time.

They're like, I just saw your Dr. K video. It's super awesome. So like, no, it was super fun to talk about, man. I really enjoyed it as well. Give me a lot of stuff to think about and kind of doubled down all the things that I was doing. Oh, really? Interesting. Can you tell me about that?

Yeah. Yeah. So like the stuff that I was doing with the ferret rescue, right? So I've kind of expanded the idea out for that now. We're going to be building the largest ferret rescue in the United States. is the idea. I've gotten a piece of land, so I moved, or I'm in the process of moving. We're waiting on, the county has finally approved the project to be able to build fiber there, which is huge. So we're going to be able to build a building that is going to be the largest ferret rescue in the

United States. I'm going all in on that, having a lot of fun with it, and hiring in people that are going to be full-time veterinary work and management for that, so they can run it, and then we can have that as a side thing. And yeah, that's kind of like the big thing that I'm doing with that. The game jam that I was running actually exploded, so we did 1,400 games for that. We ended up giving out $30,000 to the winners of that. So we've helped fund those new, new aspiring studios for that. So there was a huge winning for that. And then I'm looking into either building a publishing house or working with a publishing house to try and direct that to help with new Indies wanting to be published in that direction. So that's made me pretty happy with that.

That's a really long-term goal of mine that I had had. And it's much more attainable now. Also, I hired on all of my moderators. So everybody is now, well, six of them are salary. read right now. We're starting with half the team. Then we're going to do the other half of the team once we make sure that all this is financially stable enough to do it. And they all get benefits. So medical benefits, dental, vision, all the healthcare stuff that I can throw at it, basically, and retirement as well for all of that. And I've set it up in a corporation. So the corporation's finally done, did an S corp. So there's no way that I could ever IPO it. It has to be, you know, I can never go back on that promise. We're structured in that way to get rid of any perceptions that could happen. And then made sure that all of that was done in a way where basically the employees are going to be taken care of as much as possible, because I can't. can't do this without them. They can't do without me. That's awesome, dude. I basically just executed on everything I wanted to. Yeah. So, so, um, can you tell me a little bit about what, what is game jam? So a game jam is a whole lot of people want to make video games, right? And they may not have

sort of the, the drive to do it. They're like, I don't know if I want to do this. I don't know how to start. I don't know where to do this. So you give them a two week period and you say, you have a theme. This is the theme for the game jam. It'll be something ridiculous. Our last one was it's spreading, right? So you're like, you're going to make a game around spreading mechanics in some way, whatever it's going to be. And they build that game as a prototype, and then they submit it, and then we vote on it, and then we give them feedback, and we try to basically build this environment where they feel safe failing. You should fail doing this. It's likely that you will not succeed. So you get a really good safe environment to fail at. You learn a bunch of stuff, and then you move forward

as a game dev. And if you win, it is likely that you will be able to take that to be a game that you can go and sell on Steam or show other people or whatever we want to do with it at that point, you get a bunch of accolades and things like that. So people build a game in two weeks? Yes. Oh, yeah. And it will usually be a prototype that's kind of junkie, right? But like they get the core of an idea of something that's really good, really compelling,

and then they can expand that out into the future. And we've already gotten dozens of games that have contacted us and said, like, hey, I'm planning on building a studio out of this now. Thank you for doing the Game Jam. I'm so inspired to do this. Or people that say, you know, I didn't finish. But I never felt like I was. comfortable enough to make a game. I didn't think I could.

So they went, did it. The first one I ever did like this, I actually tricked her community into learning, which was quite funny. So many people were like, I don't want to do that. I can't make a game. I can't program. And I was like, okay, then we won't do a game jam about making a video game. We'll do a game jam about what you would do if you did make a video game. So they created what's called a game design document,

which is you make a piece of paper that says everything you would do if you made a game, all the tools you would work with, all the things that you would learn, everything you needed to know, how you would plant it out. And then that was the first week of the game jam. I was like, it's just a week long jam. After the week was over, I said, okay, second week, bonus round, go make the prototype.

And they went, well, I already know how. I'm not afraid anymore. I did all the research. Now it's easy. And they went and did it. We had, I think it was 98% of the teams actually went forward and made a prototype on our first game jam as a result of it. Wow, that's awesome, dude.

Yeah. It was huge. It's also interesting because that reminds me of something that we do in psychotherapy, which is, so if someone doesn't want to talk about something, we use this technique called going meta. So if someone says like, oh, I don't want to talk about my relationships. And, you know, it's totally fine to respect boundaries. We don't, the goal isn't to push. Um, but what we'll do is we'll ask people, can you help me understand why you don't want to talk about it? Totally fine. We don't have to talk about it. But what's your reason. So what we do is like here is the thing that is

psychologically activating. And what we want to do is move one layer like meta or one layer like removed from it and talk about the obstacle to the thing that is, that is scary. And it almost sounds like you all stumbled into that or thought of that, right? Which is like, okay, we're not going to actually make a game. We're going to do something else that feels emotionally safer and moves us closer to the topic. And then we oftentimes find that that's very effective at getting people to like open up. Yeah, the basic idea I had about it was like, because I have a background in social engineering, right? It's part of my job, part of my work.

And I was like, the one thing that's stopping people is they're afraid. And they're mostly afraid not because of anything other than they just don't know. what it takes. And because they don't know what it takes, they're worried about failing. So it's like, well, what if we structure that around exposing them to what it takes and do it in a way where it doesn't matter if they fail or not? And it worked and ended up working really, really well. So it was kind of stumbling into that, frankly. Yeah, that's super cool. General understanding. What is social engineering?

So social engineering is when you were trying to either manipulate a situation to get a certain outcome with another person, right? Or I use it more often to try and figure out what somebody needs in order to move forward and move past the thing that's blocking them a lot of times. I used it when I was in, you know, offensive security to try and get into areas of access that I wasn't supposed to be in. I role play as a character or I do anything like that to try and move forward to do that, you know, to try and trick them into letting me have access where I shouldn't have access or get information out of an employee that I shouldn't have. A good example of this is let's say you're a customer service representative and I call in. And while I'm talking to you about my

customer service problem that I have, I say, hey, I'm thinking about a person. applying at your business. And I'm wondering, you know, I can't really cook. I'm not good at that. Can you tell me where, like, the best places to eat in the area? Because I'll be there pretty soon for an interview. And then you tell me where you eat in the area. And now I know where to go to be able to clone your badge if I need to break into your office. That is part of social engineering. It's starting kind of a situation like that for an ulterior motive is the idea. And that's kind of what that first game jam was. The ulterior motive was to get people to learn. So you can do it for good reasons. But yeah, that's so, that's so interesting. So what, so this

is not coding what you're what you're social engineering is people dissection right yeah it's behavior is this like freaking no freaking is phone hacking so this is behavioral analysis social engineering is it's a very common thing it usually comes down to acting and understanding body language and behavior but a lot of that is done by intuition not through reading it is through learning that every time i learned it hilariously from playing dungeons and dragons because i role play as a dm like i'm a dm and I have to role play a bunch of characters, and I can see the immediate emotional response for my players, so I know how to act in certain ways. Streaming does the same thing for you as well. You immediately react to how chat is reacting.

You see the things that you say if they function or don't function in how you say things, the inflection that you use, all of that kind of stuff. Yeah, super important. That's so fascinating because you said role play as a DM. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. Were you playing a character as a DM? Yeah. Who's pretending to be a DM? Like that would be.

Yeah, pretending to be one. Yeah, no, definitely. I pretend to be a DM. Yeah. I do sometimes. It's good. That's so fascinating. So it sounds like you've, and the social engineering stuff is, I think, a really interesting topic of discussion.

Because that, that too, is something that. So it sounds like a lot of what you do is very similar, actually, in a lot of ways to what we do or what I do, which is also trying to help people understand what makes them tick and how to make tasks easier for you to complete, how to understand your mind and, like, how it works. your brain. Yeah. And so that's super cool. Yours comes from a very different background than mine, though. Like mine is very intuition-based. So there are going to be gaps for me, like 100%. And I think that's really interesting. I think it's interesting that you have kind of two paths that lead to the same goal there. So, you know, it's interesting that you say that there's going to be gaps in yours. I mean, I think that that is undoubtedly objectively true. But I think one of the things that I've learned about sort of like this dichotomy between like science and spirituality.

So if you look at like psychotherapy versus like, let's say, meditation training. The yogis and these like Buddhist monks and people like that, they sort of had a sample size of one and they were just interested in the subjective. They were not interested in objectively what is correct for all of humanity. They were interested in what works for an individual. Yeah. So their laboratory was a single person. the interesting thing about the Western perspective, we think it's superior because it's scientific,

and scientific is about objective truth. The challenge is that the application of science to an individual has a big gap. So even though we have a study that shows that cognitively reframing is healthy, it doesn't teach us how to cognitively reframe. So that is actually a subjective process. So I think we're going to do that. I think when you say it's primarily intuition, I mean, that I think is an interesting thought, but I think that just because it is subjective or a personal exploration does not mean that it is

inferior to science. I think it's experiential more. I guess it's better than the intuition way of saying that. It's more experiential. So it's based on my experiences. And it's based in not in a clinical setting. It's more in a out-in-the-world setting. So, yeah, that makes more sense, definitely.

Yeah, it'd be interesting to kind of compare notes. Yeah, definitely. I think the biggest gap that I get in that regard is terminology. There's going to be terminology. Like I said last time, terminology is just going to be missing because of that. Because it's like, I learned this thing out in the street. Yeah, no, but I think that the terminology is, it's really interesting because you mentioned that. There's actually an interesting study.

I forget what it's called. It's some report back in the early 1900s. there was a, so medical education was not standardized. So like you had all these med schools that were just teaching whatever the hell they wanted. So there was some report, I'm blanking on the name, that, um, analyzed like the different medical schools and like tried to figure out like, okay, is there any consensus here? And in the process of that report, they also point out that medical jargon is specifically obtuse. Yeah. To try to keep regular people from understanding and preserve the status of like,

a medical doctor. That's why they use Latin for everything instead of just saying like, oh, you have like, you know, osteoarthritis as opposed to my knee hurts. Yeah. So it's really interesting because the terminology is actually used to gatekeep. Yeah. I think it's actually funny is that reminds me of idiocacy though, because if you go too far in the other direction, you end up getting something that makes no sense where you're like, oh, my bones suck, you know, like, okay, but what does that mean? You know, like. Yeah, there's a lack of precision. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, we see that I think a lot, with our emotional vocabulary where we're not precise about what we feel and what we think.

I think a lot of the times people lack the kind of words to express that, though. Not to discredit or say that that's like their fault or anything. It's just many people don't talk about emotions. They don't talk about their feelings. And like society doesn't like you to do that a lot of the times, frankly. And I think that sucks. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's absolutely something that is discouraged. So one of the best examples that I can think of is that everyone says that communication is important for a relationship. You know, they'll ask you like, oh, like you've been married for 40 years. What's the secret?

It'll say like communication, communication, communication. But what does that mean? Yeah. Yeah. What does that mean? So one thing. Yeah, go ahead. Super common.

It's just a super common thing. And it's true. It's like communication matters, but it's like what, what is that communication entail? And it means telling your partner you're upset. I mean, telling him that you are upset that you don't like the thing that's going on, telling them why you don't like that thing. It means, and to be honest with you, sometimes it means fighting, man. Sometimes it means having a verbal argument, not a physical argument, obviously, but a verbal argument about something is sometimes that's what's needed.

If there's an emotional thing on the table and it's deeply distressing, having a verbal argument about it is normal. There's nothing wrong with that. Just don't make it bad, you know, like don't take it too far. I think that's certainly an important part. I think one of the things that worries me, there are a couple times that, you know, I've talked to people about their relationship. And one of the things that actually worries me, one of the things that I consider sort of a yellow flag, or red flag is a lack of conflict. Yeah.

So oftentimes. I learned that in the past in relationships, it's like, wow, it's perfect until it wasn't. And we didn't have any practice fighting. We had no practice having arguments the entire time.

And then we had an argument and it was real bombastic. And that sucked. You know, and it actually itself destructed the relationship. Because it was like, we went from this whiplash of just like, perfect,

perfect, perfect. Everything's fine to we fought, you know, verbal argument real bad, couldn't recover from it. Because there's no, There's no like getting rid of the stress over time.

It was just like a powder kick. It was like a pressure cooker, right? So it all goes off at once. You have to argue sometimes. You have to make that shit known. It's interesting. I did a lecture a couple months ago. I think we uploaded it to YouTube about how red flags early in relationships are good.

So like this. Really? Yeah. It's super fascinating. So like I would say 50% of successful relationships that I've seen as a psychiatrist. I don't do a whole lot of couples counseling. so I have a lot of patients who have very healthy relationships. And when I ask them about like the start of their relationship,

they're like, they're usually red flags. Like in half of the cases, they're like solid red flags. So in one case, 22 year old. Let me see what kind. Yeah, so 22 year old with basically no career prospects asking out a 16 year old. Right? So big big big no no. With parental awareness.

So there was nothing shady. So like the person like went over to the 16 year old's house and was like, hey, I would like to take your daughter on a date. And parents were actually like okay with it. And how old was the person? 22. Oh, man. Maybe 21.

Even then. Yeah. So right? That's what I'm saying. They're like they're happily married now and like they've been married for, you know, like 20 some odd years and they've got kids and a life and all this. good so like it's it's crazy started weird started weird and started weird and the interesting thing is that you know the the the parents were really like like because the the guy was quite i mean they were

like quite impressed and they're like this guy seems like respectful and decent and also like seems like to really care about you know she's 16 i'd be like that hey look i'm telling you all it's it's red flag is early i'm not i'm not suggesting that you date 16 that's like the largest red flag Yeah. I've seen it. So another really good one is like, so two people met at a professional event like a conference. And then they like text back and forth and they like make it a point to like go to conferences where like one person is. And that's like the start of their relationship where like, hey, are you going to this conference? Okay.

Like if you're coming, then I'm coming. And it's like they're not dating. They're just texting back and forth. And then they like show up. And for a period of like a year, they're just. meeting randomly at conferences for like, you know, every two or three months. And so that's the kind of thing where it's like, you know, flying halfway across the country to see someone that you're not dating. And you've got a professional reason to do it. Like,

you can go to the conference and make it worthwhile. But to do that repeatedly, like, you know, another red flag. It's a little weird. It's a little weird. I don't know if that one's as big of a red flag to me. It's just a little strange. Yeah. It's like, you know. various kinds. Yeah. There's definitely yeah. And I think the

interesting thing is that when you have a red flag early, it gives you an opportunity to like work through some negativity. And so what tends to happen when we look for

green flags is this is exactly what you described, which is like, oh, this person's great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, and there aren't like challenges. And then when a challenge comes along,

like your ability to deal with challenges is like underleveled. Whereas when you're with someone who, there's some kind of conflict early on. Like it lets you level up your conflict resolution skills. I think that actually happens over time with multiple relationships too. Like as you have relationships throughout your life,

you will have ones that fail and you learn stuff from each one of those. And you get better at conflict resolution. You get better at communicating. You get better at finding out what's the line in the sand for you, right? Of like what works for you as a person and what you need in a relationship. And I think many people don't really realize that. They're like, I had a bad relationship. No, I never have one again.

It's like, no, you will. You'll have more. You should have more. And you'll get better at it. It's a skill like everything else, right? Yeah, I think this theme of being safe to fail. I think that's the challenge. I see that so much in relationships, which, whereas people, instead of thinking about it as

something that you will get better at over time, you have a relationship. And if one person considers you unworthy of love, then a lot of people will make a conclusion in their mind, once again, not their fault. that I am unlovable. It's funny. You see the same thing in work as odd as that is, when someone gets laid off from a job. It's very similar in terms of the reaction,

which is, I got laid off from a job. I am worthless because I tied my emotional self to the status of that job, or I tied my emotional self to the status of that relationship. That's never healthy. I never think that is at all. Like, you are still an individual person outside of that.

And I find that happens far often. very, very often. Yeah, so there's a lot of interesting neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and kind of like yogic stuff around that. So the tying of the self to a particular aspect is something that, speaking of terminology, in Sanskrit, this is called the Ahamkara or the ego. Okay. So like we have this.

Huh? It's one I actually know. Oh, okay. So that's one I actually know. Yeah. So the ego is, when our ego gets tied up into something, And I think this is something that's so confusing for people is that they don't realize that they are not their ego. So I have a conception of who I am, which is not who I am.

It is just a conception. I found some of that is also very cultural. So like I've been to France before and something I found in France is if you ask someone, what do you do? They don't tell you their job. They tell you their hobbies. They tell you their interests. They tell you things that they like. And you're like, no, but what do you do?

But here in America, you say, what do you do? And they're like, oh, this is my job. Yeah. So like, it's a defining. factor here where it's not a defining factor there of what you do for a living, right? And I, I think that ties the emotional status to that much more because like your title, your role is who you are here. And that's not the same everywhere. It's a great point. I think it's absolutely cultural. Yeah. Anyway, what- I don't think either one is wrong, but just different, you know?

Yeah, so the yogis would say that all identification on some level is wrong, whether you identify with being, yeah. Interesting. Yeah. How do you have a sense of, I guess you don't have a sense of self at that point? You wouldn't have one. No, no, all you have is a sense of self. You don't have an identity.

So sense of self without identity. I understand. Okay, I think I understand what you mean. So sense of self completely that identity, you don't have the extraneous factor defining who you are. Absolutely. Yeah. Just the internal factor.

So the best way I would describe it as like, if you're on a desert island for an hour and you close your eyes and you just exist on the desert island. And imagine that in that hour, what you experience is the entirety of your life. Okay. Right. So then you're like, you're not going to have a social, like you'll exist. You'll be there. You'll perceive things.

You'll enjoy things. You'll be frustrated by things. But this overarching sense of identity that carries over from day to day, you just exist for that one hour. Right. You don't have that broader identity. You don't have a social identity. And then the really interesting thing is that if you really look at your life, your life is a string of those hours.

Right? Your life is just existing this moment and then existing. And then all of our sense of identity is actually abstractions that are strung together. They're not based on our experiences. There are external factors that we apply to that to tie them together. Yes. Tying together is the right operative work. Right.

So when we string together a set of experiences, like a good example of someone who thinks they're a loser, there's no such thing as a loser. They look at all the negative pieces and they say, I'm a loser because. Yes. They string together unique experiences, whereas those things are losses. So you can lose, but the identity of a loser is not something that is like a physical reality. It's not real. It's not. It's a perception issue.

That's really all it is. Yeah. And when things are fed through the ego, when our ego is the one that is doing the perceiving, then we end up with all kinds of perception issues. Yep. No, that makes a lot of sense. I can understand that.

No. Yeah, no. It's always interesting to see, like, perception drives reality more than anything else. It is absolutely the case. And you get people that are stuck in these weird perceptive loops where they're like, I suck. They're like, well, why do you suck? And they're like, because I made a mistake when I was 12.

You know, it's like, but look at all the stuff you've done outside of that, right? Look at all the things that you've done since then. What all the things you've accomplished? You live on your own. You have your own place to live. You have your own job, whatever it's going to be. You've accomplished all these goals. You have a cool relationship.

Yeah, but I made a mistake when I was 12. Like, okay. Like you have to, that kind of a perception can tear someone down, even though it's not based in reality. It's based in just that, you know, that little piece of a memory that doesn't really matter. Yeah, I think like I'm on the schick recently where over the last year I've been focusing a lot like in my own life and with people that I work with on perception. So I think perception is.

the one aspect of cognition that we tend to underdevelop. Like we don't think about improving our perception. We'll think about improving our logic, even our emotional awareness. We'll do certain cognitive skills to improve things like become more productive, overcome emotions. The one thing that I think is actually the worst thing in society right now is that everyone's perception has become very, very weak. So like- I agree. No, I fully agree with that.

We see it mostly on social media. You see it mostly on social media. You have people that have extremely like extreme opinions rather than having nuanced approaches to things. They don't know how to perceive anything beyond the exact thing that they've hyper-focused on in that one area. They don't know how to see a greater picture beyond that. And it usually comes across as they don't want to, that they're being, you know,

jerks or anything like that. A lot of people who are in those positions don't believe that they're being jerks. They're just hyper-fixated on one little tiny thing and their perception isn't wide enough to see the rest of the picture on that. And that's not like a, that's not like a malicious thing a lot of the times. It's just a failure to expand the perception. And I, it sucks, right? It's made the internet really toxic.

It really has. So I think that there are, I would agree that social media and especially like these short form pieces of stuff don't add for. So, so the smaller the bit of content is. Yeah. The more our mind has to fill in to add content to it. people are trained to get a dopamine rush from that short content when it's not even when it's not positive when it's destructive yeah yeah so so i wouldn't say they're trained i'd say it's uh it's taking advantage of a biological certainty sure yeah right and it's not it's not it's not so what we know

is that or my running theory i think there's plenty of support for this is that um emotional oscillation is what keeps people engaged in content okay so i can see that. If it's too dopaminergic, you'll actually develop tolerance. It's just like if you play a video game for 10 hours, like you're not having fun on hour eight. The reason you continue to play is because of other mechanisms. It's not fun, right? It's like achievement, finishing out a particular round, grinding towards a particular goal. That's why they have all those things. Because if you really think about it, like, especially like MMOs, right? Grinding is not fun. It's never been fun, but people will do it for hours and hours and hours and hours. So you get the thing at the end. Yeah. So in so no, that makes sense. It kind of reminds me of kind of like hunter-gatherer sort of behavior. How so? So I'll give you an example.

I go mushroom hunting, right? I do mycology. So we'll go and find like different mushrooms here in Washington State. Yeah, I do. I love it. It's super fun, right? I raise oyster mushrooms and Lions Main and Shataki and Rishi mushrooms. Super fun for me to do.

I really enjoy it. And doing mushroom hunting here alone in Washington State, we can actually go and get like King Belitz. King Belitz are awesome. But you're walking around at a swamp. and it's just gross everywhere. And then you see like a, oh, holy crap, I got the big king believe. They're like this big. They're huge, man.

And like, I've got a bunch of pictures of them. They're quite cool. I can send them over to you. But there's this moment where it's like gross, gross, gross, gross, gross, and then you find it. And you're like, wow, I got that. And it makes me wonder, like, how far back does that kind of trait behavior go for humans? Because that's a survival trait.

Oh, absolutely. That's a we survived because of this. And now it's being used to sell you things on the internet. But like, yeah. So, Thor, it always amazes. me how intuitive you are about understanding some of these things. So like, um, there's actually a lot of really interesting studies that were done in the mid 2000s, the early studies on video game addiction. Really discovered that it is the denial of the reward that correlates with addiction. Right. So,

so some people kind of think about this as like random reinforcement schedule where like you don't always get, but it's not just the randomness. There's another part to it, which is if you look at like from software games, like why are they so satisfying? It's because, it's hard to achieve. Right? So like you wipe on a boss, you wipe on a boss, you wipe on a boss. And then you get, so the rush of dopamine that you get correlates with the amount of denial and difficulty. Yeah.

And everyone who beats that boss, when another person sees who do it, they're like, I beat that boss and I understand how difficult that was. Absolutely. Right. It ends up being a cultural, like, kind of group thing. Oh, absolutely. So we societally, we value human beings. based on the difficulty of their accomplishments. Yeah, right?

Absolutely. And so the real challenge is that this principle, video games have figured out how to take advantage of, but the real challenge, I'm just thinking about this concept of failure and making failure safe. Because, like, the whole thing that's really interesting is the more you fail in life,

and if you feel like you're a loser, in the same principle of video games where the harder a boss is to beat, when you beat the boss, you feel really good. So the really interesting thing is that the more you've failed in life, the more I will see like a rebound. So when people are super, super behind and they get one break, you will be amazed at how quickly they can catch up. Yeah, that's me. I got my ass kicked for a long time.

Yeah. And that's the real tragedy is that people who think that they're losers in life, they think that there is a linear. Like, you know, the race is linear, right? But it's not. You absolutely have this weird potential energy, which is like building up. So I'm thinking about one particular patient of mine who was like 32 years old when I started working with them. And they had struggled with addiction their whole life. I think they finished undergrad.

And then in the span of like two or three. So they were like basically not quite homeless, but they were financially dependent on someone that they were close to, like didn't have a career, like, you know, just really, really bad. Worst possible scenario. Yeah. Right. And then within two or three years, they wrote a novel. They became a therapist themselves and got healthy, like, got into a healthy relationship. And in like three years, like they went from like zero to hero. You know, and like they've got a stable job. They do work that pays them well. And like they find like invigorating and gratifying. And in addition to working 32 clinical hours a week, they spend 30 hours a week working on their like fiction novel and they like wrote a novel. In the span of three years, it's just amazing how much someone can accomplish. And looking at what they were, how they were at the age of 35, like, you would never know that this person was behind. Yeah.

It's the same thing. Like, I've got a buddy on here, Primogen. He's another streamer. Prime programming. He talks about it all the time. He used to be, he was a meth addict, right? He was addicted to meth. And he managed to dig himself out of that.

Went to work at Netflix, awesome programmer. Now he's quit Netflix and now does this stuff full time. and is like kicking a huge amount of ass. Dude is amazing. Yeah. And it shows you, and it's funny too, because people contact me,

they're like, I struggle with addiction. And you can't really fix that for them. A lot of times you just say, hey, look over here. You can see that people can get out of this. And then you show them like, it is possible.

And I think that that does a lot of good, a lot of the times. It's just showing them, it is possible to succeed, even in that very rough scenario that you're in, you know? Yeah. So that's usually what I do is,

I'm like, look at Prime. He did it. You can. It is possible to do this, but you'll have to find your route, you know. Yeah, I think that's the challenge, right? Is that's where the ego comes.

That's where the ego comes in. And the ego says they did it, but I can't do it because I'm different. Yeah, that's the biggest thing is it ends up being, you end up being your own worst enemy there. And that's the best advice that I have for that one is then make a bet with yourself. Tell yourself, okay, I'll see if I can do it. I'm going to give myself three months. And I'm going to see if I can. I'm going to put that to the side and put all the fears to the side.

I'm just going to do this. We're going to make a bet. If that is right, if I can't do it, then at the end of three months, I'll have accomplished nothing. But if the end of three months, I made even a step forward of progress, then it means that I can do this and I can keep doing this. And it's just a short bet, right? And what do you got to lose? Nothing, really. You know, so people try when they're given that kind of idea, like, oh, I can just make a bet on this. I can try it. And they'll usually find that in three months, they've made some sort of progress. And they can look back and they be like, now I've documented evidence. I'm kicking ass. I can keep moving forward. And they just keep making the bet. And I, I just keep making the bet.

And I found that works really, really well, especially for people that don't believe in themselves. And it's usually because of like imposter syndrome. You have like an imposter syndrome scenario where someone just has that little voice in the back of their head that's telling them you're not good enough. You're not going to be able to do this. And I find that that is more of a defense mechanism than anything else. They're trying to protect themselves from failure. So if you make that little bet and you say, hey, I don't believe you, but we'll find out if you're right or not. And it works, you know.

Yeah. So it's really interesting because I think there's a lot of cool mechanisms that play there. And I love the strategy. So a couple of things that I'm kind of hearing. The first is that there's a really fascinating study about feeling overwhelmed. So a lot of times people think that feeling overwhelmed is a consequence of how many things you're dealing with. Right. So if I'm dealing with 10 things, then I'm going to feel overwhelmed.

Like, this is objective. So I think it's very subjective. Yeah. It's very different for every person. So it's really interesting. but what there's a lot of research on anxiety, which shows that the degree of overwhelmed you feel does not correlate with the number of things

that you have to deal with. So you can deal with one thing or 10 things. That's not what, that's the feeling of overwhelmed is what percentage of things that you are dealing with did you choose to deal with? I agree with that. So there's this concept called active challenges

and passive challenges. Passive challenges are like agro. Like, they're like challenges in your life that agroed you when you were like walking down the street. So things like,

oh, you know, my parents have cancer or something like that. Like, or some... I don't know. Agro. Jesus. Yeah, that's bad agro.

Like, you know, some negative downturn in the economy, like things that you can't control. So the really interesting thing is that there's, your mind keeps a ratio like subconsciously

of stuff that I signed up for, stuff that I didn't sign up. up for. And when the majority of my life is doing things that I did not sign up for, this is what leads to burnout. So the really crazy thing is in feeling overwhelmed and then like not actually being able to deal with those things. So the crazy thing is that if you're feeling overwhelmed in life, the right move is not to do less. It's actually to take on more that is intentional. Things that you can control. Absolutely. So if there are like five things that I'm dealing with that are outside of my control to take on two things will actually improve my performance over time.

I actually really like that. That's not something I've ever thought about in that direction. I think that's really interesting because usually when it's something like that, I had never drawn the correlation between things that you did control or did not control. And it's true. I've seen that for myself many times, right, where I'm dealing with a whole bunch of things and I can handle a whole bunch of projects, spend a bunch of plates, no problem. And then you have something that's like throwing a wrench into the machine. And it's like, oh, you know, it's like, now I've got to handle this thing.

You know, it's so irritating. Yeah. And I think it's, no, I get it. I'm sorry, go ahead. I was saying, I get that. That actually makes complete sense. It's not something I ever thought about. Yeah.

Yeah. That's good. I think when we, you know, when I first heard what you've been up to, it sounds like you had done this ferret reserve, this game jam, you're working on their publishing house. It also sounds like you're streaming.

I don't know if you have like a job. This is the job. Okay, yeah. So, so you're a full-time. I'm sure. I don't know. Oh, yeah. So, you know, it's interesting because someone will look at that and they'll think like, oh my God, like this person is doing so much. How is the poor superhuman? Well, he is, he does have that. I sleep five hours a day. That's the superhuman part. It's the mutant. But I think that's what I tend to find is that when people take on more, they tend to do better. And the other really interesting thing is that when you give someone this three month challenge, it moves them out of the realm of cognition. And, into the realm of action. And any shift from cognition to action is almost always a good one.

And when people are just stuck in their own head, like, what's going to happen is your mind will play through all these different scenarios that'll be hypothetical, but you won't ever actually get additional data to counter your perceptions. That's the biggest problem with it, is it's you have to have evidence. Otherwise, the perception is just going to take over. Like, if you're sitting there telling yourself, you can't do it all day and you don't have any evidence to the contrary, you're probably going to believe it. You know, and if you give yourself even a moment to have any type of evidence, you can defeat that immediately. Like, well, what about

that? And it just disappears, you know, floats away. So I think it's challenging because depending on your mind, your mind will shape the evidence. So what happens for a lot of people is that, you know, they will try things. And in their mind, they acted. But it's so challenging because our mind can shape our experience. Yeah. And there are ways to kind of get around that. But, or there are ways to clean out what our experience is so that it's more objective as opposed to not being shaped by the mind. But that's a really tough one, to be honest with you, changing it from like the subjective

opinion to the objective opinion of what's going on, especially when you're the actor involved in that, right? When you're the one taking the action, that's really difficult for people. Yeah. So it turns out it comes back to perception. So if you look at like any action that you take, there is the objective reality. And then there is what your mind. adds to the reality. So what is the significance of someone not calling you back today? What is the

significance of an email from a company that says, hey, we really liked you, but we just don't have a position that fits at the moment. Yep. And some people will interpret that as, oh, they don't like me. And some people will interpret that as they do like me. I have value, but they don't have a position that fits. Yeah. So some people will... That's why I like analytics so much. Like, that's something that I drive a lot of our businesses based on analytics, right? And I do that specifically because it's an immutable fact. It's one of those ones where it's like you have this thing that is evidence of what's going on beyond whatever your perception could be. You could have perception that may back it up and move in different directions for ideas you can try, but you have solid evidence

of what is going on. How do you use analytics? I use analytics for anything that we want to do in terms of business direction. So anytime I'm doing anything, I find out if people like that thing, we kind of do tests on it and be like, hey, I talk about this thing or we look at some game. or anything like that. If I'm getting a sponsor in, right, and we play a sponsored game, I go and show them analytics to be like, this is how many people wanted to engage with this. People may find that a game is really fun to watch. They just don't want to play it. Or people may find that they want to stop watching me to go play the game. So like, if you're streaming a video game that you've been sponsored for and suddenly half of your audience disappears,

a lot of streamer would probably freak out. They'd be like, oh, no, may people hate this. But if you go and look at the analytics on SteamDB for the game, you may find that the amount of players in the game has skyrocketed it as a result of this. They just stopped watching you to go play it because they thought it was compelling enough. So you have to use analytics to kind of get rid of whatever worried perception you can have because it ends up being a fact, right? And you can find that out. As an example of this is quite funny.

One of the best watched videos that I have on my YouTube is me playing through Outer Wilds. But one of my worst stream days was Outer Wilds. Because at the beginning of that stream, I told people, don't watch me play this if you haven't played it before. Because it'll ruin the game for you. And they left. It was like two thirds of the audience just left. So it's like the worst viewership I've ever had for that kind of a stream, but the best YouTube video.

Because after they played the game, they wanted to go see how I experienced it after they could no longer be spoiled. Yeah. So you have to use analytics. You have to. Otherwise, you run into these weird walls where I would have a negative perception. I'd be like, oh, well, I should never touch that game again. You know, but like, oh, you should. You should learn about that, you know.

Yeah. So it was interesting. I gave a talk at, I think, GDC about two or three years ago. I forget. Yeah. But I was talking to some advertisers about sponsorships. And one of my beliefs is that I know a lot of sponsors want a 60 second thing within the first like two minutes of the video. Yeah.

But I was explaining to them that I think that if you really look at like user behavior, a sponsorship at the end of a video that is tightly tied to the content of the video will do way better than something at the beginning. Because everyone's like we want more eyes, but those eyes are not engaged. Right? So people are like, oh, this is like, they'll just get past it. Whereas if you have a sponsorship that is at the end of the video related to the topic of the video, I suspect that the user behavior will be a lot better, like in terms of what people like, even though the fewer people will watch the ad, their ability to engage with whatever the advertiser or the sponsor ultimately wants may actually be way higher. So I think there's a lot of challenges with the way that we get data. And we see this a lot like in the content. creator like burnout management stuff that we do where like the the internet gives us in platforms give us a lot of data that I don't think is actually helpful they just give it because that's what they can measure this is the big problem with dating apps is that they can't measure the things that actually correlate with like success in a relationship they can just upload pictures and you can write things about yourself but there are no studies that show that making a good

bio like correlates with relationship. I mean, I'm sure that that would be true in a sense, because it's got to get you more dates. But if you look at the things that correlate with success in relationships, they're not things that dating apps can detect or select for. You also get a lot of really weird gotcha images and things online that I find where people will be like, look at how many times I had to send out a thing before I got one reply. And it'd be like, look, 5,000, you know, dates and like, it's one relationship. And I think those are pretty misleading as well, because it doesn't show you the full story there of each of those interactions, like how many swipes you did or anything. None of that matters, frankly.

Well, I find that to be very own. I think it's incredibly misleading for a whole host of other reasons. Oh, yeah. There's a lot of reasons that it's misleading. But I think that one is, that one is demoralizing to people in a way that's weird, like really bad. You know, it's not, it's not benefiting anyone to put that out. Have you heard of this concept of the missing, missing reasons? No.

So this is so fascinating. I got to send you all this link. This is one of the most brilliant psychological, explorations that I've seen. I send you the mushrooms, by the way. Okay, cool. Thank you. So there's like, if you look at posts online, especially about relationships, there's this great

psychologist, I think, or maybe it's not even a psychologist who wrote this book about the missing, missing reasons. So it is, so basically like when someone shares a story online, there will be things missing from the story. And the things that are missing from the story. story are really where the money is. Right? So someone will say, oh, like, I've been married for 30 years and then my partner just woke

up and just walked out of the house and took my kids. They refused to talk to me. They, they blocked me on all my numbers, you know, like, and then they'll, they'll, like, frame things in some kind of, like, victim mentality, but there's, like, stuff missing from the story. Yeah. And so I think it's all the- Yeah, so common.

Yeah. And even in our own lives. So if you really pay attention to the ego, the cool thing about the ego is that the ego believes it's logical, but it's very selective. So the nature of the ego is to ignore information that does not align with what your ego wants in that moment. And so one of the, and even Carl Jung, I know I'm kind of bouncing all over the place, but Carl Jung, I think, discovered this when he was talking about this concept of the shadow, which is even within our own psychology and in our own psyche, there are parts of our psyche that we actively suppress or ignore. And if you want to grow, those are the things that you need to confront, because that's really where the problem is. And if you kind of think about if there's a part of life that you're not looking at, if that part of life is not fixed, you will never be able to fix it. And so a lot of times people don't realize that, you know, they're living this life that things are going bad, things are going bad, things are going bad. And they feel like they're a victim because this person screwed me over, this person screwed me over, this person screwed me over. But it's the funniest thing about that. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Go for it. I think the funniest thing about that is you can quit it to League of Legends or any competitive game.

Oh. If you're in bronze, it is more likely that you're going to blame the rest of your entire team for your team failing. when you're not focusing on you doing better at the video game, which is going to increase your Elo. So I've got, it happens all the time in competitive games. Like, if you're in bronze, you deserve to be in bronze. I've got a,

I've got a cool paper show you. Hell yeah. Yeah. But it's really what that is, is like you need to focus on improving yourself and improving your own performance there, not tearing down your teammates. So it's not going to help you.

This is, I got to find it, but what do you mean? It's always my team, no, it ain't. It's, where's this paper

you still can't carry four people no that's true you can't carry all of your team all of the time but in times where you could make a difference your performance is what matters and you'll win more often that way and then you'll climb so I gotta I gotta do some shenanigans on my stream setup because I got a screen share

with you on Discord shenanigans I can watch the stream I can do that if that's easier well I want to show people too so let me see if I can do this browser plus two games. Does this work? Oh, sweet. Oh my god. Dude, mods for the win. Fucking, this is great. So now I can still see you and show this. So this is great. Oh, yeah. So cognitive flexibility and decision making predicts expertise in the Movae-sport League of Legends.

So look at this. So you're saying that like, you know, when you blame your teammates all the time. So there's one thing that correlates with rank. Okay. So data was analyzed by a means of correlation and multiple regression analysis. Results showed that cognitive flexibility was positively related to rank percentile P less than 0.011. So this is a pretty big confidence interval. So I don't know exactly how they measure this, but it seems like it correlates a lot with rank because this number is big. But it's very wide. Right. So and what we're talking about is like the ability to pay attention, like the ability to not think the way that you're thinking.

That's what cognitive flexibility is. So when people constantly blame their teammates, there's no cognitive flexibility. right my team sucks my team sucks my team sucks they're not flexible um let me just make sure yeah we don't need this one if you turn around you go but maybe i suck and then you work on it you go and look at the analytics and you find out where were you sucking you find out like if your build is even making sense were you building you know magic into mr right you know basic stuff like that like you have to you have to think about your own performance because you can't control your teammates performance but you definitely can control yours and that's the best thing you can start at and then

if you're doing that, you can set an example for your teammates, and maybe they modify their behavior well, and then you win. Yeah, so I want to make this video one day. I've been recording myself playing Dota and recalibrating on rank. I mentioned this on stream a couple times, but I basically had an experiment. So a lot of people will say, like, if you want to climb in video games, like don't like mute everybody because you'll test. Doesn't work. It doesn't work. It's, so I did this cool experiment. I had two accounts, one that I use for streaming so that it doesn't leak my steam information.

And then I have a second account, but Dota recently cracked down. So I stopped doing this. But, um, so I basically calibrated to both at the same time. But in one, I was, you tried to be the most toxic teammate. Is that what you're saying? And then not, are you, are you saying that you played both sides? Or you're like, no, no, so, so I played, I, I did my calibration matches, because you can recalibrate like every year.

So I did my calibration matches on both accounts. But in one I was muted and in one I was talking. I thought you were trying to say you were toxic in one and not toxic. I was like, no, I mean, I could be toxic. I'm sure that that would be a greater MMR variation. But like,

it's amazing. I mean, I think it was, it was like an 800 MMR difference, which is, you know, like a couple of ranks. I want to say it's like 20 percentile points.

Unhealthy gamer BG. It's finally happening. And when you learn how to communicate in games, like it's amazing. You can, I mean, you will gain like a thousand MMR. And there are all kinds of things,

speaking of relationships, it's like the same stuff. Like you got to learn, you know, like one thing that I found is, uh, instead of telling like, uh,

my carry player to like stop going to some part of the map, after they die three times in that part of the map, I will ask them, hey, do you want me to place awards so you don't die there again? Or do you want to play around where I have awards? Like, tell me what you want me to do.

And like 90% of the time when I ask them, what do you want me to do? And I point out like, hey, I can play around this and place awards where you keep fucking dying. Do you want, want me to do that. What they'll actually do is just switch to the right part of the map. Yep. But if you tell them, hey, yeah, dumbass, stop going there. You keep dying.

They'll keep going there. They'll do it twice as much now. Yeah. And that's what they do. Yeah. And that makes sense. Because like if you, if you had somebody going to attack you for playing the way that you are when you were failing, especially in the most vulnerable moment where deep inside you know that you're screwing up and you want to lash out at everyone around you and then you give them a target to lash out. Of course they're going to lash out at you. It's just going to spiral the whole team. It's so bad. You can't do that. Yeah. It's amazing. Sometimes I'll, you know, I'll have teammates who are so good.

And I wonder, how are they at the same rank as me? And it's because they're just so toxic. Yeah. And they don't, they can't prevent tilt and, you know. Yeah. Tilting is is probably the worst. It's, it's funny because there's a meme inside of league for a long time, which is like, oh, it's four V6 right now. You know, that kind of the thing is like there's one of your opponent, one of your players has moved to the enemy team. When you're saying that, you're the one on the enemy team. Absolutely. The really crazy thing that I've started to realize is I really do think we can learn just about everything that we need in real life from video games. Like I think all the microcosm of gaming I think is sufficient. Like the stuff around cognitive flexibility, how to not tilt.

I mean, here we are talking about making it safe to fail. Right. And what's the purpose of that? It's because we don't realize that we're like tilted IRL. Like feeling overwhelmed, you're tilted IRL. You know, like we blame our teammates, right? So my situation in my life is not my own making. It's a bad upbringing.

It's bad friends. It's bad spouses. And there's no, I mean, there's a ton of data that shows that adverse childhood experiences correlate with trauma and depression and things like that. So people do have sometimes bad, bad situations. But even the ability to rise above those situations depends a lot on these like core video game skills. Yeah.

I think that's actually true. I think it's funny because video games taught me a lot growing up, you know. What did it teach you? All kinds of things. Like, to be real with you, being able to solve through problems, being able to analyze problems and find different ways to do it, because the game doesn't care what your emotional state is. The game is always the same.

So if you're going to approach a problem emotionally, largely the game doesn't care about that. You're going to lose. You're not going to solve the puzzle. So it taught me to take the emotional feeling that I had, put it on the side for a moment, take a logical approach to it and then kind of work my way through that. That's where I learned that.

It was from games. That's why I do that today. And I do that for everything now. And I do it because I learned it from games when I was younger. And that allows me to go like, all right, I'm getting pissed off. I'm going to take a minute. And we're going to look through this logically. And I'm just going to take that emotion, put it off inside.

And when you go through it logically, like logically processed that, you largely aren't going to be angry at the end of that conversation. It just kind of goes away. You know, I think we talked about that last time we had a talk, too. was the ability to just kind of take a step back and wait. And it's what I learned from games early on, very early. So I'm kind of curious. Thor, do you have any thoughts about,

so some people are able to grind a game for hours and hours and hours? I can do that. And then they have difficulty grinding IRL for hours and hours and hours. Do you have any sense how to translate being able to grind in a game into grinding in real life. Immediate emotional feedback or immediate feedback from the game. The game tells you instantly when you get rewarding or when you accomplish a goal or don't accomplish a goal,

the best way they can look at this is homework. If you give a student a online test or an interactive test where they are immediately getting feedback from the answers, I find that to be much more compelling a lot of the times for many people than giving them homework where they have to write it all down and they find out the answers the next day. They're less engaged with that because it doesn't give them immediate,

interactive feedback. And it's funny because I see that more often with people that have ADHD. I don't know if there's a correlation there, but that seems correct to me. See what more often? That people are less engaged. If they have ADHD, I find them to be less engaged if they're not getting immediate feedback on the things that are going on, that the actions are performing. Absolutely a correlation. So we know that the dopamine reward circuitry in ADHD, so their ability to delay gratification is impaired because the the time window between action and reward is very, very tight.

So the- I think that's what games give you, frankly. Yeah, so that's really interesting. Because, you know, there's a, let me see if I can pull up some more research. Sure. I want to show you something. It's more than just open game. It's just all feedback.

Whether it's good or bad, it's all feedback. Where's that haggard paper? That's why it always made me laugh is one of, one of the memorable things that I remember from Earthbound was Earthbound had a section of the game where to progress the story you had to sit behind the waterfall for like three minutes. Okay. And do nothing. Okay.

That's tough. And it was so, in today's world, I feel that many gamers can't do it. That's a difficult one. Like, I really feel that's not a thing that's like super common. We're waiting is the solution, which is quite funny. Yeah. So, like I always wondered, like in games like Earthbound, how did they ever figure that out? So, you know, so like I played, did you play a little old Castlevania's?

Oh, yeah. So you played Simon's Quest? I don't know specifically which ones I played, but I played Castlevania. Castlevania 2 is just an amazing game. So it was like- I want to go back and play this. It was, I think, the first game where, I don't know if you played like Symphony of the Night. I did.

Yes. Symphony of Night, yes. So Simon's Quest, I think, was like the first game. I guess they had Metroid. So they sort of like turned the level-based Castlevania into like a more Metroidvania kind of game. I don't know if I played Simon's Quest. It's so good, you mean. And there was this one part of the game where you have to find some item,

and then you have to walk up to a wall, and you have to duck in front of the wall. And you just have to duck and hold it there. And if you hold it for like 30 seconds or 60 seconds, a whirlwind shows up out of nowhere, picks you up and carries you through the wall. And like, I remember we saw that because we had a subscription to Nintendo Power where they like explained this,

because that's where there was no internet, so you couldn't, like, Google things. But I always wondered, like, how on earth are people supposed to... And there was someone who, like, gave you a clue in town, but this is, like, poorly translated from Japanese. So, like, the English-speaking... There's, like, no way, like, it doesn't make any sense. You gave yourself the answer, though. We had to use Nintendo Power. Well, beyond that, you get Nintendo Power.

You have the solution. You go to school, and now you've got the solution. You tell all your friends about it. You're the cool kid. Yeah. Yeah, that was, there was a lot of, like, discussion. So I wonder how did they figure these things out? Probably that way.

The interesting thing that I wanted to mention is there's a really cool, you mentioned this immediate feedback. So there's a really cool principle or like scientific thing called intentional binding, which is what are the things that you can do to increase the repetition of a behavior? Okay. So like if I work out today, what increases the chance that I will work out tomorrow? Now, a lot of people think that the reward that you get from working out correlates with a repetition of the action. Right. So if I get rewarded, I will do it again.

And there's absolutely a component of that. Really fascinating thing is that there's a particular researcher named Haggard, who does a lot of research on intentional binding. And what he discovered was super cool. Like there are a bunch of studies that show that there are three things that you can do to increase, I want to just find the fucking paper, that increase the likelihood that you will, damn it. Okay. That will increase the likelihood of repeating the behavior. And the interesting thing is that this effect is independent of the outcome of the behavior. So people have done scientific studies where no matter what you choose, the outcome is the same.

And yet there are certain things that you can do that will increase your likelihood of repetition. This felt to me like pretty revolutionary. So the first is to think through your options ahead of time. So just consider all the choices. So people who intentionally consider choices are more likely to engage in the behavior. Because you're intentionally choosing it. Yeah. It's not just a thing you do.

It's a thing you chose to do. Yeah. So instead of like, I need to go to the gym today, oh my God. You get into this conflict of I need to go to the gym. I need to go to gym. I don't want to go to the gym. I get to go to the gym. Not just I get.

What do I want to, how do I want to exercise? I want to do it. Not even I want to do it. Just considering your options. This is how crazy it is. So not even selecting, just having the selection available. Yeah. Well, I think at some point you make a selection, but having multiple options increases the

likelihood of any behavior. So, think you through, do I go to the gym? Do I exercise at home? Even going through that cognitive process? Second thing is to predict the consequences of your actions. So spend some time thinking through what you expect to happen. Even just spending some time thinking about it increases the likelihood that you'll do it, irrespective of what happens.

Process you're talking about, I do this. So the third thing is what I'm sure we'll discover, right? Because you're quite productive and we'll find that. And anyway, the third thing is some amount of reflection afterward. So spending some time processing, and you don't even have to think, a particular, you don't have to think in a particular way. You don't have to do something specific. You literally like after a task is complete, you spend five to ten minutes just doing nothing and reflecting. You don't have to reflect in a particular direction. You don't have to

discover anything. You don't have to learn anything. And if you kind of think about it, what I've noticed in people I work with is that some people do this automatically. They do all three of these things. And they tend to be super productive. And there are a lot of people like me who don't do these things. So you don't. I used to not. So you trained into it. Sort of. Yeah. So I trained into it in a kind of roundabout way. But like basically what I used to do is like it wasn't like do I want to study at the gym. Do I want to study with my friends? It was like, oh my God, I need to study. I don't want to study. So I was always stuck when I take an action, not thinking through the consequences. I was always stuck trying to work with willpower. Like overcome myself. Instead of consider my options, predict the consequences. And then the other thing that I would always do, this is so devastating. Probably one thing that's huge is as soon as something finished, whether it was good or bad, I would move on to the next thing.

So if I studied for a test and I take the test and the test is like, oh man, like I didn't get to that chapter. I didn't get to that chapter. I would immediately try to leave the test behind. Okay, the test is over. I'm done. Time to celebrate. Never spent any time reflecting. Even if my test went well, it's like, wow, I really studied well for that test.

time to celebrate. And you don't take an account any of the things that worked or didn't work. Absolutely. So you carry nothing into the next environment. You just, yeah, empty-headed, you just jump to the next thing. So literally like predicting your,

considering your options, making a prediction, doesn't matter if the prediction is correct or not. Yep. And testing the assumption. Yeah. And then just reflecting. Yep.

And it's funny because I didn't use to do that either. And then I went homeless. And I have done that. ever since that exact process you're talking about, the whole thing happened after I was homeless. Because I lived in my car for a year. And after that point, it was like, I'd never want that to happen again.

Let's slow this down a little bit. Let's be more intentional about the actions that I take, right? All the actions that I'm going to take, I'm going to be more intentional about this. And I started doing that process. I didn't know that that was like a standardized thing. But yeah, that's how I approach anything, frankly. That's the thing is it's not a standardized thing.

So it's like biologically accurate, but we don't teach people these kinds of skills. We don't teach people, if you want to do something, what are the actions that you can take that will increase the likelihood of you doing that thing? Yeah. We don't know what our brain actually responds to, right? So everyone focuses on building habits. Everyone focuses on building willpower. Everyone focuses on finding the right thing for them.

So they're like, oh, the gym doesn't work for me. Whereas like what we're seeing, and this is something I literally just made a lecture about this, about how like we as a society. are becoming less adaptable. So if you look at like adaptability as a trait of human performance, as society, society is like engendering in us less adaptability because society will meet you where you are. You don't have to learn how to like this game because there are 20,000 games. You can find the perfect game for you.

Oh, sign up for Tinder. We have 20,000. We have a million people on the platform. You can pick the perfect person for you. You can find the perfect food for you. You can find the perfect job for you now with like globalization. And so what we're really starting to see, I'm noticing this like even in the 10 years that I'm practicing clinically, people are less adaptable. And as you become less adaptable, you succeed less because that's what happens.

They're also more extreme in their requirement, too. What do you mean? So the one of the things that I noticed quite a lot about is if if you have a video game and that video game has all the things that you like except for this one little thing, the game is trash, downvote. bad, awful developer. And that's the thing that I think is really interesting is because that sort of infinite choice where you can select the perfect game means that when you have one thing that's missing, well, then it's awful. It doesn't matter anymore, right? Because I could find something else. And I think that that kind of goes hand in hand with what you're talking about. You're right.

It is dramatically less adaptable. It's dramatically less interested in finding any type of situation that almost fits and making that work for you. It's more, well, it doesn't fit even a little bit. 1% is wrong. So screw that thing. Oh, whoops. Sorry. I'd love to hear more about your homeless time, but can I show you something real quick?

Yeah, sure. Do you like it when I show papers or yay, nay? Yeah, yeah, I love that. So this is a fantastic paper called the neurocognitive basis of human volition. So this is, this dude's absolute Chad. But there's, let me look at this. So mechanisms of human volition in the brain. there's some there's some really cool stuff

independent oh I think it's here um reading chat yeah so it's going wild with Chad it's such a good this paper is just so long and dense yeah

I read medical papers all day okay a lot so crucially this binding effect is found only for outcomes that follow one's volitional actions and is absent when the voluntary key pet, blah, blah, okay, I think this is the section. Give me a second. It's worth the wait, I promise y'all.

Okay, so first, several studies confirm that the ability to choose among several possible actions increases intentional binding. So, just if you have lots of options, it increases the likelihood that you will do the thing. So, okay, so this is what's crazy. Interestingly, this effect of free choice was found both when all possible actions led to the same outcome and when they led to different outcomes. So this is what's crazy. The outcome, this is independent of the actual outcome of your action. So simply thinking through things, like literally like in.

Yeah. Yeah. And so I think that's what's so interesting when I kind of hear you like, you know, and some of the stuff you've like really stumbled into, like this idea of like, let's make things less fearful. And the cool thing is like it doesn't matter whether they actually build something or they don't build something. Because everyone is thinking like, oh, I have to build something to get positively reinforced where that's not it. Right. And you're talking about there's an emotional component to it. Absolutely. And it's not just, but it's not just about failure. It's like literally like the parts of your brain. that urge you to act will get boosted if you think through options,

if you engage in some kind of behavior. It doesn't matter. Like, it doesn't matter if it goes well, doesn't go well, whatever. Like, it's kind of funny,

because people will come to me all the time and they're like, I don't, I don't feel like I want to do anything today, but I have all these things to do? And I was like, have you tried writing them down? Put them on a list. And then one of the things I always tell them is,

like, a list can be kind of overwhelming for someone at first, right? So you got like five items of a list. make the first item in the list, you creating that list. So then you have, at the end of you creating the list, you mark that one off. You're like, I already accomplished one. And now I have all these other options of what I could do. So I think that fits in exactly with what you're talking about.

Because that's the piece of advice I'm always giving people. And it works. It works really well for a lot of people. Not everybody. Nothing works for everybody. But the grand majority of people are like, hey, that helped me a lot. I got a ton of shit done today. It's like, yeah.

So one thing that I realized that liberated my list making and helped me so much with lists, is that lists don't have to be complete. They also don't have to be completed in order. Yeah. So, like, I started doing this thing a couple years ago where I would make these lists because I was so overwhelmed and I would have, like, 15 things on there.

And then I would do a couple and I would check a couple things and I'd look at my list and I'd be like, oh, my God, there's so much left to do. I have literally a pile of incomplete lists or, like, lists that I've not finished off. And I don't even need to finish it. I realized recently, it doesn't matter.

Because at the end of it, like, just getting all the stuff on, paper and then like doing a couple things and losing the list tomorrow it doesn't matter i'll just make a new list the process of making a list helps me so much so i have like this whole stack of just incomplete list i'm never going to finish it that's okay it's great i feel the same way too is like i'll i'll create my task list today whatever i need to do right whether it's a mental checklist or just things that i write down or or calendar stuff sometimes one of those things is just like there's not enough time the day you know my body doesn't want to keep going i'm going to go to bed right this is kind of how it is

and we move it to tomorrow. It's fine to do that. As long as you are spinning the plates in a way where things are effectively getting completed over time, you're fine. Some things are critical and they have to be handled right now, but not everything is, you know?

Yeah. So, Thor, I know we've been kind of meandering all over the place. I love this, but is there something in particular that we should be talking about that you think we should spend more time on anything that you're... I don't know. I mean, you wanted to talk about the time that I was homeless. You asked about that.

We could talk about that. Yeah, so what changed for you? A lot, pretty much everything. So I went homeless, God, I don't even know how long ago. It's a long while ago. I lived out of my car for a year, and I was in Colorado at the time. And that happened because I didn't have proper constraints on our business, right? So like I had a business at the time.

I was working freelance. I was working on things with another person. The way they worked is I was creating programming. They were creating 3D models and we were building these things together and then selling them online. Right. And they wanted to renegotiate after about probably. about a year of us doing this together. And at that point, we're making a lot of money. I was making like 10 grand a month. I was making a ton of money. And for a young person, that's a ton,

even now it's a ton of money, right? So I'm just making a bunch of money for this. And I was not careful with my finances. And I was not properly constraining the business. And what this meant is, I was spending everything. I was just like, whatever, there's a ton of money. I just do whatever I want, right? I was just being a dumb ass and spending it. I was buying, you know, ordering out, getting all the food that I wanted to do anything I wanted to do, going to any party that I wanted to. And it was what felt right at the time, but I didn't know how dangerous of a position that put me into. Eventually that person came by and they're like, hey, I wouldn't renegotiate. I want 80%.

And I'm going to give you 20% because I do the art and you just do the programming. They didn't respect that the programming was half of the half the job, right? And I said, no, like we have a deal for 50-50. Like, no, we're not doing that. And they said, okay. And they took all of our work and they open-sourced it against my wish. is our income went gone. So they cut off their nose despite their face. They lost everything as well. But I was in a much more financially precarious position because I was an idiot and spent all of my money.

That was on me, right? Their action, awful. But also, I didn't plan for anything like that. So I went homeless. I lived out of my car almost immediately too. I didn't have money for next month's rent. Like it was just like, boop, gone. That's a problem. Right. And I was on a month to month situation like that, which is already highly expensive. So I was out. And I learned throughout that process, it's like, I could blame them, but where's that going to get me? I'm going to get back in this exact same scenario. And I had a lot of time sitting in my car, being on a laptop, taking internet from coffee shops as I was sitting in the parking lot,

to think about those types of scenarios and be like, what can I do better so that even if another person acts improperly and tries to abuse that sort of connection or what they have over me, that I will not be back here. And that's where I formed all of these ways that I kind of handle problems and logically walk through problems and handle everything in the way that I do, is to prevent that from happening to me again. So, Thor, let me ask you a question.

What was your emotional state at the time? Oh, at first, I was devastated. I was so pissed. I was absolutely enraged. And I was just like, I was just super mad, right? I was like, you've stolen everything for me. And then after a time, I was like, okay, that doesn't get me anywhere. You could be as mad as you want.

The rest of the world doesn't give a shit, not even a little bit. That other person doesn't matter, right? you're not fixing the scenario that way. So it came to this point where it's like, I could be mad, but what does that get me? Wasted time, not getting that back. That's not going to give me anything at all. So I started to change that sort of idea of like, what's the victory condition here? The victory condition is to make sure that this doesn't happen to me again.

Let's change the way that I feel and interact through these types of scenarios so that it can't happen. And for me, that worked out really well was just changing kind of the objective because I think a lot of the times people want to immediately get back everything that was stolen from them, right? Everything that they lost. You got to get back to where you were. And I realized in the very beginning it was like, I'm not getting that. That's not possible. That's unrealistic, right? I can get something new, something different, but I can't go back to the way that it was. That's already out of the bag, right? So, Thor, what I'm kind of curious about is how are you able to logically disarm your emotions? Like, this is very rare. I think it's effective. Anyone can do it. But I mean, most people, you know, when they get enraged, they can't just, like, I love your framing of like, what's my victory condition.

I think that's such a powerful way to deal with emotions. Like, I think you really stumbled onto something there. I think you stumbled on a lot of things. But what I'm curious about is, you know, I work with a lot of people who they require help to decompress their emotions. So I'm curious, like, what your internal experience of, like, this emotion is not useful. Let me discard it. I understand because it doesn't lead to anything attained that is beneficial. I could sit there and be enraged.

I could when I'm mad at someone on the phone, I could throw my phone, right? I could have an emotional reaction. I could throw my phone. It'd break my phone. Does that solve my problems or does it make more? Every time you have the violent emotional reaction in the beginning, I don't think that solves anything. I think it always just creates more problems. And at that point, I didn't want more problems.

I still don't want more problems. So the way that I felt about it and the way I still feel about it is take the emotional thing and kind of put it into a box off on the side and then look at it and be like, does that make sense? Like, is that going to create more problems? Let's look at all the routes that could come out of that emotional response. Are those routes beneficial? Does this matter right now? Does this have meaning? Does this actually get me anywhere that makes sense?

Is it okay to feel that? Because if I do feel it in the way that it is, in the exact way that it is, in the exact way that it is, where does it lead? And that's kind of what I got out of that, is being able to dissect that sort of response before letting it go fully forward. And before that, I was just like, whatever, do anything? Who cares?

So did that change for you when you had this experience of homelessness or have you always been like that? I think it got more defined that way. I was always kind of like that when I was younger. Like I was more like, you know, more logically thinking, more siding with the logic. But I still have, you know,

emotional hoppers as a human being, right? And I had that for a long time until I became homeless. And then after that, it was like, never again. Not allowing that to be a thing. That was a big defining moment for me. It was realizing that I'm an adult now, and there are real consequences to not planning. There are real consequences to not thinking about my actions and thinking about what can come out of that and thinking about routes and where things lead.

And that was a, that was like a, no one's going to catch me now. So I have to be my own safety. And I need to take this seriously and think about this, you know. that I mean so so that sounds like you know like traumatic but like in a good way oh yeah yes no most definitely it was for me it was terrifying I was like what if the car breaks down what am I going to do right you know like everything was terrifying so I'm curious what what is your kind of emotional valence now like do you like do I feel emotions or yeah like like what's your relationship with your emotions now oh yeah no absolutely the only time that that that kind of like kicks in for like hey wait a

it is when I'm having an extreme emotion. When it's like normal, it's like, oh, I'm happy about this, I'm sad about this. Like, it's normal to feel sad. I think that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. There's never in an arm's length for every emotion, but it's like a, I am very angry right now. Wait a minute.

I am very sad right now. Wait a minute. Does this make sense? Because I find that when I have a very extreme emotion, if I just kind of let that go and don't think about what could happen in that moment, like, what if I'm really, really sad, like in anguish or something? and I want to break something. It's break something off the wall, right?

You have one of those types of violent outbursts because of a strong emotion. Is that going to help you? No. It's going to hurt your hand. It's going to break the thing on the wall. Everything's going to suck. You have more problems. So when I have a very extreme emotion and I can feel that it's an extreme emotion for something,

then I hold back and I go, wait a minute. This is too much, right? And we've got to wait now and figure out what that is. But for normal average emotion stuff, I guess there's like a filter in place, if that makes sense. Like there's a filter that says, that's a bit much. hold up, you know, too far, I guess is the best way to put it. And how do you see what you're doing in the world?

Like, how do you see like your, like, tell me about what you think about your life? I think that's an external perspective a lot of the times of like the effect that I'm having on those around me or any of that type of stuff. I do a lot of that through, I try to do that through objective means. Like I said, analytics before, things that people are saying, things that people are feeling. things that are, you know, interactions that people are making because it is hard to form in a subjective opinion, especially in social media, especially online, right? It is difficult to form an opinion of how I am doing when there are, as an example,

the stream has 3.5 million average viewers per month, right? Three point five million unique viewers. Grand majority of those people don't say anything. I have no idea how they feel about it, right? But they show up, they watch the stream, they engage with some of the content, and we get a bunch of people into the stream into the Discord. And I can get at least a gauge on how effective I am being with the types of things that I'm trying to do, how much that resonates with other people. That gives me a kind of basis of understanding for that,

even though I don't have the full complete picture. And I don't think there's any way to get the full complete picture, if that makes sense. Yeah. So what I'm kind of curious about is like, so when we were talking about being homeless, you said, I did those three things. I thought about my choices.

I predicted my actions and I kind of reflected on the consequences. So I'm really curious about is when you have these like things that you're doing, right? So you're a streamer. You have Game Jam, Publishing House, Ferret Reserve. What I guess I'm not so interested in the word. The motivation isn't really the right word, but I think it's a place to start. So like what motivates you? Like what is your driving force when you do this stuff?

Like what goes on, what I'm really curious about is what is the mechanism, like what is the experience of motivation for you, not necessarily like what motivates. Like, oh, like, I mean, like when you wake up, right, there's some kind of driver that gets you out of bed in the morning. And I'm kind of curious about what is that? That's kind of interesting, actually, because I think for me, it's definitely not one of those things like, oh, I have to do it. Right. I feel like a lot of people get the, oh, I don't get that at all. I don't have that. And I think I used to for some things, but I've kind crafted my life around the things that I just like doing, right? For instance, the ferret rescue. Ferret rescue is something that I didn't plan on doing originally.

Never planned on doing that. I just knew I lived in California, and in California, ferrets are illegal. So when I moved up to Washington, I wanted to get ferrets. I got two ferrets from University of Washington. Their names are Snails and Loki. Loki is still alive today. She's like six years old. Snails died three years later.

She had a heart condition. Ferrets largely have heart conditions here. And one of the things that I realized in that moment is like, I'm very sad about this. This sucks. but also I was like, but no, that's okay. And the reason it's okay is because in medicine, they will kill a ferret after one year. That's how it works, right?

Because these were laboratory animals. And I took it in laboratory animals. She lived through three plus years extra on top of what would have been her lifespan. And I realized, this is awesome, actually. It's awful that she died. But she got three extra years. Her lifespan was quadrupled, right, over what it could have been. And in that moment, I was like, I feel good about this.

I want to do this more. And then I started looking into other rescues. I was like, what is the biggest thing that plagues rescues? Where do people fail doing this? Where do other groups have problems doing this? So I started to break that down. And I found most of the time, they go the route of being a 501c3. So they're nonprofit.

And they have issues with funding the entire time until eventually it closes. Because ferrets are exotic animals. They're incredibly expensive. It's difficult to take care of them. And they collapse. over time. There's very few ferret rescues that are out there as a result of this. It ends up being really difficult. I said, how do we fix that? The community started asking, hey, can I see your ferrets? Hey, can I see your ferrets? And I was like, I'm going to put them on stream and just see what

happens. So I ran a test. It was like, maybe this could make a little bit of money to help get rid of that kind of a problem. Well, now today we sit at around 1,200 viewers on there, and it makes enough money so that I can run eventually the largest ferret rescue in the United States. The ad revenue knew from that alone, solve that entire problem. So that was me going, I like this thing from an emotional standpoint. I think it does objective good. Other people seem to like it as well. Let's do a test to see if we can do business in a different way so that it can support itself. Let's try that. It works. Let's keep going. Right. And that's kind of how I walked my way through that entire process. And it started with, this is an emotional fulfillment thing for me. How do I have that emotional

fulfillment thing in a sustainable way, if that makes sense, in a way where I can make sure that I don't cause harm to these animals by putting a financially inviable situation forward and then failing later on and just having a huge problem for a bunch of animals that I was supposed to be taken care of, right? So that's kind of my whole process for walking through that, if that makes sense. That does. So I'm kind of curious and even a little bit, skeptical is not quite the right word, but I'm curious if there's more. So you're saying you do this for emotional fulfillment? That one definitely. Most definitely. There's something. What about the others? Oh, okay. Yeah, say more. There's, I don't know how to describe this to you. There's nothing nicer than like laying on the

floor with all these freaking ferrets, right? And they're just like, they're just awesome animals. It's just really cool. There's a, there's a deep emotional thing for me for that. And I cannot place where that comes from, but knowing that I have extended the life of all of these creatures, And they are having better conditions than they did before because I do a lot of medical research for this. I look into all the different ways we can treat them. Part of what I do is nutrition and medical research to try and form new treatments for them. And in many cases, I've been able to find ways that we can pass that off to the veterinarians that we work with. They enacted a plan for them and we've saved their lives.

That isn't a financial incentive for me. That is 100% an emotional incentive for me. That feels very good because I know that I'm making a difference in a way that isn't like a financial gain difference. It's in a, it's in a, this animal gets to live. That's really nice. And especially in situations where people treat them really badly. So I know that I can correct the situation and fix it in a way that extends someone, some, something's life, right? So I'm curious, Thor, do you find that there are two layers of your, and I'm kind of like asking a leading question here?

So you strike me as someone who is not very emotionally driven, right? Usually not. And so what I'm kind of curious about, so that's why I'm kind of curious about. So that's why I'm kind of like a little bit confused. It's where. I kind of have a hypothesis. But I'm kind of curious whether you find that there's two layers. Would you say that there's two layers of your emotional experience?

There's like one where you're kind of, it's not like, you know, you have a lot of exercise over it. And then there's another layer of emotions that feels different. Right? Because gratification of your positive emotions. Okay. I don't think there's a multi-layer system there. I think that to me, it's one of those things where it's like, I understand that this is a positive thing for me.

I think that I am getting positive kind of feedback from this in a way that's emotional for me, but also can I do that more in a way that adds for other people and adds for these animals? It's a mutual benefit thing at that point. The animals win, the viewers win, I win. Does that make sense? It makes a lot of sense.

I think anything, you'll see that across everything that I try to do is like I don't like the idea of one person winning. It's the whole thing of rising tide raises all ships. Anytime that that's going on, like that's why I brought the moderators on full time. That's why I do all the free knowledge that we can do on the Discord. Everything that I try to do is with that because it, this is funny because it's, it feels greasy otherwise. It feels wrong, right? If you like, the way that I feel about it is if I've become a millionaire, I probably screwed up. I did something wrong, right? It's like, put it into other things that actually have meaning and do something of,

tangible benefit and the ferret rescue to me is definitely an emotional fulfillment thing but when having something like that where the stakes are so high where things can go wrong and then animals can be hurt because you didn't plan ahead there has to be that logical component of making sure it's self-sustainable which is exactly what the stream is for so it's the logic side ensuring that the situation is safe enough for me to get the emotional fulfillment and do something that I think is good that helps other things like the animals in the ferrets and the community

Because we also spread a bunch of knowledge in that, too. Try to spread it around. Can I think for a second? Sure. So basically what I'm kind of thinking through internally is slightly more esoteric concepts. So I'm kind of hunting for an answer. And like, so when I see your life, I see a lot of two things, Dharma and Karma. So Dharma is Dharma.

Are you familiar with that term? Yes. That's the things that you are obligated to do that you're like intended to do. versus the things. It's like your... It gets translated as duty, usually. Yeah, duty. Yeah.

Okay. But I think it's a different emotional valence from should. So I think it's... And then the other thing is karma. So like that what is happening in your life feels to me like a chemical reaction that is playing out. That a couple of pieces were put in a few... And there was a predisposition for something and you're kind of leaning into. to that. That's kind of why I ask about this double layer of emotion. So I find that for a lot of the

work that I do, there is like sort of a different feeling. So one is like a deeper sense of Dharma or a feeling of like rightness, which is, which can be emotionally gratifying. But I think that the fluctuation of the emotional experience of those things is almost like independent of this other quality. And in fact, I think that, that it's the second thing that allows me to sustain the emotional variance. Right? So, like, if I loved streaming and I did it for positive emotions, then that would not work because the emotions are not always positive.

Sometimes they're negative. So the key thing about Dharma from almost like a scientific perspective is it is that which allows you to act and persistently act outside of the variance. of emotions and outcomes. So the reason that I'm kind of asking you this kind of stuff is because, like, I get a lot of vibes from you that track to this concept in the meditative tradition from having done a lot of meditation in a past life. I think I've mentioned that to you before.

Because you have, you intuit a lot of things that are like normally taught. And so when people, when they say like, okay, like, so if you spawn and you're level like 50, as opposed to level 10. How do we understand that? Oh, like you just XP'd up prior to spawn, and then you carry over. When you respawn, you carry over some experience.

You're saying I'm on New Game Plus. Okay. You're on New Game Plus, yeah. Beautifully set. Beautifully set. Right? So many of the things in your life feel very New Game Plus-ish to me.

So your capacity for like discrimination. And by that, I mean like being able to like, in your internal awareness, your capacity to like think through, okay, like, what is the, is this a good thing or is this not a good thing? Let me abandon it. That's very rare. So like most of us, when we think through things and it's a bad thing, we still keep doing it. I can't do that. Right? That's what I learned at that moment when I was telling you, when I was homeless, it's like, I didn't do that before that, not really, not to the capacity I do now.

Fair enough. So I, and this is where I don't know if like, you know, this is, I have a particular way of viewing the world. It doesn't make it correct. and we could ultimately say that everything comes down to just there's just one layer of like emotional valence and that's what it is what it is what it is but but really like everything you're describing like screams to me of these two concepts and i was just curious if you have encountered those before if you think about it because i i don't never encountered that i i guess that to me that kind of splits between like emotion and logic because the emotional need is like hey this this feels great to do this i feel fulfilled doing this but it's beyond that there's like something else there if that makes sense? Yeah. It's hard to describe. That's what I'm talking about. So is there a third variable. And the logic is about the implementation. So once the driver is there, the logic is like, you know, like, how do it. Exactly. It's the how. It's not the, it's not the what direction you're going in. Yeah. For me, it's like, like, I have, I have the, the thing is like, why do I want to do this? How do I want to do this? And then at the end of it, it's like, okay, if I do this, does that make me

drop anything else. That's a big one. Does it get in the way of any other things, objectives that I have? Can I make it so that it's sustainable in a way that I can step away from it and it works? Can I make this so it expands? Like there's so many different things that go into that. It's a lot of pieces, if that makes sense. Yeah, but all that comes afterward. Yeah. Do you get what I'm saying? All of it comes afterward? So let me ask you this. Is the reason you do it because it needs to be done? I think the world is an objectively better place if I do it. So it becomes a compelling factor. How do you understand the specificity of how you make the world a better place?

Like, why do you care to make the world a better place in particular ways? I can't make the world a better place in all ways. I can do it within my purview. There is a limit to what I can do as an individual. So because of that, I want to do that specifically, in this case, because I can make a difference here. that is possible within what I know my knowledge of it, my interests, and my means, if that makes sense. So, but there are many ways in which you could make a difference.

How do you decide which ones to do? Is that your emotional response to a particular thing? Like, why ferrets as opposed to anything else? So, for instance, if I decided to get very deeply into an aspect of something I don't know anything about right now, it'd be very hard to make a difference inside of a, like, that area. The reason why is because there would be a perception that I'm not an expert in that area. The perception from the general public means that it's much harder for you to make a change there, make a difference, a real difference. By going down this route and showing all this stuff with

ferrets and doing everything that I have and having this entire, all this information and all these things that I'm doing, it makes it much easier to make a difference because now we have something that is widely seen as being positive force inside of that area. Now I can actually make a difference. But if it's an area that I'm starting from scratch on, there's all those pieces that have to fall into place first before people trust you enough that you can make a difference, if that makes sense. It makes a lot of sense. So I'm kind of curious because I was, it, it, my Geiger counter is going off the charts. But when I talk to you about it, it, it doesn't seem accurate, right?

Okay. So, so I'll just like share my own perspective. And I think this is just something I just got to ask. Maybe like a golden question to uncrack? Because maybe there's a, maybe there's like a piece that's missing there that I don't No, I don't think there is a piece that you misunderstand. That's why what I'm going to do is just share my perspective, and I'm curious what you think about it. Sure.

So I have a logical mind. I have an emotional mind. So if we look at emotions, like we also know that there's like two basic kinds of emotions. There's our more primitive emotions, like anger, fear. And then we actually have the second layer of emotions called social cognitive emotions, completely different part of the brain. pride, shame, guilt. That second layer of higher human order emotions requires other humans to be present. So a reptile, I don't know if a reptile is capable of feeling guilty, but a reptile can feel anger or fear.

So these are the layers of the self. So in my experience, there is a third layer of stuff. So this is where I would say, Dharma and karma operate. So sometimes when I'm meditating, for example, like I have a particular, like, insight, and then I will sometimes act on that insight, and it's weird. Like, sometimes I will not have spoken to someone in many, many years, and I'll reach out to them, and there's something kind of going on in their life, and it's kind of like spooky. So, like, there's something about my experience of life makes me think that there's a third layer of stuff.

And when I think about the work that I do, I think about what is logically good, and I think about what is emotionally fulfilling. And clinical practice is sufficient. So in clinical practice, I would make way more money than I make now because doctors get paid very well in the United States. And then I find the work very fulfilling. Like, it's great.

Like, I love doing it. I trained really hard at this. Every day is, like, fun, really. Yeah. You know, I tend to work with people for maybe a year or two, so I don't usually work with people for like 10 years. It's like people come in, we help them, and then like I get to meet new people.

Very intellectually stimulating, you know, I can work a lot in a short amount of time, plenty of space for leisure activities, emotionally gratifying. And yet something about that was not fulfilling, right? So I guess that's maybe the dimension that I'm kind of talking about is like there's a third dimension of emotional valence and what is logically a good idea or a bad idea. Did you feel like, like, I guess at that point, like beat the level sort of a thing, too comfortable? Not necessarily.

So actually it was fulfilling. So, so this is where like, you know, I experienced what I can best be described as a calling, right? So we use some of these words like calling. And, and I think that that tracks to things like Dharm. karma and now it makes sense to me. Like, so I have a karmic debt to pay to the internet. There's the golden word.

What? The calling. So tell me about that. It felt like this is correct. Yes. Yeah. So, see, that's the thing. So this is correct.

That doesn't come, I'm making a statement here, a hypothesis, which I'm asking you to agree or disagree with. In my experience and what I would venture for you is that this doesn't come from logic or emotion. No. It was a totally outside thing. Where does it come from? I have absolutely no idea.

Because when that happened, that this is correct. That was the moment where I understood that snails died, but she had lived three extra years. And that was the moment for her. It was like, this is the correct thing. I want to do this more. It wasn't even I want to do this more. I'm going to do this more. Yes.

How do we make that work? How do we have that? How does that function? How do we build this in a way that it isn't like the failures that other people have had? How do we build this in a way that it actually works? Do it. And then kind of throw everything together, make the hypothesis. All the logic stuff comes in after that.

Yeah, so I smelled it. That was that. I was wondering, I was wondering when you were going to come, because I was like, there's something missing here. Something's not being communicated. But what I'm so curious about is like, I have an understanding this stuff, and I can explain it if you want. But like, I'm so curious because you, you know, you get there on your own.

So I kind of like, I can't explain it if you want to. But that also, like, there's some amount of personal exploration. There's some amount of like reading a bunch of books. But what I'm really curious about is how do you. you understand that. I don't want to pollute you with the calling portion. Yeah. I don't know. I think that's one that's kind of outside of my purview, frankly. And it's, it's funny because it's not like a religious experience or anything like that. It was just like, this is correct. We're going to do this now. Like, that's how that's going to go, right? I'm going to, I'm going to take the emotional

side of this. This is definitely fulfilling in that part. It is the logical side of it. Like, this can be done, right? This is possible to we do. And then also that third esoteric component of whatever that is I want to do this. This is getting done, right? And then on top of it, it's also the other stuff for me, too, which goes into the emotional side of it, which is there is a real benefit to the animals. There's a real benefit to people that get to engage with this,

and it's something that I find to be good in the world. So it's all on the emotional side. And the objective side is like, cool. Like theological side, it's like, cool, it can pay for itself. I don't have to worry about that. I never have to worry about it collapsing, right, if I position this correctly, which is always a thing.

You always have to figure it out. Are you aware of other things that come from that third layer? So we talked about the fair thing. The fair thing is like that's the guy who counters off the charts. But I'm curious, like, have you noticed that layer in other parts of your life? Possibly. So doing free and open information, I gained that from the hacking community. When I joined in with the hacking community, I go to DefCon and compete and everything like that.

A big part of being a hacker is spreading as much information as possible, teaching other people to solve problems that are difficult with interesting solutions, right? So my Discord's completely structured that way. I don't need to do that. I could definitely gate that behind a whole bunch of paywalls or other bullshit. But that component says, nope, do this free. Do this free and release it to everyone. And that's exactly why I do that, is it makes sense to do that.

It is the correct action to take. You know, anytime that I'm taking a stance on those types of things, there is that extra component. It's not a purely logical, not a purely emotional. It's that third piece. And I've kind of traveled with those and used those for different reasons of choosing different things I want to focus on, right? The ones that are truly important to me are the ones that that third component takes place. And it does happen quite a bit. There's a lot of things there.

And I think it's, for me, that's what defines me as myself. If that, because we all have emotions, we all have logic. But the things that I decide, not even decide, the things that I am compelled to do from that third piece is what I determined to be me, if that makes sense. That yes, I think that is consistent. So I'm curious, what do you think that third piece is? That's difficult to discern. Me, right? Like, everybody's going to have their thing.

I guess that for me is my thing, whatever it's going to be. And I feel compelled to engage in that thing. Can I ask about, so I know you've had, like, can I ask about your relationship, your relationships? Sure, yeah. So I'm curious, does the third element, does that have, does that inform you about anything relating to your relationships? Yeah, actually. Can you share that with us? Yeah, when I, when I got married, actually.

That was a big thing. It's like that felt correct. That felt like it was, this was the thing that I want to do. This is exactly what it is. There's an emotional side to it. There's a logical side to it. The emotional side is like, hey, this relationship is really working. Been together for a long time.

This all makes sense. logical side is like, do you have enough money to buy a ring? You're going to look like a dumbass? You know, like that's like a normal one. It's quite funny. But then like also the other things is like, am I jumping in anything too soon? Does it make sense to actually go and try this? Is anything going to work?

Right. And then go along with that, right? And yeah, that relationship ended. Really devastating. But at the time in that moment, I could take that as a definition for me of like, this is the right time to do this. I feel correct about this for all their aspects of this. and there's that third component that says, go for it, you know.

In terms of getting married? Yeah. Well, in terms of, yeah. What is the third layer say about the end of your marriage? That it's fine. But that doesn't always work out. And like, I, for me, I gained a lot of experience from that. I learned a lot there.

It is, even though it ended, that's okay. And it's, this is going to be such a bad, like, such a weird way to post it. It's like an old multiplayer game. right? Multiplayer games are amazing at their peak. They're phenomenal. And one day that multiplayer game ends. Nobody's playing it anymore. It doesn't work. And we kind of can sit around and pine for the old day of when it was perfect and it was at its peak and it's amazing. Or we could be like, I was there. I experienced that and I can remember that fondly and I can take that into account for the rest of my life. And that's, I see it as the second piece. You know, I had that experience and it was great.

And I learned a lot from it. And there was upsides and downsides. And I'm happy about it. it, you know. Yeah, so that's weird, man. Like, I'm really, like, this Geiger counter is going off the charts because, like, this is so consistent, right? So, like, this is where, yeah, it's, it's so interesting that you never, like, learned this stuff. So this, like, kind of gives me, makes me feel spooky because, like, this is where all

the things that you are saying are written about, right? So even your perspective, like, the conclusions that you're coming to, the existence of the third layer of stuff. And, uh, and, I don't know where it comes from. Yeah. No, I mean, even, even your, your hesitance to describe it, I ask you like, what is it? And you say, it's me and you don't give it quality. So this is the one where it's kind of difficult.

Yeah. Yeah. So this what's really cool is like the Sanskrit description of what that third place is is neti, neti. And neti is not this. So it is not this, not this. So it cannot be described. It's not the emotion. It's not the logic.

It's something else. It cannot be described. It is that which cannot be described. So it's me, right? So you can't attach words to it. And it's really interesting because you don't even try to attach words. You don't even get into that, which tells me that you really understand it because you're like, okay, it doesn't have a form or a shape. It is like that which is left over.

It's also something that I find I cannot anticipate. When it happens, I'm like, yep, this. and it's like where'd that come from? I don't know. Yeah. So that's another feature of it. It is spontaneous. Yeah.

And there's no way to plan for it. It's an extra variable that shows up, I guess, is the best way to put it. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm curious, though, have you found things that get you closer to it or things that move you further away? I would say yes. I think there's defining factors there, which is why I described it as me as self, right? Like, a good example of this.

being incredibly transparent with things, right? Transparent with business, transparent with the Ferret Rescue, transparent with that. I found very early on one of the first things that I wanted to fix was we were starting a game studio. And I wanted to do a Kickstarter. And I found that the general standard was there's a whole bunch of these games that do kickstaters and they run away with the money. So I was like, how do I fix that?

And that compelling factor, like, stepped in and said, why don't you stream all of it? Why don't you just show everybody, right? And it kind of breaks the perception of, oh, I can't stream. as a programmer. I can't stream as an artist. I can't stream at these types of things. I can't show people the world this. And it also breaks the perception if he's not working on anything. I can see him working. It removes any whispers of that immediately because people can see it. There's a track record for that. And I think it was the first thing that was like, okay, that worked here. What if that works over here? What if that works over here? Now it makes sense. Now it starts stepping away from

just being a compulsion there where it's like, this is a standard for me now, is make sure that this is part of things that I do as a carrying thread because it's not just that it works, it's that it is correct, if that makes sense. It is a correct thing in the way that I have defined things. It is correct, right? And I feel like that is a better option. In fact, I've even seen other people implement that. We actually have a veterinarian here where they have glass windows on everything. For absolutely everything, you can watch your pet in surgery. Anytime. You can see everything that all of the attendants are doing all the way in the back, which is a wild concept. That's not something you ever see.

But they have this set up. And the customers, like the people come in with their animals and they're super nervous, they're way less stressed out because they see what's going on. They know what's happening. They may be upset because it's a crisis situation, but they can see. And they don't have to sit there wondering, is something going to go wrong? Are they going to come out and tell me my dog is dead? They can see what's happening. They know in real time.

And it's actually really interesting. It's like a really interesting thing. So I've seen other people implement the same thing, and it makes sense, right? So that's why it feels that way to me. Yeah. So it's once again interesting. So I think like there's what you described as transparency. I would describe using the Sanskrit word satya, which means truthfulness.

Okay. There's also like a weird, there's like weird angles to this. And I'm just kind of curious. But like, you know, so I also notice that you're accumulating a lot of shakhti or energy. So there's like all these like texts that say that when you start, living in accordance with Satya, you will accumulate, like, energy and things will begin to manifest around you. And this is very, like, spooky and gets turned into, you know, the secret and the stuff for, like, Oprah's Book Club. I don't put a whole lot of stock into that.

That's okay. But, you know, it's just, it's so interesting to see so many principles that I've learned about or studied about. And it seems like you're kind of like living them. So, like, when you live a life of truthfulness, I certainly found that it has been very, very, like, good for me too. So I started like intentionally becoming more and more truthful. And there's a, there's a really interesting. See, a lot of people don't realize that being truthful in life actually makes your life better and makes you more powerful. So if we think about lying, lying is all about the avoidance of consequences. And if lying is about the avoidance of consequences, then you can continue engaging in behavior that you don't have to pay the consequences.

for. And you should be because it, and it's usually more inefficient, whatever it is, it's going on. Absolutely. Yeah. And so the really interesting thing is that when I kind of like stopped lying, I think maybe once in a blue moon, I'll lie. Like I want to say maybe two or three times a year. But are you lying right now? I don't think so. Maybe this is one of the two or three. But what I really found is that once you stop lying, it changes your behavior. So if you take lying off of the table, the way that you have to live your life changes. Yeah. I used to lie all the time as a kid.

Constantly. What? When I was a kid, I lied constantly. I was constantly worried of consequence. I was like trying to avoid all that, lie about everything, right? Like, and I realized every time it was like, this is, this is a lot of energy to like upkeep all this shit. Like, because you're constantly like trying to spin the plates on like, which lie did

you tell to who? And it just turns into this web of just like, why? It's just wasted. It's all wasted energy. It's ridiculously wasted energy. I think that was something I grew out of because it was just stressful and stupid, right? And it's just a huge waste of time, massive waste. Yeah, so that's interesting because that's a very logical take.

And that's where in sort of these Eastern systems, there's like a weird esoteric take, which is that when you say it's a waste of energy, they also equate out that leakage of energy with like less manifestation in the world. Yeah. I mean, that's absolutely, I could see that being absolutely true, but not in a manifestation way. The way that I see it true is like this. If you were spending all of your time upkeeping the web of lies that you've created, how are you forwarding your life? Where do you have time for that?

Where do you have time to put it into things that could give you benefits going forward? You're spending all this time maintaining this bullshit that doesn't actually give you anything tangible when you could be learning a skill. But doesn't lying to people advance you in many ways? Like sometimes, but not forever. And that's the biggest problem. with that is if you get caught in a lie, it can set you all the way back to ground zero or before that. You could lose everything. When, if you spend the time on actually learning something, you could spend the same amount of energy doing that, you keep that forever. And that's kind of

where that went for me. It's like, yeah, I can understand that being a aspect of manifestation. It's not really a manifestation. It's a, I am adding. Yeah, it's localized to you. Yeah, it's localized to you. There's no connection to outside things. That's how it feels to me. Yeah. You are you are creating scenarios in which you have more chance of succeeding because you are spending time on cultivating keys for all these doors that you might, you know, arrive to, if that makes sense. And otherwise, you're just spending time on nothing, right? You're spending time on maintaining this big bullshit around you. It doesn't make sense. I think, I think there's, that, I think that's a fair take. I'm still somewhat conflicted about whether there is some kind of connection to outer things or, or the, you know, that's a fair take. I'm still somewhat conflicted about whether there is some kind of connection to outer things or, there is some kind of manifestation. And that also gets to this, you know, this third layer. Because where does the third layer exist?

It could be, right? Do you think that the third layer is completely localized to you? That I don't know, right? That's something that is an impossible question to answer. It could be a feeling thing. It could be like, wow. You know, there's like, I think a lot of people describe that as like kind of divine intervention, right? Like, I had God told me this thing.

and I went and did the thing because I felt compelled to do it and that came from God, right? But I'm not really all that religious. So for me, it's like, well, if that is a religious experience, I could describe it as a religious experience, but in reality for me,

it's like, does that make sense for me? Not really, because I don't spend a lot of time on that, right? So it's one of those things where it's like, this came from somewhere. I don't know where. And it's, like you said, it's the not this, not this. So what is this?

Don't know. if we get canceled again, then we'll have to, I guess then maybe that's the universe's way of telling me that this conversation needs to be private. But, or something,

I don't know. I don't know. So once again, the third space sometimes sends me signals. And the signal is that your power turns off. And it's like, the third space and like the weather things are manifesting in the universe and like, or like whether it's just in here.

Yeah. And like, this is what I mean, man. It's fucking weird, bro. Like, I don't know if this is cognitive bias on my part where I'm, like, looking at these random events and I'm making order of them, right? So we know that, like, our brain will look at, like, clouds and we'll say, like, oh, that's a ferret. But, like, that's not a ferret.

We make signal out of noise all the time is the human brain. Yeah. It's because we're pattern recognition, right? Like, humans are an amazing pattern recognition processing machine. That is the superpower that we have, hands down. And sometimes that leaves us. to making patterns out of things that don't have a pattern. Yeah.

Yeah. Pretty normal. I think that's pretty. I don't think it's wrong with that. 50% win rate. But also ghosts are creepy. So like, you know. Yeah. So what, what, and sorry, I lost my kind of train of thought, which I think is perfect,

because now tell me what, what would, your turn? I asked a bunch of questions. What would I like to know? I think we've gotten to where I wanted to go. So when you're talking about, when you're talking about not this, not this. What do you think this is? What is the this to you? So the this is, I'll give you like a personal answer,

and then I'll give you a, like, a more, like, academic answer, if you want. So the first is, this is experience. So if we look at, like, if we look at the nature of reality, okay? So we know that there's, like, a physical, and now we're going to, like, leave science behind, okay? So now we're like, there's some maybe scientific stuff where people like to talk about the quantum. But I find that most people who talk about the quantum don't know what they're talking about. And they're like just full of BS. But so, so we're leaving science behind for a moment.

If there's some science to be added, we can talk about that. Like we can talk about some scientific correlates of what I'm going to say. But if we look at it basically like we think about the world is primarily material, right? So like the world like is what I can see, is what I can touch, et cetera. But there is a layer of existence that is experience. So when I experience a thought, when I experience emotion, when I taste a strawberry, sure, there are taste buds. There's like different nerves in my tongue that go to my gustatory cortex, travel to my thalamus,

travel to some part of my brain where I experience taste. We know that all of that electrical activity is happening. But if we look at like this is a little bit more philosophical, not my area of expertise, so I'm probably going to butcher it. So, like, there's this concept of, like, qualia or qualia, which is, like, the fundamental, like, differentness of different kinds of things. So experience is fundamentally different from objects in the same way that, like, matter and energy are, like, different.

So that's where this is. So, and if you look at it, like, experience, just like matter. So matter can be collected in different forms, okay? So, like, for example, like, there's this. concept of a molecule, which is just matter. And then I can put molecules together to make a cell. And then I can put cells together to make a person. I could put molecules together to make a cup, right? So this is like silicon oxide. And so like there's there's all kinds of stuff that objects can assemble, but at the end of the day, it all breaks down into matter.

Yep. So experience is the same way, where experience can be broken down into its individual basic, components into its atomic nature. And the third thing, the third layer, is in that direction. Now, the interesting thing is that, generally speaking, when we break down matter into its constituent components, we tend to think about a reduction in complexity. But there's this concept, and now we get a little bit more. So I think what that thing is, is tapping closer into pure experience. So that's the thing, right? It's not logical. but it's absolutely experiential.

Like, you feel it. You get better at it over time, the more that you learn. And so I would say that for me, that's where, like, I call them knowings. So sometimes when I work with people, like, in a more spiritual way, like, we'll talk a little bit about a particular kind of spiritual practice that I do that increases your connection to this thing. And there are all kinds of other, like, weird manifestations to this. But so this thing, you know, this third layer of stuff, it's actually like kind of like this infinite potential is the way that I would describe it. So even any manifestation or form is actually a reduction. So if you kind of think about like, you know, a blank piece of paper like or actually a better example is a block of wood.

So one of my favorite books is this book called In Search of Schrodinger's Cat. And at the end of the book, it's a book about quantum mechanics and physics. And I think it's like pretty accurate. And I don't think it's one of these like, you know, spirituality, quantum mechanics things. I think it's written by a physicist. And so, you know, at the end of the book, they have this beautiful analogy that they're talking about things like the particle wave duality. And they say that if I show you a block of wood and I say, Thor, your face is inside

the block of wood. And you're like, that's crazy. And then sure enough, like, I take a chisel and I take a hammer and I chisel away and we find your face. Look, it was there all along. So there's kind of this idea in physics that, yeah, you know, you know, you know, you know, the world gets shaped by the way that we look at it. But in its core form, it is undifferentiated.

So I don't really understand this stuff, but there's some stuff about, like, you know, the universe existing is a probability wave form, and then the act of... And it collapses when you view it. Yeah, when you view it, right? So, like, and some people will say, oh, that is proof of this, like,

Eastern concept of undifferentiated consciousness that then collapses into form, Sanskrit, which is a Roup, right? So this thing doesn't have root. People also use it as a basis for saying the universe is a simulation and part of a computer. Yeah. So I can't comment on the physics connection to that. I think it seems to make sense to me, but I'm not an expert in it.

So that's what this third thing is. This third thing is, and so in the academic sense, we have a couple of different states of consciousness. We have sleep. We have dreams. We have wakefulness. and then we have, or sleep can also be unconscious. And then there's this fourth state of consciousness called Thuria.

Thuria is a state of consciousness without object. So the sense of self, so right now as we go through the world, I am here and you are there. So if I'm playing a video game, like I am playing the game and things are happening in the game. But even when I worked with like e-sports teams, we kind of talk about becoming like a divine, incarnation of a player where you are one with the game. And you'll see like some of these players like make these just amazing moves.

And it's like they reach some transcendent level of skill where I'm sure there's a neurologic correlate. But when we talk about how to do that consistently, it is becoming one with the game. Yeah. So even... We see that in other ways too, like pretty much any athlete or even even ones like NASCAR. You know, like they, they, it's even funny because we kind of. explain that in certain audities around the world where like you get in a car accident it's not

they hit my car they hit me you know and that's so there's little pieces of that and other stuff yeah so that actually is considered a misidentification so we'll we'll talk about that but so the main thing is that um so the closer you get to this thing the better you will be so even in terms of like flow state is like one step closer to this thing because in the flow state you you said it. Yeah. Let me do this. Let me screen share with you. Hold on. Give me a second. Give me a second. I can see it on the stream too. When people hear that we offer coaching at HG, their first question is like, what on earth even is that? So here's the basic problem. When you struggle with something in your life, you don't see the problem from the outside. You see it from the inside. The value of a coach is that they can look at your life from the

They can understand what's going on and they can help guide you to improve things like motivation, accomplish short-term goals, and even increase a sense of purpose in life. And over the long term, we also see improvements and feelings of depression and anxiety. And the best part is we've had over 100,000 coaching sessions and we incorporate that feedback to continually improve our program. So if you all are interested in actually making a change in your life, check out the link in the description below. So Thor, I know we got, our last conversation got truncated by the universe. And we tried twice.

And the really funny thing is that, so that evening, there's a book that I have, which is a commentary on this text called the Shiva Sutra. Okay. And I got this book back in 2003. And it's been sitting on my shelf for about, yeah, so 20 years, like 21 years. And so about three months ago, I pulled it off the shelf because I was preparing a lecture on something. And I was like, oh, maybe I'll take a crack at this. But I had six books that I was going to go through. And the first three or four books were sufficient to prepare the lecture.

So it was sitting on the shelf. And then so, you know, our stream ended. And that evening I was like, okay, so like, let me just read this book because I've never actually like read it. Or I tried to read it and it was too dense for me. And it's really interesting because it actually talks a lot about what we were talking about. And so I thought it was like quite coincidental. And then the part of my brain that looks at a cloud and sees a dog that that generates patterns out of randomness made me really wonder in like kind of like a spooky way. I was like, maybe like maybe I was supposed to read this thing before I talk to you.

And so maybe we can kind of, I'll ask you kind of where we left off and what you remember. But I hope that your power doesn't explode this time. I don't think it will. So I think now that I have prepared by reading the Shiva Sutra, and I've also looked at a couple of, I've got a couple of research articles pulled up. So hopefully we can kind of pick up where we left off, but also like if that doesn't, you know, if we kind of lost the threat of it, so be it. But can you just remind us and help me remember kind of where we were in the conversation and what we were about to embark on? We were talking about something. I'm trying to remember the very specific thing, because it's, it's, it's,

for me when like a thread gets severed like that to return to that we were talking very about a very specific thing okay I can't remember so here's what I remember what I remember sure so we were talking about the the way that I recall the conversation is we talked a lot about different things that you were doing yes so you're working on the ferret rescue yeah there was some gaming thing I forget what it was uh game jam game game game and then you have a long-term goal of building a publishing house. And a clinic. And a clinic?

Clinic for what? Exotic animals. We're going to build a veterinary clinic, yeah. So those are the things that you're working on. And we had talked a lot about your kind of journey and being homeless for a year. And I think in the past we had talked some about you were in a relationship that kind of, you know, y'all ended up splitting up. And you kind of grew a lot through this process. process, we talked a lot about your relationship with your emotions, how you utilize logic.

But then I had kind of tossed out this sense that I had that you are not operating from a place of logic or emotion. Yes, that was the secret third thing. The third thing, right? Not this, not this. Yes. And so as we try to understand what that is, like we started to explore that and I offered some answers from a tradition.

So that doesn't make it right. So this isn't science, right? This is just like some people sat down and looked at this thing and examined it for a while. And then they came up with conclusions. They didn't all come up with the same conclusions, but many of them came up with the same conclusions. And so I think I just pulled out my iPad and was sort of starting to explain like what that thing is. Yeah. Or at least one theory of what that thing is.

And then it detonated. And then it detonated. I think that's exactly what it was. That was the specific thing or something. It's funny. I couldn't remember it because it was the, it's nothing anyway. Yeah. Right. So it's nothing. So, and then the other thing that I know we DM'd a little bit back and forth about, you know, rescheduling and stuff.

And then the other thing that you mentioned is that a large part of your community is actually progressing very nicely from like a professional standpoint. Right. Yeah, I've gotten a ton of people that are messaging me, tons and tons of people around the world that are like, I put the things that you say. said to action and I got an amazing job. You know, and it just keeps happening over and over. There's like hundreds of people that are messaging me, reaching out on Twitter, reaching out on DMs and Discord, which I can't answer all of them, which is so many.

People sending emails and people saying it in chat all the time. It's actually really awesome, frankly, seeing that like those types of actions go to work and it's a lot of really easy stuff most of the time, but it's things that people don't know when they're first entering the workforce. You know, like making a resume and a cover letter, they're one page long. you know, the way that you handle yourself inside of an interview, little tiny things like that, people just don't realize is like super important. And they just kind of end up sending out like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of applications. And then they change this stuff and they're like,

I got a job to two applications later. Yeah. They're way faster. So that's awesome. And I think you had mentioned to me in DMs that like drive and burnout are major aspects that y'all are kind of dealing with. Can you can you say a little bit more about that? Like what do you what are you seeing? Some of the the largest trends in people asking me questions usually around drive and burnout. They're like, I don't have drive. You know, I don't have the drive to go and do something. Or I have pushed myself too hard and I'm burning out. Or I love doing this thing so much that I don't want to do it anymore. You know, they don't realize that they're hitting that burnout threshold where they're pushing themselves in a weird way or like the environment is bad for doing that works and they don't want to do it or they're doing it too many hours a day. so or they're trying to a really common one is i want to quit my day job to go do my hobby full

time and a lot of times people don't realize when you do that hobby full time you now have added a ton of pressure to yourself of like i need to be financially viable doing this thing now and now you hate it right so like there's all kinds of stuff like that where it's it's little things like that all the time and those are generally the things that i give advice on i'm like how to fix this because it's super common crazy common yeah so so here's what i was what i was what i was what i was I'd kind of imagined for today. And like this is like, you know, welcome to modify, disagree, completely, you know, go off the rails. So what I was sort of thinking is that, so I think these two things are related. So the first is when we think a little bit about drive and burnout,

these, both of these things are signals from within us. And if we understand, A lot of times it's an alarm. It's like, hey, you're doing something that you shouldn't be. This feels bad. And people don't realize that's an alarm bill going off. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Right. So what I was kind of referring to is that not even the quality of the signal, that it's an alarm,

but that this is something that comes from within. So drive and burnout are not necessarily created by the outside world. They're created by something within us. And so I think that the really interesting thing is that I'd love to hear what your advice is for those kinds of cases. And then I think the other thing that we can do is try to better understand your experience of what drives you, what protects you from burnout. And then what I've kind of done is prepare a little bit about like my understanding of kind of this like Eastern concept of the self, which I think is quite robust, quite correct, like even

scientifically. And then I think there's also a lot of like cool stuff in understanding drive and burnout from the neuroscience research. And specifically, I'm not familiar, I'm not sure if you're familiar with the concept of hedonics versus eudaimonyx. I have not. Okay. So we'll talk a little bit about that. I'll kind of give you kind of a quick TLDR. So if you look at human happiness, what we call happiness. So happiness is actually a lot of discrete things. So one kind of happiness, and this is something that Aristotle actually, I think, originally coined. So he sort of noticed that there's two kinds of like happiness. There's like fun and pleasure and then there's a sense of like well-being and satisfaction.

And what we tend to find is that if you look at the neuroscience of it, this is an oversimplification. But I tend to find that in a lot of my patients, there's an inverse relationship between the neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin. So what we think of as dopamine is like the pleasure neurotransmitter. So this comes from this part of our brain called the nucleus accumbens. So when we use opiates or we play a video game, we get a rush of pleasure. Now, what we sort of know, this is to be disputed, and probably actually what I'm about to say, I'm leaning towards this actually being incorrect, but it's a useful model. Is that when we look at people who are depressed, this gets tied in some way to their serotonin levels or the levels of serotonin transmission.

So there's kind of this, the prevailing theory, which is now being countered by, Some people like, anyway, we can go into that detail, but that basically like your sense of well-being is governed by like your serotonin. So we know that. That's why we use SSRIs. Yes. That's one of the reasons we use SSRIs. And so what we sort of find, like if you take someone who has an addiction, for example, like they actually get a fair amount of dopaminergic transmission, right? So I'm playing video games all day.

I'm using marijuana on a daily basis. but my sense of well-being and happiness in life actually declines. And what we oftentimes find is that people who are working hard and even denying themselves pleasure, right? So like when I'm driven towards, I don't know, like running a game jam or something like that, that is not like a pleasurable activity. It's not fun. I mean, there may be parts of it that are fun, but there's a large like effort investment, but it increases your sense of well-being.

So there's this inverse relationship between dopamine and serotonin that once again is really a neuroscientific oversimplification that we can pick apart very easily. But I think it's useful to think about. We also know that just from observational studies and clinical experience and stuff like that, that these two principles can sometimes be, that we have good data about, that if I chase a life of pleasure, I will probably be unhappy. And that finding a life of happiness sometimes involves avoiding pleasure. So that there's good data about, but we don't quite know that the neuroscience lines up.

Anyway, so I think this is also really important because when we talk about drive and burnout, I think that a huge part of what I've found as a clinician, we also have like a creator coaching program and a career coaching program where we sort of use some of these principles of like self-fulfillment. People have better outcomes. And they have, they reduce their unhealthy behaviors, which are usually dopaminergic in nature. And oftentimes what we will discover is that drive and burnout come from listening to a particular part of yourself that doesn't consider these kinds of things. So like I want to become something. I feel like I've fallen behind in life.

I need to prove something. And as a result, like I'm going to push myself, push myself, push myself. And I'll end up burning out even though I'm like moving towards my goals. So I don't know exactly how we're going to do this. I don't know if it's going to happen, but like what I was sort of thinking about is we could understand your experience of this third thing and teach people potentially how to operate from that space more. Because I get the sense that you work very hard. You are driven and you don't burn out. And then we can also lean into your personal advice and your personal experience of like how you've created that.

And I am very confident that whatever answers you have, I will be able to provide a framework or research support for whatever you already do. Makes sense. Yeah, it makes complete sense. I think the biggest thing for me is, yeah, you're right. I don't burn out. Like people laugh about it all the time. They're like, oh, he's going to burn out.

He's going to do this because I work 16 to 19 hours a day. I sleep five hours a day. I work all day, do all that kind of stuff. But the thing that I found that started that chain to make that possible, I can see the impact of my work. One of the things that I find a lot of the times is when someone's in a workplace and they feel really bad about going to work. Sometimes it's the working environment, sometimes the people they work with, but very often I found they don't see why their job matters.

They don't see what their job does. And you'll see this quite a lot for a lot of weird kind of areas, or maybe they look down on the impact of the work. Let's say you work at fast food and you think your fast food job is worthless because you work at fast food, right? You work in McDonald's or something like that. Some people can see like, hey, working at McDonald's is actually a really positive thing because I'm feeding people and that gets them through the day and then they feel better about the job. Some people just go, I just work at fast food as a dead and job. They feel like garbage about it, right? So like I think impact is a really big starting point, if that makes sense. And that's usually the first thing that I look for is like, do you see the impact of your work?

Okay. Most of the time, the people who have burnt out completely are like, no, I don't see the impact of my work at all. I'm like, okay, now we can work on that piece. What I'm going to do, Thor is I'm going to take notes. Okay. And we're going to start. So I'm going to just so, so, so, burnout correlates with lack of impact. That's one. Yeah. I think that's an aspect of it. And then in your case, the way that Thor avoids burnout is by seeing the impact.

Yes. Okay. Great. Seeing impact is huge. That's actually one of the reasons I look into analytics for stuff. It is something that gets beyond the idea of having imposter syndrome, right? The little voice in the back of your head that tells you, hey, you know, you shouldn't be doing that or you're not good enough or anything.

I see that kind of as a defense mechanism that's over-achieving, right? It's soon they're telling you like, you shouldn't do this because if you do it, you'll fail. And if you fail, then we'll feel bad. So don't do that. Right. But in reality, you should do that thing. You should try that thing and see if it works. So I'll usually tell people like, hey, if you're getting that overwhelming you and it's

stopping you from doing things in the first place, it gives you that failure to start, make a bet with it. Say, I'm going to do this for three months. I'm going to wait and see, and then we're going to go back and review everything and see if I did better than when I first started. If I did, then the imposter syndrome is wrong. Because I look at my analytics all the time, because I see all the feedback that people are giving, all the things that people say, how they say the advice is actually helping them through things. I don't have to deal with that because I can see the impact, and that's immediate evidence to say like imposter syndrome sit in the corner, right? Because I have evidence that it's not correct. So that goes away.

That's the second layer of that. you've got the impact for your work and then you've also got impulsive syndrome being you know pushed to the side for that okay um trying to think of some other things uh another one is environment for me i create zones so i have a zone for actually doing work i have a zone for when i want to rest i have a zone for when i want to do entertainment i these are physical areas of my space right and i've talked to people in the past they're like well i don't have any areas i was like do you got a couch they're like yeah i was like do you got a laptop and they're like yeah do you got a laptop and they're like yeah stuff in a laptop. It's like, okay, when you're playing games, sit on the left side of the

couch. When you're working on something, sit on the right side of the couch. The reason that I learned that is because I was trying to do everything from a laptop in bed. And what I found was when I was working on things, I wanted to go to sleep. And when I wanted to go to sleep, I couldn't stop thinking about work. And it created this weird mixed thing for me. I don't know if that's the same for everyone. But for me, environmental mixing was a problem. And I had to separate environmental areas to make sure that I was focused on the task for that area, if that makes sense. So Thor, when you see analytics that are not going well, what happens within you?

I want to know why. I'm not upset. I just want to know why. And I try to form a number of different possibilities for that, things that could be the solution to that. And then I try to isolate those in a way where it is possible for me to test it. Okay. I'm going to jump in for a second.

Sure. So why don't you feel bad? Because it's a chance to learn something. And then I can use that for every other situation. If I can solve why that thing went wrong and then use it to my advantage, use the information from that to my advantage, I can win not only that situation, but many others that come beyond it. Okay. All right.

Cool. Is it okay if I interrupt you? Yeah, go for it. Okay. So we're going to map this out and we're going to try to like, we're going to do everything that you're already doing. We're just going to provide some support for it. Okay.

So you mentioned environment. Okay. What drives you? A lot of different things. It really depends on the situation, though. I think different situations have different driving factors, if that makes sense. Yeah. So it's not always the same.

I think there is probably the greatest drive for me, as we were talking about puzzle games earlier, the drive to solve is a pretty big. big one for me. I love to solve things. And the reason why is because it's like, oh, I don't know that thing. Let me see if I can learn something from this. Because I found that there's so much kind of like cross-pollination between things that you learn. And you can apply those skills anywhere else in your life. And it makes me more adaptive, I find. Okay. All right. So now we get a little bit potentially into the weirder area. So we had talked about

so here's Thor. And Thor has logic. Thor has emotion. Thor has maybe something called personality. Maybe. So no one's proven that yet. Puzzle solver.

Right? So empty husk with a nice head of hair. Yeah, there we go. And then there's this, this like third thing. The secret third thing. The secret third thing, right? And I get the sense that a lot of your drive, so here's what I think the order of operation is. Here's you.

The third thing starts. And then what happens is it sends signals to your logical mind. And it sends signals to your emotional mind. And then what these things do is they structure your activity. So these will give this thing, which is formless. They will give it some kind of shape. And then this shape is very dependent on you. Like someone else may have this drive, but based on your desire to solve puzzles, based on the logical conclusions, based on certain values that you hold.

It gives this thing a particular manifestation that suits you. And since this thing is suiting you, this leads to success. And the more things that I learn, the more ways I can make that happen in different scenarios. Sure. So then what happens is that they're, yeah, so the more that these things get enhanced, I'm going to call learning. I'm going to say that learning is over here, right? So then what happens is if you get this kind of impulse and your logic is insufficient, then you can't give this thing shape.

But as your logic improves, as your emotions improve, this thing starts to take shape. As we're leveling this up, leveling this up, getting rid of this. I think the big thing for me, though, is when I see that, when I find one of those scenarios where it's like, I don't know enough to do this, I want to. It's like, oh, this is great.

That's another thing to add to the Batman belt, right? That's kind of the way that it feels to me. each time I am presented with one of those. And it's funny, all of you guys in chat, you saw me do this all day. You've seen me do this for the last like three days in Animal Well. Every time it's like, oh, I don't know what this is. I'm going to do this. It's not even hates not knowing things.

It's that I know that at the other side of that, when I finish knowing the thing, I'm going to have new ideas that I can apply to other situations. So like solving all those puzzles in Animal Well, I'm going to go make some really cool ARG stuff. I can make that for Heartbound. I can make that for the hackmud stuff that I'm doing anything else. I can apply that all over the place. And I can solve other puzzles in the future.

Yeah. So, Thor, was there a time where you weren't like that? Hmm. I don't think there was a time where I wasn't like that. I think there was a time when I wasn't that good at it. It's like a snowball. It's like an avalanche, right? Okay.

So, like, there was a time where it was like, God, I don't know anything. I'm just pissed all the time. And it was like, once I started to get a couple of footholds, And I was like, wait, I know how to do this. Wait, I can apply it this way. We can try this way. Then it was like, well, I know how to solve a lot of things, but I don't know how to talk to people.

And I'm not good at that. How, what do you do when you feel a negative emotion? So you said you used to be pissed. What happens to that emotion? I think when I was younger, it was a lot harder to manage because emotions kind of came out of nowhere. And it was like really, really kind of rough, you know? Because I think growing up, I,

And I'm sure a lot of people can understand this. Growing up, there was like, don't be over emotional. You know, you're a guy. You know, suppress that sort of a thing. So for me, when I was younger, it was a lot of that. It was a lot of like, be a manly man. Don't do that. Don't show that off.

And then as I got older, it was like, no, it just makes sense to do that. It's fine. And I kind of evolved out of that, if that makes sense. So I think that made it more difficult to handle that side of things in the early days. But over time, I realized that was okay. And how did you evolve out of it? Do you know? It's funny because it keeps going back to that that sort of inflection point of homeless for a year, right?

I think it was it was like the most devastating thing that could happen and it was a hard reset for me, frankly. Okay. If that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So who did you think you were before you were homeless? I had a very kind of grand vision of myself, way grandiose. Way, way larger than life, frankly.

In an absurdist sort of way. I thought it was top of the world. I thought I was kick ass all the time. And it humbled the shit out of me, frankly. It's the best way to put that. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

Great. So, do you have any questions for me so far? No. I think this is cool so far. Okay. So now... It's interesting to see, like, my whole mental process. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. So I think what we're going to do is like we're going to... What we're going to do is use you as a test case to generalize certain principles of the mental process. And we're going to see if we can figure out the code that results in some kind of like outcome. Right. So like if I'm if I'm like typing hello world or whatever, there's something I can type and we can get a particular outcome. So tell me. I do.

Yeah. Oh. Go ahead. I was going to say I do think it was not just that moment though. It's every time I failed ever as well. Every time I ever experienced failure in the ideas that I had, it showed me there's something more to learn. And then eventually it's like, you don't know anything.

You just know the things that you already know. And you can use those as to adapt yourself to different situations and become better at discerning things and better at evolving through that. My whole thing was like, train yourself to adapt, no matter what. And failure is great because it gives you another chance to learn a new adaptation. Okay. So I'm going to point something out to you. Sure. When some people fail, they say, I am bad.

Oh, absolutely. And when you fail, what do you say? I say, ooh, a piece of candy, you know? It's like, it's an opportunity for me. Opportunity for what? To learn. It's an opportunity to get better. Okay.

So we're going to, I'm going to just keep track of this. Okay, we'll see if we can suss out what the big difference is. Um, so actually, maybe we can do it now. What do you think is the object of this thought? Object meaning can you define? Yeah. So where is my, in what direction, it's going to be hard to, but I'll, I'll keep trying. And then you can puzzle solve your way to the answer.

Um, what am, what is my mind looking at when I have this thought? Short term. I generally think that that is a very short-term sort of feeling. It is, I failed here, which means I am a failure, rather than I failed here, but look at all the things that I've overcome in my life. I don't remember all the really difficult things that I've gotten through to get to this point. I survive to here. So it's a short term like, this happens, so I suck. It's like, no, all the other stuff that you learn, you rock, actually.

The fact that you are here, that you've made it this far means you've succeeded. Okay. Okay, so I'm going to translate that into certain terminology. So I'm going to say that when you say like, okay, people only see this one thing, right? So they don't, they kind of don't take the big picture. Like they don't think about all the things that they've done. I'm going to call that zoomed in. Okay, so this thought is zoomed in.

This thought is short term. Yep. I'm going to go ahead and say that the object of this thought is your identity. So I'm thinking about me. That makes sense. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, you're thinking about yourself rather than the situation.

Yes. I can see that. So when you have this thought, what is the object? What am I looking at? The problem itself, for me. Okay. So the problem? And the future rather than the present.

It is, I'm focusing on the goal, which is when the problem is already solved. Okay. It is more of a long-term thing as well because it's like, ah, this is not. opportunity for growth, it may be difficult to get through this, but at the end of this, I'm going to be way, I'm going to be way more suited to solving stuff like this and, you know, whatever it's going to be. And I think I learned a lot of that from being a programmer, as funny as that is. Because programming is 99% fixing your own bugs, frankly. Like, you are constantly making assumptions, trying something, seeing that it fails,

trying to find out why it failed, getting better at that thing. And then you can see the progress as your code stops failing as much, or it starts to fail in new and more fantastic ways, frankly. Yeah, no, I think it's so interesting because once again, I'm reminded of this analogy when you kind of say, like, you know, 99% of it is solving your own bugs. Like, I think that's what growth is too. So personal growth, whether it's through, you know,

kind of the yogic path or the psychotherapy path, I think that there's like, there's overlap there. Yeah. And a lot of it is basically, I think, think a lot of people really don't realize that that actually they control so much. And even if we look at the way that you respond to failure, right? So like what I've sort of noticed is that there's, so there are two types of people in the world.

Those who what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and those who what doesn't kill you cripples you for life. So this is the sad truth is that a lot of people say, oh, what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger. That's not true. what doesn't kill you can just cripple you for life as well. That's one of the reasons why I try to give people that feedback of like, you need to find the impact in your work,

because I found for me that was my first foothold. That was the first like, wait, I'm not terrible. I'm not shit. I have evidence now. It's like finding a sword, right? Because you can finally fight back at that point. You're like, I have evidence that I'm doing something that matters.

And that's when you have nothing, that's a really empowering thing. Yeah. So I think that there are things that make it difficult for people to do that. Oh, definitely. I do think it's incredibly hard, especially when you don't have anything to start off with. Well, I think a lot of people have something. I think they have difficulty seeing that they have something.

I agree with that. Yeah. What do you think makes it hard for them to see that they have something? I think a lot of times it's easy to kind of fall into that path of seeing all the negative patterns, seeing that path of, I failed here, I failed there, I failed this, I failed that, and not being able to see the positive things. I'm interested in what leads someone down that sort of path. Because I don't, it's quite interesting because it's exactly the same path, but in reverse. It's the same.

So I can focus on all of the successes that I have, all the things that I can do, all the things that I've learned from those failures, or I can focus on all the times that I failed and keep that as the focal point. point. The interesting part to me is what leads someone down one of those paths first, the other one? Let's talk about it. What does that? Yeah. So, what do you understand about this third thing, the nithy-nethy thing? Like, can you toss out anything? So, like, I use the word calling, and I think that was the term that kind of resonated with you. It is. Yeah, 100%. Like, how do you understand, like, what is that? Where does that come from? Just give me anything that you've got about it. And if you've got nothing, that's totally fine, too.

I don't even think it's nothing. It's there's a moment that I have where it's funny. Some people will talk about it like intuition or gut instinct or anything like that, whatever it's going to be. But it really comes down to I'm in a scenario and I go, this is the right way to handle this. And then I go, how do I logically handle this? How do I emotionally handle this? Can I do that? Is it within my ability to do so?

How is it going to affect everyone around me? does everyone win when we do this? And it starts cascading down all the possibilities of the different routes of ways that this could be handled. Pieces that I could touch. How the puzzle gets solved. Where do all the puzzle pieces lay?

And does it hurt anyone along the way? Okay. That's the biggest one. So here's what I want to point out to you. But that first piece is just... Yeah. So the right answer precedes the logic. Yes.

That is correct. How does that work? I don't know. Okay. Yeah. I got nothing on that one. So this, if people want to understand why they are burnt out, if you can understand this, that the right answer comes first, then all kinds of problems will be solved.

So let's like talk about a couple of different problems that arise from not knowing what the right answer is. So the first simplest example is like want versus should. right so like let's say you've got someone who's like okay like i'm unhappy in my career and or i'm unhappy i'm unhappy with something i don't it doesn't matter what relationship career job whatever and then what happens is that logic and emotion enter the picture there's no north star to begin with and then logic and emotion fight okay so emotion says i want to do this i don't want to work i don't want to do this i want to play video games and then logic says but i should play video games and there's internal conflict and then we get to

this really interesting principle of ambivalence. So human beings are conflicted in their nature, or not actually in their nature, but in the psychology of understanding human behavioral change, this is what we've sort of figured out. Human beings are ambivalent. So right now I have, you know, I have like a plus minus over here and I have a different plus minus over here. So this may sound kind of weird, but I'll explain. So like if I move, you know, so anytime I have a conflict, there are benefits of doing what I want. And there are costs of doing what I want and there are benefits of doing what I should do and there are costs of doing what I should do. So we start in the middle and the interesting thing is as you

move in one direction, this becomes small and the costs start increasing. It doesn't matter which direction you move in. Anytime you move towards an action, this is what the science of ambivalence tells us. Let's say like I think about going, do I want to play a video game or do I want to go to the gym. And if I go to the gym, like, what happens is the thought of going to the gym and the experience of going to the gym are different. When I'm thinking about going to the gym or I'm thinking about eating a salad, once I sit down to eat the salad, I have to eat the salad. So the actual, it's like I'd love to be healthy, but now I got to eat salad. Right. And you got to go and actually do the action. Yeah. So this is what's really interesting is that if you look at it, like as we move towards something,

the cost start increasing. Our brain starts to experience, there's a hypothetical cost of going to the gym, sure, but once I'm actually there and like I'm feeling intimidated by people and I'm feeling like all these people are in shape and they're judging me and all that kind of stuff, the cost actually increases. So then what happens is as the cost increases, the grass is greener on the other side, right? This also explains this very simple principle of why the grass is greener on the other side. Then people end up moving over here. And as they move over here, oh, now I moved a little bit over here, and it turns out that the grass is not greener on the other side. I'm breaking up with a mistake. Let me see if they'll take me back. And then people sort of end up stuck.

So this is what's super, super crazy is that operating from emotion and logic, which is what a lot of people try to do, doesn't work very well. What actually works incredibly well is figuring out what your North Star is. And logic and emotion are not doing. determinants of your behavior, they are tools to actualize whatever your compass is. This is what we see in you. That ends up being a strong sense of self. Okay. But why?

Where does... Let's talk about that. What do you mean by strong sense of self? Great. Because the only way you could find that North Star at that point is that means a strong sense of self that says, regardless of the logical of the situation, regardless of the emotion of the situation, this is the thing that I think is correct. So from there, how do we logically handle this and how do we emotionally handle this

to make sure that that becomes the end goal, like becomes the outcome, right? And that just ends up being a really, yeah, it's a strong sense of self, which is funny because most people on the internet just go base, right? But like that's what it sounds like to me is what we're describing here. Yes. So here's the first principle to understand. And there's a big problem that we see in our society right now. Logic and emotions are tools.

They're to be utilized by the self. They should not run your life. And what we tend to find is people who are overly logical. First of all, there's all kinds of problems with that. People think they don't realize that there's problems. But so the first thing is like logic, the more logical you are, the more prone you are to things like depression. And when your emotions run the show, I think we can all agree that that's like not a good plan. And the basic problem with logic is that logic is not really logical.

So in the human brain, when you take this abstract principle of logic and you apply it to the human brain, you're going to have all kinds of selection biases. Right? So I don't have space. So when people say that, they do have space, but their brain isn't, their logic is not able to see that. Because there is something within your mind that is obscuring information from your logical apparatus. Makes sense. Actually, that kind of reminds me, have you played...

Oh, God, what is that game? I'm going to look this up while you're talking. Okay. Yeah, I want to show you this. Anyway, keep going. Okay. Disco-Elysium. There we go.

Thank you. I played a little bit of disco-elisium. I absolutely loved it. So I thought Disco-Elysium actually ties into this quite well, because in Disco-Elysium, you have traits to your character, and those traits turn into intrusive thoughts. But the intrusive thoughts are based on those statistics. So if you have encyclopedic knowledge because your intelligence is very high, you may be able to recollect things.

Like you remember things when you're talking to people about different stuff in the world. But also it may cut in and be like, you shouldn't listen to that person. They don't know anything. They're an idiot. And it's very interesting because that's exactly what it is, is you're seeing the logical side do something that isn't logical and kind of push them away from that scenario. That's quite odd. I remember just one really interesting thing about the game. So I was playing the game.

And in the game, there's someone who talks about a preon disease. and familial fatal insomnia. So they're like, they don't name the things. But I was reading this and I was like, you know, this is really interesting because this sounds like familial fatal insomnia, which is a really, really like rare case. It's like a very rare disease. And it is it is familial fatal insomnia,

which is exactly what it sounds like. It's an inherited condition where you lose the capacity to sleep and you go crazy and then you die. And one of the nice things about training at some of these like some of these institutions. So I trained at a very famous hospital. And the cool thing about training at a famous hospital is like you get people like there's like maybe five cases of this a year across the globe. And so like people will fly to like, you know, very specialized hospitals to get this kind of care for these diseases, which is really bad, really scary thing.

Very exceedingly rare. So you don't need to worry about it. For each one of them, maybe you get closer to fixing it. Maybe. Yeah. Maybe closer to a solve. Yeah. Okay.

So dyscolycium. is absolutely full of this kind of stuff. Yeah. So let's go back to this. So now I'm going to ask you a question, Thor. So you said it comes from the self. So basically what we're going to help people do is understand what you've managed to do so that you can operate from that place. The other really interesting thing is that I don't know if this kind of makes sense.

But when you're operating from the self, you can know that this is logically a bad idea. You can know that this is emotionally not a good thing. And then you can still do it. Does that make a way to make it work? Exactly. That's the big one. Right? So this is the cool thing, is that normally what happens is we are bound by our logic and our emotions.

Our ability, our capacity for self-determination can be restricted by logic. So my mind is telling me this is a bad idea. Like, I do this stuff all the time. And it's kind of weird. But someone asked me recently, like, what is something that I wish I knew when I was 30? And my answer was to walk away from good things. that like some of the best things, some of the best decisions in my life are to walk away from quote unquote objectively good opportunities. And so we have this idea when we're 30 that,

you know, we have to like, we're still following the script of the world. And we don't realize that the script of the world doesn't translate over into us. And that like some of the best decisions I made are to like walk away from like objectively great opportunities. Interesting. And so logically it doesn't sound, it's stupid, but you do it anyway. And then it turns out it works great because maybe then you're in alignment with the universe or whatever the fuck. Anyway, so I think the interesting part about that is if you're doing that, you're choosing to have more hardship, which means you're choosing to have more scenarios in which you can

adapt and learn to adapt better, which is going to make long term to make it easier, frankly. Theoretically, yes, that is one way to look at it. But the other way to look at it is if you get an amazing job opportunity, from a great institution. Generally speaking, people will say, sure, you may not, I mean, you can adapt there too, but I think that like there are certain things that are viewed as right answers in life,

which I don't think is the case, and that's the whole point. But what I'm kind of going to zero in on and tunnel down on is like, if you're someone who is struggling in life with burnout or drive, you cannot come up with an answer from logic or emotion.

Or if you come up with that answer from logic or emotion, if you start to implement it, it is going to, the experience is going to be like this, which is not unsolvable. You can get through that. But generally speaking,

logic and emotion are not great places to operate from. That's my belief. That's a statement of belief I'm making. It's funny. I was actually just thinking about it. There's people that, everyone's all get a question like this

where they're like, should I have this job or should I take this job? And I'm like, which job do you want to take? And the moment you ask somebody that, They sit there and they go, you know, I never asked that of myself. Yeah, absolutely, right? So they're operating from a place of logic or emotion instead of operating from a place of self.

Now, I've got a question for you. So you said this comes from you. Yeah. Now, you mentioned that you had a grandiose version of yourself in your mind. What is the relationship between the grandiose version? and self in your own... I think the grandiose version of myself you come up with, okay?

I'm just curious. I think the grandiose version of myself when I was younger, the fatal flaw that I had with that was I can do anything and it doesn't matter. I do anything at all. And it wouldn't matter. I don't need to think about it.

I can just do it. Who cares, right? And that was, that doesn't make any damn sense because when I did that, I didn't know why I succeeded. I didn't know why I failed. And I didn't care. and I learned nothing from it, frankly.

And I found that to be, it's kind of like gambling, frankly. You're just gambling the whole time and you're not learning anything from it so you don't get any long-term benefits from that. You just get kind of luck of the draw, frankly, because you're just throwing things at the wall and you're not even seeing what sticks.

You're just throwing things constantly. Okay, that's very useful. We're going to tie that into something in a second. But when you say grandiose version of yourself, I'm curious, what is the, so like, you have this voice inside you, right, that says this is right. And then, by the way, can you see what I'm screen sharing with you? Yes, I can. Okay.

Okay. And what is the relationship, right? So like I'm, and I can come up with, I can keep on using language and framing this because what I'm asking is kind of confusing. What is the relationship between, like, what is that? What is the grandiose version of the self? and this is right. Like, this is right comes from the self, and then you have the grandiose version of the self.

Are these the same thing? Are these different things? Like, how do you understand this? And if you don't, that's perfectly fine, because I'll offer a hypothesis. I would say those are different things. Okay. And I think that there's a little bit of,

a little bit of that in there. There has to be. You have to be strong enough to say, this is right. Regardless of any other pieces that may come after that, like logic and emotion telling you, no, this isn't right, there's in right, right? It's the driving force. It's the one that says, this is what we're doing.

Let's use everything else as a tool set to make sure that that happens. So there is a little bit of like kind of domineering aspect to that, right? Okay. But it's not, I guess the best thing to say there is it got tempered. So before I went homeless, it was just like, yeah, we're just going to do it. Who cares about the consequence? Who cares about how it affects anybody else? Who cares about how it affects me later? It's going to work right now. So who cares? right and that changed completely now it's like okay we're going to do this how do we do it in the right way that was the big shifts between those two things how do we do it in the way that actually benefits the most for everybody okay that was the difference so now i'm going to offer a couple

things the first thing is i want you to notice this statement and this statement what do you notice about these two statements they're pretty polar opposite that's what that's absolutely true. And I would say that they are very similar because what is the object of this statement? It's I. Yeah. Right? So this is where a lot of people get mixed up. We look at this and we see that this is at the end and this is at the end and these two things are opposites. And if this one is bad, then this one must be good. But it turns out that the yogis would say, no, no, no, no, no, no. Both of these statements are equally bad. Yep.

So now we get to the true nature of self. So deep within you, you have Thuria, the self, the Atman, the soul. I don't know what this is, right? So this is Neti Neti, Neti. You have a voice within you. Some people call it divinity. Yep. Described as kind of a divine force, things like that.

Yeah. And there is some transcendental quality. Now, if we want to take a biological reductionist perspective, we say nothing like this exists. And this is simply subconscious processing or unconscious processing. You could say that, yeah. Okay. I personally don't believe that, but that I think is a very scientifically valid argument. Because not only does this thing have no words that can describe it, it has no capacity to be

measured. Makes sense. Okay? Yeah. So science will never detect this in my opinion. For me, I don't have an answer there. And I think not having an answer is okay. Yeah.

That makes sense. So, and then you can, you can make an argument that it sort of doesn't matter, but we'll, we'll get, we'll get to this a little bit better. I think it matters greatly. I just don't have an answer. I think it does. I think it does, too. So then what happens is we have this thing called the Ahamkara or the ego.

Now, this is where these things. come in. I can do anything. I am bad. And if I, if we ask you, Thor, how did you become the person that you say today? You cite one inflection point, which is a point of basically abandoning your ego, right? So you even use the word humbling, incredibly humbling. So prior to this, you had a very, very powerful ego. And then the humbling, same thing with me, by the way. So I was like premed and I was going to become, you know, I was going to go to Harvard and I was going to be one of the best doctors on the planet and all this kind of shit. And then like I had a very, very humbling experience over the course of years and years and years got rid of my ego. And the big irony is I wound

up training there anyway. But like I didn't, you know, it wasn't a goal for me then. It was just, it felt right. Yeah. So now here's a lot of very important things to understand, right? So now that we've entered into the ego, now a couple of things happen. If the ego controls your logic, and manages your emotions, then these tools will result in, like, different kinds of problems. This is also where we see the seed of burnout and drive. So if your drive comes from here, so if your drive comes from here, okay? Let me think about how to draw this. So let's say that, so let's say here is the dimension of drive.

If your drive comes from here, logic and emotion, okay? What that means is that your drive will be conflicted. Because as the logic changes, as your emotional state changes, the drive will wiffle waffle. This is what ends up with people not truly being stuck. So very few people are stuck in life. Usually what happens with people is they're more like pendulums, where they move two steps forward, two steps back, two steps forward. There's a lot of activity, which is why they're so exhausted all the time. because they're actually moving a lot.

There's a lot of energy being expended, but the energy is just getting dissipated in two opposite directions. Yeah, they're just, it looks like they're standing still, but they're actually working twice as hard as everybody else. Absolutely. Well said. Yep. So if your drive comes from a hum god or ego,

this can lead to a lot of accomplishment, but it will oftentimes lead to unhappiness, a sense of fragility, a lack of contentment. So this is what I see with a lot of people who have things like imposter syndrome or people who are in banking and they have this idea,

I want to be something one day. So I want to be successful. I want to be respected. I want to be sexy. I want to do this. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I. And that can be... That used to be me, too.

Yeah. So that can drive us very effectively. So we'll see a lot of various success. I'm not going to name names, but I think you can look at like the internet and Twitter, and you can see a lot of people who have a lot of objective measures of success. But if you just pay attention to them, they don't seem happy. Because they're getting upset about stuff. They're getting into fights with like people like, you know, they just don't seem content. Yeah. You're just fighting on social media all the time. Yeah. Right. So there are people who can

let negativity like kind of slough off them like a roof with rain. Like, It just, you know, it falls on you and it kind of sloughs off. And then there are people who like really, despite the fact that they're very successful, they don't appear to be content. And that's because ego can absolutely drive us and can lead to good outcomes. And this is where a lot of people get confused because they want those things. The problem is that when we're operating from ego and when we're driven by ego, we, this controls, the ego controls the ego controls the emotion and the love. So we end up doing things that are not good for us and end up leading to burnout. So, for example, let's say I'm a programmer.

So we had a great interview a couple, maybe about a year and a half ago with someone who was like dealing with a lot of burnout. And this programmer was very successful. And what would happen is like they would go home on the weekend. Like if there was some problem that needed to be solved, they literally, this is what they would describe. So they go home on Friday. and then they would work on the problem all weekend long. There's a team of developers. And then they come in on Monday morning with the solution.

So instead of getting a weekend, they do the whole team's work over the course of the weekend. And then they come in burnt out on the weekend. But man, everyone is like, holy crap, this is great. Like, thank you for solving this problem. And they feel so good from that positive enforcement. They have this desire to be, and what we sort of discovered with them,

is they have the desire to be the hero. Like, I want to be the hero. It feels good to be the hero. But the hero is an aspect of my ego. So what happens when I operate from ego, I want to be something, is it causes us to make, generally speaking, unhealthy trades. So we value something so much and we're willing to sacrifice. I don't want to disappoint my boss.

I want my boss to love me. I want my boss to respect me. So I'm never going to set a boundary with them. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. I think a lot of the times, that's kind of interesting because I think a lot of the times that's the same sort of traits where it stops you from wanting to do things like take breaks when you really need to or be able to go on vacation.

Like one of the things I learned pretty early is I do work a lot. I really enjoy working. But when I need a break, I listen to myself. And I'm like, I'm not going to stream today. Today I'm going to take a chill. I'm going to walk away for a minute because you need to do that. Everybody, no matter how driven you are, you have. to do that.

Absolutely. Yeah. Right? So I think what happens with the ego is since it almost shapes or even suppresses logic and emotion, it leads to a very selective logic, right? So then the logical part of you that's like, hey, sometimes like you're human and you need a break, that gets suppressed. So what happens is a lot of people will cultivate this.

And I see this a lot like on social media in terms of like, like, you know, this hustle culture and stuff like that that, like, sacrifice. sacrifice, sacrifice is to be lauded. All of these people are operating from ego. And you can lead, it can result in a lot of positive outcomes, like materialistic outcomes, absolutely. But it also leads to a lot of unhappiness and burnout and all kinds of like other negativity. I had that actually. So when I used to work for the DOE, right, because I worked for the Department of Energy,

I made an insane amount of money, right? Because I was working for the federal government hacking power plants, right? crazy well well paid job but I was flying around the country 10 weeks a year I wasn't home and they wanted to change that to 30 weeks a year and I realized like there's I could sacrifice everything I could just have no home life I could just never be at my house I could just not have any friends none of this and I could make a ton of money doing it but at a certain point it was like that's not worth it it's absolutely not worth it you I think there's there might be a time in a place for that to put yourself in an advantageous situation down the line if it's short.

But, you know, but not a permanent solution like that, not something that lasts a super long period of time. I can understand the idea of grinding for a little bit so that you can have yourself in a better situation. But that stuff like that can absolutely take over. At least I felt, you know, the draw for that. And I was like, no, I'm not doing it. And so the challenge, Thor is that if people are, if ego is where they're coming from, they can't draw those limits. Because if I don't work 30 weeks, then in my mind, I become something else. And I don't want to be that thing. And the avoidance of that kind of thing, like, I want to be the hardest worker.

Because the hardest worker means I'm the best, which means that if someone else, and this is all kinds of problems come with ego, one is that comparison really sets in. So ego, by its nature, exists to compare. It's one of the fundamental things. So like if I have an identity of I'm the best, what that means is that like if that's my identity and someone shows up who's better than me, then I can't let them do that. So then either I need to work harder or I need to be toxic and try to sabotage them or all kinds of other crap happens. So comparison and ego go hand in hand. And even if we kind of look at some of these, this is kind of confusing for a lot of people, but recently I've been talking about how tall and short are not real things.

they are comparisons and they are abstractions. So height is a real thing, absolutely. But tall and short are comparisons. You can't be, if I'm the only human being on the planet, like, and I live on a desert island or I live on an island, there's no other human beings. I won't be tall or short. I will be a certain height.

I can do certain things, but other human beings are necessary for tall and short to exist. That makes sense. So the other challenge. I've actually never seen it that way. It's quite funny. But you know, it makes sense. It's really wild, right?

So, and then the people. who say this is not correct, Dr. K, if you pay attention, they will be operating from ego. I am tall. Here is my experience of tall. Is there a reality of being, of not having a particular height?

Absolutely. So I can't reach particular things on the shelf. People will judge me. Absolutely. That judgment is 100% real. But there's, this is what, this is where things get really tricky.

The judgment is real, but the way that I see myself is moldable by me. I think it's funny because I use that as a point of humor a lot of the times, like the, the ridiculousness of being like, oh, short people, tall people. It's like a, it's a really common silly joke that I tell because I'm six foot two. So it's slightly above the average, right? And it's like, it's not that it's not that good to be a tall person because you can see where

you want to get to, but there's all these short people in the way. And like, calling out the ridiculousness of that kind of comparison is like, I find that really funny, right? Because it calls to point. It's like, it doesn't even matter, right? None of that stuff even matters, but it's funny. It's funny to do that. So this is where there is a reality.

There is a real logic to tall and short, but there is, still, if we're operating from the ego, it's never going to be enough. And this is where, like, I've worked with people, and I guess arguably I'm one of them. So I'm like 5-7 or 5-8. I'm confused about that because I think I'm 5-7 and someone else says they're 5-8 and I'm taller than they are. So then I'm like, I don't know anymore. I'm probably 5-7.

And then, and a half. Yeah. And so, but like, you know, I'm okay with that. Like, that's fine with, like, you know, and people will say like, oh, five, seven, cursed. And it's like, you know, that. Be honest with you. Yeah. I think it is frustrating being taller sometimes.

Planes suck. Absolutely. Like, legitimately. So I think there's always things that go along with both. And that's why I always found it to be kind of silly. Like, it doesn't really matter. Yeah. Because, like, if you're shorter, some things are out of.

reach, people will make fun of you. And if you're taller, you're going to hit your head on stuff, and you're also not going to fit in a lot of places. Like, I have to think about the shape of a car that I want to get into, right? And that sucks. It's awful. Yeah. I think that there is, there is a logic to that that I think a lot of people, because they are operating from ego, will reject. The thought that being tall comes with disadvantages is something that their logic will respond and say, that is insane. There may be some disadvantages, but the advantage of far, far, far outweigh the disadvantages. I mean, it's funny to me because, like,

there's not a lot of advantages to having a toll programmer. You know, like, it doesn't really matter for us. It's kind of irrelevant. And they, I'm pretty sure there are people out there who would argue with you. They would find some other point of argument. My point is that when things are operating from the ego, this grandiose sense of self as opposed to Thuria, which is this transcendent state, which we'll get to,

then it can lead to a lot of success, but it will come at a very high price. Makes sense. Then there is... Yeah, I can agree with that. I think that makes a lot of sense to me, honestly. Yeah. So then there is operating from Thuria.

So Thuria is this fourth state of consciousness. So if we look at... This is kind of how we can view consciousness, which is awareness. And then we can look at mental. activity, and what we find is that we can make a two-by-two table. So there's plus-minus, plus-minus. So when we are aware and we have mental activity, this is what we call wakefulness, right? I'm awake, which means I'm aware that I exist and my mind is functioning. When I have no

consciousness and mental activity, this is when I am daydreaming or dreaming. So I lose my sense of awareness, but my mind is operating, right? And it's beautiful that we even call this daydreaming, because we figure out that these two states are very similar, subjectively. I get that when I read a book, as weird as that is. Yeah. Right. So when we get lost in something, there is a lot of engrossing mental activity. And then over here is sleep. And over here is, let's call it duria or this is where we have consciousness but we have no mental activity. So this is the goal of meditation is to move into this place. So this is where once again, if we think about ego, logic, and emotions, these are things that are part of the mind.

That makes sense. This is the mind, right? So I have a sense of who I am. I have logical thoughts. I have emotions. Emotions can be physical too, for sure. But the goal is to actually, the goal of meditation is to move into this place. Now, somewhere along the way you tapped into this.

And this is what's super cool about operating from Thuria is that when you operate from this place, like all kinds of cool stuff happens. The first thing that happens is that you have very high reserves of energy. Yeah. Okay? So much like you, I work oftentimes seven days a week. and I won't work 16 to 19 hours a day. I basically can't unless I'm doing clinical work. So I can work like 60 hour shifts at a hospital because I'm constantly seeing patients,

but I can't do regular work like that. But what I tend to find is that I tend to run out of energy. Like I have low endurance. So I'll work seven days a week because that kind of works for me. But you have a lot of reserves of energy. The other cool thing is that you're resilient to setbacks. Oh, yeah. Right? Setback is an advantage.

Absolutely. So this is where we go to this, where failure becomes, and even if you think about the term, right? So failure implies the end of something. Setback implies a continuation. Yeah. And if we really... Uh-huh. It becomes fuel. Absolutely. It's really what it is. Right? So this is what's really crazy is that like if you think about any event in life, it is neither a failure nor a setback. It is the way in which you conceptualize it, which determines whether this is a failure or a setback. So I applied to medical school for a year, got rejected 40 times. Was that a failure?

Like, absolutely. Like, objectively, you could call it that. But it is the attitude that you take. This is an opportunity to learn. We got to keep doing it. Let's keep moving forward. You know, I certainly had these feelings of I am bad. And in my case, I had gone through some degree of formal training, which we'll talk about at the very end.

today, that helped me move from here to here. But once again, the key thing, if you, if people want to stop thinking this way, this is what they need to eliminate. The I. The I needs to be eliminated. Because if we pay attention to your language, Thor, you do not operate from I. Right? So, so it's like, it's like, it's pretty rare.

I mean, I still use the word I. No, no, we all use those. So the ego is, so the ego is. So the ego is. Eventually, when we do it right, the ego becomes a tool just like logic and emotion. Ego isn't bad. It is just that we should be aware of like ego and we should not operate from ego. So when you operate from Thuria, you also get a sense of like direction, right?

And then what happens is normally when we get paralyzed by logic and emotion, right? So this kind of business, this kind of business goes away. So what happens is that right now, so there's like two ways. of operating. So if I'm over here and as I move this way, I get more negative. And then what happens is since I'm trying to do something good, like the reason I moved this way in the first place is because over here, there was a beneficial ratio of like positive and negative. There's neuroscience to this as well. Now that the ratio is unfavorable, I move this way. But now I'm over here. And then I end up doing this. So when you operate from a place of Thuria, what happens is this negativity becomes an obstacle to overcome. We don't stop moving in this direction. It just becomes a problem to solve. We keep moving in that direction.

So then the experience is like this. This is our activation energy. It's friction, but we don't stop moving even though there's friction. Yeah, it's kind of funny. It's like it's friction. It's like there's a wall in front of you and you just walk through it. Yeah. You just keep walking until it's not there anymore.

This is also what gives us follow through. So this is a huge problem in our community right now, like in the world, where people like don't follow through with stuff. And you're not going to follow through if you're operating from logic or drive. You will absolutely follow through if you are operating from what I would call a transcendent space. And by transcendent, I mean a place that is outside of your mind, right? That drive comes from in here.

It doesn't come from up here. Yeah. And so it's actually, it's funny because we're playing that puzzle game all day today. and basically every time I hit one of those puzzles it was like a ramp up and it was like another another another because you're you're hitting all these obstacles and I see a lot of people fail out of games like that they put negative sort of emotions to those types of things and they're like oh I hate this because the game didn't hand it to me oh and it's like for me it's like no like more like keep keep giving more obstacles please because that's that's what drives me for that it makes it makes it more interesting so this is where there's challenges when I teach that that makes so I'll all kind of reflect that concept back to you. So there's this concept in Eastern religions, basically spiritual traditions, called Dharma. So Dharma means duty. And the cool thing about duty is, generally speaking, in life, we try to run away from negative things. So your life would be way easier if you could run towards things that were painful in some capacity. And that's what

Dharma allows you to do. So if we're operating from logic or emotion or gains or outcome, it's all about a risk benefit. Our brain even does this action success calculation where it decides whether something is worth it or not. This is why everyone procrastinates when they're studying for a test because our brain knows that if we wait until 48 hours and we cram, we can still pass.

That's how the brain decides. And it decides that I can study for two days or I can study for two months. And in one case I get a C and in one case I get an A and from an actual like hourly calculation it is more beneficial for me to procrastinate. Because a C for two days is worth, is a way better deal.

It's way better value than 60 days of studying for an A. Yeah. So when we look at Dharma, Dharma is also what allows us to do hard things. So I don't think you have kids, but, you know, I have kids in the best example that I... I have 38 ferrets. Huh? I have 38 ferrets in a rescue. Right?

So actually, the ferrets are a good example. So, you know, if you think about making sacrifices like staying up or spending your money, if you do it out of a duty to your ferrets or I do it for my kids because I don't have ferrets, then it makes it easier to stay up late, right? It makes it easier to do the dishes. It makes it easier to do laundry. It makes it beyond yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Beyond yourself, right?

So once again, this allows us, Dharma allows us to mitigate the strength of the ego. Okay. Makes sense. There's another kind of dimension which I want to kind of talk about real quick. I think I'm screen sharing with you, so hopefully you all can see this. So I'm going to just toss in a little bit of science because there's some support of these principles. This isn't really a one-to-one. There are other studies which we could talk about transcendent states of consciousness and psychedelics and ego death and stuff like that.

If you want to talk about that, we can. Oh, yeah. I dig this. This is where I want to introduce this concept to people of hedonic and eudaimonyx. Let me see if I can find... I've never heard those terms, actually. Yeah. So let's take a look at some brain stuff.

So what we know is that there are two kinds of things that make people happy. And I think the biggest problem is that when we're operating from ego, so usually when we're operating from our base logic or emotions, this results in hedonics. Now, people may get confused because they're saying, like, logically, isn't it a good idea to, they understand with emotions. Like, if I gratify emotions, like, yeah, that's, like, short-term pleasure. But oftentimes, our logic is flawed, right? So we'll say, well, like, logic ourselves, oh, yeah, like, I can get drunk today. Like, it's not that big of a deal. Like, I can do this work tomorrow. That's logical thinking, but it's in a hedonic pursuit. So what

what I find in people who are highly addicted to stuff is that their, like, logical brain is actually run by their addiction. They will constantly... So it's just in relation to hedonism. Absolutely. So a lot of our logical thinking actually results in a hedonistic lifestyle. And I know that that runs contrary to what a lot of people would think. They're like, oh, no, emotions are hedonic. And, like, if I live my life logic, that's not actually how it works.

If you pay attention to eating that cookie, like your brain will give you logic as to why it's okay. Yeah. It's always like it is a way of proving yourself like, well, it's okay to cheat on my diet this time. Absolutely. Because of these reasons. So yeah, that makes sense. That leads to hedonism, for sure. And people will call that flawed logic, but it is my experience as a psychiatrist that the abstraction of logic and code when put into a human brain is no longer objective.

Like, that's just not doable. I think it's always the first reaction, too. It's not the, well, I should have the cookie. You know, it's like, no, I have to convince myself. I have to give myself a reasoning for why it should be okay. Absolutely, right? So your brain will do that. Like, you'll work really hard to convince your, the addicted part of your brain will work really hard to convince the other parts of your brain through logic that what it wants is correct.

Do you think we see the same thing in kind of criminal behavior? It's like, I should do this bad thing because of these reasons. So it makes it okay. Absolutely. Not just criminal, all behavior. Interesting. Yeah. So I mean, you see this all the time.

So then there's this concept. So this is kind of hedonics. And the more that we operate from here, the more where you diomonic. This is my understanding of the neuroscience of it. And like one other, like one other way to look at this is that none of this stuff is actually existing. This is all unconscious processing. And the reason that we feel good when we operate this is because of eudamonia. But anyway, so let's, so here's what we kind of do. If, if, you know, hedonics is for hedonism, what is eudaimony of what's the, you know, based of that? We're going to

talk about that. So hedonics is pleasure, gratification, the fulfillment of desires, comes from the nucleus accumbens and dopamine, but I'm going to show you a paper that shows that that's not even correct. A lot of what I'm saying is like oversimplifications, because the truth is that neuroscience is incredibly complicated. Yeah. We're still figuring it out, so. Okay.

So now here's the cool thing. So here's what we know leads to eudamonia. First is self-determinism. Second is self-expression. Third is effort. And fourth is importance. right so when I see your life now we're talking science okay forget about soul and all this nonsense sure when I see your life I see all four of these things so you are living a deterministic you're

a life of self-determinism you decide you want to do something right we'll talk about the transcendence we're going to go to science then we'll end up in spirituality I'm fine with that so there's self-determinism there's self-expression right very literally like you are expressing yourself constantly. When we look at burnout, what we tend to find is that burnout is inversely correlated with eudamonia. So in cases of burnout, like you were saying, people don't get recognized for their work. They don't get to do what they want in their job. And the advice that you give people is like, if you make your hobby your job, there's a chance you may not love it.

And why is that? That's because when it's a hobby, it's all about self-expression and self-determination. But once you have invoices to send, once you have customer service tickets to handle, once you have all this kind of stuff, you lose that capacity for self-determination and self-expression. Yeah, another big one that I talk to people about is if you're feeling bad in your job, like you don't feel good, you don't feel like what you're doing matters, is to talk to your boss. And if your boss is good in any capacity, they'll tell you you're doing great, here's how, or you're doing badly, here's how. and either way you have an answer which helps state that goal. Like if it's bad, then you have a, you know, target. If it's good, then you have backup, right?

Yeah, so I don't think that works for most people. So I think your advice is correct. I've seen it work sometimes, but I think you're right. I think in some, because it hinges on another person that is an outside unknown variable. No, so I mean, I would argue that the reason that works so well. So I think it's the right advice. Sure. I think if we want to understand when people do.

that, they're not able to hear that. Right? So I think that's what you give them. I think it's very important that you do that, Thor. I don't think it's the wrong answer. I'm saying it doesn't work for some people. And the reason is because of the ego. That I agree with.

No, I super agree with that. That's one of the biggest things is I don't think there is a silver bullet, if that makes sense? There is. Oh. So you've got the secret sounds. I think you found it. Right?

That's what we're talking about the silver bullet. I don't, just because things are complication, we'll get there. But I just want to point out that if you go to your boss, and sure, that's assuming that your boss is decent, but even in the case that your boss is decent, if your boss says you're doing a bad job and here are the reasons why, for a lot of people, they'll say I suck. Yeah. They'll go down this and they can't go down this. So what is the difference? That's the ego. It's framing and ego.

So I think part of what you offer, which is awesome, Thor, is that you teach people this literal thinking. And the more that people think this instead of this, if this is what happens in their mind, their ego will get weaker and they will proceed. You're 100% correct. That's always why I try to frame it that way, which is when you get the answer, if the answer is negative, you need to see it as a target that you can reach to to fix to get better. And you have to see it in a way. And if you don't see it that way, then it's worthless. But in that, in that track of thinking, Thor, I invite you, I mean, this is what I see. I see no ego there.

Right? I see externalization of the issue. Do you think that it's, do you think it's beneficial to portray that as even an option, though? Because I find a lot of the times people don't even realize that's possible. Yes, they don't. Yeah. No, I think what you're doing is, let me be super clear. I think what you're doing is correct, very beneficial, and you are training people, you are literally training people to think in this way.

You're training people to think outside of the ego. I think the main thing that I'm sort of pointing out is that the reason that you offer advice and it has a differential impact on people. And now what I'm trying to do is talk to the members of your audience. If they want your advice to apply better, translate more into their life, this is a missing component. it. Because it is the people who are not able to absolve themselves of their ego, not become objective, not think long term, not zoom out. They're not able to do those things.

Then it won't work. If they're able to do this and we see in your life that you had an inflection point of dissolution of the ego, which is why you can think like this. I do think that it's funny because I don't ever call that to attention for that because I know that there are more components that went into that. And it's kind of like a journey of that over time. Sure. Because I find sometimes people use that as a sort of a crutch for it to say, well, I can't do it because I didn't have that experience.

Ah, so interesting. What, look at the, what, what, what were those statements that you made? Well, I can't do it because I didn't have that experience specifically. And I do, I do see that, you know, where people are like, well, he had it, so he's, he's got the special power now. Yes. That's the thing. It's a way to defeat any potential type of growth by saying that you're in a position where it is impossible for you without trying. Absolutely.

So that statement comes from the ego. That's why it doesn't work. Do you see that? It's like the same construction. Any construction that operates from here is going to be like flawed. Maybe not any, but the majority of them in the context that we're talking about. Okay. So I think that this is like,

And this is what... I'm sort of lost myself for a second. Because I love it, because that's exactly what they say, right? And now we see, like, the principle in play is that a lot of people go through their lives. It's interesting because you mentioned adaptability. I just put together a lecture, which hopefully will be coming out soon.

And one of the key things that makes people less adaptable is they... I'll skip that for now. I think the big thing for me is, you're not going to succeed in the same way as me. You're not going to succeed in the same way. way as somebody else. That's why I really dislike when people draw comparisons between themselves and other people's work. They're like, oh, I'm not a good artist because look at that

artist over there. It doesn't make any sense. They're in a completely different journey, completely different things that they've learned. They've got a totally different path with learning things. You have to look at yourself three months ago, six months ago, and say, where am I compared to where I was? And that's, that to me is more important than looking at someone else's thing. You know, looking at someone else's progress. And that's the same thing for me, right? I did all my things. You know, I went down that path and did all these things. But the idea is that you have your own path and you learn your own things in your own way. And you'll have your own adaptations that are vastly different from mine.

And that's kind of how that goes, right? Yeah. So I would agree 100% that the healthiest comparison to make in life is a comparison to yourself. And even that can get... That's a big one. That can get messed up, though, because like, especially when I work with people who are like sober, like, you're sober for a year. you relapse and then you look at your former self. And you see fallen.

And you see that you fall in and that can create problems. So even I think ego is like basically, it should never be in control. Like it's a tool just like your logic and your emotion. Yeah. I do think that that is, that is probably one of the most devastating situations I've seen is when someone is relapsing, especially from addiction. You know, that's just so, it's so rough because that does break that entire thing of like, look at everything that I've accomplished. I've made it this far, you know.

But again, it's. the eye. I've made it. It's the eye. It's the eye. It's the eye. It's the eye. Okay. Yep. So just one last, I mean, I'm not feeling too much of a need for science right here, but we'll just kind of talk about this very quickly. So if you look at like, this is the hedonic brain circuitry, right? So I think nucleus accumbens is going to be somewhere over here. Let's see. Yeah. So, yeah, right here. That's whatever this one is. It's somewhere around here. And then what we know is that the, oh, where's the eudamonia? Anyway, eudamonia comes from other parts of your brain, like your ventrometrial prefrontal cortex.

I don't see it over here. But it's like, it's more, it's, anyway, so it comes, so we know that eudamonia comes from some areas, pleasure comes from other areas. And that basically, like, even when it comes to, let me just look at, yeah, so in particular, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex forms these. flourishing beliefs by generating positive evaluations of life circumstances like life satisfaction, the self-esteem, relationships, and goal progress. So eudamonia is about these kinds of dimensions. Now, I know I'm talking about the ego, but I'm using ego. The reason I use Ahamgar is because that's a different concept. It's actually a different thing. But the self is not ego. The ego is the construction of my identity. And what we sort of know is that the

regions that are associated with hedonics and pleasure are different from the regions that are associated with, like, being satisfied with your life. We also know that, let me see if I can find this. It's not here. Okay. I was hoping to find a good paper. I think it's in a different paper that talks about what the components of eudamonia are. I'm sure they'll have it here. Give me a second. Okay, we'll skip that. I don't think it's that. important. Anyway, the point here is that when we're talking about living a fulfilling life, we don't want to operate from these things.

And interestingly enough, accomplishment of goals, so this is really important. Goal accomplishment is over here. This is one that really trips people up. So if you look at eutomonics, it's not accomplishment. It's actually effort and importance. It's things like self-determinism and self-expression. And if you look at studies on burnout, what we know, we basically know is know what burns people out. So what burns people out is not working hard.

It is working hard and being ineffectual. Yep. So for me, like the top of the list is like, I can see a patient, I can be on call. I remember there's one particular case from residency where we had a patient who was on the, I was doing, I was working on the neurology floor, so not psychiatry. and we had a patient who needed a very expensive, so we had a 40-year-old person who basically had an autoimmune condition where his eyes were being eaten by his immune system. So the eyes are super scary because they're actually immunoprotected. So our body knows what we are and it knows what other people are. This is why we get transplant rejection and things like that because the body recognizes this is foreign tissue.

One really scary thing is that our eyes are never exposed to our immune system. So if our immune system ever gets into our eyes in a certain way, it'll actually activate an autoimmune reaction and your immune system will eat your eyes. So this is happening to this patient in real time. And we had worked really hard to figure out why this person who was in their 40s like suddenly was going blind. We were like, what the hell is going on? So we did all kinds of tests and stuff. And then we finally figured out, okay, this is an autoimmune reaction. so we talked to the insurance company,

and the insurance company was like, we're not going to pay for that treatment. We're like, this is crazy. Like, you guys need a pay. That's the height of burnout. Like the whole, like, 24 hours of very, very intensive tests and calling consultants and, like, talking to this person and really trying to figure it out.

That we're fine with. Like, that doesn't burn you out. Working hard doesn't burn you out. It is the inability to work hard. Sorry, it is working hard and not getting some kind of result. and that really leads to burnout. Yeah, no, I can agree with that. I mean, like, since I work in, you know, rescue,

we get all kinds of cases that come in, and some of them are pretty horrific. Like two of the ferrets that we had have an autoimmune disorder called dim, disseminated idiopathic myofasitis, and it's the neutrophils from which is the component of the immune system, attacking all of the soft tissue of their body, heart, everything, everything, everything. And it's, they basically just form holes everywhere and disintegrate. That's kind of how that goes.

And it's horrific to watch, but I gained a lot of good feeling out of this from like helping them because what we did was we reached out to the foremost veterinarian in Oregon that is dealing with this. We took that and then like worked with them and they gave us all their research. And then we worked with the ferrets to try and figure this out. And basically what we did was we gave them a chemotherapy that suppresses the bone marrow that reduces the neutrophils in the body. And ferrets regenerate very quickly, right? So at a certain point, if you keep doing this and you do it in ways where it doesn't kill them because the bone marrow also produces red blood cells, so you don't want them to, you know, run out of that. But thankfully, ferrets don't have, they don't have blood types.

So you can just do transfusions if that does happen, which is kind of cool. They get to a point where they regenerate faster than the damage being done. So now mocha and latte are the two that we have like this. They're totally fine. They're in remission because of it. And those types of situations are like really scary. Autoimmune situations are insane. deal with. Because you just watch them deteriorate.

I'm kind of curious about that. Can I ask a couple questions? You may not know because, but, but so when you say they regenerate fair enough from like a red blood cell perspective, but as soon as the bone marrow bounces back, don't the neutrophils start attacking the muscle tissue again? Yes, they do. So what we have to do is just keep doing testing again to see what their neutrophil count is. Generally, a ferret that's in dim, it is a detection of exclusion, right? So they test for exclusion. They test everything else first, and then they find at the end, this is the only thing that is left, so it's usually pretty hard. Most people euthanize a ferret that has dim, most of the time.

There's been an uptick in it recently. They don't quite know the cause. There's not enough research that's being done on this, but situations like this allow us to learn more stuff, and they spread it out to all the vets that we work, and everything like that. But with this one, it was, it's more interesting because when you're testing for this, you can see the neutrophil count is very high, insanely high. Normally a ferret's going to have usually between 500,000 and 2,000 per blood count,

and they're at like 160,000, like crazy high numbers. We're like, this is ridiculous. What do your ferrets eat? Raw food diets. So everything is fully raw food diets. It's a freeze-dried raw food, and it's easy to control that because it's easy to figure out what their kidney and liver values are supposed to be out of that, while making sure they get all the proper nutrition.

I'm curious, though, like when you say, fine, it's freeze-dried raw food, but what is it? Meat, 100% meat. They're obligate carnivores. Meat and bone. It is all meat and bone. They are obligate carnivores, so meat, bone, and egg is all they can eat. Interesting. So ferrets don't eat any vegetables?

No, not at all. It'll actually kill them. So if you give them even pea proteins, so like protein derived from peas, it gives them kidney stones. Can't have anything other than meat. Meat, bone, and egg. Yep. No such thing as a vegan ferret. Not a thing.

What percentage of their diet is egg? Oh, very low, to be honest with you. It depends. Some ferrets can have indigestion from that. Very low amounts of it can cause kind of like, well, the poops, right? They have diarrhea from it if they don't tolerate it very well. But it's usually seen as more of a treat. A lot of it is mostly ground meat and bone.

And the biggest thing you have to target is tarrine, because you have to make sure they get about 500 milligrams of tarrine per day for a healthy kind of ferret. And they do self-regulate so they won't overeat, which is interesting. Not like a dog. We'll just keep eating and eating and eating. So you can just kind of put food in there and they'll self-regulate. But if you don't do that, you don't hit that mark, they get heart disease and it will kill them 100% of the time.

We've actually reversed some of the heart disease. What do wild ferrets eat? Black-footed ferrets are the same. Yeah. But like what is their actual prey? Oh, geez, all kinds of stuff. So a ferret can actually take down an animal between two to three times its size. They can take down a chicken.

They can take down other small mammals. they can take down. They're very vicious hunters, but their primary diet, the primary thing they want to take down rabbits. They are very skilled at going into burrows and taking down rabbits. No problem. That's a big thing that they're, yeah, they're fantastic at it. They're actually used for hunting in Europe because of that. Do they eat reptiles, amphibians, or insects? No, not insectivores. I think in a pinch they might try to eat a reptile, but that's not like a normal thing. And amphibians also not like a normal thing. That's really interesting. Yeah, so I was just curious because a lot of with this autoimmune stuff, at least what we know for humans, is that dietary changes have huge impacts on autoimmune status. We're seeing as odd as this is, the last time that we had a huge uptick in specifically dim was when they changed the formulation for what is called canine distemper vaccine. So canine distemper is 100% chance of death in ferrets. It is vicious. They don't survive whatsoever.

and it spreads throughout the population very quickly because it's a fecal oral route and it just goes through the whole thing kills them all. So what they have to do is every ferricus canine, December vaccine. And something with Marshalls, they changed the formulation on it and they had a massive increase in dim and then they changed the formulation again and it dropped off again. There are still cases where they get dim, but we don't know why quite yet. There's not enough research. And unfortunately, because so few veterinarians are actually trained on how to identify dim,

in the first place, we don't get a lot of good data points on how to detect this, and we don't get a lot of good data points on how widespread it really is. Most of the time it's ferret is lethargic. They're having these weird problems. They're not eating. They're not drinking. They're not drinking euthanize. And it is very sad, but that's generally the way that it goes.

So when we talk to other, you know, vets or rescues or anything like that, if we find out that they have a ferret that fits the kind of general conditions that a dim ferret could have, we go, go talk to your vet. here's some paperwork and like take this. And we've had a couple of times where they're like, oh yeah, no, totally. Like this, it turns out that they do have them. But the chemotherapy for that is also incredibly expensive. It's like $450 a treatment.

And you're talking like a treatment every two weeks for the next six months. Right. And like that's not cheap for people. It's not cheap at all. So like there's got to be something that changes with that to save these animals, really, when they're in this kind of a situation. Thankfully with us running the rescue here on Twitch and like the ad revenue from that, ad revenue paid for it all so we just do it and we don't have to think about it and save the animal's

lives but for an average owner that's not possible which is why euthanasia happens we we usually will reach out to people that we can find out for that and if they are in an area where we can take them we try to be like hey do you want to surrender the animal because we have a good chance of saving them we have a good track record with this we haven't lost one yet so far because we not handle it but um that's a big part of building that new rescue is like um you know the the the point of this it's going to be the largest rescue in the united states that's the whole idea is to make sure that we can have kind of a coverage that's beyond just, you know, 50 mile radius, which is sort of where we're at right now. It's like the 50 miles is about it.

It's like 50 to 100 miles is like the maximum that we can really go. Because outside of that, it's just it's not possible. You know, it's just too far. And what is the average lifespan of a ferret? In the United States, it's about five years due to poor genetics, unfortunately. Marshall's Farms is the primary breeder inside of the U.S. They produce all the laboratory animals, United States federally funded so that's not really going anywhere. Unfortunately, the breeding practices have led to bad genetics that include heart disease and cancer. Incredibly common. In Europe, most ferrets live to about 10.

And they've also found that if you take a European ferret and you crossbreed them with a Polkat, they live to almost 20 years old or one year old because they either die horrifically to cancer really early or they live forever, which is really interesting and kind of strange. Polk cat is a kind of ferret. Polkette is another muslin. It's a wild type, different sort of animal. kind of like a mink or things like that, right? So mustelids, the whole

classification of musselids can be like badgers, you know, I think otters, all kinds of different stuff. It's muslin. Those animals that look very friendly, but we'll fucking tear you apart. Rebut a bits. Yeah. Oh, yeah. They're so vicious. If the ferrets were larger, I'd be dead. Is an otter a muslin?

I think, I'm pretty sure an otter is. Let me look this up. I want to make sure. Friend move forward. Yeah, so I think it just falls under the category of like cute and I want to cuddle it, but it can literally eviscerate me. Yeah, they have such

strong bite strength, like such strong bite strength as well. And they're, I don't know, they're a little weasel shaped. They're so cute. Yeah, they're absolutely.

And some ferrets will bite you pretty hard too. You've got to train it out of them. That's a pretty common thing. Behavioral training. You know, Thor, I know this is a little bit outside of the scope of my expertise in this conversation,

but I think that like, especially with myofasciitis, I've seen a lot of really good outcomes. I don't know how many studies there are on this. I imagine they're out there. I'm just, you know, rheumatology and autoimmune disease is not my area of expertise, but I see it a lot. I used to see it a lot in my patients because there's an overlap between autoimmune illness

and a lot of these like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, there's a lot of these things that end up in psychiatry or like oftentimes these weird occult autoimmune kind of, what's another example? Chronic Lyme is like another good example of like some weird autoimmune activation. And diet really seems to be like quite helpful for a fair chunk of patients. Yeah. That's the hardest part about this is there's no there's no way you can possibly modify the diet.

We can choose a different protein source, but it has to be animal-based protein. Because if you go into vegetable-based protein, they get kidney stones. And they get them real fast, too. So you end up having this weird problem with that. where like there's not a huge amount of options, unfortunately. And I'd love to explore that more. I really would. I just don't know where to go for that.

Yeah. The next time I, you know, this is kind of floating around in the back of my mind. I may just, the next time I get in touch with a few colleagues, I may just ask them if they know anything about ferrets. Oh yeah, no, totally. It's funny because like my main goal with it is we create enough situations where there is a good, a positive outcome, like we have, like we're basically in remission, right?

And to be real with you, the way that we see remission on this is mocha and latte have not had a treatment for six months. And they've had no problems. They run around, they play like any other ferrets, they have no issues, right? None. Wild. And my hope is to get rid of that idiopathic part of that diagnosis, right? Which is the, if you don't know what idiopathic means, it's, we don't know where it comes

from. And like, that's it, right? We just don't know. We have no it. We're like, this happens spontaneously. from somewhere and that sucks. You know, it's a really awful thing. We don't know the cause.

And eventually, my hope is that we do know the cause. And this is just not enough information. I think a lot of that information gets lost because we euthanize the animals when we don't know what it is. Oh, yeah. You didn't hear about Henry, did you, our ferret? No. So we had a ferret come in.

He had been owned by these people since he was half a year old. If a ferret mom gets, and you're going to love this, this is wild. if a phara mom gets feline parvo or canine distemper, whether she lives or dies, the babies that she has have a very high chance of having weird brain anomalies, physical changes in the brain. And usually they end up dead, right? So this fairer comes into us, and he's two years old. And the owners are like, he's only turning left.

Or like, oh, that's neurologic. Like immediately, you're like, that's going to be a neurologic issue. He can only do circling behavior, only moving left. like something's definitely wrong here. He can't control his mouth. He can't eat. So we're feeding him, syringe feeding him for like weeks. And we go and get him a CT scan.

We found out he has middle ear infections and artery infections in both ears. They're like, okay, here's something we can objectively fight, find out what's going on here, and see how he reacts afterwards. Afterwards, he stopped what is called head pressing, where they push their head on things because they're in so much pain. And he stopped the inability to eat. It fell away. So he could eat. He could feed himself. But he moved really weird.

He's constantly doing these weird. head movements and he's still not running quite correctly. There's clearly something wrong. So we set up an MRI. An MRIs are pretty expensive, but like, again, rescue pays for it. We can do the whole thing. And we put him through the whole MRI. We get him out.

60% of his brain is scar tissue. And it's all through the brain. Like it's 60% of the white matter of the brain is scar tissue. And even the portions that would normally control autonomic functions. So like things like heart and lungs, totally scarth tissue, which is mind-boggling. So the time that he was born was when there was whistleblowers that talked about there being a K-9-December outbreak at Marshalls, where they suddenly stopped giving ferrets to any of the

vet or any of the pet coast inside of the United States. And so whistleblower said that about 250,000 ferrets died. That time period was when he was born, which means there was a very high chance his mom got K-9 December, if that was true. He somehow survived six months with that kind of issue. moving like that without being detected because they would call him, if that was the case, if they found him, made it into a pet store, got bought it half a year, made it to two years this way, and then came to us, and then finally we find out what's wrong with him. And it's wild because we've got, we've been able to see him

adopt behaviors from the other ferrets so he can do things like digging behavior now. Didn't do that when he first came was. He can run and jump now. He tried to groom one of the other ferrets the other day, which is new, new behavior. And like we can watch him being able to pick up social traits, but it's mind-boggling to see how much of his brain is damaged. It's completely, I can actually send you the... You said white matter damage, right? That is correct, 60%.

And some other portions, some of the structures of that, it's completely annihilated, basically. So it's also, it is fully symmetrical, the damage. So it had to have happened before he was born. So is canine distemper a parvovirus? In a simple, let me actually look that up to make sure. Because you mentioned parvo earlier and I was. Yeah, feline parvo.

So, you know, it's interesting because I mean, that's consistent. So there's, it's, it's fascinating. I love hearing that story. So here's like a couple of initial thoughts. First is you mentioned that. Yes, parvo virus. Yes. So you mentioned that the ferret wasn't called, right?

So like we have to think about it kind of statistically. So it actually makes sense. Like everything in your story makes sense. and things could get better. So let's understand a couple of basics. One is, so when you have, you know, a perinatal or prenatal viral infection of the brain, generally speaking, that is very, very bad.

But there are, there can, it sort of makes sense. It's almost like a selection bias where the ferret that, how can I say this, out of 250,000 ferrets, if there is one ferret that happens to have the viral infection, in a certain way that it is not detected early, like it kind of dodged the bullet. Does that make sense? Because if it had affected maybe the gray matter part of the brain,

which we'll talk about in a second, then you're kind of like SOL, and then it would have been detected. So the fact that it did not get detected means that that's a good prognostic sign. Oh, but he, I think it was negligence that it wasn't detected. Okay, fair enough. He moved very strangely. So that's absolutely a possibility. But my point is that, like, sure, it could be negligence.

But the other thing is that the particular damage of this perinatal infection was on the less severe side, which is why the ferret did not get called. Oh, yeah. I think that it made me wonder if it was just the chaos of what was going on in there, legitimately. Because it is, when he's around any other ferret, it's very obvious. So there's all kinds of other things that could go into that. just from like just purely a medical perspective. Forget about the circumstances, forget about things like that.

So, so, because we see this sometimes, where there's someone who has like, you know, a really messed up brain. And then, but the whole thing is that even though the brain is super messed up,

something about the pattern of damage is, you know, there, it's kind of like, you know, if I get shot by a gun, a gunshot wound does not have the same effect, depending on where it hits my body.

So even though. I've sent you, I sent you a video just so you can see so you can have the context I totally understand where you're coming from but this is profound so I don't know how to look at a ferret brain but I definitely see

so I can walk you through the ferret brain but the video if you see him unable to control himself but I mean how do I show this whole month I got that he needs he does not move normally whatsoever hold on a second and this is every action that he makes and he's constantly

you know shaking This is the first time he ever tried to groom another ferret, by the way, that video that you just saw. So the one that's white there, that's Mouse. Yeah. Mouse has what is called a Wardenberg syndrome, if you've heard of that. Wallenberg or Wardenberg? Wardenberg? I've heard of Wallenberg.

Very different. Yeah. But you can see Henry's that head movement, that's the biggest thing, is he does that all the time, constantly. It's very, very obviously neurologic condition. Yeah, I mean, so is this the cerebellum? Do you know what part of the white matter this is? So if you want to look at this, I've sent you a tweet there as well. Yeah, I'm going to try to pull it.

But do you know if that's the cerebellum? Or did it in cerebral or damage. Yeah, so this looks like cerebellar damage. We thought it was going to be cerebellar. Cerebellar hypoplasia first. That was what we believed going into it. Makes sense. And it turned out to be this instead.

On top of some kind of lesions on the cerebellum, which we need to fully. we need to fully review it with radiologists soon. Yeah. But if you see, do you see the white on the top of the brain there? Yeah, yeah. That's all lesion. Let me just pull this up so that people can see. Yeah, the official diagnosis from the veterinary was Swiss cheese brain.

They were like, I've never seen anything like this. So this, I mean, so this is where the cerebellum, I don't know what a fair brain looks like, but this is generally the ballpark of the cerebellum. Not this stuff over here, but this looks quite cerebellar. And the main thing is that this kind of ataxia, is look cerebellar. Like the way that the, the way I describe it is that, so the ferretus trying to target something, but the part of our brain that manages that.

Yeah, like that part of our brain that's like, if I want to like point over here, like my cerebellum is what lets me do that. So it's basically like missing. Like when you have cerebellar damage, it's like you have an accuracy debuff where you can't like hit things where you want them to go. And he'll just like, he's also got like, cognitive issues where like he can choose a thing and he does the thing. And most other ferrets will do like multitasking. They'll try to do different things. They'll try to like, they have like kind of a

forethought for that. He does not. There's there's definitely other factors in there. So the really interesting thing. So you're saying that he's getting better. Right. So here's the cool thing. So our brain has white matter and has gray matter. Gray matter is generally speaking neuronal tissue. So these are neurons. And generally speaking, we don't regenerate neurons. But our white matter is things like astrocytes. These are the supportive cells of the brain. And the good news, I mean, if it's scarring, that's a different issue.

But generally speaking, white matter, we can recover. Yeah, it's full legions, unfortunately. So I don't know if it will recover. But seeing him perform new behaviors is incredibly compelling. So that's why there's like, I think it's consistent, right? So if this

is like a white matter lesion, like it's, white matter doesn't, and if there's scars, that's a whole different ballgame because scars are like, we can recover white matter if there isn't stuff in the way, but scars are like rubble that prevent the white matter from regrowing. I'm not a neurologist. I'm not a neurologist, but there's going to be like a little bit of scarring in there and then a little bit that can be recovered.

I'm wondering if we're basically seeing the recovery of those pieces that can be over time, because he's clearly forming new bonds, new behaviors. Like, that's not what I expected. I expect him to say the same. I mean, I wouldn't expect the cerebellar damage to get completely. completely back to normal, but there's two different mechanisms going on. One is that white matter can heal. That's what we see in like multiple sclerosis, for example. So that's like a white matter, you get these white matter lesions. And then when someone goes into remission from MS, like they're,

they recover, hopefully. The second thing is, uh, the brain can still adapt, right? So even in the case of like gray matter problems when someone has a stroke, the brain will adapt. And then you'll have like some part of the brain that takes over and does the lifting for something that a different part of the brain used to do. Makes sense. Yeah, that's exactly what I thought, because especially with the autonomic function area that had been damaged,

because we talked to, I forget the portion of the brain that was handling that one that was confirmed damage, but basically it looks like it shifted somewhere else. And they're just like, don't know where. Something else is handling it.

It's like, okay. Yeah, that's what the brain does. He's clearly still got a heartbeat, you know, like that's kind of how it came down to. The coolest example of, I mean, I don't know if this is cool, but I had a, I can't remember the exact, I think, yeah, so I had a patient who had an amputation below the knee. And something, I think there's, I don't remember the exact circumstances of the problem, but they had an amputation below the knee.

And then the part of their brain that was devoted to that, so basically we have a map in our brain of our like physical body. and so you have certain regions of the brain that will correlate with your face and your feet and things like that. So this patient, when they had the below the knee amputation, so there's basically a part of their body missing, sometimes this results in things like phantom limb where you can feel the part of your body,

even though it's not there anymore. Yeah. But this person, they actually, this part of their knee mapped on to, the part of their brain that was devoted to the clitoris mapped on to their knee. And so what started happening is they started, they could achieve orgasm by someone rubbing their stuff.

And it's just, it's amazing. Like, it's crazy, like what the brain is capable of. And a lot of people are like, a lot of people are like, you know, oh, like that sounds epic. But it's actually quite, can be quite debilitating because when you look at a prosthetic, like, you know, it's like you're. How do you walk? Yeah, it's very challenging. So it was a very, very difficult case. But it's super interesting.

Yeah. You can get all kinds of weird, you know, your brain gets. It's wild. But yeah, it's kind of funny because I didn't even mean to derail at all, but I just wanted to show you that because I thought you'd be really interested. Yeah, no, it's bonkers. And we just found out this last week, too. It's only been like a week since we found out about it. And it's like, no one expected that. Everyone expected like, oh, it's probably going to be, you know, cerebral or hypoplasia. That's what we thought, originally. Because it cats get that too when the mama cat gets feeling parvo. Very common.

And they call them wobble cats online. It's usually what you see. And ferrets get the exact same outcomes. You're like, maybe it's that. It's like, no, this is way more wild than that. Looks very salerebellar. Yeah. Anyway, going back to, I love the detour. Like, this is cool.

Like, it's like, I haven't looked at an MRI in like a year. And last one I looked at was like a human MRI, but, you know, I don't, I don't get a whole opportunity to look at MRIs. So it's nice to be able to, you know, dust off the cobwebs a little bit. I can send you some really wild ones for this, too, like just massive, like all the files. I think you really dig them. And it's funny because you see the exact same types of behavior in, you know, humans, depending on the portion of the brain that's damaged.

Yeah, that's, I mean, I'm not a vet, right? But that looks like cerebellar problems and that's the region of the brain. And so it makes sense. I know more about animal medicine, specifically with ferrets than I do with humans. Yeah, so, you know, I think there's a lot that carries over, right? Like, we tend to have, you know, you mentioned inner ear stuff. I was getting hopeful there that it was like an inner ear infection that's messing with your vestibular system, so that's why the ferret is always turning loud. Yeah. I was like,

it's vestibular. Yeah, and it's not. Because then if you deal with the infection, it can start turning right again. Yeah. They usually recover, at least in ferrets, they usually recover really fast when it's vestibular. Yeah, I mean, but still, turning left is like, that's not consistent with vestibular. Usually that's like, that sounds more like heming neglect, which does sound more neurologic. And I don't know if you all have seen like, you know, pictures of heming neglect. And I don't know, and clocks, but this is... neuroscience. I mean, neurology is fascinating. Yeah, it's pretty wild to watch.

So, this is a great example of what hemi neglect looks like. So it's like your brain can't see... I don't know if I'm screen sharing this with you, but your brain can't... You'll basically make a whole clock face on like half of it. So this is what hemmy neglect looks like.

So sometimes if we're all left, it, you know, like if we can't turn right, that's because our brain can't see. So this is what the, this is what having neglect. If you ask someone about what they see, like they won't be able to see half of the stop. And if you ask him to draw a clock, their brain only recognizes like one half of the thing. I think there was a thing like this. The, um, there was a case where a guy had the two halves of his brain were severed. If you remember that?

Yeah. And he, he was able to like identify objects. differently based on which I it was being seen in. I have, I have to look into that study as wild. Yeah, I mean, we can, we can talk about it if you want. Yeah, no, absolutely. It's, so basically what happens is our, our eyes are like contralateral. So my right eye actually see like the left part of the brain.

Well, it gets complicated depending on what the tracks look like. But, um, so like basically half of the visual field is anyway. So eyes can be somewhat contralateral. and the really interesting thing is that different parts of the brain have access to different qualities of information. So when you get a severing of the corpus callosum, there are certain...

And that's the bond between the two halves of the brain. It's the big highway. There are certain things... I mean, my neurology is rusty, but there are certain things that... So the left eye, which is connected to the right side of the brain, will be able to perceive the,

for example, the emotional impact of an object that you perceive. I could be wrong on the details there. This is like, I'd have to sit down and draw the tracts and stuff. But so like basically, like if you ask someone who has like this cerebellar severing and you ask them to close their right eye and they look at something with their left eye, they'll be able to tell like, oh, this is like someone's, this is someone's like favorite stuffed animal.

They'll know that part. But if you ask them, how many ears does this bunny have, they may not be able to tell you. And on the right side, through the right eye, which is connected to the left hemisphere of the brain, they'll have the opposite. So they'll be like, if I ask you like, okay, like, what is, what, what is this? They may not be able to name it, but they'll be able to tell you like, oh, it has like this many eyes and this many ears. It's that hoppy, it's that hoppy animal. But they like, so it's all kinds of weird shit goes on in the brain with hemion neglect.

And I'm rusty on that stuff, but it's super cool. You basically have two types of brain fighting each other. Yeah. To figure out what it is that they're looking at. The thing is we just, I think we're about to release our trauma guide. And what's really fascinating about this is dissociation is basically a signaling version of that. So there's an anatomical severing. But what we know in people who dissociate is that they have, like, you know, they're experiencing something.

So it's something called hemispheric lateralization where they're going through a really terrible. experience, but they feel no emotion. And that's literally because what happens in their brain, the emotion is so overwhelming that it's almost like, you know, the blast doors on like these like spaceships when like, when you get hit by a torpedo and then you're like venting vacuum in these sci-fi things and you like close the blast door. Like that's what the brain does. So our brain is like there's way too much emotional fire over here.

We need to protect our logical side of the brain. So they shut the blast doors and they separate out like these two parts. The problem is that that part of the brain is still active. We're just, you become numb to it. And so then it starts doing things like resulting in impulsive behavior and leads to things like addictions and like all kinds of other problems. So it doesn't, it doesn't shut off. It's just we segregate the two halves of our brain as like a survival mechanism. And the subjective experience of that is dissociation.

Would you say that the two halves are adversarial, but in a positive way, in a normal general way, like normal general function? Because it seems like it's like an adversarial model where it learns from, it's this, no, it's this, no, it's this, but it's actually this together, and then they can agree. I don't, I wouldn't say it's adversarial. So I don't think basically any, so things are balanced, right? But like, I don't think any part of the body or brain is adversarial within, all of them have the same goal, right? So we all evolve to have, like, survival. So there can be, there can be conflict, right?

And that can happen even between, like, for example, like our heart and our kidneys and our lungs and our kidneys. and our heart and our lungs. There's all kinds of homestatic mechanisms to where if one part of the body is not doing what it's supposed to, the other part of the body will compensate. So I'd say they're more, it's co-op.

It's like PVE. It's not like PVP. Makes sense. Yeah, no, see, a lot of the things we build things like that in kind of like programming, adversarial model, which is like, you have one side that works one way,

one side that works another way, and it's competition between the two to make the whole thing more efficient and find a better sort of description for what it's seeing, if that makes sense? That's why I was wondering if it worked the same, if it was similar in any way in that way. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't use the word adversarial, but there are absolutely, like, balancing mechanisms. And there are different parts of the brain that will, in a sense, compete with each other. So a really good example of this is the thalamus.

So the thalamus is sort of our sensory processing center for the brain. So what happens is, like, we constantly have input from our eyes, ears, nose, and then like what gets floated to your attention. So the thalamus integrates, but I don't think that the eyes and the ear, well, I mean, in some case you could argue that they're competing,

but not really, right? So there's, but things are friendly. Yeah, so it's like, okay, the thalamus is trying.

No, it's this. Yes. And they get closer to it. So all parts of the body and the, all of our sensory organs are inputting things into the thalamus. And the thalamus is basically deciding for us, like what floats to the top.

But I don't think that are, you know, our eyes are like competing against our ears. Like the signals need to be balanced, but I don't think it's like a competition where one wins and one loses. Makes sense. In fact, when you have that, that's when you end up with illness. So there are cases where if we look at things like chronic pain, so chronic pain is when there is a part of our brain that is amplifying its signal

and ignores everybody else. So when it goes PVP, we end up in chronic pain where it's demanding your attention constantly. Yeah, that makes sense. Would you say, are there any similarities between that and Restless Leg Syndrome? It's interesting as that is. My first answer is not really. My second answer is that I am almost sure that my first answer is wrong. I was reading some interesting studies about it, actually.

So if you don't have anything, then do you? What do you mean? Oh, no, I'm interested in here. Anyway, continue. So here's what I would say. So like we have an understanding of the pathophysiology of restless leg. Okay. So it's like a restless leg is somewhat idiopathic.

At the same time, I'm sure that that pathophysiology is incorrect. So the right answer. So we know that restless leg has a lot to do with the dopaminergic transmission. And so we. We will use medications like ropineral and other kinds of like dopaminergic agents because that seems to fix the problem. But there is no doubt in my mind that that is an incomplete understanding. And I have not kept up to date. I mean, the last time I got fresh on restless leg was like literally probably nine years ago.

So the last time I really treated a patient who had bad restless leg was like I can think of the patient. It was like nine years ago. Why do you ask about the research around restless leg? We can try to figure it out. So something that was really interesting to me was the, like you said, dopaminergic, the, the interesting thing was like levels of dopamine that were actually being uptaken and being utilized and Restless Lake Syndrome. And one of the things that I thought was really interesting was She used to have Restless Lake syndrome all the time. He used to complain about it constantly. Who?

And Shea. So Shee runs the ferret rescue with me. Okay. Makes art with me does all this kind of stuff. And something that they found that was really interesting because they were looking. into literature for this was they found that melatonin at one point had been correlated with reduced dopamine uptake they stopped taking melatonin they stopped having restless leg syndrome which was really interesting and i was wondering if you knew anything about that kind of subject um so i i mean i

can look some stuff up right now i think that that is consistent so not that i know this stuff but here's the mechanism of action that i would think so melatonin helps us sleep Generally speaking, dopamine is an activating neurotransmitter. So dopamine does all kinds of stuff, right? So it also does like cicatic movement and it's implicated in Parkinson's and movement disorders and stuff. But if we like look at it like on a very, very high level, like abstract, not entirely scientific, but just clinical understanding. So if we have dopamine that's too high, we will become psychotic. So we'll perceive things, like, we'll hallucinate, we'll become angry, we'll feel attacked.

So what, so we use anti-psychotic medication is dopamine-nergic blockade. So if you kind of think about it, like dopamine in that way is like an activating neurotransmitter. And it doesn't surprise, I did not know this, but it does not surprise me at all that melatonin or other things that are correlated with the induction of sleep will sleep. will slow down the activity of our dopamine. Yeah, I actually, I sent you a PubMed there. Check it out. So what I would venture is that melatonin, it makes sense that melatonin does. Oh, whoops, hold on.

Melatonin. Sorry, sorry, sorry, I left the call. Oh. By accident. I clicked the wrong thing. Hold on. Oh, God. I've been deleted.

Gigied. Hold on. This should work. Discord. Let's go. This. And let's go to this and let's get you back where you're back. Okay.

You sent me a PubMed. Let's take a look. I can't believe Dr. Kay works for big melatonin. Try to get rid of me. So before I take a look at this, I think this is the, you know, the way that I would understand it is dopamine is generally speaking activating. So it makes sense that melatonin production would suppress dopamine signaling. Yeah. So that makes sense.

And then, you know, we use dopaminergic agents to help with... Sleep. Not, no, we use dopaminergic agents to help with restless leg. We don't use dopaminergic agents to put people to sleep. Yeah, no, I mean, sorry, we use melatonin versus sleep bed. Right. But I found it to be kind of interesting because I'm wondering, with things like that, it's always really interesting because it's seen as like super safe, right?

It seems like the safest sleep aid you could have. And then we sort of finding these articles out of it. That's quite interesting. Dude, this is literally exactly what I was hypothesizing. That's exactly why I sent it to you. Right? So, look at this. This would make sense.

So in Parkinson's patients, melatonin may, on the one hand, exacerbate symptoms. So this makes sense. So Parkinson's is a dopamine deficiency. Melatonin and dopamine are inversely correlated, right? Because when we want to go to sleep, we want to lower our dopamine levels. So this makes sense. melatonin oh this is interesting

so melatonin being an effective treatment for tard of dyskinesia is very interesting because tard of dyskinesia is caused by prolonged dopaminergic blockade so

and that's not that surprising so that's kind of why I say like if you really look at it like unfortunately the body is not it's not like one to one. There's all kinds of various compensatory mechanisms. So I would predict the melatonin being problematic for Parkinson's, but there's something weird going on with Tart of Dyskinesia. But then there's also reasons why that could make sense to,

because Tart of Dysk is actually an adaptation to prolonged dopaminergic stuff. And I mean, we can really get into that if you want to, but that's a little bit. Is what it looks like? Yeah. So Tart of Dyskenesia is what it looks like. Yeah. Tard of Dyskinesia is caused by the lifetime exposure to dopaminergic blockade. Makes sense.

And so then what happens is Tart of Dyskina may in and of itself be a adaptation to chronic dopamine blockade. And so then actually here's the mechanism. So if I, if my brain is, so this is probably it. I mean, we don't know. But so Tart of Dyskinesia is my brain's adaptation to a lack of dopamine. So I don't need the adaptation if I no longer have a block of dopamine. Or if something else is blocking the dopamine for me, I no longer need to adapt. That's actually the mechanism.

So tard of dyskinesia happens when we have dopamine blockade. And if melatonin comes in, then our brain is like, we don't need the tart of dyskinesia anymore because the melatonin is doing the job for us. I don't know if anyone in chat is following this, but like that would be my hypothesized mechanism. Who the fuck knows if that's actually what it is? But it's almost like the melatonin is doing the job of the tard of dyskinesia. And anytime our body gets something that does the job for us, it shuts down those mechanisms. And if I'm right on that, that would be, I would think I'm a Chad. That would be like a Dr. K. Chad moment.

That's exactly why I brought this to you. Because like there are things that I get to see in animal medicine that I get to research. each other time, things that I get to see in anecdotal evidence, and being able to pass it by somebody who knows this much better than me is way helpful. Because I'm like,

look at this. Does this make sense? You know, I do that all the time for veterinary medicine when we're trying to come up with the way to handle that, you know, like trying to handle anything that's going on with the ferrets. Super, super, super common. This is a super, super cool paper, though. Yeah, it is. Very interesting.

It turns out that... I keep a list of these. I could be wrong, though, because they say that there's something about the antioxidant nature of melatonin. So I didn't even think about it. I missed that one. That was anyways. This is super interesting though. But yeah, no, thanks for talking about that.

Yeah, no, I mean, I love talking about, I mean, I like medicine. Medicine's great. A lot of fun. Just circling back. So I feel like there was one other thing that I wanted to share with you. I know we're kind of off track. That's fine. But just to kind of TLDR for people.

So earlier we were talking. talking about like drive and burnout. And we were also talking about this kind of like this third space where your drives come from. So a couple of things, Thuria, self, Atman, whatever. So I think that like the part of the reason that this stuff is easily accessible for you. So one of the, the explanation from the Eastern system, I'm not saying this is correct. But the way that they would explain that is that you've done some amount of spiritual practice. in a past life. That being said, we don't know if that's real or not.

There's also some really interesting biological mechanisms of that, which have to do with like epigenetic memory and things like that, that like we can basically inherit memories from our ancestors. So the concept of memory or learnings that come from beyond your life, that's scientifically fact. Instinct is a really great example of that. Like, that's like learning that comes from before you were born. So there are sources of transmission of information and competence that can happen before you were born.

Yeah. It's really interesting. But a couple of— I just find that to be interesting, too, because it's like you can't just have an animal always act, you know, similar to the other animals like itself, even in isolation where they've never had any type of environmental factors where they've learned from others of their kind and they're still acting, you know, in the same way. I'm sorry. You can't have an—so are you saying that some animals— So like, as funny as this, say you take a ferret, you never show it to another ferret, they're still going to do war dances. They're still going to do all their behaviors, they're digging behaviors, all this types of things, an instinctual drive to do those.

And, yeah, outside of socialization. Where does that come from? Didn't come from socialization. They didn't learn it from humans. There has to be something that carries over. Yeah. Yeah. So that's a pretty well-known scientific fact.

Yep. So the couple of things that, you know, I want people to kind of like take away is, first is that I think, if, we look at your thought process, we see that there are very few egotistical oriented statements. We also see that the inflection point that you describe is actually very consistent with this idea of abandonment of the ego. Now, I think inflection point is a really good word because the other really important thing to understand is that the more that you think in an egotistical way, literally the number of thoughts that you have that are ego-related, will strengthen than your ego. And the number of the less you think in an egotistical, I am bad, I am good,

I am a badass, I am grandiose, I am this, I am that. The fewer thoughts you have like that, the less egotistical you will become. So we know that like literally if you take like a thousand thoughts that you have, the percentage of them that are ego oriented with an eye involved will correlate with like a stronger ego in a bad way. And, and that's, and that's, that's just because neurons that your neurons will habituate. So like you, you will have patterns of thinking. You're training yourself. Absolutely. And you notice this if you like know people who are like very habitual thinkers. Like you can trigger people who will, you know, go on their tirade. Like, you know, I have family members that will go on their tirade about like, so I have a family member who thinks that the younger generation is losing touch with whatever the hell. And so that like all you have to do is like you, it's like you activate. like boomer rant. EXE.

And then like the, you'll notice is that the, what they say is like, it's like it can be scripted, literally. They can repeat it over and over and over again. And it's not that it's right or wrong. It's just that once the script activates,

it'll continue to activate. It's never going to stop. Yeah. And the script of the ego is something you have to be very careful about. And so literally I think the really cool thing that you're doing, which I think correlates a lot with the success of your community, Thor,

egotistical way, right? Setbacks are setbacks. There are opportunities to learn. There's some stuff about growth mindset and Carol Dweck's work in there. The last thing that I want to talk to you about is so a lot of people may be wondering, okay, how do I get rid of ego? How do I get access to that third space? So a couple of weird things about that third space. The first is that some people believe that all knowledge comes from there. I happen to be one of those people. So it's kind of weird, but like, because we notice that the conclusion happens first and then logic and emotion happens afterward, there's this kind of belief that all knowledge exists in that third space that you have access to. So this is not part of you.

This is why we use the word transcendental. And now we've left science completely behind, okay? Or, I mean, there's some scientific arguments that can be made, but they're not, I don't think they're anywhere near convincing enough. It's like you can kind of, you can MacGyver it together and it may be correct. but we're far from any kind of scientific proof of what we're talking about now. So all knowledge exists in this kind of divine collective consciousness weird thing. And when we tap into that is when we get these right answers. So the less ego we have, the easier it is to tap into that.

And the really interesting thing is that the text that I happened to read the night that our stream got flubbed was talking about. particular techniques to directly tap into that. So this text is specifically about there's many complicated ways to tap into it. You can do yoga, you can do pranayam, you can do different kinds of meditation practices. But there are direct ways to get on, like tap into it just directly without all of these steps. And the essence of that is, it's going to sound weird, is in the in-between spaces. So if you pay attention to your experience of life, what you will probably discover what I've discovered, what a lot of people I've worked with have discovered, is that, you know, you have a

thought, and then you have a thought, and you have a thought. And then you can also have an emotion, you can have an emotion, you can have an emotion. But if you pay attention to your mind, there is a quiet space in between thoughts. There is a quiet space in between emotions. And that third space, I would venture, I would hypothesize for you, Thor, is accessed in those quiet spaces. It is not the result of logic. It is between logic and it is between emotion. Yep.

I could see that. No, that makes complete sense to me, actually. So can you explain that to us? Because I don't ever feel like I'm pushing down my logic and emotion. I'm not raining it in or telling it to step aside for a moment. It's like there's a breathe in and a breathe out. There's a moment where it's like, okay, it's this. Now logic of motion.

Now it's this. Now it's logic in motion. Whatever, it's taking turns. But there's never any type of a, I need to force myself to do this. It just happens. So it's funny, the language that you used, because that is actually the technique, is to catch this. Yeah, it's cool. It's weird.

So if you're trying to look for the in-between space, there are a couple things you can do. First is when we meditate, generally speaking, our goal is to stop, create a cessation of thoughts. Yep. And so if you're, if you have no thoughts and no emotions and you're just present, if you're in that Thuria state of consciousness without mental activity, you're just focused, this is kind of like flow. Flow is on the, on the track to this place. But flow still has mental activity.

So at, so what we try to do in meditation is we widen the in-between space, right? So if we say thought, nothing, thought, nothing, thought, nothing. And if we look at our suffering, our suffering correlates with a very, very tiny gap. So if you look at something like a panic attack, the subjective experience of a panic attack is one thought leads to another, leads to another, leads to another, leads to another, there's no space in between them. There's no relief. A thought loop is also, we're going to cycle through these 15 thoughts, and we're going to cycle again, we're going to cycle again. there's no gap. Meditation is the exact opposite.

We are trying to increase the gap between our thoughts and our emotions. The really interesting thing about what you described is that the other formal way to practice this is to find the gap between inhalation and exhalation. So breathing in and breathing out is a very natural thing where there's directionality in one place. There's directionality in another place. So you have to move through an inflection point every time you breathe. There is an inflection point between thought, and thought number one and thought number two. There's an inflection point between happiness and sadness.

There's an inflection point between breathing in and breathing out. There's an inflection point between being awake and falling asleep. So in all of these inflection points, it is in the inflection point that the magic happens. And if anyone wants to free them, themselves from thought, emotion, ego, and they want to follow your path, Thor, they need to sit in the in-between spaces. I think that's really hard for most people to conceptualize. If that makes sense.

Yes, it is very hard for it. So the tradition that I'm drawing from is Shambava Yoga, which is a very, very rigorous and difficult technique. So it is like straight onto the highway, so it's hard to do, but it is absolutely. absolutely possible. They also describe it as a choiceless awareness. So choice, and this is where, like, I don't know, I think this will resonate to you as well. Like, you don't really make a choice. The choice sort of gets made and you follow it. Yeah. Does that make sense? And like, this is where I don't think many people will understand that. But the more that you do this, the more that it just becomes

what it is. There's no choice to be made. There's no choice about the ferret rescue. It's just, to be done. It's happening. It is happening. It is right. It is. It is. It is. It's funny because people will be like, how do you choose things? How do you choose to do things so fast? I always have to like wait and I was like, it's already chosen. Yes. Yes. I can tell. So I think Shambava yoga is what you're doing. So I don't even know, you know, I don't need to do anything for you. You're doing it. All right. You know, if you want more detail, we can go into more detail at some point about practices and stuff like that. Like we're actually doing something on the membership side this month about developing a

meditation practice. But, yeah. So I think that like this choiceless awareness, I'm not surprised. I think it's very confusing for a lot of people. Like, what do you mean I don't choose? No, the choice. Yeah. Choices of the mind.

It's been confusing for anybody that I've talked to. Yeah. Pretty much about a whole life over. Like people I mean real life, people I know online. Like, it doesn't make any sense. And they're just like, what? Like, what do you mean? you just do things.

And it's like, I just do things, you know. Yeah, I get you. So, so the, you know, my experience of it is that I oscillate between choosing things and choiceless awareness. The more my ego activates, the more emotional I get, the more that state of mind happens, then I feel paralyzed. I don't know what the right choice is. The whole point is like, what's really cool about this is like, once you operate from

Thuria, there is no choice. It just happens. I guess it's even the thing. It's like I'm not even, it's not even that I do things. It's that things are happening. Yes. That's a weird way to describe it, but that makes the most sense. And I know it's hard for people to understand.

At the same time, I think that every person who is listening to this has experienced what we are talking about. They've had a moment in their life where things became clear. And then it was how do we make this happen? as opposed to right choice, wrong choice, or it wasn't about it being the right choice or the wrong choice. You abandon the concept of right or wrong, and you just do the thing.

You kind of know, like, deep within you that this is like, this is to be done. You kind of know what it feels right. It kind of reminds me of. What? Sometimes crisis situations. When there's a crisis situation, you just do without thinking.

You just do. Your brain goes, it's not even your brain. it's this needs to happen. I'm doing this. That crisis situation feels, it's not the same, but it feels similar in that way, where it's,

this is happening. We're doing this. And the other parts of your brain go, how do we do it? And then they figure it how to do it. And then you do it. It's a beautiful analogy. The challenge is that when some people enter crisis,

there's two kinds of modes in crisis, that with ego and without ego. So when you are in a crisis and your ego is active, then it's the very opposite. It is absolute torture. Because you're like, what will happen? This will mean this. And then this will happen to me.

And then this will happen to me. And then this will happen to me. And then you spiral out of control. You feel overwhelmed. And the crisis crushes you. The flip side is you're in a situation like what Thor is describing, where you remove the ego from the equation. Right?

In the absence of ego, then suddenly you go into like, you know, Chad mode where you're just like you're crushing it and it needs to be done and you don't think you don't worry about the fact that it may not work out like it may not work out you just accept that and you have to act. So an interesting thing about that too actually that one I've had that many, many times in crisis situations, especially when you know there's like an emergency with the rescue or something like that. And it doesn't mean you don't have emotions. You just have them afterwards a lot of the times. I've found. where it's like, I need to put this one to the side because it's going to cause a problem right now. And it's like, I've decided, you know, this is what needs to happen. We figured out how to do this. And if I break down right now, none of this is going to work. So it's like, in this instance, I need to wait, right?

This needs to wait, whatever that is. And I've had that happen a number of times. Yeah. So that's very common in medicine, too. So when we're dealing with crisis situations, you know, we have a specific process. we tell everyone, set your emotions aside from now, for now, and then we'll do debriefs. So we'll do post-mortem debriefs and things like that. Like we have time and space to let that emotion come back into your life, which, by the way,

is a very useful technique to apply for normal people, which I don't think we do enough. We don't set aside space for our emotions in a particular formalized way, which means that they have to like, you know, it's like, if I'm inviting my neighbors over for a Christmas party once a year, they don't have to show up randomly to see me. Like, you can set aside a time and space for something to happen. And when you give that space for that thing to happen, it's beautiful what your brain does. So another great example of this is sometimes like when I, I'm working with patients, right, as a psychiatrist doing psychotherapy and stuff like that. I'll ask them like, you know, sometimes they'll notice something really interesting, which is that their life is getting better,

but every time they come to therapy, they feel worse. And they're like, I don't understand. Like, I feel so bad like we're fucking here crying, but like my life is fine. And I'm like, yeah, that's exactly how it works. What you've learned how to do is you used to cry every single day. And now you've learned how to push it all aside, come here, take out the trash, and then like your trash can is empty for the rest of the week. And you pile up that, you come here, and then you feel bad. And they're like, oh. And I was like, we can continue.

And then the cool thing is even that stops eventually. Like once they figure that out, I don't teach them that. They have to figure out. You figure out human garbage collection. Yeah. That's what we're, that's what we are. We're trash compactors, you know? Yeah.

Yeah. I found that to be useful sometimes. Like, it's definitely a tool kind of in that belt where understanding when it is healthy to move that to the side to handle that crisis situation. but not to keep that permanently aside. There's no, that's not good for you at all. And I've had a number of situations like that. We had one, Vinnie, one of the ferrets that came in.

Owner was like, oh yeah, he hasn't eaten in two days. Get there, he's half the weight that a ferret his age should be. The owner is very clearly on meth. So house reeks of it, horrible. Had to file a police report, do all that kind of stuff. And it was just grim, man. Like, it just really messed me up. But it was like, in this moment, these are the things

need to happen. Animal has, like I have to put on the happy face, be like, oh, everything's okay, get the animal from the person, make sure that everything feels good, call the police, file the police report, put all the evidence in front of that, get the animal home, like, figure out what we're going to do, start finding a way to make him so that you, if you have a person, even any mammal, actually, that is not eaten in a certain amount of time, and you try to give them a full meal, they actually go in a shock and they die. Yeah. It's a horrible thing. And so. Yeah, refeating syndrome, but that's exactly what it is. So we had to figure out exactly what levels of food can he eat over that amount of time to prevent

refeating syndrome because he would just like his vitals would crash and he die. So trying to figure all that stuff out and then okay, everything is handled. Let's go sit the car and eat a pie and cry. You know? Yeah. No, I mean, I think it's a huge problem that I think people, you know, we push the emotion to the side, which I agree with you as healthy, but then you've got to pay that price. You have to.

You have to. Yeah. You can't dodge your karma. Like that debt needs to be paid and you need to feel that negative emotion. Yeah. And I've gotten very good, I think, at knowing when it's okay to push that. You know, it's like this is, it's only in a very critical situation. Like a really critical, like something could die.

There's no coming back from the failure on this one. You could fail. Sure. And you might learn something from it. But there's something that will break that cannot be unbroken in those situations. It's like, okay, now it's time to push this aside for a moment, handle it, you know. And like you said, with medicine, it's the same. I would say I would add one thing to that.

So I think that that's perfect. And I think that you can't discredit your ability to deal with it later. So the ability to set something aside is way easier when your brain knows that we can deal with this later and it won't be catastrophic. A lot of problems that I see with people are that they keep setting it aside, keep setting it aside, keep setting it aside. And then they don't know that they don't have confidence that they can deal with it when they open that basement door that's full of negativity, right? It can feel so incredibly overwhelming. And that can also become kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy because the more that you let things pile up, the more objectively overwhelming they are when you try to tackle them. so then you feel overwhelmed.

And so then you let things pile up more because you can't deal with it. And the reason you keep on letting it pile up is because you can't deal with it. And the more you let it pile up, the more impossible it becomes to deal with. And so that's where like oftentimes professional health, like with a medical professional, can really go a long way. Like so we're really good at helping people deal with unsolvable things. Yeah, I remember when I was when I was younger that kind of felt like a pressure cooker. You know, it's like it just keeps building up, building up, building up. And you're like, I don't even want to let's seem off that.

explode, you know, just going to leave it over there, right? And then you get another pressure cooker and another one. Then you're just, what I didn't realize at the time is like, it's not just like you're putting something in a cabinet somewhere walking away. You're maintaining that thing. There's energy that goes into keeping that pressure cooker pressurized, right? Every day, you're like, I'm just going to spend, maybe I'm only spending 5%. Well, maybe it's only 10%. Maybe it's 15% until you're just buried with this spinning plate maintenance that you have going on. then you don't know what to do with the damn thing, right? And that's, I, I've felt that before my life.

And I basically got to a point where it was like, you have to let the pressure off and just sometimes that's awful. Sometimes it's horrible going through that. But if you don't, then you're going to be maintaining that and paying taxes on it all the time. Absolutely. It's debilitating. So one of the three biggest willpower drains is emotional suppression.

So the more emotions that you're constantly, constantly, constantly suppressing, Like it's amazing how people don't realize so people will like look for motivation. They'll look for drive. They'll look for passion. They'll look for like discipline. And literally like all you need to do is is unburden yourself of all of your emotional suppression because just the maintenance. It's like your inventory is full and then you can't loot anything.

Like you can't you're like, how do I pick up this nice epic piece of loot? You can't because everything is full. So maybe that's. That's not the best analogy, but like, there's a man of maintenance cost. Huh? Yeah. It's like endless dailies so you don't get the raid? Sure. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're just grinding for the same old crap and not really making progress. And you just have to unburden your mind. Yeah. No, it makes sense.

I think that's the scariest thing, too, is that moment when you realize, like, oh, it's coming out. And there's nothing I can do about it now. And, like, that's a scary thing, especially if you have, haven't practiced that. You know, you haven't gotten used to feeling those types of emotions or even the fear of allowing yourself to feel that way or looking vulnerable to others, not realizing that that's okay. And even then, the idea that maybe you do make yourself vulnerable to somebody else and you do let those emotions out and they reject it.

You know, there's so many, there's so many fears that go along with that. I can totally get that. And yeah, that's just like everybody else. I went through the same things throughout my life. Like, I've gone through the exact same things. and I've just kind of learned that it's okay, right? It's okay to just be like, I'm just going to, I'm going to have a shit time for a minute, you know?

Yeah. It's fine. No, I think that even the language of going through something. So I think so many people get stuck because they avoid going through something. They try to prevent it. They try to avoid it. They try to keep it from hurting. They try to practice in secret or solve all their problems so that they don't have to go through

it. You know, I'll see this a lot with, you know, people who like just move from one relationship to another and just can't tolerate, like, being on their own for some amount of time. And, like, sometimes you just have to go through it. But the whole point of going through it is you end up on the other side, but you can't end up on the other side until you go through it. Yeah. I think the one thing, the one caveat to that is I found, you have to avoid circular thinking in that or it's like, this is bad, so everything's going to be bad, because this is bad, so everything's bad. The moment you start feeling those emotions, it's really easy to be like, everything is awful. And it's like, no, you can feel these so that later you don't have to feel them in the same way.

Or they don't have to define who you are. You don't have to spend the maintenance on that anymore. You can be different afterwards, and that's okay. You know, like, that was something I had to work through as well, was like realizing, like, it doesn't define it. who you are as a person, you know? Yeah, so I think there's a very important thing there about, see, when we experience negative emotion, what really screws us is the identity-based conclusions that come from a temporary elevated emotion.

So, like, when we feel a lot of negative emotion, we can form a conclusion. And then the problem is that conclusion stays with us, even when the emotion goes away. So that's where like, you know, and I think, I think you're speaking to, you maybe used to do that more and now you do it last. You recognize that even if you have negative thoughts in this moment, those negative thoughts are not necessarily true for all time. They don't make a determination about you. Yeah, that doesn't hit me like that at all anymore. I think when I was much younger, it was like, yeah, I mean, I think everybody has those thoughts growing up. It's like, oh, no, they don't like me.

My whole life is over. You know, like, I got an F. My whole life is over. It's like, I think as you get older, you realize very quickly, you're like, maybe that permanent record really wasn't that big of a deal. Yeah. It's like, maybe I'll still be a person afterwards. And it doesn't really define me, you know.

I, so, yeah, I, I love that phrase permanent record because like, we get terrified. I remember being terrified, too, of stuff going on my permanent record. But I don't think anyone. reads the permanent record. Like, no one reads the permanent record at school. Like, I don't know, I don't know. It's going to your permanent record. It's like, you know, it's like, it's like when you apply to university, like, I thought

they were going to send my permanent record. But you literally just request transcripts. Yep. That's it. Yeah. The, the school is too dysfunctional. And the university doesn't have the administrative bandwidth to look at everyone's permanent record or something.

You know, it's like, it's weird. I mean, sometimes you can get stuff like in med school and things like that. you've got certain, you know, yes or no questions and jobs where they ask you, like, have you ever broken a law or whatever? But yeah, I think it's like one of the biggest skills, and I think it's a skill that has to be learned. So the other challenges that people can look at you and they can say, oh, like, I wish I was like Thor, but you're a finished product. You're not, or somewhat finished.

Your version 2.0, let's say. Release. Right? And that's a skill. The ability to separate, tease apart, I am feeling this way now versus this is like a, a, ego-based conclusion that I carry with me is like, that's huge. So just feel the negativity and don't, and wait 24 hours to form conclusions about yourself. That's what I would like strongly recommend. Yeah, I mean, to be real with you, I don't even, I don't even see just like full

release or anything like that. Like, I'm going to be learning stuff the rest of my life. And that's a pretty cool place to be. Like, quite frankly, it's, it's neat. And the way that I generally see it is me as a person gets to learn who me as a person is over the rest of my life. And that means I get to learn about the things that I'm good at, learning about the things that I'm bad at, learn about things that I can improve, learn about things that, you know, maybe I don't want to do. And I get to be along for that ride. That's a pretty cool story, man.

And I don't even know what it is yet. So I get to read it the whole time. That's how I've always felt about this stuff for a long time. And it's neat because it's like, it's all disgusting. The whole thing is discovery, you know? Yeah, I really enjoy that. Yeah, I'd strongly encourage you, Thor, to spend some time in the in-between spaces because I think that's where some of the coolest discovery happens.

Oh, yeah. No, I can totally understand that. It's funny when you're the way that you're describing that is something I like to do quite a lot is just kind of take away any type of tasks that I have, take away any type of social obligation or technology or anything that's in the way. I just kind of let myself think about stuff. And I find that that's kind of rare in today. There's too much doom scrolling and, like, I have to stay on social media and I have to do

these things like, ah. And then you do that until you pass out and you wake up with your phone stuck to your face. You know, like just giving yourself even just 20 minutes a day to just stare into the middle distance and figure out who you are is crazy beneficial. I completely agree. So I think we see that. It's interesting you bring up technology because technology is destroying our. in between spaces.

I completely agree with that. It is taking away more than anything else. It is taking away our time with ourselves. Yeah. So what I really love doing and like one of my best productivity hacks is pacing. Like not listening to music, not listening to a podcast, just pacing. When I don't feel like working, I get up in pace. And then oftentimes when I'm done pacing, I'm ready to work.

And it's kind of, it's kind of funny because I think there's, a number of people that do that in video games as odd as that is. Like run around in a circle in Dalaran. They're not really doing anything. They're just kind of like running around in a circle in Dallaran doing nothing, right? Not thinking about anything. That's a common thing. Yeah, pacing in games

is a very common thing. How many of you guys ran around in a circle in Dalaran or Ogrammar or Stormwind? Just there's so many. The city is huge though. They just pay it. Just running a circle. And they don't do anything? Nope. They're not even waiting for a raid. They're not waiting for anything.

It's just like I'm just going to run around in a circle. There's a lot of people that do this. It's very common behavior. I've done it too. I've never done that. It's, it's,

it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's really, all of chat is saying that they do it. Yeah. So what's going through your head?

Are you like, nothing? Sometimes nothing. Wow. You're just kind of gone. And you're just like, I'm just going to run in a circle for a little bit. Sometimes you'll be talking to someone.

Sometimes there's just nothing going on. Some people just like doing that sometimes. And I, I think that is sort of that in-between space where technology is still involved. But you really only see that a lot of the times in multiplayer games that have downtime areas, which are areas that are intended to be when you're not doing anything, like sitting in town. It's kind of interesting. That's so wild.

Yeah, wild therapy, exactly. GTA-5. Yeah, people are talking about the same thing. Yeah, GTA-5, I can kind of understand. The GTA-5 is a game that I feel like you can just absorb the ambiance of the game. game. Yeah. Pre-game

Overwatch. That's another good example. It's just that jumping back and forth left to right, that walking in a circle in the,

in that area. It's areas where there's, yeah. Yeah. It's areas where there is no objective and you are, you are not currently tasked with doing anything,

and you just kind of turn off for a little bit. That's really interesting. Yeah. Cool. Well, if there are any last thoughts or questions, I mean, I know we've covered a lot of ground today and,

you know, a couple days ago. No, I think this is awesome, man. And I always have a blast coming and talking to you. Likewise. Yeah, it's super nice. Yeah, I think it's, I really enjoy talking to you. I think it's like really interesting to hear your, it feels to me like you've attained a very high rank without following a meta that I've been religiously following.

So I'm so, and like, that's what's cool about this is like, I don't think you need to learn this. You can discover it. So I really like listening to your experience. of stuff. I think your impact on the community is hugely beneficial. And it's so interesting to look at what you do through the lens of what I've learned. Because I see a lot of these mechanisms of even the way that you talk to your community. I'm not surprised at all that people in your community do incredibly well. Because I think you, whether you realize it or not, you're basically dissolving their ego for them, right? I didn't realize that was what was going on.

Yeah, that's the biggest effect. I mean, I don't know if it's the biggest, but like that's what I see, right? So even the ability to fail is ego-oriented, reframing the way that you look at things to remove ego. And I think that's why people see this explosion of like progress. Because once the ego gets the fuck out of the way, like I want you to just think about this for a second. When you're living your life, you oftentimes know what the right thing to do is. You know that you're smart enough. You know that you need to do these sequence of steps. But something within you, whole, you back. And we think it's willpower. We think it's a lack of discipline. We think whatever. But no, if you really pay attention, it is going to be your perception of yourself.

What will people think it'll hurt if I fail? It'll be you telling yourself not to proceed because of X, Y, Z. And if you literally look at it, okay, what is the negative consequence that you're worried about? Your mind doesn't think about it logically because it doesn't think, oh, like, this is a game jam. It's not like, this goes on my permanent record. Right? Like, the thought is absurd. But your logic does not function properly.

There is some kind of fear or avoidance of emotion, which, by the way, the ego and negative emotion are very tied hand in hand. Right? So like, like, just the more you remove yourself from the equation because what's holding you back, it's you. Remove yourself from the equation and you'll start to fly. You're really what's weighing you down.

And it's, it's like amazing how you've learned that for yourself, internalized it, applied it, and now you teach it to other people, which I think is super cool. Well, thank you. And I think, I think the thing that I really enjoy about it is, like I said before, I like solving puzzles. And sometimes person's biggest puzzles them, you know. I think it's almost always them. It's always them. So when someone brings me a puzzle like that, the best thing that I try to do for that is to see, how does this? person feel in that situation? Because you can't really tell someone like, you should feel this way, but you can be like, try to understand how they feel in the position that they're in with the understanding they have. The more information that I receive about the person, the more that I can understand, like, how they feel, why they feel that way, the things that they're working with,

the easier it is to sort of form that, that mental image of who they are. And then it's like, well, how would I break out of that if I was in that position? And then try to hand them that, you know, and be like, this might work, you know? Yeah. So I think that there's a subtle, really important thing in that answer, which is that, see, when someone loses confidence in themselves, they have all these beliefs, right? And then I think the key thing is that a lot of the default thinking is like, oh, this person is wrong. So I see that a lot when I'm working with people who are suicidal, who are like, you know, I have no reason to live. And the right answer isn't, hey, here are all the reasons you should live. That's invalidating. Also doesn't help you understand their situation. The right answer is to add more to the equation, right? It's not to try to remove the negative necessarily. Like, that can be done, definitely. That's important over time.

We want to do that. But the first thing to do is, like, add more information. And when I see that a lot of people are like, oh, I'm a loser because of X, Y, Z, right? And you can't change your past, but you can add additional experiences to your life that will change what's on the right side of the equals. sign. Yep. And the real tragedy is that when we feel like we're losers, we stop adding more experience. Oh, I had this one terrible relationship and now I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life because you won't have other relationships. And that's what's so paralyzing about

it is the very thing that will solve the problem is like doing the, the thing that you don't want to do is exactly what you need to do to fix the problem. Yep. It's funny because I drill that down as like a single phrase a lot of the times. It doesn't always apply, but when it does, I think it's quite funny is someone would be like, oh, I'm not a good artist, not a good artist, I'm never going to be a good artist. I was like, no, you're not a good artist. Yet.

Yeah. And that's that single word reframes the whole thing. It's like, oh, wait a minute. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I'm with you. It's not about convincing someone, no, you actually like, you're, oh, like, you're such a great artist. And it's like, they'll just be like, no, I'm not.

Yeah. Like, you're now you're lying to me. Now I don't trust anything you say. Absolutely. Right. No. Your art sucks right now, but you're not a great artist yet. It's fine.

It's wild, but this reminds me of a sociopath that I once worked with. Who is like, you know, and they were like, you know, I'm a sociopath. And I was like, yeah. I was like, what are you going to do about it? Right? I'm not going to convince you otherwise. Like, yes, that is correct. But what does that mean about your future?

It isn't deterministic. And some of the best people that I know are sociopaths. They like, they make a very conscious, non-emotional. decision that like I'm going to live a good life and I'm going to be add value to the people around me and I'm going to that is the way that I want to live. So just just because you are something today doesn't mean that you have to be that thing tomorrow. It is the nature of life. And forget about humans. Life to adapt, to grow, to survive, to improve. That's what life does. That's what separates it from non-life. All right. Are you streaming? Because I'll all right.

you. I am not. Okay. If you like, you could, you could raid the ferrets, though. Okay, let's raid the ferrets. I am going to do this. Okay, where are the ferrets? It is ferret software. I will link you the channel. Here you go.

They are currently in food mode, but they're in the cage in sleep time. So they sleep 18 hours a day. Yeah, for those who don't know, the ferret rescues run completely off of ad revenue. so everything that we do for them, all of the medical everything, is all done from ads. You don't have to sub or throw bits or anything. It's just watching the stream, doesn't it? We are rating.

Hell yeah. Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming on, Thor. Good luck on your journey. Spend some time. And for those of you all that are like paying attention, like spend some time in the in-between spaces.

If you want to connect that what are that transcendent weird, maybe it's just subconscious and epigenic memory. Fair enough. But that seems to be what works. And take care of y'all. Thank you all very much for coming today.