HealthyGamerGG - Stop Learning from Failure and Start Learning from Mistakes

Episode Date: April 11, 2026

In this episode, Dr. K breaks down why the popular advice to "learn from your failures" is often the biggest mistake you can make. He introduces the clinical concept of mentalization—the skill of separating your internal thoughts from external reality—and explains how mastering it can help you stop misinterpreting social signals and start building more effective life strategies. What to expect in this episode: Mistakes vs. Failures: A crucial distinction between learning from an error you made and over-correcting for a bad outcome that was actually out of your control. The Trap of "Just to be Safe": How doctors and individuals alike sabotage their future by making defensive rules based on a single bad experience, leading to "incidental findings" and further life complications. The Science of Mentalization: An introduction to understanding that your internal beliefs (like "I am ugly") are not the same as external reality, and how to add more "variables" to your thinking to break cycles of hopelessness. The Preconscious Conclusion: Why your brain "serves up" logical-sounding conclusions on a silver platter before you even realize you’ve made them, and how to slow down that process. The 64% Flirting Rule: Surprising research showing that the majority of flirting is designed to be missed for "plausible deniability," meaning an absence of obvious signals doesn't necessarily mean an absence of interest. Making Friends by the Clock: Why most people give up on social groups too early, failing to realize that it takes 50 to 200 hours of contact to actually form a friendship. Pursuing "Delusional" Dreams: Why you should run toward—not away from—impossible goals, and how the "failed" journey toward them often builds the exact skills you need for future success. The Power of Secrecy: A psychological and spiritual explanation for why keeping your biggest goals secret can actually help compound your drive to achieve them. Something sexy is coming to HG! Join the waitlist: https://bit.ly/3PGdmUAHG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3SztHG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Many promotions are available both in-store and online, though some may vary. Hey, chat. Welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Al-Ocunoja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist gamer and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in.

Okay. Shall we get started, chat? Okay. So I don't get it. I don't get what I did wrong. Nothing's, not everything's a lesson, Ryan. Sometimes you just fail. So I'm one of these, I've seen the office a couple of times.

I think it's a brilliant show, a lot of the show. And sometimes what's great about the office is they have some like good wisdom in there. And I think this is one of the things that is like the trickiest to understand, right? When you, sometimes you just fail. And there's a lot of like sentiment on the internet of learning from your mistakes, constantly improving, iterative improvement, you know, fail forward. Right? So like always be learning from your failures.

Like failures are just paths on the stepping on the stepping stones on the path to success. And I've said this stuff before. I believe that a lot of that stuff is true. But I think there's something really weird that a lot of people don't understand, which is that learning from your failures is oftentimes the biggest mistake you can make. And something that they actually teach us in medical school is why you should learn from your mistakes, not your failures. So I know it sounds kind of weird, so let's understand. Okay?

So I'm trying to think about which clinical case I want to share that illustrates this point. What's a good one? Okay. So when I was an intern, we had a case of a patient who came in, was evaluated in primary care clinic for particular things. There were some weird abnormal symptoms. They were having sweating. They were having diarrhea. We weren't really sure what was going on.

A couple months later, they start to have some neurological symptoms. Okay? So first they presented with like some diarrhea, things like that. Then a few months later, they present with neurological symptoms. symptoms, specifically weakness in the right leg. And once there is focal weakness, they got sent to a neurologist, discovered that there was like a mass that was pressing on the right side of their lungar spine.

And then we biopsyed them. We did imaging, right, found the mass. Mass looked heterogeneous, which is bad news. Let me actually show you guys. Let's see if we can find this. heterogeneous mass on right lumbar spine. This one looks homo— Yeah, here's a good picture.

So this actually looks homogenous. I don't know if you guys can tell. This is a heterogeneous mass. So you guys see how some parts are light and some parts are dark, and there's like little lobules here and things like that. Whereas this is like—it's like—it's like— a spot. Maybe this is heterogeneous, and I'm not a radiologist. Let's look at this one real quick. Yeah, so this one looks more heterogeneous. So you guys see how there's like light stuff over here

and dark stuff over here. And there's like little lobules. Let's take a look at, yeah. So you can see there's a dark area here in the middle and then like a lighter ring around it. So generally speaking, when we've got masses, the more heterogeneous they are, the worse they are. Okay. So if you get a cyst, a cyst is like a fluid-filled pocket, right? So there's like a pocket and there's just fluid inside. Sometimes you'll have like solid tumors. So you'll have like little lumps. And it's like one kind of tissue that starts to mutate and grows. But when you've got a mask that's like a lot of different tissues that is highly, highly suggestive of cancer. So we ended up biopsying the mask. Turns out that it's some advanced stage of cancer that has mutated and has, all these different expressions, and then, like, turned out that, you know, the patient didn't end up doing too well, passed away, I think, about a year, year and a half later. And so when a situation like this happens as a doctor, the most natural thing to do is to say, like, oh, my God, this was, like a huge miss. Like, we missed cancer and a patient. For months before that, they had these vague, like, diarrhea symptoms and some of these other, like, you know, maybe a little bit of fever here and there, some of some fatigue.

maybe a little bit of anemia. There's all this kind of like mild, vague sort of stuff. And so one of the weirdest lessons they teach us in medical school is that you should not, you should be clear about learning from your mistakes, not your failures. So what happens in medicine when someone misses a cancer diagnosis is the doctor feels really bad. Sometimes there's a lawsuit.

And then there's this part of our brain that does something called counterfactual thinking. Okay? So this is the part of our brain that basically when we make a mistake goes back in time and considers alternatives that would not have led to the mistake. This is a fundamental faculty that allows us to learn from our mistakes. The problem is in a field like medicine, if we look at this and we say, okay, if a patient comes in with diarrhea, I miss to the cancer, should I start ordering imaging on patients with diarrhea? just to be safe. Most dangerous thing that we say in medicine, yeah, we're going to do this just to be safe.

Okay? And the answer is like, no, you shouldn't do that. This is what's really confusing for a lot of people. Happens a lot in psychiatry with imaging specifically, where like some people will want to order brain imaging when someone has a psychiatric diagnosis. But generally speaking, brain imaging is not indicated for most psychiatric diagnoses.

And the reason for that is because people don't realize this. When you do something, there is a cost to it. I don't just mean a financial cost. So when you order a test like an MRI, there are these things called incidental findings. The test isn't perfect. Let's actually take a look at incidental findings, lumbar MRI. Okay, so this is great.

This is perfect. Okay. So when I do a Google search for incidental findings of lumbar, This looks like American Journal of Radiology, Incidental Findings. This looks the same. No, this is heterogeneous. But you guys remember we saw that lump that was, yeah, this one. Okay?

You guys see like, this looks pretty freaking similar. Incidental findings on Lumpur, MRI. Like, this looks kind of similar. You guys see that? So, and presumably because it's from, I'm assuming that Google index correctly. So here's the problem with like just ordering MRIs when someone has bad stuff. You know, if you have a bad case and you start ordering MRIs, you find things like this.

It's called incidental finding. It's like not everybody's body is perfect or actually everybody's body is imperfect. We've all got little lumps. We've all got little bits of scar tissue. We've got like veins and arteries that maybe are hypoeclusive or whatever. And if you go scanning, pan scanning stuff, we're going to pick up all the stuff that is actually normal. And then here's the real harm of that.

Once you find that lump, you've got a biopsy it. And if you biopsy it, there's a risk with biopsy. So if I'm biopsying something on your lumbar spine, there's like a risk of nerve damage. There's a risk of bleed in there. And when I get a bleed from a lumbar biopsy, then that's going to compress on the spine. And then I can have neurological problems.

Okay? So one of the weirdest things about medicine is doctors will make mistakes. and we should correct for those. But not all bad patient outcomes are mistakes from doctors. Right. So sometimes in life, you just fail. It doesn't mean that you did something wrong. And just like in medicine, if you start adjusting your baseline strategy based on a failure

where you did something wrong, you will end. up living life in a very suboptimal way. Not only is it that sometimes in life you just fail and there's nothing to learn, it's actually learning from failures without mistakes actually harms your strategic thinking in the future. Okay? We'll end up, and this is something that literally we see all the time in psychiatry. So I would say like you could even describe psychotherapy as the practice of unlearning from failures that weren't mistakes, right? How do I get this person? How do I get mom or dad to love me more? The failure is that they don't love me. How do I fix that? Oh, I behave in this way and I behave in this way and I behave in this way. We form all of these

adaptations because dad or mom doesn't love me. And then we carry those strategic elements into our future relationships. Now that I know how to get dad or mom to love me, I have to clean up after them. I have to admit blame even when I'm not wrong. So we learn all of these lessons from our failures that end up creating additional failures. So just like the incidental finding on the MRI, if we start acting in this way, we will actually create additional problems. And so like a big part of my job is helping people understand that sometimes in life when you get dumped has nothing to do with you. Right? Like sometimes in life, so a very concrete example, sometimes in relationships if you get cheated on, that's actually, there's nothing wrong with the way that you are in that relationship.

And if you make an adaptation based on that failure of a relationship, oh, since I got cheated on, now I need to be more vigilant of my future partners. I need them to share location. This is your counterfactual thinking. How do we solve for this painful failure? I need them to share a location. I need to check their text messages. I need to make sure that they don't have platonic relationships with people who they could end up dating.

I need to make sure of these things, right? we want to do it just to be safe. This is how we're fixing this failure. We have to learn our lesson. What's the lesson that you learn when your partner cheats on you? These are the lessons that people practically learn. And then if you go into your next relationship with those lessons learned from your failure, your failed relationship, then that will be like biopsying and incidental finding causing a bleed that then creates further problems.

literally creates sabotage in your future relationships. And we have this whole culture, right? That's like, learn from your failures, learn from your failures, learn from your failures, fail a thousand times. And like, I think that's good in many ways, right? So failing many times. So I like the proverb, you know, fail, lose your first 100 games of go as quickly as possible. It's great advice, right?

Don't be afraid to lose. Don't be afraid to fail. But I want y'all to think about this. So the other example that I really like about this, what is the great? talking about gaming. See, when you lose a game, this is going to be kind of specific, okay? I know not many people play Dota 2. So, like, sometimes, you know, you lose a game of Dota 2, and I play support.

And there's this item called Hand of Midas. And Hand of Midas does kind of what you would think it would do. You spend a lot of money to give you an item that then gives you more money. And it takes about 18 minutes in the game to refund your Midas. So you spend $2,200 gold on an item. a midas, and it takes 18 minutes to get 2,200 gold back, which means 23 minutes onward, that item gives you a net positive. But for 18 minutes of the game, the item is basically wasted gold.

So in Dota, this is what's so interesting, if you guys are wondering, like, you know, why do people stay stuck at low rank? They stay stuck at low rank in video games and in life because they learn the wrong lessons from their failures. And it's not even their failures. You're like, okay, so now I'm going to buy this item because this game is lasting 60 minutes. Man, I really should have bought Midas. I'm going to buy Midas next game.

And buying Midas, early as a support, actually decreases your chances of victory. So the adaptation that you make based on this failure sabotages your future efforts. Right? Oh, this person is using this champion. This person is using this gun. I should only use sniper rifle the whole time. That's like, that's what I'm going to do. And if you look at low-rank players, what you find, and if you ask them, right?

My favorite example of this is like when they start arguing with high-ranked players. People will say like, oh, yeah, like this hero or champion or whatever, this item is overpowered. And a high-ranked player is like, no, it's not. Like, you just need to know, like, how to use it. They're like, no. In this game, this person used this item, and they won. This is how we're living life. We have these failures and we learn the wrong ones.

lessons. Hey, y'all. If you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health. And so we start by understanding what literally is meditation. How does experience shape us as human beings? How do we strengthen the mind itself as an organ? And so by understanding our mind, we understand a very, very simple tool, a crucial tool that we have to learn how to use if we want to build the life that we want to. So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today. So now the question becomes, okay, you said learn from your mistakes, not your failure, is how? How do I know the difference between a failure and a mistake?

Right. When should I learn a lesson? When should I correct my behavior? This is where things get a bit complicated. But I would say a really good rule of thumb is your own internal emotional state. the more calm you are, the more likely you are to not learn the wrong lessons after a bad outcome. Okay? And this is something like literally, we do such a good job of this in medicine.

So I remember I had a patient who I was taking care of all day. And then at the end of the day, they got sent to the ICU. Or actually, they didn't get sent to the ICU. Then what happened is my shift ended, and the person who was covering me came, on, right? So at 6 p.m., my shift ends, the next person comes. We do this thing called passoff, where I tell this guy, okay, hey, there's, and one of the things that we tell is like, okay, which patients should you be careful of overnight? So the night staff is like smaller than the day staff. You're taking care of four times as many patients because most of them are asleep.

Most of them are stabilized by the day team. So my colleague comes in and I'm like, hey, this is someone that you should really watch. And I'm going through this scenario. I'm like, you know, they're, they had this problem and then they're like respiratory rate dropped. O2SAT started dropping. Their blood pressure is now, like, actually a little bit lower. Here's what their labs show. We just ordered PM labs, so we'll see what's going on. He looked at the scenario, and he's like, oh, my God, why isn't this person in the ICU? And I was like, well, I talked to my attending about it. You know, we checked in three times. And my attending is like, you know, low threshold to send to the ICU, but they're not really there yet. And the person I was passing

off to was like, this is insane. This person should be in the ICU. So they panicked. They called the ICU and they're like, hey, we need to transfer someone right away. And then I felt really bad about it. I was like, oh, shit. Like, I really screwed up. Because once they started talking about it, they were like, wait a second. Let me understand this. They've been, they're septic, basically, right? So they meet service criteria. They have dropping blood pressure, elevated white count, decreased respiratory, like they're going to be intubated or may need pressers. Like, they need to be in the ICU. And I was like, oh, shit, this guy's right. And then I felt really bad. And then something cool happened.

The next day, we talk about this, there's this thing called Morning Report, where you come in the next morning and the night shift, right? So now I'm taking care of the patient from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. And then my colleague is taking care of the patient from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. And then I come in and then we discuss cases in the morning. And so I talked to the attending about it. And attending is like, you didn't do anything wrong. I was like, what do you mean? I missed this.

First thing he said is, I was like, I don't know how I missed it. And he said, well, this is what I said. I said, I don't know how I missed this. It happened right before my eyes. And then he said, first of all, that's why you missed it. The things that happen right before your eyes are the things that are the hardest to see. I was like, damn, that's a good one. Stuck with me.

But the other thing is, like, he made an argument for, okay, like, let calm down. I know that your colleague was, like, really up, like, concerned and panicked and whatever. And then you kind of got panicked. But let's, like, think about this scenario, right? Your attending was involved at all three points. you're attending has way more experience than you do. It's kind of like an equivocal case. Actually, you didn't do anything wrong.

I think it's completely reasonable to say, hey, you should keep a close eye on this person. We were on the fence about sending them to the ICU. You didn't miss anything. You looked at the data. You realized it was like kind of suss. And then you decided, like, let's not send them yet. But we're keeping a close eye.

That's completely reasonable. Okay? So here's the thing. When we get upset, when we become destabilized, we look for things that we can do differently, right? Because when I get cheated on, I don't want this to happen again. How can I prevent it? How can I be safe? How can I be sure? And negative emotional circuitry and counterfactual thinking go hand in hand. Because counterfactual thinking activates when we make a mistake. It's to consider alternative hypotheses.

Why is it called counterfactual? Because there's the facts of what happened. And they're things that are not the facts of what happened. And when we're considering those things, they're actually oftentimes the opposite of the facts, right? That's what like, that's what retrospective hypothesizing is. Does that kind of make sense? And our brain is wired in such a way where when negative emotion activates, counterfactual thinking activates with it, and we start to make adaptations. So the most important thing you can do to avoid learning from your failures, which I really think is really important. Don't just reflect. flexively learn from your failures.

Sometimes you do just fail, and the reason that you fail is because there's a lot of things out of your control. But the most devastating thing that you can do is to start making adjustments to your behavior when the thing that went bad was somebody else's fault was out of your control. Right? When someone is driving drunk and you get into a car accident,

It's not clear to me that you made a mistake. And even though that's a bad outcome can be considered a failure of sorts, got to be really careful about it. So step number one is to calm down, like literally, just calm down emotionally. Talk it through with someone in the case like this is what was cool. The reason I shared that story is because the attending talked me down. Right? He was like, hey, like, hold on a second.

And like, that's their job as attending. That's our job is attending. That's what we do. We have medical trainees who are in high pressure situations. who get emotional, and if we're not careful, they will learn the wrong lessons. So step number one is just look at yourself. Are you calm? And if the answer, this is really important, if you are not calm, don't make a conclusion.

Right? This is, I want you all to think about the precision of this. I'm not even saying what you should learn or shouldn't learn. I don't know, right? That depends on the scenario. The key cognitive thing to do is don't be final. Don't conclude something. This is what I should do going forward when you're emotional.

This is how people end up with problems, right? Like bluntly. Like you're really pissed at your partner and you're like, oh my God, never again, never again. And then you form some kind of a conclusion. It becomes an ultimatum absolutely sabotages. I'm never going to do this again. I conclude I am ugly. I conclude this type of people can men can't be trusted, women can't be trusted, when you're feeling hurt.

And those generalization, black and white, just don't make a conclusion. Wait till you're calm and then just revisit the situation. That's as simple as it is, but it isn't easy. Make sense? Checking with chat. How does one get the wisdom to accurately assess if one is at fault or someone else? Excellent question. We're going to get to this a little bit later in mentalization.

First, so here's the first thing that wisdom teaches you when you're asking the question, how do I tell if I'm at fault or someone else? First thing that wisdom teaches you is be skeptical of the word or, right? Just be skeptical of the word or. If your mind is thinking an or, that's actually wrong, period. Now, there are some situations where I may be totally in the right and someone may be totally in the wrong, but that should be the conclusion that you end to. it should not be the hypothesis that you start with.

That is something that we call a diagnosis of exclusion. You should consider all of the possibilities without or first, and if none of those are true, then you end up with, I am wrong or they are wrong. But generally speaking, in relationships, okay, announcement coming soon, in relationships, things are created between two people. So my favorite example of this is erotic transfers. So this is a really common thing that happens in therapy, where when you form intimate bonds with somebody else,

sometimes sexual thoughts come with them. And so, you know, oh, I have a patient who's going through a divorce and their husband doesn't listen to them and they don't really understand their feelings and they don't understand what they're going through and they're so, they put on weight and things like that and they're like always walking around, they're depressed,

and they have sweatpants on, and they've got a stain on their sweatshirt, and then they come to an office with Dr. Gay. And Dr. Gay is, oh, my God. He's always wearing, like, back then I used to wear, like, ties and button downs, and I'm listening, and I'm there for them, and they start crying, and I'm so empathic,

and oh, my God. And so sexual feelings can arise. Very common. And the thing is, this is something, and then there's erotic countertransference, right? So then like something happens between us. But this is not like they're not making it. It's not like I'm so sexy that they're into me or they're so sexy that I'm into them. This is something that is created between two people.

Things get created within relationships. In relationship, there's three people. There's me, there's you, and there's the relationship. has a life of its own. Okay? So when we're trying to understand, okay, am I at fault or they at fault? What I want you all to understand is that there are contributions from me and there are contributions from you. And that nuanced way of thinking is the way to figure out where the appropriate blame goes.

What could I have done differently? What could you have done differently? And this is also a point where there are times where there's really nothing you could have done differently. Right? You think through those stuff. But actually, you could have done things differently. This is where things are getting really down the rabbit hole. But doing those things differently, even though they could have solved that situation,

they would create problems most of the time. Right? So it's like, for example, if I run into erotic transference, you could argue that, okay, if I only do virtual appointments, the likelihood of erotic transference goes down. But do I actually want to do that? Is that the right thing to do? I don't think so. Great question, though.

So first is step away from the word or. Second is calm down and then reanalyze the situation. Great question. Okay, what can people do if they're too far gone for any help? I'm glad you asked. Oh, how does someone with OCD follow this advice? Okay, great question. Let's talk about that real quick.

So if you have a diagnosable illness, so here's why advice on the Internet sucks. See, when people give advice on the internet, myself included, we have to make assumptions about you. We have to make assumptions about how your mind works. We have to make assumptions about your brain chemistry. We have to make assumptions about your pathological, like where you are on the pathology spectrum. So you can tell someone, hey, just meet more people if you're lonely.

And that advice can be fine. But if someone has social anxiety, that advice changes drastically. If someone is on the autism spectrum, that advice changes drastically. If someone has ADHD, the advice is insufficient because it presumes a certain baseline. Right? Oh, if you lose your house, just go stay in your condo. What's the big deal? If you run out of money, just ask your dad to pay your credit card bill.

I'm confused. That's how I deal with my money problems. Right? And this is why, like, these are all good questions. And so there's two basic things that you can do. One is you do the thing to address the pathology so that the advice works. So if you have intrusive thoughts that are negative and self-blank, and whatever, right? You have to deal with those intrusive thoughts first. Then you can apply the

advice. It's a great question. And it's what makes my job hard. And it's why most of what I say will be wrong. Right? Because I'm talking to the internet. But the internet isn't a person. It's a homogenous, like, collection of people. The good news is that then why do we even do this? Okay? That's why I love being a clinician, right? I'm a psychiatrist, and this is a lesson that I learned by working with individuals. Great. Individual work is fantastic. So that's challenging, for sure. But then on the flip side, what we also know is that there are things that apply to more than one person, right? So just because you're an individual doesn't mean that you are completely unique and you share no features with other human beings. Since that is also true, that is why we can try to do this on the internet. Because something that I say, and this is literally why I started streaming, what I noticed that in my office, I was saying the same things to a bunch of people. I was like, this is weird.

This is not actually individual. This is like, I'm teaching the same shit. And I did it with one person, helps them. And then I do it with somebody else helps them. Do it with somebody else helps them. Now it's like my go-to. And it's like, if these Christ, are met, then guide the patient down this road.

And it works really well. And then I was like, well, hold on a second. Can I teach this to lots of people at the same time? And how many of that then would it help? That was literally the thought that I had when I decided to start. Or that was the thought that I had before I decided to start streaming. The end of that road of thinking, it resulted in, okay, let's start streaming. Great question, though.

Okay. But someone asked another one. Let's get to this. What can people do if they just feel like they're too far gone for any help? Okay. So I want to share a couple of posts that I thought were fantastic for more subreddit. So, so I'm now officially becoming a 40-year-old male virgin. Okay?

And I love this. You're now 41-year-old virgin is back with astonishing results. Okay? I love this post. Okay. So here is the astonishing result. Nothing. Nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. I'm sorry to let you guys down since there's always this BS talk about once you focus on your mission, your job, don't think about getting a relationship, just letting go not caring. Things will fall into place. No, they don't. Nothing happens. The women at work ignore me like I'm used to be. They talk about me about work related stuff, but they don't tell me the time of day. They don't look at me and they couldn't care less. Love this. Not because this person is suffering. But I think this person captures a huge problem that people face, which is that there's a lot of advice out there. Right? People say, do this, do this, do this. And this is great. I like this because this person actually like measured, right?

They're like, okay, I'm a 40-year-old virgin. I'm going to try to do a bunch of stuff. And one year later, I like this because it has the bones of a scientific study. And a year later, I tried all this stuff. Actually, nothing happens. None of it works. Okay? Now, here's the problem, right? And I think they're good at this.

They say, you know, I can already read the comments. Oh, there's so much frustration in your post. No wonder no one wants to be with you. See, you're all attached to the outcome. Otherwise, you wouldn't write like this, et cetera, et cetera. Well, you don't know me in person. I do so many things right, way more than a lot of other people. I'm not cynical.

I'm not an asshole. I care for people. I'm funny. I help. I listen. I have great skills. I care for myself. I have stuff to do.

I'm busy. No addictions. I write good music. Right. They're also, by the way, six foot seven. Okay. No other girl. So he gets flirted with by ladies over 60.

You have diabetes. No other girl, woman has ever flirted with me except old ladies. Okay. So I think this is a great post. And I appreciate. when people post their problems. So I was a little bit conflicted about responding to this publicly

because on the one hand, it sort of feels like this person is... Let me see if I could... I want to show this. I feel conflicted, but I'm going to show you. Okay. So here's what really struck to me. That is the reason I decided to post again

to make stuff clear that gets ignored by Dr. Kane, Healthy Gamer Team. You can do everything right. You can work your ass off. You can have all the skills in the world. but a lot of us are still going to lose. Right? I noticed a trend with a lot of HG content recently.

Everything isn't working in your life is in some way or another your fault. You don't have a boyfriend and girlfriend. It's because you don't do this or that. Your mind tells you this or that. You're not moving forward in life. Okay? So this is kind of a challenge.

This is a conflicting situation. This person says, look, I'm posting because I've watched content for a year. And this person has invested a lot and things like emotional regulation, social skills building, maybe working out, going to the gym. They do a lot of stuff. And they're here to tell us, look, at H.E., you guys are like, hey, do this, do this, do this.

So now I'm sort of conflicted because of this. So when I read this post, I think that this person isn't doing everything right. And in fact, I think they're doing a couple of things very, very, very wrong. But on the flip side, that's what I always say, right? I always blame the person. Hey, you're doing something wrong. So let's start with that before we get to what to do. So the first thing that I want to say is I've worked with a lot of people.

I'm a psychiatrist, work with people who are depressed, hopeless, people who did everything right. top of the list of people who did everything right and life still fucks them. Mothers with borderline personality disorder. If you've ever talked to a mother with borderline personality disorder, 55 years old, 58 years old, 62 years old, estranged from all of their kids, they did everything right. They tried everything. They listened to all of the advice. They've been in therapy for years.

Their kids are sometimes you just fail. I've also worked with people with major depressants. disorder, bipolar disorder, who tried everything. They've been in therapy. For years, nothing works. So now I have a challenge. So on the one hand, I don't want to be punching down, right? This person has the balls.

I'm pretty sure it's a dude. To show up and say, hey, here's my experience, shares their authentic experience. And they even point out this pattern that Dr. Kay says, it's always your fault, always your fault. On the flip side, so on the one hand, it feels like bad. to punch down and say, hey, yeah, you're right, you are doing something wrong. On the flip side, like, what's my job? My job is precisely to help people like this.

That's why I got into this. And one of the scariest things is that this person isn't wrong. Sometimes there is nothing that you can do. Nine-year-old, diagnosed with myeloma, spreading through their body, there is nothing you can do. I've had treatment refractory depression patients, nothing we could do. I've had people who are 40-year-olds virgins, 50-year-old virgins, 65-year-old virgins feels like nothing you can do.

And maybe there is nothing you can do. Here's the first thing that really scares me. When you conclude that there is nothing that can be done, there's a chance that you're right and there's a chance that you're wrong. But the thing that you can do to really doom yourself is to incorrectly conclude that there is nothing you can do. The most damning thing. So our job is first to get people to question their conclusions. Right.

And this is where like I say this because there are so many people that are. have tried it all. This is not like a small part of the population. This part of the population is growing. Or just fucking stuck as wage slaves, lonely, isolated, in cells. Right? There are so many people out there who have looked at advice on the internet, but nothing seems to work.

And this is where, how can I say this? see, this presumes that advice fixes the problem. The problem, though, is that if something is not functioning properly, in the way that you approach the advice, in the way that you move through the world, if there is something more fundamental so that advice doesn't work, then that needs to be fixed. And I want to go back, so mentalization,

I don't know that this person, has a personality. I'm not diagnosing me with anything, okay, but illustrates a point. So when I read this post, I turned, because I've been reading this text for a year, okay? So mentalization-based treatment is a treatment for personality disorders. And the cool thing about it is it's very similar to like yogic practice and meditative practice. Yogis in India teach the same stuff that mentalization people do. The difference is that mentalization is designed for a group with a particular pathology. So these are people with borderline personality disorder, for example, right?

So the 58-year-old mother, like I said, whose children have alienated them. And they will say literally the same thing. They say, I've looked at all this advice, I've read all these things about relationships and stuff like that, I've tried giving gifts, I've tried listening to them, I've tried doing this, I've tried doing this, I've tried doing this, nothing works. And that's because it's not the action that is creating the problem. It is the underlying way that this person relates to the things around them. That's why we call it a personality disorder.

Now, I've no idea if this person has a personality disorder or not. I don't really, I can't evaluate that based on the information. It's not my job. My point, though, is that this thing that works for BPD can be applied in some way, sort of like in the yogic system. We can use it for everybody. So if you are someone that tries a lot of things. advice and none of it works, you have to look deeper.

And this may not work for you. But I am still going to try. Right? So if I meet you where you're at and you're like, yeah, fuck, I'm not willing to do that. I could be wrong. Could be arrogant. Could be an asshole. But for those of y'all who have given up on anything working, that's why I fucking

started this is to help y'all. And I want to make a case. I want to show you. guys what the actual problem is. Okay, it could be, could be, hypothetically. So this is a problem of mentalization. And let's understand what mentalization is. It's kind of like such a weird thing. Okay? So mentalization is understanding that actions and behaviors in the outside world are connected and driven by things in the inside world. That's it. Now, it seems like common sense, and it sort of is. But there are a lot of things

about mentalization that are really hard to understand. Once we show you guys what's in the book, it'll become more clear. So the first thing is that everyone is going to say, yeah, I do that. Everybody does that. And you're kind of right. Everyone does it to some degree, but some people do it more poorly than others. And the better that you get at it, the less likely you will end up with nothing works. It's the fundamental thing. So if nothing works, but it works for other people,

I don't know if this makes sense. There's like a piece of the equation that's missing, right? And this person says that they're ugly. Okay? Weird. I've got a sworn they used the word ugly in their post. Hold on a second. Ugly?

Weird. Okay. Maybe ugly isn't this one. Yeah. It was hard to work to accept that I'm ugly. And maybe the person is ugly. We don't know. Okay. But here's the thing.

I don't know. I sort of had a brain fart there. I forgot what I was saying. But let's go back to the core of mentalization. Okay? I had some point. So mentalization is like understanding that behaviors are driven by internal things. Now, here's the key thing about mentalization.

This also means an understanding of other people's behaviors being driven by internal things. Okay? So this person kind of concludes that no other, no one has ever flirted with him. And then if you kind of dig down into it, he talks more about like, this means that I'm So what he kind of says is like, since no one flirts with me, that means that I am ugly. So there's a couple of things about mentalization that we have to understand that are kind of weird, okay? The first is that mentalization is something called pre-conscious. This is a bit hard.

Y'all got to bear with me because it's, just bear with me. It'll make sense, okay? Mentalization is pre-conscious. What does that mean? It's kind of weird. It means a bunch of calculations about why things happen are made before you are consciously aware of them. And they get served up to you with a silver platter. And a prime example is no woman over 60 has ever flirted with me, therefore I am ugly.

Okay. Do you see how that thought is logical, but it gets served up to you? So one feature of people who, I don't know that this person doesn't mentally. well, but if you look at the spectrum of people who mentalize well versus people who don't mentalize well, some people who mentalize well are able to consider lots of hypotheses. So is the reason that they don't flirt with me because I can't detect flirting accurately, which, by the way, fascinating study. There's a study where they had people flirting and they videotaped the interaction. Two people flirting. Or one,

person is flirting with the other person. Then they had this videotape is watched by a neutral observer. So I'm going to show you a videotape of person A flirting with person B. 64% of people who are neutral observers watching a tape from flirting could not detect flirting. 64%. People don't realize. So the thing about flirting is that, okay, there's a whole guide about this. Okay.

And we haven't announced it yet, so, but this is, okay. This is what people don't realize. Flirting is designed to be missed. Because the whole point of flirting is like safety, right? If I come on too hard, then it makes things awkward. So the way that I'm safe about it is like, I have plausible deniability. Right. And so the whole point of flirting is that we don't want to send a strong signal.

We want to send a weak signal that is hopefully picked up and then reciprocated. That's how it works. And this is insane. These are neutral observers. You're not even people in the interaction. In the interaction, your likelihood of detecting it is even way lower. And you guys may have seen these posts on social media about like, I don't understand why men don't approach me. like, I'm, you know, I'm sending signals. They're not picking them up. That gets into other stuff about, you know, like men being afraid to approach women and respecting boundaries and things like that.

We're not going to go down that road. My point here is that when you are good at mentalizing, anything that happens in your life, whether it is your behavior or somebody else's behavior, you are able to see lots of different reasons for it. Okay? So let's look at this text. Okay. All right.

So let's start with page five. So what is mentalizing? Okay. Characteristics of mentalizing. Central concept that is that internal states are opaque. So here's the first thing about mentalism. Remember we said it's pre-conscious. So the first thing that mentalization researchers figured out is that the default state is for,

your emotions, motivations, desires, and thoughts to be hidden from you. Right? Everyone thinks they know what's going on inside them. It's actually the opposite. Like, you just get floated, if you really pay attention to this, this is so weird. You get floated a conclusion. My boss doesn't like me. And people can ask you about it, but it's not like you literally went through like a sequential

problem. You think you did, but that's not actually what you did. Okay. inferences are prone to error and so mentalizing easily goes awry inferences no one is flirting with me therefore dot dot dot um mental states unlike most aspects of the physical world are relatively readily changeable um uh okay so overarching principle of mental is mentalizing is to take an inquisitive stance okay so we're going to show y'all um let me find this.

Give me a second. Okay. So we're going to show you all when mentalizing is done incorrectly. What does it look like? Okay. Pre-mentalizing modes of subjectivity. Mind world isomorphism.

Mental reality equals outer reality. Internal has the same power as external. Thoughts are felt as real. Subjective experience of the mind can be terrifying. intolerance of alternative perspectives links to concrete understanding. Self-related negative conditions may be felt to be too real. Reflects domination of self-affects state thinking with limited internal focus. Managed in therapy by clinician by avoiding being involved.

Okay. So let's explain what this means. Okay. Let's start with the basic. Mental reality equals outward reality. So a big part of doing mentalization right, actually, let me change this. This lecture is, I feel like I should need to start over from the beginning. I'm going to check in with y'all.

Are you all following? I know I haven't like made my point yet. Are you guys kind of following what I'm saying? I know it's fast. Okay. I'm going to make it clear now. So here's what mentalizing is, okay? So here's me and here's you.

So the first thing is that there is a self and there is an other. And then there are actions on both sides. And then there are internal. Actually, let's put it this way. Internal. Internal. External. Okay.

This is the core thing of mentalizing. The more that you are able to separate these things out and simultaneously consider them, the better you are at mentalizing. I should have started with this. In the edit, if this goes to YouTube, this is moving to the front. When you fail to separate these things,

you become weaker at mentalizing. So the core thing, if we remember, mentalizing is psychic equivalence. What is in my mind, there is no separation between the outside world and my internal mind. So if I were to ask you,

so here's a really clear, test to see how good or bad you are at mentalizing. If I were to ask you, tell me about yourself. And then I were to ask you, what would other people say about you? The closer those answers are, the more bad you are at mentalizing. Right. So in BPD, this kind of makes sense. When someone treats me poorly, that means I'm a bad person. When someone doesn't flip, flirt with me, that means I'm ugly. And it's not that it isn't true, you may be ugly, but there is a differential diagnosis for an absence of flirting. Maybe the reason that they aren't flirting with you is because they're going through a breakup. Maybe the reason that they're flirting with

you aren't flirting with you is because you are missing it. Maybe the reason that they're not flirting with you is because they're gay. Maybe the reason that they're not flirting with you is because they've developed a platonic relationship with them, you missed the boat on the window of expressing romantic interest. And so they've slaughtered you. They've friend zoned with you. That doesn't mean you're ugly. You can friend zone people who are physically attractive. Happens all the time. This really confuses people, right? They're like, oh my God, how can you possibly be friends with someone who is physically attractive? Here's a prime example of the failure of mentalization. The failure of the gap between self and other. I have difficulty making friends with people that I'm attracted to.

Therefore, if you claim to be able to do it, it is false. You are lying. You are deluding yourself. It cannot be done. I cannot do it. Therefore, it cannot be done. How have you tried to do it? I don't know. Forget all those questions. It is pre-conscious. It just presents in your head. This is the failure of mentalizing. Separation between self and other. It doesn't necessarily say anything about you if someone behaves in a particular way.

We're not saying that there isn't a correlation. We're not saying that there are absolutely studies that show that if you are more ugly, you will get less romantic interest. That is true. But do you guys understand that there's a difference between that generalization, but it is also true that sometimes people who are below five on attractiveness end up having healthy relationships that are sexually fulfilling and have kids,

right? Where do ugly people in the world come from? They have ugly parents. And I'm not saying that to be a dick, but like, you guys get that, right? When two pretty people have kids, their kids are pretty. When two mediocre people have kids, their kids are mediocre. When two ugly people have kids, their kids are ugly. Where do ugly children come from?

Which means that you can, like, it's like, I'm not trying to be a dick here. And of course, there's variance. Sometimes you get two pretty people who have a mediocre kid. Sometimes you get two mediocre kids, mediocre parents who have beautiful children. Sometimes you get two mediocre parents who have ugly children. There's a certain amount of beauty is in the eye of the beholder. there's a certain amount that's objective. My point is that it's, once again, pre-conscious.

It just presents to you in this way. And the key thing about mentalization is you have to be able to separate out internal drives with external behaviors. That's the other thing. So first is separation of self and other. Second thing is when I act a certain way, it is because of certain things.

So prime example of poor mentalization that is not personality disordered is avoidant attack. Fear of commitment. Why have you guys been dating for seven years and aren't getting married? And this is where you all may say, ah, I see what you're saying, Dr. Kay. This is the internal driver that is leading to a lack of marriage. Incorrect.

This is the pre-conscious mentalization response. Fear of commitment isn't actually the reason. Fear of commitment is what pops into your head originally, but there are a thousand different things that go into this. I'm ashamed of myself. I'm not afraid of commitment. I want nothing more than to be married to this person, but I think they are better than I am.

I'm afraid I'm going to screw it up. I have sexual thoughts about other people. I've got FOMO. Once I get married, it means marriage equals decrease in freedom. You guys see my point? This is rich. There's all kinds of stuff going on.

It's not a fear of commitment. It is a thousand different things that our brain says, oh, yeah, it's fear of commitment. Damn it, I got to find something. Hold on. I want to make this point. I want to show you guys this chart. Hold on. Just patience chat.

Here we, here it is. Page one. Hold on. Because everything's in my book. Okay? Okay. Found. What does mentalization, non-mentalizing, look like?

Excessive detail to the exclusions of motivations, feelings, or thoughts. So when we look at this, okay, there's nothing you can tell me I don't already know, but that is not the reason I'm writing this. The reason is to show you that even after doing all of it and more, some people are not going to make it, some will lose. I am a person who has individual appearance that no one seems to like. Well, I shouldn't say no one. The only group of men flirting with me are over 60 and have diabetes.

This is no joke. It is funny, yes, because the pattern became so obvious, but it is true. No other girl has ever flirted with me except old ladies. And just for the record, I am six foot seven. Okay? So let's look at exclusion of motivations, thoughts, or feelings. Do you guys detect in this any semblance of the women's motivations, thoughts, or feelings? are these complex human beings that are driven by all kinds of stuff.

Is the picture that we're seeing here more like this or more like this? How unidimensional is it? Okay? This, by the way, is a great paper. Highly recommend it if you guys want a good summary on mentalization. Focus on social factors. Focus on physical or structural labels. Lazy, tired.

Oh, yeah, the reason that things are this way in my life is because I'm lazy. Preoccupation with rules and responsibilities. Denial of involvement and problem, this is more pathological. Right? Or maybe it's not. This person tried everything. So they're sort of involved in the problem. This is what's tricky.

We have to get to pseudomentalizing later. Blaming or fault finding. This too is like kind of black and white. expressions of certainty about thoughts or feelings of others. This is my favorite. In this person's mind, how certain are they that other people find them ugly? Now, this is what's really confusing about mentalizing. Okay?

Ah, I want to pull up another thing, but I'll look for it. Here's what's really confusing. So if I were to just ask you, this is how you tell. I'm not interested in arguing about whether this person is ugly or not ugly. In the mentalization textbook, there's a beautiful passage about how they say, the biggest mistake you can make as a therapist is actually in engaging with this crap at all. If you try to prove to them or you inquire, are you ugly, are you not ugly, you've already lost to the battle. Okay, so I'm going to explain how you fix mentalizing.

Okay? So I just want you all to understand it. because people say, I am ugly, I am lazy. Here's all the evidence. Here is how you fix mentalization. Fear of attachment. And then I say, no, bro, let's get you like secure attachment, right? When you engage with this and argue with someone about this, it doesn't work.

That's not how you fix mentalization. It is not even trying to convince the person that they're ugly. If I tried to convince this person that they were not ugly, what would they do? wouldn't work. The way you fix mentalization is by adding all of these arrows. The way you fix mentalization is not in dealing with any truth in your mind. It is understanding fundamentally on a more basic level that truth in your mind is not true. You'll get that.

Like this is why I'm doing this. I know it's hard to understand. I know it's been a circuitous route. Right. So if I get into it, they say, oh, I should do something. I should go to the gym every day. And if I engage with them around that, lost. They say, oh, yeah, I don't need to stop drinking.

Yeah, you do. Try to convince them. Lost. Game over. Right? If they are blaming themselves, if I am working with an insult and they say, all women are bitches,

and I try to argue with them about that belief, lost. No way. Oh, yeah, I am this way because my neighbors are mean. That's the fault. The solution is actually in just adding more to the equation. What mentalization is, is it is separating out self from other. We're moving this in this direction. I'm over here, you're over here.

Wow, that's like a sad face in the middle. Right? And then it's happy face. It is in separating out behaviors from motivations. This person did not flirt with me because of this, this, this, this, or this. This is how you fix it. Okay. Hold on a second.

Okay. So let's go back to psychic equivalence. All right? I got to check in with chat. Am I, are you guys, am I just fucking, I can't tell with this. I've never taught mentalization before. taught yoga. Right?

And here's the thing about yoga. Do you guys understand this or is this not making sense? For personality disorders. Okay. Does coaching help with this? Great question. Okay, let's talk about coaching. So you guys hate it when I talk about coaching, which is fair enough, right?

So people are like, oh, Dr. Kay is an influencer. He's a business. He's trying to sell you things. Coaching, coaching, coaching, coaching. So I want to be clear about something. How much can a YouTube video or live stream help you. What is the most reliable way for a human being to advance in their goals, understand themselves better, do better in life? I'm a clinician. So when I started this,

I looked at a lot of stuff like this. Right? I read this book, and I read a thousand others. There's a great United Nations report on the efficacy of peer support programs. And I talked to the Surgeon General of the United States, and I said, hey, have you guys seen all this stuff about peer support, and they said, yeah. And I'm like, who's doing it? And they're like, no one. The reason I talk about coaching is not because I'm a business. The reason I'm talking about coaching is because I looked at the problems that people have, realized that the most effective thing to help them that is non-pathologic. So if you have a pathology, go see a therapist. We already have a system for that. But the problem is that mentalization for personality disorders

is for personality disorders, but the tools in this, as I hope to show you all today, can help people who don't have personality disorders. I built coaching because I know it's insane, right? So once again,

this also is a failure of mentalization. When I do a certain behavior, what are my internal drivers? And you'll notice that there's all kinds of precondious conclusions to make money, to do this, to do this, to do this, to do this, to do this.

My internal driver is I looked at y'all, realized that making videos on the internet only goes so far and then made a thing that I believe will actually help with the problems that you guys complain about. I took the problem that you had, did a bunch of research, and was like, what will help with this thing? And then I realize I can go so far with a video, but there's like stuff beyond that. Will coaching help with this? I certainly hope so.

If you really love this, go see an MBT trained therapist. If you have a pathology, go see an MBT trained therapist. If you have a personality disorder, don't sign up for coaching. Go see a therapist. But if you have difficulty, challenge. your own thoughts. If you want to understand why you think this way, if you feel stuck and need a shift in thinking,

I literally just had a meeting about with our director of coaching. And he told me something that really stuck with me. You can't unrealize something. So I was asking him now that we have 49,700 coaching sessions. I was asking him what works. like what's effective. And he's like, here's the thing. You can't unrealize something.

You're blind to your blind spots. But once you realize something, you can't unrealize it. And the whole point behind posts like this is that there is a lack of insight into what the potential problem is. And when you guys just follow advice without understanding what is wrong, right? I'm ugly, so let me look smacks.

This is the problem. So this. This is the problem of this. This is what we need to tackle. Because it's possible that this person is right. I'll be the first to admit. It's a possibility there's nothing that you can do. But if you are wrong about that conclusion,

here's why I do this, because then you're fucked, but you don't need to be. That's what I want to intervene on. For those of y'all that are hopeless, you have my compassion. for those of you that know what to do, I will guide you as best as I can.

But my heart is for the people who believe that they are hopeless but do have hope and just don't realize it. That's where I am. Right? And if you think about what coaching is, like that's what it is.

You cannot unrealize something. Once it clicks, then change happens on its own. And what I try to do in videos like this is share these principles. Right? So let's keep going with mentalization. Okay.

Where was I? So I want to go back. Okay, so this is what non-mentalizing looks like. So now what we're going to do is look at forms of non-mentalizing. Let's go back to 2016. Okay. Number one, psychic equivalence. Okay.

So what is in my mind is tied to the outside world, basically. What this means is that if I believe something in here, belief, internal, external. I believe I am ugly, therefore no one flirts with me. These two things are connected. Healthy mentalizing is doing this. literally separating out. So when I'm working with people in this capacity, like if I'm working with someone with BPD,

love working with people with BPD. One of the most enriching and wonderful experiences I've had as a therapist, which I know some people don't like people with BPD, but they're just amazing human beings. And the reason I love it is because they're trying so hard, but they're missing something fundamental. And if you can help them realize that, you see such an amazing outcome change.

Their life transforms. They have stable relationships. People invite them to things instead of trying to dodge. It's like night and day. So if you connect internal feelings with external stuff, why don't women, why can I, I feel ashamed, I feel alone, I feel rejection. I feel rejected, I feel hopeless. All of this collapses into sexual marketplace value. You guys kind of see that?

So speaking of that, let's move on. This is great. Another form of poor mentalizing, teleological mode. Okay? A focus on understanding actions in terms of their physical as opposed to mental constraints, over-reliance on what is physically observable. Understanding of self and others in terms of physical behaviors,

only a modification in the physical world, is taken to be a true indicator of the intentions of others. Manifest itself is behaviors that generate observable outcomes, extreme external focus, momentary loss of controlled mentalizing, misuse of mentalizing for teleological ends. Okay, this is where we get to the pathology. But this is what I want you guys to focus on.

Overaliance on what is physically observable, understanding self and others in terms of physical behaviors. You guys heard of looks maxing? You guys heard of sexual marketplace value? Have you heard of being an alpha? When these people talk, where is their focus? They're deterministic. If you look a certain way, if you make a certain amount of money,

women will fuck you. high value woman, men will line up and they'll buy you bags and they'll buy you this and they'll pay for this and they'll pay for this. Focus on external things. If a man does not pay for your hair, pay for your nails, pay for your bag, he doesn't value you enough. The concept that someone could value you more than anything in the world, but they're fucking broke today, does not even enter their minds. Do you guys see that? Like how insane. saying that is, that a behavior that someone has does not correlate one to one with what goes on inside them.

And I've seen this like all kinds of ways, right? So like when I'm working with someone who is suicidal and has major bipolar disorders of the person I'm thinking about right now, severe bipolar depression, they want to kill themselves. Why? Because they love their family. And I've also worked with children of people. who killed themselves.

And they believe, oh my God, my dad, if he had loved me more, he would have stayed alive. Right? There's like a complete disconnect. Dad thinks you're better off without me. Child thinks, if my dad loved me, then he would have survived. He would have kept going. He wouldn't have done this. They look at one action, and they end up in completely opposite pulse.

And once again, the solution here is not to convince some of them. someone that they did love them or didn't love them or anything like that. That's not the solution. This is where people, so many people miss the boat. And I'm going to say this like 10 times during this lecture because I want it to sink in. And it's not clear to me that I have the capacity to explain this in the way that I want y'all to understand it, which is maybe a failure of my mentalization. Maybe I should look at what I'm saying and then realize, okay, I'm actually explaining it pretty well. The solution to mentalization is not meeting in the middle. It's adding additional arrows.

And when we have this teleological framework, okay? Like, literally, you can look at stuff about Manosphere. You can examine this post if you want to. And what you will find in this post is physical things that are hyper-focused on. Actually, this person does a really good job. They talk about all kinds of other stuff.

I think there's a lot of good stuff going on here. So not to demon either. There's a lot here. Okay, so the big difference between this person and, like, Manosphere looks maxing kind of people. And this, once again, is like, you know, it's not about whether improving your looks improves your chances of dating. There's no question about that.

But it's like, what are the other variables? And people who are poor at mentalizing have few variables. Okay? Then we go to pre-mentalizing modes of subjectivity. Okay. Ideas do not form a bridge between inner and outer reality. The mental world is severed from outer reality. This gets a little bit more pathologic.

Okay. To the listeners, this is what's really cool. You can detect whether someone is bad at mentalizing based on your response. If you roll your eyes and stop paying attention to them, their reasoning is kind of circular. So like when you see like people start going on political when they start vomiting what they have ingested about politics. Does that make sense? I'm going to swallow a lot of political stuff.

It's going to be in here and I'm going to just vomit it back out without really thinking about it, without understanding the nuance, without understanding contradictory perspectives. Like I'm just going to the patient's discourse feels empty and meaningless. Unless you mentalize in the same way, in which case it feels like truth that no one else is willing to. accept. Marked by simultaneously held contradictory beliefs. Okay? This is another big one. If women only date...

If sexual marketplace value is a thing, why are most of the human beings on the planet who are mating of average looks? If this is a thing, why is there so much evidence? Like, I think a good example of this, we did this pretty fucking clickbait video. This is one of the clickbaits that I can actually get behind. of why women prefer beta males. And there's a really cool study that shows that the drive for muscularity, how muscular you want to be,

is inversely correlated with the length of your relationship. So the more muscular you want to be, the less likely you are to be in a long-term relationship, right? And women are able to pick up on this. So they actually prefer dudes in, that are like more, in the median, towards the median, than people who are very extreme. But that's not what people would have you believe. They'd have you believe that if you get in shape and you make more money,

if you, what is it again, do everything right, they want you to believe that you can do everything right. You can work your ass off. You can have all the skills. And they want you to believe that you're going to win, that these external behaviors will mathematically lead to a particular solution. And that's what we see in this community, right? We see this sort of idea that if you do, if you make more money and you do this with your hair and you do this and you do this, you get leg lifts, you break your shins apart, insert metal rods to get two inches taller, that if you do these things, that there's just a really clear, simple, physically observable things, physical behaviors that you can do, that'll solve the problem. People's minds basically

don't exist. People don't have choice. They don't have preferences. They don't have traumas. Now that stuff matters. Doesn't exist even. And this is the interesting thing, it's pre-conscious. Okay? Now, um, okay. So now I'm going to ask you all a question. We can go more detailed or we can go to solutions. What do you all want? There's one even trickier thing that I can talk about, which I think I have to. Okay. I think we've got to go to detail, actually. I take this back.

So here's a basic problem. So if I am saying this to you, this is a problem in mentalization. You may have various rejections of it, arguments against it, whatever. My point here is that the more things... Thank you. No, no, no. So either you'll reject what I say, which is fine, because I could be wrong, right? So that's like part of my attempt to mentalize is the acknowledgement that just because it feels true for me, it could be wrong for you.

Just because it makes sense up here doesn't mean that it's actually true in the external world. Fine. Second thing, this is what's actually like trickier, okay? Hard to teach, but really important, is a lot of y'all will say, I already do this. You're right, Dr. K. Plebbs. Fucking Plebs on the internet. They don't do this, but I do.

So we got to talk about pseudomentalizing. So intrusive pseudo-mentalizing is characterized by opakness of minds is not respected. So this is the first thing. There is a disrespect of, if you say you do this, there may be some of it. that you do, but there's a lot of it that you're not doing that you don't see. Does that kind of make sense? It's kind of a mind fuck, where it's like, you see the part that you do, but you don't respect that there are things going on in your mind that you're not aware of.

Like, that's the baseline. Okay? Here's another example. I love this. Extends knowledge of thoughts and feelings beyond a specific context. So if you believe you mentalize, but you, instead of looking at individual scenarios, you are making generalizations, then you are not mentalizing properly. You're doing something called pseudo-mentalizing.

Presents knowledge of thoughts and feelings in an unqualified way. Okay. So what does an unqualified way mean? I interpret this to be whatever shit your brain generates, are you able to look at the shortcomings in that thinking. Case in point, I did it when I said, oh, like maybe when I say mentalization is important, I must acknowledge that you guys may disagree. So it's like looking at the shortcomings in your own thinking. And what mistake am I making? I am failing in recognizing the opakness of my own thoughts. So I can point out, you see, guys, I'm mentalizing. I pointed out the

weaknesses in my thoughts, but even I am unaware of lots of things in my thinking. Does that kind of make sense? So even when I say I'm mentalizing well, I'm failing one of these requirements because I'm not recognizing the opakness of my thoughts. There are all kinds of other considerations which I might not be thinking about. Is this an ego battle between me and some fucking Redditor where I'm using my platform to bludge in them? That could be something that is opaque that I'm not aware of, right? Okay. Here's the. This one's kind of scary, okay? Presents thoughts and feelings with a richness and complexity that is unlikely to be based on evidence.

So this one is kind of hard to manage, but I'll tell you what this looks like. When you see a wall of text that may not be supported by external things, that's when you're doing this. And if you guys pay attention to mental health subredits or people, you know, just talking about stuff on the internet, really good example of this is like strong political discussions. There are walls of text all the time that people are very, very, very, very passionate about. And they just assume that if I'm really passionate about it and I write about it a lot about it, that there's like a lot of evidence to support it. You guys kind of get what I'm saying. What I want you all to do is judge with a critical eye. When someone presents a wall of text, what is the actual evidence and how strongly do they feel?

feel about it. Next thing. Here's a beautiful thing. When challenged defaults to non-mentalizing accounts. Love this. When someone is challenged, they will become hyper-teleological. Everybody knows women only date men who have money are this tall. So when you challenge someone, They can even mentalize at the beginning, but their response isn't hyper-teleological. Their response is in psychic equivalence. I feel this way, therefore it is true. Right. So strongly held political beliefs, you will see this very clearly.

When you challenge someone's political perspective, do they critically think about it, or do they default to all liberals, all conservatives, all this, all that, we start to become black and white? Now, the problem is that this person will sort of do what's called a pseudo-mentalization, okay? So overactive form of so intrusive pseudo-mentalizing. So this is, let's talk about destructively inaccurate pseudo-mentalizing. Denial of objective realities that undermine subjective experience. Huge, right? people who are in your demographic sometimes do better than you are capable of doing. They're like, nope, I'm doomed.

There's nothing I can do, right? Sometimes, and this is more pathologic, I think denying someone's real feelings and replacing them with a false construction, this is when we get to like borderline personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder and things like that. Another example of pseudo-mentalizing is thoughts about others felt by them as confusing and obscure. So if you literally ask people, like, when someone says something as contrary to your experience, what is your experience of that? They're like, I just really don't understand it. They start with this person is wrong.

And then they really, and I love this in our community because you guys will try. It's beautiful to see. And the person who posted this, like, I'm so grateful to you because we could not be having this discussion unless you had the balls to post this. And people will show up and they'll be like, I really do not understand. I'm going down the in-cell pipeline. I do not understand. I cannot fathom why someone would date anyone like me. I cannot understand that.

People say this all the time. I'm confused. Like, it really just does not make sense. People say they want someone who's supportive, and I'm supportive, and I'm alone. It does not make any sense to me. And see, the mistake they're making, and now we kind of get to this, the mistake they're making is they're not respecting all of these other things. And this is the core thing about mentalizing. Okay?

And this is sort of the solution, but we're going to be pretty quick about it. The simplest thing, the reason that I focused all of these things on the negative aspects of mentalizing is it's pretty simple. Don't do that. Now that's a bit more complex, which I agree. And remember that mentalizing is something that, you know, this is a clinical manual designed for fully trained mental health professionals. And if you guys want to know what to do, this cannot be reduced to a five-minute YouTube video. Sure, this is focused on pathology. Sorry.

There isn't like a Just do this, and it'll work. However, there are very concrete things that you can do. Oh. Hold on. I think I did find something. Okay, let's look at one other negative thing. One other sign.

Whoops. So here's a list of things that, the more you observe these, the less likely mentalization is happening in a healthy way. way. Lack of attention to thoughts, feelings, and wishes of others. Predisposition to massive generalizations and prejudice.

Circular explanations. Concrete explanations are extended beyond the range within which they could be appropriately used. Good example of this is the concept of alpha males and wolves and stuff like that. You can make whatever general observation about biology that you want to from an animal species. and some of that is going to translate over into humans. But like, unless you are accounting for the complex nature of human conditioning, bonding, social norms, you know, I've never heard of a wolf being pressured

to be in an investment banker. So unless you're incorporating that possibility into your model, the model doesn't translate. Speaking in absolute terms, he always, style of blaming or fault finding, exaggerated characterizations in black and white thinking, attributions in terms of unchangeable personal characteristics. I'm ugly.

Inflexible and rigid, sticking to the first reasonable account of behavior. So assumptions and motives based on physical appearance. Y'all, this text was published in 2016. And it's like, wow. 10 years later, how many people does this describe? Arbitrarily established ideas accepted without question. Once again, alpha males. Overgeneralizing from single instances of expression on the part of others to a general and more extreme state.

Like, I want you guys to just look at this. Like, this is nuts. Right? This is insane. Like, this describes what is happening in our society. right now at a huge level. Political conflict. Wars. Gender dynamics. The threat of AI. The people who say, oh, yeah, AI is going to replace everybody's job. Are they mentalizing? Are they generalizing? Are they considering alternative perspectives?

Are they looking at studies from MIT that suggests that actually it's not going to replace a whole lot? right? There was a study recently that sort of suggested that conversation for a different day. So what's happening right now is we have this like information trash diet that is conditioning our thinking. And the more conditioned our thinking becomes, the more divorced from reality we become. Because basically there's this thing called science. and science has one, you know, it's got several, but it's got like one pretty consistent conclusion, which is that a worldly phenomenon

is made up of multiple things, generally. So if you look at economics, there is not, like economics is not an on-off switch. There's lots of different factors. even at the level of like cell membrane dynamics, there are complex equations that govern cell membranes. Are they reducible to chemical forces, biological forces, and physical forces?

Absolutely. Can we predict a lot of that stuff? Absolutely. Neuronal firing is on the one hand really simple. Electrical charge passes across a membrane, depolarizes the membrane, fires a neuron. But as we add layers of complexity, a neuron firing does not mean no one wants to fuck you. Bluntly.

The more complex the system becomes, the more complex our view needs to become. So if we look at a human behavior and we want to ask, why is this true in my life? the more variables you add to the equation, the more likely you are to get to a good result. Now, there is a limit to the variables that you need to add, which is based on things like factor analysis. So if we look at something like charisma, there are five to 12 different components of charisma. Interestingly enough, physical appearance is number six. There are five more things that are more important to having charisma than your physical appearance. If you need evidence of that, just look at no shade on the dude, Winston Churchill.

Incredibly charismatic. I don't know that his only fans would be super successful. Right? And maybe that's just my take on his physical appearance. Winston Churchill is known for a lot of things. Being a sexy motherfucker, I don't know how true that is. Maybe he is known for that. Okay?

So now the question becomes, okay, Dr. Kay, what do I do? And this is where it's one of those things where there are a lot of things to do, but telling you all of them doesn't help. You need to start with the first one and do it really well. And it's really simple. Damn it, I want to find this. Hold on. Hold on.

I'm going to find something. Bear with me, chat. Oh, I don't care about epistemic trust. Hold on. Oh, this is a good one. Okay, okay, let's talk about what to do. I couldn't find what I was looking for, but I will find it. But we're going to go to this.

Okay? So the key thing that we're going to focus on in what to do, like I kind of already said. So the problem with mentalizing is that everything is one thing. Psychic equivalence, right, hyper-reliance on physical things. Like, these are the problems. So what we want to do, goal with mentalizing is add arrows and separate things out. So there is internal and external. These are not the same, okay?

Not the same. So what do you feel and what does somebody else feel? So my favorite example is because I've asked this to people with BPD. How do you feel about yourself? How do other people feel about you? If those answers are the same, you're not mentalizing properly. Period. right? There's a difference between how other people perceive you and how you perceive yourself.

So the more you add to that gap, the more you're mentalizing. Okay? Actually, this is self versus other. So good examples of this are borderline personality disorder, which is when self and other are together, right? There's no difference. If someone is mad at me, that means that I'm a loser. Their feelings aren't separated from my feelings. Here's what's really interesting. Mentalizing works really well for antisocial personality disorder. In the case of antisocial personality disorder, can y'all guess? Let's see. Can you all guess what the self-other dichotomy looks like? An ASPD? Let's see. And while you guys are, while I'm waiting for chat, I'm going to try to look for, there's one thing I want to find. Very good.

Excellent. Excellent. Man, you guys got there so fast. Okay. So this is great. Self. Others empty. Narcissism is sort of over here. Right? So it works for NPD2. But great. There's no separation. So still, the goal,

in mentalization-based treatment for antisocial personality disorder, I've never done mentalization-based protocols and antisocial personality disorder. That's a disclaimer. But based on my understanding of it, right? His first thing that we want to do is add someone over here, and then we want to separate them out.

but adding them is the big part. Okay? So we want to separate out external from internal. So are you hyper-focused on physical things, then focus on feelings, focused on thoughts, focused on motivations? If you are hyper-focused over here, then focus on actions. You guys see, like, why I love this stuff? Because this describes so many problems in our community.

Some people are way too stuck in their own head, and they just don't physically represent. Like, this is what this looks like. I want to solve all the problems in here, and then I will act. They're so, it's not even that that won't work, right? This is what I mean about mentalization, which is so, like, slippery about it. It's not even that that won't work. It's that you're literally viewing things in an unhealthy way.

So if you shift from internal, what I'm thinking this way, I'm thinking this way. I'm trying to figure out nihilism and the meaning of life and depression and logic, and I'm watching YouTube videos and watching YouTube videos. You're watching YouTube videos. And instinctively, you know, like, I'm not doing anything. Unhealthy mentalizing. Separate out the external from the internal.

Hyper focus on the external in the case of all this, like, dating stuff. Hyperfocus on the internal in the case of nihilistic puer, eterni that are, like, paralyzed and never do anything. And the tricky thing there is that they want to find that. silver bullet. Right? And I'm not saying that even the silver bullet doesn't exist or how to find it. The problem is that they are looking for the one thing that will puncture this and fix it.

The fact that you are looking for this in the first place is the problem. The fact that you are angled over here is the problem. Find solutions that are insufficient. Don't find perfect solutions. But then I don't feel good about that. And then you're like, how do I get rid of those feelings? You see what I mean? It's like, how do I know I'm making the right choice?

How do I do this without feeling anxious? Where are they looking? They're still looking over here. Their eyes are always over here. And no matter how many times we say, okay, don't do this. And then they're always just looking in the same place. That's the problem. And in the case of people who are focused on bags and looks maxing or whatever, we're not saying don't improve your appearance.

We're not saying that this is wrong. It is woefully and damagingly incomplete. Okay. So the goal, basic goal of mentalization is separation of self and other, separation of internal and external, and adding more things to any equation. understanding that avoiding the use of generalizations. So if you generalize, try to add as many specific things because a general truth doesn't really, is not usually actionable. Whereas if there are specific factors, those are actionable.

Okay? And those are the kinds of things that like coaches try to do. Now what we're going to show you is, where was this? No, I want to show you guys. Oh, no. Okay. Yeah, page. Okay.

So we're going to look at this, okay? So if you guys want more concrete stuff, like, what do I do? Okay. Box 1.3, the mentalization dimensions, automatic versus controlled. So key thing is, remember, it's pre-conscious. So it pops up in your head. So it's a rapid and reflexive process. Like, it happens every day.

Okay. Oh, no. And then actually, this is a little bit different, but still illustrates the point. If you guys want to learn how to mentalize, slow it down. Add words to it. Add words. Reflect, add attention, and try. Okay?

Then we have... So just pay attention to these two things. and move in whichever direction you need to. Okay, so if you are hyper-mentalizing of your own state, limit interest or capacity to perceive other states, then we need to focus on other people. If you're hyper-focused on other people, then you may have, you may struggle with emotional contagion.

Okay? Here's the really fascinating thing. Sometimes there's a really cool thing that they observed here. This is in the side. So some of these people are, actually accurate in mind reading of others. Here's what's really interesting. They have no understanding of others, but they're good at prediction.

So sociopaths are good at this. People of BPD are good at this. So when you're hyper-focused on other people, your ability to read them is actually pretty good. You can predict their actions. But you have no idea what's going on under the hood, which there's a whole fascinating section on. And then the other thing that we want to do to kind of illustrate this is ability to make mental states on the mental state judgments on the basis of internal states.

Right. So I am doing, I'm taking this action because of a richness of internal stuff. And we can apply this to other people as well. This is what's kind of weird. It is other people's internal stuff, right? They're behaving this way because of something going on internal. inside of them. The reason my BPD mom is sending me inflammatory text messages is because they're feeling disconnected from me. And any time they try to, you guys want to get sucker punched,

the reason your BPD mom is sending you inflammatory and aggressive text messages is because when they try to send you kind messages, they don't get a response. And so when they're kind to you, you pull away. And when they're inflammatory towards you, they piss you off. And at least you're closer, an understanding of their internal environment, that they're looking for approval, that they're looking for love, will help you in dealing with them. Okay? When someone starts inting down mid in one of your games, right? So there's a really interesting observation, which is that the higher rank you go in a competitive video game, the more toxicity you encounter. People will say, like, you know, once you get to Challenger or like immortal or whatever, right?

Like that's where you find the most toxic people. And why is that? Let's practice a little bit of mentalizing. How much effort does it take to get there? And what is your reward for being there? You know, if you're a Twitch streamer making some money, maybe that's a decent reward. but for most of these people, right, we're talking like top 5,000 players. Like, it's really hard to be in the top 5,000.

But if you're like number 4,882 and you're playing said game for 10 hours a day and you don't have shit to show for it, what do you think your life is like? You're making all the same sacrifices as a pro, but you've got nothing. And then no wonder you're more prone to get pissed off when things don't go your way. Okay? And so people who are external have higher sensitivity to nonverbal communication tends to make judgments on the basis of external features and perceptions and can lead to rapid assumptions and less checked by internal scrutiny.

Right? So key thing here is balance whatever you're doing. That's the solution. Now, I'm noticing that there's probably a need for a more structured DIY mentalization thing. so I'm thinking about that now. But that's where we are so far. So TLDR, I know it's not like a advice doesn't work. Fine.

So there isn't something really concrete to do because if I say, hey, do this, it'll work. What I'm saying is change the way, the fundamental way that you interpret the world around you. And literally, when we take people with narcissists, personality disorder, anti-social personality disorder, and borderline personality disorder. And we teach them this skill, these illnesses get better.

But if you're doing this stuff in some other dimension of your life, dating, politics, whatever, the more you do this, the better off you will be. Okay? Your mileage may vary, but I think that there's a strong argument to be made for the learning of mentalization skills makes things better. And this is sort of what yoga does too, right? Yoga focuses on observation and awareness of the internal environment. That's really all they care about.

Okay. Let's do another thing. Okay. So speaking of concrete things to do, I know I just made an argument for like, don't do stuff. So for a while, people have been asking me one thing. How do you improve your dating skills? You can't get a date. where's the guide on dating?

Please make the next chapter about relationships. Relationships, please. Teach me how to flirt. I'm patiently awaiting Dr. Kay's dating program, Healthy Rizzler, Gigi, dating and making friends, talk about Sacks, thank you. Module on Relationships Would Fix Me. Dating module when.

Okay. I would like it if you can create a step-by-step guide, a set of modules on Dr. Kay's guide devoted to dating relationships. So you guys, I'm sure, have figured out what's coming. But let me explain. My problem is that I'm not a relationship expert. I don't really, like, I got lucky when it comes to relationships. I like stuff like this.

This is what gets me excited. I like stuff like, this is what I have on my shelf. Handbook of General Hospital, Psychiatry, and Meditation and Spiritual Life. These are the two books. This is what I have on my bookshop. So as a psychiatrist, I'm noticing, like, a big problem. Is that if you look at mental health, what does it mean to be mentally healthy? There's the treatment of illness, but then it is also the presence of other things.

And at some point, I was like, you know, I had people in my office that had various traumas and self-esteem issues and things like that. And it was like, I actually think that the best person, best thing that I can do for this person is to help them find a healthy, loving relationship. And so for the last couple of years, you know, some of y'all are upset about this, but like, we've been focusing on dating more on the channel. And the reason we focus on dating more on the channel is because it's the problem that y'all have. Right. And one of the key founding principles of the work that we do here is we're here to help you not make presumptions about what you need and force it down your throat. So, and just to be honest, it's like when you have a loving relationship in your life, so many things get easier. And when I see patients who have depression or bipolar disorder or cancer, having a relationship is really important.

So we built a thing. Hold on. I can't hear the sound. Hold on. This doesn't work. Wait. All right. We're going to start that over.

I think it's time for a new guy. So we did it. You said, at least he blurted the feet. You're damn right, I did. Yeah, because I think this is what people need. Right? I think it's like We look at this and it's like, okay, what can, how can we help you? Already traumatized you once.

There's a trailer that drops in two days. Okay? So what questions do you all have? Yeah, dude, if you guys, look, if you guys want the feet, you have to pay for the guy. Leader DLC? Yeah, no, I don't think so. Okay, so we can talk about what it is real quick. So here's what I tried to make. First thing is there's a lot of crappy information out there.

Right? There's like a lot of stuff that spreads across short form content and TikTok and YouTube and things like that about how to do this and how to do that. And like the crazy thing is like none of that stuff is based on science, number one. So I was like, okay, what does the science say about finding a relationship? Like what actually works? Then I had another problem, which was a lot of people are behind. And so what the guide is supposed to help you do is go from like zero, like all the way to the end.

So it's like if you've never been on a date, there's like stuff about attraction and getting a date, then there's like how to behave on a date. And there's like how to advance in the relationship. And so what I was sort of thinking is, if I had to make something for someone who had never been on a date, got someone to say yes and someone that they were really into, how can I help this person not screw it up? So if someone's never been on a date,

how can I equip this person with the skills so that this first relationship will be their forever relationship? And that means not just focusing on meeting, not just focusing on the initial stages. It also means conflict resolution. It also means communication. It also means sex. Right? What is the right healthy way to have sex?

What is good sex? And that too from like sort of an evidence-based perspective. You know, how important are things like penis size? Like all these things like we try to address. So it's kind of, that's what we're building. We're built. Building. And so it was actually a really challenging endeavor, but I'm really happy with what we ended with.

And we've also got some other cool stuff associated with it. Hopefully we'll be ready soon. But yeah. There's one other thing that I wanted to talk about, unless you guys, You guys have questions? Yeah, I see a question here from Alexander. What if they've never been on a date and they're 30 plus? Isn't that too late?

No, no. If you've never been on a date and you're 30 plus, that's my whole point. I mean, I said that before I read this, but like, I thought about y'all. Right? So it's like, you know, it's kind of like, it's like a wiki. Not a wiki, but it's kind of, I mean, I thought a lot about y'all. So the big challenge is, this is for. people who are in relationships, how do you solve problems like dead bedroom? And it's for people

who have never been in a relationship. But it's still important for you to know how to solve dead bedroom. And here's the reason why. If you know how to solve dead bedroom, you know how to start a healthy relationship. You know how to maintain a healthy relationship. Does that make sense? So it's kind of the full suite of things. And the really interesting thing is that even if you've been in a relationship, for a long time. Understand the basics of how human beings fall in love, how human beings become attracted to each other. We may assume, see, there's this huge problem with the way that we view dating and relationships, which is that we think of them as linear. You start with this,

and then you end up over here. But one of the key things I've learned is that doing the early stuff later in a relationship is like how you maintain that spark. which is a huge problem, right? And knowing the communication tricks, or once you get good at communicating after you've been divorced once and you've been dating for 20 years and you've been in relationships for 20 years

and then you figure out how to communicate, if you knew that when you fell in love and there was the one that got away, it will help you increase your chances for the one that got away to have never gotten away. These are the problems that I tried to solve. This is how I thought about it.

So it's like the knowledge of how relationships work and the skill set of navigating relationships is useful beginning to end. Although there is absolutely a sequence to it, right? So transitioning from a date to a physical relationship is something that you should have, even if this is your first date and you've never been on a date before, I want you all to be equipped with that before you even get started. And if you're later in a relationship and you, there's a video on early relationship touch, which is like, how do you touch someone?

Right? It's really simple. But it's stuff that no one ever teaches us. How do I know when to hold hands? And this is why people get friends owned because they don't do a lot of these things. What about friendships? There are some elements of making friends, but it's not a guy. to making friendships.

Right? So we talk a lot about how friendships form, but we talk about, like our insight into friendships is almost from the angle of the friend zone. So once you meet someone, if you do certain things, you end up as friends,

and if you do certain things, you end up as romantic partners, and it's about insight into that. So in that process, you will learn, okay, what is it that makes, that results in friendship? Simple example of this,

a lot of people don't realize. The thing is, I was blown away, by how much I learned. So the statistic about flirting blew my mind. Like what flirting is? What are the components of flirting? How do you do it successfully or unsuccessfully?

Evidence-based. There are studies on this stuff. Another thing that's really interesting, people don't realize how long it takes to make a friend. Studies show that making a friend takes 50 to 200 hours of contact. 50 to 200 hours of contact. And people are like, oh yeah, I like join this hobby group.

I go for two hours once a week. I've been going for 20 weeks and I have no friends. Oh, that's interesting because you're actually 10 weeks short of the minimum that it takes to make a friend. Right? So I want you guys to think about 200 hours for a second. If you go to work for 40 hours a week, at the end of a month, will you have made a friend? Yeah, decent shot.

But how much actual exposure is that? It's 160 hours of exposure. Maybe you've got a friend. A couple months in, your friends, you're super tight. Hundreds of hours of exposure. So there's just so much stuff that we're trying to do, accomplish all these things. And we don't even realize it's sort of like I'm trying to buy a house and I've saved $14. Like, you're nowhere in the ballpark.

And then you're like, yeah, it's impossible for me to buy a house. Like no one's willing to sell it. Impossible for me to buy a house. You know, there are a couple of things that you can't just go from $14,000 to $400,000 very easily. It's kind of a crappy analogy. But it sort of like speaks to the point. Like people are shocked. You know, they don't understand like how to flirt.

like because we don't understand that 64% of flirting is missed and that's not you're not making a mistake that's the way it's supposed to be because if we're if we don't do that if we don't have plausible deniability when we express affection

if we don't send soft signals that are easily missed we end up as creeps I tried to tell people say make your intentions known they say Dr. K tell her how you feel tell them how you feel make your intentions known I did it. Now it's awkward. Now she reported me to HR. Yeah, don't do that. Make your intentions known in a plausibly

deniable way. Subtle. Send a little bit. Wait for a response. Here's the other crazy thing I learned. You guys ready for this? The first interaction in a romantic dyad comes from the woman. It's fascinating. fascinating. People think that men should ask women out, and that's like some of the standard, right? So some people are more equal about it. Here's what's really fascinating. Studies show that women transmit something called an approach signal. And you guys may have seen this where like some women are like, I don't understand why no men come up.

Like, I get dressed up. I'm looking hot. I go out and no one approaches. Like, no men ask me out. Like, do men not ask women out anymore? And then some dudes are like, yeah, we stop doing that because you all started complaining. It's actually deeper than that. Like, that may be true on some level.

But actually, there's a lot of evidence that shows that women signal approachability first. And then men approach. And there's a fascinating study that attractiveness is outweighed by approachability signaling. So women of average attractiveness who have high signaling, get more dates than women who are highly attractive and have moderate or low signaling. And if you're a dude in the audience, this is not surprising to you at all.

If you're a dude in the audience, you know that sometimes a girl will be open to your advances before you even show up. You can tell. You guys like know what I mean? Like you're like, yeah, even if that girl is hot, there's no way I'm talking to her. Like, no shot. And it's not even about your attractiveness.

So then there's like other things about how technology is affecting this because our social skills are decaying and all this kind of stuff. But basically we try to put something together for y'all two days. You all will see more. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, people are saying stuff like 10 out of 10 girls are viewed as some elevated thing that is unapproachable. Like, this is true. So here's what I learned in making this guy, which we did, like we always do, tons of research,

citations and stuff like that. So this is true, but what blew my mind is how much more there is to the equation. We have these, like, broad sweeping generalizations about this happens and this happens and this happens. We don't have like quantifiable things, like 50 to 200 hours is what it takes to make friends. 64% of flirting is missed. And there's all kinds of other statistics. Right? Minimum penis size that is good enough for sexual intercourse. What's the science of developing an orgasm?

What's going on with the G-spot? There's actually like some pretty cool science behind all this stuff. Actually, yeah, I was blown away by, we have good scientific evidence why there is so much debate about the G-spot. And that I'm going to, I'm going to fucking cliffhanger that. I know I'm cliffhangering it. I know you guys want to know one of the few times that I'm intentionally, I'm just not going to tell y'all.

You know what would be fun? You guys try to figure it out. Let's see. Okay? Like, seriously. Let's see. Okay, there was one other thing I wanted to. and talk about today. Okay. Girlfriend said I'm a loser for taking CS seriously. I was happy after my

EC league match today and my girlfriend said congrats by that it's kind of a loser stuff to take a video game so seriously. I didn't really see it like that. I only play 10 hours per week so I didn't think I could be a loser. My team is one B.03 away from reaching EC advanced. I'm proud of us. But I guess since it's still in the amateur level, it's not so impressive. It's just a hobby now. How to stop people thinking you were a loser for taking the game seriously. When you win major, should I break up with her? And Ludwig, really love Ludwig's opinions and takes on things.

I think he's a really thoughtful person. In college, I became obsessed with Smash. I wanted to go to tournaments, commentate games, and make videos about it. My girlfriend at the time thought it was lame as hell, and we broke up shortly after. There's a beauty in dedicating a portion of your life to a delusional dream, but you need people in your life

who will support you. I thought this was great. You know, this plane, video games make you a loser. If you're dating someone who thinks playing video games makes you a loser, should you break up with them? And there's this thing about delusional dreams. Right? I forgot exactly what he said. Dedicating a portion of your life to a delusional dream. Should you have dreams? Should you have delusional dreams? What's the difference between a dream and a delusional dream? I love like all of the things that this touches.

So first, let's start with this concept of loser. Does playing a video game make you a loser? My answer is, it depends. So a little while ago, I wrote a book, and a lot of it is like, just playing video games is like, how do you know when it's a problem? So here's my take on it.

Really simple. parents ask me this question all the time. How do I know if my kid is playing too many video games? I think it's the same as true as an adult. Is playing video games impairing the basic stuff that you should be doing in life? Does playing video games make you a loser? I say actually sometimes yes. If playing video games prevents you from doing the things that you should be doing,

kind of makes you a loser. Like that's kind of my like general, you know, yardstick to measure that. I think video games are a perfectly acceptable hobby, recreation, or career. Should you break up with someone who thinks that you playing video games makes you a man-child, makes you a loser? Well, first of all, if you're taking care of your shit, I don't think you should play video games to the point of it causes problems in your life. Right?

So if you can't pay your rent and you're spending all your time playing video games, that's a problem. Now, should you break up with someone who believes that video games make you a loser? And I would also say, sort of. So here's the key thing that I think is really hard. So it's not that you have to break up with them. But I want you all to understand what kind of person this is. So when someone looks at a behavior that you do, looks at one attribute of your life, and makes a broad-scale judgment based on that attribute.

The question that you want to ask yourself is, do you want someone who judges you based on their conditioning or do you want someone who judges you based on their experience with you? And generally speaking, I think if you are in a relationship with someone who judges you based on the conditioning of the world, that is going to be a sub-reesome. optimal relationship. It can be very harmonious and works for people. Sometimes it's mutual. I'm going to judge you for this. You're going to judge me for this. We're both conditioned. We like it. That can actually

work. Another good example of this is like, you know, if you refuse to date someone because they don't have a physical object, like an iPhone. Right? I've seen these cases of like, yeah, like, I refuse to date a guy or girl who does not have an iPhone, which is like fine. It's your prerogative to date what you want. My point is, if someone doesn't have an iPhone, what does that say about them? And if your answer is anything beyond they don't have an iPhone, that is technically wrong. Right? If you say, oh, that means that they're not keeping up with the time. Like, you can't make that generalization. What are the associations of owning an iPhone? You know, I want to date someone who's a doctor. And like, even if you marry someone who wants to date a doctor, that may not

end well for you? Are they, is that based on their conditioning or are they treating you like a human being? Are there responses to you based on the whole plethora of individuality that you are? And that doesn't mean that you have to break up with them. But I want to be clear that, like, you should be clear about who you are dating and how they look at you. And we all do this, by the way. Right? What's my example? I'm such a little bitch

when it comes to some of these things. Like, another example is Tesla. So, like, people will make all kinds of implications about someone if they own a Tesla. If they own a Tesla, that means this. So it used to be if you own a Tesla, that means that you're a pro-environment

and you're liberal and things like that. Now, if you own a Tesla, that means that you're maybe conservative and you like Elon. Like, I'm not even sure what it means, right? People will make, like, all kinds of judgments on people. I will do this too. I can't think of anything right now, but I'm really like, oh my God, if you do this thing, I will judge you so harshly for it.

I'm sure it has something to do with, oh my God, what is it? I'm trying to think, man, where's Grutty when you need her? Yeah, she knows because I will say this thing to her, but I'm blanking on it. Oh yeah, I don't like that Apple devices don't play with other other devices. I hate that. And I hate that about Apple. So I love some Apple devices. This thing is great.

But I hate that this thing cannot talk to anything that is not an Apple device. It's like such a pain in the ass. Hate it. Feel really conflicted. So should you break up with them? I don't think it's that simple. I think it's, are you willing to be in a relationship with someone who takes one aspect of who you are and generalizes it to mean all kinds of other things.

Generally speaking, the more they do that, the harder it is for you to have a healthy relationship because they're not judging you based on you. They're judging attributes of you as proxies to other things. The other thing that I think is really important in a relationship is if you have people who are flexible around their opinion of you, then I think that's really good. So it's fine if they start this way. But if you explain to them, look, I'm taking care of all my stuff I play for 10 hours a week. Like you waste 10 hours plus a week browsing short form content.

I don't really think it's that different. Right. And if they kind of push back on that or they're not willing to be flexible on that, then I think it's clear. The main thing you need to understand is who you're getting into a relationship with. Because if they're rigid around this, they're likely to be rigid around other things. and I think probably one of the best indicators of long-term success in a relationship is flexibility around your beliefs. Doesn't mean that you don't, you can't have any, doesn't mean that you need to compromise them all,

but what is your capacity to change? And if you want to know why someone, I was about to say number one, but it's not based on data. my instinct is that the number one reason why people are not willing to commit to a relationship is because they perceive a lack of ability to change in their partner. So if someone demonstrates that they're not capable of change, then what you marry is what you get. and then you can't marry them until they are what you need and what you want. So I want you all to think about this, right? So it's like, if you are in a relationship with someone who is willing to adapt to circumstances,

then they don't need to be perfect now. They will change over time. And so willingness to change for the sake of your relationship, I think, is one of the strongest positive indicators of who to have a healthy relationship with. And the really scary thing is this runs contrary. to a lot of what social media will tell us. Social media will tell us don't compromise

for another fucking human being, especially not a romantic partner. If you want to do this, you do it. If you want to play video games for 40 hours a day, who cares if you have a newborn at home? You speak your truth. If you want to move to New York City when you've got a 12-year-old and an 8-year-old

at home to pursue your acting career because in middle-age, when you gave up your career and you had two kids, if this is speaking your truth and finding your truth and going on your soul journey, you go for it.

How dare you let your husband restrain you? Oh my God, everything is so patriarchal. Right? We're getting fed this. If a bitch don't do X, Y, Z, then you dump her and you move on. Here's how you find women

that are malleable. Here's how you manipulate women so that you never have to change. Toxic example. All over the place. So should you break up with them? I don't know. That's for you to decide.

But be clear about their rigidity. Be clear about what's going on, how they perceive you, how they judge you. And then there's this issue of delusional dreams, which I'm a huge fan of. So first thing is, what's the difference between a delusional dream and a dream?

Capability. Right? So there are a lot of dreams that I think are delusional, that I think you should absolutely pursue. But get better to the point where they're no longer delusional. Don't give them up because they're delusional. Run towards them, not away from them. A lot of people will tell you, oh, this is unachievable, don't do it.

Terrible idea. I think you should go for it. I think pursuing delusional dreams is one of the best things that you can do. Now, sometimes it's really dumb, right? sometimes they're truly impossible. So if your dream is to like, I don't even know what, go to Saturn. Like maybe that's delusional.

But even then, it's not clear to mean that you shouldn't pursue it. The pursuit of delusional dreams is what's responsible for the advancement of humanity. Humanity advances because one person looked at something that had been impossible and said, I'm going to do that thing. even though it's impossible. And then they work towards that thing.

They may not have done that thing, but then someone else came along, and then at some point, we started continually doing the impossible. My favorite example of this is transplant medicine. Some insane doctor was like, oh, my God, this heart ain't working anymore. You know what I'm going to do?

I'm a cut out a heart from this other creature, and I'm going to stick it in this creature, and I'm going to hook up all the tubes and I'm going to cross my fingers. Like how insane is that? We're going to remove a body part from another person. People are trying head transplants, by the way. I don't know if you guys know this.

Trying just full transplant of the neck and the brain and the head onto a body. Which is wild. It's like then are you transplanting the whole body? Or you transplanting the head? But I think oftentimes we underestimate the value from pursuing a delusional dream. It's not about accomplishing the dream necessarily.

So I had dreams to become an enlightened human being. And I was going to disenlightenment. So I strove to become a monk. That ended terribly. One day I got laid, came over. Am I mad or upset that I pursued that dream? Hell not. You know, I don't know if I agree that the journey is more important than the destination.

but man, we grossly underestimate the value of the journey. And Ludwig became obsessed with Smash, and he tried to make it work, didn't really work. But there is no doubt in my mind that in the pursuit of that dream, he learned many of the things that make him an exceptional content creator today. The Smash community is filled with love and passion, and arguably a game-making. who is like not even supportive in actually anti-community in a lot of ways. So like the grit and resilience that that community needs to thrive,

they really pull things together with duct tape and thread. It's amazing. Such a tight-knit community. I still remember interviewing Bobby Scar because I wasn't too familiar with Smash community. Now I'm getting into Smash because I play with my kids, which is great. Actually, cool milestone. About a year ago, I could 1V2 them and kind of dumpster them. I tried 1V2ing them like two or three days ago and just got absolutely edge guarded out of my mind.

Like one of them would attack me, right? And I would hit and we'd trade and I kind of get knocked off. And then the other one like a fucking wolf would be just waiting to pounce. And the problem with, like I don't know if this is possible. I'm really curious about this. but if you're really good at smash and you're 1V2, is it possible to escape edge guarding? Because the cool down of like one person who, like the cool down seemed,

I would get owned. Like if I got knocked off the ledge once, they would be waiting like hyenas at the edge of a watering hole for me to come out. I got basically, I mean, I didn't, I think maybe I knocked one of them out once, but once I hit the edge, it's like game over. So I think this is where we underestimate the value of a failed dream. So you should go for it. I think it's great.

You need people in life who will support you. I think that's absolutely true. I think the trickiest thing here is understanding when someone does not want to pursue your dreams. Sorry, does not want you to pursue your dreams, is supportive. So just because you want someone who will support you does not mean that they need to be in favor of your dreams. Right?

And this, I think, is also another like black and white kind of thing. Oh my God, if this person does not support my dreams, I want to do this thing, my partner is not supportive, fuck them. And this, I think, comes down to one word, which is enough. I think the right way to do this as a partner is to give them a fair shot. support them, encourage them, let them go for it. And also, at some point, I think it's okay to say enough. Hey, you've been trying to go pro and smash for eight years.

There's no income there. Enough, man. Like, move on. Find something else. Right? And I think that's what's really hard is you can have a partner who is supportive of you without being supportive of your behaviors. And then I think if you're in the position of being that partner, the scariest thing is I don't want to give you all license to say, oh my God, I'm so tired of this thing. Enough is enough. It's not about how you feel. If you're frustrated by it, that's not the right compass. That's not being a supportive partner. It's looking at them. What is happening to their efforts? Are their efforts being squandered? Are they sweating day and night to get nothing? Is their life better off?

if they separate, if they decide to move on from this thing, right? A supportive partner thinks about you, not themselves, not their own frustration. So if I've got a young kid at home, oddly enough, the thing to think about, I think this is different because there's a child's needs that trump, in my opinion, the parents needs. That's an important distinction. But I still think, like, the right attitude is, sure, this is what's important for the kid. but also like you playing 40 hours of wow a week is not actually as good for you in life as you spending 40 hours a kid with your 40 hours a week with your kid.

And then there's some debate over that, I think, which is fair, right? So how many hours is okay if you have a parent who gets to relax some or they have better parent when they spend time with their kids. There's a lot of nuance and detail there. But I would strongly encourage y'all. I mean, this too was like sort of a dream, except it really wasn't. It was not like something I set out to do. Right, I have a dream.

I'm working on that dream. I have two or three. They shall remain secret for now for reasons that some of y'all may know, right? So we don't talk about those things. But if they ever come to fruition, y'all remind me. And then, yeah. And they're absolutely delusional. It's like I could do more stuff in healthy,

and I realize I'm being a cryptic asshole. I apologize. But I still can't tell you. Just being a dick. My bad, guys. I'm genuinely sorry that those words came out of my mouth, beyond which I will tell you that my money is where my mouth is, and I too am pursuing delusional dreams.

Last thing to explain and also to give you all a tip, if you do have a delusional dream, if it requires telling other people, you should tell other people. But if it doesn't require telling other people, keep it secret. I'm going to give you all a psychological, cognitive, and scientific reason, and I'm going to give you all a spiritual reason.

Freud made an interesting discovery. Words are a substitute for action. If a patient has homicidal ideation, sharing that with a therapist usually reduces their homicidal ideation. talking about things helps you remove some of them from you, the drive for it. We use that in therapy all the time. Second bit about this is that there are people who talk about what they're going to do and people who do things.

Sometimes they're talkers and sometimes they're doers. Sometimes there's both. It's not mutually exclusive. But there is evidence that speaking about something activates your reward circuitry in some small way. And then we get into a problem, which is what we're rewarding, is speaking about something. And then the behavior that we are reinforcing is speaking about something instead of doing the actual thing.

The other thing from a spiritual perspective is when something gets externalized, it is no longer within you. It's also true of things like trauma. So when we have traumatic thoughts, feelings, memories in here, when we vent the trauma, it is no longer in here. When it stays in here, it compounds. So I talk about this, I think, in Dr. Kay's guide to meditation. One of the key things is this is why we keep mantra secret. The more secret your mantra is, if you don't share it with anyone, the power of it compounds.

So if you have a delusional dream, I'd say be hungry for it. Chase it. Work on your capabilities so that it is no longer delusional. And in the words of Gandalf, keep it secret, keep it safe. All right, y'all. Thank you guys so much for coming today. I gotta get going. Thanks for joining us today.

We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life. If you enjoy the conversation, be sure to subscribe. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.