Julian Dorey Podcast - #365 - Dr. K on LIES of Western Med, 3rd Spirituality Layer & Org*sms | Healthy Gamer GG

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

SPONSORS: 1) RAG & BONE NEW YORK: Go to https://www.rag-bone.com/ and use code JULIAN for 20%! 2) AMENTARA: Go to https://www.amentara.com/go/julian and use code JD22 for 22% off your first order! PATREON https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey ****TIMESTAMPS in description below**** - Alok M. Kanojia, also known as Dr. K., is an American psychiatrist and co-founder of the mental health coaching company Healthy Gamer. He streams interviews on Twitch, where he and participants discuss mental health topics. DR. K'S LINKS: YT: https://www.youtube.com/@HealthyGamerGG WEBSITE: https://www.healthygamer.gg X: https://twitter.com/HealthyGamerGG TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@healthygamer.gg IG: https://www.instagram.com/healthygamer_gg/ FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 0:00 – Intro 01:28 – Gaming Addiction, India Trip, Emotional Suppression, Meditation Paradox 13:26 – Diablo & Warcraft, Sent to India, Yogis & Temperature Control, Layers of Reality 23:59 – Yoga Physiology, Empty Stomach Rule, Diet & Meditation, Tai Chi Experiment 33:04 – Mind–Body Split, Gut Brain, Serotonin, Ayurveda, Inflammation Theory 42:53 – Eastern vs Western Medicine, Pills vs Hard Work, Laziness Debate 53:11 – Convenience Trap, Decision Fatigue, Habit Weakness, Flow State 01:04:01 – Habits vs Mental Training, Ignorance Causes Suffering, Residency Patient Story 01:15:49 – Consciousness, ADHD Patterns, Subconscious Decisions, Identity Formation 01:26:34 – Emotion vs Understanding, Experience Over Information, India Origins 01:35:30 – India Stories, Sensory Removal, Deep Meditation States 01:47:31 – Orgasm Addiction, Meditation, Nature of Thought 01:55:16 – Ashram Life, Yogic Purging, Bipolar vs Awakening, Advanced Practices 02:09:11 – Chi Experiment, Perception Training, Spiritual Plateau, Walking Discipline 02:20:49 – Losing Enlightenment Drive, Privilege Awareness, 7 Continents Kid 02:30:36 – Privilege, Emotional Evolution, Youth Mental Health Decline 02:41:36 – Fixing Mental Health Crisis, Systemic Issues, Incels, Natural Selection Pressure 02:51:46 – Tech & COVID, Eating Disorders, Cognitive Overload, The “Ick” 03:01:06 – Achievement ≠ Peace, Healthy Gamer Parenting, Trauma & Epigenetics 03:16:46 – PTSD Treatment, Trauma as Adaptation, Rewiring After Trauma 03:19:04 – Dr. K's work CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef - https://www.instagram.com/joeydeef/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 365 - Dr. K (Healthy Gamer GG) Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Canada's Wonderland is bringing the holiday magic this season with Winterfest on select nights now through January 3rd. Step into a winter wonderland filled with millions of dazzling lights, festive shows, rides, and holiday treats. Plus, Coca-Cola is back with Canada's kindest community, celebrating acts of kindness nationwide with a chance at 100,000 donation for the winning community and a 2026 holiday caravan stop. Learn more at canadaswunderland.com. We as human beings have the ability to affect change in our life, don't we? Mm-hmm. Yeah. So you asked me what I learned in India. I see I've got you excited.

So if we look at psychotherapy of behavioral change, a patient comes into my office, f***ed, addicted to their mind out of phantom. And how do we get this person to change their mind? So if we look at conscious experience, it cannot be detected, but it has a profound impact. And I think there's like a third dimension of like spiritual. It's about control of your mind.

Meditation doesn't work for you because you haven't been doing it right. You need to do hardcore meditation, my friend. But you'll be able to handle it. And if you want to try it now, we can. Please. Don't try this at home, boys and girls. So close your eyes. Breathe in. One. 21. 31. Exhale. What is that like? Wild. And then this is just the beginning, dude. I've been teaching you for 15 minutes. We can spend like two or three hours on weird, esoteric, meditative stuff if you want.

Listen, I think our audience will like that. You can go wherever you want that. Okay. So... Hey guys. If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. You're both a huge huge help. Thank you. She likes your podcast quite a bit. She's the one who introduced me to it. Your wife likes my podcast.

Yeah. She was the one that got me on the Julian Dory train. Wow. Shout out Dr. Mrs. Kett and Mrs. Dr. K, thank you. That's awesome. well it's great to have you here i'm glad you fit this in last minute as well yeah thanks for having me of course i i had told you i had seen what you've done multiple but i'd seen one of your podcast maybe like a year and a half ago i want to say cool on stephen bartlett's diary of a

ceo just thought it was excellent and you know you're like a really smart guy but you're also you you've taken your expertise and you pick around on a lot of different areas and really dig into it and go layer by layer and make it digestible for people like me who who aren't doctors, which I really appreciate. But, you know, for people who aren't familiar with your backstory, obviously you said you were addicted to gaming at one point. Was that like just your entire childhood gaming? Yeah, I mean, I started gaming when I was really young.

So I didn't realize, you know, my brother was two years ahead in school and I was one year ahead. And so I didn't realize. I always thought I was bad at sports. But really what it was is when I was like five, I was competing against six or seven-year-olds. And so very early on, I had this idea that I was, like, physically just not very good. And it's because I was a year younger. And then, so I got into games because games were the only place that I could compete where I could sort of, because it's cognitive.

Right. So I started playing a lot of video games when I was young, was sort of like a gifted kid, and then started to become problematic in high school. And then I went to college. and then, like, suddenly I had no longer had, like, restricted parenting. Oh, so your parents at least were putting some barriers. Yeah, so, I mean, I was probably gaming way more than I should have, but my dad worked a lot. My mom was, wasn't really, you know, parents back then didn't really know that games were a problem.

Their biggest concern was, like, it'll mess up your eyes. So sit back from the screen, and then everything is fine. So I really struggled a lot with gaming, basically failed my first two years of college. was on academic probation and then my parents kind of tried everything they tried tough love and they tried being supportive they're really great parents but we just didn't really understand back then

how addictive games could be and then so then after a couple of years of trying all kinds of stuff my dad was like you gotta go to India what I mean that's a wild jump right there which obviously worked out for you but like what what kinds of things would you try I mean, obviously, it's like any other form of addiction. It's, it almost becomes involuntary.

You start to be like, I have to have it. But what kinds of things weren't working? I mean, so I think my basic problem was, man, let me think about this. So, you know, I tried a lot of different stuff. So my parents, my mom sent me, I think, to a therapist when I was in high school maybe. They were going through a divorce at the time. So I'd sort of had some access to mental health treatment. But when I was in college, I didn't think I had a mental health problem.

I thought I was just like, you know, undisciplined or lazy or whatever. And I felt like I wasn't living a real life. I was living this kind of like half life and I was just spending all day long playing video games. And so I tried things like joining a fraternity. And so I was like, okay, let me join a fraternity. And then I'll like go to parties and I'll hang out with girls and I'll get laid and all this good stuff.

Where they play video games in the fucking, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, the main room all the time, by the way, in fraternities. Now they do. So, so back when I was in college, so I was, I mean, this is like 2001. So gaming was like very rare. There was one guy in my fraternity who also watched anime. So we sort of instantly bonded over that, but like no one else in the frat watched anime, really played video games. It was like quite rare back then. It's not ubiquitous. Interesting. Okay. So, you know, I tried hanging out with people. I tried running for student council.

So I tried anything to get myself out of this rut. What was it that you loved about it so much? Like the problem-solving aspect? So a couple of things. So one is if you look at kids who are attracted to video games, oftentimes they are intellectually engaged by them. So I always found school to be boring. And so now when I work with kids who are like addicted to games,

my first question is, is this kid like challenged intellectually? So I think it's one of the only ways that you, you can kind of compete into like if you're bored at school like the cool thing about a video game is that you know when you beat level one level two is there so it sort of naturally you will hit your your threshold of what is challenging for you um i was sort of trying to play a little bit competitively like sucked but you know i got some sense of agency progress control i was like good at something and uh but i think there was a lot of other stuff which i wasn't aware of like at least explicitly so a lot of emotional suppression emotional suppression yeah so i would um so i remember

when i would go to bed every night so i'd set my alarm at like 7 a.m. and i would never wake up for it because i would sleep at like 2 a.m or 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. and i remember the the worst thing was when i would go to bed i would like have all of these thoughts about how can i use profanity you can say whatever the fuck you want all right so i'd have all these thoughts about how i'm like fucking up my life right like so we love that in jersey i mean that that's just i mean that's what it was like i remember like you know hearing from looking at my my syllabus for spanish and my syllabus was like you know if you miss a certain number of days you like start to lose like points right yeah and so i was just every day i skipped i was like my total grade was like dropping by a couple of points and so i was

fucking up my life and i was like but i just couldn't get myself out of it and so when i would go to bed, I would be so filled with like shame and regret and self-hatred. So I couldn't tolerate that. It was so painful. So what I would do is play to the point of absolute exhaustion to where when my head hit the pillow, I would pass out. So I was playing until I was so tired that I didn't have to deal with anything on the inside. Then when I wake up in the morning, I have some degree of like regret, right? Because I'm, I've overslept again. And then the only thing I could do to like manage those feelings was to like start playing games. So the moment you start playing a game then you're focused on the game you're not thinking about anything else in life you know you

it's really interesting because everyone's like so interested in meditation nowadays because it brings you to the present moment and i think if you look at games like they do that too yes you're not thinking about anything else when you put it that way though by the way it actually creates the visual where people can see the exact parallels with like alcohol addiction or something like that people get so drunk to get themselves out of realizing it that they can just crash on the pillow and then when they wake up in the morning, they have the need to hit it again. Yeah, so I think one of the things about alcohol, I mean, I'd say that specifically with alcohol addiction, marijuana addiction, with the patients that I've worked with, insomnia is such

a huge problem for them. And so this whole like going to bed and like hitting the pillow and having no time for your thoughts, right? You're trying to get away from those. And I think what I see with my patients who are addicted to stuff is they're usually running away from something that they feel like they cannot control right so it's it's sort of this like day by day slide into absolute failure real quick doc i just want to they're drilling over there i want to stop them from drilling so we'll we'll be right back all right we're back sorry about that

but you and i were just talking off camera actually on what you've been saying at the end there so what what kinds of games were you generally playing at this time so i was playing a lot of diablo two and Warcraft 3 and was was climbing the Warcraft 3 ladder, which is like a ranking system. And my claim to fame was I was one of the top 250 players in North America. Oh, wow. So you were nice. Yeah, I played, I still remember I played one game against like a tier three professional player, like a player who was a professional but had never even made it to a major tournament.

And I just got absolutely demolished. It was like not even close. Yeah, like, why am I playing this 12 hours a day? Yeah, absolutely, man. start to question but then i was stuck dude this was already screwing up life so so your dad eventually says to you you're a couple years into college you're not doing well in school when you should be yeah sub 2.0 GPA yeah that's crazy for yeah you're definitely a four oh sleeping but yeah yeah i don't know about that but close close you're you got something going on up yeah yeah sure meaning you were

underachieving for sure and your dad says you got to go to india yeah so i mean because they tried right So they tried like punishing me and he'd like, we'd done lots of heart to hearts and we'd taken trips and things like that, right? So like some good like father-son time and and so he was like, you just got to go to India. And I think he had gone through probably something like a midlife crisis and he had gone to India. So he was an oncologist and then started to really think through with like some problems with the way that we practice medicine.

Like he was like there has to be something better. And so he started looking and then found some weird stuff in India. And so he's like, you should go. Now, when you say found weird stuff in India, what kind of weird stuff we're talking? I mean, so things that would arguably be medical impossibilities, right? So things like, so now we have more evidence to this stuff.

But when you go, like, traveling in the Himalayas and things like that, you meet these, like, weird yogis that do all kinds of things that are not scientifically possible. Now we have research to verify some of these things. So a really good example is there's a guy named Herm Benson who I was sort of, He started an institute at Harvard Medical School, and that's where I was kind of based for a little while.

But Herb was testing alterations in body temperature. And what they found, they found that someone who's trained in yoga could alter their peripheral body temperature by 9 to 11 degrees Celsius. Right. So that's the, that's the largest variation that, like, a yogi is able to induce in their fingers and toes. And so that's just kind of the tip of the iceberg. So the other problem with like sort of medical verification of this stuff is most of our studies on things like meditation and mindfulness are not like we're going to go find a yogi living in a cave in the Himalayas. It's like we're going to take someone like me or you. We're going to teach them a mindfulness technique for about eight weeks.

And then we're going to see what kind of change we can see. There are a couple of good studies of veteran meditators usually from Buddhist traditions that they'll, do like this yeah buddhist sorry yeah that's the proper way to say yeah i mean buddha in in here in the us buddha right um and so yeah so there are a couple of good studies on on basically like veteran meditators but even that those are for more of the like the more common traditions the more worldly traditions and then you have like all the esoteric traditions which are like not really you know popularized they don't have centers that you can go to and sign up for classes no internet presence, things like that. The ones you talked about in the Himalayas, though, who were able to

alter body temperatures by 11 degrees Celsius to what? What was the range? Yeah, nine to 11 degrees for peripheral digits. How do they do that? That's a great question. How long of an answer do you want? As long as you want. Okay. You're probably wondering why I'm not wearing ragabone right now. That's because in that room right there, I got two suitcases packed to go out of the country and They are loaded up with rag and bone products because I would never travel without them. I love these clothes and you're going to love them too. And specifically, if you haven't seen Rag and Bones jeans yet, they got a lot to offer there. Rag and bone infuse offers a range of fits tailored and styled for any occasion.

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please support our show and let them know that I sent you. Can I think for a second? Please. Okay, we can spend like two or three hours on weird, esoteric, meditative stuff if you want. Listen, I think our audience. cancel like that. You can go wherever you want that. You can come back too. Okay. So the first thing to understand is that we're going to have to talk about, we're going to talk about layers, okay? So if I look at like humans, right, there are many layers

we can look at, like we can look at something called a family, which is like not technically a real thing, but it's sort of like a layer of human interaction. We can look at a human, so we can it as a human as a part of a family. So that can be like part of what being a human is. But we can also look at like sort of an individual physical layer, right? So I can look at you and I can say Julian is like this thing that I can touch. Julian is also like thoughts and emotions. But you understand how those things are not the same as your physical body. Right? So there's a couple of really interesting things when it comes to the science of weird stuff in meditation. And that is that a lot of meditation takes place, this is going to sound so wonky, in layers of reality

that we don't really understand or even acknowledge. So I'll give you a really simple example of this, okay? So you have thoughts? Do you know if there's any scientific evidence of the proof of thoughts? I feel like that's a trick question. I would assume there's scientific evidence that we can prove our brain fires and parts of its centers to create something that's a thought? Oh, excellent. Very good. Right? So we can detect

that your brain fires. So we usually study the brain in two ways, a couple of advanced ways. But generally speaking, we look at something called a functional MRI, which is functional magnetic resonance imaging, which looks at blood flow to different parts of the brain. And then we can also look at something called EEG,

which is electroencephalogram, which looks at electrical activity on the brain. So we can look look at like electrical activity or we can look at blood flow and where it goes then there's also things like pet scans and things like that but but basically we can measure electrical activity or blood flow but is that a thought i would say no okay so how do we know so we there's this part of our brain called the amygdala okay so the amygdala is like our fear and survival center of the brain it's a really primitive part of the brain it's where we feel anxiety fear like crocodiles have the amygdala too how do we know that

fear comes from the amygdala oh now you're getting above my pay grade i don't think i am i i mean a lot of scientists have studied that and they've determined based on brain scans that like when something happens okay great so let's let's slow down right so let's say you're in an fMRI machines he's like fuck no no no no you're doing great you're doing great you're doing great right so this is perfect because this is what everyone who's listening needs to understand so we slap you in a brain scanner we measure your electrical activity how do we know that you're a friend Let's say we see blood flow to the amygdala as opposed to the blood flow to a different part of your brain. Well, that would be my guess.

You see where the blood's flowing. But how do we know that that blood flow correlates with you being afraid? I don't know. We ask you. Right? So when we see blood flow in a particular place, we ask you, what are you feeling? What if I lie? Then we would get incorrect data.

Right? So this is what people need to understand. I've asked, like, so trained at Harvard Medical School, was faculty there, was in a neuroscience lab there. I've asked a lot of neuroscientists, do we have any proof that thoughts exist? No, is the short answer. So everything that we know about the psychology, right? So psychology is what happens in our mind.

Like, I know this sounds kind of weird, but you have no idea if I have thoughts, right? I could be a bot. You have no idea, if anyone who's listening to this, they have no idea of we're AIs. Like, we have no subjective experience of someone else's subjective experience. Hypothetically, yes. Yeah. Okay, fair enough. So here's the first thing.

So objectively, like, there's this whole material world which science measures, right? So we can, like, do brain scans, we can measure your heart rate, we can measure your blood pressure, we can touch you, we can x-ray you, we can do all these kinds of things. so when you ask the original question of how do they elevate their body temperature so on a physiologic level they engage in certain practices that we probably don't really know so we know that body temperature is regulated somewhat by brown fat which is like the fat in our cells that we basically burn to maintain body temperature probably has something to do with like thyroid hormone and things like that as your thyroid hormone goes up your brown fat activity will increase that's why people at equatorial are usually a little bit more overweight than people who are living super north or super south. So if you go to Texas, you're going to see a higher rate of obesity than you will in a place like New York or Boston.

Part of that has to do with walkable cities and things like that. But thyroid levels, I think, are probably a little bit higher up here. Okay. Right. So someone from Texas will feel cold when, like, you won't feel cold. Right. And the reason for that is because your body regulates temperature. So we know that there's some long-term temperature regulation things that involve things like

thyroid hormone. So hormones will be active for extended periods of time. Then there are certain short-term mechanisms, okay? So short-term mechanisms include things like shivering. So when our muscles contract at a very, very rapid rate, it's going to generate heat. We don't really know. I don't know the physiology of how a yogi increases the blood flow to their toes by nine degrees Celsius. I would guess it has something to do with vasodilation and vasoconstriction. So this is the dilation or constricting of our blood vessels. So if your hands, like right now when I look, look at your hands, they're like nice and red. But if you go out into cold temperature or you stick them in ice, they'll turn white. Yes. Right? And the reason they turn white is because the

blood vessels are contracting in your hands. And so as the blood vessels contract, they do that to preserve heat, by the way. Your hands will look whiter. So I guess that the only short, because these studies are short term. Okay, so they'll like turn it on and turn it off. It has to be vasodilation and vasoconstriction. That's the only thing that I can think of, medicine. medically, that makes sense. A little bit of that in the Himalayas, for sure. The interesting thing is that if you ask them, they talk about a system that is not something that has been medically verified.

And there was a really great colleague of my original PI when I was at Benson, Henry and Harvard, or sorry, this was Osher, also Harvard, but a different place, who's trying to figure out like this stuff called Chi or Life Energy. I don't know if you guys have heard of this. So what a yogi will tell you, and the practices that they do have nothing to do with what we call biology or physiology. That's not what they're trying to do when they're doing it. Does that kind of make sense? Yeah. They're working on the pranic or the chi level. So there are certain practices that you can do that will elevate your chi or your prana, which will then allow you to maintain body temperature. So there are certain yogic practices that I do that, um, so as you, I've been doing a little bit more intense yoga practice over the last two years. And, and like your body temperature will go up. So like, now it's it's really weird but like i'll start i've started meditating naked because i just am i feel so hot like when i meditate not not like sexual hot hey i wasn't going to go that but

but but like like it's weird like as you start to and there are you know a couple of these hilarious things on like social media of like yogis in the himalay is like wearing loincloths and i finally get it because yoga generates heat in the body so that's that's what they'll say you do these practices like kundalini practices and things like that and you just feel an incredible a credible amount of heat, you'll start to sweat, even though you're just kind of sitting there. And then I was also taught a couple of things that I sort of now understand. But after doing intense yoga or meditative practice, first of all, it should be done on an empty stomach.

So you've got to wait about four hours at a minimum before you do yoga practice. Why is that? I think it has something to do with this like Brana flow or this chi flow. So if you're, if you have food in your belly, it's going to, well, one thing we definitely know is that it'll alter where your blood goes to, right? So anytime you eat something, your visceral vasculature, so all the blood flow

to your liver, your stomach, your intestines, all the blood flow goes there. That's why we get into food comas, right? So if we, like, the blood literally goes away from our brain and goes like to our liver and intestines especially. So probably has something to do with that on a physiologic level. But then I'll

notice that, you know, the type of meditation that you can achieve, and I know that sounds kind of weird, varies wildly depending on your diet and whether you've eaten or not. Oh, I believe that. And then the other thing is that after you do yogic practice, so one of my teachers told me, you know, you shouldn't drink or eat and you shouldn't drink especially nothing cold for one hour after practicing because it has that residual heat and you'll basically counteract the effect of the intense yoga practice or meditative practice. Wow. Even just with like drinking water. Yeah, so absolutely no water, nothing.

And so I think when we talk about meditation, you know, what I'm noticing is that there's kind of like these like two sides of meditation in the world today. There's like the scientific side, like cardiac coherence breathing and non-sleep deep rest and stuff like that. And all of the studies that we're doing on this stuff does not adhere to like the yogic system, the true meditative system. And so I think the benefits that we see are kind of, I'm trying to figure out how to say this. It's like, let's say I teach you how to swim. And then there's an Olympic athlete who follows a regimen that is not just the swimming. It's a certain kind of diet. It's a certain kind of sleep.

It's a certain kind of like preparation, right? And then if you look at the effect of swimming from the Olympic athlete to like the regular person who just learn how to swim, even though they're doing the same thing physically, the effect is night and day. Yep. So I think these guys are, they're doing all this like bronic stuff basically. like using all these things that, you know, are stimulating the flow of your chi in particular ways. And the problem is that we have no scientific evidence, probably because there is none, actually. There's some very limited evidence that in the interstitial space, which is the space between cells or our body is filled with cells, right? But we have like space between cells, that there's alterations in electrical conductance in the interstitial space between cells.

so this is where they're basically like there's a bunch of cells and there's a bunch they're floating in a bunch of stuff but there are actually channels with altered electrical conductance that's the best evidence i've seen and it is still sketchy at best and there was a guy at osher who was i i don't know if he's still there or not but he was trying to basically discover like the scientific evidence of chi what was he doing to try to discover he was measuring interstitial conductance so he was measuring the electrical conductance between cells because all... Which he had to prove existed.

Well, no, so he's looking... So there's the system of chi, okay? And the system of chi says that we have all these things called meridians, which are like these like things that are basically like blood vessels or nerves through which our life energy travels. And if you look at these practices like Tai Chi or Chi Gong or yoga or...

I mean, pranayam. What we know is that these practices have medical benefits that are disproportionate to what is happening to the body. So I know that sounds weird, so I'll explain. So if I do a head-to-head trial, there's a great paper from maybe 2009

in the New England Journal of Medicine by Chen Chen Wong. I was in her lab. So she's an osteoarthritis researcher. And so she's a Tai Chi researcher. So she did a trial on Tai Chi where she was basically taking people who have arthritis of the joints

and then had them do physical exercise, that's the control group, and Tai Chi is the non-control group. And what she basically found was that Tai Chi was superior to physical exercise, which means there's something going on. Now, as we've learned more, so what type people who believe in Tai Chi will say is that that's because we're adding a chi component, I don't think it's a fair study. Because we also know that in physical exercise, there's not a mental component. And in these mind-body practices, there is a mental component. There's an attentional component.

Yeah, what do you mean there's not a mental component in physical exercise? It is not an intentional, attentional, mental component. Meaning you're not purposely getting in touch with the interior of your mind for mindfulness when you're lifting. So I'll give you a great example. So there's absolutely a mental component to exercise. The most fascinating study about this. So when someone visualizes exercising, great study in people over the age of 65. If they visualize strengthening their arms and hands, how much do you think it improves their physical grip strength?

If I just visualize my arm muscles getting stronger and I'm a geriatric person. 25%. 60%. Whoa. It's insane. Right? So the reason we study geriatric populations is because they're weaker so that there's the you can detect bigger. Bigger range.

Yeah. Yeah. But so we absolutely know there's a mental component to exercise. You can talk to bodybuilders, athletes, et cetera. They will all say that. I agree. The difference is that if you look at these Tai Chi and yoga practices, the way these practices are designed is to activate your mind. So if you look at a yoga practice, right, so let's say I'm doing something like a headstand. The whole point of a yoga practice, the reason we turn into human pretzels is not to increase flex. Well, there's the bronic stuff, the chi stuff. But it's going to bring your attention to the present. So anytime you do a yoga posture, it's hard to think about other things. So you're physically doing something that, you know, has you in a sustained mental focusing state. Whereas let's say I'm bench pressing. Is it mental? Absolutely. But the mental, the attentional component is in bursts.

Yes. Right? So I'm going to do a set and I'm focusing for like, how long does it take you to do one set of bench press? Am I doing 10 reps? Sure. 20 to 30 seconds. Okay, great. And then how much time do you have between sets?

Depends what weight I'm doing. And if I'm doing progressive weight? Ballpark. A minute. Okay, there we go, right? So, like, it's going to be somewhere your rest time is going to be greater than your exercise time if you're lifting usually. Yes, absolutely. Whereas in yoga, what you've got is you're holding a posture for eight minutes.

I see. So I don't think it's a fair control, honestly. Yeah. And as much as I love all, I mean, I believe in all this stuff. But, like, there's a difference between, like, in the reasons for that. But just because I believe it doesn't mean that there's scientific evidence for, right? That's something that a lot of people don't really acknowledge. But there are lots of studies that show that yoga and Tai Chi are superior to physical exercise.

They will say that, oh, that's because it's working on the brahma. Whereas I would say that those, I think it is working on the prana. I think that's true. But I don't think that they're fairly designed studies. And if you do something that has that attentional component, that would really be how we tell the difference. It's also like a subjective kind of thing in the sense. that if you're saying just broadly, yoga is better for your physical health than, you know, deadlifting, squatting, and bench pressing, obviously the person who deadlift squats and bench

presses like crazy is going to get very big, whereas the person that does yoga is going to be muscular, but they're not going to be, you know, someone who can bench, you know, 400 pounds or something like that. So it's a different kind of physical health, no? I mean, so I would say use the word better, which is like what in what, in what category right so i think that yoga has very discrete effects that are physiologically yes a neuroscientifically measurable same is true for weightlifting right so it's just what what do you want each each intervention has a scientifically verifiable effect yeah i agree once you also extrapolated the point of like oh within lifting you have more rest time than you do actually

doing the lift and stuff and then you think about like what yoga is as someone who is outside of yoga like i don't really do yoga but i know people that do and i know how much focus is put into that it makes sense to yeah why it would be much considered much more of a mindful exercise as well yep than lifting or even doing cardio or something oh absolutely where you're still moving but it's kind of the same thing yeah so so i think that there's you know but even if you talk to weight lifters and stuff right they'll enter meditative states long distance runners will sort of enter this zone right yeah i do every day and and and i think that like so I think we sometimes undervalue the mental component of exercise, especially in psychiatry.

So a lot of people will say, oh, you know, you're depressed or you just got dumped by your girlfriend. And then, you know, the manosphere will be like, just lift, bro. And then a lot of people will be like, no, you need to like go to a therapist and talk about your emotions, like talk about emotion. Honestly, there's a lot of men that I've worked with where I think we grossly underestimate the value of intense physical. activity for mental health. There is an amazing clip that our mutual friend Chris Williamson has on Pierce Morgan show. Have you seen, you know what I'm talking about? I haven't seen the clip, but I'm familiar. Piers Morgan goes, mental health or physical health? And Chris goes, and Chris goes, oh, I disagree. I think we have such a mental crisis. I have a terrible English accent. Sorry,

I think it's absolutely mental. And Chris goes, you often can't have, and I'm paraphrasing, you can't have mental without physical strength and being able to get your biological body healthy itself to have your brain firing he is in my opinion a thousand percent right about that and that's why like with yoga as well in the examples you're giving those two are perfectly married from start to finish of what like the mental and the physical when you're actually in the middle of doing yoga yeah so two or three things there i see i've got you excited yeah so first thing is i think we oftentimes forget that the brain exists within our body. So one of the biggest problems in the way that we've organized information in the West is we split the mind from the body. This is a

huge mistake. So as much as I love my colleagues who are therapists and psychologists, I really think if we want a mentally healthy society, every person who is working on your mind should understand your body. And there is now a ton of evidence to support this. There are studies that show that depression involves inflammation in the brain. We know that alterations to diet and there are a couple of particular bacteria, it's hilarious. There's a bacteria that is implicated in anxiety called ruminobacter, I think, a ruminococcus, which is not rumination, but I think it has something to do with the, I don't remember what the prefixes. But there are certain gut bacteria that will do everything from make

neurotransmitter precursors. I know that's a big term. Make the building block. for things like serotonin and dopamine in our brain. And so when they'll do that. And then the other thing is that there's some bacteria that are symbiotic and they don't cause inflammation and there are other bacteria that do cause inflammation. And the bacteria that cause inflammation are the ones that eat highly processed food.

And the reason for that is because we've evolved for millions of years and we eat certain foods and the bacteria actually help us digest those foods. So our body cells learn, hey, these are our friends, these are our neighbors, these are the guys that are going to make us, you know, turn that tryptophan into a serotonin precursor, make our neurotransmitters. And then there are these other bacteria that eat twinkies. We have not evolved with these guys because a million years ago we didn't have twinkies.

These are foreign bacteria. And when you have these kinds of bacteria in the gut, they cause inflammation. That inflammation will be whole body, will affect things like our brain. So we know that there's evidence of inflammation and depression. Yep. And the other big thing that we see. is that if you have a gut problem, there's a really good chance you have a mental problem and vice versa.

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providing you with the highest quality raw Aminita and consumer-ready-made Aminita products at a price that you can afford. They're the number one supplier of Aminita in the U.S. And right now, Amantara wants to help you find your harmony. Just go to www. Amantara.com slash go slash Julian that link is in my description below and use code jd 22 to get 22% off your first order that's www.mantara.com slash go slash Julian link in my description below jd 22 at checkout much love so diagnoses like ibs irritable bowel syndrome very tightly correlated with things like anxiety so i don't think you can separate brain and body yeah people are talking about now that like their science is saying that like the gut is like the second brain itself i've heard that phrase obviously it's not

literal but figuratively no i think it is literal you think it's literal oh yeah so how do you define brain well just by the organ itself the brain is the center of the nervous system very good right so so largest concentration of neurons is in our brain second largest concentration of neurons is in our gut so serotonin production happens in the brain happens in the gut that's why most of our antidepressant anti-anxiety medications number one side effect is GI upset so so So we literally have, you know, tons of neurons in our gut and tons of serotonin production. So I think it's like, you know, sure, there's a physical, you know, the thing that floats around inside our skull is our brain. But if you look at our central nervous system, our central nervous system doesn't end up here.

It actually goes all the way down our spine. Right. And the second largest concentration neurons that we have is in our gut. I mean, there's absolutely a brain down there. And they're so completely tied, as you were just saying, with. our health problems. And that's, you know, from the outside, that seems to be something that has been talked about a lot more over like the last 10, 15 years as opposed to before that, that wasn't really a conversation. Like, oh, for example, the one you use like, IBS, it's going to cause anxiety

and vice versa and something like that. And now I hear a lot more doctors like putting those two together. And I think that's just because the data is there now. Yeah. And the really sad thing is that, you know, I think they understood that a lot in the East, like not to overly romanticize, But, you know, in traditional Indian medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, first line treatment for mental illness is dietary change. That's what they start with. Yep. They're right about that, I think. Yeah.

So I think there's a lot about, you know, physical health that you can't separate. I mean, I don't separate the two. I think that you've got one system. And we also know that, you know, when you're feeling anxious about something, it's going to affect your GI system. Yes. And, you know, there's some really fascinating evidence that Alzheimer's is actually, I think the forefront hypothesis for Alzheimer's disease is actually that there's some problem in the gut that travels up the vagus nerve into your brain, which is like where Alzheimer's comes from.

It gets a little bit complicated. I did not know that. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, man. There's all kinds of stuff from neurology about the vagus nerve and just how tightly these two things are connected. have you ever talked to my friend louisa nicola no in her show no she's a neurophysiologist okay one of the she does several different things but one of her like lifelong goals is helping to solve the problem of Alzheimer's so cool yeah yeah she's talked to me about a lot of stuff with that that's a she might

yell at me if i forgot that but that's a new one i i don't remember yeah i could be a little bit wrong there so so i mean i i don't know that it's the forefront hypothesis but when i you know i've seen several publications in major journals suggesting that alzheimer's a somehow tied to the gut. There's also some evidence that dental health also correlates with dementia. I've heard that. Right. So I think all this like inflammation stuff and like the GI tract in general is it's the only

part of our, it's the most sensitive part of our body that is outside of us, which I know sounds weird. But if you really look at it, your mouth is outside of you. your esophagus there's a tube of the external environment that runs from your mouth to your anus and that's the GI system so yeah I don't you know

Eastern medicine is one of those things I'm fascinated by but I've never like done the deep dive on it I know some of the basic tenets like what you just said for example they'll try to instead of throwing a pill at the problem they're going to try to fix your diet and things like that but there's like an official term for it Rhea I knew I was going to fuck this up what is it again

upperveda Ayurveda. Ayurveda. Sorry. I know it's going to mess that up. But it emanates, would you say it emanates more from India or China? Oh, Ayurveda is Indian. For sure.

Yeah, right. So Veda, IU means life, I think. And Veda is a text. Okay. Yeah. So TCM, traditional Chinese medicine is what the Chinese system is. And then Ayurveda is one of the systems in India. It's the one that's the most well-known.

Right. How, why is so much of Eastern medicine, even still to this day, like kind of pooh-poohed by people in Western medicine? Oh my God. So this is such a cool topic. So I was, my mentors hosted an Integrative Medicine conference at Harvard a couple of years ago. And I was still a trainee. And someone asked that same question to one of my mentors who was faculty at Benson Henry. And so he said the biggest problem with like, you know, these systems like Ayurveda and T.C.

is, y'all don't let your treatments fail. So if you ask an Ayurvedic doctor, let's say there's 15 treatments. And you ask them, which of these work? Do they all work the same? That is a foreign concept to them. So I don't think everything in Ayurveda works. They're just not rigorous about testing what's good and what sucks.

Right? So I think that the system of testing of these Eastern methodologies is very, very, very poor. that's a huge part of it I think that's probably the biggest piece as a medical doctor I'd say that's the biggest problem then there are certain other things which just how the system of medicine works it doesn't lend itself

to the kind of scientific study that we consider very good so simple example of this gets a bit technical but a big part of Ayurbed is they don't treat a disease they treat a person and we may think that we do that in the West,

but we don't do that in the West. What we do with allopathic medicine is we treat diseases, right? So I diagnose you with a thing. And the treatment that I give you is not based on you, it's based on the thing. So if I diagnose you with IBS, I'm gonna give you treatment for IBS,

I'm gonna give her treatment for IBS, I'm gonna give your neighbor's treatment for IBS. Right, so this is what we call evidence-based medicine where we look at populations of people, we derive patterns, and then we treat that pattern. with something that we derive from all of them to be able to say you all can kind of have the same thing same thing right and so if you look at like a treatment algorithm for major depressive disorder what we find is that if i give someone an antidepressant medication like an

s sri there is about i'm going to summarize for the sake of simplicity but there's about a one and three chance that you'll have remission so statistically right that so we operate in statistics Statistics is not about individuals. It requires populations. You're with me? And the more people we have, the better statistical validity we have. So that's our gold standard in allopathic medicine, is statistical validity. But statistics by nature are not individual.

So there is about a one in three chance that you'll have a remission, which means that your symptoms will improve by at least 50%. There's a one in three chance that you'll have something called a partial remission, which is that you'll get about a 30 to 50% improvement in your symptoms. And there's a one in three chance that nothing will happen, that won't really help you in any substantive way. That's not how these Eastern medical docs work. So they'll look at a person, they diagnose you with like a particular pattern that's kind of individualized. They still have diagnostic schemes and stuff.

They'll say that your fire level is too high or your water level is too low and they'll kind of balance that sort of stuff. Do you mean they may not acknowledge, for example, they're like, oh, you have cancer. No, no, no. So a lot of them will understand that. But their diagnostic system is different. I'm trying to think about an analogy. You know, so you can have a family structure and you can have a job structure. And you can kind of say like, okay, a boss is kind of like your mom, but it's not really your, like, you know, the mother and the boss are different.

Right. And if all, if I was an alien and all I understood was workplace things, I could look at a family and I could say, oh, that's kind of the same, right? I understand. Oh, so this person's the boss. you're the employee or this person is the janitor you know i could try to map it on but it doesn't quite fit that's kind of how eastern western medicine are okay so with western medicine like you said they're going to diagnose the disease and then try to attack that with the evidence that they found from the entire population and then they just do it based on percentages and as a little

tangent like you brought up SSRIs it you know i try to live in the world in nuance as best i can right people want to demonize every single thing. What it does seem like to me, though, is that for whatever reason, there's been sort of a group think ideology that has entered a lot of the medical system where, for example, with SSRIs and there are other things as well, there is an overwhelming, I guess, like Western principle to throw a pill at the problem rather than look at other underlying causes like we're talking about with Eastern medicine. So, Julian, why do you think that is? wrong 100% wrong i'm 100% wrong i said money a 100% wrong so this is where so i love that you like to think with nuance so let's understand this he's like that's cute no i love it i love it so so

let's understand a couple of things okay first of all doctors are absolutely incentivized to prescribe medication financially okay so let's understand this so if i am i if i'm a practicing psychiatrist. So I prescribe medication, but I never do pure psychopharmacology. So I will never have a patient who just comes to you for medication. Either you're going to do the whole thing or you're going to do nothing and medication is a tool. Okay. That's where I come from. When I prescribe medication, I get paid $250. This is ballpark for a 15 minute appointment. Okay. So in one hour, I can get paid about $1,000. If I do psychotherapy plus medication management, I get paid about $350 an hour. So there is. absolutely a financial incentive, which is why we see so many people prescribing. But that's not why we reach for pills. We reach for pills because human beings would rather take a pill than do hard work. Right? So as much as we want to demonize big pharma and stuff like that, I'm not saying they're great. They're all kinds of problems with the way that FDA drugs are approved and things like that. So for example, I'm rusty. This is not my area of expertise. But like, you know,

if you're a drug company and you have 20 failed trials of a drug, you only need to have a couple of successful trials. So there's some amount, you have to register every trial that you do, but when you're putting a drug through the process, you don't have to show all the failures in some way. I don't know the details of that, so maybe someone can correct me. But the real fact of the matter is, so I've been patients who come into my office, and well, my office is different, but back when I was working at Mass General Hospital, you know, I'd be working in a psychiatry, psychopharm clinic, and I have patients who come in.

And the truth of the matter is that most human beings on the planet would rather have a Right? So how many people do you know that would rather take it a cholesterol medication or Ozempic? Yeah. Case in point, right? So almost no one on the planet needs Osepic. If everyone exercises I agree. And starts to eat food in the right way, they don't eat Ozempic. Is it because we're lazy? Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. Right. So that's one word for it. I have different words. I think there's a little nuance there. But the short answer is that this system is dictated because people would rather have pills. But it's not laziness. I think that's not fair.

Generally speaking, yes. But here's what I'd say. So when a patient comes into my office, right, they come in, they say, okay, I'm depressed. And I'd say, okay, let's do a thorough diagnostic evaluation, things like that. And I come up with the Dr. K treatment plan. We're going to change your diet. You're going to eat whole food, plant-based, salmon for three times a week, chicken you can have once or twice a lot of chickpeas a kid no okay you know what's really fascinating you know what's crazy is so my parents had indian accents when i was growing up my i don't have an indian accent no but my kids can do the accent i don't even know how they got it it's genetic shit going on it is genetic it's got it because they don't they don't but their

indian accents are like fire dude they're so good oh my god like i will laugh my i don't know where they learn this stuff right because it's not i mean i'll do that shit with you because you're your white dude but like i'm not talking to my kids in an indiana you know it's like i'll do different accents for punishment if you do that i i think it'll hit way less hard right you'll start like that's like go to your room shit down shit down first you do the shitting then we'll talk um yeah so so you know we give them the dr k treatment plan which is like you're going to do this kind of diet we're going to put you on an irobedic diet that's going to boost your endogenous serotonin production, help your gut make more serotonin.

What does that mean in English? So your body will naturally make more serotonin. And once you have more serotonin, so the antidepressant medication boosts your serotonin signal in the brain. Okay, so we're like ramping up your serotonin signal. When I prescribe a patient on an antidepressant medication that boost their serotonin transmission, how successful they are at getting off of it depends on their dietary change. So over the course of a year, if they stick with their kind of pro serotonin diet, then if I take them off, they rarely have a remission.

Because they're naturally producing it now. But there's like some, there's some serious side effects with that stuff too. With SSRIs? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so top one is GI upset. Uh-huh. And that usually gets better over time. Most problematic one for most people is sexual side effects.

Right. Which is specifically an orgasmia. So it's not erectile dysfunction. This is what really confuses a lot of people. Yeah, but even with women, though, too. Oh, yeah, I dated a girl that got on pros, prozac. She didn't want to fuck anymore after that. Yeah, so that's because it's very hard for her to achieve climax.

There's some yoga techniques there, too. Okay. We can talk about that after. I'll show you. Okay. Pause. Anyway. Yeah, so going back to, you know, the patient who comes in and I lay out this, like, diet plan,

and then we're going to be doing psychotherapy once a week, and I put them on a meditation regimen and a yoga regimen and all this kind of stuff. We're going to be doing sauna and, you know, light therapy and whatever. And then sometimes I'll, you know, ask my patients, right? Because some of my patients are like, I'm a 36-year-old dude. I have a two-year-old at home. My wife is pregnant. I don't have time for that.

Yeah. Right? So when we say lazy, like, sure. But I think we sometimes grossly underestimate how little time people have to take care of themselves. You know, you make a really good point. there. There's something Jesse Etzler said, I heard him say it seven, eight years ago, where he talked about the number of decisions from the most micro things to the most macro things that the average human being makes a day. And I believe the number was around 30 to 50,000 decisions. And he's like,

and then if you're like an entrepreneur or someone who, you know, you also had the family and everything like that, that number is probably higher. So he had made his whole life about trying to limit the places where decisions were less important to not have to think about it. And so when you, I've always translated this to like self-care and stuff like that. When you talk about people not wanting to do things, not because they're lazy, I think a lot of it actually would be better said as like it could be decision fatigue as well. I mean, decision fatigue is just the tip of the iceberg, right? So I think if you look at, let's understand what is laziness?

What do you think laziness is? At the base level, I would define it. deciding you don't give a shit to do the thing that you know you're supposed to do. So are there things, can I ask you a couple questions? Sure. Are there things that you should do that you do do? Yes. Are there things that you should do that you won't do?

Don't do. Sometimes, yeah. Yeah, right? What's the difference? The personal motivation I have to do it or not. What determines your personal motivation? How I view the quote-unquote reward on the, the other side of it does it feel i'll give you an example sometimes especially like if thief's

not here and i know i'm supposed to do like ads for three days from now and it's ones that i've done like a million times i won't want to do it even though there is a reward on the other side there's a bigger reward for me wanting to sit down and make thumbnails for two episodes from now because that's artistic creative and it actually impacts how i perform in my business so i will make a decision when really I need to focus on the ads right now that is the more important priority I don't need to worry about next week's thumbnail but because my mind is like I like that better I do that and then this gets put to the last minute and then unless he's yelling at me because we don't have the ads still the night before okay so there's a couple of really interesting things in there so first

of all I don't think laziness exists I think laziness is a lazy term for a lot of complex processes right so I see what you did there So, so I don't know if this makes sense, but we have no, we can, we have scientific measurements that can measure your procrastination, your perfectionism, your mood, your anxiety, your willpower, but we have no scientific instrument that measures laziness. That's because it doesn't exist. It's an amalgamation of all kinds of other things. And if we listen to your answer, we will find, and this is what's crazy. So I work six to seven days a week. I would describe myself as a lazy person.

Like, I'm still lazy. Like, I was watching, I should have been writing a chapter for a book, but I was watching anime on the train up here. So, like, I struggle with this stuff, right? I work a fair amount. But I think there are a couple of important things in your answer that a lot of people don't realize. The first is that you can't get your mind to do what you want it to do. Right? So you say, I should be doing this, but the reward is greater.

And this is where I think everyone talking about dopamine, this is the biggest mistake that people make. Everyone thinks it's about reward. It's about reward. It's about reward. Right. No, it's about control of your mind. Right. So even if the reward is greater over here, I don't know if this makes sense.

So you're saying the reward is greater for you to do thumbnails than it is for you to do whatever ad read. Because the ads are always just kind of a consistent same thing. Whatever. Yeah. So the reward is greater over here and the lower over here. And this is where we make a huge mistake. like, okay, let's figure out how to craft our environment so that we can optimize our reward system, right? Yes.

You're turning yourself into a bot. Like, you get that where you're shaping this environment where you're autopileting towards rewards. Like, this is terrible. So everyone's like super into building habits nowadays, right? And I appreciate this. So I think good habits are better than bad habits, but no habits are better than any habits. no habits no so let's understand what a habit is i know we've got a thousand no this is great i like this so why would you want to make a habit what happens to you when you

are behaving habitually what what is your subjective experience when you're behaving that totally depends habitually doing nothing and sitting around and watching tv very bad things happen habitually waking up at 615 every morning to go to the gym very good things happen so that is a good habit versus a bad habit when you are behaving and habitual behavior. What is happening in your mind? You're using neuroplasticity. And you can't use any of that scientific crap.

What is happening in your mind? There's no neuroplasticity in habit, by the way. Very good. So you're not conscious, right? You're programming. You're turning yourself into a bot, a productive bot, but a bot nonetheless. So this is where like, this is what's really wild, right? So you can't habitually get into a flow.

The flow state is not a habit, right? So a flow state is a state of high engagement and high presence. Habit is automatic. It's being automatic. Right? So if I'm a habitual, if I have tricketillomania

and I'm habitually picking this, I'm not thinking about it. I'm just doing it. You're just doing it. Yes. Right? You're doing it without thinking. So what we've tried to do,

this is so scary. We used to be programmed in bad ways. Now we're programmed in good ways, but we're still fucking programmed. So I think this is where like when we really talk about the height of performance, it is to be like present and aware and to be using your conscious energy, right? Like you want to be focused. Like that's where really the best stuff comes from. And this is where I said I'm lazy.

And the reason I get away with being lazy is because I do a couple of things. One is that like you said, when you're, you know, there's a lot of this reward stuff. The other thing that you, I forgot what I was, I asked you, oh yeah, I. I asked you what laziness is or why you don't do certain things, why you don't do certain things, right? And I think I said something. You talked about reward. Yeah, right? So reward is a big part. But the key thing here, the reason I talked about habits and stuff is the basic problem is the more good habits you have, the weaker your mind will get. Because you're not using it. It's all automatic. What if you're present in doing it? Then it's not a habit. So what is the definition of a habit? oh now your brain fucking me okay what is a habit tell me define it something that you do on a regular basis of some sort not regular automatic that yes isn't that the whole point is that we want to make

we want to program ourselves so we don't have to think about it so it requires no willpower it requires no discipline it is automatic the key thing the endocannabinoid circuitry in the brain which is where our habits come from they're all about automaticity there's no neuroplasticity with a habit. Forming a habit has a ton of neuroplasticity. Getting rid of a habit has a ton of neuroplasticity, right? But that's the wiring stage. The whole point of habits, when you wake up every morning, which hand do you brush your teeth with? We're assuming you brush your teeth in the morning. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And do you, what are you thinking about when you brush your teeth? Not much. Because I do the same thing every day with that. Are you thinking about brushing your

teeth? A little because like, you know, you know, basic like, oh, making sure I'm getting the back or like getting the inside the back but it's very in the right so oftentimes human that's the point of a habit is to make it second nature yes so the more habits we build the weaker we become at getting our mind to listen to us so when i tell my hand to raise up and it listens to me when it obeys me that's what we want and we've we've created a society where our mind is being shaped by our technology on the one hand. We're trying to counteract the technological programming with our own internal programming. It's still all programming. So you basically what you're getting at, and I want you to also explain the presence point you had because I think that's interesting

and that's kind of going to explain some of my question here. But what you're getting at is that we have convinced ourselves that good habits using that term exactly is helpful for life. and yet that is the wrong way to package what needs to be good actions we take. Okay. Not the wrong way. It is a way. It is an incomplete way. Let's just understand.

Habits are great, but let's not try to have them be a substitute for everything. So if you're trying to get rid of bad habits, you should absolutely have good habits. This is good. Good habits are not the enemy. Okay. But let's be very clear that good habits are not the same as mental training. Mental training, and literally comes from completely different parts of that. the brain. The endocannabinoid habit

circuitry is one part of your brain. Your frontal lobes, your anterior cingulate cortex, your insula, these are the parts of your brain where, like, willpower and, like, executive function come from. These are not the same parts of the brain. It's actually the opposite. So when you are mentally struggling with yourself, the part

of your brain that lights up is not habit circuitry, right? And if you form a habit, you know that. Because you are fighting against yourself. Internal conflict is actually the same thing as willpower. Okay. Okay, anyway. Okay.

But so when we're talking about, you know, why people are lazy, it's fine if you want to make yourself a habit because then you never have to become unlazy. You know what I mean? If I have good habits and I'm lazy, it's not a big deal because eventually I'm doing all the right things. Right? Yeah. That's the whole point.

So there's value to it. Don't get me wrong. But overcoming laziness involves two things. First thing is control of your mind. So in the same way that if you tell a dog to sit, if you tell your mind enough is enough, your mind says yes, sir, or yes, ma'am. The second thing is you mentioned understanding. So this is where we really start to get into the weird place.

But so if we look at like psychotherapy of behavioral change, okay? So I patient comes into my office fucking addicted to their mind out of fentanyl. Okay. So, you know, investment banker started using, oh yeah, started using cocaine, then started getting into opiates, now uses fentanyl because they're, they've burned through so much money on cocaine. Cocaine's inexpensive drug fentanyl is cheap. Yeah. And so, you know, and how do we get this person to change their mind, right? How do we get this person to like stop using fentanyl? Well, now they're chemically dependent. Oh, they're absolutely chemical. But that's different. That's different. That's different. Yeah. So there's a lot of different layers to this stuff. Okay. So they're chemically dependent. But if they're in, and so I don't know if this makes sense. If their mind is made up in the right way, they'll withdraw and they'll get through the chemical dependence. Does that make sense? Yes. Anytime someone goes sober, their mind overcomes the chemical dependence. It may make the hill that you have to get over higher, but the key thing is the mind has to be in the right way, right? So the more chemically dependent they become, the more true the point that I'm

going to make is, is that once they understand their situation, truly understand it, then behavior will change. So the second thing that makes people ignorant, I mean, lazy, is ignorance. And I know this sounds really weird. It doesn't say, you keep saying that about stuff. It doesn't. You explain stuff well. So, so people are lazy because they literally don't understand. And if I think about, like, think about anything in your life, right, where I say like, oh, Julian, don't touch that hot pan. And you're like, I'm going to touch the hot pan.

And then you're like, oh, shit, that's hard. Yes. And then I tell you, Julian, don't touch the hot pan. You're like, all right, fine. Yes. So if we literally look at, you know, how does human behavior change, it changes through understanding. True understanding. This is not the same as information.

Information and understanding are two entirely different things. But if you sort of think about the mistakes that you used to make and the mistakes that you don't make anymore, it's because you just understand. So you look like you're in shape. You work out? Yes. Did you always work out? Yes. Shit.

Bad example. Like even when you were like six? Well, actually, yeah. I grew up running and then I got into weightlifting heavy at 20, but then I was sick for four years. So I couldn't do it during that. So bad example. But there's got to be some stupid mistake that you use. to make that you don't make anymore.

Oh, there's got a lot of those. Now you're putting me on the spot. And is that because you developed good habits? Is that because you use willpower every time you don't make the mistake? No, it's because you understand. Yes. Right? Okay.

So here's the beautiful thing. Once you understand, you don't have to exert effort. Right? Like, you don't have to, like, once you understand, oh, this is stupid for me to do. Like, once that really gets into your brain and really sinks in, and like, my favorite example is I had a patient who had a really toxic relationship right and and the problem is like they just don't get it yeah they don't get they don't get it right they don't get that this person is harmful for you yeah and even if you ask them is this person good for you or bad for you they'll say

they're bad for me but they don't get it you know what I mean but I love it yeah right so but deep down they don't understand that this is bad for me and so the the process of psychotherapy there is don't tell me everything that she does wrong I'll tell you a story you want to your story Please. Okay, so I had a patient. I'm going to start saying no when he asked me questions. No, you could say no. No.

Okay. So I had a patient, a dude in his 40s. And so he came in and he was depressed. And so I was a third year psychiatry resident at the Massachusetts General Hospital. And so he had been in the clinic for about eight or nine years, gets passed down from resident to resident. You know, he comes in, he talks to me about his problems, tells me about how everything is going. in his life and I listen to him and I'm very empathic and reflective and I'm like, hey, bro, that sounds hard for you. Oh, how did that make you feel? That sounds hard for you. That must be

tough. How does that make you feel? So I was doing what a therapist does, right? That's what therapists do. They ask you how you feel. Yes. And then they tell you that like, that must be hard for you. So eight or nine months into this, I'm kind of getting bored. And he comes in one day and I'm like, hey, is this helping? And he's like, what do you mean? Is it helping? I was like, Are you, like, any better than when we started? And he's like, I thought that's what we're supposed to do. Like, I'm supposed to come in. I'm supposed to tell you about how bad my life is.

And then you're supposed to, like, be nice to me. And I was like, is it helping? And he's like, I don't know. I mean, it's just how it is, right? So he started like, I just started trying to get to know the guy. So I was like, we stopped talking about why he was depressed. And I was like, you know, tell me a little bit about what you like in life and things like that. And it was really great.

There was a lot of, like, bro energy in the room, which I think something we need more of in therapy. And so we were talking about, you know, not to be indelicate about it, but women that he had had sexual relationships with. And what we talked about, we actually used this term, which is why I say it. I was like, you know, he's like, you want to tell me to tell you about the chicks I fucked? And I was like, yeah, man, tell me about the chicks you fucked. And so he was telling me about, you know, his favorite, like the best lay he ever had, okay? And sometimes therapy, I think, can look like this and should look like this. We sort of, we have demonized this kind of language so much.

It's important not to be, like, to denigrate those people or really objectify them, but to use a language that feels, you know, safe and acceptable and really helps people open up. Like you're at the bar, chilling. Yeah, absolutely. And I've talked to my female patients about the dudes they fuck, too, so. You hit the Indian accent when they do that. Tell me about the good one. I have never done that.

So I have, I'm more careful with my female patients for sure, with, with, But, you know, Dick jokes abound with the male patients. Yeah, there you go. So, you know, he was telling me about this woman. And so he loved it because she was like, like they would go eat at expensive restaurants and they would have very crazy like sex and things like that. And then he told me this one story of so, but she was, she was divorced and she had a couple of kids. And what he actually really liked about it was that like he was starting to get to know her kids. And he loved that because he'd always wanted.

kids. And he didn't even care like they weren't his, but like he just really genuinely enjoyed spending time with these kids. The kids were amazing. It was really forming like a relationship and bond with them. And then one day he, on Christmas day, he goes to her house with gifts for the kids. And she opens the door and he's like, you know, I brought your kids gifts. It was a little bit of surprise. She said, thank you so much. One of the kids sees him standing in the doorway, runs out and gives him a hug oh thank you so much for coming and so his girlfriend on again off again situation ship kind of thing tells the her daughter she says you know go put these by the tree and um so the kid runs to go put him by the tree and then he's standing there literally like

out in the cold in the snow and she says thank you for coming and shuts the door in his face and so this relationship the problem for this guy is that this relationship was perfect half the time. And it was terrible the other half the time. So, you know, he would be like, I don't understand why I can't stop, right? Like, he looks at this. And the reason he can't stop is not because it's bad for him, but because it's so damn good. Yeah. So a lot of the things that we do that are bad for us, where our head, our cognition, our analytical reasoning tells us this is bad for you. That's not. not the same as understanding. Yes, that's a great point. Right. Yeah, because essentially he's drawn

to the drama of it and the idea of like, it's a problem. He's got to find a way to solve in some ways, you know, because like she's hot half the time and cold half the time. How do I get her hot all the time? Exactly. Right. So that's why like we look at this and everyone around and says, hey, this, this is a bad relationship. This is an unhealthy relationship. No, it isn't. So for him to walk away, it's a perfect relationship half the time, right? So now he's thinking, oh, if I play my cards right, if I do this right, if I figure this out, right, then it'll be, then it won't be an unhealthy. Like sure, this piece is unhealthy, but this piece is amazing. And all I have to do is figure out how to make this right, because we as human beings have the ability to affect

change in our life, don't we, Julian? Yeah. So he's like, I just got to figure this out. I got to figure this out. If I can figure out, I can have everything that I want. So for him to walk away from this relationship, he needs to understand, not that it's a toxic relationship, but that it's the perfect relationship half the time. And then what does he want from life? Does he want to play this game? Does he think that this person is going to come around? Does he want to wait for this person to come around? Right. This is the kind of understanding that he needs. He needs to look at his life and realize, I'm putting all my eggs in the basket of this person. Am I counting on this person? Can I count on this person to ever love me and respect me the way that I love her?

Is this something that she has demonstrated to me that she's capable of? Right? She's perfect in so many ways, but... But they add another. So, in some ways, maybe the best outcome in a situation like that is you realize that she's not going to be right in what you deserve, which is 100% of the... or as close to 100% of the time as possible. So kind of like that old Bruce Lee quote, you take what you like about it, you move on from it you discard what's bad which is maybe the relationship itself and you look for what was

good in it in a more healthy relationship that does not have those two sides the hot and cold i mean that sounds great that's not actually what happened right so so you know the what we came down to is this is a guy and this is like what i love about being a psychiatrist like it came down some deep work this is a guy who the reason he was so chronically depressed is because he had never won anything. You know, like, we think about, like, people winning things and everyone gets participation trophies and things like that. But this is a guy who had just gotten the short end of the stick. And this is what's really sad. This is actually the common man. The common man you meet is not the best at anything. So this is a guy who had been chasing his whole life. This is a guy

who had been, like, disappointed his whole life, right? Like, and not disappointed because he deserved better or anything like that. He just wasn't the smartest kid in the class. Had a pretty toxic upbringing in a lot of ways, so had a lot of family mental illness. So it was kind of deprived in some ways. Like, that's not his fault, though, right? So, like, he just wasn't taught how to socialize well and things like that. Actually, I mean, he learned a lot of good things.

But so, I mean, this was just a dude who was always sort of like left with a choice. He never made a choice. So for him, what it came down to is like, bro, do you want to ever make a choice? Like, sure, I agree. Maybe if you wait around in three months time, six months time, a year's time, 15 months time, like, you know, it could be tomorrow. You never know. Could you get her to love you the way that you want? I'm not saying it's impossible.

See, a lot of people will say like, oh, it's not possible. You know, you can't control other people's actions. Like, I'll say that shit. But I think that's not the point for him. The point for him is, do you want to wait around? while someone else decides your future, right? Or for once in your fucking life, like, take some control. Yes.

And go, I don't know what you're going to find. You may find, and he had a lot of problems with future relationships, too, that were interesting. But not in the same way. Yeah. I mean, the point is you can't, you use the term chasing as well. And this is related, you're using in a relationship context, but this is related to a lot of things. You have to be willing to walk out. door on things when it's not working for you and be okay with whatever's on the other side

that we're not following you out and i think a lot of us including myself we struggle with that because it's like especially when it's involves people friendships whatever it is or a personal relationship like you want that person to be who you want them to be but they're going to have to prove that to you in some way or another or you're going to be stuck in this loop forever well so that's what i'd say like the way to break out of that loop is understanding really like looking at your situation and understanding your situation for what it is, not what you want it to be. Yes. Right?

You need to really look at yourself and look at the people around you and could they change, could they not change? And like, you can make whatever kind of truisms you want. But what I've sort of found, and there's an ancient kind of Sanskrit concept that avidia or ignorance is the root of all suffering. Right. So I don't know if you guys have heard that story about, you know, the monk who's, there's a scorpion that's drowning. I don't think I've heard this. And so there's a scorpion that's drowning or something. And then the monk is like, oh, like, let me save the scorpion.

So he picks up the scorpion, scorpion stings him. And so then he, like, drops it, right? And it starts drowning again. And it picks it up a second time, it stings him again. And he's like, ah, and he drops it again. Picks it up a third time. And it stings him a third time. And then someone is watching on the bank, and they're like, you know, why do you keep on doing that?

And he said, it's in the scorpion's nature to sting me. It's in my nature to try to save it. Right? So, like, this is where once you understand. the nature of the people around you oh my god life becomes so easy first thing you got to understand yeah go ahead do you find that people can have a moment where let's say they they don't understand that at all and they can't like get that through their head and then they kind of have like i don't want to say one day they wake up and suddenly it's all good but literally like people's perspective you're

able to work with them and then it just completely shifts and they're like oh no oh that's just how I got to look at the situation now. All the time. All the time. And not just me. You. Anyone who's listening, who among us has not woken up one day and you're like, this is fucking dumb.

I'm done with this. Right? And it could be like never buying a Twinkie again. It could be deciding to quit. It could be like, I'm even uninstalling a video game. So this is a key thing. There's some really, you know, fascinating research on, I'm going to go off on a quick tangent, but like there's a lot of fascinating research on the nature of consciousness.

Okay. And so people are like, okay, like, so we can detect whether you're going to push this button with your right hand or your left hand, 0.04 milliseconds or 0.4 milliseconds before you do it. So your brain is making this decision for you. There's no consciousness. The decision has been made, even though you become consciously aware of it. So here's what a lot of people don't understand. So when I work with a patient with addiction, they don't become sober overnight. Right.

But they wake up one day. I know this sounds kind of weird. And they say, and if you talk to people, they'll be like, enough is enough. I'm done, right? What they don't understand is that that binary shift, because on the one hand, they don't become sober overnight. But on the other hand, like, that's literally

what the subjective experiences. Does that kind of make sense? Yes. You wake up one day or you're dating a boy or a girl or whatever, your boss, you're like, enough is enough. I'm fucking done. You make up your mind. Yes.

What people don't realize is that making up your mind is a thousand subconscious decisions. It's a thousand neuroscientific calculer. that are happening underneath the surface. We only experience it as binary. Right? So I don't know if there's a really great, simple experiment that you can do. Like anytime you go to the grocery store, anytime you go to a restaurant, you're sitting

there, you're looking at the menu you're thinking about it, right? And then you decide. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yes. So the decision is binary, but there's lots of processing going on underneath the surface. So this is one of the key things that I've learned about people who are struggling to like wake up one day and you know under have that understanding they don't what a lot of people don't realize is that you have to do a lot of subsurface work so you have to put in a thousand steps that you're not consciously aware of to wake up one day and have the realization every that's always how it is you'd say uh there are some very rare exceptions okay so higher states of consciousness connecting with divinity things like that that's the weird yogic stuff i think when you have certain

very, very rare states of mind, there are times that it can happen very quickly. But generally speaking, the reason why psychotherapy is an evidence-based program is because if someone shows up in my office for one hour a week for 12 to 20 weeks, they will change by the end of it. Right. And that was the, like, we designed this coaching program where like at 20 weeks, there's a 58% increase in a sense of life purpose. So this is absolutely something that But the first four weeks someone shows up, they don't get anything. They're like, I don't, I'm not, I don't see any benefit. So I don't know if this makes sense, but you're, just because you don't see the benefit doesn't mean that change isn't happening.

Just because you don't see the benefit doesn't mean change isn't happening, meaning at least if you're putting your two feet down in the thing that's getting you into a position to do something better and you're not feeling the effects of it, the fact that you've shown up to put your two feet right there if you continue to do that, I'm not going to use the word habit, but. but continue to build that willpower to do that, eventually it is going to cross that boundary. And you're going to be like, oh, my God, yeah, of course. If I go, if I go to the gym with you today and I lift weights, what change am I going to see? Not much, but if you do it for 90 days, you'll see something. Right. So I wouldn't even say not much. Incorrect. There we go.

Be precise. Right? And that's what a lot of people don't understand about the way their mind works. if you put in the right reps you will change i mean i think also i don't know if you're getting at this as well but i think this is exactly the same family at least how i think of it that like momentum comes from you know people talk about oh oh what's a good example stay with a gym example so someone will be like oh here's like the six minute abs program i just got to jump in and do that right away and then get into habit of doing that and i'll have a fucking six pack in three days it's not like that

You'll probably burn out in three days trying to get through that if you do it the first time. But if you just start with, hey, I'm going to do 10 crunches, 10 half sit-ups and, you know, 10 leg raises. And I'm going to do that for like 21 straight days. And then maybe I'll move to 11. You're starting in a smaller bite, but you're building reasonable momentum of something you can actually stick with that will eventually get you to the point that you have a result. I like that, but let's be precise. Okay. If I wake up and I say I'm going to do 10 pushups, 10 leg raises, 10 squats, whatever.

10 crunches. I'm going to do it for 21 days. How many people do it for 21 days? Not a lot. There we go. Okay, so let's start with that. Second thing is, if you get really excited about, why doesn't that build momentum? So when you get excited by something, which part of your brain is active? You don't have to give me the neuroanatomical. The planning part? Nope. When you get excited about, well, I'm thinking of it, sorry, I'm thinking of it in the context of planning something. Now, when I get excited, is that also the amygdala? It's the excitement part. Right? That's not. the planning part. Like when I get excited, like, I'm, I'm a get swole, Julian. I'm going to do it, and it's going to be great. And I get so excited. You said when there's a lot of passion, right? Yes. That means that your motivation is coming from the passion. But the moment that emotion turns off, your motivation will go with it. Right. Right. Which is what you're describing is very different. So that your success stories, you're spot on with your example, right? But let's understand the neuroscience. When you are doing it without excitement, that's when

you're going to succeed. Yes. Because when you're excited about something, oh my God, I see this all the time. You know, I'm so in love. I'm so in love. She's so in love. Oh my God, we're so in love.

We're so in love. And like six months in, eh. Right? This is what's so sad is like everyone's like, it's really kind of random fact, but there's this, there's this really interesting bait and switch that happens with people in ADHD

in relationships. And what is that? So they get hyperfocus. People with ADHD get really, really excited. And so when they enter a relationship, they are so attuned to this person. They're so attentive. They're so excited.

Their mind is constantly on them. And when they enter the relationship and that like ADHD hyperfocus disappears, so a human being can be the object of your hyperfocus. There's this weird whiplash effect that's actually been described in scientific papers. There's a whiplash effect where if you are the recipient

of someone with ADHD's attention and then once that excitement disappears, you're like, what the fuck? Where did they go? They're not texting me anymore. It's been scientifically described. One of the reasons why people with ADHD have a lot of challenges in romantic relationships. So if we're using the excitement part of our brain to trigger motivation, if we're using an emotion to trigger our motivation, we're in big trouble. There's no sustainability.

And the reason there's no sustainability is because our emotions are designed to disappear. So what do we have to trigger? To create that. Understanding. Just the understanding. Yeah. Do you wipe your ass every day? Yeah. Is that habitual?

Sometimes take a second wipe, sometimes a third wipe. Oh, yeah. Right? So why do you take three wipes on one day and one day, one and half? I mean, I want to make sure I'm clean. Right? So you understand that this behavior sometimes, because it's not a habit because it's not just one wipe, right? Sometimes it's three.

Oh, yeah, it's definitely multiple. Yeah, multiple, right? So, so, yeah, okay. Guess it says more about me than it does about you. So. Let me know when you're ready to keep going. All right. Right.

So if you think about the wiping of the ass, the wiping of the ass is a great example of understanding. And you know, some days, like you get a little bit of a liquidy one and you're like, I need a couple more. Yeah. Yeah, you know what I mean, right? Right? Everybody knows it, right? Yeah.

And so this is where understanding naturally motivates you. Do you have to use willpower? Oh my God. You realize that when you wipe six times instead of three, you have to spend twice as much energy. It's twice as much effort, Julian. I don't think that at all. No. But it's twice as much effort.

No, I'm just making sure I don't sandpaper my ass, that's it. Okay, there we go, right? So that, too, is born of what? What happened? One day you wipe, Julian Doth wipeeth too much. And then he hath 24 hours of sandpaper ass. Once again, understanding

shapes your behavior automatically. Avidia is the root of all suffering. Ignorance is the root of all suffering. So as you understand, behavior will change naturally it'll change in the right way so and i want to make because like understanding is such a simple word like we all know that but like looking at it at the meta level that you are right now because you're looking at the simple level but also there's like a metaphorical like kind of blanket this puts over a lot of things in a good way i was talking with my friend nico

about you know like the resistance to getting up in the morning to work out because like i i work out six days a week. I'm very good about getting up at the same exact time and having that schedule and going in there. My body's on. My mind is not when I get in there, but like my body's always on in the morning. But I told him, I'm like, there's still some days, probably at least once a week, where when that alarm goes off at 6.15, I might have slept eight hours. I might have slept great. But like that little thought goes in your head, like, ah, maybe, maybe I could just skip today. And I told him what I do, and this is literal, is I just go, and I just like kind of jam myself out of bed, like jump like that. And I'm like, all right, let's go. And it's not because, like, I'm suddenly now excited

or I'm trying to trick myself into being motivated. It's more because, like, I'm thinking about it now, like what this actually is. It's more because it's like, this is what I'm supposed to do. And if I just quickly make a motion to get my feet moving, I know that I will get into that fucking mode and be able to go to the gym and show up and do what I got to do. Is that because I understand what the goodness of going to the gym and having that routine is versus the ulterior? Almost, almost. Here's the key thing. How did you learn how to do that? You did it once, and then you were like, this works.

Then you understood. It's not even about this abstract benefit, right? It's about you understood, okay, if I want to go to the gym, this is what I need to do with myself. Right. So you're talking about understanding, and we can define it. So this is why I love Sanskrit. So I think Sanskrit is a beautiful language because, you know how they say, like, Eskimos have 100 words for snow or whatever. So I did not, but.

Okay. So Sanskrit has a lot of great words for mental states. So they have two words. One is Vidya. It gets translated as information. And they have another one that is Nyan, which is understood as, which is translated as understanding. Okay. So here's where we get into trouble. Vidya is objective. Is transmissible. Is information. understanding nyan is subjective not transmissible not what do you mean by not transmissible this thing worked for you right yeah are you able to communicate that to me are you able to transfer it to me now that i've heard you say this is the same thing going to happen with me maybe tell me because i've told you something that worked for me and now you may let's say you wake up at 6 a.m. or something. That's your habit, but you don't go to the gym. You may have that thought creep in your head like, oh shit, maybe if I just jump and then if it works, you're like, oh, shit, that works. Hold on a second. Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Your audience,

I think, picked it up. I don't know if you did. I definitely didn't. You try it and if it works and then you say, oh, that's the understanding. Do you understand? Right? So you have to try it. So you pay attention to your example. You're like, but that's not transmissible then? No. The So the moment you told me, did I understand? No. Oh, okay. All right. Say, say, go ahead. What'd you understand? Yeah. So when I, when I tell you it, I don't understand it. I have to try it first to understand it. And if I try it and you even described the scenario that creates the understanding. You're like, and I try it. I'm like, oh, wow, that works. Yes. So that is, that is the same revelation that you had. You can't transmit to me. You can only tell me what to do and then I have to do it and then I have to have

the same understanding. Yeah. Okay. Give you another example, a little bit indelicate, but I'm having a good time. Okay. I'm glad.

That's what we do here. We have a good time. You ever had an orgasm? Yes. Okay. You understand what that feels like? Fucking amazing. Okay.

Right. So you can describe it to me or not, your choice. And there's no way that I'm going to know, right, unless I've had one myself. Yeah. So you can transmit the information for an orgasm. But the understanding of it,

you can't do. So understanding is related to experience, not information. And the big problem that we have in society, right, the reason why podcasts like yours and channels like mine are successful is because everyone is looking for information. And we're looking for, and you do a beautiful job, right? You're trying to get people into an understanding state through the transmission and information. Now you're making sense because the way I look at this is like I have on people who from all walks of life with all different perspectives on stuff, whatever it is. And I'm here talking with you to get my own understanding, but my hope and hopeful expectation is that people at home can listen and get their own understanding from it.

Absolutely, right? Good, bad, or indifferent. But hold on a second. So this is interesting because you're saying, I'm going to get my understanding, they're going to get their understanding. But if I'm saying the same words, how can you get two different understandings? Based on an opinion of whether or not you agree with what's said on your own experience or personal whatever. I, okay, fair enough. I'm transmitting the same thing, right? So information can be transmitted.

That's right. Vidya can be transmitted. Understanding if the same information is transmitted in the same, everyone is hearing the same words, but their understanding is different. That's correct. Right? And as they're understanding,

if anyone who's listened to your show has not implemented, if there's an episode that they have not found useful, that's because they didn't understand. understand it. They didn't try it, right? They didn't experience it. Experience is ultimately how we gain understanding. And that's why if we are a bot and we use lots of habits, we stop experiencing. Right? We're just, so experience involves a certain amount of conscious awareness, generally speaking. Did you, so going back to your personal story, because

you would try a bunch of things, and this is obviously before you're a psychiatrist and before you're fully trained and you know you weren't even doing well in school because you were skipping a lot of school but you spent a couple years in college and you were trying so many things and they wouldn't work to be able to get you to remove video game addiction so obviously you didn't have an understanding of all the things absolutely you understand now pun intended but like did you learn all this when you went to india for seven years or did is this stuff that you've also like picked up after the fact or from other things as well no yeah so so i have new understandings all the time Right? So that's how human beings work. So I would say that a lot of what I'm teaching now, I learned the kernel of when I went to India, right? And I learned a lot. And we didn't even get to the weird esoteric stuff. But yeah, we'll come back to the esoteric stuff. But like, what did your dad even say you were going to be doing in India? So I asked him. I said, what am I going to do there? And he's like, I don't know. And he's like, you need to go. So he had, he had some, you know, sixth sense kind of shit going on. So he was like a really good doctor.

and um and i think that he was like operating on some levels that so you mentioned like you know a union of physical and mental and i think there's like a third dimension of like spiritual and i think that that that's like a real thing yes right and this is where the reason i was getting in all that shit with the layers at the beginning of the layers is because there's so if we look at conscious experience conscious experience cannot be measured but it has a profound impact it cannot be detected right so we don't know if anyone else like even if i like look at like if i'm assessing your consciousness which i can do right using certain medical terms i'm still using like physical stimuli i don't know if you have thoughts i could be in a dream right now there's not a really

scary story if you want to hear please so i this is one of my favorite stories i've told a couple times it's just super cool so i had i had a patient i was on the consult service at mgh and i we had a consult in the neuro i see you so i'm i'm on the psychiatry service but we got get consulted for the neurological ICU. So there was a guy who had been in a car accident and he had been in a coma for about two weeks. Comes out of the coma, physical therapy is

progressing well, he's expected to make a full recovery. So we got called and we're like, what's the problem? And this is something that seems like a bullshit consult. So sometimes you get these where like, you know, the primary team is just like calling you and they don't really have a great reason. Right? So they're like, yeah, we don't know. Like he seems

depressed. And I'm like, what do you mean he seems depressed? And they're like, I don't know. Like he just seems depressed. And like, that's not a reason to consult us. Like, like, is he a functional problem? What's his prognosis? Like, is he, like, crying? Like, what is going? I don't know.

It seems depressed. We're like, okay, fine. So I trained at a place where, thankfully, where we try to be helpful. There are some hospitals where people don't try that because they're toxic environments. But I had some awesome teachers and great, fucking fantastic hospital. So we go see him. And I go see the guy and I try to get a sense of, okay, like, you know, what's your recovery right? Like, okay, so this is your wife.

These are your kids. Okay, older one's 19. She's going to college. Younger one is 17. She's applying to college. You know, how's your job? Okay, like, no problems at work. You're a partner at this firm.

And they've let you take six months of medical leave. But let me talk to the rehab person. Rehab is progressing well. So everything seems good. So I go and see this person every day for about six days. And I kind of ask them like, you know, how are you feeling? They're like, I'm fine. I'm fine.

I'm fine. I'm fine. So on day six, I go and I'm like, look, I feel like I'm missing something. Because everything I know about you, you're doing fine. work is fine family loves you everything's great like you're making a full recovery sounds like you know the nursing staff loves you right so he's like cracking jokes and like you're doing well and i'm like what's what's the deal am i like and if you don't want to say anything that's fine but this is the last day i'm going to see you're being discharged tomorrow so if there's like

any like you know but i feel like you're sad just like sitting with you it feels like there's something off and that's when the dude starts crying and i'm like what is this so he tells me that while he was in a coma, he had this whole other life. And he was, like, married to someone, and he had two boys instead of two girls. Oh, my God. And he's, like, basically grieving, because he's like, I realize that those people aren't real. But I, like, miss them. And I'm never going to see my sons again.

I'm never going to see, like, that. And he's just all fucked up on the inside because it's really weird because it's like, he just woke up. And he knows that this is his real life. He's like, he has all these memories, but he has all these other memories from, like, this other life. And he had been afraid to tell people. Yeah, because it sounds crazy.

It sounds crazy, but it's not. I mean, no. He was in a coma. You know, your mind dreams things. That's why it wouldn't sound crazy to me, but it's a wild thing. Yeah, so you got to be careful once again with dream, because I don't know if it was a dream. Okay, so. An illusion?

I don't know. So, I don't think it was an illusion. I don't think it was a dream because dreams have certain. I don't know if this makes sense. There's certain, like, scientific qualities. Right? So in a dream, like, your feet can be gigantic and you can fly and, like, objects can, there's an internal, the logical rules of a dream are not what this person experienced.

It was not a dream, right? So it was consistent with prolonged memories. The other thing that's really common with dreams is you don't remember your dreams like 30 minutes after you wake up. This guy, six days post coma, was grieving because he's still thinking about his wedding day from this alternate life like what the fuck is that i have no idea right yeah so so this is where there's there's some weird stuff going on that i don't think can be explained now you can you can come up with hypotheses neuroscientifically psychologically my sense of having worked with this

shit is that there is more to the body and more to the mind and and what i'm talking about is this subjective quantitative qualitative experience of existence can you explain that yeah so You can experience stuff, right? That's not the same as like neurons in your head firing. They may correlate, but like neurons in the head doesn't necessarily equal experience. Right. It's just qualitatively different. So understanding happens at that level.

So I think it's not even psychological. I think it's like when I work with patients, there's like this breakthrough, which is not quite mental. It's not like you can put the mental blocks in a certain order. There's kind of this weird, experiential, like, moment of catharsis, right? We even have a word for it. It's catharsis. Yeah. But catharsis is not something, I think catharsis is like more than mental.

Now, that's not a scientifically defensible statement because we have no evidence of this stuff, because we have no, we can't, science can't study subjective experience. It can only study the reports of subjective experience. So what are you basing that on then saying that, just like your subjective opinion on it? Yeah, yeah, absolutely, right? Right. So there's no scientific evidence of subjective experience. We only have reports of subjective experience. Right. So this is some philosophical problem on our philosopher. But, you know, do I see the same red that you see? Like, I don't. The problem still persists that we can all acknowledge. That there's a quality of existence that is subjective experience. And when we're talking about really where understanding or neon comes from, in these ancient, you asked me what I learned there. So I'm getting making my way. there. So, so what I learned is like accessing that shit, right? So there are certain states of mind that you can enter states of mind. It's not really states of mind. You shut off mind. Your, your body becomes basically inert. Your mind becomes inert. And then you're like, all you're left

with is subjective experience. And then you start exploring weird shit. And if that doesn't make any sense, I can. Yeah. Can you unpack that a little more? So best example I have is, so right now you're aware of your existence, right? Anyone at home, as long as y'all aren't driving, you can do this to you. So I notice you're sitting in a particular posture. Close your eyes. What do you notice about your experience of this moment now that your eyes are closed? What do I notice about it?

Yeah. Where is your attention going? My attention's, I was just looking at you, so my attention is imagining you saying this because my eyes are shut and I can't physically seeing you say this. Okay. Keep going. Tell me where your attention is. Again, it's still at you and it's actually more focused at you because now I can only hear you and so my hearing is more sensitively aware.

Okay, there we go. You can open your eyes. So as we remove one sense, your attention in the other senses increases, right? So if you're listening to a really good piece of music or you're in that mythical state of orgasm, closing your eyes makes it better. Right? Okay. Okay. So now let's understand something. So if I cut out sight, everything else gets better, right? What happens if I cut out sight and sound? And touch. Yeah. That's no good. Why is that? No good. I mean, talk to Helen Keller. I think she would make that trade if she had all that back. No, no. What happens to your attention, right? So if I remove sight, all of your other senses increased by 20%, right? yeah but like if i lost my hearing and my sight and my touch at the same time that would fucking blow i'm talking about a temporary state oh okay yeah yeah i was thinking fair enough fair right right but so so if if we remove like so when you close your eyes for a moment everything else intensifies right yeah so if i if you stop hearing and you stop seeing everything else

will intensify right yeah and then if you remove the sense of touch which happens all the time so I was asking you, where was your attention? You weren't really aware of where your body was. Now, everyone who's listening to this is suddenly aware of where their body is. You feel that? You're aware of your body now. I would amend that a little bit and say, my focus was more on thinking where you were, but I was still aware that my body was sitting in this. Sure.

Were you more aware when your eyes were closed? No. Okay. So the key thing here is that as we remove a sense, our attentional awareness of the other senses increases, right? If I listen to music with my eyes closed, I will hear it better. Yes. So what a key part of meditation is is removing all five senses. So all you're left with is attention. Now, a lot of people may think, well, then I would think about my thoughts. That's why we shut off mind too. So you shut off mind, you shut off emotion, you shut off touch,

smell, taste, pro preoception, sight, sound. And then all you're left with is, you're left with is attention and then it goes to this like other place question yes when you say and and i've heard this phrase used a bunch talking about mindfulness and meditation in particular yes when you say shut off the mind though right and i've never been particularly great at meditation i'll be honest about that the best i do is actually ironically in between sets in the gym absolutely when i'm lifting for an hour and then i do cardio for a half hour when i lift i do not have headphones and it's my time right and i'm very focused in between and I will get in touch with my thoughts and have a little bit of peace but my mind like when people say like shut off the mind i've never understood that because it's like you know a

thought is not a vacuum it's always going to be replaced with another thought i'll tell you two times that you've had that your mind has been empty okay okay both involving the penis orgasm is one of them so in the moment of orgasm you have no thoughts you have thoughts before You have thoughts after. Yeah. The moment. Second one, when you really need to take a piss and you first start to piss. The second most common no-mind state that people experience.

I would actually also buy that one too. Right, you're not thinking about anything. Yeah. So how do those states feel, by the way? Fucking great. So now you know what yogis are doing for years at a time sitting in caves. Pricing and fucking? Nope.

They're attaining. So here's the key thing. Pissing and fucking. Important. Great, great, great question. You think you're being funny, but that's a good question. Pissing and fucking induce that state of mind. It's not the fucking itself. It's the experience of fucking. Does that make sense? And if you want to understand this, I mean, this is unfortunate, but I've had a lot of patients who have had bad sexual experiences, which means it's not the physical act. It is the mental state that determines, right? And it can be the most, like I've seen this, it can be the most horrible thing that can ever happen to a human being or it can be the most wonderful than that. that can ever happen to the human being but the sexual act right so depending on the willingness okay right but okay yeah the act is identical right is the mental state that determines determines what people right happen to people so the reason we are all addicted to orgasm is because it induces the state of samadhi it induces a no mind state very very briefly and so there are some

practices of meditation where when we empty our mind and we empty everything all of our our physical senses. And the reason we empty our physical senses is because many of our thoughts come from our physical senses, right? So if I go like this, you're having thoughts now. Let's think. Right?

So if I do that, like, it's going to create thoughts. Yes. So all of our senses are going to make thoughts. But sometimes they can slow down our thoughts if you look at a sunset or something like that. I remember for me, another big one was smelling the top of my kids' heads when they were born.

I don't know if you guys have ever smelled the top of a baby, and it's kind of a weird, creepy thing. No, it's not. Like, they're very pure. Yeah, like, there's something about that that is just, you know, really calms you down and empties you

and you're kind of like in the moment. And the way that that works is we'll oftentimes use something called an alambana. Okay, this is for you. So we'll use an alambana. So an alambana is an object that pulls your attention towards it.

So it is like an object of meditation. So when we use an alambana, like we're using an alambana, Like, we're using, we're putting our attention toward something and removing everything else. Does that make sense? Yeah. So, and I think sex is a really good example, because when you're doing that, you're focused. And I've had plenty of patients who are not focused and then they have trouble and they don't

orgasm, like, makes sense, right? Yeah. So an alumina like pulls your mind in to one place. And then even, I don't know if this kind of makes sense, but even then you won't have thoughts. So if you really get pulled in, like watching a sunset as a good example. Like, so you watch a sunset, you're not technically thinking. if you're really in the in the zone right right yeah but even then there's there's one stage beyond that which is that still when you're absorbed in the sunset there's you in the sunset

so you're you are absorbed in one thing orgasm you're absorbed in one thing urinating out on a full bladder you're absorbed in one thing if you stay in that state for an extended period of time then you will enter then that will acclimatize so now there's one more thing which is like you're wearing a shirt, I'm wearing a shirt. But you don't feel your shirt after the first few seconds you put it on. Right. Right. So there's one other principle, which is once you acclimatize to that state, right,

and usually we don't acclimatize to it because it's temporary. So like pissing and orgasm are like super temporary. And that's where we get to Thaunthric sex, by the way. Because then you're extending that state for a very, very, very long period of time. And then, you know, the bliss of that moment will then, you go to this other place which is basically impossible to describe there's no vidia for it there's only none you can't i can't i mean i can try but it's not going to make sense to people and you have to experience it meaning like all these things we're talking about whether it's sitting with the sunset

or like the moment you got to begin peeing or something like that where your thought has just been like oh i really got to go you still have one thought technically no you don't i really got to go is a thought. So this is where you guys got to try this at home. The moment that you start peeing, there's no thinking. Can you define, all right, I don't want to get like too meta here, but can you define a thought for me? Yeah. A thought is a fluctuation within the mind. That's what I would call a thought. No matter how big or how small, just a fluctuation. Yeah. So, well, I mean, emotions are not thoughts, but thoughts usually have like can have an analytical reasoning, They have some activation of like some of the verbal parts of your brain, right?

So, but it is it is a temporary, like the thing about a thought is it's never permanent. Thoughts come and go. That's what I'm saying. And I'm getting a little, a little bit literal with this. Yeah, it's good. I kind of have to. You have to. You should get literal.

But like when I really got a pee and I've been holding it, maybe some guy was going on and talking on a stage and I wasn't allowed to leave the room for a while. I'm like, oh, shit, now he's done and I can go out and leave the room. Like that first moment where I start to. pee where you're like your thoughts are empty even if i go oh that's a thought no it's not it's not oh so you got to you got to test it because i saw something in my head when i did that i was like oh my god i'm peeing yeah but but that's not a thought it's you're just one with the experience you were just a pisser like you're pure pisser there's no thinking right so i'll give you an example let's say oh my god i'm not allowed to leave the room you run outside and you see there's a line thoughts increase

Oh my God. How many people are there? How many urinals are there? Thoughts go up, up, up, up, up. Thoughts are very rapid. And then you just become, oh, my God, I'm a pisser. Oh, my God. And everything in your mind empties, and it feels so good. And here's the crazy thing. Here's the crazy thing, okay? This is going to be so hard. But if you, if you've, maybe I'll be able to explain. The key thing is you're suffering, right? So let's say that I'm waiting to take a piss. and I see that there's an exit on the highway and it says gas station is five miles away. So it takes me expected time to urinal is six minutes.

You slow driver. Fine. Okay, whatever. So six minutes is expected time to urinal. I'm fine with that. No problem. Okay. If next exit is one mile away and I exit

and I walk into the bathroom and there's a line much more suffering. Right. Right? Even though the technically the two scenarios could be the five six minutes in both cases waiting five minutes to piss or driving five minutes

to piss subjectively completely different agree yes so here's the key thing i was going to ask you how are they different maybe i can ask how are they different what's different about because when i see the line i've now encountered a new obstacle that i wasn't previously expecting to encounter that is the surface of it what happens within you that's the external circumstance but in both But in both cases, you're just waiting six minutes, which you can handle. So why is one harder for you? Expectations. My expectation.

Where do expectations exist? A thought. Very good. And as your expectations increase and as your mental activity increases, what happens to your suffering? It increases. Absolutely. Yeah. Right?

Oh, my God. Is she going to call me back? Is she not going to call me back? I texted. Should I text her again? Should I double text? Is it okay to double text? Let me ask my friend if it's okay to double test.

Oh my God. My boss, are they going to see my presentation? Oh my God, my fucking coworker. They sent this presentation. I sent it to them for revisions. I sent it to them, hey, can you guys take a look at this presentation before I sent it to the boss? They looked at it and they sent it. They attached it.

They told my boss, here's the presentation that we worked on. They're taking my fucking credit. The more our mind becomes active, the more suffering we engage in. the lesser mind becomes active pisser orgasm meditation lifting for those moments and you know what i'm talking about oh i know for those moments it's all making sense now it's really coming home yeah empty mind so you asked me what i learned in india and now you understand yeah and that was seven years out there right uh summers for seven years so i summers for seven years and sometimes when But I would go there, I would learn particular practices.

I would come back, do those practices diligently for a year, and then I'd go back and learn more stuff. Wow, so it's almost like programmatic in it. Oh, 100% bro. Yeah. Yeah. So take me into the first summer when you went there, because at this time you're like addicted to video games. Are you like Jones and on the plane all the way there? I mean, yeah, sort of.

But I mean, I would say first two weeks there were the worst weeks of my life. Just felt really incredibly alone. The food was terrible. I couldn't eat. Probably some amount of dopamine withdrawal or whatever from video games. That was not how I experienced it. Where were you? I was in an ashram outside of Bangalore, India, southern India.

Okay. And what was it like? Like, you got dumped into this. So when you get there, like, are you like, oh, I'm becoming a monk? Or what's the? No. So, I mean, my experience was, so I went to the airport. So, like, I didn't, this was before the days of cell phones, okay?

So like I went there and I got off the plane I didn't speak the language So I'm I speak one Indian language But not the one where I was going And I remember like walking out of the airport At 2 in the morning And basically there were like a bunch of people there

And so everyone eventually left And I was the last person there at the like outside the airport At like 2.30 in the morning And there was one other guy who was there Who clearly come to pick someone up And I just kind of like pointed at him And I was like are you here to pick me up And he went like this

is that yes no one knows right so the indian headbobble can mean all sorts of things so so then i just started going with him so i just went to a car he doesn't speak english i don't know if he's there to pick me up i told him my name and then he was like this and then he he shook my hand like this is how he shakes hands this how people in india shake hands like dead fish yeah like it's just they they you know that's not even dead fish that's a frozen Yeah. It was just really, really weird. So then I'm with this guy for about an hour and a half in the truck where we leave the city. We're going out into the wilderness. And then we like park somewhere eventually. Or there's a gate that opens, I remember. And then like we're like at this place in the wilderness and it's like pitch black outside because they lost power. So there were no lights or anything. And so I go to my room. I end up in my room at around. No, sorry. I think the flight landed at 1230. I think I was in my room by 2.2.30.

um they gave me a candle and so i did discover that i was in the right place and someone was like yeah you know dr canoja mentioned you were coming and you're in the right place and oh so they do talk to you it's not like the quiet eventually eventually so there was someone who spoke english so after i got there but i didn't know like i was like i was like i was like really scared and i was like i wasn't but i was like okay this is crazy i'm just got into a car with a stranger and we left town and i don't know where i am um but so and eventually i was i was uh There was a wonderful woman there who was one of the administrators of the ashram. So she basically took me to my room and said, you know, here's a candle and sorry, the power's out.

So I go to sleep at like about 2, 2.30 in the morning. And then a couple hours later, I wake up to the sound of a bell. And I look outside. The moon is still out. So it's like, I'm like, what the fuck is this? And it's like, is it a fire or whatever? And so I like rush outside. And then I see that like I hear the sound of toilets flushing and like people like,

like sinks turning on and stuff. So no one seems to be panicking. So I was like, this is an alarm clock. So let me get ready. So I brush my teeth. I walk outside. And there's like this, you know, I still remember because it was dark and there's no power,

but there's like a little bit of moonlight. So I saw like, you know, these groups of people like coalescing and moving down a path. So I'm like following this like herd of people when I hear, I was like, what the fuck was that? And then I, like, what is going on?

So I'm walking. down this this this road and i see that there's a row of people who are projectile vomiting and i'm like what have i come it like is there some plague or something turns out it's a yogic practice called vaman dhoti and so that what you do is you drink a bunch of isotonic saline water so it's not it's the right um concentration is your blood same concentration is your blood are you drink it yeah so you drink like two liters or more of isotonic say and then you vomit it all out. Ooh.

And it really cleans you out. Yeah, I use saline every day in my nose in the morning and night. So that whole netty pot thing. So there's like, you know, you are asking about the levels of practice. So netty pot is like level one. Sootranetri neti. So that's called gel neti. Sutraneti is level two.

That's where you take a catheter. You insert it into the nose and don't try this at home or without proper guidance. You take the catheter. You stick it in your nose and then you put your finger. in the back and you pull it out your throat, right? Oh, fuck that. And then you floss. It feels terrible, but it really, it really helps

with allergies and stuff. I'll bet. So that's level two. Level one's working well. You should not try level two, but if you ever want more, level two is good. I'm good. Vamandoti is level three. Then there's a particular practice where it comes out the other end.

So you start with, it's basically like an animal. You put the tube all the way through your ass? No, no, no. Sorry, you drink. you know no no no I could just see let's get through the intestine no no no no no yeah I should have so so you drink a bunch of water and then you basically do a set of yoga practices that force it through your digestive tract so at the very beginning you're pooping and then by the end it's clear water that doesn't sound bad that's level four that's level four that sounds way better than level three yeah I mean I think it's level four because it's harder to do okay so So you have to drink water and then you're also like, you know, you're not like vomiting it up right away. So it has to go through your digestive canal and then, I mean, you just feel like you're walking on air when you're done by. You know what's interesting? In the first 10 minutes of waking up every morning, one of the things I do is drink since 60 ounces of water.

And like, I mean this literally, not to be funny, but like cleans out my system right away. Like same concept. Yeah. But do you have, you poop water at the end or you just trigger about? Oh, you're saying it literally poops. Oh, yeah, you're pooping out. You, you, like, you know, when you look in the toilet, it just looks like nothing has happened. It's, it's, you know, wow.

Yeah. That's next level. Never mind. So, so this is the, this is, these are the introductory practices at a, at an ashram. So this is like stage one through four for like everyday people. Then as you do more advanced yoga, you learn more dangerous and, um, potent is the right word. More potent practices. When we're talking more dangerous, like.

What are we talking here? We're talking. So one of my teachers once told me that, you know, I'm going to teach you a yoga practice if you want to learn. So you were asking what I learned this. So there's the introductory yoga. And then there's also like kundalini yoga. So kundalini yoga is to awaken your kundalini and stuff like that.

So these are like more esoteric practices that are more spiritually potent. So these practices, you know, one of my teachers told me that, okay, if you want to learn this, this practice, we have to cleanse your Mooladhar chakra, which is your root chakra. And during this practice, you have to be with me for, I don't remember if he said a week or a month. You have to be with me in the woods for a couple of weeks, let's say. And during that time, you can't see any other human beings because you're going to get hypersexual. And if there are any other people around, you're going to assault them. So we've absolutely, I mean, I've seen, you know, there are case reports of meditation.

induced psychosis, I realize now that it's probably some yogic techniques that do something like induce a state of mania from bipolar disorder. So, and then, you know, we, there's a lot of overlap between like psychosis and spiritual experiences, right? So there's a lot of this stuff that we see the negative version of in mental health all the time, bipolar disorder, mania, psychosis. And there's a lot of interesting neuroscience about, you know, like these, you know, these ego death experiences that people have when they use psychedelics, same parts of the brain get

activated when we meditate, basically. So we'll have these, like, ego death experiences. And so a lot of these, like the cultivation of things like compassion from the Buddhist tradition involve, and we all try to dissolve the ego, generally speaking, in the Eastern meditative traditions. Right. So, like, we sort of figured that out a while ago. So you do these more advanced practices.

They are riskier because I think they can induce, like, you know, mental health problems. That's why they're done under the guidance of guru. And you got to work your way to it. You have to, yeah. So there's an immense amount of these first four practices I told you about. Those are should-thi, which means cleansing. So, you know, a more recent practice that I started doing would not recommend that people do this.

Is a certain kind of cleansing practice, which involves inhaling for 16 seconds, holding your breath for 64, and then exhale. for 32. Inhaling. Whoa. And even if people want to try a safe version of this, you can try 4168. But if you try this, and if you want to try it now, we can. You'll, you want to try it or no? Yeah, the 4168.

Let's start with the basic. Okay. So close your eyes. Sit up straight. Your spine needs to be straight. Back is straight. Okay. So I'm going to ask you to inhale.

One, two, three, four, and hold it. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, eleven, twelve, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, fifteen, sixteen. Now exhale for eight, so go slow. one two three four five six seven eight are you fully exhaled yeah okay let's do it again close your eyes do another round on your own so count to four hold for 16 exhale for eight all right start now yeah we're going to do two more rounds Exhale. Exhale.

you should do eight we're gonna do eight yeah you can stop if you need to okay so you specifically you should do eight on the inhale yeah i'm gonna walk you through it so we're 8 32 16 all right okay okay okay so close your eyes you're you'll be able to handle it okay if it gets too much that's okay but i want you to experience okay that okay don't try this at home boys and girls is only for julian so breathe in one two three four five six seven seven 8. Hold. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 15, 16, 17, 17, 17, 18, 19, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 27, 27, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, exhale for 16, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 12, 13, 14, 15, 15, 16. What was that like?

I don't mean to be like too simple with it but meditative okay so did you notice no why's that funny Joe no no no no no no no so so meditation doesn't work for you because you haven't been doing it right you need to do hardcore meditation my friend so I did ayahuasca once that's not meditation right um and ayahuasca by the way I can talk about that a second but so so I want to know when you were breathing when you were holding right so between let's say 24 and 32 seconds did you notice anything in your body especially around your shoulders no where i really started noticing was on the exhale because i would i had to control the exhale more because it was going to be

16 seconds instead of eight the first two rounds were easy yeah so so if you do this practice you will start to notice all kinds of sensations okay and and and that's the problem so it's it's it's weird, but you'll notice like all these sense, like, it's hard to describe it, you'll notice your prana. So you'll notice like your chi. You'll, you'll notice like if you do like even three, four or five rounds of this practice, right? So if you do five breaths, you'll start to notice like all kinds of weird like, I don't know, like heat and wobbliness and like weird things that are not localized to physical sensation. What do you mean by not localized to physical? So it is not, your shoulder will not be moving, but you'll, you'll feel things around your shoulders. You'll

feel things around your neck. Oh, okay. Right. So, and I mean, we're not going to do it now, but, but if you try this at home, you'll understand. And so that's, when they talk about brana or chi, it's not something that can be measured, but it can absolutely be felt. So I teach my kids, this practice called the squishy pillow.

That's what they gave it the name, where we basically like, we'll kind of go like this. So do this. So, yeah, keep your arms at, yeah, 90 degrees. Okay. Now what I want you to do is hold it there for a, like, let's go 10 seconds. So kind of Namaste position with your arms at your elbows kind of being at 90 degrees.

And now I want you to pull them apart a little bit. Now what I want you to do is just feel what's between it. Now move it a little bit. Do you feel the heat between them? Yes. Okay, so now what I want you to is pull a little bit further. Right, you can bend your elbows if you need to. But try to stay in that zone.

where you feel the heat i can still feel some right there okay good now try to go a little bit further and hold on hold on to the heat you feel it now i'm feeling less of it come in got it again yeah okay so then now that's wild now now come out come up you can do it pay attention you got it now don't you yeah yeah okay close your eyes a little bit further focus you got it still Yeah, I'm going to explain after, but I got it. Okay. You feel like the tube or the pillow? It's not a pillow.

It feels like I'm, I keep picturing an accordion. Yeah, good. It's following me. Yep, weird, right? On the note, yeah. Yeah, let's see how far you can go. You feel that resistance? I still have it in the dead center of my palm.

Good. Okay. Yeah. You want to keep going? Yeah, I still have it. All right, now I kind of don't feel it. Okay, come in a little bit. All right, got it.

Okay, you can open your eyes. So that's a really great introductory practice to give people a sense of browner. Okay, so like let's try to understand this from a neuroscience perspective. So when we're this close, absolutely you have temperature. sensors in your hands right but when we're this far that's a little bit different it's in your mind now uh in i wouldn't say it's in your mind so i think it is still a perception right so it's not a thought and it's not an emotion it's not an imagination it's a perception you are perceiving you're not thinking it's not a thought you're feeling a perception is not in your mind

no a perception is an experience i thought about that wrong my whole life so so so I'm defining mind is the place where thoughts and emotions take place. Right? So it's not a thought. A perception is not a thought and it's not an emotion. Do you experience it mentally? Sure. You have experience of it.

So that gets a bit complicated. But a perception is usually like it's a perception. That's all it is. Yeah. So that's a perception. It's not an imagination. I didn't tell you what you should feel. So I told you with the breath cleansing practice.

I've given some people a sense of suggestibility. So maybe that's flawed. That's flawed now, right? Because I said, this is what you should feel. This is what you may feel. I said, you'll feel some stuff around the shoulders. You remember when I said that? Yes.

But with this one, I didn't tell you what you should be feeling. I just said, hey, look for something. And then you said, look for the heat. Yeah, right? And then you're the one who gave me the accordion, right? You're like, it's not a pillow. It's an accordion. Like, what the fuck?

Right? That's really weird. Like, stop and think about that for a second. You're like, no, you are incorrect. It is not a pillow. It is an accordion. Well, that's how I was perceiving it. So you weren't thinking, it wasn't analysis.

Right? It's not logic. It's not thinking. It's a perception. So that's qualitatively different. I've never separated the two. That's interesting. I mean, you're separating it.

So now I'm going to separate it. Yep, yep, yep. And that's just because we're not mentally trained in this stuff. Right. So as we do some of these yogic practices, you asked what I learned. As we do some of these. So I had my introduction to practices like this. And then this is just the beginning, dude.

I've been teaching you for 15 minutes. but we've been talking about other stuff like motivation or whatever so like once you start really exploring and by exploring you have to put yourself through this subjective experience you have to train your body and train your mind

you have to alter your diet to the point that your diet is incredibly incredibly pure and even the water that you breathe the air that you I mean the water that you drink the air that you breathe you have to be in the right location so there's a reason why yogis live in the Hula is

like the power of meditation there. And I'm not talking about like, you know, alterations to your neurochemistry. I'm sure that shit happens. But your subjective experience is insane. When you go to a spiritually concentrated place and you sit to meditate, it's not something that can be understood.

It can only be understood. It can't be explained. But like, like what you, you felt an accordion. There's all kinds of other shit. Right? There's like places you can go. That's the best way I can describe it.

And like that's like, You said you felt an accordion, well, like, people don't know what the fuck, you know, like, but that's, dude, this is just like five seconds. Yeah. You know? And so as you really get into this stuff and you train your body in the right way is you start using the right accessories. What's that? That's Rudraksh. Rudraks.

Yeah. Do you hold that up again for the camera? Yeah. Rudraks. Is that like the yogi rosary bead kind of deal? Yeah. It's a form of yogi rosary beads. But depending on what practice you want to do.

do, you use this is the right this is the right yogi rosary bead for this podcast. Yes. So you have different ones? I have an old one. This is the one that I'm using ever since my midlife crisis. What happened with your midlife crisis?

I had a midlife crisis, dude. I was like, what the fuck am I doing with my life, bro? Was this after you were married with kids? Oh, this happened about, it started about two years ago. So I brought it on. Success. So I, you know, I started this Healthy Gamer thing. We're the fastest-growing stream on Twitch, got invitations to work with the

United Nations, the White House, started getting recognized on the street, you know, became the expert in certain things. And I started, and I was like, what am I doing with my life? Right. So my, and my kids were okay. My wife was, you know, everything was okay. But I was like, what am I doing with my life? Like, what's the point of existence? Like you had gone, maybe you had gone past even your wildest expectations with how you could get recognized for what you did. And you thought, like, wow, how do I go above this? It was sort of like, okay, like, so I had an opportunity, right? And I had a mission, which is like, I'm going to help the people that no one else is lining up to help. That's really why I started streaming on Twitch and why I started healthy gamer.

It's like, there's just a group of people like my 19 year old self that no one was trying to help. And these guys need help. So I started on Twitch, started helping all these people. And then, you know, a couple years into it, we still don't make a whole lot of money. So, like, our services are... At Desjardin Insurance, we put the care in taking care of business. Your business, to be exact. Our agents take the time to understand your company so you get the right coverage at the right price. Whether you rent out your building, represent a condo corporation, or own a cleaning company,

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how it used to be. But now I had an event at YouTube a couple years ago where like 300 people that are like big fans of our channel and many of them have done coaching and things like that. So now we're, you know, because a podcast like yours, we're reaching people who are not losers on the internet. But I was also like struggling with my. because I'd walked away from a very lucrative career. And having a successful startup, I was like, and then I was like, I'm still not making very much. I make about a third of what I did when I was a practicing physician.

And so I was like, what's the point of doing all this work? But I'm not making any money. And then I was like, but I didn't set out to make money. But then six years in, it's sort of like, okay, I haven't made a whole lot of money, but I didn't set out to make money. So I was really conflicted about that because if I had just been a practicing doctor, I would have had a different life, right? so wrestling with that also figuring out my relationship I was like unhappy I was just deeply

unhappy like even though everything in my life was going right and that's when I sort of realized like okay I've been spiritually coasting so spiritually coasting oh yeah so for for eight you know seven years I did a lot of intense spiritual activity between the ages of 21 and 28 and then I went to medical school yeah and so then like I tried to become a good doctor and I did a pretty good job, I think. All of my energy was like going into medical school, you know, ended up training at Harvard and tried to do a good job there. And then I tried to do a good job at work. And then I tried to do a good job in my marriage. And I tried to do a good job with my kids. I think I did okay. And then I realized like, oh, I haven't been like grinding spiritually. So then I

started doing that about two years ago. And I realized like, oh, even the midlife crisis was like a call for like, okay i've coasted long enough in some ways you had turned it into a habit rather than a present a hundred percent yeah way to bring it back dude look at look at the balls on this guy i love this guy well done that's so that's top top tier podcasting right there so so you had you had an understanding of that out of nowhere and to bring it back to your example there were a thousand subconscious things or 10,000 subconscious things that kind of led to a moment where you're like, holy shit, I'm having a midlife crisis and this is why. Sort of.

So I would say that there was a, there was, there were 999 things that did not give me the answer. And then ultimately my answer was more of that spiritual thing. So I know that sounds kind of weird and it's different. Yeah. Can you explain that? Yeah. So, so, you know, understanding. Ah, this is hard.

So there are all, neuroscientifically, there are a thousand decisions that then tip you over. Okay. So that's what I mean about the layers. Now we're coming back to it. So like you can, do you want to answer the question from a neuroscientific perspective or do you want to answer it from a subjective experiential perspective? I want both. Right.

So the neuroscience is there's a thousand tiny decisions. Undoubtedly, that is true. For me, my subjective experience of it, like, so I started going on a lot of walks, which was sort of the birth of my spiritual tether. So I just walk and spend a lot of time with, I don't listen to music, I don't listen to headphones. I just walk until I figure things out. Love it.

And when I was really, like, struggling to put my life together, this was, like, post-India, but pre-medical school. So I applied to medical school for three years in a row. I got rejected from 120 medical schools because my GPA, I graduated with, like, a 2.5 GPA. 2.6, if you round up. 2.56. And so, you know, I was, like, trying to figure out what I was doing with my life. And so I would just walk a lot. I was in Boston.

I didn't have a whole lot of money. And I just lived in a place that was cheap. And so I had to walk 45 minutes to the grocery store. So in Boston, you'd be like snowing and shit. So I'd, like, load up. And then I would walk with my gloves and I'd take as many groceries as I could carry. And so I would walk a lot. And so I started walking again.

And I think it's really, really good. I like to hike and stuff too, Matt. Like, not climb as in vertical, but I'll go hiking. So just spent some time with myself and I was like, what am I doing? Like, what am I on this earth for? And I was like, oh, yeah, that's right. Like, I wanted to achieve as far as I can on the road to enlightenment. And I stopped doing that.

I started putting all of my, like, energy into material success and material happiness and, like, doing all the things that I'm supposed to do in life. And I was like, I stopped, I've stopped striving for spiritual success. How long did it take for that enlightenment goal to set in after you started on your journey at the ashram? Two and a half months. So after two, so the first two weeks at the ashram were the worst in my life. And why was that?

We got off that. Just, it sucked. Yeah. Like people talk about, you know, we romanticized. Oh, I went to Ashram. Look at this Dr. Kay. Coming back with all this, oh, giving you such this, no, you're feeling the accordion and you're understanding, understanding and didn't realize.

Look at this guy is so good, man. Oh, my God. He's dropping all these bombs, bro. So great. Okay. So. So. alive with the ashram fucking sucks dude the food sucks people steal your underwear like

steal your underwear oh yeah like right so there are a lot of people there so ashrums are also like homeless shelters basically in india where like they don't they don't like turn anyone away right so there's like people there are mentally ill and and things like that like really wonderful people so but it's like it's not a good so i i hadn't eaten fruit in like two and a half weeks and one day i found a fruit seller and i was like what the fuck this guy has fruit i bought a mango i didn't realize I didn't have a knife, I went back to my room, and I, like, tore it apart with my hands. And I, like, feasted on it like a fucking monkey. It was the best mango I've ever had in my life.

And because the food is really local. It's actually very healthy, very sat thik, which means it's conducive to meditation. But at the beginning, it tastes like shit. By the end, it tastes amazing. Because your experience of it has changed. And I don't know if this makes sense, but once you start, you know this weird shit that we did today? Once you start eating food with the same state of mind. mind that you're doing this.

Oh, it's totally different. It's completely different. Yeah. Yeah. Right? Yep. So I discovered this and I was like, this is amazing. I also met someone who is basically my guru for that period of time.

So and the guru taught me, initiated me into some, some kundalini practices, some tantric practices, things like that. And I was like, let's go. Right. So the squishy pillow or accordion or whatever, that's just like not even 1% of the way there. That's like, this is what you can get in 30 minutes. Yeah, the first hour.

Right? So once you train for three months with dedication with the right kind of teacher, like you will experience like crazy things. Starts to click. And then I'm like, okay, this is what I'm doing. So I went to my teachers and I asked for two things. One is I asked for a tantric initiation, which one of my teachers agreed to and gave me a mantra. Okay. So that's a practice that I've been doing for 22 years now.

And the second thing is I was like, I want to become a monk. So I want to take my vows. And they said, no. They said, go back to the U.S. My teacher said, in order to become a monk, you have to give up your life. You don't have shit worth giving up. Go and build something. Seriously, that's what he said.

He said, go back to the U.S., get a doctoral degree. Put 100% of your effort into professional success. And then nine years from now at the age of 30, if you still want to do it, you can give it up and we'll take you. They said, you can come back every year. We'll still continue to teach you, but no vows until you're 30 and you have a doctoral degree. So you wanted to give your life to be in a monk out there with them. Yeah, yeah. Isn't there like a vow of celibacy and shit? Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. And you can't talk. No, you can talk. Yeah, I mean, there are periods of time where you more, which is you maintain silence, but yeah, so then I went back,

met my wife, you know, but, and so we got involved, but I was like, no big deal. Like, I have till I'm 30. So, like, this is part of what I'm supposed to do. And then, you know, that just didn't as hilarious, because I would tell, I even told her, like, once we started, like, getting serious, you know? I was like, hey, by the way, I'm spiritual. And I don't know if I want to be tethered to this life. You know, I can do this for now, but my heart is over there,

and I must take, I'm going to become punk, and I'm going to give this all up, okay? Oh, my God. And she was like, yeah, whatever, bro. So she was, I'll even ask her. I was like, don't, weren't you like, what did you think? She's like, I know you. You're like so full of it.

Like, I knew you that you weren't going to leave. Well, also, when you were addicted to video games, it's not like you were getting box and stuff, right? You were just sitting up and playing video games all the time. It wasn't like I was going to be like. Like you were getting women. Oh, I was, I was certainly not getting women, bro. So now you come home and you're like, this is fucking awesome. So that was kind of weird, you know, because like the interesting thing, I think the reason we got together is because I decided to be Sullivan.

So then when when I would talk to her, She insists that we didn't go on a date. In my mind, I wasn't asking her out on a date. I was like, hey, do you like Thai food? I know a great Thai place. We should go get food together. And I was like completely relaxed, right? Whereas like the rest of the time before that, I was like, I'm going to get laid, right?

There's some interesting psychology. A hundred percent, dude. Right? So like my expectations were gone, right? My thinking was clear. I wasn't like over analyzing or anything like that. And I wasn't like invested. And I was like, hey, if she wants to come, great.

if she doesn't like no big deal right i enjoyed the way she looked like i wanted to go to lunch with her yeah but i really didn't think because i was like oh not for me not for me right and then what i realized is like even my desire to become monk was fucking ego dude it was like oh yeah like since i had sucked at life i was going to rise above life by rejecting it she said no to me oh she's a bitch that's basically what i was doing with life i was like rejecting you because i sucked at right so it's like i'm devaluing the thing that i am bad at which is another piece of interesting it's like a lot of by the way like if you want to look at it yeah i don't want to say parallel but another type of psychology with that you see like a lot of these like voluntary in cells now

just got turned down by women so they're like fuck you i'm not going to do it in some ways like this is similar so we reject things that reject us yes right instead of saying i suck at this that's right and and so even now like people get i respond to compliments in a weird way so like you know so so clearly i'm exceptional in some ways but i really don't feel like that you know so like and this gets weird but it's it's not weird it's a little bit of are you talking about some uh imposter syndrome no non-imposter syndrome it's on the other side so i don't feel bad about it. It's just people don't realize how stupid I am. And here's the key thing. So for me, it's a realization that even if I'm intelligent or brilliant or whatever, so I do that self-denegrating

Indian accent thing when I talk about my advantages. But it's also the realization that I did nothing to deserve it. Right. So I remember I had a patient once who had a fetus that had something called anencephaly. So anencephaly is the absence of a brain. It's not like brain damage. It's like there's no brain in there so it's not a situation that's compatible with life and even if i have an IQ or i have certain advantages and i'm fucking privileged i have a great story about that um it's not like i did anything to deserve this right so it's not like i did anything to deserve having parents that could financially support me by sending me to india for seven years in a row and and even even if you look at things like intelligence or or meeting my wife or being born

in houston where i got to like you know meet my wife like i i didn't do anything to deserve most of the cards that I was dealt in life. I played my hand decent, like, sure. But I also fucked up a lot. Yeah, but after you fucked up, you improved. I got to be honest, that doesn't track because I've seen it from my patient side, right? So I improved, but I had so many, my bench is so deep that six of my players could get hurt, and I still have like starters on the bench.

Right. So that's what, I mean, if you want to hear a story about privilege, please. So I just learned this, which taught me something really interesting about privilege, which is most people don't know how privileged they are, which is like by definition. Because the very nature of privilege is that it's so baked into you. Yep. So my parents applied for me to be in the Guinness Book of World Records, and we got a certificate for being the youngest kid to go to all seven continents. So I was nine years old when I went to Antarctica. Wow. And the reason. that no nine-year-old had ever gone to Antarctica. So when we were booking the trip, my parents, my mom just told me the story, this is

wild. So you can go on our same privilege is like on next level. So we booked the trip to Antarctica and they said, oh, sorry, no kids under the age of 12. And they said, why not? And they're like, there's no medical staff in Antarctica. You know, so like if something happens to your kid, the nearest hospital is

like 48 hours away. You've got to like truck it to like Argentina or something. And so my mom is like, I'm a pediatrician. What if I bring the stuff? he's under my care and they're like then that's okay so she fucking she just told me the story like a month ago i didn't know this so she packed iv bags she packed butterfly needles she packed antibiotics she packed like this medical kit for me to go to antarctica and like that's insane man yeah you know and now people go because i think the medical infrastructure has improved but this was

back in 1990 wow where and so it it's nuts. So like when I, when I look at what I've accomplished, like, have I worked hard? Yes, but have I worked like that much harder than many of my patients? Absolutely not, bro. You know, I see what you're saying. It's a humble way of looking at it. And it's also, I think you want to err on that side of being like, I'm not all that rather than I am all that for sure. But I think what you accomplished, after you did get, you had great parents who also were able to give you the push to be able to get. you to India. So that's incredible privilege. But what you accomplished and then immersing yourself in that and actually changing your life through that process, which is an incredible mental game

to play as well, is pretty amazing. Yeah. So I don't think about it as humble and I don't think about it as prideful. I think about it as that's what is. So this is my karma. That's really the way that I think about it. I love that lens. So it's like I have certain advantages. I have certain disadvantages. Have I worked hard? Yes. Could I work harder? Absolutely yes. And, you know, I just, I am what I am, which is what I try to help people understand is that like, you're neither good nor bad. You're just you. And all of this relative comparison is, is like relative. But like, that's not really like who, you know, what difference does it make if I'm smarter or stupid or anything like that? What different, you know, because the important thing is that whatever hand you've been

dealt in life, play it the best that you can. Yes. And even then, I mean, I've had so many patients that, you know, we're working two, two and a half jobs work way harder than I do, are way more resilient than I am, and their life is shit. You know, so it's hard to look at people who are doing such a better job than you are and end up 5% of where you ended up. I don't think ego can enter the picture. The only way you can feel good about yourself is with like ego or narcissistic thinking or whatever, right?

only way you can feel good about your soul? Yeah, you have to be egotistical in order to feel good. Like when you see people who are like, you know, like I worked hard in residency. But what people don't realize is, you know, you work like 80 hours a week, 100 hours a week, right? So did I work hard? Absolutely. But what people don't realize is like I have patients who will work 40 hour or 32 hours at Walmart, 32 hours at Home Depot. And then like 14 hours doing like landscaping on the weekend. Those people work way harder than I do. perspective with it right and and so i think and this is if you feel ahead in life or you feel behind in life both are equally stupid you just are what you are you are where you are right and like

and i know it sounds kind of weird but like there's no there's no alternate reality this is what is and so why attach your ego to what is like you know i i just don't think it makes any sense yeah i i think a similar like in a similar family of what you're talking about right now is also how people think of themselves right now. So there's an old philosophical quote, I'm going to fuck it up now, but it's like thinking about the past leads to depression, thinking about the future leads to anxiety, thinking about the now can lead to happiness. And I think to focus on the people who look at the past a lot, I think people will look at the decisions they've made in the past or even just the things that have happened to them that weren't

their decisions in the past that were, say, not positive. They were negative effects on their life. And I know I've fallen into this trap as well. And they'll still define themselves as those moments or as those decisions or whatever instead of focusing on the fact that they can make changes or put themselves in a better situation or, you know, even improve 0.1% tomorrow and try to build on that each day from where they're at. You know, what do you think it is that throughout you know it's a part of humanity that we we have a tendency in many cases when things haven't gone our way to dwell on that and then let it become who we are great question so what have we evolved for what have we evolved for yeah what's the purpose of what has

evolution been doing what's what determines success in evolution what is evolution selecting for i you've heard of natural selection yeah of course yeah what do we evolve we're evolving towards a stronger species stronger in what way intellectually why what okay what's the point why do we so that we can progress as a community no evolution doesn't give two shits about community let me change the word community there so we can progress as a species evolution doesn't care about progression as a species. It doesn't. Nope. What does it care about? Survival of the individual. Survival and having viable

viable offspring. Yeah. So, you know, male lions killing the offspring of their competitor is not about survival of the species. Right? They don't care about other lions. Okay. I see what you're saying now. Okay. Right. So let me let me restate then because I think we were thinking the same thing and I just did a shitty job explaining it. in order for like 500 years ago the birth rate whatever it was the average number of babies that died per birth was way higher than it is now right yep so over time we were able to

with the offspring we have improved our ability for that offspring to survive and a part of that involves all the little you know adjectives i was putting on it absolutely if you will right so so spot on so i think you're i think we're saying the same thing but basically we've evolved for survival not happiness yes i agree right so that's where like why why is everyone so mentally unhealthy let's be clear sadness has an evolutionary purpose shame has an evolutionary purpose guilt has an evolutionary purpose this is conserved across our species evolutionary purpose absolutely it serves a survival function sadness is a survival function yes 100 percent in what way great question so which is the most visible emotion

noticeable maybe i should say that i would say anger or sadness those two okay which one do you think is more visible if we're talking tears sadness yeah okay so anger is yeah yeah the most visible yeah okay so what is a side why do we so we're we're it's we're sending out sensory stimuli right yes what are we what it's a signal what are we signaling when we cry very good and what happens when we cry people tend to gravitate towards us absolutely right so when my kid falls and bumps her knee what happens all the adults in the room come right so if we didn't have that and I fell down a crevice and I didn't cry if I felt ostracized from society right I start to cry and people flock around me that's why everyone feels sad all the time because

it signals to the society around us, hey, I need help. I can't handle this situation. We are a communal species. Tigers do not cry. Any solitary animal on the planet will never cry. Okay. Then, right? Yeah. Can I ask you a question in here? Let's use a public figure because it's, you know, everyone will know this one, but like Robin Williams. Okay. It's a guy who spent his whole life making people laugh. Yep. Had some amazing performances at the end of his life too. Yep, didn't reveal that he had, I think he was diagnosed with Parkinson's or early onset Parkinson's or something like that and didn't reveal his sadness to the world at all and then ended up taking his own life. He appeared to be a perfectly happy guy to the average person and I think even to his wife. Yep. So if it's a survival mechanism, why do people hide it? What happens when they hide it? They blend in. Nope. What happened to Robin Williams? What happens? Why are 80% of suicides, men? What do men not do?

Survive. They don't survive. Absolutely. They don't survive. Right? So suicide attempts, arguably even more common in women. Completed suicides, men. So when we stop crying, we start dying.

Literally. Whoa. Right? And there's like over 100 years of evidence about this. men don't cry we stop crying we start dying like literally like that's not like a

you know I'm not trying to like drop wisdom on a podcast there's like statistical evidence I've worked with so many men who are suicidal and we help them cry like if that's what they need and you'd be amazed like how little it is right like I mean five 10 minutes

I mean not now but like you give me five 10 minutes with you or him we'll get you there buddy the amount of hurt that you all have dealt with like you said robin williams makes people laugh what do you do you help the rest of the world so that they don't get hurt the way you've been hurt yeah right yeah it's a huge huge problem and so maybe it's a good time to talk about it right now but it's a huge problem in society with you know we kind of put this big bridge term on it, but the mental health struggles that are going on, especially with

young people. And it's men and women manifest in different ways and the same ways, but I think it's fair to say there's a lot of agreement that we're seeing a lot of lack of purpose with people and especially people who, you know, if we want to go to a stereotypical kind of thing, you know, maybe they go about life, they have a decent enough childhood. In some cases, obviously they don't, but let's stay with a base example. They go to college because they're told to go there. They sign up for all this debt that they don't understand when they're 17. They get a degree they think is useful.

They go out. They realize they're not making a lot of money. There's not a lot of upward mobility. Suddenly they're getting weighed down by their debt. They're not going to be able to buy a home like their parents at age 28. Then they can't find the fucking girl or the boy, depending on what you're looking for. And then suddenly you're like, what the fuck am I doing with my life? So before you even get to a midlife crisis, we're seeing a lot of people.

we're seeing a lot of people in quarter life crises right now feeling like it's over. How do we, what do we got to do to, you know, you're not going to solve every single problem, but what do we got to do to shift the percentages in society to a healthier place in that department with our younger people especially? I'm going to ask you to clarify your question. Okay. So there are two levels at which we can work. Are you talking about shifting society?

are you talking about shifting a person those are two very different interventions are we talking about public health are we talking about psychiatry right so public like there's societal interventions that happen that there's systemic interventions that happen at the levels of a system okay and there are individual interventions that happen at the level of an individual meaning you customize it for people based on what they're dealing with yes yeah yeah you would do that with any patient I guess I'm talking about it let me state it this way at a societal level I'm going to make up numbers right now because I don't have them in front of me, but like 20 years ago, X number of, you know, males in their 20s was suicidal. Now it's X plus 10. 20 years ago,

X number of males in their 20s reported, and let's put females in all these examples, too, X number of individuals in their 20s reported depression. Now it's X plus 20, right? So on a social level, we see massive increases in depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, hopelessness, lack of purpose. So I guess I'm asking in a societal level, how do we change that besides like, let's fix the economy? So my first answer is ask somebody else. That's not my area of expertise. I'll give you an answer. But to be honest, right? So first and foremost, what I am and what I'm devoted to is like I'm a clinician. So I work with like a person. Now, it so happens that, you know, with a YouTube channel and podcast or whatever, right? So we'll reach millions of

people help millions of people a year. But like I work from the lens of like a single person. So I'm not, you know, I specialize not in feeding everybody at a homeless shelter, but like if you are in your kitchen, here's how you make a meal. Does that make sense? Yes. So I can offer you a systemic answer, but that's not where my, and I have a degree in public health too, but it's not where my heart is, to be honest. So I don't want to build interventions for like populations, man. That's no fun. Like I like to sit with. Yeah. Yeah.

So a couple of things. So I do think fixing the economy is a big part of it. So you kind of say, except for fix the economy. Well, like, you know, mental health crisis is really masquerading as an economic crisis in a lot of ways. So 50% here are some statistics. Totally fine that you don't have at your fingertips. 50% of people under the age of 30 live with their parents.

50%. Okay. Wow. In the United States. Wow. Maybe in Europe, probably statistically, things used to be different. But so like, let's be clear about, and this is something I've seen as a psychiatrist. And this is also why we started a coaching program.

So as a psychiatrist, what I realized is like, people are coming into my office and they're depressed. Right. So I've got a 24-year-old kid who comes into my office is depressed because it doesn't have a job and has never gotten late. And it's like, I can therapist him a lot. Like, how does that make you feel? Oh, my God, that must be hard for you. But honestly, it's like, let's get you laid, bro. Like, let's get, like, like, not just take action.

The things that you are missing in life, let's help you get those things, which is not what psychiatry specializes in. Psychiatry specializes in helping people who have a pathological illness return to a baseline level of function. Right? But it doesn't help them achieve things. So when I was in psychiatry training, I remember I was sort of, sort of a misfit. Not really.

I mean, I did great, but so I remember, you know, I was in my second year psychotherapy training and someone comes in and says, if someone comes into your office and says, can you help me find a girlfriend? What's the right answer? And I was like, yes. And he's like, no. How does that make you feel? Why do you want a girlfriend? What about having a girlfriend is so important to you? Right? And I think that a lot of therapists nowadays would disagree with that. But like, and there's a There's value to that inquiry as well. Like, that's really important, and I do ask that question. But I think it shows us that psychiatry is not about, there's no, like, quarterly earnings in psychiatry. We're not, like, really about hitting targets, right? The targets that we're focused on are surveys around mood and anxiety and things like that. And we sort of have this assumption in psychiatry that if we elevate your mood and we

elevate, improve your anxiety, decrease your anxiety, then the rest of the stuff will follow. And we're not wrong, but there is another element to it. hence the whole coaching thing and and that's where so if we really look at it like systemically okay there are systemic things and people live a life right now

where you know you commute for 45 minutes you go to your job you struggle to find employment someone just recently reached out to me someone who I grew up with one of my parents friends and you know they have a son-in-law who's older than I am so I'm 43

they have a son-in-law and then they have you know, someone else, like another, their, one of their kids is dating someone. So they're like two dudes that are basically like 45 plus between 45 and 55 who've been like unemployed for six months. So the truth of the matter is like, and I don't know if y'all, I've had just a very, very, very brief period of like real financial hardship and like damn near close to homeless.

And the effect on your physiology and mind is profound. Oh, yeah. Right. So let's just start with. like while the economy is shit, that needs to get fixed. So that's one thing. Then at a systemic level, you know, I think another thing is that we need to, so I think what's happening right now is, this is kind of scary.

I made a video about this and a lot of people took issue with it. I think we're actually under like a natural selection event right now, like literally. So natural selection is the ability to, natural selection is someone having viable offspring. So what's happening in this post-COVID technological world, see, when I grew up, I fucking sucked at talking to women. I joined a fraternity. I got super drunk, hung out with other chicks who were super drunk, you know, woke up the next morning and was really confused about this person that I was attracted to the night before. Like all kinds of stuff. You know, I sucked at talking to people, but society existed in such a way where it forced me to socially interact and I basically caught up. Does that kind of make sense? That doesn't happen anymore. So now if you ever leave the pipeline of social interaction, right? So I was in school like in person. So I had to go up, show up.

I got put into group projects. You know, like I had forcible social rehabilitation. That's right. Now I don't have to leave the house to get food. I don't have to leave the house to work. I don't have to leave the house to get a job. I don't have to leave the house to get an education. That's right.

to leave the house to do therapy, right? I don't have to leave the house to exercise. I don't have to leave ever. So now what we're happening is we're seeing people who are, there's a bunch of people who are socially behind who basically catch up. They're late bloomers socially. Now the late bloomers, their buds are getting picked. They're never blooming at all.

So what's happening is we're literally, and I'm not trying to freak people out because there are certain associations that we have to get into here. That natural selection means you're fucked. It doesn't mean you're fucked, but we'll get to that. but I think there's literally a selection event where there's some people who are like literally able to get laid and mate and some people who are not

right and these people become in cells and they start shooting up schools yeah so the key thing and this is where some people and the way I realize this is I talk to different people right and if you talk to different people what you'll discover is that people are not living in the same world one person is just like hey just go out

and put yourself out there right and someone else is like I try to put myself out there. I started talking to women. They called me creep and called the cops. So I forget the statistic around this. I think one out of six men in the workplace, oh my God, I'm going to butcher the statistic. One out of six men who tries to talk to, I can send it to you all afterward if you guys want it because I found this research. It was shocking. One out of six men who approaches women in the workplace has been reported for it. Yeah, we have created a talk. environment with that kind of stuff so so it's it's really challenging right so like right now we live

in a world where from like a mating standpoint everyone has like there are super super clear rules about what you should and shouldn't do the problem is no one agrees on what the rules are everyone's sure that should you hold the door open for a woman should you pay for a first date should you split the first date everyone is really sure about it just no one fucking agrees right so it's like no one like and so So there are some people who are able to navigate this because they have a secure attachment style. 50% of the population has had, has something called a secure attachment, which means their ability to, like, handle relationships. They can handle some emotional intimacy, physical intimacy. But only 50% of people have secure attachment.

25% of people have something called anxious attachment, which means that they get really, really anxious about relationships. They're afraid that the other person is going to leave them. They engage in a lot of behaviors to pull this person in. Yeah. 20% of people have avoid an attachment, which means they're afraid of emotional intimacy. So the closer that you get, the more they freak out and pull away, these are dudes with a fear of commitment. Yeah. It's really interesting.

Anxiously attach people use sex to bring someone into an emotional connection. Avoid an attachment people use sex to keep people away from an emotional connection. So we're just, hey, it's not a thing. It's just a situation ship. Yeah, don't get attached to me. You know, it's friends with benefits. So half of us are doing fine. The other half of us are not.

So I think that this is where, and there's like literally a selection event because there's no system in place right now where if you're like, if you were born right or you had the right kind of upbringing, you can survive in this technological world. That's where I was going to ask. Do you think that this is primarily caused if I could, it's more than this, but if I could whittle it down to one real culprit, do you think this is primarily? caused by the social media world that we've created where every single fucking thing is under the microscope? It's, I think, technology plus COVID. Yeah, that's a great answer. So, I think COVID accelerated some very serious changes.

And the interesting thing is we're actually bouncing back. So if you look at, like, you know, the rate of people who have not had sex, like dudes, especially, and women. So, so the original insult, I don't know if most people know this, was a woman. So the person who invented the term was a woman. Really? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

People don't know that. It's crazy. Who is she? I don't know. She was like she posted on some forum somewhere. Yeah. So she coined the term itself. So we are seeing, by the way, the gender-based differences in mental health problems is shrinking.

So there's like isolation and loneliness and both men and women. Eating disorders are on the rise and dudes probably a lot due to social media and all this like manosphere alpha male. Oh, yeah. Scary. Like eating disorders, women used to be like, women used to be like, well. ahead of us but like dudes are catching up now it's really a lot of dudes are yeah so so i think addiction used to be higher in men women are catching up um so we're starting to see a homogenization of that's so interesting yeah so i think everyone's getting fucked equally now yeah because that's what

we're shooting for in a society right it's a quality between men so i think systemically but the cool thing is that just because there's you know natural selection right there's a selection pressures there are things that you can do so social rehabilitation is absolutely Like, I was stunned when we make certain videos, you know, people will say, like, forget about these like neuroscience stuff. Just tell us what to say. So like all kinds of things about, you know, how to have a conversation. People say, everyone says communication is the foundation of a relationship. No one ever tells you how to communicate.

Right? Yeah. So what does that mean? I think a lot of it stems from overthinking, stemming from what we think expectations are from what we see online. And we put things, you know, men and women. and put each other on pedestals and it becomes I don't even mean it this way

but it becomes like objectified in a way and you start to instead of thinking about it like communicating with another human being you're like you're communicating with this thing like thinking out from the guy perspective it's like oh she's so hot

yeah so we're absolutely seeing that right so people don't you're right that they're in their own heads they have a lot of expectations which lead to what suffering yeah right outcomes right so and now you're thinking So this is what's really scary.

As you think more, your empathic circuits shut off. When your empathic circuits shut off, you can't form an emotional connection. So what's happening is everyone is trying to play the game of dating. I don't know if this makes sense, but like, you know, animals get it on without any, like, you know, they, like, read each other's signals. And even if you've had like, I don't know

if you're dating someone right now or what, but you're dating? I'm not. Okay. No, I'm single. Had a good romantic relationship in the past? Yes. Okay. So, like, that's like, you feel that.

Oh, yeah. You know, you're not operating from here. And, like, the circuits that get us going and form connections are emotional. There's a really beautiful experiment that illustrates this. So they took people and they had them go on their first date in the middle of a bridge. But there are two bridges. One is a rickety bridge, like rickety rope bridge. The other one is a stone bridge.

and the people who went on the date in the middle of the rickety rope bridge they both feel a little bit scared and so their emotional connection was higher so shared emotional experiences is what causes us to bond but when we're overly cognitive

right you're not like so when you go on a day the people who say just put yourself out there just be in the moment right there are people who are operating their empathic circuits of the brain are active so they're responding to the signals that we're sending yeah right so there's a lot of like back and forth kind of non-cognitive communication what you're talking about that

bridge example is amazing though because it's not just in my opinion it's not just the shared emotional experience of like oh shit this is like a little shaky you're forced to be present in the moment and focus on something that isn't thinking about how you're going to communicate with this person it happens yeah second nature so so there's a really great you know i don't know if you all have ever done this or seen people or you've had this experience where you're like having a regular conversation and then someone shows up and then you can't talk anymore. Have you ever had that? Absolutely.

So that's because when you're, when you and I are just hanging out, right? So our parasympathetic nervous system is active. We're just vibe and we're having a good time. And then when someone else shows up, a different part of our brain lights up. Our stress system starts to activate. And now we're like judging, right? We're not participating. We're on guard and we're like, oh my God, what do I say?

Do I say something right? Do I say something wrong? And it's like, I would have this problem all the time. is so i went on a series of terrible dates before i met my wife and they were all with women that i was less attracted to because anytime i was talking to an attractive woman like i wouldn't think clearly the indian accent would turn on huh the indian accent would turn on if only right dude that's i mean that's i i was operating i was like you know a maximum amount of indian accent i've ever used in my wife actually i never thought about this is actually when when i met my wife

So I was a counselor at a camp, and it's a camp for Indian kids, and we were all busting out the Indian accents. Oh, my God. Right? But also, like, when I use the Indian accent, right, so every time I use it, how do you think I feel? Like an Indian? Nope.

Think. Come on. I'm thinking. You can do it. Don't do that. No, no, you can do it. You can do it. How do you feel right now when I start using the, how do you feel?

Because you make me laugh, so you feel powerful. No, I feel fun. Right. Yeah. Feeling fun is like that's, you're in control of yourself when you feel fun. That's interesting. I had never, I don't have to think about that. When I'm busting balls and like it's hitting, I own you. And I mean that in a good way. It's like the best feeling ever. It's like, oh, we're good. We got this. Communication is 100% flowing. Yeah. So, so, okay, I think I sort of, I think I understand what you mean. But the key thing is when I'm using the accent, I feel good. And then you empathically feel good too. Yeah. So one thing that's really scary. So a lot of the reason that people struggle. especially dudes is they don't realize that when when a girl gets the ick with you what they're picking on up on empathically is your lack of confidence yes right so if i can if i if i when i feel good uh come on come on right you feel good with me come on right so like i can't do that shit

unless i feel good right if i have like a patient who's like stroking out or like having a a fucking seizure, I can't be like, oh, we're fucked. So this is what's really interesting. It's really scary, but we need this like social rehab where we like teach dudes these kinds of things. We're like, if you're feeling uncomfortable around a woman, she's going to get the ick around you. The ick is an empathic response.

If you ask someone, that's what's so confusing, right? Because people ask, how do girls get the ick? It's something you feel. It's the ick. Yes. And so the more confident you feel in yourself, the more you kind of let things go, hey, like, I'm going to see this person once.

I'm never going to see them again. right this is just a moment in time that's all it is i'm going to spend this time with this person in this moment maybe it'll be fucking awkward and i still have those moments you know a moment in time where you are present and not thinking about outcomes or desired outcomes you are strictly talking with someone yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna love it i love it but but but but there are times and i know you know what i'm talking about where you can be thinking about desired outcomes but be present with that desire. It's like, yeah.

Like, let's go. You feel like, I have an outcome in mind. It doesn't happen in the first moment. It doesn't happen in the first moment. Yeah, you're right. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Right? So it's not an outcome that you have in your mind

before the interaction. But there comes a moment in time where you and I are both having drinks and I'm like, hey, how do you feel? Don't look at me like that. You see? You see, the empathy, it's beautiful. I was just waiting for the accent

I didn't toss it out I didn't toss it out on purpose yeah you're looking very good do you I desired see you can look at me when I do the accent but it's too real right so

wow what a distinction you're fascinating man like you have a you have a obviously you have a real clear cut goal in your content and obviously within your work behind the scenes to help people, which I think is an awesome thing.

But the way you got there was really helping yourself and like finding yourself along the way, so much so that like even when you were already an expert and had gone through medical school and had worked with a bunch of patients and had all the success and made all these channels and were helping all these people. You even got to a point where you're like, wait a second, I don't even feel good in my life. So point being, I think a lot of people, especially online, as we've seen the internet, error progress we see these people come out and they appear to have it all figured out or like they're so perfect because they're such an expert in something and the reality is like we're all humans we all have

our flaws and I think the fact that you're so self-aware of that and you express that in your ability to teach the very things that you're teaching really separates you from a lot of people out there talking about this stuff yeah thank you I think um one of the key things that I probably one of the most important things that I learned is like, so when people have it together, it's okay to not have it together. Right? So I think this is even when people become successful, you'll see this a lot with successful people who are like really unhappy and you can sometimes tell.

Oh yeah. Right? They've got deep things in their life that they still don't have and they've learned how to strive and achieve. But achievement doesn't bring peace. Yes. This is what's really scary. Like achievement just usually brings a desire for more.

more achievement, right? So we keep on moving the goalposts, like one million. Oh, man, the first 100,000 subscribers we got. And then it's like, let's go for a million. Once you get a million, get that, you know, the gold one from YouTube or whatever. And then it's like, let's go for the platinum at 10 million. So it never works. So peace is actually independent of accomplishment, which is wild because that means you can be peaceful now. Right. So the work towards achievement is independent from like the way that you feel about it. And that's what a lot of people don't really get. But I think my big thing is that, and this is, I guess what makes me exceptional, I can own that in this moment, is that I'm okay not being exceptional. I still suck

at some stuff, you know? Like, I suck it. I wrote a book. It's really helpful. And it's not that great. And my wife is going to kill me. But it's not, it's a really great book. And if you're struggling with like, you know, kids and how to raise kids. It's a, it's a very evidence-based book. If you want to learn how to communicate, you want to learn how to other people, you all should check it out. It's called How to Raise Healthy Gamer. So what, why is it not great? I can do so much better. And that was the first book that I wrote, right? And it's not, it's evidence-based. It's very, very helpful. But it's not as fun as it could be. and I'm okay with that right like I feel frustrated with myself but it's a good book it's honestly

like my publisher's gonna kill me right I just get like it like it's a good book like cut no but I mean but really right like so but it but it's not linked down below it's not really I mean the reason I wrote it even though it's not the reason I wrote is because I I saw that there's a generation of parents who are raising kids that are addicted to technology and then they don't know how to deal with it, right? Because we were never taught by our parents like how to keep your eight-year-old from getting addicted to Minecraft. That's right. So it's really to, the reason I wrote the book is all the men, usually men and women that I help today, it's to prevent all of those problems from starting in the first place by catching it young. So it's a great book

and it accomplishes that. But it's also my first book. And I want to write more, right? And it's okay for you to be a work in progress. Like how, like, why do we expect ourselves to be finished products? I mean, how old are you? How old do you think I am? 30. 32. Yeah. I don't think I'm a finished product at all. When are you going to be finished product? I actually am not, I don't think you ever are. So we say shit like that, right? But when you fall short of your expectations, you forget that very easily. Yeah. There are times when we're calm and we're like, oh, everyone is work in progress.

But when you fuck up, you're not like, hey, bro, you're work in progress. You're like, why the fuck did I do that again? What the fuck is wrong with me? Right? That's what we say to ourselves. Yeah. And what comes out to us other people can be work in progress, but not me. I have to be finished product

at 21-22 Sound like a lot of Indian parents Yeah, right? Oh yeah, oh yeah Yeah I grew up with Indian parents Yeah I fucking I fucking live with Indian parents right now

They're in my own home Raising my kids No no no Me and my wife Your wife's Indian too Yeah yeah Awesome Yeah

I gotta send this episode To Oliveira I'm sending this episode to a lot of people. Oh, yeah. Fuck yeah. Amazing. What is the one other thing I wanted to ask you about?

Because there's a million other things, but I'd have you here all day. So I'm going to have to bring you back. But, you know, you and I were talking right before we got on camera today about, like, epigenetics and how you can literally evolutionarily pass down some traits. And one of the most common ones that people look at like this is with, like, trauma. So if you have grandparents who went. through a genocide or something like that's built into your DNA and we now have a lot of science to prove that this is real yeah yeah yeah so i mean i think there's a i forget the guy's name but

there's a guy out of israel um who did a lot of the seminal research so there was uh i think the seminal research like the the first stuff that kind of came out was pretty rigorously done still has some methodological problems but was was looking at holocaust survivors or sorry the children of holocaust survivors And even I think there are some studies that will look at people who are adopted from parents have PTSD, but children are refugees and can be adopted and things like that. So, you know, even if I have, if I've been through a trauma and I raise you, there's a chance that what gets passed down is the way that I raise you. But there's now, I think, enough evidence to suggest that some of these epigenetic changes, which is not changes to our DNA. But the way that our DNA is turned on and off, which is really what determines what happens in us, right? So we have all the silent genetic code that isn't doing it anything. What matters is what you turn on and what you turn off. So that absolutely gets passed down. And, you know, I see weird, weird versions of this. So oftentimes, you know, I'll have a lot of patients who don't have, don't appear to have a traumatic event, but either have some baseline anxiety disorder, some kind of. kind of panic disorder or some symptoms of PTSD.

They'll have some version of like hypervigilance and things like that. And I was talking to, you know, one of your colleagues about, you know, so speaking of the weird stuff. So I've had some patients that will do like past life psychotherapy, which is really weird. Yeah. And so the other really interesting thing is that there's some, there's a one guy out of University of Virginia who's done some pretty decent academic research around this. Also some, I think some of the research, some people extrapolate too much from the research, in my opinion. But I think that there's clear inheritance of some kind of memory. And the most basic version of this is what we call instinct.

So a child will be scared of a snake, like a two-year-old will be scared of a snake, having never seen one. So clearly there is some amount of quote-unquote memory where someone has a reaction to something that they've never had before, which you would think there would be a, completely neutral reaction. Does that kind of make sense? Yeah, because I mean, maybe I'm oversimplifying it, but the same way that like a baby gazelle maybe hasn't seen a lion before, but they know to run from it when they see it. Right. Yeah. So in the animal kingdom, there's a ton of they have more instinct, right? Yes. So we still have instinct as human beings. That's the most simple form of inherited memory. When we get to epigenetic phenomenon, it seems like things can get passed down a lot quicker. So like instinct is also shared amongst the human race, right? Yes.

So that may be more in the genes than in the epigenetics. But we know that like, people will inherit certain qualities, certain, like, kind of lived experiences. You say in the genes rather than the epigenetics, can you just explain where the epigenetics exist then? Yeah, so you have a genome. You have a sequence of nucleotides, okay, T-A-C-G. These are the four nucleotides we have in our DNA.

God, I hope I didn't fuck that up because it's been decades since I looked at this stuff formally. but um so and that's your genetic code every cell in your body has these genes so that has all this all this DNA that is like basically like a blueprint for all kinds of machinery yeah okay that's it gets transcribed to our uh transcribed to RNA RNA gets translated by uh rhizomes into proteins proteins get folded and that's what becomes our enzymes and our cellular structures and things like that so that's the genetic code but what's really important is something called epigenetics, which is not the gene code itself. It's whether the code is activated or

deactivated. So a good example of this is like, I can have a blender, but the blender can be like under the counter at the table. That means I'm not blending shit. Or I could bring it up. I could plug it in and I could turn it on. Then I have a smoothie. So most of our genetic code is like silent. It doesn't do anything. So epigenetics is what we turn when we turn things on and off. And so if I have, let's say an enzyme, let's say I a transporter on a neuron that depolarizes my neuron faster, I'll explain what that means, basically turns on a particular nerve cell easily. My nerves get jittery, so super easy to turn them on. And if that's like an anxiety neuron, then if that gets turned on really easily, then I experience more anxiety. Does that kind of make sense? Yes. So I can activate the neuron

based on the machinery inside the neuron. So it's sort of like the neuron has a very low threshold to freak the fuck out. Yes. And then that's going to be epigenetically determined. So which, you know, how sensitive is your neuron? And that's why we can wire and rewire. So when I work with patients with PTSD, a lot of what we're doing is like rewiring them. So we calm down their physiology, we calm down their neurology so that they don't...

How do you do that? I mean, it takes a while, but... Yeah, so, you know, I, I, so I, there's two different approaches that I have. One is a clinical approach and one is a non-clinical approach. The non-clinical approach is we built that into a trauma guide. And that's basically like starts with physiology. So literally what you're doing is you're starting with like changes to breathing and your nervous system level activity. You're basically slowing down your nervous system, which has been wired into like a high alertness state.

Yes. So you can do that gradually through mind-body practices, breathing practices, things like that. So that's the first step is physiology. second thing is emotions so you have to be able to when people have trauma they tend to run away from their emotions because their emotions are hyperactive so you have to be able to reintegrate your emotions and oftentimes when the emotions get too high it'll trigger a dissociative response so i don't know if you're familiar with dissociation and trauma but when people when they have really bad flashback when trauma gets very severe people will dissociate yes and that's a protective mechanism in the brain

actually. So as emotions get really, really high, that triggers dissociation. So then we have to help people tolerate negative emotions, feel negative emotions that will prevent the dissociation. And then once we have lots of emotions, then this is what a lot of people don't realize. You know, you were mentioning that people don't have purpose in life. Feeling lots of emotions is how you determine your identity. Is what a lot of people don't understand. So when I ask you, you know, what is your life like? tell me about you and tell me about what makes you you. No one's going to say, I eat chicken salad every day.

They're going to say the emotionally important events. Yes. When I was 15 years old, I got bullied. When I was 18 years old, I went to the gym and I vowed to myself never again, right? And if you look at movies, they tell a story. But all movies have emotion because that's how we tell stories. That's how we develop identity. Yes.

Right. And even if you go back and you listen to the way that you have, have talked about me, you will reference the emotionally important points in my life. Right? Yes. That's what makes you a person is like your emotions. Like this was hard. And then I triumphed and then I fucked up.

We relate to it in other people at all times. Absolutely. Right. So then a lot of times people with trauma have difficulty with identity. And the reason they have difficulty with identity, they don't know who they are. So after you get traumatized, right, you lose your sense of self. I don't know who I am anymore. I thought the world was a safe place.

But I don't know, the world is unsafe. And I don't know who I am. I don't know what I'm doing anymore. I don't know what I'm doing in life. And that's why, you know, you were saying that a lot of people lose purpose. The reason they lose purpose is because, speaking of systems,

we have so much stuff that emotionally numbs us, social media, video games, pornography, drugs, marijuana, alcohol, whatever. We're shutting down all of our emotions, right? The sad ones, the unhappy ones, the angry ones. And as we shut down all those emotions, we don't know who we are. We're just numb.

Yes. And so you lose your sense of identity. Once you lose your sense of identity, once you lose your sense of identity you don't have a direction so if i were to ask you what are you doing with your life what would you say i'm going to be the number one in the world at what i do in this okay that's what i'm doing with my life who are you julian dory who's julian dory who's julian dory friend son YouTuber right so if you look at your purpose in life

it's tied to your identity if I asked you who am I and you said I have no fucking clue and then I asked you what are you doing with your life you're not going to have some mission does that make sense right identity if you in there's something called factor analysis but if you ask someone what is your purpose what is your direction who are you if you can answer one

you'll have answers to all three not 100% but they cluster together I agree with yeah yeah so when we're working with trauma like that's what we try to do so you know epigenetics plays an element but i think that like we're working on the physiology working on the emotions and working on narrative and identity building and then there's a spiritual component as well yeah it feels like you're in some ways stripping down to the basics forcing someone to look inward and consider what they want and at the same time that you're doing that type of exercise you are and i mean this in a positive way distracting them from thinking

about the things that are wrong to have them sitting in this current mental state right now, the trauma and the things like that. It's not like you're going to ignore that, but you're putting it aside for a minute to say, what do you want to be and who are you? Okay, now how do we get, how do we stop this thing over here from driving the car so that you can be these things? I think that sounds good, but I really don't think it's accurate and I apologize. That's okay. So let me explain. So we're not distracting anybody from the trauma. Let's understand that the trauma affects every layer of your being.

And we don't want to distract from it. We just need to understand that the trauma makes certain changes to your processes. And we're reversing those changes. So we're not running away from the trauma or moving towards the trauma. Okay. Right? So it's just trauma. So this is why trauma is so hard to treat.

Trauma is hard to treat because it's the only, it's the only illness that is not something going wrong. Trauma is an adaptation. Right? So I don't know if you've ever seen a feral cat that tries to get rehabilitated. You know, I don't know if you've ever seen cats. I've heard about this.

I haven't personally witnessed it. So it's fascinating, right? So a cat wants to stay the fuck away from people. That's not a problem. That's because the cat has had some bad experiences with humans and this is helping its survival. So trauma is our survival mechanism. hyper-activated.

And it was necessary. So I had a patient who was once sexually assaulted in a gas station bathroom. And in that moment, dissociating absolutely protects you. Right? Because you don't feel it. You don't remember it. Like you want to not remember it. You want to not feel. You want to feel like a shell of your former self.

You want to feel like you have disappeared. You don't want to be you in that moment. You want to be you in that moment. you want to disappear that's why it happens to people but then the way that you have wired for survival over here becomes maladaptive when you when somebody when now when i'm married and my wife walks into the bathroom i don't want to dissociate so that's why it's so hard to treat because it is actually not something wrong with you it is just your body's evolutionary capability to handle trauma yeah but then the problem is that we live in a world where those that's adaptation becomes maladaptive, so we have to reverse all of that. So I wouldn't say it's

even directly related to the trauma or not. And that's where from a clinical perspective, it's different. So in a clinical perspective, it depends. So for some people, this is what really shocks people. A lot of people don't realize that you look at sexual assault survivors. First of all, 50% of them are totally fine and just never want to think about it again, never want to talk about it again. They'll go take a shower. 50%? Or more. Yeah. Wow. So we have this idea, and that's what's so confusing. So I've had patients come into my office and be like, you know, I was sexually assaulted a couple of years ago, but I feel fine. Is there something wrong with me? So most human beings will actually respond totally fine. That doesn't make it

okay or anything like that. I understand. People don't realize how resilient we are and not every negative thing will break you. Like some people are just, you know, yeah, it's interesting. I guess I can share this. I guess this qualifies a sexual assault, but someone, I was at a, I was at a spa recently, and this guy was following me around and jerking off. and so I went to the attendance and I it's kind of a funny story but like so like you know

that happened to me and I was okay with it I'm not okay with it in the sense that I liked it but but God that's good like it's not like it scarred me for life yeah that's not what I mean

so I went to the attendance and I was like they're like can we help with something I was like yeah there's a guy following me around and he's jerking off oh my God right but I wasn't scarred

or anything like that I noticed it was actually really great experience from the sense of I understood what hypervigilance feels like. I'd never understood what my patients had been through. And I was just amazed by how many thoughts got inserted into my head that weren't there before.

So like every time I would like when I were traveling around, I'm thinking about this stuff more. And I was like, oh, shit, that's weird because I have some meditative training. And I noticed like, oh, this is unusual. These thoughts are happening more. And I was okay because I knew that also would, it'll be high for a while and it'll decline over time. view that as a form of PTSD from it? Because you're hypervigilant? I don't think it's PTSD because it

didn't impair my function, right? But it's the natural trauma response that was not harmful in a way because I was also, so a big part of it was like I was in a position of power. So a big part of trauma is not the bad thing that happens to you. It's what is your power in relation to it. So this guy was out of line. I honestly thought about smacking him on his dick. I got angry. And I was going to like smack him and tell him to stop right so i think that the challenge is that now i understand like when especially my my patients who are disadvantaged or women i can only imagine if i was alone with that guy and he was like an older dude too so i you know i think i could have kicked his ass in a fight but like if i couldn't like that's how terrifying that was and and i

appreciate the experience because like i was thinking about oh if my if that situation was different I now understand trauma in a way that I never have. And so that, too, in a sense, is a negative experience. But like, it's all part of my karma and it's like part of who I am and like I'm grateful for none than I want people to do it again. On that note. Yeah. This has been awesome, man. Yeah.

You are a fountain of information. I love talking with guys like you. Because it's the kind of thing where it could just go in a million different directions. So we're going to have to do this again at some point when you're in town. if you're down to do that, but we'll link your, your Twitch, your YouTube, your Instagram, anything else we should put down there as well? What about that book? That's not that great. So, I mean, look, the book is really great for two reasons. One is if you've got kids and you want to teach them good, healthy technology habits, that's great. The second thing that is applicable

to other people, if you have someone in your life who is addicted to video games or addicted to pornography or addicted to something, we teach some really fundamental communication skills. that are very, very, very good. Excellent. I'll bet it's an awesome book. I haven't read it, but I'm going to read it now. Dr. Kay, you're the man. All right.

Thanks a lot. Everybody else, you know what it is? Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button

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