The Iced Coffee Hour - Harvard Psychiatrist: The #1 Reason You’re Sad, Single, and Lonely (FIX THIS)

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

Zocdoc: Go to https://www.zocdoc.com/ICED and download the Zocdoc App for FREE NetSuite: Take advantage of NetSuite’s FREE KPI checklist: https://www.netsuite.com/ICED Insider Clothing: Head to https://insider.clothing/IcedCoffeeHour and use code ICED15 for 15% off your order Hims: Start your free online visit today at https://hims.com/ich Follow Dr. Alok Kanojia and subscribe to him here: @HealthyGamerGG NEW: Join us at http://www.icedcoffeehour.club for premium content - Enjoy! Add us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jlsselby https://www.instagram.com/gpstephan Official Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeBQ24VfikOriqSdKtomh0w For sponsorships or business inquiries reach out to: [e-mail] For Podcast Inquiries, please DM @icedcoffeehour on Instagram! Time Stamps: 0:00 - Intro 0:52 - This Is The RIGHT Way To Sit 6:59 - How To Know You’re ACTUALLY Happy 19:34 - How 99% of Things Are Out Of Your Control 24:13 - Who Is Dr.K? (Background) 26:18 - There Is No Such Thing As Good OR Bad 31:18 - Should You Go To Therapy? 33:26 - Dr. K's Thoughts On Tony Robbins & Neuro-Linguistic Programming 39:03 - How To ACTUALLY Become Happy 1:02:33 - How Much Sacrifice Is Required To Be Successful? 1:14:09 - How To Get Into Your Flow State At Work 1:22:25 - Why Dr. K Thinks 'Monk Mode' is “Silly” 1:31:07 - Dr. K Explains Burn Out 1:39:07 - How Our Brains Can Experience "Hypothetical Pain" As REAL PAIN 1:42:47 - How To See NEGATIVES As POSITIVES 2:00:46 - Dr.K Explains The Whole Scale FAILURE of Our Traditional Institutions 2:16:26 - How Our Minds Are Being Controlled 2:46:28 - Is Social Media A GOOD or BAD Thing Overall? 2:49:24 - Dr. K’s Thoughts On Drama Bait YouTube Channels & Instagram ‘Gore” Reels 2:57:27 - Dr. K On PORN & INCELS 3:13:19 - Should You Make Decisions For Your Significant Other? 3:17:41 - Why People Lie & The POWER Of Truth *Emotional* 3:28:30 - How Terminal Patients Learn How To Deal W/ Death 3:35:34 - How Dr.K Personally Deals With Trauma & Negativity 3:59:07 - Dr.K Brings Jack & Graham Through A Meditation Exercise 4:15:31 - Closing Thoughts *Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Graham Stephan will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Graham Stephan is part of an affiliate network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Other people are capable of controlling your mind. We think that money means freedom, but for many people, money starts to mean bondage. Think about what you're doing. You're giving up all this pleasure early on to have an unmitigated, hedonistic, pleasurable life after the age of 30. And it doesn't work. What we're seeing is a whole scale failure of our traditional institutions. There's one major aspect of human psychology that I think is critical.

Dr. Kay, Healthy Gamer, Alok, thank you so much for coming on the iced coffee hour. We really appreciate it. Yeah, of course. Thank you so much for having me back. I had so much fun last time. Our last episode did so incredibly well that one of the top comments is to have you back. So here you are. So we're doing a deep dive. We're going miles deep, everybody. This is going to be a banger episode. Thanks again for coming on. You have this viral clip about your waist needing to be above your knees when you're sitting. And apparently it's very advantageous. if you're sitting and watching this, you better have your waist above your knees. Why is it so important? Usually what happens is our knees are higher than our waist.

So we have these kinds of chairs where we kind of lean back, right? So if you lean back, your butt is lower and then your knees kind of go up and this feels comfortable because you kind of have this curve. But if you kind of look at it, your center of gravity changes and that's why we hunch over. So I don't know if this kind of makes sense. But then basically what happens is if you sit, if you elevate your hips and your hips are higher than you're knees, your back will naturally be straight. So everyone thinks that posture is about like training, right? But posture is about physics. If we sort of think a little bit about this table, this table doesn't need to train. The reason that it's stable is because the physics align.

And if you look at our spine, the way to maintain a straight spine without any effort is to basically have your knees lower than your hips because it alters your center of gravity. What's the point of good posture when you really get down to it? Is it just looking better Or is there a feeling that you have when you sit correctly? So there's all kinds of reasons why you want a good posture, everything from like biology to spirituality. For example, like on the spiritual end of the spectrum, we have this energy that's seated at the base of our spine, that when it rises to the top of our head, we become enlightened. So if that's something you're interested in, you can do that. But from a very physical standpoint, just biological standpoint, if we look at our body, the basic problem is that weight should be supported by both.

not muscle, right? So like really simple. So if I, for example, if I do this and you push down, you can put like 100 pounds of force on my arm, and my arm will be fine. But if you put five pounds of force like this, my arm will go down. So if you sort of look at it, we want the bones of our body to support our weight. And when we have bad posture, when your spine is curved, now suddenly the weight of your upper torso is over here because your spine is curved. Whereas if you have your spine like this and all of the weight of your body is over here, then your muscles can relax, right? Because they're not carrying the load of your body. So what we tend to see a lot is like tension in the trapezius and around the neck muscles. We'll see problems in our scaling

muscles and things like that, like all these back problems are because we don't sit properly because our back is, our spine is designed to support our weight, not our muscles. Why does it feel so good to slouch? It's true, Jack. It feels comfortable. I couldn't agree with you like this. I could not agree with you more. I have a problem every time I work. What I do is especially when I'm reviewing podcasts or researching a guest, I kick up my feet on my desk and I lean all the way back just because it feels so amazing. Yeah.

But I feel like I'm ruminating. No, no, no, no. So let's understand a couple things. Okay. So why does something feel good? Because that is what the center. That's where our center of gravity and our weight distribution is. That's why it feels good.

So let's talk about you for a second. So when you kick your feet up and you relax back. what you're actually doing is straightening your spine. Does that make sense? Like when you go like this, this is straightening my spine right now. Like if you kind of like, that's what happens with these chairs as we lean back.

And then if you want sitting up to feel good, all you need to do is if you grab a pillow and you sit on it right now, I guarantee you, you will feel much more comfortable with a straight back. I don't know if this makes sense, but if you have to force yourself to sit up,

that means that you are using muscles to make your posture erect, which does not feel relaxing because it is actually a muscular contraction. So the way to feel comfortable sitting up is to elevate your hips and keep your knees below them. And then if you sit like that, it will feel natural and relaxed to sit up straight. That's fascinating. Very interesting. So the simplest thing that you can do is literally stick a pillow under your butt and make sure that your knees are lower and you will feel a very natural straightening of the spine. So one of the most dangerous positions to be in is when you're working on your laptop and you're kind of like leaned over and doing that, that's not a very good one.

No, it's not. Yeah. I mean, because what's happening is you're getting, so if you think about it, like if I'm leaning over like this, you got how is my head, how is my body being held up? My body is being held up by these muscles, right? And then we also see changes in our neck muscles. So when I lean forward, for example, and I go like this, now what's happening is this is literally what my head It's like, this is what I'm doing. I'm craning my neck up, right? So I'm going like this. It's a little bit exaggerated, but that's literally what we do.

I can imagine everyone watching right now suddenly adjusting themselves. Yeah. Yeah. So that's where you don't have to do it. And even if you look at some interesting things, I don't know if you all are familiar with like the lotus posture and meditation. Right. So this is the one where you're cross-legged almost. You're cross-legged, but I mean, it's hard to demonstrate.

Yeah, I know. Yeah. But, you know, the whole point is that you actually have your foot on your thigh. So I'll give you all an example. Like, did you guys notice a change in my posture just now? So here's, here's non-Lotus. Right. Right.

What do you see I'm doing? Slouching a little bit. And then I do this and like this feels easier. You look better too. Yeah. You look taller and more confident. I, if you guys under the table, I'm adopting half lotus. So what I'm, I'm literally, I guess we can't see that.

I can't see that. Gigi. Okay. We need a foot cam. Just trust them. Yeah, foot cam. Okay. Okay.

You guys got to practice half foot lotus. Foot cam only fans? The foot cam I actually had someone reached out to yesterday Did you actually Yeah yesterday

This is not the first time No this is not the first time They said they wanted the souls of my feet Which is interesting Because I always thought it was the top of your foot Which is the toes in the top of your feet And the composition But this person asked for the souls of my feet

I asked how much he said $75 I can't lie I'm tempted That's a different conversation Why don't I get those No one reaches out from my feet Because man you're your fiancee You have a fiancee You can't be doing

this stuff, that's adultery. Okay. Me and their hand, as a bachelor, I can send out as many feetpicks as I want. I just feel left out, that's all. I want to ask you, are you happy? Yes. And how do you know you're happy?

So how do you know you're unhappy? I'd say maybe some pressure in different areas of your body? Sure. Probably like this weird pressure verbally to be like uttering more negative things that you feel like you're not necessarily in control of. Like words all of a sudden are. connotated negatively that are usually pretty neutral or positive words. It would be a sense of dread, sadness, panic.

Let's understand what happiness is. Okay. So the people are like, oh my God, like, what is the meaning of life? I think it's actually pretty simple. So let's like understand. So first thing is sometimes we have biological or psychological needs. But just because we have those needs and they are not met does not necessarily mean that we're unhappy. So let's say that I am waiting for my food at a restaurant.

And I kind of know that, okay, like the food is coming. And there are two states of mind that you can be sort of in that situation where you're hungry in both situations. But just because you're hungry, there are times where you're hungry and you're unhappy, you're hungry. And there are also times where you sort of know that, okay, like I'm hungry. This is part of what I'm like, let's say I'm going for a hike. And at the end of my hike, I feel really hungry. And even though I feel really hungry at the end of the hike, I'm totally fine with it. because I know I'm going to sit down soon. I'm going to eat something. It's going to be delicious. The fact that I've been hiking all day actually will improve the enhancement or will enhance the taste of the food. So even though my biological condition of being hungry versus, let's say I'm hungry and I'm waiting at a restaurant and the food is 15 minutes late, 20 minutes late, 20 minutes late, 45 minutes late. In these two situations, the biology of hungriness is the same. The signals of leptin and growling in your brain are going to be identical.

And yet in one situation, you can be happy. In another situation, you can be unhappy. So let's actually look at it the other way. We have a lot of people who will indulge their biological signals, right? So if I feel like eating a twinkie, I eat a twinkie, and then I have some degree of happiness. But over time, the more twinkies that I eat, the less happy I will become. This is what we see with video games. It's what we see with drug use.

It's what we see with basically like any kind of physical indulgence. Satisfaction of biological needs does not equate happiness. So then like kind of the question becomes, what do you all think is the source of happiness? Gosh. Stumped us on that one. The source of happiness? Yeah. Satisfaction from our biological or physiological needs is not sufficient for happiness, right?

And you guys mentioned like, so are you all happy? Yeah, I think it varies. I'm happy right now. Yeah. So what makes you happy right now? Let's talk about that. I just, I love talking to you. I feel like you're, you have so much information that I just, I just want to absorb.

Every time I talk to you, I just learn excitement. I'm happy to be here in Austin. We just both took incredible vacations. Graham took his first vacation in years. A proper vacation. A proper vacation, right? Where he wasn't like doing it for work-related purposes and just enjoying it. Same here.

First one in years where I felt like I could just like do away with work and not worry about it. And I would say that all has like residual happiness in it. Inner peace. I feel like I'm at peace right now. Okay. So let's understand that, right? So you went on a vacation. And were you happy during your vacation?

The happiest I've been in my life. Why? So, Graham, while we're on the topic of mental health, I accidentally recently sprained my ankle playing basketball, and I ended up having to book multiple different doctor's appointments just to get it checked out. Going through this, I realized just how hard it is to get a hold of a doctor, let alone finding a doctor that accepts new patients and accepts your insurance.

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I thought there was so much like pent-up stress and work-related, just like, not negativity, but just like, got to do this. Every single Sunday. Got to post. Got to do this. Got to do this on this day. And then I finally had, it was like the first time. and probably four or five years where I had two weeks where I could just like,

eh, you know, like it's all being taken care of. I don't have to worry about it. Okay. So let's understand that. So like basically it makes sense, right? You were on vacation and that's why you're happy. And human beings like vacations because, and why do we like vacations? Because vacations make us happy.

And yet, are you on vacation now? No, no. And you said you're happy now. So how does that work? I think it's living in the moment, being in the present. One pointed consciousness. I'm not thinking right now what I have to do tomorrow. Okay.

What I have to do a week from now, I'm just here with you in this conversation. Right. So that's like, so that's sort of the right answer, but let's understand it, right? Because being in the present moment can also lead to all kinds of challenges. So for example, I once worked with a patient who had a boyfriend who was really into being in the present moment. So he was like, oh man, like I'm at this party and there's this other girl who's not you and I want to be in the present moment. And I'm going to be in the present moment. And I'm, I'm vibing with this chick right now.

also, you know, we're going to, I'm going to be unfaithful to you, but this is not really infidelity because this is just my value of being in the present moment, right? So there's like all kinds of impulse gratification that can also lead to unhappiness. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about what being in the present really is. But I think this is the essence of it. Y'all are right, right? So if we sort of look at it, and I ask you, what is the problem with work? The problem with the work is the stress related to work. So it is the absence of stress, that leads to happiness, we can say. And the reason that a lot of people think that vacations are the source of happiness

is because vacations are a circumstance that has the odds of being less stressful, right? Does that make sense? But I don't know who you went on vacation with. But you can go on vacation with certain people, and it's not going to be stress-free, and that'll destroy your happiness. So then the question kind of becomes, okay, so it's not biology. It's not necessarily biological needs being met. it's not necessarily the absence of work or the presence of work because like this is fun like I'm happy in this moment right so then the question is like when we say stress what is the actual nuts and bolts experience of stress I think I've noticed a stark shift in my general happiness when I felt like I was okay let's go shoot this podcast I want to go do this I want to go do this and I feel like I'm like the engine and now I feel like I've become the oil in the machine

where the engine is going to keep running, and I have to, because I'm, you know, I got the golden handcuffs with, like, an incredible job. And I feel like you feel similarly where, with the main channel especially, where, okay, I have to post three times a week because it pays well. I'm helping out a bunch of people. And I'm not necessarily the engine anymore. I kind of just have to give my input rather than being the spearhead of the main channel, like always excited to put out this new piece of content. Yeah. So we can kind of unpack that in a couple of different ways. One is that, see, when you feel excited about something, you're usually focused on the task as opposed to the outcome. So, like, now Graham's problem is that he has a thing.

And if unless he continues to act, he will lose the thing. Does that make sense? So the moment that we have a thing in life and we are afraid of losing it, even though you put in all this work, it's about like avoiding a loss. That's unhappy. Right. Whereas if we look at, okay, before we start it. a thing. So we have no idea where like this could be a terrible podcast. This could be a great podcast. We have no fucking idea. Right. And yet we show up here and we say, hey, let's do,

let's create this thing. We don't know if this is going to be good. We don't know if this is going to be bad. The more that the three of us stress about topping the last podcast, the worse it's going to be, the more unhappy it's going to be. So instead what we're going to do is we're going to sit here. We're going to have a conversation. It could be good. It could be bad. Who the hell knows, right? Because none of us can predict the future. So when we talk about happiness, I think one of the biggest things that we sort of trip up in, which confuses a lot of people, because we think, okay, if I make more money, if I get a promotion, if I have a beautiful job as a podcaster or content creator, right, which are golden handcuffs. How does that work? Everyone strives for this. And even at

the beginning, it's fun. So what changes? It changes the moment that you have a thing. See, it's so free when y'all are starting a podcast because you've got nothing to lose. You're just, we're going to create something, right? I have nothing that I can lose. And then the moment that you have something, now you're afraid of losing it. So now we become attached to the world. And we think that money means freedom, but for many people, money starts to mean bondage. Because now it's like I'm afraid that someone's going to take my money.

Am I going to lose my money? I can't do this. I can't do that. Like, it's all kinds of stuff, right? And it's kind of weird. So I think it really comes down to a couple of. things, living in the present is one. We'll talk about what that means if you'll want. I think another thing is basically attachment. So this is, in Sanskrit, they call this Vairagya. And what we sort of

discover is that you can be detached from positive and negative things. And in both cases, it'll be good. So if I sort of like accept that, okay, I have to get, let's say, like a vaccine or I have to have surgery or something like that, there is some amount of physical pain that comes with that. But the moment that I accept that, okay, like, this is going to happen, I can't avoid this physical pain, then I'll be fine with it. But if I keep stressing, oh, my God, this is going to hurt so much and I won't be able to do this and I won't be able to do this, I won't be able to, ergo, I have an attachment to something that I will not be able to get. I'm losing something. Does that make sense? It does. So everyone sort of thinks about, you know, even if you look at something

like a breakup, right? So why are people hesitant to break up? Because I will lose this relationship. And so in that loss aversion, they end up staying in a relationship and then they end up being like unhappy because they're trying to run away from unhappiness, which is one of the fastest ways to become unhappy. Is attachment ever good? Is it ever healthy to be attached to something? It depends on what your goal is. So when you say healthy, if the goal is happiness, the answer is no.

If the goal is worldly success, the answer can be yes. So it depends on what your goal is. So, you know, when I decided to have kids, I was really struggling because I was like, oh, my God, like, do I want to be detached from my kids? I had kids. And then I realized, okay, like, I'm supposed to be attached to this. The moment that I start loving my kids is the moment that I, like, open myself to a world of hurt, right? Because if things go bad, then I'm unhappy. And if things go good, then I'm happy. So now what I've done is I've taken my contentment and I have surrendered it to the outcome. of this external human being. And so then what I kind of did is detach from that attachment. And I sort of said, okay, in this life I've chosen to have kids, this is what I've signed up for, which means that one day I could be heartbroken, one day I could be sad, one day I could be mad. When I took the, when I decided to have children is when I opened myself up to a world of joy and a world of hurt. And so even in that, I have a lot of peace because this is what I signed up for, right? It could

go well. It could go bad. And the key thing is deciding to roll the dice with your eyes wide open. It's like, okay, I'm going to do this and this means that my life could be screwed or it could be happy and chances are it's going to be all of the above. So it's kind of about surrendering to the outcome. Yeah, because you can't control the outcome. Right? I know this sounds kind of weird. It's a hard thing to grasp that you cannot control the outcome because I still feel like if a podcast does poorly for us, like we could have done more research, we could have done this, we could have done that. And I think that there is, you know, and we do have attachment to the outcome and that does affect the way that we feel. And in other areas of

life as well, like you can always work harder. You can always do more. Yeah, I've always felt like you should take responsibility for everything that happens. So if, let's just say this podcast sucks, like Jack said, that's then on us to improve on that. And we should have done something better or we could have done something better to prevent that from happening. Yeah. So I think this is where there's a Sanskrit concept called karma far. So karma means action and farra means fruit. And what this sort of means is that as human beings, all we control is our actions. We don't control the outcomes of our actions. So, and this is kind of like there's a, there's a nuance to this because let's say I plant a seed and I water it every day.

Does it turn into a plant? Depends on the seed. Depends on some circumstances. And the conditions, yeah, sure. If you water it properly, it's not just the watering, but it's also if you're giving in the sunlight. Absolutely, right? So there's a lot of factors that are outside of my control. The other thing is that I could take a handful of seeds.

I could throw them out into the wilderness and I could walk away. And will those seeds grow? Possibly. Absolutely. Right. So this is the main thing that we don't understand in life is that we control a lot. So we're entitled to our actions. And so you should take the right action.

But I mean, I've seen this so many times where, you know, couples going through marriage counseling. And like one partner in the relationship can basically do everything right. It doesn't save the marriage. Right. So you need both partners trying to do everything right. And as a human being, you can. can't control how invested your partner is in the relationship. That's a choice that they make. So this is what's what's kind of subtle. I'm not saying that as human beings, we can't do something. But even then,

if we sort of look at it, there are a lot of human beings, let's say like, let's say money, right? So there are some human beings on the planet who work very hard and therefore we think get a lot of money. But there are a lot of human beings on the planet who don't work very hard, who end up with a lot of money. So how do you like reconcile that, right? Like how does that work? So I think kind of the TLDR, which you're right, it's hard to understand and we can get into more details if y'all want. But, you know, basically, if you really look at it, all you can control are your actions. Like, y'all worked really hard to set up this podcast, but what if I showed up hungover? That's not in your control.

So you can optimize all kinds of things, but there's going to be some element that you don't control. And in my experience, it turns out that that element that you don't control is probably 99%, which a lot of people don't understand, which is fair enough. That's a really hard pill to swallow. I feel like in today's culture where everyone says that you will be happy when you get the Lambo, when you end up running a business, when you have the hot wife or whatever, when you're in like a non-monogamous relationship, you have 10 wives. Like everyone says that that's what's going to make you happy, but that's all completely outcome oriented. And to shift that over into not, you know, surrendering to the outcome and placing your happiness and the things that you do, I feel like is like the exact opposite of everything that's being spread. And I think, like, is the happiness in the world increasing or decreasing? Decreasing. Right?

So we have tons of mental health data that supports that. And, oh, like, that's an interesting correlation. Is it causation? I tend to think so. But, like, I mean, like, if all this stuff worked, then I don't know if this kind of makes sense. You take your favorite influencer who is all into fancy cars and this and that. And, like, you just ask yourself, like, how happy does this person really seem? Oftentimes, if you get to meet these people, a lot of them are very discontent.

And then the interesting thing is that you'll, you know, there's a thousand happy people out there who are like taking their kids to the playground slightly overweight, drive like a Toyota or a Honda or like, you know, nothing fancy. And they're like quite content in life. So guys, as Dr. K knows, as we know, and probably some of you guys know this too, that running a business can be incredibly tough. And trying to stay organized amongst a bunch of different softwares and spreadsheets can oftentimes be a lot more energy in time than what it's worth. But with today's sponsor, NetSuite, all you have to do is remember these three numbers, 37. thousand, 25, and 1. 37,000, because that's how many companies have switched to NetSuite and stopped doing

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For people who don't know who you are, could you give us a two-minute background, why they should listen to you? I mean, I don't know that they should listen to me is number one, but I'm Dr. K, I'm Alloke. I sort of struggled with video game addiction a lot, failed out of college, went to India, planned on becoming a monk for about seven years or did monk training for about seven years. And then that didn't really work out. I met my wife, so decided to go to medical school, went to med school, became a psychiatrist, trained at Harvard. I was faculty there for a couple years. And then a lot of what my area of interest is is integrating some of these Eastern monk concepts, but this Hindu concepts about spirituality and stuff, into psychiatric practice. So now the kind of work that I do is really about like understanding the mind from both like a neuroscience clinical perspective and from like a spiritual perspective. And what I found is that like, and we see this actually in the field of psychiatry. So right now in psychiatry, we have something called the third wave of psychotherapy. So the first wave of psychotherapy was psychoanalysis, which was like Freud and

Jung and these kinds of people. And then we had these behaviorists that came along. And so you have people like Aaron Beck who developed cognitive behavioral therapy, which is like, in the first wave, it was like, oh, you have all the stuff going on in the unconscious. If we fix the unconscious, then we'll fix you. And the behaviorists were like, we don't know if any of that stuff is actually real. It's all like theoretical. We have no data behind it. Instead, what we should focus on is behavior. So if you can get an alcoholic to literally stop drinking alcohol every day, you've won. Now we have something called the third wave, which is the injection of minor Eastern concepts into psychotherapy. So dialectical behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy,

these are basically therapists usually who study the Eastern stuff in some way and then realize that there is something missing in therapy. And when they add this Eastern component, the outcomes from the therapies that they develop start to improve quite a bit. So what are those, you just mentioned two Eastern therapies. Can we break those down a little bit? So let's say someone is struggling with some sort of mental illness. Yeah. Okay. Let's say like an eating disorder or something like that. How can you impose Eastern-based therapy into somebody like that? So let's take the example of dialectical behavioral therapy. So dialectical behavioral therapy is something that is designed to look at something called the dialectic. So a lot of people struggle with like opposite

things being true. So for example, like if I'm angry at you, it's very hard for some people to believe that I love you at the same time. So to hold two opposite things to be true at the same time is very difficult, right? Is this person good or is this person bad? And generally speaking, the challenge is that we fluctuate between the two. So if you have a unhealthy relationship, the reason that you stay in it is because sometimes the relationship is really good and sometimes the relationship is really bad. And then people really struggle. They're like, should I stay in this relationship? Should I break up? Like, should I stay or should I go? And the problem is that when the relationship is good, you want to stay. And when the relationship is bad, you want to go. And so what we

naturally do as human beings is we try to like put all of that data into an equation. And then there's an equal sign and then there's a decision on the right side. So we try to integrate all of this stuff and try to like make a decision, have some kind of final conclusion. But that's not what life is. So dialectical behavioral therapy trains people to understand that two opposite things can be true, that a relationship can be both healthy and unhealthy at the same time. This is actually rooted in an Eastern concept called Adveit Vedanta, which is non-duality. So if I were to say, Like, is this cup a good cup or a bad cup? That's a cup.

It's a good cup. Right? So, yeah, the Advait Vedanta says that there's no such thing is good or bad. If you really think about it, like, if you walk outside and you see nature, there's no good nature or bad nature. There's no good rain or bad rain. When does rain become good or bad? Well, if there's a drought, we interpret that rain is good. If I am not expecting rain and I'm walking outside and then rain starts, I view that rain is bad.

So if you really look at it, good or bad is created by the human mind, it is not an intrinsic quality of reality. And the more that you realize that good and bad is created by your mind, suddenly you have the power to create good or get rid of bad because it's created in here. The action is just the world is just the world. It's the way that we receive the world, the way that we interpret the world, that makes it good or bad. So I know that, too, is like something that's wild.

But just to give you all an example, so I, you know, when I graduated from college, I had a 2.5 GPA. And at the time, there was no circumstance in which I thought that a 2.5 is superior to a 4.0, right? There's no way, except when I wind up at Harvard. And so suddenly my story is different, because if I was a 4.0 kid, I would have been like the other 5,000 kids who were there. but I'm a 2.5 kid. So suddenly, even in terms of like personal brand building and like my experience, like that 2.5 is actually more valuable than a 4.0 because I figured out how to figure, do this stuff with a 2.5, right? I'm not one of these kids who like always was good at studying and super smart and like dedicated and hardworking and all this kind of stuff. So one of the things I've learned in my life is there is no such thing as good or bad. There's just what happens.

and it's the way that we interpret this, which there's good data about, that ultimately determines our happiness, whether things are successful or not, all kinds of things. So going back to DBT, DBT basically introduces this concept in a pretty watered down way. And even if you look at the practices in DBT, which are very like meditative practices that are grounding, literally like the practices are something like, you know, holding an ice cube. And if you hold an ice cube, the physical sensation is actually unpleasant. but holding the ice cube kind of focuses your mind and you even start to embrace things that are physically unpleasant. And the moment that you can embrace something that is unpleasant, that thing no longer controls you. Does that kind of make sense? Because when you avoid things that are unpleasant, you lose control over your life because then unpleasant determines your actions.

So the whole point of some of these practices like DBT is to embrace things that are unpleasant. to recognize that there's no such thing is good or bad. And then if you really look at what really controls a lot of people's lives, it's like running away from bad and running towards good. But then suddenly, like, you can't, you don't lose, you don't have any control because if something is good, you have to move towards it. If something is bad, you have to run away from it. So you don't actually have freedom in that life because you're just,

you're just like a bacteria that's moving away from an oxymour stimuli and moving towards a pleasant stimuli. Yeah. So when should people go to therapy versus work on it on their own? So I think that there's a very common misconception about therapy, which is that therapy is about treatment. So the first thing to understand is that as a clinician, the diagnostic value that I bring is like 50% of the value. So I think that, you know, we should probably have a society where people have like, you know, we have physical annual physicals, right? Which is like once a year, we just check you out.

But if we really look at society today, you know, a 21-year-old doesn't need a physical evaluation. on a yearly basis. What we need way more is a mental evaluation on a yearly basis. So I think one thing to understand is I think basically everyone should try therapy, whether you think you're something's wrong with you or not, because the whole point is that a therapist can tell you, okay, are there problems here which we can work on? Are there ways that I can help you? Is there something actually going on? Some of the most sad experiences I've had in therapy are people who come in for one problem and then discover that there is something that they thought was completely normal, which has been like wrong their whole life. So a good example of something like this is like

adult diagnosis of ADHD, where people have been struggling their whole life with this, and they never understood that like, oh, this is actually something that can be fixed. Like this can be treated. And this fundamental struggle that I've had my whole life can be corrected. So I think that everyone is, it's good to go for an evaluation. But I think that that as far as your question of, you know, when should you do it yourself and when should you do therapy? I don't think that I kind of, I don't see it that way. So I think that therapy is to be done in conjunction with what you do yourself. So the worst cases I've had of therapy, therapy patients, or when people come in and they're like, Therapies me. Right? They're like, just fix me.

Yeah. And when they don't put in the effort, like I can't, you know, I see them once a week, and then there's 100, whatever hours that they're awake during the week where they don't do any work, and it doesn't do any good. Some people in therapy for a decade, and they just show up expecting the therapy to be done in the room, and they don't make changes to their external life, which doesn't work. What do you think about NLP? I was listening to a podcast with Tony Robbins, who said that there was a person who went in with the fear of snakes, and they had been working with a therapist for 10, 15 years, and they're still just as afraid of snakes. And Tony Robbins claims that in 30 minutes, he cured her fear of snakes on stage using NLP.

What are your thoughts on something like that? I think we sort of know that the science of NLP is kind of pseudoscience. So if we look at it like the theories of NLP have not been born out to be kind of correct. But there's a lot of caveats to this. So we got to dive in a little bit. So the first is that we certainly know some of the premises of NLP are that our actions and our words are somehow tied. And that's absolutely true. So if you look at like just basic psychotherapy techniques, like if you pay attention to someone's words, it will give you an idea of what is going on in their mind, even predict certain kinds of behaviors.

So there's definitely like you can use language diagnostically for sure to sort of get a sense of where someone is. Now, when you look at something like Tony Robbins, curing someone of their snakes, I think that that's probably real. So, like, in the sense that this person had a very real clinical outcome. I've seen that a lot. So my area of interest was evidence-based complementary an alternative medicine. So, for example, like, I encountered a patient who had stage four metastatic cancer, who basically was going to die, right? So it's like not really treated. There's something else here now.

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19 plus to wager, Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2-6-100 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. So they decided that they were going to spend the last three to six months of their life living in a monastery and learning to play the flute. They're like, I'm dead, there's nothing I can do about it.

They go to this monastery. They do yoga and meditation every day. They learn to play the flute. And then five years later, like, they're still alive. So no one knows, like, what happened there mechanistically. So one thing that I've learned about all these stories about complementary alternative medicine is that there are absolutely success stories that defy scientific understanding in the moment.

The challenge, though, if we're looking at whether something is scientific or not, The question is one of reliability. So now the question becomes if Tony Robbins takes a thousand people who have a thousand different phobias, can he reliably cure them of their phobia? And then the next question becomes if this is really NLP, then theoretically we should be able to teach it to a thousand other people who should have the same success rate as Tony Robbins does. And I think when you do that, it doesn't work, right? So we have not reliably been able to teach, let's say, a large group of people, NLP, who can reliably get the outcomes that maybe Tony Robbins achieves. I haven't looked at his data. I have no idea, like, what his sample sizes, what his success rate is.

We have no idea what the duration of the cure of the phobia is. Right? So like even in that moment of someone that they've then bring out a snake and that person is fine, what happens a year later, what happens five years later, what happens 10 years later? So a lot of times like these people who are very like, and I'm not trying to dog on Tony Robbins here, but I'm just pointing out that their outcomes are not filtered through a traditional scientific lens. And so the mechanisms don't seem to be 100% correct from what the NLP theorists do. I think that people who do NLP will frequently get good outcomes with certain people. But the question is what is really the mechanism of that? And we don't really know. So we know that for a example, placebo effect is incredibly powerful. So when someone pays, and we also know that the more that you pay for something, the more, the stronger the placebo effect is. So if someone pays like 10 grand to go to this person and really believes that things are going to be really powerful, so I've seen like spiritual gurus in India, that people will go through a lot of, you know, they'll travel all

across the world, they're disabled. So they have to like trek up to some mountain and they see this person for five minutes, the guru touches them, and then they're like cure. I've seen that kind of stuff. Yeah. So I think that there's all kinds of mechanisms around belief and faith and like all kinds of other stuff that seems to be responsible for clinical improvement, but not in a reliable way. That's the real challenge. So don't you think that then still makes it a treatment? If someone truly believes it's going to work, doesn't then that just mean it works? Yes and no, because we know that the placebo effect isn't 100%. But yeah, I mean, there are some people, who have even sort of talked about, so there's one person when I was doing research at Harvard,

there's this great guy named Ted Kapchuk. And Ted Kepchuk is a, he's trained in traditional Chinese medicine, but he's also faculty at Harvard. So he does placebo research. And his research is super cool. So what he does is he'll go to someone and he'll say, I'm going to give you something that's a placebo. And then he says, we also have all this data that placebo can potentially improve your symptoms and can even like cure you potentially. And the reason that I'm giving it to you is because I believe it will substantially improve your symptoms, even though it's fake. So he did a beautiful study where he did this and people got better. Right. So like you're right, basically, that, you know, there's some element to this. I think the real challenge that we look

for in medicine is reliability. So how consistently does that work? So in the case of something like antidepressant medication, it seems like it's quite consistent. And even 70% of the therapeutic value of antidepressants appears to be placebo. We spoke about happiness a little bit in the beginning of the episode. I have a question. I was reading a book called Stumbling on Happiness.

I had a whole segment on this about how do people know if they are happy or sad when they've only lived as themselves? What if they think they're truly happy but in terms of the universe they're only a six out of ten? In terms of reality.

Why do you assume that happiness is objective? Why do you assume that there's an objective scale happiness. Because it's a term that we use to describe a certain feeling. That, like, we've all kind of like... I think it's a perspective. You could probably have someone in a really terrible condition who's happy from their perspective, and you can have someone with an amazing life who's just unhappy.

So, I mean, like, I think this is a really good, ignorant question. Okay. Apologies. No, I'll take it. So, like, let's understand this. Okay, so if you say a 10 out of 10 happiness, how, like, as a scientist, I'm asking, how do you define? What are the variables that correlate with a 10 out of 10 happiness? Well, I just, the only, as a scientist? Yeah. So if you're saying that something is objective, right?

So if happiness can be objectively rated from zero to 10, then there have to be variables that correlate with it. I don't think you could say it's objective, but I think you could take a big enough sample size of people with like the law of big numbers and come to a certain agreed upon spectrum of happiness. Yes. And then someone maybe as an outlier of that thinks that they're on the higher end when in actuality they could be doing other things to make themselves happier. Yeah. So we do that. And when we do that, that kind of falls apart. I think I'm not an expert in happiness research. So take this with a grain of salt. So we know that, for example, happiness correlates with quality of life. Right. But then if we

look at it, the measure of quality of life is fundamentally subjective. So if you like ask people, like, are you happy at the end of the day? What you discover, it's, it's an objective measure of a subjective feeling. So I think the question is kind of like, I don't think the question really computes once you really get to my scientific understanding of it. And then this is also where we can tunnel into what is the nature of happiness. So let's assume that what you're saying is true. So let's say, I think I'm happy. Okay. So let's say that I'm, I'm married and I believe I have a good marriage. And then I see someone else. And now, as you're presuming, I realize, oh, my God, there is so, a marriage can be so much better. So now I've become, I've become objectively aware,

and that destroys my subject of happiness, right? That's the presumption. Am I understanding this correctly? Kind of, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So now let's understand what is the nature of my unhappiness in that moment. What is it that is actually making me unhappy? Comparison, right? Absolutely. Right. So now what's started to happen is I have created a unfulfilled want. And I'm chasing that want and I'm letting my unfulfilled want dictate my happiness. So I think that this is where it sort of falls in my opinion. And I'm maybe losing you all a little bit. But it kind of falls apart because what is the nature of the unhappiness? Now I see something that I want that I don't have. But this is like this is really common. Even if we go to like any, let's say, middle school and there's a very popular. type of sneakers, right? And then some kids have it and they're happy and some kids don't have it and they're unhappy. But the whole point of like understanding the real source of happiness is that just because you don't have something, there are particular skills that you can, or perspectives that you can gain that will allow you to be happy in spite of not having the sneakers. And I think the only

thing that we're talking about here is once I see, okay, this person has this in the marriage that I don't have, now this makes me unhappy. But the way that you relate to the, things that you do not have in life ultimately determine your happiness. That makes sense. And it's kind of hard to articulate this, but you can still somewhat isolate it down to certain variables and certain changes in your life that you can make to become happier. And my whole point is if you take a large enough sample size, like I think it said in the book that I was reading, they did a study where they got like one person or whatever and they gave them an Oreo cookie. And they're like measure happiness before you eat the cookie, measure it after the cookie. And it was like someone

that went to from a four to a six or something like that. And you can't say that for everyone in this on this planet that's now a four after eating an Oreo, you're a six. But if you measure this across 10 million people and then you average out the delta, the difference between before and after Oreo consumption, then you can generally say that this is probably how you're going to feel after eating an Oreo cookie, right? And you could do that with other certain variables, like, what is your relationship with desire?

What things do you desire in life right now or are you content? And then you can map that out across 10 million people. And then you say, okay, well, relationship to desire has a stronger correlation with happiness than... Okay. Beautiful. So now we get to a really important fundamental. What is the relationship between a population-based conclusion, an average, and your life? I would say it's a good heuristic. In what way? Something to consider when trying to increase my own happiness.

Okay. So like, I think this is really important to understand. So if we look at like population based recommendations, right? So like if I were to take every person in the city that we're in right now, I were to take their articles of clothing, I were to average their articles of clothing and I were to make a recommendation that everyone should wear gray smocks. And then would that correlate with like everyone in the world? So we take all this pile of data. We average what everyone is doing and we say this is the. average that we discover, and then we use that as a recommendation. And everyone started wearing

gray smocks. Do you think that their happiness with their clothing would increase or decrease? Decrease. But I also think that that's slightly different, whereas like clothing is a little bit more like subjective and higher variance, whereas an Oreo cookie is an Oreo cookie. Fair enough, right? So you can make the argument that an Oreo cookie has a stronger dopamine, a more consistent dopaminergic release than a gray smock or clothing or things like that. So that's a fair point. But I think my big learning as a clinician is that population-based medicine cannot be applied to an individual. There's this whole kind of concept of something called external validity, which is kind of this concept of we can do a study and we can learn something about a population. But just because it's true

of a population, in fact, we sort of know that it's not necessarily true for an individual. And you're kind of spot on where you can say, okay, what's true for a population should be used as a compass for exploration, right? That's what kind of you say. So that I agree with completely. But the whole point is when we're doing a compass for exploration, there still has to be a translation to the individual. That makes sense. Okay. So yeah, I was saying it shouldn't be really used as like dogma. Yeah. Like, you know, the population-based medicine, but it's a fantastic tool to use to challenge your own beliefs and maybe to guide you, like you said, like a compass. in the right direction.

And then this is where, like, I'm going to kind of support your point 100% in tank what I was saying earlier, because even if we look at this yogic perspective, what the yogic perspective says is that there is a uniform. To look inside? Yeah, to look inside. And that there is a consistent, subjective path that will lead to happiness. Right. So which makes it kind of objective because they believe that detachment living in the present. I mean, we just sort of torpedoed what I was saying earlier. Right?

It's slightly different because one is like an Oreo cookie, whereas the other one is, like you said, it's so, it's subjective to the individual, but you can objectify that by saying it's for everybody. But it's sort of. So I think the other problem with the example of the Oreo cookie is that it is not happiness, it is pleasure. Yeah, okay. That's right. So dopamine doesn't correlate with contentment. Dopamine just correlates with pleasure. And so this is where I think that why I asked the first question of like, oh, okay.

okay, when you say that there is an objective scale of happiness, what are the variables of that? And what we know from happiness research is a lot of that is subjective. And then the question becomes, okay, if happiness is subjective and not objective, then if you want to be happy, do you need to do internal work or external work? And the whole scam, right, now we come full circle to this idea of everyone telling you, if you fuck more bitches and you drive faster cars and you have more money and you have a bigger dick, you will be happy. These are all objective measures.

And I don't think many of those people are very happy. I mean, some of them are. But generally speaking, I mean, I've worked with a lot of them. And they're usually not very. I mean, that's why they end up coming to me in the first place. Right. But there could be a sample size selection bias there. But so now we kind of come full circle to where I think there is actually like there

are certain biological, psychological, psychological, and spiritual laws. And we know what constitutes happiness. But the work is largely subjective. The whole problem with the work. is that we chase external things that give us pleasure or dopamine, and we think that those are happiness because no one ever teaches us what happiness truly is. And so we go chasing these things, but the basic problem with an Oreo cookie is that your dopamine is temporary. Right? So then the Oreo goes away, and then you want another Oreo, and then you eat another Oreo,

and then you get more dopamine, and then you eat a third Oreo. Now you're developing dopaminergic tolerance. Now you've eaten four Oreos because you need to eat two extra Oreos to get the happiness of the first Oreo. And now you've eaten six Oreos because you're chasing this pleasure of an Oreo. And now you're feeling guilty because you've eaten six Oreos. That's interesting. So I feel like a good, a good guideline would be how do you feel without any stimuli? If you're just sitting by yourself without anything, good job. You asked me, you asked me, you asked me. It was the first question of the podcast you asked me. Are you happy? Yes. And what did I say? You said yes. And you asked, how do I know? And that was a... And then, so what's the

answer that you just came up with? What were you saying? Because you're able to feel content and happy, pleasant, positive, without any stimuli. Yes. Not just without any stimuli. So now we're going to take it one step further. So thank you very much for answering your own question. Not only in the absence of stimuli, but then a certain tranquility in the absence of stimuli, which remains. exactly the same with stimuli, whether it is positive or negative. So to be tranquil in the face of pleasure, to be tranquil in the face of pain, for pleasure and pain to be exactly the same. And when you have that, then you'll be happy. Kind of sounds like stoicism in a sense. It is. It's very similar. Right. So now let's just think about the implications of this. So if I react

the same to pleasure and pain, suddenly all of my problems in life, like literally go away. It's easy for me to work because playing a video game or doing work gives me the same amount of joy. Imagine how fucking overpowered that is. So that's literally like what changed in my life is that I used to chase video games and now, for example, like I have a book coming out in two weeks and I started writing my second book like four days ago. And that is just as enjoyable to me as playing a video game. How do people get to that point?

They're starting off from scratch, like never done any work on themselves. How do they get to where you are? Now, you all know I choose function over fashion any day of the week, but every once in a while I get the best of both worlds. And yeah, I'm talking about this tech t-shirt that I'm wearing from our sponsor, Insider Clothing. The t-shirt has a very simple, minimalistic design, so you could wear it with anything. The material is also very light and soft, which I love. And it's levels above a normal men's t-shirt because it adapts to your body, has anti-sweat technology, and has antibacterial action that prevents odor-causing bacteria.

Does that mean I don't ever need to wash it? Jack, please wash it, and the color's not going to fade if you do. Do I ever need to iron it? No, you don't need to iron it. Okay, so what you're saying is I should order some more. I actually think you should. I think it looks good on you. Should also get some other colors, too, because they have six different options.

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It's 15% off. You're going to absolutely love it. Insider clothing. Thank you so much. Back to the episode. How do people get to that point? If they're starting off from scratch, like never done any work on themselves, how do they get to where you are?

So how do you get to that point? What a great question. So this is going to sound kind of weird, but we're way closer than we think. But I'll try to like lay it out. So the first thing to understand is like, first just observe your internal state. And then what I would say is like if you kind of like, let's say we can do this now. I want you to just, like, close your eyes for a second. Okay.

And what do you feel? Like the sensation of touch? What do we feel? Just whatever? Anything. I would say my fingers feel a little tingly. Okay. Just a physical sensation, or we're talking about like a mind? I feel pretty happy.

I feel. Where does that happiness originate from? I would say it's my chest. Okay, right? So now what I'm going to do, can I have your hand? Okay. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to pinch you, Jack. Okay.

Now this is going to cause pain. Okay. So does this hurt? No. I'm going to pinch you hard. You're not pinching very hard. Okay. Does that hurt?

I mean, it's, you know, not really comfortable. What's happening to the sensation in your chest? I would say I'm not really focusing so much on it. Okay. Focusing more on the pinching. Okay, very good, right? So now this is important. So the sensation in your chest doesn't go away.

You can open your eyes. All right. So the sensation in your chest doesn't go away. But what happens, now you've basically stumbled upon the source of all meditative tradition. which is that we get distracted from our tranquility. That's the problem in life. It's just distraction. So the more that you are centered in here, the happier you will be. And that's the beginning and end of it. So I'll give you all an example, right? So let's say that you're having a good day. And then what makes a good day a bad day is that you get pulled outside of yourself. Now I have to

think about this upload over here. Now I'm going on vacation with this person and this person is waking up late, you're not sitting within yourself, you start to think about the outside world. Is this podcast going to be good? Is it not going to be good? Are we sitting here just having a conversation? As long as we're sitting here just having a conversation, we're going to be happy. We're grounded, we are centered, we are in the present call, whatever you want. And the moment that our mind starts to go to other places, this is when unhappiness will set in. Because now I have to fix this or not fix this, even as we go towards positive things, we will be unhappy. It's so funny you said that because when you had been closed my eyes and you're asking me like what you feel in the moment,

it was for me a bit of anxiety because I checked, as you were adjusting the levels, I checked all my notifications. And I saw like, no, it's, Markets closed today. But I saw like five text messages. I'm like, oh, I should respond to this and I got to do this. And you're right. It just took me out of the moment by seeing like the to-do list that's waiting. Yeah. Breaking the fourth wall. Yeah. So it's crazy, right? So this is the essence of it, is that what we need to do is we need to understand that the more that you are grounded within yourself. And if we literally, like, even we can look at extreme cases of psychosis, like hallucinations.

So what is happening? So I really enjoy working with patients who are actively psychotic. It's kind of scary for a lot of people. But I love that, like, my meditative training helps me a lot. Right. So with all these people, what's literally happening is they have such powerful external stimuli. They have sounds, they have visions, they have all this kind of stuff that pulls them away from themselves. And they get literally caught up because they think that the devil is chasing them.

So I had a patient who thought the devil was chasing them and they were so focused on the devil that they ran down the hallway and jumped out of a third floor window and like broke both of their legs. Right. So they are so caught up in this external stimulus. And this is what happens with us. Oh my God, did this person text me back? You're thinking about it. I'm thinking about this. I'm thinking about this.

My mind is not in here. My mind is all in the outside world. Am I going to do okay on the test? Am I not going to do okay on the test? Now, when you sit down and you take a test, if you were just simply absorbed with the question at hand, even then you're a little bit externalized, but there's less externalization. If I'm thinking about this question and the next question and the next question and my grade and my GPA and my desires to be a doctor and my desires to do this and then making all this money, the more external I become, does that make sense? The more my Stress increases, the more my anxiety increases. So what we want to do is just come back to you. And even if we look at the things that we enjoy, like orgasm. So orgasm is a moment where we are with us, right? Don't look at me. Hold on this. Let's talk about that.

Take my hand. The other one. And then you guys, let's talk about, you guys need to hold hands to ring of. Now we're going to talk about it. about how orgasm is us. We're going to do this to get a knock. Jack just stares at me. All right.

So now let's think about that, right? So when you say you're uncomfortable, where did your mind go? I thought of Jack looking at me when you were talking about that. Okay, right. So once again, let's try again. Hold, take my hand. All right. Take my hand.

Okay. Now, now, okay, so notice the discomfort. Where is the discomfort? Jack's hands are sweaty. Okay. So that's just a sensation, right? That's just a sensation. It's not good or bad.

Yeah. Right. So now close your eyes. Okay. Take a deep breath. And breathe out. So notice that nervous energy going out. Right.

So this is a deeply uncomfortable. And just notice that discomfort. Where is the discomfort? My hands. Okay. So that's okay. So like just notice that your hands are discomfort. They're going to be uncomfortable because you fucking invited me back and like G.G.

Right. So this is nothing you can do about it now. You guys open this. And so now just, okay. So what's happening to the discomfort in your hands? I want to pull my hands away. Okay. So now you're thinking about trying to change something.

So I want you to focus on your chest, Graham, focus on your chest, and now breathe in and out of it. Right. So you want to pull the hand away. You want to avoid this stimulus. Maybe this won't work. Who knows? But just accept it. Right?

So we're just holding hands. That's all we're doing. There's nothing weird about it. Like, it's, sure, it's fucking weird. But this is just a physical sensation in your hands, right? So you can put your hand. You can grab a wet towel. You know, you can grab all kinds of stuff.

And like, what's slowly happening? Are things getting worse? So things getting better. Slightly better, but I don't think they're going to get 100% good. Okay, so that's totally fine. So now let's open our eyes. We can let go. You all are free.

Okay. So now notice the relief flooding in. Yes. Okay. So there's so much relief, right? So this is actually how we start. So the first thing is that this was uncomfortable for you. It seems like Jack got better than you did faster, which is fine.

So everyone starts somewhere. But now what you've been able to do is even if it doesn't get better, you have tolerated discomfort. I feel like it was forced. I think we need. It wasn't like a. Is the next. Voluntary.

Sure. Right. But you were still tolerating it. So I forced you into it. Yeah. G. And so you're asking how do you do this? You start by not responding to these external things that shape your behavior.

So even if there's discomfort on the inside, you can learn to tolerate it is the first step. And once I can learn to tolerate discomfort, then a lot has changed. So I. I had a problem with this where basically I thought all this fell apart when I got nauseous. So I got food poisoning a couple of years ago. And then like I became nauseous and I was like, there's no fucking tolerating this. Like accepting it that doesn't work when you're feeling physically bad. And then a year ago, I got, I got food poisoning again. And I actually found that it actually works pretty well. You can just tolerate the discomfort. There's nothing you can do

about it. You're kind of grounded with it. You're tranquil with it. Like this is going to hurt. It's going to feel uncomfortable. But I don't know if this kind of makes. sense, when you were feeling uncomfortable, your mind wanted to run away, right? You wanted to run away from this stimulus. And so the moment that you practice, first of all, tolerating the discomfort, even if it's forced, then you will get used to it. Like, just like you get used to a sauna or anything, any other kind of physical sensation, you can acclimatize to it. And as you acclimatize to it, it will affect you less. As it affects you less, now you no longer need to let go. And so now what's going on is in your case, being unable to let go is creating so much

suffering. And so how do we conquer that suffering by being okay with not letting go, which is practiced in a very simple way like this. A couple of really simple things in case that sounded weird for everyone. So one is, so I think meditative practice and practicing literally training your mind to be in the present and tolerate discomfort is like really, really good. So part of the reason that we meditate for, let's say, 30 minutes in lotus posture is that as you meditate 15 minutes, 20 minutes, your body starts crying out. I want to move. I want to do this. And there's a beautiful meditation practice for this that we can do here, if you all want, called Gaiash Theorem.

It's going to take a little while, like maybe about three or four minutes if you all want to give it a shot. But how do we do this? So I think meditative practice is good. I think a certain amount of introspection is good to also understand, okay, what is it that really makes me unhappy? And it's not the object. It is notice the pattern or process of unhappiness. So as a simple example, when your mind is moving fast versus when your mind is moving slow, which one is more likely to be unhappy? Fast.

Really? I think fast to be happier. How so? More to do. Okay. More going on. Right. So this is great.

I feel like I'd be more occupied. Yeah. Okay. So if we sort of look at it, right? So generally speaking, the speed of the mind will lead to an absence of tranquility. But excitement is absolutely has fast mind. Anxiety has fast mind, right? But if we think about excitement, excitement is also externally oriented.

It's pleasure oriented. It's super hype. Let's party. Let's do this. Let's do this. Let's go crazy. Let's everybody have fun. And so this is where we get back to Adveit Vedanta, where the yogis say that excitement and

anxiety or equally bad, right? There are two sides of the same coin, which is an absence of tranquility. So as we start to understand that excitement leads to a fast mind, anxiety leads to a fast mind. So how do we become happy? We actually slow down the rate of our mind. And we sort of know this psychiatrically, too, that as you kind of calm down, right, as you, as you're calm and your mind is calmer, then you will be more content, but you won't necessarily engage in more pleasure. So I think a lot of it is internal observation. A lot of it is like practicing being kind of tranquil or grounded or present in the moment. There's some amount of tolerance of discomfort.

There are all kinds of like complex meditative traditions that there's a stepwise process of, you know, asanas and breathing exercises and all kinds of different stuff. Got it. Since we have a lot of business owners, entrepreneurs on the podcast, how much sacrifice do you think is required to be successful in a lot of those areas? What do you mean by sacrifice in what area? You hear the general mindset, and I think almost everyone who's really ultra successful has said this, that you need to give something up to focus on the one thing if you want to succeed at it. There's always going to be someone out there who's going to outwork you, do a little bit more. Maybe that means you can't have the social life that you want to.

Sleep a lot of the time is a pretty big sacrifice. You could sacrifice sleep. I mean, there's a lot of things that you could give up in favor of pursuing an outcome that is greater than the average. What's the point of pursuing an outcome? desire of that outcome. Okay. So, I mean, I think if your goal is desire of an outcome, then by all means, make sacrifice. But what I have found in my life is that the fewer sacrifices that I make, the more successful I become. So I think relentlessly pursuing a desire can absolutely come with a lot of sacrifice. But what I found is, but I don't think that's the only way to reach success. So like, you know, I don't make many sacrifices now. In a sense, I make a lot. but they don't feel like sacrifices. I just make choices. That's all it is.

And then I decide to myself. So sacrifice, you can't make a sacrifice unless you're attached to something. Does that make sense? So it kind of makes sense that as you become less attached to things, you don't sacrifice because it's kind of,

eh. So going back to the book example, when you can enjoy writing a book just as much as you enjoy playing a video game, are you making a sacrifice by not playing the video game? No. Right?

So there are times where, so speaking of the book, right. So I had a couple of full-time jobs, and I work really hard, but I don't suffer, right? There's a big difference. So there are times where, you know, my editor sent me like a draft of the manuscript and, like, I had a full, like, work schedule. I was working like 70 hours a week, but they need this draft of the manuscript within like one week. So, you know, I spent a couple of nights not sleeping. And that's a choice that I made. And I dealt with the fatigue the next day. So you can work really hard, but it's kind of like, that's just a choice that you make. I don't have to, you can argue that that's a sacrifice, but I don't have to make the sacrifice, right? I just have to choose what I rather have sleep or what I rather work. What is more important to me in this moment? And being tranquil in the face of both of those decisions makes it not a sacrifice. I don't know if that makes sense or if this is so foreign. Kind of. So you're basically saying that you should enjoy what you're doing so much or have the outcome be such a big part of your objective that it's not really a sacrifice

because you're getting what you want and that just comes with the territory. Yeah, but I'm not focused on an outcome. Okay. So someone asked me recently, like, you have this book coming out, are you nervous? And I said, no. And they were, like, really confused by that. And they're like, how aren't you nervous? Like, what if the book does well? Or what if it doesn't do well? I was just thinking about it, right? So, like, the book is written. Whether it does well or doesn't do well is completely out of my control. If I wrote a shitty book, the book is shitty. That's just it. Right? Does that make sense? So like what's the point in stressing over whether the book is good or bad? Like it, I did, I applied the effort that I was willing to apply to write it. And so this is my

karma. I've decided to write this book and it's either good or bad. Now that's done. So I think this is where I kind of have a different perspective where people say you have to make all these sacrifices to achieve this outcome. And it's like, yeah, if you want to achieve the outcome, you have to make some of those sacrifices agreed. But the question is, why do you want the outcome in the first place. Are you looking for happiness because then it's silly because you don't have to get the outcome to get the happiness. And this is the crazy thing is when I work with people like this, right?

So what happens? They have a problem of, and I'm sure you all understand this, moving goalposts. Oh my God, million subscribers on YouTube. Are we done? Time to retire? No. Now we need two. And once you get two million, are you happy?

No. Yeah, you're very happy because it took you two and, and a half years. So in my case, it took us like two and a half years to get our first million. It took one year, a little of 15 months to get our second million. So we're improving the rate in which we're acquiring subscribers. But now what happens is even I've gone, even though I've improved, two and a half years for one million, one year for two million. Now what happens next? How much time do I give myself for the third million? One year. Less. So think about what's happening. The more successful I become, the more I'm making my life difficult, and the more

unhappiness that I'm buying for myself. It's stupid. Right. But this is what we all do. And now they say, oh, I have to make sacrifices. You're damn right. If it takes you two and a half years to get one million, one year to get two million and six months to get three million, you're right that the more successful you become, the more sacrifices you have to make. And then they say in order to get three million subscribers. I had to sacrifice this and I had to sacrifice this and I had to sacrifice this. And they're right. But why? Why do you? Well, sometimes I feel like the benefit outweighs the sacrifice in the long term. In what dimension of benefit? I think in my case, it was working throughout my 20s, not really having much of a social life. I could look back now and I have zero

regrets. But I really enjoyed working. I loved it. I think the same could also be applied to diet. Like this year, I've gotten really into eating healthy. And like last night, I chose the low calorie chicken thing, even though the higher calorie one would have tasted better. Okay. But like little things like this. Yeah. But so now you're like, you're sort of, I think you're in a sense proving my point, but let's understand this. Okay.

So first thing is I was a degenerate in my 20s. And like, I don't regret that because if I really think about it, so I had friends who I used to feel intimidated by because they were in these accelerated med school programs where they start med school at 18. they fully finish residency training by like 32 or something like that. And so then like they get the advantage of retiring early, right? So it's like, I'm going to work really hard in my 20s and 30s so I can retire in my 50s. And it's like, just think about this for a second. Would you rather work in the decade of your 20s and take the 50s off or would you rather have fun in your 20s and work in your 50s? Which time is actually more valid?

To me, I would say my 50s. But that's because I could look forward to it. And that's something that I know will be. Like, I feel like I take a lot of comfort in knowing that the future is secure. He also gets a lot of his enjoyment and relaxation and stuff. Like, for example, for me, I love going out and playing sports and competing and, like, doing crazier things. Whereas he provides, he likes things that can be, can be done, like, in the 50s through 80s, whereas I love Leisure. Yeah, yeah, but so this is kind of what I'm saying.

And that makes perfect sense, right? But if we really look at like, so even if we pay attention to some of your statements, you said, I really got into diet. Yeah. And so if you really pay attention to that, what that means is that you are deriving enjoyment from something that is unenjoyable, right? You were getting some... Overall, yes.

Overall, absolutely. And that's how you can choose to eat the low-calorie thing, because that your tranquility is not determined by the high-calorie thing. You got into this. And even when you say, I enjoyed working in my 20s, I enjoyed making the sacrifices. Well, then it's not a sacrifice. Like, sure, objectively, it's a sacrifice because you're not working. working. But this is exactly my point, is that whether you are happy or unhappy depends on the

attitude towards the action, not the action itself. So can people force themselves to think a certain way? Like, let's just say they want to be CEO of this company and they know that they have to work 15 years. Can they trick their mind into? Yes and no. You can't force yourself to think a certain way. You can't trick your mind, but you can absolutely consistently change the way that you think. So let's pay attention to language as well. And this says so much about you because you force yourself to do all kinds of shit, don't you, Graham? Yeah. Because your mind has a natural tendency, and you have to rein in that tendency, you have to control it. There's conflict in the mind. That's not peace. This is exactly what all these people do. They force themselves to work really hard,

but the mind doesn't want to work hard. So you force yourself. That's bad, because it's not tranquil. The whole point is, imagine if you could love it. Then you're not forcing yourself at all. And how do you get to the point of loving work? You pay attention to your internal experience. of work and what the fuck you're looking for. You pay attention and you will realize something crazy that chasing an outcome is never good. If you really pay attention, because this is where we get to the problem. Once you achieve it, what's next? More, more, more. So I've done a lot of work with imposter syndrome, right? So I, and I, I mean, so I went to medical school at Tufts and I trained for residency at Harvard. So it was at four years at Tufts and four years at Harvard. There's way more

imposter syndrome at Harvard than there is a tufts. There's way more, I've never seen a homeless person with imposter syndrome. I've never seen a degenerate, unemployed, 25-year-old with imposter syndrome. There are all kinds of challenges. In order to have imposter syndrome, you have to be successful and not feel like a success on the inside. That's literally what imposter syndrome is. I've achieved all of these things, but internally, I don't feel achievement. I feel like everything is going to come crashing apart. They have no security about the future because they're impostors. They don't realize objectively that you can't trick everyone into getting to where you are. People just aren't that stupid. You actually deserve to be here because, you know, unless you're like straight up cheating

all the time or something like that. And so what people don't understand is that like a lot of your happiness in life comes from your internal state. And we sort of figure this out in certain ways, right? At the very beginning after a breakup, you feel devastated. And then over time, you begin to realize, oh, like, you know, the relationship was just over. It was like time. for it to end. I'm okay with it now. I'm in a better place. The objectivity of the relationship ending is the same in both situations. It's the way that you see the relationship that determines whether you are happy or unhappy. And then everyone thinks, oh, okay, I have to have, if I find a better person, I will find a better relationship. And that's true to a certain degree. But I've seen

plenty of people who carry the problems with them from one relationship into the next. So kind of coming back to like what we're talking about here, like I think it's fine. I mean, a lot of people will say you have to make sacrifices to achieve certain things. That makes sense, right? If I want to, like, have 10 tomato plants, I need to plant 10 tomatoes or 10 tomato seeds. So there's a certain amount of work that correlates with outcome. I think the real tragedy is that when we're stressed about sacrifices, it doesn't actually improve our performance.

In fact, it negatively impacts our performance. The more stressed you are, the more imposter syndrome you have, the more worried you are. on some level it improves performance, but it makes things like the flow state harder. So, for example, like, I used to stress in med school. And the more stressed I became, the harder it became to study. And then I started, I'd let go. And I said, I'm going to just study two hours a day. And I'm just going to optimize my studying of like two hours a day in med school. And I studied for two hours at the end of the day. I ended up getting an award for academic achievement at the end of med school. And, like, I studied like 20% of what most

my colleagues did. And that's because the mind was efficient when I sat down to study. I was not stressed out so I could fully focus on the material. I'm not worrying about my grade on the test. I'm just, hey, I have to learn this stuff. So this is where I think a lot of these people who make a ton of sacrifices don't realize that there's like an incredible inefficiency to stressing over an outcome. And how do you get into that flow state? Is there a trick that you could do? But The one thing I've tried doing, and this is a Tony Robbins thing, is anchoring my flow state to certain music. And then when I hear that music, I can play, which in my case is Philip Glass, I love Philip Glass. I play Philip Glass.

And for whatever reason, it takes me into or helps me get into that state where I could focus and get work done because that's all I listen to. That and Danny Elfman, oddly enough. But those two, I put that on and I can work really well. Yeah. So I think that's a great question. So I'll sort of address it in two ways. The first is let's understand that a state of mind is influenced by the environment. This is number one.

So if I'm trying to study in like a burning building, like it's going to be hard to get into a flow state. But let's tunnel down into what is literally happening in my mind when I'm in a burning building. What do you all think? Got to get out. Okay. So what am I thinking about? Getting out. Okay.

Right. So as long as my mind is thinking about something else, it's going to be hard to get into a flow state. So now we have it very simply. You just need to learn how to focus. And we'll talk about that in a second. So there are absolutely environmental aid. So just as an example, there is a particular kind. I have about three or four different kinds of incense at home.

There is one kind of incense that I use when I meditate and only when I meditate. So we know from the biology of things that certain environmental anchors will facilitate a focused mind. So that's absolutely true. So whether it's music, like I have a, you know, like a writing beats. like playlist that I listen to when I'm like in a writing mode. So you can absolutely use environmental triggers to facilitate a flow state. But I think the biggest thing to facilitate a flow state is to practice concentration. So concentration is a mental skill just like dribbling in basketball.

We just don't practice it. And so as you practice meditation, as you practice concentration, which is oftentimes done through meditation, you will train your mind to focus on one thing. And if we go back to the burning building thing, what is my mind actually focusing on? It's not focusing on the things that I'm studying. It's focusing on the burning building. So all we need to enter a flow state is to concentrate and have one pointedness of the mind. Got it.

And how often do you have to change your environment? Because I found myself, if I work in the same room for, let's say, six months, that room starts to have less of an effect on me. And I have to move somewhere else to get a new sense of inspiration. And so I found myself moving around the house every few months to get myself in that same state. What you're talking about is the relationship between internal and external, right? So you're saying that for some amount of time, this external stimulus creates this state of mind. And then once my mind acclimatizes to this external stimulus, then I require a new external stimulus to freshen things up. Correct.

Okay. But is there an internal component to that? So can you change the way that you internally receive different environments? I don't know if I can. Okay, so let me give you an example. Sure. Okay. So I'll just, simple example.

So I'm a first year intern working at the Massachusetts General Hospital. I'm on call in the emergency room. There is a guy who is high on methamphetamine and cocaine, who is in a locked bay. And I step into the locked bay to evaluate this person. This is a very powerful external environment, right? the guy is yelling at me, fuck you, like, you know,

all this kind of stuff. I'm going to kill you. I'm going to do this. I'm going to rip your head off and I'm going to poop in your real thing. Someone told me this whole time. So this is an external environment that affects me. Now,

it is an intern. This scares the shit out of me. As a fourth year resident, I'm fine with it. Does that make sense? So the external environment is the same. But the internal response to that environment can be adapted,

can be strengthened. cut. Yes. Okay. So this is the first thing to understand is that how often do you need to change the environment? That depends on the internal too. It's, there are two sides to the, there are two variables in this equation. So you can also, anyone can kind of do this where like, you know, some people have difficulty with flying, let's say. But as you get used to it, your internal environment changes and your tolerance of the external environment changes. So as I get used to hiking, as I get used to working out as my internal environment changes, then the external environment doesn't have to change anymore. Does that make sense? So that's number one. So just to give you a simple example of this,

I stayed in an ashram for three months. Ashram is the same environment, literally the same food every single day for three months. For the first week, I hated the food. For the next, then I tolerated the food. Then I got incredibly bored of the food. And by the third month, I love it. I love it. I love. loved the food. So I don't know, you guys drink coffee every day, right? How much variety do you need in your coffee? Zero. Okay, then. Right? So this is a really important thing to understand. We all assume, see, this is the basic problem we make is we look at our lives and we say, I need to change my environment at X interval. But you accept that as fact, because that is your observation. Oh, I heard something that changing your environment sparks creativity. Yeah, only if you don't know how to

spark creativity internally, right? That's my whole point. Sure. Okay. Right. So you only need hanging out with other people inspires you. That's only if you can't find your inspiration internally. So very practically, we'll get to how often you should change things and stuff like that. But I mean, this is a really key point, right? So if we have an untrained internal self, then we become more dependent on the environment to trigger us in the right way. Does that make sense? So when you say I have to change my environment, and there's all kinds of physiology that's countering to what I'm saying. So just let's run through a couple of those things. So one thing is, for example, plant aerosols are reductive for anxiety.

Anytime you spend time indoors, your ciliary muscles in your eyes are like contract quite a bit. So we want to look at things like the horizon and far objects to even literally relax the muscles in our eyes. When we relax the ciliary muscles in our eyes, it has all kinds of interesting positive benefits for stress reduction and all this kind of stuff. So there's no question that a change of environment is healthy, like generally speaking. But I want you all to come away with this understanding of how important your external circumstances are relate to how stable your internal environment is. So literally as a psychiatrist, you know, like if you have an untrained person and they're sitting with someone who's depressed, you'll get depressed too. You'll get emotionally exhausted.

And so then people will come to the conclusion that I need to hang out with these people. This is too much of this person. Makes perfect sense, right? You need a variety with the people that you hang out with. And yet at the same time, if you train yourself internally, you need no change in environment. You have yogis that are sitting in caves in the Himalayas. They've been sitting there for 30 years. They don't need any change.

Why? Because this has changed. When you control this, you don't need anything from the outside. Right? This is how you even get people who will do things like hunger strikes. Like think about a hunger strike. It's incredibly hard to do, but you just need to be able to tolerate this internal thing without a problem. So practically, how often do you need your environment to change?

I'd say, you tell me. Because for different people, their internal stability is going to be different. You'll figure out what works for you. I, for example, try to take a walk every single day. So I find that one hour of outdoor time is very healthy for me. So I think everyone should get some outdoor time, sunlight, vitamin D, all that stuff is great. But I think it's sort of variable and it kind of depends. And I'd say that the key takeaway here is that the answer is variable and you sort of figure out what works for you.

And that also that if you can't achieve what environmental changes you need, then you can change internally to. So a good example of this is like if you've got shitty roommates, right? You can't change your roommate right away, but you can learn how to deal with a shitty roommate internally. And what are your thoughts on the entrepreneurial grind set? Do you think that is healthy? Do you think it's healthy that it seems as though younger and younger people are getting into things like monk mode? What is monk mode? You want to explain that, Jay?

Monk mode? It's like a term used to describe because monks are about relinquishing desire and for pleasure and stuff like that and attachment to outcome. And monk mode is like, okay, I'm going to relinquish. going out playing sports with my friends, you know, having unhealthy foods and stuff like that, and just grinding and building this e-com store that's going to make me $7,000 a month in passive income. Have you not heard of the term monk mode? I have heard the term, but I don't know exactly what it means.

So here's, I think it's, in a sense, it's silly. So let's just understand. All you're doing is giving up some desire for a different desire. It's really about eliminating all distraction. Any dopamine high that you could get, any pleasure. and you just focus on one thing, which is... In this case, it's usually work-related. Yeah, work-related, shop-fi store-related.

It's almost always associated with Shopify for some reason. And just like, you know, when you're 30, you can then have a laptop in the Bahamas in a pool. That and Amazon FBA, for whatever reason. So look, I mean, so I don't think it's bad, right? But I think, well, let's understand really what it is. So here's the crazy thing. So I think a lot of people strive for freedom, but what they really mean by freedom is slavery. So let's say that at 30 years old, you achieve whatever monk mode is supposed to help you achieve,

and you have a billion dollars in the bank. What does your life look like then? Sounds like freedom. Okay. So tell me what freedom is. Ability of choice. Choice of what? To make the choices that you feel like you want to do in that moment.

Okay. So now let's understand what keeps you from making the choices that you want to make in your 20s before you have a billion dollars? Probably money would be a big source of that. So right now, my internal self has a desire. right? I have a desire and I'm unable to gratify that desire because of my circumstances. So all these people who want to be billionaires by the age of 30, they're gaining external freedom to become internal slaves. Now you are going to be a slave to your desire because you have nothing holding you back. So if I want to do one line of Coke, I can afford it. If I want to

buy first class, I can do it. If I want to buy a private jet, I can do it. If I want to go here, I can do it. If I want to go here, I can do it. I've worked with people who are billionaires. The worst thing is you will become a slave to your internal desire. You're giving up all this pleasure early on to have an unmitigated, fucking hedonistic, pleasurable life after the age of 30. And it doesn't work. So, okay, I want to go to the Bahamas now. I'm going to go to Japan. I'm going to stay in the suite. Think about what you're doing. You're just becoming a slave to your internal self. Now the mind wants this. Now the mind gets upset because the presidential suite is not available and why the fuck did I make a billion dollars if I can't get the presidential suite.

Then you're on the phone with your personal assistant. Hey, fuck you. You didn't book this thing long enough. That's not happiness. And I've seen this. Right. I've seen this with like princes from the meaner region. I've seen this with billionaires who retire. And this is where like a lot of times what happens is sometimes billionaires will realize that this doesn't work. And then they try to adopt some kind of broader like now I'm going to make the world a better place. So that's how they kind of make a substitute for it. But this is a. is really crazy and I really want you all to think about this, that all, the only reason we want external freedom is to indulge our internal self. Then I can do whatever I want to and no one

can tell me no. But that's indulgence too. A kid who is 18 years old who has the desire to play a video game instead of going to class, they're internally indulging. That's what they're doing. An opiate addict is internally indulging. And so everyone is looking for this external freedom only to They align themselves completely to internal slavery. Does that make sense? It does. But then how do you win? Because I feel like if you don't do that, then you're at the whims of, let's say, a boss, a job that you have to be at, maybe circumstances that you just don't enjoy that you would want to change.

Now we're coming full circle because the way that you win, the way that you win, and I've had bosses that I really dislike, right? And so then what happens is like, why do we get stuck with a boss that we really dislike? The reason we get stuck is because we're a slave to this. Oh my God, I have to stay in this job. Why? Because I'm afraid that if I leave this job, I don't have security, I don't have this, I don't have this. Or there's some weird psychological thing where I need approval for my boss so that I don't like them, but then I need their approval. It's all kind of crap. It's all being a slave to this internal thing. So the more that you master your internal environment, I recognize I have a boss that I have to deal with for one year.

But already from one month in, I'm planning my exit. And then I just recognize, okay, I've got 11 months of this that I have to deal with. So be it. And so once you sort of recognize that, then you'll be impervious to your boss. So I know that, I mean, this happened for me, like, very specifically. There was a moment in medical school where I was in the operating room. And I was doing vascular surgery. And there was an attending.

So attending is like your boss, who was an absolute asshole. And this guy, I was doing something called retracting. So we're doing a surgery on the carotid artery. And so the attending nicks something and there starts to be blood. And so this patient is like, The artery that feeds their brain with blood is now leaking, which means that their brain is not receiving blood. The attending starts panicking is sort of in control. And then I'm sitting across the table, right?

So the table is over there or standing across the table and I'm holding something back. I see the source of the bleed. I know exactly where it is. And then I make the mistake of a third year medical student, which is I open my mouth. And I say, excuse me, doctor, whatever. I think I. And then they cut me off. And they say, medical student, when I want your opinion, I will ask for it.

And I'm like, all right, bro. I see where the bleed is. I know you're looking for the bleed. If you don't want my help in finding it, that's on you. And everyone, the other medical students were terrified. They were like, oh, my God, you misspoke. This guy could fucking fail you. He could do this.

You could do this. Your future could be jeopardy. And I'm like, look, I'm here to save lives. I'm here to learn how to save lives. There's a patient who's like literally not getting blood flow to their brain. and I tried to do something about it, I'm fine with this. If he wants to kick me out of medical school, he can kick me out of medical school. That's fine.

So what I mean by this is like, we have all of these like asshole people around us. And how do we be okay with that? You have to be internally okay with it. And this person could have absolutely ruined my medical career. Turns out that they didn't. Right? So they kind of, I think I got enough of the sentence out where they were kind of panicked and stressed. But they like, I said, I can see.

and then he was like, when I want your opinion, I'll ask for it. And then he immediately, like, within 60 seconds, he looked at where my perspective was and he found it and he fixed the bleed. This is what I mean is we have these asshole bosses. The more internally tranquil you are, the better off you're going to be. And just because you're internally tranquil doesn't mean that you have to tolerate the circumstance. So then you make moves. You make changes. It's easy.

Right? But it's easy to make a change when you're not, like, caught up emotionally with your boss being an asshole. couldn't you say it's easier though to make that change if you have five million dollars absolutely so doesn't that seem like a worthwhile pursuit should have a financial cushion to be able to make those changes without the fear of financial security absolutely so i think striving for security is good i mean don't get me wrong but i mean y'all are asking me but this is kind of what i found is that you don't have to be mentally suffering or sacrifice to get that financial security that's the whole point

right? Like your internal, like, so getting financial security is about external actions. It's not about how you feel on the inside. Does that make sense? If you, if you do the work, you will get the money, hopefully, right? We can't really control it. No. And so all I'm advocating for is that you do all the right things, but the whole point is that if your internal motivation is a desire, is this kind of thing, is a fear even, right? So like, if my, if I'm afraid and that's what drives you. me to save a lot of money. Even when I have a lot of money, do you think my fear will go away? To some degree, it might. And then to some degree, it'll still be there because what if I lose it? Yeah. Right. And so that's where, like, ultimately, I think being internally tranquil allows you to free your mind and then be objective and with the way that you live your life. And it makes your decisions actually better. And where would you say that fits with burnout, the people who are pursuing something and then all of a sudden they just feel tired of it? Yeah, so burnout, it completely counters burnout. So I am probably like at this point a specialist in burnout. So we worked with 500 content creators and content creators get burnt out and we're really good at reducing their burnout.

So here's the thing to understand. Burnout is caused by one thing. Extreme effort with a lack of reward. So what causes physician? So I, as a doctor, so I'll work a 30-hour shift in a hospital and I'll be fine with it. Like that's like 30 hours. Just think about that. I'll go to a hospital on Friday at 6 p.m.

And I leave like Sunday morning or something like that. So this is almost a week's worth of normal human beings work that I'm doing a little, I mean, I can't do it in 24 hours and basically a day in six additional hours. And this is normal for us as doctors. And we don't burn out. What burns me out when I have to talk to an insurance company to try to get approval for a medication for my patient? This burns, like a 30-minute, 45-minute call where I'm sitting on hold with an insurance company creates more burnout than 30 hours of work. And so if you look at the science of burnout, what causes burnout is when someone tries something really hard, is invested in something, and then they don't get it. So if you look at content creators, why are they so burnt out?

Despite all the success that you have, y'all know this, that there's always this voice in the back of your mind that you're never content. And then you do all this stuff And then these people are fucking They're stalking you And they're like You know like I'm sure you guys get like internet hate People are sending you requests for pictures of your feet You know

And you like that kind of thing But like Hey So if we really look at burnout Burnout is about internal expectation Being dashed by the external world That's literally what the science of burnout tells us So what burns out employees

Is when they try really hard And then their boss doesn't see their value. It's not the effort. It is the dashed effort. And then what we sort of know about burnout is the solution to burnout is not to actually reduce your workload because that doesn't sort of work. Because what happens is when people reduce their workload by going on a vacation, then they come back and they're like back to the grind. And then even if they start like reducing their workload, it sort of doesn't work out. It can. But what really works well is detaching. Sort of saying like, okay, this is the most that I'm willing to do. And like the rest of it can go

it's short itself out. Like, I'm not responsible for this thing being successful, right? I work on a team with six people. I'm not responsible for the success of the project. The more that one person on a team of six feels responsible for the success of the project, the more burnt out they're going to be. So you just do your part, you recognize this is my part. I'm even going to do more than my part. I'll do 20% of the work, even though I'm one out of a team of six. And that's okay. You won't get burnt out. So let me try to just summarize, especially when it comes to burnout. So let's just like take a look at a standard scenario, okay? So let's say I have a goal. So I'm one of these kids who's like 13 or whatever and I'm adopting this monk mode grind set. So let's just play that through.

So I have a goal. I strive for the goal. I sacrifice for the goal. I have all these internal impulses that I give up for the achievement of this goal. Now when I achieve the goal, I feel good. but I'm not done, right? Because as we talked about, there's like, you know, the first million, then there's the two million, the second million, there's a third million. And so then I have to adopt a new goal. So I move the goalpost and now I need to do more. So if you sort of look at it, like I'm sacrificing all of my present to achieve something. And then in that achievement, I will be happy, right? That's why I do it. When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the way you want.

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But the moment that I achieved this thing, I move the goalposts, and then I keep moving again, and I keep moving again, and I keep moving again. And then before you realize that you've spent 10 years of your life sacrificing for a goal that keeps moving. And then you're kind of like never happy, and then you end up burnt out because you've given up so much. And so the whole point, though, is that if you look at some people who do this kind of work, who do achieve a lot of great things, their process of work is enjoyable, right? what makes me feel good, and hopefully I'll understand this, there's a difference between the joy of a podcast that has really good metrics

and the joy of having a conversation that you feel good about at the end of the day. So when we did our last podcast, I had no idea how good it was going to do, but I felt great about it. And this is exactly what I'm talking about is that everyone who's on this monk mode grind set or I need a sacrifice to achieve this, you're like, I want happiness over there and I will get it. when I get there, but any kind of goal-based happiness, you don't stop. You always need more. That's just the nature of the mind with the Oreos, with all these other things. Let me ask you this.

We had Grant Cardone on the podcast a few months ago, and he had his daughter with him, and we brought her on. And Jack asked a question, do you want your daughter to be happy? And he said, no, I want her to be productive, because if she's productive, she will be happy. What are your thoughts on that? Do you find that people are happier if they find themselves productive? I think as weird as it sounds, I would be inclined to agree with him. But there's a big difference. So when you use the word, and this is why I think definitions are so important, when you say happiness, what does that mean? Because if Grant Cardone is envisioning this kind of like billionaire playboy lifestyle as a correlate for happiness, which is what our society tells us, I think she's going to be miserable.

My whole point is that when you can be content with productivity, right? That's the whole point is it's about the action. It's like, I woke up today and I was in the hospitals. This is what I mean. Like if I'm on 30 hour call, I feel good about that. I'm physically exhausted. I'm hungry. I'm cranky. But when I go home, I feel so good. I came here to try to help human beings. And for the last 30 hours, I've done this. All of the sweat and the toil of the last five years, six years, eight years that I've spent studying and going to the library and doing all this kind of stuff, all of this has come to fruition because I've I get to exist in this moment and apply everything that I've learned. That's where contentment comes from. And this is where like even now, you know, I'm quite happy. I'm not even striving for more success. Honestly, I'm not. And yet I'm very productive.

And the reason is because like it's, you know, this is what I, this is, I derive my enjoyment from the process of work. And the moment that you start deriving your enjoyment from the process of work, first of all, you become impervious to outcomes. You also get rid of this crap like comparison because you can't make comparison without outcomes. Does that make sense? So like all these things and when they say comparison is the thief of joy. So yeah, because and how do you get past all that is you focus on the action itself.

And you also realize you can't control the outcome. And then you get to this, all this present stuff and stuff like that. Whereas, you know, what I would kind of say for my daughters is that I want them to understand that joy can come from productivity, not the product of productivity. And the moment that you understand that, you will be incredibly productive and you'll be incredibly happy. And this is why I have a problem with the people who say you have to sacrifice because there's this idea that you can't have both. And in my experience, the two are actually very highly correlated. When you see people who are spiritually developed, right, so you have a lot of these entrepreneurs and stuff who will like meditate

and they'll say, I'm way more productive and I'm way happier. We know from studies on meditation that you don't sacrifice happiness for productivity. In fact, the two go hand in hand. That's what the flow state is. It's a state of contentment and a state of high productivity. So our optimal performance actually comes from a lack of sacrifice. It's crazy. So why is it that we're more afraid of losing what we have

than gaining something or winning? So this is great. There's a super cool neuroscientific mechanism. So loss ofversion. is a very powerful evolutionary, like, psychological feature. So if you look at your brain, this is absolutely insane. So let's say you're anticipating a task. Like, let's say, like, I don't know, just pick something.

What are we doing? What's something I'm trying to achieve? A million subscribers. Okay. So let's say I'm trying to achieve a million subscribers. So this is what's really wild about the brain. So do you all know when I achieve a million subscribers, do you know which part of my brain activates?

I don't know how no idea. Dopamine, nucleus, accumbens. Okay. So the pleasure. that we get from, let's say, an achievement, like a million subscribers, that's the nucleus accumbens and dopamine. Do you all know which part of the brain activates if we screw up? Amygdala, limbic system, fear, anxiety, stress. Okay, these are two parts of the brain. There's the part of our brain that gives us pleasure and there's the part of our brain

that gives us pain. So here's what's crazy. In a hypothetical example, before you achieve a million subscribers, you can actually experience pain. Like, so you're the, you're the circuits of your brain, your amygdala, will light up even with a hypothetical danger. Does that kind of make sense? So, like, you can experience the pain of a potential loss in the present. In your brain, that part of your brain, that part of your brain can light up. And it is as if you are experiencing the loss. So there is no difference in your brain between a hypothetical loss and an actual loss. Do you all get that? Literally the part of your brain that feels the pain can activate even in a hypothetical. But you cannot activate the nucleus accumbens with a hypothetical. The nucleus

accumbens and dopamine, you can't imagine playing a game and get a dopamine rush. But you can absolutely imagine getting dumped and feel the pain of that. So if we look at our brain, it's lopsided. So our brain can experience hypothetical pains as real pain, but it cannot experience hypothetical gains or pleasure as real pleasure. So we're we're mismatched, and this is evolutionarily, because we want we want potential problems to be something that we retreat from, from an evolutionary standpoint, right? So if we kind of think about it, like, I want to imagine the pain of petting a tiger and that that tiger like attacks me and hurts me and then I want to run away from it. So we've also known this from like studies of neuroeconomics,

where this principle gets played out, where we know that. basically your brain can calculate the likelihood of a success, but we also know that your brain actually purposely screws up the numbers. So what your brain does when it's calculating the likelihood of success, it makes you think that things are going to be twice as bad as they actually are and half as good as they actually are. And people have literally done experiments on neuroeconomics where they'll do these kinds of things where if I ask you all, I'm sure you are kind of familiar with this. You know, Graham, would you rather have a million dollars guaranteed or coin flip? And if it's heads, you get five million. And if it's tails, you get zero

million. Which one would you pick? In my case, the heads are tails. Okay. Yeah. Well, you're rare, right? Most of us, most people will pick the guaranteed win. Right. Over the chance of even a probabilistically higher reward. Right. And that's just all neuroeconomics. So this is kind of like, that that's the problem is that the potential losses, our brain does not function. I mean, it functions properly, but it's actually like is not tied to reality. Does that answer your question? It does. One thing I've observed in my own personal life is that a massive differentiator between those who

appear to be better off and worse off in life is someone's response to a negative situation. Are people biologically predisposed to a positive or negative reflection on a negative event or is it something that is forced or learned, how can people experience something negative and see it as a positive rather than be binded by the trauma? Okay, so let me try to see if I understand your question.

So there's a group of different people. Let's say there's two different people and they face one situation. And the circumstances are the same, but the way that human beings respond to negative circumstances differentiates their like trajectory in life. Is that fair to say?

And I think it's you. Yes. Because Graham, for one, has experienced plenty of failure. He wouldn't say that it's failure, though, because he learns from it and utilizes it and leverages it later in his life to become more successful. Whereas other people that could have experienced the exact same failure could be binded by the trauma of the failure. And then it prevents them and then from becoming successful later in their life and harms them. And I don't know, like, if it's just arbitrarily assigned at birth, we're like, okay, you're going to be a positive. on negative experiences, you're going to be a negative reflector on negative

experiences. But I've just noticed two people can go through the exact same thing and reflect on it differently in the future and it makes wild impacts in their life. Okay, so I'm going to divide this because there's a lot of questions in here. The first is what, how do people end up different, right? So we can acknowledge that when someone is faced with a setback or a failure, even that, right? So I use two words, but some human beings will refer to it as setback. Some human beings will refer to it as failure, which is exactly what you're talking about. So in one common circumstance, one negative circumstance, two people respond differently. That's one point that we have to dig into, why that happens. The second point is whether change is possible and how to

change. And the third is why these people are different in the first place. Is that fair? Yes. Okay. So let's start with the response. So this is what we know from, once again, science of neuroeconomics. So it's super cool. Some people, what we know is that anytime there is a negative event. If it is viewed on something called an intermixed time scale, people will respond better. If it is viewed as an end point, people will respond poorly. Okay? So let me just explain what that means. So it's exactly what we said between failure and setback. So in both cases, let's say I get an F on a test. Some people will say that this is the end. And anytime the human mind has an end on some point, if that end is bad, then we feel really bad. It's hard to be

resilient. We feel really depressed. So if it's like, if I end on a bad note, then the psychological impact is very, is damaging. What we know is that when two human beings get an F on a test, one of them will view that F as the end. So this is like, this is where my measurement stops. another human being will view that F along something called an intermixed time scale, which means that they're actually looking at the F in the context of the next 30 tests. So when your view is more long term as opposed to this is the end, then you are going to be more resilient to setbacks. Yeah.

From my perspective, I tend to view any setback as like this was meant to be and this is just a part of what I needed to go through as a person to get to the next stage. or next thing. So anything that comes at me, I'm like, oh, wow, this is, this is a good thing because it's teaching me or pushing me in this direction. And now I could be even better because of it. So that is a great answer. And first of all, you're getting, you're jumping ahead. So we're going to talk about why people are different. But we all, what we also know is that the way that you cognitively reframe your circumstances ultimately determines like the status of your mental health and your trajectory. So when we view, things as setbacks, right? Because even if we think about setback, this is like on a long time scale versus a failure means it's over. You can't fail until the game is over, right? You lose when the clock runs out, not at the halfway mark. So the other thing is that you're doing there is you're cognitively reframing. And so you're kind of viewing the positive in a negative sort of situation. And that is healthy. We know that that makes people adaptive,

resilient, and improves their trajectory. So that's really good. And that's what a lot of us should learn how to do. The problem is that many of us can't see it that way, which we'll get to. So the first thing is, yes, there is a differential response and the way that you respond to an event. Once again, the way that you interpret an objective set of circumstances not only affects your happiness, but your success performance. Does that make sense? So now we're cycling back to internal versus external. This is exactly what I've been saying all along, is that when people chase a particular external outcome, if that's what you're chasing, then you're not going to cognitively reframe like that. This is going to be the end. I failed. So now let's move to the second question of how to change

if that first answer was sufficient. Okay. So how to change is to basically implement and change your internal way of thinking and your internal response to these circumstances. So in cognitive of behavioral therapy, for example, we work on something called automatic thoughts, which is if you look at most human beings, we don't realize that most of our thinking is manufactured, not by us. This is what's so tricky about it is if you think about the way that your mind works, most of your mind was formed without your consent. So literally, if we look at trauma, right? So what happens in trauma is that our mind forms a conclusion.

But that may not be the right conclusion. And the real tragedy is that most of the conclusions that we form are actually incorrect. And so let's talk about that for a second. When I go through something traumatic, my mind is not functioning healthily. And yet, my mind forms a conclusion. So a simple example is if I grow up in an abusive household, I'm feeling emotionally hurt, and I start to believe that I am not a good person. I am not worthy.

Everything is my fault. Now I carry this belief. but that belief is not objectively true. And so the real tragedy is that the worse our self beliefs are, the more likely they are to be incorrect. Does that make sense? It does. But the problem is that for these people, they feel true.

So how do we change that? We can change that in a number of different ways. One thing that we can do is reframe and re-examine the formation of these beliefs, as well as emotionally digest experiences of the past. So if we think about someone who says, you know, let's say like someone who has like more of this alpha beta ideology about men and dating. So there's a recent study that showed that in cells are very confident in their belief about women's preferences and they are very wrong. This is kind of Dunning Kruger, if you all are familiar with that, that like, you know, the more confident, the more ignorant you are, the more likely you are to be confident.

And if I, when I work with my patients who believe that they're the worst pieces of shit, the planet, their confidence is 100%, their ignorance is 100%. So there's a process through which we go back to like basically the inciting event. So what I would kind of say for people who want to do this is, when did you learn this lesson? So we can't tell you that it's wrong. That doesn't work. That gets into conflict in the mind and it's not going to work. When did you learn this?

How did you learn this? How did you form these conclusions? And then the cool thing is that when you have a 25-year-old brain examining the formative experiences of a five-year-old brain, then you can become your own therapist. So then what I'll say to people is, okay, imagine that you met a five-year-old kid. Sure, it's this way for you. But what would you say to the five-year-old who told you that they're the worst piece of shit on the planet? Right. And even as a 25-year-old, they're able to recognize, wow, I would say, like, you know, there's no way that you're responsible. But they're not able to tell themselves that.

So you have to start the process of training the mind by sort of like externalizing things. if that makes sense. Instead of talking to yourself, imagine that this happened to a different person. And I know that y'all are probably like this, you more than him, but you know, you have a different standard for yourself than other people. Like other people get to make mistakes, but you don't get to make mistakes. So this is the mind, this is how the ego works. So you want to start by sort of finding the origin of this belief, the origin of the way that you interpret circumstances. And this is really wild. So I want you all to really think of. I want you all to really think about this, that, see, we interpret these circumstances. The circumstances are ad-vite. They're

non-dual. They're neither good nor bad. The circumstance is what the circumstance is. Our mind literally filters the experience of the outside world and gives us conclusions, which is also something that a lot of people have difficulty understanding. And so we can go back to the origin and try to dissolve it there. the other thing that we can do is catch it in the present. So anytime you have an automatic response to something, I don't know if this makes sense because this is so abstract. So let me make a statement, see if you all understand. I'm going to need your help with this. So the more unaware you are of your thought process, the more that thought process will control you. Do you agree or disagree? I agree. Yes, unless your thought process is automatically going to be like, a positive sort of thing. I feel like I don't think about if something negative happens, I don't have to force myself to think, oh, like, let's reframe this. It just, for me at this point, just comes naturally.

Okay, so help me. So I need your help. So you guys agree with that statement. Help explain it to me. How is that true? So the more automatic you are with your thought process, the less likely it is you said to be true or the less likely you should follow it, right? the more it will screw you up in life.

Right, right. So it's just lack of intention. And I think if you're being intentional about your thoughts and your decisions, you're going to make the right decision. Whereas all the other stuff, if it's automatic, it's usually deterministic. So it's all of the things impressing upon your brain as you're getting older to help you make a certain decision based off of past subjective experience in an objective universal reality. Okay. So the more unaware you are of your thoughts, the more of those thoughts will shape your reality.

Okay. So let me give you just a simple example of this. So there's like in the alpha beta world, right? There are these people, and I've worked with a lot of people who are like alphas or whatever and like red pillars or whatnot. And then... Are you looking at me, Jack? Come on.

So in these situations, you know, they'll say that, okay, like women or like, you can't trust women. Like women can't be like counted on. 100% of people like this that I've worked with, by the way, have a traumatic experience with a woman, like 100%. 99% 100%, which is where they form this belief. Now, so here's the tricky thing is that once they start to believe this, they protect themselves from emotionally connecting. They protect themselves from emotional vulnerability. They learn to not trust. Does that make sense? Because if I trust a woman, I can get taken advantage of. And so then what happens

is they start to form transactional relationships with women, because I can't form an emotional bond. So now everything becomes transactional. And the moment that I start behaving in a transactional way towards women, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Does that make sense? So they don't realize that they're falling into this pattern where they are adding transactionality. They're actually bringing it to the table. And if I'm unwilling to ever trust a woman and I'm trying to get something out of them and I'll trade you X amount of money for so amount of sex, right? Not in terms of prostitution, but in terms of I'll buy you this, I'll take you out

this and I want to get laid. If I'm going to take you an expensive dinner, I better get laid. They'll have all these kinds of attitudes. But what they don't realize is that this is creating self-fulfilling prophecy, because any woman who wants an emotional connection will run away from you, and the ones who are willing to play the transactional game are totally fine with it. And then what happens? Now I've had relationships with 10 women, all of who are fine with transactionality. And then I conclude that this is all women want, right? So this is a good example of my automatic thinking, which I'm not aware of, actually shapes my reality. So in terms of what to do with it, all you have to do is be aware of the thought process. You don't even need to change it or fix it. So you can go back into

the past, figure out how that thought formed, digest it, reframe it, or in the present, you can say, okay, this is my mind believing, okay, this is my attitude where you don't have to say this is a setback, right? So all you, even if you say this is a failure, you just need to acknowledge it in the present. And something beautiful happens. If you catch your mind and you elevate it to the level of consciousness, this is, okay, this is a failure, everything is over. And you don't get lost in that thought process. You need to be aware of it. So observe it from the outside. Then what you need to says, okay, my mind is getting into this cycle. I'm saying, spiraling again into failure. My mind feels like it's spiraling into failure. And there's a big difference between you being caught up in the spiral of failure, which if you really kind of think about, I don't know if you guys have ever worked with someone who's like spiraled, right? They don't realize they're spiraling. That's what makes the spiraling so powerful. Does that make sense? I don't know if this has happened to you, where once your mind starts spiraling in negativity, you don't think you're spiraling, you think you're right. And other people tell you, hey, it's not that bad.

There are other fish in the sea, but you're like, no, no, no, no, no. I don't know. It's that bad. So you are stuck with your thoughts. You become one with your thoughts. And you are not able to gain any outside perspective. So literally all you need to do is just observe your thought pattern. And something really cool happens.

When you observe your thought pattern, the thought pattern weakens by itself. How? So here's something to understand. A habitual thought pattern is strong. It's automatic. It's uncontrollable, right? So all we need to do to dissolve a habitual thought pattern or a way of viewing the world, which a way of viewing the world is the same as a habitual thought pattern. Because a way of viewing is fixed, right? Does that make sense? There's a difference. It's like a lens. So the moment that I start observing my thought pattern, the thought pattern will start to dissolve. Because automatic, so an automatic thought pattern is automatic. It can't be conscious. It can't be intentional and be automatic at the same time. It is either or. Does that make sense?

So all you need to do is move it from automatic to observed. Once it moves into observed, it will start to weaken and become less automatic. So there's even some interesting neuroscience to support this. A lot of people don't realize that what we view is willpower is not willpower, technically. The part of our brain that monitors internal conflict is the same part of our brain that exerts willpower. So technically willpower is just. monitoring and internal conflict. I know this sounds really bizarre, but I'll give you all an example. If you are trying to decide between a healthy meal and an unhealthy meal, as long as you are

fighting in your mind, that is willpower. Does that kind of make sense? And I don't know if you all have ever done this, but sometimes you stop thinking about it and then you choose the wrong thing. You can't choose the right thing unless you are aware. Does that make sense? And so it turns out that awareness and willpower are actually technically the same part of the brain. It is the same thing. Subjectively, we experience it as willpower. But objectively, it's the part of our brain that monitors internal conflict. So this is what's really interesting, is if you look at people who are addicted, you don't have to get them to win against the alcohol. All they need to do is not stop fighting. And it turns out that not giving up the fight and winning is one and the same. So when it comes to

changing our reactions, all we need to do is notice our reaction. As we notice our reaction, the strength of the reaction will weaken. And then it'll be easier to cognitive reframe. Then you can also do like specific cognitive reframing exercises where you catch your automatic thinking. That gets weaker. And as that gets weaker, then you can start behaving more intentionally. And really quick, for all of you guys out there, sometimes I get it. We're too busy to look after our health. With so much going on, we don't want to spend our time waiting in lines, going to doctor's offices, or going to the pharmacy. But our sponsor, HIMS, can help.

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So, oh, man. So I think the anti-work movement is a product of its environment. So, like, the anti-work movement is manifesting in different ways culturally, like all over the world. So I think there's something going on. So in South America, for example, or Latin America, it's called Nini. So Nita Rih Bajo, Nia Studiar. So these are people who are like needs, not in education, employment, or training. In China, it's called laying flat. And it's like a huge problem. So there's like, there's definitely something going on where people are like checking out of this like concept of like a job in the grind and whatever. And I think the reason is because there used to be something that worked and then people basically got taken advantage of. So I think that there used to be a formula for success in the world. And this formula for success was maybe you go to college, maybe you don't even, and then at

some point you get a good job. And then getting a good job was some amount of security, that if you went to a good job, they would recognize your value and reward you for it. And then I think what basically happened is we had this unprecedented level of economic success and growth. So I kind of think about this as like if you were in college in the 60s, first of all, you get to do a lot of like psychedelics in school before everything gets criminalized. You kind of slide into a booming economy through like the 70s and 80s. And then you retire before the 2007, 2008 stock market crash.

So you can kind of like jobs are easy. There's booming economic growth. You've got a nice fat portfolio. And then like, you know, the stock market crash happens. There are all these like once in a lifetime events that we've experienced in the. the last five years. So there was this formula for success. And a whole generation of people could follow that formula and they could end up okay. But I think what started to happen is that people have taken advantage of this. So just like any biological system, when you've got like a nice,

juicy thing, like there will be predators who will take advantage of it. So I think a good example is that many years ago, you know, the federal government in the United States started guaranteeing federal loans. So if you sort of think about it, if I have an 18-year-old kid and the federal government is like, we'll give you as much money as you need for a federal loan, so you can, you don't, you can get loans for college. You don't have to pay for college, right? And you have to pay for it, but with a loan. And then what happens is you look at universities that are like, well, shit, these guys have a blank check. So what you've seen, I think, over the last 20, 30 years, you all may know these statistics better than I do is a huge increase in administrative costs in

university. And then you, so you have no like free market. I'm not an expert in this stuff, but you have no free market stuff. So you've got textbooks that are $500 because the kid can pay for it. It's not like the kid can't afford it because you're guaranteeing a loan. And so textbooks become $100, $200, $200, $300, $400, $400. So someone is making a shit ton of money. But it's not the student. And now we have a bunch of people who are in debt. And then people are talking about loan forgiveness, which is fine. Like it's not my place to comment on whether that's good or bad. The one question that I have is, even if we start forgiving a bunch of loans, what are we doing to control costs? Right?

So, like, even if you forgive everyone who's in debt now, are you still guaranteeing loans and are people taking out, is this next generation of 18-year-olds taking out gigantic loans to pay for college? So I think this is just one example of, you know, like, people used to, you could trust your employer and your employer would, like, look out for you. And there was somewhat of, like, I think, a collegial relationship. And now what started to happen is everyone is trying to, not everyone, and this is what I think is really sad. So as someone who, you know, we have employees at Healthy Gamer. I don't think that we're like evil corporate overlords. We're not having people like, you know, piss in their bottles and not being able to work. We're like, I think we try to be relatively nice. But I think the challenge is that right now, like so many people are taking advantage of these like traditional work environments. And as more people, we're, like, we're, we try to be relatively nice. And as more. people take advantage of it, we have a generation of people who are just checking out. They're like,

this doesn't work for me. Like, this is not worth it. You know, if you look at things like, you know, wages, like, for example, teacher wages. So teacher wages have not kept up with inflation at all. And then on top of that, we have this, like, growing technological crisis, where kids are becoming more dysregulated than they've ever been. We also have all kinds of, like, fear of lawsuits. So teachers cannot discipline kids. And so we're seeing an absolute collapse. I don't know if people are seeing it economically, but I'm seeing it on the level of, like, teachers who are burnt out and, like, students who are really struggling, like, parents come to me. No one knows what to do. And, like, the school systems in the United States are

getting absolutely screwed. So I think what we're seeing is a whole scale failure of our traditional institutions. We're seeing this in medicine as well, where, like, we have all of these, like, medicine progresses pretty slowly. So if you look at, for example, the average, therapist gets zero hours of training in technology, pornography, addiction, social media addiction, video game addiction. But these problems are huge. Like 5% of the population was addicted to video games in 2010, and that's like 9% now in 2020. And the rate is probably increasing. So something is going on where there used to be a formula that worked, which is now no longer working. And so I think the only choice that people have, like it's almost like a trauma response

of becoming calloused, right? So anytime you get hurt, like if you literally look at a callus, it is repeated injury, but then you lose nerve sensation and you kind of wall yourself off. I think that's what's going on in anti-work, where people have been fucked so many times that they're just like, I'm done with this crap. Where do you feel like the overlap is between that and quiet quitting? Do you feel like they're the same, or do you feel like anti-work is just completely given up and quiet quitting is just doing the bare minimum?

I think it's heterogeneous. So I think what a lot of people, what a lot of people do in quiet quitting is they recognize that additional effort is not rewarded. So it used to be that like additional effort. And I'd like to think that there are many places left where additional effort is reward. And so what's happening with it. And now what started to happen is, so what used to happen is, okay, like there are four employees. And if you work hard, you will get promoted. And so then the default became.

everyone is working hard, but you still only get one person who's promoted. And so over time, what that sort of means is there's this interesting pressure where it creates almost like a game theory kind of situation where I have to work harder than all of my colleagues in order to get promoted. But the harder my colleagues work, the harder I have to work to outpace them. So this system was happening. And then employers realized, holy shit, everyone is working way harder than they are paid for. Then what started happening is I think employees started taking this for granted. So now we started getting things like unpaid internships or really lowball salaries. And employers started to think like, oh, we can just lowball the fuck out of people because this is now

the standard. That happened so much that employers started taking this for granted. And then they expected it's not even going above is no longer going above. Going above has become the norm. Right? Does that make sense? It does. And so now, like, employers are like, I remember seeing some post where someone was like, my employees leave at 5 p.m. every day, like, how can I get them to stay till 8 p.m. and work weekends or whatever? There's some, like, idea that everyone should be going above and beyond. And so then what happens is, like, what's the balancing force, right? So then you have employers who are taking advantage of this. And then the only choice that people sort of figure out is, oh, by the way, even if all of us work 50% extra, only one of us is getting promoted, that's not

a good mathematical equation. So we balance that by quiet quitting. Do you feel like that's healthy for the employee, though, because I feel like that sends many people into a negative spiral where I'm going to quiet quit to the bare minimum, but they're also going to be the first to get laid off. They're going to be the first to get passed up for promotion. There's always, there's going to be someone else who does put in that effort, who is rewarded. Now, I'm not saying in every career, but overall, I'd like to think that more work is rewarded long term. Yeah. So I think there are lots of problems with anti-work and quiet quitting. So the first problem is that oftentimes these are almost traumatic responses, which means people aren't thinking clearly. Right. So what I mean by that is

like if you talk to someone who is super into anti-work or quiet quitting, they're zealots, usually, not always. But what that sort of means is they've been so hurt by the system that they have so much resentment towards this system, which I think to a certain degree is fair, but I don't think that it's healthy. And anytime we have kind of a traumatic response, it's appropriate, but it's not necessarily healthy. So I think this is where when I work with people who are kind of like this, what I sort of advocate for, so we have like a career coaching program, for example, where we do a lot of this work, and we see really good outcomes. And it's basically helping people understand that, okay, I want you to objectively look at your work environment

and try to see if there is, what is the reward for additional effort? And oftentimes people are actually okay doing additional effort without even a financial reward, as long as they can get acknowledgement. Right. So I think about like times in my residency program where my residency program is considered like pretty rigorous or maybe even malignant. I didn't really see it that way. And there were times where I worked extra. And all I needed was my boss to say, hey, this other person was sick today.

thick. This other person was sick today. I really appreciate you stepping up. That helped us a lot. I'm grateful. So right now what you're getting is when you have a corporate environment that expects extra, there's not even gratitude. So a lot of times, like, all you need is gratitude to do extra. I don't think that everyone needs to get paid a dollar for every minute that they work or whatever like that. I think like it's normal and healthy in work environments for some people to give a little bit extra. I gave a lot of extra. in my life, I think that helped a lot. I don't think it's necessarily bad. And that's what I think is the real problem is that we need to sort of have a tranquil mind and really think about, okay, in what way do I want to give extra? But I think something that's very, very common is that people keep on giving extra, keep on giving extra in an effort to be noticed or rewarded. And then as long as you're doing that and you're not like operating from like a clear state of like a clear frame of mind, then I think it becomes problematic. So I think the,

other problem with doing extra and not getting rewarded is we are all narcissistic. So if you look at like roommates, for example, so this is where I think the other problem with like anti-work and stuff happens or quiet quitting is that everyone thinks that they are working harder than they are. Right. So if we're both roommates and their dishes in the sink, I always, both roommates believe that they're doing 60 to 75 percent of dishes in the sink. And they think that the other human beings are slacking. So the other problem that we see with this is that sometimes people who think that they're doing a great job or doing a whole lot extra that's not getting rewarded aren't able to see that they're not actually doing that much more. Or even, this is something that I see very

commonly, is that there are some employers that are really, really good. And that gets taken for granted by the employees. So I think it's really hard, but like I kind of see different variants of that. I understand that. What do you think about posting their videos on TikTok or online about them getting fired? I mean, I think that the internet is all about righteous fury. So, like, I think the reason they go mega viral is because when you see a video on TikTok, right, so this is like a 60 second or 75 second clip where the narrative is fully shaped by the uploader.

So what happens is everyone sees this and they resonate with it on an emotional level, which is why it goes viral. But for all these people getting fired, we're not getting the other side of the story, right? What would the employer say? Like, which part of the, which part of them getting fired? What percentage of it is uploaded? Is it the full thing? Is it not the full thing?

What were the questions that, what were the interactions that happened before? What are the performance reviews like? So I see this all the time where someone makes like some kind of video and they make someone else out to be a complete asshole. And then there's like another side to the story. So I tend to be like kind of skeptical of that stuff. And usually what I think is going on is if you kind of look at it, a lot of the internet is like rage bait. So this is where things get tricky because I think there is a very genuine case of like corporate evil malfeasance, negligence, hiring and firing. But like I don't know if you all have employees, but like, you know, I've worked in a lot of places where like sometimes employees suck too.

Right? Like sometimes you have like and think about your coworkers. It's not like all of your co-workers are angels who do a lot. Like a lot of your co-workers are fucking slackers. And so like I think there's a whole, my experience as a psychiatrist is that usually things are not black and white. They're very multifactorial and there are a lot of different perspectives. Yeah. So I worked with some patients and this may be kind of like a hot button issue, but I worked with some patients who will blame some kind of discrimination, either sexual discrimination, racial discrimination. or religious discrimination for some negative outcome in dating or the workplace. And the problem is they'll say, oh, like everyone's racist, everyone's racist, everyone's racist. And I'm not even saying what race we're talking about here. And so then what happens if you kind of think about it, that's absolutely a possibility in systemic racism exists. But just because systemic racism exists doesn't mean that you aren't also an asshole. So if we're really talking about equality, I think that like any ethnicity can be an

That's interesting. We did, we heard on another podcast about the scar study. Have you heard this? So it's a study where they had 30 people go into a job interview, a real job interview. But before they went into the interview, they said, we're actually going to put a scar right down your face. And so they applied this really realistic looking scar to the face. And they had them look at a mirror. And they saw this, this scar that was obviously very visible. And they were told you're going go into this interview with the scar. And then before they went into the interview, they took the mirror away. And then they said, we got to do a quick touch up to the scar. And they actually remove the scar in its entirety. Then they had the person go into the interview without knowing

the scar was removed. Then after the interview, they said, did the interviewer notice your scar? And almost all of them said, yeah, they did. Do you feel like this held you back? Yeah, it did, actually. Did they make any comments about the scar? And it was like 30% of them or 40% said they made aggressive comments or insinuated that they were not going to get hired because of the scar. And it was this proof that if you go in thinking something, you're going to find reasons that correlate with that, even though it's not true. Yeah. So this is, I think, case in point. So I think there's one, there's one major aspect of human psychology. that no one is paying attention to that I think is critical. So we're all aware of the value of logic.

We're all now aware of the value of emotion. But the one thing that is a society we don't understand is the value of perception. No one trains their perception. So what happens, what's happening in the world right now is we are all being basically indoctrinated. Like, you know, so if you look at this conflict between Israel and Palestine, my one takeaway as a psychiatrist is that depending on how critical you are of your perception, that's what determines what your view is. Because literally what the, I mean, there's research on something called online drift, which is basically the unequivocal tendency for any of us who are online, our thoughts are being shaped and pushed towards the edge. So if you start out like in the middle of a belief system, the more time you spend

online, the more extreme you'll become. That has nothing to do with whether that extreme belief is correct or incorrect. We're seeing this with like anti-vax stuff, flat earth stuff. You know, I'm not saying that Israel is right or Palestine is right. I'm not making comment on that. But what I sure as hell know is that the world is divided between people who are 100% Israel and 100% Palestine. And everyone is kind of like, you know, everyone is really sure. So I think what's going on right now, the biggest problem that we're seeing right now is that no one is critical of their perceptive faculties. No one trains their perception. So what happens if you don't train your perception is whatever someone else wants to convey, you're just going to let sink in. And so what that sort of means, if we really

think about that, that means that other people are capable of controlling your mind. And even though that sounds insane, we've been doing this for years, right? This is what advertising is about. We are going to shape your thinking. We're going to shape the thinking of the customer to try to induce behavior. Advertising This is all forms of mind control. And what's happened is that advertising, marketing, neuroscience, behavioral neuroscience, you know, I had a buddy of mine who started this company, a startup, where he had advertisers show ads. This guy is faculty at Harvard Medical School, an expert in empathy research. So he builds a lab where he hooks people up to EEGs, EKGs, skin galvanic conductance.

he uses the highest technology that we have it available to measure human response. And he hooks people up to all these machines, has them watch ads, has them watch 10 versions of ads, and then goes to the company and says, this is the one that will engage your customers the most. This is the one that you should show. So what we don't realize is that the whole world is getting very good at manipulating our mind. And we don't even realize that it's happening. We think that all of these thoughts are well thought out. We'll say like, oh, I did my research.

What do you mean you did your research? What is your research? I watched things on TikTok. Like, that's not research. I read things on the internet. Like, were you actually in a laboratory? Like, have you looked at scientific peer-reviewed papers? And not just one.

Have you looked at like 200 or 300 peer-reviewed papers on, let's say, like, ethnic and religion? Dear Canadian exporters, our ambitions, our ideas, and our potential. were never meant to be boxed in. Nothing can contain us. With the support of export development Canada's market insights and financial solutions, you can turn obstacles into opportunities, discover new markets, and keep our nation front and center on the global stage.

The world needs more Canada. Together, let's give it to them. Visit edc.ca to learn more. Just conflict between Israel and Palestine? Like, do you, like, because that's really what research is, but no one holds to that standard. So if you look at the yogic system, they say that perception is incredibly important.

And so what I sort of find also as a psychiatrist is that altering people's perception is one of the best things that you can do for their trajectory and happiness in life. So I'm told with that scar study that the whole point of that was really about a victim mentality and that if you're told you're a victim,

you behave as a victim. And one of the best things that you could do is not call people victims. Do you tend to agree with that? Do you think that's a positive that we don't acknowledge people as victims, that they are just people? No, I think that is a gross oversimplification of a much more subtle concept. Okay. So whether you call people victims or not, like that has different psychological impact.

So let's talk about being a victim for a second. So when you have someone who has been traumatized, is it helpful or not helpful to think of them as a victim? So the answer is it's both and it depends. So let's run through this, okay? So many people who get traumatized don't see themselves as victims. So they feel responsible for the trauma. And this is a problem, right? So like if I'm in an abusive relationship, and oftentimes the recipient of the abuse will blame themselves.

Like, that's pretty common, right? And so if you kind of think about it, they say, it's my fault, it's my fault, it's my fault. In that situation, this person is not a victim. Does that make sense? They're the opposite of the victim because it's my fault, therefore I'm in control. So to help this person realize that this is not your fault and that someone else is doing something bad to you, we are increasing the idea of victimhood. This is helpful because now I'm not responsible for all of this negativity. This negativity actually comes from this other person.

They are responsible for it. So becoming a victim is good. This is part of the reason that we have this kind of victim mentality. On the flip side, I also have trauma patients. who feel too much like victims. And then my job is to make them less of victims. So I'll show you what this looks like. See, if I'm a victim, that means I have no power and I have no agency.

And literally, one of the ways that abusive people propagate traumatic relationships is by tricking people into feeling powerless. So if I'm in an abusive relationship and I'm the abuser, what I'm going to do is convince my romantic partner that they're are powerless without me, that they can't do anything on their own. They have no agency. I will turn them into a victim. And if I can trick them into thinking that they have no power, then I've really won. So in this scenario, I want to make them less of a victim. And this is where things get really, really tricky from like a clinical perspective. If someone is a victim, it's not their fault.

But there's a very thin, tightrope about it's not your fault and it is your responsibility. Because we want to empower these people by helping them understand, actually, you are responsible for this relationship in some way, which is something that's very hard to sit with because there's an abuser and then there's an abusee. So we don't want to give any responsibility to the abusee. But I don't know how you give responsibility without power. I think those two things are linked. So just as a simple example, you know, my grandmother had a saying that, this is an Indian saying, that, you know, if you don't lock your doors at night, you shouldn't complain about being wronged. So there's like all kinds of other like nuances there, right? Where there's like you have some control over whether you are a victim or not. You have some actions that you can take.

And then there's a counter argument to that as well, which is sometimes you don't. So like if we kind of look at, you know, this is where things get devolving into, you know, asking for sexual assault. I don't believe that because I've had patients who are like literally like, you know, seven years old and like they weren't asking for anything. They don't even choose how they dress. So there are real victims. My point is that it's, it's a, especially. especially when dealing with trauma, there's a very delicate balance between, this is not my fault. I have some responsibility and I have some power. So does that make sense? It does. And so that's where when people say is victimhood mentality good or bad, like, I think it depends. And it's like a kind of a tricky balance because you can't, in order to no longer be a victim, you need to have power. In my experience as a psychiatrist, is like giving people power is a good thing.

So do you feel like people have less power? it seems like victim mentality has increased over the last 10 years. So do you feel like that's because people feel like they have less power over their lives? Yeah. So victimhood mentality is really interesting because one of the things that we see is that victimhood mentality rises with the power of institutions. So I'll give you all an example. So if I'm at school and people are mentally checked out in terms of like administration or teachers

and I get bullied, I cannot appeal to my teachers to save me, right? So then what happens is I have to fight for myself. So prior to the culture of victimhood, which we have now, there used to be things like the culture of honor. So why did we have like an honor culture in Japan or even in the Wild West? It's because you could not trust a overarching power to correct a wrong. You had to correct things yourself. So if you do me wrong, I'm going to do you wrong. So this was kind of the culture of honor, where if there's an insult to my honor, I can't rely on the government to fix it. Like, I have to fix it myself. We're going to throw down. So as we've seen a rise in institutional power, what we sort of start to see is that the way to win in a conflict is by becoming a victim.

Because now that we have like everyone's like so scared, scared about bullying and stuff, if I can go to my teacher and I say, this person bullied me and I can get them punished, now suddenly where does the power lie? The power lies in claiming to be a victim. Right? So if I can show the teacher, oh, I'm being bullied, I'm being bullied, I'm being bullied, whether I'm being bullied or not being bullied. I've also seen this now where bullies will bully other people by being victims. I've seen adolescents who will get their friends to all have a coordinated smear campaign of lying about another person. and they will go to the administration and say, this person has been X, Y, Z towards all four of us. And if they can play the victim card, we protect victims, right, because victims deserve protection.

And then they end up like getting this person expelled or suspended or whatever. And it's actually a form of bullying. So we're seeing that basically one way to gain power with strong central institutions is to play as a victim. How do you, how do you, yeah, how do you fight that? Because that seems like a very slippery slope because you want to believe the victim. But if it's abused, then I think it spreads skepticism on all the real victims. Yeah. And then you don't want to go into every victim and be like, well, are you really a victim?

And where do you draw the line on that? So it's really tricky, right? So I think this, too, is a response to a protracted period of time where we like systematically dismantled victims. So if you look at the Me Too movement, the whole point was that like people were, I mean, I remember someone, some celebrity was like on the red carpet or something many years ago. And someone, you know, some, some entertainment reporter asked this celebrity like a question. She's like, what advice would you have to young girls who are trying to make it in Hollywood? And she was like, don't ever go to like Epstein's parties or something like that. I think it was Harvey Weinstein. It was Harvey Weinstein. And so she was like, don't ever, if you get ever get invited to a party from Weinstein, like, don't. go. Yeah. Right. And because he was the one who made made a lot of people in Hollywood. So we have, we have this culture for many, many years of suppressing victims or even further victimizing victims. We have this huge power dynamic. So I think we had the Me Too movement, which I think was by and large good, right? Because there was a systematic problem where like we literally

had sexual predators in places like religious institutions, entertainment industries that were just running amok. And like no one was doing anything to stop them. because they were just so powerful. So that needed to be corrected. And now what's happened is that, so for a long time, victims were not taken seriously. So I think we should take victim seriously.

And at the same time, now what's happening, just like any human beings do, is at the moment that you have, you know, once you have like some way to gain power, some people will use, will abuse that power.

And one really good example of this is now you have false accusations of sexual assault. And things are so challenging. I've worked with, especially so many men who will have, false accusations of sexual assault? How do I know they're false? Because they'll even like have

recorded conversations or text messages where the person admits that this was false. Right. So they'll say like, hey, like, I hope you like it now. Like you dumped me. And I mean, I've seen those text messages from my patients of mine where people will, they'll essentially have former partners that are gloating. Now, it's very possible that I suppose my, my patient could have manufactured those to show me and convince me. But we know that there's some false accusations of sexual assault. We don't know how often it is. And so now we're running into a problem where if we're kind of saying like, okay, believe victim, now we have sort of a situation where people are getting judged without any sort of due process. It's like the allegation is enough to destroy a career. And I've worked with people who are simple people like school teachers, like 31 year old male school teacher punishes a 16 year old girl for having her cell phone one too many times. And the next thing that she does, she's going to fucking, this guy, this teacher doesn't understand. he has no power in the relationship. She makes one accusation of sexual assault his career is over.

Right? Like that's what we do. And so it's a real challenge because on the flip side, we also have 31-year-old teachers who are sexually abusing their students. So, like, this is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate. And, like, I think the problem is that we're kind of like, we used to have the pendulum over here.

Now the pendulum, maybe in the middle, I don't know, maybe it's over there, but it's absolutely a problem. How do you solve that? Is there a solution? Because that seems incredibly dangerous that you could make an allegation like that. It is automatically believed. And even if it's disproven, most people don't care to ever follow up. I think, Jack, you gave that example of Reds to Orange County.

Yeah, he's my favorite artist musician. And he, there was some accusations alleged against him. and I'm in all like the forums and everything in the chat rooms and everyone's like I'm never going to listen to him ever again even though it's just alleged. And they even said like even if it comes out false that it didn't even happen, I'm still never going to listen to him because you should like believe all women in this circumstance. And then CCTV footage came out. Turns out it's completely false. And still you see a substantial financial impact on him. You see his listenership down. You see all of these people that, like, hated on him back in the day. They

still harness this hatred. And one thing that's really interesting is I was talking to this girl, and I told her I listened to Rex Orange County. And this is after the CCTV footage came out, after, you know, I read like the one article that was published absolving him of that wrongdoing. And she was like, well, do you feel weird listening to him? I'm like, no, there's proof that this actually didn't end up happening. But of course, she doesn't know about it because there's millions of articles that are made alleging him of doing this crime, basically making him lose in the court of public opinion. And then when all this stuff comes out refuting that, no one makes any media about that. And no one apologizes for the

incorrect allegations in the beginning either. Yeah. So I think there's a lot of different problems here. And like solving it is going to be on the one hand hard, but on the other hand, I think, potentially very easy. That sounds weird. So let's start with a couple of things. The first is that there's also a bias on the internet of like corrections don't ever get propagated, but like allegations get propagated. So one of my favorite quotes from Terry Pratchett, if you all know, Terry Pratchett, is a lie can get all the way around the world before the truth gets its boots on. That's funny. And so, like, I think that's true, right? So I think, like, this is just the challenge is that no one wants to read some in-detail corrective thing. The internet is just designed to trigger our

emotional engagement, right? And then you have these people who will say, like, believe women, like even if so so if you have people who are saying believe women unequivocally irrespective of proof what you're going to have is a subset I think minority of women who are likely on the more sociopathic scale which by the way recent research shows is closer to one to one who will take advantage of that right so if we say like believe all white people or believe all brown people or believe all doctors we also have doctors who are peddling all kinds of bad crap because everyone has so much faith in doctors. So anytime you have a unequivocal acceptance of a class of people, some people in that class will abuse that. So I think we've got a couple of things that we can do to correct this.

The first is that, like I said, we need to be better about our perception. So we need to be like a lot more critical of our own thoughts on the individual level. So for example, like people ask me, you know, what do I read? I read a lot of primary peer reviewed research. And it's boring as fuck. But like, that's what I read. So, like, when I'm following a particular thing, like, if I'm following, like, a trial, I will read court transcripts. I will, like, look to the source of the information as closely as possible. The closer you get to the actual source, not some article about it, not some post about it, not some TikTok about it, I think the closer to the truth you will be. But even then, there will be some level of, like, you know, because that's just a court transcript and someone could have lied or whatever.

So that's one thing. I think the second thing that we need to do is just in general be critical of our thought process is that the more sure you are about something, see that this is a problem of sureness. It's a problem of 100% confidence at its root. So the more that human beings question our own beliefs, whether you're anti-work or pro-work or late-stage capitalism or communism or capitalist, whatever, it doesn't matter. The basic problem that I see in the world today is that no one is trying to understand a perspective that is not their own.

So when I talk to people about things like Israel or Palestine, what I never hear is someone who's super pro-Israel, really trying to understand why is it that these Palestinians, these people who are pro-Palestinians believe this. Help me understand where you're coming from. What is your experience of this? Because what it ends up being is an argument. You are wrong.

No, you were wrong. Well, you did this. Well, they did this. Well, they did this. Well, they did this. And chances are the truth is somewhere in the middle. But the basic problem is that we have a society that is becoming increasingly polemic and increasingly antagonistic. No one is trying to understand everyone is trying to win.

And as long as you are trying to win, everyone's fucked. Because in order for one person to win, one person has to lose. And I've seen this in marriage, like marriage counseling. When one partner wins, the other one loses. It's a loss for the marriage. We all lose. I have a book coming out about video game addiction and this is where it's getting such big pissing contest

between parents and child. Kid wants to win, parent wants to win. And man, this gets ugly. When parents and children start fighting, even on levels that they don't know, parent is like, I want you to go to gymnastics and you're going to listen to me because I'm the fucking parent, you're going to do what I say because I know better than you.

And kid has no power in the situation, so you know what they do? Psychosomatic illness. Now I have nausea. And it's not fake. start throwing up. If you push that kid, they will end up winning. They become suicidal. It's a power play. I've seen it gets real ugly. So anytime you want to have a relationship, and I think that's what we need, right, between like liberals and conservatives, like let's understand the other perspective. Instead of just assuming that everyone else is an idiot,

like let's acknowledge that on average, this class of people is going to be no smarter or stupider than I am. And let's understand that they're coming from somewhere. So the moment that we start doing that, I think all these problems will go away. Don't you think it's human nature, though? I feel like what you're saying sounds really good, but I think if you try to put it in practice, no one's going to do that. I mean, it might be 1% of people that could actually see a story like that and think critically about it. I feel like even though it's true what you're saying, realistically, people are just not going to do it. People are going to be people. They're going to see the head, lines. They're going to feed into the drama. They're going to think, I'm right. They're wrong.

And it's going to be a battle. Like, how can we actually make a meaningful change on this? Where does that thought come from? I think the people are just going to be people. I think it takes, to have the majority, so like 51%, take what you said and actually apply it just from everything that I've seen, very few people will actually do anything with it. I think of even our audience, I'd say maybe at this point probably 35, 40% of people are watching this, probably 35%. So we've already lost the majority of people who clicked on the episode are still here. And then of those 35, I'd say realistically, 10%. So here's my point is that I want you to critically examine that belief, which is exactly what I'm saying.

So here you are with a lack of faith in humanity, which is fair enough. You're not wrong. Right, but this is exactly what I mean, right? Is if you pay attention, your instinctive reaction is that's not going to work. But I guess that's been my experience throughout everything in my entire life has shown me that most people are just going to. Yeah. And you can take someone who's pro-Israel, someone who's pro-Palestine, someone who's conservative, someone who's liberal, someone who's a flat-earther. And they will say the same thing that you said, which it has been my overwhelming experience that the earth is flat.

They will literally use the same language, right? And here's all the data that I've seen. So this is exactly what I'm talking about is when we have these instinctive reactions, we need to be critical of them. But let me address it. Okay, cool. So as a clinician, what I've seen is that I don't trust populations, but I trust individuals. And this is like, this is where there's like, if you look at all this data, right, like, you know, we're looking at, let's say mental health is getting so much worse. There's a crisis.

There's all this kind of stuff. And like even what we've done at Healthy Gamer, we've had a huge, unbelievable positive impact. Right? Five million people, unique users watch us every month because they want to be better human. beings. The momentum towards this is growing towards wanting to understand your perception. So we recently launched like memberships, right? And we were like concerned because like this costs extra money. And that too, we didn't realize so stupid. I didn't realize that the more free stuff is easy to do if you're doing it for a small number of people. But the larger you grow, the more expensive free

stuff becomes. And so we started this membership thing. And like we're amazed by how people, how much people are into it because it's really advanced stuff. And so what I'm sort of found is that like, don't give up on people. Like, don't do it. Like, you don't need to change 51% of people. Stop trying to change 51% of people. Change one person. Anytime I do an interview, I'm just talking to one person. And oh, this is pretty cool. Like a million people get benefited from this. You and I are having a conversation. I'm not talking to the 35% of people who are still here. I'm talking to you. I only need to convince you. And what we've seen is that if I can convince you, or if we can engage, there can absolutely be a ripple or scaling effect from this conversation,

which you absolutely know, right? That's what y'all do. You all have scaling effects. You have one conversation with one person and a million people benefit from it, literally. So don't give up on people yet, but we'll get to that. Okay. So I think this is what I'm saying is with the internet, we can change one person and we can have a scalable effect at the rate of a million. So I think this is also where you're right because the assumptions that you're making are not utilizing the technology that we've utilized. So when we look at Healthy Gamer, I have faith because I have helped more people in four years of doing Healthy Gamer. I've helped literally probably a thousand times or even 100,000 times more people than I could in the lifetime of clinical practice. Clinical practice, I can help 40 people a week, tops.

Right? So like even one YouTube video with 200,000 views is going to help more than that. So I think there's scaling effects that we haven't taken advantage of yet. But let's go back to this. What was your original point that they're just not going to do it? Yeah, that the overwhelming majority are still going to be people. And that even if we reach a million people, it's 0.2% of the U.S. population. And that it's not enough to make it. It's part of human nature.

Yeah, like you're going against the grain. And what is? Like ascribe their belief system to themselves. They want to identify with a certain set of beliefs and feel attacked when their beliefs. their belief systems attack because it's a part of there. You're right. So we have one really, really good thing going for us. This would be an unsolvable problem, except for one difference,

which is that human beings are probably the best living organism on the planet that has the capability to go against their own nature. So if you look at like my favorite example of this is vegan dogs. So you'll have all these people who raise like vegan dogs, right? And they're like, oh, they don't even like meat anymore. And they'll do some kind of experiment where there's like meat, and there's like vegan food, and then the dog, even if they've been eating vegan crap, their whole life, they'll go to the meat. So if you look at like what really separates humans from other beings,

and this may not be biologically true. I mean, who knows, like maybe even dolphins can do some of this stuff. We don't really know, right? But one thing that I've seen human beings do time and time and time again is go against our nature. Now, you can also make a biological reductionist argument that you're not really going against your nature, but I mean like on a surface level. So case and point, my human brain, which is 99% similar to like a monkey's brain or even a cow's brain or a lion's brain, wants to eat a twinkie. But I have the ability to resist. So even if human nature is this way, the key thing about human nature, about humans, is that we can go against human nature. And I think a lot of what becoming a successful human is is actually learning to conquer our nature.

This whole podcast, what have we been talking about? I have this natural desire to accomplish this goal. I'm looking at what everyone else is doing and I want to do that too. And we're talking about all the neuroscience that supports it. I have loss aversion. My amygdala activates dopamine. The nature of dopamine is that results in behavioral reinforcement. So the first time I shoot up heroin, I'm going to want it again.

I'm going to want it again. I'm going to want it again. This is human nature. This is our biology. We know this. And yet people become sober. And yet people conquer video game addiction. And yet people conquer porn addiction.

And yet people who hate each other and are racist and who have been conditioned to be this way because we are tribal by our evolution, we can fight against that. So I have hope because we have something within us that can conquer our own nature. Now, once again, you can make an argument that that too is a part of our nature. But even if you make that argument, then we can still overcome human nature. So that's the second thing. So I have faith that we can do this. Next point that I would make is that y'all are saying, even if we affect a million people, that's not enough. Yeah, you're right.

If the three of us affect a million people, we haven't transformed the world, but we've definitely increased, we've affected way more than three people. But if all we, if three of us can affect a million people, we don't need, all we need is 0.1% of the population, right? If we can change 0.1% of the population, and this is what I've seen as a clinician, is that if you can take 1,000, human being who's been traumatized and has low self-esteem and you can help them believe in themselves and learn to love themselves, the ripple effects that you will see are astronomic. Right? This person who used to be, I had a patient who was addicted to opiates and started to write dystopian fiction and became a therapist and like amazing human being.

And transforming this one person, this person now has a clinical practice where they see 40 people a month, I mean a week. And they write fiction, through which they're very successfully writing dystopian fiction, which is resonating emotionally with like millions of people. And so like, I made one alteration in one human being. So don't underestimate the power of a single human being. Well said. I appreciate that.

And that's where like if we're not careful, we'll slip into this automatic thinking of its point one percent. I mean, who the fuck made you responsible for 100 percent of the population? bro. If you can affect 0.1% that is an overwhelming victory. So how do you, I feel like we're so caught up in these certain like agendas and thought processes and like automated thinking. And every single time we bring something up, you're like, well, it's not necessarily that way. And you provide like a slam dunk. Grants throws you the alley you if you catch it in midair, double-handed 360 slam dunk. Yeah. Like how do we reframe our

mind to be able to be doing the dunking rather than. than the alley-ooping. So you've already done it. You see what you just did? Now you've risen against meta. Like, I don't know if this makes sense. I don't know if anyone's following this. It does. It's awareness.

Right? Yes. Yeah. You gained awareness. Oh, my God. So originally it's this thought process was automatically accepted and we debunked that. I'm not right, by the way. You guys know that, right.

Like Graham may be right. I could be wrong. I'm not saying I'm right. So we did that once. We did that twice. We did that three times. And now we're off to the races. Because you've said, hold on a second.

how do I no longer need Dr. K to do this for me? And the moment that you ask that question, now you've truly boarded the train of change. So now you've started to realize, holy shit, this is a pattern of automatic thinking in my mind. How do I fix this pattern of automatic thinking? And like, I know it sounds crazy, but that's the biggest, the most difficult step. You think social media is a net positive or negative? In this day and age, probably net negative. I would tend to agree with that.

I agree. So I think what's happened with social media is it's kind of like, you know, back in the day, there was a doctor who discovered that we could put cocaine into cough syrup and like opiates into cough syrup. And it's like, cocaine's are like great neural stimulants, right? So they'll help you stay sharp. So anytime human beings develop something, it tends to run a little bit wild and we recognize the benefits before we recognize the dangers. But over time, thankfully, so far, the human race has discovered the nuclear bomb or the hydrogen bomb or whatever, and we, like, we dropped a couple, right? And then we were like, okay, this is maybe not a great idea. And maybe we'll still end the nuclear war. But I think we're doing this thing

where technology has infected our world like an invasive species, and it's grown out of control. And we have not utilized technology for mental health promotion, while we've utilized technology for mental health decay. And so as we start really understanding how to harness technology for humanity's benefit, that's when things will start turning around. Do you think we're destroying our minds by doom scrolling? Yes. I tend to believe that when you talk about the nuclear bomb, I can't help but compare that

to social media today. And it seems as though that is our mental nuclear bomb that we're going to realize 20 years from now, how detrimental it is, even to put a child in front of... Not 20 years. We already know. Yeah. But we're not doing anything about it, it seems. It seems like individuals on a small scale might delete certain apps or limit their scrolling,

but it seems on a wide scale, it's so prevalent. It's so prevalent, but we are doing something about it, right? So I think that, like, so just to give you a couple of examples. So the American Psychiatric Association has an app advisory committee. So the American Psychiatric Association is starting to develop guidelines for like healthy usage of apps or I think that what they're doing is developing an advisory for people who want to make mental health apps. So there are institutions that have been slow to start, but they're doing good work now. I recently met some of the co-founders of, I think, moms against media addiction, right? So there are other grassroots movements.

There are some policy changes that are starting to happen. So I think right now, like, basically technology got a head start, and, like, humanity is, like, starting to turn the corner, I hope. Or at least we're moving towards turning the corner. And even the fact that, like, we're successful on YouTube is proof of that, right? Because here we are, like, on the internet talking about developing a healthy relationship with technology. And, like, people are into that. I think individual humans understand that this is a problem. And so as people develop resources, like I think we're moving in the right direction.

What do you think about YouTube channels that primarily focus on finding an event that has happened, usually a fairly nuanced event. And there's so many of them out there. And in fact, we talked to Ludwig about this recently because you know he has Mogul Mill. So I'll say, I'll say Mogul Mill because we talked about it during the episode where he finds some event that's happening, covers the event, usually to elicit a response in the audience. That sort of whole niche on YouTube. What are your general thoughts on that? I mean, I think human beings love to know what's going on with other human beings. So, like, I mean, what I say that these, I don't think mogul mail is bad, like, by any means.

I mean, I think there are worse versions. So I think generally speaking, human beings are looking for commentary on things that are going on. And we as human beings are very social creatures, which means we love to gossip. So, you know, six thousand years ago, gossip involved, like, us, like, sitting around a fire and maybe going for a walk. And I'm like, oh, did you know that Jack had this? And, like, Graham, did you know that Jack is selling pictures of his feet and, like, this kind of stuff? And then what happened is we had, you know, we had things like, I guess, like National Enquirer or whatever. Like, we have these gossip magazines.

And then we just have the most recent incarnation of drama-oriented channels. And in the same way that we had these magazines, these tabloids, right, that would, like, pick particular people, offer a completely unnuanced view, crap on them. We literally have paparazzi that will follow people around and try to find the one unflattering picture, which then they will sell. There will be an appetite for this stuff, so people will make it. I think that the internet just amplifies. So I think that, like, you know, the signal that we get from, like, the internet is going to be more potent than what we get from a tabloid. So I don't think that they're healthy. And at the same time, like, that's kind of like, it's just scratching

an evolutionary itch. So I don't think that they're good. And I think oftentimes these people are, like, quite toxic because they will be, you know, especially some of the ones like, so I've worked with a lot of creators who will have, you know, some of these channels, like, actually a couple of them are now banned because they are so insightful of, like, harassment. So they'll say, oh, this person did this and they're, they're so terrible and they're taking advantage of this and they're doing this and then like all the people on the all the angry people on the internet will then go and harass them. So I think that they're bad, but I mean, I think they're also like human nature. Here's a good question. Is a creator responsible for their audience? I don't think you can be

responsible for another human being. But I think that all human beings are responsible for their actions. And so we should think as creators about the implications of our actions. So I think that you should, as a creator, you should behave with responsibility, but I don't think you can hold a creator accountable for like something that one of their diehard fans does. What you can hold a creator accountable for is what they say.

Right? So if I tell my audience, hey, this guy is an asshole and I think they suck. Like, it would be nice if some, someone did X, Y, Z. Right? So, like, I think what we're responsible for are actions. And I think that especially with creators, I mean, there are so many strange parosocial

relationships. Like, I've had people, like, who are, like, actively psychotic, like, show up at my house because they thought that I was sending the messages over the internet. And I don't think I'm responsible for that person's behavior. You know, so I don't think creators are responsible. But I think that I think every human being, because I think, if we kind of think about it, right? So if we say that the creator is responsible,

does that mean that the member of their audience is not responsible? Does that make sense? It does. So I think that we're responsible for what we say, but I don't think you can hold us. And if I tell someone in my audience to go doc someone, then that's a different story, because I should be held responsible for what I do as a creator.

Do you see any issue with the violence that's so prevalent now on Instagram Reels? I don't know what's... I don't know. to. It's actually the only one who gets this algorithm. I'm not the only person. I've never seen it. People watching this podcast know exactly what I've talked about. I've never seen it.

There's going to be, I'm going to say, like, I'm just going to throw out guesses here. 60% of the people have no idea what I'm talking about. 40% know exactly what I'm talking about. There is an algorithm that you get on on Instagram that just like every fifth reel is some heinous, disgusting, graphic, gore-filled video of some evil thing happening in the United States. And these have tens of millions of views. And people like, they like the videos, they engage with the videos. And then you go to the comments and every single one is like day 135 of seeing someone die on my Instagram feed. Okay. Do you see anything wrong that could

happen psychologically with being exposed to violence online, even though it's not actually in front of you, but seeing that online? And if so, what kind of? Yeah. I mean, I don't know what exactly, because I'm not 100% sure. So let's understand a couple of things. So remember that platforms engage their users through fluctuating their emotions. So this is why you see it every fifth video. So if you saw every video is violent, it wouldn't work. But the more that I alternate between cute cat videos, heartwarming daddy daughter videos and

gory violent videos, the more addicted people will be to like their feet. So we just sort of know, I don't know how much like core primary research there is to this is sort of an extrapolation and clinical work is that basically they ping pong our emotions. So it's like cat video outrage. Cat video outrage. So I think that that's unhealthy in the sense that like people are becoming more addicted and their emotions are like ping ponging all over the place, which I don't think is healthy from a physiologic standpoint. So we tend to see with a lot of people who use this kind of technology is that, whatever emotions life is generating do not get addressed or processed because we're dealing with all the ups and downs of like internet stuff. So we know that if you're feeling bad in your life and you start using any platform that has emotional engagement, your brain will not process what you are going through and instead it will be distracted by this ping ponging emotion. So that I think is pretty unhealthy. I don't know, I mean, I can't. can't really extrapolate out what effect that would have from a violence perspective. Like,

I think there's a reason why Karen videos get so propagated, right? Because we like to see people, there's some amount of Schadenfreude. You know, we like to see people doing really bad things and getting punished and it makes us feel superior. It helps us feel narcissistic. I think one of the reassuring things is it appears that especially when it comes to video games, like playing violent video games, does not increase violence. I think the counter argument to that, is that I think that there's a lot of like prank videos and stuff where people are being like harmful to others, which catches on. But I don't think it's like you're increasing a violent tendency. I think that's more like peer pressure and mimicking other human behavior as opposed to really like creating violent tendencies. I think most of the people that I see who are being violent on prank videos, I don't think they have like malice in their heart. I think that they're just completely unempathetic and don't realize that another human being will not enjoy this because their brain is so like, caught up in the narcissistic view of like, I'm going to make content and I'm a creator and I have to make content and it's okay because everybody else does it and stuff like that.

But that's really outside of my realm of like that feels like a prediction that's hard for me to make based on clinical experience and scientific research. I want to talk briefly about porn. Okay. So the topic we've discussed on this podcast. A lot of people think it's not an issue. A lot of people think it is an issue. Is it an issue fundamentally?

and if not, when does it become an issue? What do you mean by fundamentally? Like, just exposure to porn, period, is just bad for your brain. You're feeding yourself whatever positive hormonal influences or whatever from this, you know, thing online that you're seeing. And potentially, maybe just even one exposure could have this other effect where you're like, okay, well, maybe I don't need to pursue a romantic relationship or maybe you're in one. And just exposure to one can be.

dangerous to that relationship that you're in versus like, you know, you can do it casually and then at a certain point it becomes a problem. So I think the first thing to understand is that just like anything else that can be addictive or harmful, an individual's relationship to it can be highly variable. So I am not of the mind that porn is unequivocally harmful. So I do think in some ways, like from a spiritual perspective, I think it's harmful. But from like a physiologic, neuroscientific or like hard, like mental health perspective, I don't know that it is unequivocally harmful. I think a lot of people can have relatively healthy relationships with pornography,

masturbation, et cetera. That being said, I think that the way that porn is advancing is becoming increasingly problematic. So if we look at some of these like interesting studies, what we see is that the reason pornography is getting worse is because they are tapping into this neuroscientific principle called a supernormal stimulus. So if we look at our brain, our brain likes certain things and it dislikes other things. So what human beings have figured out is we can take the natural level of like and we can modify it in some way that hyperactivates our physiology. So a good example of this is something

like high fructose corn syrup or like, you know, saturated fats. So what people will literally do in laboratories is they will like mess with saccharides or sugars and they'll mess with fats until they can create something that is more delicious than anything you will find in the natural world. This is where Twinkies come from. Now what's happening is people are doing this with pornography. So if you look at the trend in pornography, it is becoming more. More what? More everything. Like the dicks are getting bigger. The tits are getting bigger. Like the colors are getting brighter. The sounds are getting louder. It's becoming virtual reality. It's becoming more immersive. There's more jiggling. There's more like all kinds of stuff is getting like enhanced.

The second thing that we're having is we're having a really. good way to scratch whatever itch anyone has. So it used to be that we were all protected by the fact that there was not the perfect porn for me. Like we're limited by the amount of pornography production. But now what's happening is that we have so many people making so many different kinds of porn that you can sort of scratch your brain in the eight or nine specific places that are genetically and like developmentally just work for you. So I want like feet, picks plus this, plus this, minus this, minus this. So we're starting to develop such niche pornography that like it is getting even more engaging. Okay. Right, Jack? Right. Why are you asking

right to me? So I'm going to ask right for you. So then, so then the next thing that we're starting to do is one example of that is if we look at something like only fans, now we're adding a layer to pornography that we've never had before. Parassocial relationship. So you can have people who, have been obsessed with, let's say, celebrities, politicians, musicians, pornographic actors or actresses. So you've always had human beings who are obsessed. But now, so if you look at the slice of human beings that are obsessed with someone that you cannot ever interact with, that slice is pretty small. Enter only fans.

Enter parasycial relationships. Now I can interact with this person. This person can interact back. So this starts scratching are the brain's need for a social connection. Like, in order for us to have a social connection, there has to be, or it doesn't have to be, but the more interaction we have, the stronger the social connection becomes.

So with OnlyFans we're seeing, I've seen, unfortunately, this is like really scary. You know, I've seen a lot of, like, troubles in marriage with, like, it was one thing, I mean, there's a certain amount of insecurity that sometimes partners can have with their partner watching porn. Like, why can't I satisfy all your sexual needs? Sometimes, honestly, the answer is because you're not willing to do the sexual things that I want. And, you know, that's something that we don't really say very often, right?

Because you're a pervert for wanting these things and I don't want to indulge you. So that's part of the reason that people watch porn because partners are not willing to offer what someone wants. So then they get it from somewhere else. But now what we're starting to see is I've seen a lot of like marriages really get rocked by like the social and emotional connection and the financial connection to a particular only fans create. or other whatever pornography delivery system we use. And so now, like, you can be unfaithful to your partner by engaging with this person, by paying this person, you know, and things like that. I think there's a lot of, like, predatory behavior going both ways.

So there's a lot of, like, abuse of people who are pornographic content creators. But then there's also a lot of, like, taking advantage of people who are, like, lonely. and isolated and have money, and you're sort of like paying for affection. So I think it's getting like super toxic and very predatory as well. And this is what we know is that, see, the more like itches I can scratch in your brain,

the more addictive something is going to be. So if we look at video games, there used to be no community element. But as video games have added a community element, now like they're more addictive. So this is what we're seeing with pornography. So things are getting worse. And we're like scratching those itches more profoundly.

I think we're ruining more brains more quickly. There's very little regulation around pornography, so the access to pornography is going through the roof. And then the last thing to consider, as we mentioned about the supernormal stimulus, as we create more of a supernormal stimulus, the dopaminergic and emotional consequences in our brain are increasing. So as I watch pornography that is supernormal, my brain acclimatizes to that, and it becomes difficult for me to engage in a health.

sexual or romantic relationship. I'm guessing your general thoughts on porn in a relationship are not black and white as far as like you can watch it in a relationship and the relationship still healthy, as well as you can't watch it in a relationship. The relationship still fine. It's probably more a case-by-case basis. You would be right. I want to know your thoughts on, and I'm guessing it's probably going to be very similar to open. Need a vehicle that isn't afraid to make a splash? That's the Volkswagen Tower. Capable and confident, the Volkswagen Taos is fit for everyday life, nimble in traffic, agile and tight spots, and still spacious enough for weekend getaways.

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Is that true? Yeah. So I don't think it's black and white, but I generally speaking, this is what I will say. I think I am, I don't think anti is the right word. I think the general conception of Polly Amory and things like that being good and okay. I think it probably harms a lot more people than can make it work, is what I would say. So this is what's really interesting. So I was just looking at a meta-analysis on polyamory and open relationships.

And the meta-analysis basically found that polyamory is like pretty good. People feel mentally better. People feel physically better. People feel more fulfilled. So they basically showed that the data suggests that polyamorous relationships are positive. So you can look at that meta-analysis and you can say, wow, polyamory is good. But there is such a catastrophic misstep in the research, which is that these people are studying polyamorous relationships. So can y'all detect what the catastrophic bias in the research is?

Yeah. They're only getting the people where it works. Exactly. So this is a nuance, which I think will be lost on the internet. I've seen very few or no studies of people who tried polyamory for whom it was a disaster. So this is where from anecdotal evidence and clinical evidence, this is what I see a lot more of, is that one partner has some kind of dissatisfaction in the relationship. So if I'm dissatisfied in my relationship and I say, let's open the relationship, why?

So that I can have my desires satisfied. Remember what we said about being a slave to our internal desires? that's a bad thing. And so then what happens is instead of fixing the problem in my relationship, I bring a third person into the equation. And as someone who's done a fair amount, small amount, honestly, of things like couples counseling, making a relationship work with two fucked up human beings is hard enough. The moment that you add a third person to the equation, it becomes exponentially difficult.

And then like we don't really have good, I'm not saying that it can't work. And I've worked with some people who have successful polyamorous relationships. And like, I think, and I'm not going to comment, but there's some people who used to be poster children for successful polyamorous relationships, which will then sometimes fall apart. So I don't think we really have good data on really what the impact is. but I suspect that there is a very vocal minority of people who are able to succeed in polyamorous relationships. I think succeeding in a polyamorous relationship is probably objectively harder than succeeding in a monogamous relationship, is my guess. Just because the emotional bandwidth required is different. But I've seen it done for sure.

The challenge is that we don't really have good guidelines. The other challenge is that we will use polyamorous relationship, as masks for like other unsavory things. So if I, just as an example, like I said, you know, if I'm unhealthy and unhappy in my relationship and I open up my relationship, I'm not actually solving the problem. So if I decide that I'm not sexually satisfied and I'm just going to start a polyamorous relationship, oftentimes what I see is that one partner is basically forced into it, right, where like they feel like guilty for not saying no.

And especially because now we're making such a value. judgment on polyamorous relationships as positive, that like, if you're anti-polyamorous relationship, you don't want your partner to be fulfilled or whatever. I've seen some really bad examples of this, bad in the sense of, like, harmful of like, you know, partners who will come out as even gay, so they're in a heterosexual marriage and they'll, like, come out as gay. And then, you know, so they want to start having homosexual relationships outside of this heteronormative marriage. And then if the partner, if the, if the heterosexual partner who's married is not in favor of that, they're viewed as homophobic, right? Which I think there's a different perspective, which is that, hey, we agreed to do

this thing. And I recognize that that's not what you wanted, but, or that's not who you are, which is totally fine, but like, you know, this thing may need to end. Like you, I think there's a different perspective of like, you know, there's just, it's weird. Right. So I think there's a lot of weird value judgments going on with it. But, you know, we'll see. I think what we sort of know, my take is that human beings are probably supposed to be something close to serial monogamous. So it's not that you have to be with one person until the end of life. But we have to remember that, you know, that the, for majority of human history, human lifespan is like 35, like 35, right? So until death, do us part, used to mean like maybe 20 years on the top end.

So I think we're sort of moving beyond our evolutionary constraints in terms of what our lives are, and we're starting to see some changes related to that. Do you think porn is creating incels or is contributing to that sort of behavior? Yeah, for sure. Can women be incels? Yes. The original incell was a woman. The person who coined the term incal, the first in cell on the planet, was a woman. Could you explain this?

Yeah. Like, tell us the backstory on this. I know nothing about it. So the term in-cell. Yeah. The person who invented the concept was a woman. So she said, I'm involuntarily celibate. And then, much like much of society, the men showed up and took it away.

Right? So then like, like, so the first and now we have fem cells, right, which are female incels, which is really bad cultural appropriation because the original in-cell was a woman. It's messed up. So I think there was someone who had some kind of website or something. And so she was talking about being involuntarily celibate. And the original insults were a group of women. And because if you kind of think about it, right, there's also this premise that, oh, women can get laid whenever they want to.

So there was a group of women who were like, we can't get laid whenever we want to. We get rejected by men. This is not nice. This is not good. And then some dudes showed up and were like, fuck yeah, let's go. They should have just hung out. I know. You know, there was a match there.

You can't get laid. Me too. All right. Everyone says that it doesn't work like that. Everyone is like, why don't the female in cells and the male in cells get together? And it's because oftentimes, if you look at in cells, they have standards that are unrealistic. And this is where the pornography comes in. So I think there's also all kinds of weird shit.

Like, I can't really comment from a peer-reviewed literature standpoint, because now we're getting into the dark corners of in-cell psychology that come from clinical experience. And if you look at pornography, there are so many themes of, you know, male dominance, abuse. I mean, we even have pornography, which is like visibly abusive, right? And so, like, when, when, when you have someone who has a lot of resentment, and I'm assuming a male in-cell watching a certain kind of pornography that is usually heterosexual, you know, it, there's a lot of, like, weird, it's hard to describe, but there's like, there's a lot, like, sometimes, like, angry sex. is like very engaging and so that that it's almost like some people feel this resentment towards a group of people and watching these people get sexually demeaned is very gratifying, is very validating, is very like resonating is kind of what I would say. But I don't know that that applies to all in cells or even the majority of insoles. We're talking about like, you know, asking someone who is an insult when you watch pornography, like what do you like

about it. And some people that I've worked will say, like, you know, it feels righteous to watch, like, this is unfair. And then there's also some amount of identification and aspirations of, like, I want to be the dude with the big dick that is doing this to women because I'm so angry at women. I want to slap them around. I want to do this and things like that. So, like, there's a lot of fantasy component, too. On the topic of relationships, this is a question I've had for a super long time in my life. is it ever appropriate or right if you have power over someone else or maybe you don't have power over them but you know that you can make a decision for them that you think would be better for them to do that or is it just asking them questions and eventually praying that they come

to the realization that they need to do a certain something to make themselves better off so can you make a decision for your partner even if they don't want it let's say you're talking to a girl okay and you don't think that you're very good for this person. But she's fine for you. But you think they would genuinely be better off with you out of their life. Okay. You can make that decision to say, hey, I'm cutting this off. I'm not good for you, even though you're getting pleasure from it. And they think they're getting pleasure from that. But deep down, you may know that you're not the best thing for this person at this moment in their life. So I think I'm going to run against the grain,

where I think it is, I think if you look at the reality of successful monogamous heterosexual relationships, probably homosexual relationships as well, oftentimes one partner will overrule the other because they know better. So I think that is probably like a positive attribute within a relationship. Because if you look at it fundamentally, the whole point of a relationship is that I'm good at some stuff and you're good at some stuff. I know things better in this dimension and you know things better in this dimension. And so usually probably like the unit is superior because one person is making decisions over here and one person is making decisions over here. So I think on balance, I may be like maybe canceled, but I think it's okay to make decisions

for your partner. I had a I had a really, and I say that as being someone in a relationship where my wife makes decisions for me at times, which I think are good. And then I make decisions for her, which I think are good. And I think we even discovered through our relationship that, like, we have a signal where we say, hey, this is one of those times when you need to listen. Like, so we even have a signal where I say, like, hey, this is one of those times. And she says, this is one of those times. And then so the moment that she says that I acknowledge that in the past, She has been right and I have been wrong and she had a certain confidence. I had a certain confidence and that works out well for us.

And then sometimes this made me look like a real abusive asshole because we used to go eat Mexican food. And then there would be a situation where she would like finish everything on her plate. And then for the next two hours, she would literally be groaning in pain from overeating. So she could not like move or function. She had to like put the seat back all the way. so she would like overeat to the point of physical pain. And then there I am a 21 year old dude on a date with like, or maybe a 22 year old dude on a date with a 19 year old chick.

And I'm telling her to put the fork down because she's had enough. Right. And the whole like restaurant looks at me and thinks that I'm the complete asshole from, you know, like, oh my God, this controlling dude. And the hilarious thing is that then she started doing it on purpose. And she's like started overeating and overeating and overeating more to try to put me in a situation where everyone would think I was the asshole. Anyway, so it's a very loving relationship.

My point is that I do think there are times where like partners, it's okay for a partner to make a decision. Now, the real problem with that is the moment that you say that, you open the door to all kinds of abuse. Because how do you know when it's okay for you to overrule your partner? When do you become controlling? How do you have autonomy? That's the problem.

But I think the real important thing to remember is that just because we like autonomy does not mean that human beings are actually equal in a relationship with all competencies. That is like probably a scientific fact that one partner is going to know better when it comes to a particular thing than another, and that both partners may not be aware of that gap in knowledge. Does that make sense? That's like a statistical fact of probably most things in the relationship. And what I tend to find is that healthy relationships are the ones where both partners are able to acknowledge that in some way. So there is almost a willingness to be overruled, is kind of like the key thing that we go for.

What about white lying? I think lying's bad. In every single circumstance, even if you know 100%, if I'm 100% honest with this person, they will go do something that's either self-destructive, they'll go do something destructive to somebody else. This is not going to help anybody in this circumstance aside from maybe some like not transgressing some ethical guideline of like being honest or being dishonest. So here's what I would say.

So I say lying is bad from a spiritual perspective, not a practical or psychological perspective. So I think that there's like a Sanskrit concept of satya, which means truth. And just to give you all an example of like how powerful truthfulness is. So if I told y'all tomorrow that it is physically impossible for you to lie, how would that change your behavior? I feel like not much, really. Yeah, same. Okay. No, I would probably change some things.

Right. So then here's the question. The way that you would change your behavior, Do you think that would make your life better or worse? I don't know. I feel like... Worse. I feel like mine would be pretty much the same.

Okay. So in my experience, see, why do we lie? We lie to try to avoid conflict. Sure. So even more than that, avoid consequences or literally to control others. Right? So if we look at it, if I tell you the truth, you may behave this way or this way. But if I lie, I narrow the possibilities of your response.

So if you really look at it, why do we lie? We lie to control other people. Literally, duh, right? It sounds weird when I say it like that. But anytime you tell, okay, like I'm going to lie to my partner about having an affair so that they don't divorce me. So I'm taking choice away from another human being every time I lie to them. So what I found the more truthful I've become is once you commit to truth,

you cannot do any of the things that you have to lie to protect, which is usually a good thing, in my experience. Now, we're going to get to your point because what about negative consequences and white lies and lying for the protection of others? So I can see why your life may get worse. But in my experience, committing to truth is generally speaking a very, very good thing. Right? So then like, if, so I remember, you know, I used to lie about fast food because I felt embarrassed. And my wife would ask me, she's like, oh, like, what did you eat? and then because she's like making dinner

but I had fast food at 3 p.m. And I'm like, oh, fuck. And so I was like, yeah. And then so if I really think about it, but like if I lie about fast food, it makes it easier. We usually lie about things that we shouldn't be doing bluntly, right?

And so then if you kind of think about it, if you stop lying about the things that you shouldn't be doing, that means that you stop doing them. If you really commit to truthfulness. And so I tend to find that there is a very positive impact to committing to satia or truth. But this is a spiritual lens.

This is about not what you're talking about, right? So your example is a little bit different. So let's talk about your example of like white lies. And the whole point of a white lies that it's harmless or even protects other people. Generally speaking, I have found that lying to people to protect them, generally, I used to think that that was okay. And the more times I test it, the less valuable it becomes. So as a simple, example, you know, like, let's just use a really common example. People will come into my office and they'll say, I'm suicidal because I have no reason to live. Now, in this moment, I'll tell me, okay, so tell me about your life. Okay, they say, I have no girlfriend, I have no job, I'm overweight, I'm addicted to pornography, I'm addicted to video games, I'm addicted, I have no prospects. I'm 32 years old.

I have no, nothing in my life. Now, the instinctive response in this moment is to say, hey, live, I believe you can accomplish a lot. And then what I found as a psychiatrist is to actually like speak honestly. And I can say, yeah, I can see why you would want to kill yourself because you literally do not have a life worth living. Your life seems like an absolute mess. And I can totally understand why you would not want to live this shitty existence anymore. It sounds like you're bouncing between dopaminergic activities to forget how bad your life is. But eventually the dopamine tolerance builds up and the reality of how shitty your life is.

breaks through. So this sounds like a terrible thing to say as a psychiatrist, right? And then I ask them one question. Do you want to change that? If you want to change that, I am committed to helping you have a life that is worth living. And this, I find, works way better. Because then the choice is theirs. Look, bro, you're telling me your life is shit. I met you 30 minutes ago. It's not my place to say that your life is worth living. But if you tell me that you, you're going to want to change your life and you're tired of living this life, this is what I will tell you as a psychiatrist. One option is to kill yourself. That's one way to get out of this life. The other option is to build a different life. And that's what I think you should do. So that's a good

example of like, you know, if this person is coming to me for my assessment. And another good example is things like cancer, right? Where like you want to protect people from the diagnosis. But I think like now you don't want to protect people from the diagnosis, even children. So I may be in the minority here, but I even find that talking to my children, talking to children patients who are seven, eight, nine years old, it's kind of, I'm getting emotional because I'm thinking about these experiences. I haven't had much of them. But it's like so amazing how, how we underestimate what children are capable of. And furthermore, how terrifying it is for a child who is so empathic, because it's seven, you don't have anything except for empathy. Your mind

doesn't work. You don't understand any logic. But your parents are, sitting there telling you with a smiling face that you're going to be okay, but you can tell that your parents are paranoid. It fucks children up, man. It really screws them up to be hearing one thing in every single. They're sitting there in the ICU with all these tubes hooked up to them, and their parents are coming in with trying to hold back tears and saying everything is going to be okay. It's so confusing for the kid. What's the alternative to that saying that, hey, there's a 30% chance you're not going to make it? I feel like that's worse. I feel like that's worse. I feel like it's better in that circumstance to say you will be okay because it gives them the maybe

the placebo belief that if they say I'm going to be okay, I trust my parents. They wouldn't lie to me. I believe I'm going to be okay. Yeah. So I think the placebo effect gets tanked pretty quickly because of the empathic circuitry at play. Because what you're actually getting, what that child is actually receiving is like no hope. Right. So I know it sounds crazy. And I may be I may be wrong here because it's not an extensive area of clinical experience. Suicidal people, I feel good about. And by the way, for suicidal people, like, you know, if the person tells me, like, I'm going to kill myself, I will also tell them. I'll be honest. I said, I'm not going to let you. Right. So I'll say, like, I'm going to send you the hospital. I'm going to hospital. I've done this

a thousand times. I'm going to hospitalize you against your will because I do not think this is right. I understand that you think it's right. But like, I do not think it is right. And I am imposing, I am imposing my will on you, which thankfully, you know, the laws of this country, allow me to do. I am taking away your freedom and forcing you to live this miserable existence. All I ask is that in the next 10 days, you give me a chance to try to show you that this can be fixed because I've done this for 100 people before you and we've made progress. I know that you think it's hopeless, but I think that there's hope. And you don't have to agree with me, I'm in charge. So I think that degree of honesty, so like I would never lie to a patient, but you'll absolutely

take their freedoms away. That's what we do as psychiatrists. So in the case of a child, I think it's even explaining to them like, hey, like, you know, it's a good chance that your life is going to end soon. And, you know, you may not be like you probably have maybe six months to a year. And like, what do you understand about death? Like, what do you think that is? And then also asking the kid, because think about this, right? If we never ask the kid, if you have six months left, what do you want to do? You have all these parents who are making decisions for the kid that, oh, this is what they're going to like and this is what they're going to like.

don't, we don't even, we take the kid, we take the last year of freedom that the kid has, and we take it away. It's restricted enough from the chemotherapy and whatever the else fuck they're getting. And I know I'm getting emotional, but like, I mean, I've seen some really powerful stuff that has changed my mind that kids are very understanding. They're very smart. And we shouldn't take that away. That's what I think now.

And I think when these, when these examples come, I think it makes a lot of sense, like logically that we shouldn't do this, right? of course, like protect the child. But I think kids are tough. Like I've seen so many seven-year-olds, eight-year-olds, nine-year-olds who've gone through so much trauma, so much abuse. They're much more resilient than we give them credit for. Do you feel like more children do better in terms of their illness being told that they're going to be okay? Or they do better being told, here are the chances, here's the reality. What do you want to do? So in the case of oncologic patients, I really can't answer that question because I'm not an oncologist, right? So my sample

size is incredibly small. And also, my involvement with these children is as a psychiatric consultant. So what this means is that there is some problem already, which the oncology team then calls the psychiatry team to help out with. So I have a very skewed sample size. One of the things that I think I would say, though, is my guess is that it's good. So if you look at the field of palliative care, the field of palliative care is a special of medicine where people, these are doctors that help people die. So palliative care is called in when terminal diagnosis is there. So it's not even about maintaining life. And generally speaking, the vast majority of palliative care physicians that I've worked with are, I don't think I've

ever heard a single one say like you should lie to a patient. The thing is they get so good with truth that you don't need to lie. That's another thing that we sort of slip up on is that we're not good at telling the truth. Like we don't practice it. We don't know how to do it properly, which is why we lie. Like kids start lying at such a young age. Right. So we get very bad.

Think about it this way. If I have a hard truth that I need to say and I dodge that by lying, I'm never going to get good at telling hard truths. And then what happens is hard truths become harmful because I'm not good at them. Right? Mm-hmm. And so what I've found as a psychiatrist is that telling the truth, like, It's hard, but you get good at it. And then, like, it works out pretty well.

How do people accept that they're going to die in the circumstances or that they have a high chance of not making it? Like, to me, if I'm told something like that, I don't know how I would be able to cope with that. Yeah, so you wouldn't. So how do people accept it? The answer is with help. Okay. Right? So the whole point is that you're going to have people there who will help you accept it.

So for whatever reason, I don't know why, I've had a lot of like terminal situations just in my practice. And this isn't necessarily my patients. It's oftentimes patients who are who have spouses or family members or even kids or parents who have cancer or whatever. Right. So I deal with death a lot. And I think that maybe the patients come to me because I have some perspective on it. But I think this is where what we know is like, you know, in order to understand how to deal with death, we have to understand a little bit about what life is, what death is. You know, and it starts with something simple as like, so, Graham, let's ask you.

So if you had a terminal diagnosis tomorrow, how do you think you'd respond? Terrible. In what way? I would feel like I didn't live to my full potential and there's still so much that I feel like I have to live for. Okay. So then we would talk about that. Sure. Right?

And so do you think that regret can be overcome? Yeah. Okay. Right? So the theoretical thing is there. Do you think that in this life you will accomplish? everything that you want to accomplish? No.

Of course not. So the basic measuring stick is the same. You can overcome regret and you're not going to accomplish everything anyway. Right? So it's doable. It's hard. There's help. There's, for example, like the Tibetan book of living and dying.

So we can also, like, so I draw heavily on spiritual perspective, which are really good. So we'll talk a little bit about that and then science if that's okay. So the first is that we have, there are some fundamental fears, and one of the fundamental fears that we have, I forget the pronunciation of this, abevinisha, or something like, I'm not pronouncing it right, this is the fear of death. There's a group of people, there's this book called the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, where they sort of say that if you look at your life, basically all of your fears and regrets stem from the fear of death. So if we look at something as simple as a desire, why do I want this thing now? Because my time is limited. Right. So if I don't

get this thing now, I may not get it later, and then it may be too late. So any problem in your life where you think it's not enough, why isn't it enough? Because I won't be able to get it later. Does that make sense? I won't have enough time. I need to do it now. Oh, should I marry this person or not marry this person? I don't want to waste the best years of my life. You only have to worry about wasting the best years of your life if your life is limited. You have an infinite amount of time, you can waste as much time as you want. And this, by the way, is why people procrastinate. The moment that you have an infinite amount of time, I can do it tomorrow, I can do it tomorrow, I can do it tomorrow, people procrastinate. So there's a certain liberation from infinity.

And if we look at human beings, what is it that takes infinity away from us? It is death. So once you understand and conquer your fear of death, all of your other fears or problems will melt away. This is sort of the theory behind the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. I think it works pretty well. So then they have a whole process of kind of overcoming that. So I think that works from kind of a spiritual perspective. From a practical or scientific perspective, what we know is that having a internal compass

to make sense of life is protective against death. So for some people, this is God. For some people, this is the theory of reincarnation. And even you can be an atheist. It doesn't matter. You just need to have some understanding of life that includes death in some way. And I've worked with people who are biological reductionists or atheists who are very comfortable with that, and they say, this is just what I get. Right? So I'm going to accomplish

as much as I can. I am stardust. I'm a speck in the universe in the grand scheme of billion years. I'm completely insignificant. So what does it matter? The whole point is you can believe in God. You can believe in reincarnation. You can believe in biological reductionism. But you as a human being should be centered in that belief. And that you can absolutely get people to. And it starts with something as simple as what I told you, which is that are you going to get to do everything that you want in life? No. And is there some way to deal with a regret? Yes. So since they're theoretically possible, now it just becomes a matter of degrees, right? Does that make sense? It does. And so it's doable. What role do you

think religion plays in that? And how important do you think it is to be spiritual or be religious? So, great question. So I think that religion is a easy way for people to get a compass in life. So remember that the scientifically important thing is that you have some kind of comprehensive and internally consistent system. Does that make sense? These are the two requirements that you need. So it has to account for everything that happens. And it needs to be non-contradictory. So that's really all you need. So generally speaking, we used to use religion as a pretty packaged way of getting and receiving that. Also, if we look at different cognitive temperaments, some people are more devotional by, nature. They're more faith oriented. They're less questioning, less logical. It doesn't mean that they're illogical. It just means that in the value system of what's important to them, they're

comfortable with not knowing. They're comfortable with faith. So religion is good in that way. But I don't think you need to be religious. And in fact, we've seen that with like atheism and things like that. It's just an easily packaged set of beliefs. We know that religion is protective in a lot of ways, right, because it does give us this compass. It gives us resilience, religion is also associated with a lot of positive mental health benefits that may not be due to the beliefs themselves, but congregations, community, a place to go, someone you can confide in, being able to talk to God. The other scientific advantage of religion is that it's usually speaking the way that we offer meditative practice. So for the majority of human history, meditative and concentration practices were accomplished through religion. So you'll have like, you know, the Hasidic Jews who will like rock back and forth. which has a whole physiology associated with it. So I think if you look at religion, there's a lot of very concrete benefits to it.

I think in the world that we live in today, you don't necessarily need religion. I think spirituality, I don't even know how you define that. So I tend to define spirituality is that the pursuit of that which is non-material and also non-mental. So if we look at like layers of existence, I believe that there is a material layer to existence, there is a psychological layer to existence,

and then there is, or energetic layer to existence is a better way to put it, and that there is a consciousness layer to existence. So the exploration of that third dimension is the practice of spirituality. That I think is very helpful. But once again, you don't necessarily need it. You can have religion, you can have spirituality, you can have neither. How does seeing so many people in crisis are so much tragedy throughout your life? because if you look at the concentration of just your world experience versus Graham or my world experience,

you have a very strong concentration of so much like negative stuff, just due to your profession. How has that affected your own personal life? And how do you keep an abstraction so you don't let that in? Yeah. So first of all, I don't try to keep it out. So I know it's kind of paradoxical. but I think it's had an overwhelmingly positive effect on me. And I think it'll have an overwhelmingly positive effect on most people, assuming they're able to maintain some degree of tranquility.

So I remember when I was in med school, I was, I asked my mom, because I had this case of a pediatric patient, pediatric oncology. And so I asked my mom who's a pediatrician, like, how are you able to do this? Like, because it was so emotionally raw and like so sad. And it's like kids, right? It's like dying kids. And she was like, well, what I like about pediatrics is like they get better. So she was telling me that she had a patient who had basically been run over by like a tractor. Okay, so like not a car, like a tractor.

So some part of their body leg or something like that. And she was like, yeah, he's going to be okay. Because like kids heal. Like they're still, you know, their brains are still plastic. Their brains are still growing. There's like all kinds of like kids will heal. And so I know it sounds weird, but we think that a lot of this negativity, like how do you deal with the negativity? So I actually find that it's some of the best like success stories.

So I've had patients that have been sexually abused since childhood, you know, who'll come in, suicidal cutting. I met them on the inpatient unit when they were kind of at their worst. And I'm thinking about one patient in particular who would say, like, I'm kind of fucked up. And so then as the weeks went by, I would start asking her, like, basically every time she came in, like, how are you today? And we'd kind of develop this rapport where she'd say, I'm fucked up or I'm less fucked up. And then over time, like, she's actually does great and, like, ends up, you know, forming healthy relationships and has kids. And people get better. And so I know that there's this idea that, okay, you're working with all these people who are sick.

Like, how do you not get worn down? But I want you all to just think for a second about the worst person that you've seen, that you've gotten to know. And you take these cases which are like probably worse than what a lot of people will see in their regular life. And you see that person get better. How does that change your perspective on life? And so if anything, I found that the more, you know, I work with incels who end up getting laid. and getting married. And then it gives you so much hope

that all these people are coming in, but you've seen human beings recover. And then this is the other thing that I think sometimes we don't pay attention to. So we don't pay attention to the mechanics of what really weighs us down. And like, even if something as bad as happening, the thing going well is not necessarily

what fixes people or gives people hope. It's actually sharing a negative experience. So you have these situations of people, going through things like genocide or, you know, death in the family. Like, let's use something way simpler. So the death in the family is never going to get better. You all get that?

Like, no one's coming back to life unless you're Jesus. And yet, families survive. Families actually get closer together. People, like, become more tightly bonded. They start to appreciate life even more, even though this negative outcome is never getting better. So I think sometimes what happens when people look at the negativity that a psychiatrist goes through is they look at this and they say, This one thing seems so scary.

But the whole point is that that which you don't understand is going to seem scarier. And so what I've actually found is that, like, the more I do this kind of work, like, the easier it is. I mean, the person that y'all are seeing in front of you is I'm made from this work, right? It's seeing human beings strive and sometimes fail and sometimes succeed. But, man, it gives you a ton of hope because now I know that, okay, these problems are not unsolvable. I'd probably say that out of the, you know, several hundred patients I've worked very closely with, I'd say that three of them have been people that I've quote unquote failed with. But even then, if you say that maybe let's say 1%, it's not that like, that's my failure, right?

It doesn't mean that those people are hopeless. It just means that like, I mean, my error rates got to be somewhere above 1%. So there's still even hope there. The last thing that I would say is from a very practical perspective, we are very poorly trained at dealing with other people's emotional energy. We don't get trained in this at all. So there are some practical techniques that I tend to engage in that really keep me centered. So it's kind of like, you know, if you're, you have to be like a rock in the ocean.

And so the whole reason that crisis dysregulates everyone, including me, is if I feel untethered. So when you get swept up in someone else's crisis, that's when it's going to affect you. But the more that you can kind of stay grounded, which are very practical techniques that you can kind of engage in to sort of help with that. And then it becomes it's completely different. How much of human behavior would you say is genetic versus environment? It seems like some people are genetically dispositioned to feel certain ways, whether that be, you know, sadness, happiness. Their baselines are a little bit higher in terms of where they are. We had Chris Williamson on and he, there's apparently a bunch of studies that have actually gotten like direct percentages for, you know, we can map out all of the physical traits like height, eye,

color and stuff like that, but for a lot of mental ones or like career ones as well. Yeah. So, I mean, I think I don't, I don't, I don't view it as a percentage. So in medicine, the way that we think about it is the genetics gives you your probability. And then the environment gives you the actual result. So let's like just take an example of like something called the bracham mutation. So the brachian mutation has a very high risk of breast cancer. So when people have a bad genetic braca makeup, they'll even recommend prophylactic mastectomies. So even before you have cancer, the risk of cancer is so high that the safest thing to do is to remove usually both breasts. So bilateral mastectomies.

So in that situation, we have a very strong genetic effect. In other situations, we'll have, I basically think about genes and environment as permissive. So even if we look at some things like, let's say, anxiety, we know that. there's a predisposition towards anxiety based on certain things. There's certain, like, for example, ion transporters that predispose you to depression or can be protective against depression. So we've mapped out a lot of this stuff. But I think what we sort of know is that, you know, gene plus environment. It's not like what percentage is what if that kind of makes sense. We need both of them. So if you have a certain kind of gene, but you have a protective environment, you may not

manifest with that phenotype. And if you have a high risk, or if you have a low risk gene and you have a very bad environment, you'll still manifest with that phenotype. I think from a clinical perspective, it's not useful to engage in that. For me, at least not yet. So I, because I can't do anything about either one, right? So we can shape environment from here on out, but like, I want to know what differences with mental health have you noticed going from small scale, like one-on-one client you, versus going public and making a YouTube channel and taking an information from a bunch of people, not only those who feel so compelled to go actually see a clinician, but those who maybe have mild interest in mental health and they go and they

watch one of your YouTube videos. How has it shifted your perspective? So I would start by saying almost like, I don't see much of a difference, but there is. I mean, I think that like the two experiences have been quite resonant. So one thing, I've learned a lot from doing public work, but I don't think that, so here's an example of what I've learned. So in psychiatric diagnosis, we have sort of a threshold of diagnosis, right? So if you meet, let's say, five out of nine criteria, you get diagnosed with a mood disorder like major depressive disorder. So if you have four out of nine, you don't get the diagnosis. So in psychiatry, we have, a very artificial binary nature to mental illness. So we say you have an anxiety disorder or you don't

have an anxiety disorder. It's very binary. The one thing that I realized from doing public work is that there is a vast majority, literally over 50% of people who have subclinical mental health illnesses. And what does that mean subclinical? That means that they've got like 50% of the illness. So that means that there are a lot of people who are struggling in some way, but they are not struggling to the point where it impairs their function and they meet the threshold of diagnosis. So what I've really found is that what I've really appreciated is that in the world today, we're so focused on mental illness. We're not focused on mental health.

And that mental health is more than the treatment of mental illness. and if you want to understand why mental illness is getting worse, the main mistake we're making with mental illness, in my opinion, is that we focused on diagnosis. So we've waited, we've taken this subset of the population that has five out of nine things going wrong, and then we treat them. We don't do anything for people who have one thing wrong, two things wrong, three things wrong, or four things wrong. So you can get 80% of the way to a mental health diagnosis and have no support or no intervention. And when we have a society where 80% of the problems are not being addressed in the average human being, this is the problem. Right? So we don't have a mental

health-focused society. Hell, even psychiatry is not about mental health. It's about the alleviation or buffering against mental illness. So if you look at the physical world, we're doing a good job compared to the mental world. Look at how often we have gyms. We have healthy food. we have smoothie places. We have all kinds of places where you can get healthy food, you can exercise, you can take care of your body.

How do you take care of your mind? No one knows. Hell, we even have physical education. One of your eight classes in school is like using your body. And there isn't any class on using your mind. So I've come to an appreciation of how widespread these problems are

that we ignore in psychiatry. Do you think that's just because physical bodies tend to respond the same way, but our minds don't? No. No? Our minds respond the same way, too. But don't you feel like everyone is so individualized? Like, you could tell one person something, they're not going to get it. You could tell another person something, you're not going to get it.

But if you reframe it in such a way that's personalized to them, maybe then it clicks. I feel like everyone's minds are kind of wired differently. Well, everyone's bodies are kind of wired differently, right? To a certain degree, but I think it's... if you put people, let's say, like, on the treadmill walking, you know, five miles a day, a lot of them are going to have similar results, or you give them the same weights based on their height, they're going to have similar results. I think the same is true of the mind.

I think the problem is that our understanding of the body far outweighs our understanding of the mind. So if you look at it, like, we know that, like, let's just take a biological reductionist view for a second. So, like, how different is your brain from Jack's brain? pretty much the same. We all have an amygdala. We all have a nucleus accumbens. We all have a frontal lobe. We know that there are certain changes in the way that things are connected, but that's true of the physical body as well. We know some people have kidneys that don't work quite as well. Some people have livers that do this. We know that some people will have, they're literally the way that their blood vessels are wired or is actually like different. There are variations in the way that, you know, does your right coronary artery feed this percentage of your heart? Or does it feed this percentage of your heart? There's a lot of variation. within people's bodies. And you can know this because you can look at two people and no two people look exactly the same. I would say the same is true of the mind. The fundamental pieces of the mind are the

same. So this is where I would kind of say that like, you know, you say, okay, you have to phrase things this way, you have to phrase things that way. I would say that the physical analogy of that is, sure, if you force everyone to lift weights, but like look at people's preferences for exercise. If you want to practically get someone to exercise, some people like swimming, some people like lifting weights. Some people are jogging. Some people are like running. It depends. Right.

So I've actually found that, I mean, the whole reason that I can do my job is because I can meet a new person and I have some idea of how their mind works. And that's true of all therapists. We know that there are things like automatic thoughts. We know of the impact of trauma. We know what trauma affects in your brain. All this kind of stuff. Got it. One thing that we talked about last episode, which was probably one of my favorite things, was Ayurvedic medicine.

Ayurvedic treatment and how you essentially what you do is you determine yourself as a certain kind of constitution and then based off of that constitution you can remedy any ailment based off of like some archetypal medicine treatment for that exact constitution. How would you describe the pros and cons of Ayurvedic medicine relative to Western medicine? Great question. So, okay, so con number one of Ayurvedic medicine. is that it may be wrong. So like, if we look at the biggest advantage of Western allopathic or what we would call scientific medicine is it is the most reliable system that humanity has

ever developed. So if you look at medicine, 99% of what we believe in Western medicine has historically been wrong. But we are also the system of medicine that is the best at detecting our own errors. This is, I think, the best thing about science. So if you look at science and we look at medicine, you know, for example, we had this medication called thalidomide. And man, thalidomide was great for nausea, was so good for nausea. And we used it in patients with cancer. We're like, this is a miracle drug, nausea.

And so then some doctor was like, you know what? You know who else gets nauseous a lot? You know who gets nauseous a lot? People that take the drug? No, that's what it cures. Pregnant ladies. They're like, oh, like morning sickness, this is great. Let's start giving these pregnant ladies thalidomide.

And it turns out that when you start giving pregnant ladies thalidomide, they give birth to babies without arms or legs. Right? So we had this miracle drug, and then Western medicine realized that this is bad. So if you look at what's really good about Western medicine, we're pretty confident that we're right. So the first problem with Ayurveda is that we don't know which parts of Ayurveda are like more correct and which parts are less correct.

So we know, for example, that Ayurveda has some treatments where they'll administer to stir heavy metals. And they believe that if you take something like mercury or arsenic, and then you boil it in clarified cows butter for six hours, that makes the arsenic safe. So they'll have a lot of these different beliefs and interventions that we just don't know what's actually working and what doesn't. That's the biggest weakness with Ayurveda. There isn't a whole lot of evidence base for the fundamental theories of Ayurveda because they're non-physical, which is kind of weird. So that's really the biggest weakness. We don't know really what works, what doesn't.

We don't know how correct or incorrect it is from an objective level because that's just not how they operate, which is maybe a conversation for a different day. The biggest advantage, which I think Western medicine is moving towards Ayurveda, is that in Western medicine, we separate a disease process from a person. So we have treatments for depression, right? So we can say that this is population-based medicine. We can take 1,000 people with depression. We can give them SSRIs, and we will see a, let's say, 40% improvement in depressive symptoms. This is a population-based approach. All science can tell us, or Western medicine can tell us.

Western medicine cannot make predictions about an individual because it is based on a population. Now, the interesting thing about Ayurveda is that a disease cannot exist outside of a person. And so what they do in their system of medicine is treatment is very individualized. Now, this is something that is so hard to understand because we think that Western medicine is individualized, but this is sort of like if you've grown up eating, you know, speaking English, the concept, if you've never heard of a different language, you can't imagine what a different language would be like. So I'll try to explain this. We try to think that in Western medicine, a disease obviously can be, you know, like exists within people, duh, right? But that's not actually how we treat it. So I'll give you all an example. In Western medicine, the gold standard. of how we collect information is something called a randomized controlled trial or RCT. Have you all heard of this? Mm-mm. Okay. So a randomized controlled trial is like the best level of evidence.

So in a randomized controlled trial, do you all know what controlled means? Mm-hmm. What does it mean? That means it's the group that hasn't been affected by something. Yeah. So what we try to do is not just that, but we try to control for all of the variables. So what we try to do is control for age. We control for race.

we control for ethnicity, we control for socioeconomic status, we remove some people from the trial. So, for example, like, you know, if we're doing a trial on depression, we'll remove people who are in heart failure. Does that make sense? Because the heart failure will affect, will mess up the trial. So if you really look at what controlling does, it removes individuality. Does that make sense? Because all the individual factors will removing, because we're trying to isolate the disease process. And we're trying to remove all individuality from the equation.

And so then what we end up with is an objective population-based answer, which works on average. But since we've removed all individuality from the equation, we can't practice individual medicine. Because all we have is general conclusions. Ayurveda is the exact opposite. So Ayurveda says individuality is paramount. And that you cannot, depression in two different people will look different. We'll manifest in different ways. And I think this is what we practically find as clinicians is we have to become miniature, amateur

Ayurvedic physicians because we know that actual patients don't respond to the medication the way that they're supposed to in trials. So the good thing about Ayurveda is that it's very individualized, which means that you can make better predictions faster because our system of diagnosis is not of a disease, it's of a person. So how is this person different? And so we can make our interventions that are more tailored to an individual as opposed to treating a disease. Because if 10 people walk into a psychopharmacologist's office, they get diagnosed with depression, the psychopharmacologist will give all the time of them the same medicine.

Whereas then, an Ayurbedic physician will give different people, different medications, or interventions, even for the same symptom of ulcers. Because they'll say that in ulcers, in this person, they have a hyperactive immune system, in this person, they have this problem, in this person, they have this problem. And even though the symptom is the same, the treatment will actually be different. because they don't work on the level of symptom. They work on the level of what is the root problem within the person. So how can someone find out more about Ayurvedic medicine? How would you recommend? Like, what resource? And on top of, I know that's kind of a weird question, but I'm sure a lot of people their interest is going to be fixed by this and they want to look further into it. And then on top of

that, just broadly, which classifications are there and how do you know which one you are? Okay. So great questions, but real problematic answers. So the first problem is, So now we get to another problem with irobedic medicine, which is that Western medicine has a very good skill floor. So we do not let people become doctors unless there is a minimum level of competence. The problem in the Ayurbedic system is that there, my sense is that there's a high degree of variability between Ayurvedic practitioners. So there isn't, like I think that like a lot of Ayurbedic doctors are, may not be very good. It's hard for me to really judge, but I think that one thing we're really good at in the West is standardization. So if you buy a car, like, the car is going to be pretty reliable. Like, I have a bottle of water here. Like, I'm pretty sure, like, I know what, you know, the solute concentration is going to be pretty reliable. In the West, we're all about standardizing, not about individualizing. So that's where I would, I would give people caution to

explore Ayurveda because even as a medical doctor and an expert in evidence-based complementing alternative of medicine, whatever that means. I am hesitant. I'm careful about when I recommend Iyrovet to patients because there is so much variability. I've seen some people who really don't know what they're talking about. Some people who know what they're talking about. I myself see an Ayurvedic physician. I send all my family members to an Ayurvedic physician. I had some really bad post-COVID symptoms, which like my Western doctor couldn't like really do much about. And my Ayurvedic doctor, like, had me back to normal in 30 days. And there's also some really interesting research that they have where Ayurvedic doctors claim that they can predict which, based on your constitution,

what kind of complications of COVID you'll have. So I don't know if you guys remember this, but some people will get brain fog, some people will get clots, some people will get lung problems, and they can predict and apparently intervene. But I haven't seen good data to support that, because their research infrastructure is also not very good. So where can you go to learn about Ayurveda? I think that David Frawley has a book called Ayurvedic healing, which I think is really good because it's someone who speaks English, first of all, and also understands Ayurveda pretty well. But David Fawley, I think, has a fair amount of what I would call fiery bias. So you've got to take that with a grain of salt.

The short answer is, for the majority of the audiences that I am familiar with, I do not think that there are good resources. That's the honest to God answer. So with the level of complexity, depth, support, logic that we are used to in the West when we consume information, that doesn't exist in Ayurveda. So Ayurveda has texts like Jarak Samita, but there's no justification of anything. There's, in fact, very little explanation. These are all sutras, which means basically they'll give equations, but they don't extrapolate at all. So, for example, like, what would be, you know, a 500-page textbook?

Like, if you have, like, let's say a textbook on physics that has F-equals MA, E-equals MC-squared, F-equals G-M-M-M-over R-squared, you have all these equations, and then we have all these chapters. But the Ayurbetic text will just have the equations. They'll just list them, and they won't explain a damn thing. So they have a lot of, like, you know, the essence of the knowledge, but poor extrapolation, so it's hard to learn. because in the east, we didn't learn from books. We learned through a lineage, a parampara, like a guru disciple tradition. So that's really where the knowledge is. So if you want to learn, you have to find a guru.

Ayurbedic healing, I think, is a good book that introduces the concepts. Let's do Kayashteram. We could try Kaish Theorem, but it's going to be hard. Yeah. Okay. So let's do Kaish Theorem. Maybe it'll work. Maybe it won't.

If people are listening to this at home, I would not recommend doing Kaish Theorem at the end of like listening to something for three hours because it's quite intense. So let's start with a quick background. So remember that Dr. Kay's whole argument is that the external world gives us happiness and unhappiness, which is what we think most of the time, right? So this is why I chase a particular, I want to date this particular person, I want to drive this car, I want to get this amount of money, finance. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck.

salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero, more like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. Security, whatever. So Dr. Kay's approach is that, that's not quite. quite as much as we think.

So more of it is internal. What question of it is internal is a question that you all have to answer? So we are going to go through a practice, which will do a couple of things. The first is it will train us for a tolerance of discomfort, which once we are able to tolerate discomfort, then we no longer need to give into discomfort,

and then we have control over our lives. Because if I say like, okay, like eat a kale salad, you say, I don't like kale. But if whether you like, liked or what you liked or didn't like didn't matter to you. Like when my kid says, let's play pretend, I want you to be the monster, I want you to be the princess. It makes no difference to me. So I can do both. It's very easy. Right. So you gain freedom when you are, don't have to give in to your likes and dislikes. So part of that is practicing the tolerance

of discomfort. The other good advantage is when we do that, we will strengthen our frontal lobes because we will have all these impulses. We will have all these signals and we're going to restrain them. But hopefully, if we're lucky, we'll learn something else, okay, which we're going to see if we can do. So what I want you all to do is sit up straight, neck straight, back straight, spine straight. Y'all can do this at home. Okay? I want you to close your eyes. You can fold your hands in front of you in your lap. Okay. And now what we're going to do is take a moment to work out whatever kinks you have. And now what we're going to do is be still. So Stiram means stillness and Gaia means body. So what we're going to do is don't move at all.

Okay? So at the very beginning, you may sort of notice that's a little bit difficult. And what I want y'all to do is start to tell me what it's. feels like to be still. How hard is it? It's pretty hard. I feel like little micro movements. Okay, so now we're at the stage of micro movement. So I'm going to start walking y'all through it, okay? So just notice that your little movements that you're trying to restrain. We've been doing this for about, let's say, 30 seconds. We're going to continue doing it. And then what you'll notice is that your body is sending you more signals. It's becoming a little bit more unpleasant. And then in your mind, you may have a reaction as well, which is, I'm not going to fail.

The ego begins to arise. I will succeed. I'm not going to give into this. I'm going to win. I'm going to learn whatever I need to do. I'm going to learn how to meditate so I can become successful and I can go monk mode and grinds that and all these things arise. So now your mind begins to try to overcome your physical sensations. You see what it is doing is giving you reasons not to give up.

It's telling you all the benefits. Because if it didn't tell you that, then you'd stop. Becoming more uncomfortable? I'll say it's about the same. Okay. So we'll wait until it starts to become more uncomfortable. Y'all let me know. I'm worried I could do this for a while.

I'm not predictably comfortable right now. All right. Okay. Right. So you feel the discomfort. Right? And what do you want to do, Jack? So no creasing your eyebrow.

And there you go. Right? tell me your experience, Jack. What I want to do right now? Or what do you feel like? I mean, it's so hard not to... What do I feel like? What do you feel in your body?

What are the signals that your body is sending you? That it just wants to like start kind of like running around, expelling energy. Okay. So now what I want you to both you all to do is I want you to start to breathe in slowly. feel the cold air as it enters your nostril, and then as you exhale, you feel the warmth. And now breathe again. And now notice that as you breathe,

in that moment of breath, as it's going in and going out, you have some relief from the bodily signals. Are you all getting that? Right? So now, like, what's starting to happen is in between breaths, there's, like, more torture. You're starting to feel like, you know,

know, aches, pains, nervous energy, you're starting to feel uncomfortable. But as you breathe in, notice that that gets a little bit better. So now sink into that breath. This is going to be your boat in a storm. So you're going to get rocked around, but you have one area of stability. Lean into that breath. Nice, deep breath. Feel that coolness come in, see it kind of flush into you and breathe out.

Maintaining perfect stillness of the body, it's going to be difficult. but you've got this one anchor. This is going to keep you tied. And so the signals around you are increasing. The back is aching. The arms feel strange. You're getting sweaty. You didn't notice that you were holding your body in some way,

but now you're locked into it. You feel uncomfortable and lean into the breath. Find solace. Is the breath helping? Mm-hmm. And now what's going to happen is things are going to get harder. Things getting harder? I would say I'm still enough.

The breath is just nice. Okay. So now let's wait for things to get harder. So as you say the breath is getting nice, just notice how much you're gravitating towards it, if that kind of makes sense. Right, that the worst things get in your body, the more relief breath provides.

We've been doing this for longer. So theoretically, things should be worse, right? The longer that you hold it, the worse that it gets. but what is the breath doing for you? It's like keeping me kind of grounded. Right? And so now what we're going to do is five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. And so as your body gets worse, the breath becomes more enjoyable, becomes more of a refuge, more of a solace.

Does that make sense? So now we can, I'll leave you all here. we don't have to continue more, but this is the purpose of the practice. So you can go ahead and come back. And the crazy thing there, so here's what I want y'all to really understand. You breathe.

How did it feel to breathe? Pretty good. That was really relaxing for me. I had no difficulty whatsoever. Okay. Yeah. So more for you than for you. So this is where meditation is to be individualized.

But see, breath gives you, like the only thing that was holding you was the breath, right? And so we think about it. We go our entire lives breathing. But how much do we enjoy it? Not a want, not at all. We take it for granted.

And yet look at how much joy, relief. Like, I don't know about y'all. We didn't do it long enough because of, you know, but really you do Kaish theorem for 15 minutes. And it becomes a torture. And as you do Kaish theorem for 15 minutes and it's torturous, the breath becomes a salve. It becomes cooling.

It becomes a refuge. It becomes ecstatic. And what are we actually doing here? We're experiencing suffering and ecstasy at the same time. In the same moment. And what is giving us ecstasy? Is it a million dollars? Is it a Lambo?

Is it big guns? No, it's all it is our breath. So the really powerful thing about Kaish Theorem, which if you do this practice for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes without moving, you will discover that there is ecstasy, from breath alone. You don't need anything. And once you practice this every day for like a month where you're sitting still for 20 minutes and it's a torture, it's a torture, it's a torture. And then even you can try holding your breath and holy shit, you're going to put yourself

in so much pain and then breathe. And then you'll begin to realize that like how deeply uncomfortable is this and how much pleasure comes from and what are we doing? We're doing nothing. You're not doing anything. You're not succeeding. You're not failing. You're doing literally, you are sitting there with your eyes closed. And look at the struggle. Everything is internal.

The relief is internal. The victory is internal. The failure is internal. If someone looks from the outside, what are they going to see nothing? What benefit is this going to be nothing? But you can fight an entire war within yourself. You can find victory. You can find relief.

You can find solace. And once you realize this, holy shit, whatever the external world throw It doesn't matter because you have it all in here. You can create ecstasy any time you want to, right in here. And all you need is your breath. Gaiash theorem will teach you this. So you asked a question earlier. You guys have been asking the whole time, how do you get someone to understand?

What do you do? I can't explain it. You just have to do it. If you really do Kaysh theorem or some other meditative practice, you will discover that literally your experience of life is internal. I don't know if this makes sense, but you look at the outside world and you think something brings you happiness or unhappiness. But how? What literally happens?

So if I look at a piece of paper, that's a test and it has an A on it. This is ink on a piece of paper. How does this bring happiness? It's ink on a piece of paper. It brings happiness how? Because this I see. So I have a sight of something. Does this visual stimulus?

Is this pleasurable to the eyes? do I look at this and say, wow, look at this piece of paper with an A on it. What a work of art. Look at how wonderful it is. No. Where does the happiness come from? So it's not the eyes. It's not the paper.

Then where can it come from? Inside. It is the association that I have with this. What this means to me, it is the meaning that I attach to a piece of paper, which is what brings the happiness. So I had a patient who was upset that she didn't have a thigh gap. Do you guys know what a thigh gap is? Right? And so like, this is something that is in her mind. I'm not saying that people won't treat her differently. The world will treat you whatever way that it wants to. But make no mistake that the world can treat you a particular way. It doesn't have to be, you know, like, I'm walking down the street and a homeless person tells me I'm a dumbass. This is an insult. Do I get bent out of shape? Do some people get bent out of shape? Absolutely. Do other people be like, wow, this person's crazy? The stimulus is the same. It is the way that you. It is the way that you. you respond to it that dictates whether you get into an argument with a homeless person or

you just continue walking by. So all of this is what's crazy is I'm going to go ahead and say 99% because I can't say 100%. But all of these things you guys talk about money. What is money? It's a number in a bank account. Can you control inflation? Maybe it'll be worth half as much. What if the market goes down?

What if the market crashes? What if there's a nuclear war? There's all kinds of things that we get caught up and all this stuff. if you really look at yourself, all of your unhappiness doesn't happen from the outside. Something from the outside enters the inside. It crosses a barrier. And when it crosses a barrier, you attach things to it. And it is what you attach to the outside world, that is where you're suffering or joy comes from.

Right? If I get a phone call from a friend of mine and says, hey, fucker, what's up? The signal is the same. It is what does the hey fucker mean to me? So this is what's crazy. And then if you really think about it, we think that the world is this way. But hold on a second. When the world conditions you, what is it actually doing?

It is shaping your internal reaction. That's what conditioning is. But it's not the world. The world shapes your internal reaction. Your internal reaction results in happiness or sadness. So all you need to do is recondition yourself. recondition yourself and no amount of suffering in the world will affect you. Right? So you asked me a question earlier, how do I do it with all these suicidal people all the time?

It's because when this person does well, I condition myself. I say, look at this. Isn't this amazing? That this person was so screwed in life and look at what they can accomplish. Look at the testament of the human spirit. And if someone else comes along, now everything comes full circle because we talk about cognitive reframing. It is the way that you choose to see the world, which ultimately determines your experience of life. When we talk about the internet, what is the basic problem with the internet? The internet removes our ability to see the world the way that it is. It biases us. That's what it's doing.

We're all getting shaped, conditioned by the internet. This is why people are upset about thigh gaps. People have had no thigh gap for the history of humanity, and human beings have been okay with it. But, and then people will say, but this is the world that I live in and people will judge me. But how much do you care about other people's judgment? That can be shaped. Right? So all of this starts very simply with Gaiash Theorem.

Gaish Theorem will change the way that you experience something fundamental as breath. That which you take for granted, which brings you no joy, no pleasure, nothing. It is a completely neutral stimulus. You can find joy in that. And if you can find joy in the completely neutral, And even then in Kaish theorem, you will long for the practice because you'll love that joy, you'll tolerate the discomfort. And you will love the practice and you will choose to sit down for 20 minutes and torture your body for 20 minutes as it cries out to you that I want to move, I want to move, I want to move. Holy shit, if you can do that, then nothing will stop you.

Because anything that the world says, your mind will tell you this will hurt, it will not stop you. Because hurt is nothing to you. It is the way that you deal with it. Amazing. That was awesome. Thank you. That was a perfect way to end an episode. This has been one of the best, I think the best podcast.

For all, it's the longest podcast we've ever done, but this is one of the few where it's just time seems to have stopped. Just thrilling. Beginning to end. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you. That was incredible. Anything you want to talk about?

I know the book and you're writing another one right now. I mean, so we have a guide to trauma coming out. So I think that a lot of people who want to understand a, see, here's. one thing to understand. So when we look at psychiatry, we think it's in the mind. But the one thing that I've learned about trauma is that so much of it is physiological. So I think part of the reason that mental health is getting worse is because we try to treat mental health only in the mind. But the mind exists within a body. There's a whole nervous system that contributes to the function

of your mind. So we made a guide on trauma because I have seen some amazing results when people start focusing on the whole dimension of a human being, which is kind of what we dig into. Like, how to rewire your physiology, how to change your thinking. A lot of this conditional thinking that we kind of talk about will sort of talk. We explain how to sort of shape all that stuff. So there's a lot of stuff in there because if you really look at trauma, what trauma is, it is the way that you adapt to your circumstances. So you change as a human being when you survive trauma.

And those adaptations become maladaptations. So the trauma guide is really our best attempt at teaching people how human beings get. wired. And once you understand how the wiring happens, it will help you rewire. Perfect. So we'll link to all of your information down below in the description, whatever you want there. It'll be there. Thank you so much. If you've actually made it to the very end of the episode, if you're actually watching this right now, please comment. Let us know how many people have made it to the very end of this. We really appreciate it. If you're not already subscribed, also just make sure to subscribe because it's totally free. We're closing in on a million subscribers. So if you want to be a part of that,

it's free. Just click the button. Thank you so much. Shout out Caleb Hammer for letting us use the studio. Thanks, Caleb. Shout out Noah for being behind the monitor right now. Working for free.

Thank you guys. Until next time.