The Joe Rogan Experience - #1869 - Dr. Gabor Maté

Episode Date: September 13, 2022

Dr. Gabor Maté is a physician, speaker, and author regularly sought for his expertise on a range of topics including addiction, stress, and childhood development. His latest book, "The Myth of Normal," will be available on September 13, 2022. https://drgabormate.com/

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Pleasure to meet you. I've really enjoyed your conversations online. I love your perspective, and it's really a real pleasure to have you in here. Well, I really am happy to be here with you. Thank you. My pleasure.

This book, The Myth of Normal, this is your book. Yeah, I really am happy to be here with you. Thank you. My pleasure. This book, The Myth of Normal. This is your book. Yeah, it's called The Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. And it kind of sums up everything I've ever learned. What exactly is toxic about our culture? Is that a too big a question? No, it's the central question. Yeah. If you imagine you're a microbiologist in a laboratory growing microorganisms in a Petri dish, that's called a culture. You put in a brew with the right nutrients and the microorganisms thrive and they multiply. But if a lot of them start getting sick and a lot of them started dying,

you'd say this is a toxic culture. Now, if you look at what's happening in North America now, there's an article in the New York Times 10 days before we speak of a teenager being on 10 different psychiatric medications. 10 different psychiatric medications. More and more kids are being diagnosed with ADHD, with anxiety, with depression. The rate of childhood suicide is going up,

and everybody's saying, what's going on here? Why is this going on? More and more people are getting autoimmune disease, mental health issues. The overdose crisis in the States, over 100,000 people died of overdoses. Either we assume that these are all accidents and sort of blows of misfortune,

or we get that there's something about this culture that's fomenting so much illness. 70% of American adults are on at least one medication. 70? 70, yeah. 40% are on about two at least. That's a toxic culture. There's all kinds of, I could talk about what makes it that way, but when I talk about toxic culture,

I'm talking about its impact on the people who inhabit it. So this toxic culture, are you just talking about the overall way human beings communicate? Is it the way we're being raised? Is it the foods we eat? Is it everything?

It's all that. It's all. And salient amongst them, how we raise our kids. What about how we raise our kids? Well, if you look at how human beings evolved over millions, really, of years and hundreds of thousands of years, and even our own species has been on the earth for about 150, 200,000 years. For all that time until the blink of an eye ago we lived out in nature in small band hunter-gatherer groups where kids are raised

communally so that it wasn't just an isolated nuclear family or a isolated mother or father it was grandparents and uncles and aunts and the whole community. It takes a village, as the saying goes. It takes a whole community. Now, children also were picked up when they cried. In fact, they were never even put down. They slept with their parents. They were breastfed for three or four years. In today's society, and I can start even before that, already we know that stresses on the pregnant women have a negative impact on the infant, physiological impact on the infant's brain development. It's not even controversial. In our society, we don't pay attention to women's emotional needs when they're pregnant,

and we don't pay attention to the child's emotional needs. So the child needs to be held and accepted unconditionally. Now, in our society, we actually tell parents not to pick up their kids when they're crying. Yeah. And that is an insult and a trauma to the child. And that has an impact on the child's trust in the world, sense of safety, sense of belonging, how they feel about themselves.

You know, in the book I talk about my mom, and I talk about my own infancy in Budapest, Hungary, as a Jewish infant other than Nazis. So you can imagine how stressed my mom was. But forget the Nazis for a minute. I read her diary, and she writes, this is when I'm two weeks of age, and we're in the maternity hospital,

and she says, my poor little Gabor, my heart is breaking for you because you want to be fed and you're hungry, but I promised the doctor I would only feed you every four hours, and you've been crying for the last hour and a half. What's it like for an infant to lie there next to their mom and not be picked up and fed for an hour and a half? Now try telling a mother baboon or a mother cat or a mother bear

to ignore the child's distress for an hour and a half. So the very advice that we give to a lot of parents these days already damages the child. Where is that advice coming from? Who are the experts that thought it was a good idea to not pick up children when they're crying? It's been going on for about 100 years, maybe even longer.

Dr. Spock, I don't know if you remember the name, Benjamin Spock, his book was just the most influential parenting Bible for decades, through the 50s and the 60s and the 70s. And he talked about the tyranny of the baby who wants to be picked up. He says, well, how you deal with that is you walk out and you shut the door and you don't go back. In other words, you isolate the infant.

Now, look at how hunter-gatherers raise their children. They carry their babies everywhere. I met a Cree woman once who told me in our community, kids weren't even allowed to touch the ground for two years. They were just held all the time. So it's modern life. It's the pressure and stresses of modern life acting on parents that makes it so difficult for them to really be there for their kids.

Now, my mother's heart was breaking. She went against her own instincts to follow the doctor's advice. Again, you tell a mother rat or a mother baboon to ignore the baby's cries, and you find out what mother rage is all about. And what does this effect of not holding babies and not comforting them when they cry,

what does this have on the child? Well, let's say you're my friend, okay? And you come to me for help as an adult. And I ignore you. What's the impact on you? What are you going to believe? I don't know. I mean, if you ignore me,

I'm going to take into account what the rest of the world says. You might, but what would you believe about my attitude towards you? I would think you're ambivalent. Yeah. You don't care. Exactly. That's exactly the impact on the child. Not consciously, but unconsciously, the child makes the assumption that there's something wrong with me. I'm not lovable.

Consciously, the child makes the assumption that there's something wrong with me. I'm not lovable. The world is an unsafe place because we learn about our worlds through how we interact with our caregivers. That's the template. I mean, if you ever raised a puppy dog, you know that how you treat that little infant animal has a huge impact on what kind of a creature they're going to develop into. Well, human beings are the same, in fact even more so, because we're more dependent and more helpless than the average animal is. So we need that care and that connection even more powerfully. So when we're lacking it,

the infant assumes unconsciously that there's something wrong with them, they're not lovable, the world is not a trusting place. Then we spend our lives acting out from that unconscious belief. So the majority or a large portion of our culture develops as a child with this problem. In this world, yes. In this world, very much so. Then there is the, like if you look at

what a psychologist friend of mine calls the irreducible needs of children. Irreducible meaning that if you don't meet these needs, there's going to be negative consequences. The first one is unconditional loving acceptance. Just the sense of belonging, attachment, it's called. Connection. The infant needs that. You know how a baby elephant is born? When the mother elephant goes into labor, all the mother elephants stand around in a circle. When the infant plops on the ground, they all reach out their trunks and they stroke the infant.

That's natural instinct. You belong to us. You're welcome here. Now the human infant needs that at least as much as the baby elephant. So the first need is this unconditional loving welcome in the world. The second need of the child is that the child shouldn't have to work to be loved, to be accepted. I shouldn't have to be pretty, smart, successful, compliant, good, nice, anything. smart, successful, compliant, good, nice, anything. I'm just, I shouldn't have to work for what is my birthright,

which is to be accepted as a person with value and worth and lovable in their own right. That's the second. The third need is the freedom to experience all our emotions. Okay, all our emotions. Now, our brains have emotional circuits for rage,

which we need to protect ourselves, for lust, which we need to reproduce, for seeking curiosity to explore and get to know our world. One of the, and there's other emotional circuits as well, for care, so that we can look after each other.

These are circuits that nature, evolution has wired us with. These have been studied. Now, so one of the needs we have is the freedom to experience all our emotions, all our emotions, our gut feelings and everything else. our emotions, our gut feelings and everything else. A lot of parenting experts will tell you an angry child should be made to sit by themselves so they come back to normal. I'm quoting a very famous person here, a psychologist who said this in his book. An angry child should be made to sit by themselves so that they come back to normal. Now, what's the message to the child?

Anger is not normal. If you want to belong to us, you have to suppress your anger. Now, suppressing the anger is a trauma because anger is given to us by nature as a natural boundary defense.

If I enter your space in a way that threatens you, you better get angry with me. Get out. That's healthy anger. If I suppress that, if I depress it, push it down, 30 years later you're diagnosed with this disease called depression. It's not a disease. It was your response to the stupid advice of the parenting experts that your mothers and your fathers believed they should follow. It's a coping mechanism. You pushed on the anger to be accepted by your environment, but later on that causes you problems,

mental health issues and physical health issues. So when I'm talking about irreducible needs, I'm talking about the real needs. And in this society, parents are told to keep ignoring their own parenting instincts, to make the child behave the way they expect them to behave, and the result is a lot of kids are hurt without parent meaning to hurt them. They love their kids.

They do their best. But because of this culture, they actually end up hurting the kids. So this is standard in America. Pretty much. And you feel like this is the base of this host of psychological problems. Well, I wouldn't want to put everything down to just one dynamic.

Right. But it's certainly what happens to children in the first three years is a huge template for problems later on. And once a child develops and becomes an adult and has all these issues that are connected to the way they were raised, what can be done then? Well, that's where the process of healing has to begin. And by the way, okay, let me deal with the question.

What can be done then? Well, the first thing we have to do is to recognize what's going on. What happened to me. Like, if I can talk about my own example. Okay. So, medical doctor,

I'm in my 40s, successful physician, newspaper columnist, respected, good income and all that. But I'm a workaholic. I have to be working. If I'm not working, I'm kind of depressed and alienated,

which is how my family experiences me, including my young kids. Why am I that way? Because as a Jewish infant under the Nazis, the message that I got is that the world didn't want me. Now, not because the Nazis directly affected me as an infant, although we lived under Nazi occupation in my first year of life. So my mother was, our life was under daily threat. In the book, there's a painting of my mother and I with her wearing a yellow star. When I was 11 months old,

she handed me to the complete stranger in the street to save my life in Budapest. I stood on that very pavement just a couple of months ago when I visited my birth city. So she gives me the total stranger to convey me to some relatives in hiding because she thinks where we're living, I'm not going to survive another day. So she does this to save my life.

Now what message do I get? I don't know that there are Nazis. I don't know that, remember, there's passing me on to a stranger to save my life. What sense do I get? I'm being abandoned. I'm not wanted. I'm not lovable. Well, if you're not lovable, if you're not wanted,

one of the things you can do is to go to medical school because now they're gonna want you all the time. And every day you get to prove to yourself how important you are and how much they want you and how essential you are to everybody's life. What message do my kids get when daddy's not around all the time? Or when he's around, he's kind of in withdrawal from workaholism. They get the same message.

So we pass it on. This is what trauma is. We pass it on unwittingly from one generation to the next. And we don't even know we're doing it i didn't know i was doing it so you know when you say how do we at some point you have to say so damn the successful doctor colonists and so on but i'm depressed at some point i have to start asking and my kids are afraid of me i have to start asking myself, what's going on here? Why is this tension in my family? Why are my wife and I breathing together at this point, 54 years coming this November,

but when our kids were small, we had a very tense marriage. And I have to start asking myself, what's going on? And that's when you start looking for the answers. So the first thing is we have to recognize that the way it is is not working. And maybe it doesn't have to be this way. So how did you go about shifting the way you think about your life and the world and being a workaholic and becoming what you feel like do you feel like now you're a healthy person you should ask me that relatively you should ask me that on my deathbed okay because then i'll give you the final answer but uh well right now how do you feel right now i've come a long way i'm much more balanced um i'm not 100 there there. I'm not. Like what's missing? Every once in a while when I get

triggered, I still can behave like I had never learned anything at all. Sometimes when you're triggered, the circuits in your brain that can regulate you and guide you, ground you, go offline. I can still go offline sometimes, but much less than I ever used to. And I come back to groundedness much more rapidly. I also have learned how to take care of myself. But I've done a lot of work to sort out all the traumas that I experienced as a child. So it's taken a lot of work. And what kind of thing really triggers you?

When I'm not understood. When you're not understood, really? When I'm not seen, when I'm, and when I perceive myself as not being respected for who I am. And I don't mean respect for what I do. I mean respected for, because people can disagree with what I do, and I don't take that as a sign of disrespect. It's just a disagreement.

But when I'm not respected just for who I am as a person. As a human being. As a human being, yeah. So if someone insults you or someone dismisses you or treats you like shit? Very often I can see that as their problem. They're projecting something on me. I'm sure you've had the same experience. In fact, I know you had because I saw you on TV with Lex Friedman.

And he talked about how you handle the negative vibes that come your way sometimes. So sometimes I can see that as their issue. But if I'm particularly vulnerable, maybe stressed, maybe I haven't taken care of myself, maybe I haven't swum for a few days, so my nervous system is on edge, then maybe I can take it personally and then I can get triggered. That seems like one of the best forms of medicine, some sort of rigorous exercise. You don't want to talk to me if I haven't swum for a couple of days. Swimming is your thing. That's my thing.

That's a great one. That's a great one because it's physically exhausting. It exhausts the muscles, the cardiovascular system. The mind gets in that meditative state of constantly stroking, constantly kicking. And you have to breathe, don't you? It's like a... And so I do that 50 minutes an hour a day and it makes a huge difference for me. And when you do that, do you do it with the intent of enjoying it or do you do it saying that this is the necessary work i have to do or is it a

combination of both for me it's enjoyable i i love i look forward to stretching with my body in the pool and just getting that rhythm as you say going getting the breathing going um and just notice the thoughts oh next week i'm gonna be on joe rogan you know and and just notice the thoughts. Oh, next weekend, I'm going to be on Joe Rogan, you know? And notice that those thoughts come and go, but not stay with them. Just watch the video in my mind as I swim, you know? Yeah. So you recognized at how old were you when you recognized that you really had a problem?

I would say I was in my early 40s, early to mid 40s, I would say. So what were the first steps that you did to try to come out of that and just evolve your process? Yeah. I will answer that, but I have to tell you as well that this is not separate from my medical work either, because in my medical practice I began to notice that who got sick and who didn't wasn't accidental. There were certain traumatic imprints in people who got physically ill and mentally ill, who got addicted and so on. So what I saw in medical practice kind of melded with what I experienced in my own life. kind of melded with what I experienced in my own life. So my steps were both to start talking to my patients and to find out about their lives.

And I began to see the commonalities amongst people, including myself and my patients. It doesn't matter how addicted or how ill they were. There was always something about them that I could recognize in myself. And I began to go for therapy. And I began to really research the child developmental and trauma literature. And the more I did, the more I learned.

So, and then, you know, eventually, like you, I got into psychedelic work as well. That didn't happen until much later. But it was all that. And what psychedelic work did you do? And how did that help you? How did that happen? So my book on addiction in the realm of hungry ghosts,

Close Encounters with Addiction, was published in 2009 in Canada and in 2010 in the States, in which I point out that addiction is always, always, always rooted in trauma. Always? Always, yeah, 100%. What about genetics? Do they play a factor, or is the genetics just related also to trauma? Well, here's the interesting thing about genetics.

You know what the best letter I ever received was? It was from a woman who was 48, and she wrote me from somewhere in the States. She sent me an email to thank me for the birth of her over-4-year-old child. She said, we just celebrated my daughter's four-year birthday thanks to you she said because my husband used to be an alcoholic and he used to believe that his alcoholism was genetically determined so he didn't want to have a child because he didn't want to pass on the addiction the alcoholism gene because he was he had suffered so badly but then he read your book and he realized it wasn't genetics at all it was uh trauma as a result and i was just at the edge of the childbearing years i was 44 so now we have this four-year-old child thank you and i thought this is the best praise

i've ever got because i've been thanked quite often for saving people's lives but never for causing one long, long distance. So go back to your question about genetics. There's no gene for addictions. I don't care what they tell you. What there are, there are some genes that make it more likely that you might become addicted,

but they don't cause addiction as such. In fact, the addictions have nothing to do with, sorry, the genes have nothing to do with addictions at all. Now you say, well, how come? My father was an alcoholic. My grandfather was an alcoholic. I'm an alcoholic. It's not the gene that's passed on. It's the trauma that's passed on. Because what's it like to grow up in a home with alcoholism? Now, there are some genes that make some kids more prone to have mental health conditions and addictions and so on.

But there's no gene that causes any specific mental health illness, any specific addiction. What there are is a large group of genes that the more of them you have, the more likely you are to have any mental health conditions, including addictions. But you can have those same genes and be a perfectly happy, successful, joyful, creative person depending on how the environment acts on those genes. Which means that the genes are not for disease, they're for sensitivity.

And the more sensitive you are, when things go well, the happier you are. When things go badly, the more unhappy you are, the more pain you have have the more you have to run away from pain and that's where the addiction comes in. So the genes are not for addiction as such and most of my profession gets this completely wrong. So yes there's a genetic position, predisposition not to addiction as such but to either joy or suffering depending on what the environment does when it acts on you so um i forgot where this conversation began but this is where we are now

well we're just talking about addiction and genetics and whether or not you know when when you hear about families that have a history of alcoholism. We just assume, based on what we're told, that that's because this is... The gene. Yeah, and it's probably the part of the world your ancestors are from, and whether or not they had a history of abusing alcohol, and there's genetic predetermining factors.

Okay, there's a great example to refute that right here in the United States. So prior to colonization, the native people had no problem with addiction at all. And they even had some alcohol in the New Mexico area. Really? Yeah, apparently so. There was all these other plants around, by the way. There was no addiction. Then you traumatize that population.

You subject them to the extermination and the destruction of their ways of life and their culture. Like in Canada, we have a terrible problem. When I worked with addictions in Vancouver's downtown east side, 30% of my clients were indigenous people. They make up 5% of the population. 30% of the people,

of the men in jail in Canada, 50% of the women in jail in Canada are indigenous people. They have much more addiction, child abuse, mental health issues, suicide, violence. Maybe you heard about the stabbings up in Canada right now. Yeah. It was in an indigenous community. Why? Because they were so traumatized by what happened to them. And for 100 years, their children were abducted from their homes by the state and the church,

sent to these residential schools where they were sexually, physically, emotionally abused. I met a woman. By the way, I remember where we started talking about snog. You're asking about psychedelic works. I'll come back to that in a minute. I was in a psychedelic ceremony with some indigenous people in Canada maybe about eight years ago now. I met a woman who was taken from her family

by law, abducted by the police, taken to the nursing school. The parents weren't even allowed to visit these kids. They were, her first day in school as a four-year-old, she spoke her tribal language.

You know what the punishment was? They stuck a pin through her tongue. This was in the 1960s in Canada. 1950s, I'm sorry, late 1950s. For a whole hour, this little girl couldn't put her tongue back in her mouth for fear of cutting her lips. That's before the sexual abuse began. By the time she was nine-year-old, she was an alcoholic. By the time she was nine years old, she was an alcoholic. By the time she was 20 years old, she was a heroin addict. Not her grandchildren are heroin addicts. What's being passed on here is the trauma, not the addiction. Now, the reason I began to talk about addiction is after that book came out showing the relationship between addiction and trauma, I would travel and I'd be speaking, and people would ask me,

what do you know about ayahuasca and the healing of addiction? I'd say I know nothing. Next city, hey, what do you know about addiction and the healing of trauma? Nothing. Finally I got sick of it. I've just written a book. I've just spent three years writing a book, and you keep asking about the one thing

I don't know anything about. But you know what? The universe is a way of knocking at our doors. And somebody said to me, did you know you could actually do this up here in Vancouver? I said, okay, this is the message. I've got to do it. I did the ayahuasca,

and in half an hour I got, I've been asked that question. I just got it. Because with the ayahuasca and the chanting, I had these tears of love flowing down my cheeks. Not love for any one particular person,

just open heartedness. It was amazing. And I understood something. How close they had been to love all my life, even to my spouse and to my children and to the world. Why was my heart so closed? Because it had been bruised so early

and so we closed on our hearts. We don't even know what that kind of love is. So with this plant, that opened up and I also got the pain of what happens to us when we close our hearts all of us human beings it really hurts and then we have to protect ourselves from that pain but drugs and behaviors and sex and gambling and work and everything else so I got that if we can both feel the pain that we've been running from all our lives,

but also maybe experience the love that's underneath all that pain. We don't have to keep running. No, it's not that simple. And it's not like overnight I was a changed person. Believe me, I wasn't. But at least I saw the possibilities. And then I decided, I'm going to work with this plant. I'm going to help others with this plant.

I'm going to help myself with this plant. So that's how I got into psychedelic work. So this one experience, you have this revelation. You feel this love and you understand that you have been closed off to this your whole life. Yeah. Do you need subsequent experiences do you do you just internalize and reflect and try to sort things out and then or like how what is the process for you well what you said should have been the process but I didn't know that yet you know I had this thing and then you know the buddha um has got this terrifying story that he tells that's one of the

metaphoric stories that he tells of this two strong men dragging a third man towards an abyss they're going to throw him into the pit and he resists but he's not strong enough to resist. The Buddha, the two strongman he called it, are habit energies. They're ingrained habits, beliefs, subconscious emotions, everything that's driving us. And if we want to overcome those habit energies, we have to do what you just said, integrate, work on it, reflect, hang out with it. I didn't do that. I just plunged back into my workaholism. Now I'm going to save the world using this plant. And I started leading retreats.

And I did a great job helping others. But I didn't go far enough with myself. So that's something I had to learn. How did you recognize that? Well, I can tell you a story. Sure. So it's in the book. 2019, this is like three years ago now, in June,

I flew to Peru to lead an ayahuasca retreat for physicians and healers and psychiatrists and psychologists, counselors from around the world. And by that time, I had a worldwide reputation. My books had been published in 30 languages. So people, healers, came from all over the world to work with me. In the Amazon jungle, at this ayahuasca center. Now, I don't lead the ceremonies, I'm not a shaman, so my role is not to pour the, not to give the brew or to lead the ceremony, but to help people formulate their intention and after the experience to help them integrate it, to help them understand what happened to them. I'm adept at doing that.

So we do the first ceremony, and there are six shamans, maestros and maestras, three men, three women. These beautiful, short little people stand up to my eyebrows. And there's a first ceremony in the Malacca, the tent-like building in which the ceremony is held. And they chant. Each of them chant.

There's 24 of us. There's 23 participants that came out of the world, from all over the world, four continents to work with me in the jungle. And there's me. When the shamans come to chant to me, all six of them in turn, I'm sitting there thinking you can do your best but this brain is too thick you're not gonna get through, this skull is too thick try and break through this one and not much

happens. Next morning they send a delegation to me, and they say, we can't have you in ceremony. Why not? Because we think that you have such dark, dense energy that affects everybody else in the room, and it interferes with our capacity to help the others, and because of this dark energy that you're carrying,

our Icaros, our chants can penetrate you. What is causing them to have this reaction? What are you doing? Well, it's not what I'm doing. It's my fixed belief. And how do they know about this fixed belief? How is it manifesting? Because they're shamans.

They just feel it. They sense it. They're highly trained people. They pick up on energies. I don't say anything and they don't know who the heck I am. They're not impressed with my reputation and my international standing

or the books that I've published. They just pick it up. That's what shamans do. That's what a good shaman does. So they said, our chance can't penetrate it, but worse than that, it's affecting the others.

So we want to help the others. We can't have you in the room. And furthermore, they said, we think you have worked with so many traumatized people in your life and you've absorbed their traumas and you haven't their traumas and you

haven't cleared it out of yourself and furthermore they said and you were very small we think you had a big scare and you haven't got over it yet this is me at age 75 wow no in the book i can i'll show you a a painting um if i may. This is from the first chapter. This is a painting that my wife did from a photograph. The photograph is in the up and left-hand corner of the painting of my mother and I at three months of age. You notice she's wearing the yellow star that Jews had to wear under the Nazis. What do you see in the expression in my head?

You traumatized baby. Yeah. These people picked that up 75 years later. And so what they did is they assigned one shaman to work with me alone. And I had my own ceremonies over 10 days every second night. Wow. And the other five worked with the rest of the group. And so they fired me from my own retreat. Now my ego didn't like that very much, but, uh,

you know, these people came all over the world to work with me. And now you're telling me I can't do this. Yeah. We're telling you, you can't do this. I said, yeah, I get it. Do you recognize that they were correct? Like, do you see what you were... I knew right away they were correct. Yeah. And I accepted it. And so this guy worked with me for five nights, and by the fifth night, I had the big breakthrough experience.

Yeah. So what I'm saying is that... What was the big breakthrough? I won't... I describe it in some detail in the book, but you've had those experiences and as far as I can tell, it's very difficult to describe them in language

because they're like beyond words, you know? But the download I got was yes, my grandparents died in Auschwitz when I was five months of age. Yes, my mother was terrorized and stressed. Yes, I was a very scared little infant.

Yes, the world was a terrible place to be born into, that place at that time. But that doesn't have to define who I am. It doesn't have to define how I trust the world or how I don't. It doesn't have to make me defensive and scared anymore. Because there's also love and there's also acceptance and there's also a reality that's much bigger than the trauma that happened to me. So it kind of liberated me from having to drag that experience around in my soul the way I really had. So you feel like up until that point, you couldn't accept the fact that there was love

in the world. There was good things to focus on. You were too consumed by your own personal trauma. You know, everything works in layers. So in many ways, I did accept it. And if you had asked me i would have said yes the world is a can be a beautiful loving accepting place but in some deep emotional level i couldn't allow myself to feel it so you had perhaps developed a pattern of thinking that was insurmountable

and that even though you had had psychedelic experiences and even though you thought you were doing a great thing by bringing people to these ceremonies and exposing them to the mother and all of the that comes with it you had not changed the way you really viewed the world well again it's that's true in a very deep sense but but again, it's sort of relative because I've seen a lot of people heal. I had guided them to healing. Right. I've seen miracles. But you know that sometimes people do that.

They concentrate on others instead of concentrating on themselves because it's kind of easier to fix other people's problems. But that's exactly the case. Yeah. That was one of those. But also because one of the impacts of trauma is that you feel so alone with it. So everybody thinks that they're uniquely traumatized. Right. So even though I knew intellectually that wasn't the case,

and I knew how to work with people who had terrible experiences, I mean, much worse than mine, I just couldn't allow that to penetrate me very deeply, as deeply as it needed to. And what these shamans helped me to do was to kind of help remove another skin of the onion. Let me put it that way. It's more like the skin of the onion.

It's not one layer. There's different layers. And so I've been through many layers, very important. But what I can tell you is that since that experience people who have seen me before they say there's a more more lightness about me than they used to be you know so people pick up on it I wish I met you before when I was really dark and our yeah I like to see what the difference is. Because I've met people that have changed because of psychedelic experiences. And I certainly have changed.

So I kind of would have liked to have met me. So how would you summarize your experience with them? I don't mean the different experiences, but in terms of the transformation that you've experienced. Much kinder. I grew up in competition. but in terms of the transformation that you've experienced? Much kinder. Uh-huh. Yeah, just I grew up in competition, and most of my teenage years were spent competing in martial arts competitions. Well, I know I read somewhere about you that you said that you hated the idea of losing.

Yeah, I hated the idea of weakness. i didn't even like the fact that i enjoyed sex because sex to me seemed like pleasure and pleasure seemed like a lazy weak way to approach life wow but i was very dedicated to winning you know i was very dedicated to being the best. And that mindset is very ruthless. And it takes a long time to get that out of your system. So when you say dedicated to being the best, there's two ways you can be the best. We can be the best version of ourselves

or we can be better than everybody else. Which best were you thinking about? I was trying to be the measurable best at a specific form of competition. Yeah. Where you're just essentially trying to hurt people. Take one over. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So the problem with that is it's to be the best, you have to be insanely dedicated to this one thing. And you have to be pretty ruthless. Yeah. I understand. You know, and it took a while for me to realize what that was. It took a while for me to realize that my desire to do that was not a healthy desire

and that it was a desire based on trying to acquire love and respect and the appreciation of others. And I was trying to do it through accomplishments. And are you aware of the trauma that led you to believe those things? Yeah. No, my path is pretty clear. I mean, my childhood was very fucked up and my father was very physically abusive and my mother left him when I was five years old.

And it was, there's a lot. Yeah. There's a lot there. I it yeah yeah no I don't want to by the way create the impression that I'm some kind of a psychedelic evangelist I think this I think psychics have a low role but it's somewhat of a limited role overall in healing and then when it comes to social issues and even individual healing so it's not like I don't just don't get the impression it's not the only thing it's not it's not the only thing and certainly in my experience it's it's a relatively

relatively small small part of what I do but it's it's a very cherished part of what I do well the experiences are so profound and so significant but they are just a day. And then, you know, whatever more you do, but there's a lot of days, you know? And so it's very easy to go back to baseline. It's very easy to slip back into your old way of thinking. One of the ways that I describe a psychedelic experience is like a real, like a DMT experience is that it's like control alt delete for your brain. So your brain reboots and then you're left with an empty desktop but with one folder and that folder is labeled my old bullshit and you can either choose to approach life approach life with a completely new perspective

because you've had this experience yeah or you can comfortably and easily slip back into that old mild bullshit folder and most people do that yeah and then i would say that's true for me as well you know and but it you know but the learning continues yeah but overall um there's so many issues and so many problems in this culture and psychedelics will never be the answer no you know it's not the answer. No. It's not the answer, but it's one of the answers. It's one of the answers, for sure. And I think it's also having the option and having people know that there is some sort of

a deeply profound transformative option, this thing that happens that brings you into this other dimension which is truly feels like another dimension i don't exactly know what's going on but whether it is or isn't a dimension another dimension it has the feel of another dimension i think it opens up a part of our brain and consciousness that's usually not accessible to us i mean some people get there with our psychedelics don't they they have these holotropic breathing or just deep meditation for some people but that's also igniting endogenous I mean if you look at yeah yeah that's what I'm saying so it's in our brain that capacity yes psychedelics get

us there much quicker yeah but you know it's sometimes it's even very frustrating because the person who drive me drove me this morning to your studio um he's a vet and um he's got friends with severe ptsd and we know specifically there's a plant called the boga abogain that's been shown by experience first First of all, it's got this amazing quality that it can get people off heroin overnight. Yeah. You know, and I've seen that personally. I've done it myself. It's not for the faint-hearted, by the way.

What did Ibogaine do for you? You know what? I'm going to forget what I was saying. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, we'll go back to that. So this man who was driving me was talking about, and I was saying, you know what? There's actually a plant called iboga, ibogaine.

Iboga is the plant that is really good for PTSD. And there's people working with it south of the border here, but they can't work with it in the U.S. because in the U.S. it's illegal, which is insanity. It's insanity. And he said, actually, this friend of mine with severe PTSD has actually gone south of the border and working with one of the universities

who was doing a study on it. I said, oh, good. And he says, the driver, he says, there's already been such profound changes in my friend. Now, what the hell are we doing? Yeah. Making that illegal instead of embracing it and researching it.

Yeah, it's not harming people. That's the thing it and researching it yeah it's not harming people that's the the thing about ibogaine is it's not an addictive substance it's it's almost impossible to be addicted to it well you wouldn't who'd want to do it who'd want to do it anyway well i have never done it so i'm just going on other people's experiences but it doesn't seem like something that you would ever want to do a lot what was it like for you it was toughest experience one of the toughest experiences of my life because it's just um you're so out of you you so lose control you know and uh felt pretty dark and heavy at times afterwards i felt very clear

you know um dark and heavy how so sorry dark and heavy how so how did it feel dark and heavy in the body and there's nothing you can do to change it like if you feel uncomfortable in your body and there's nothing you can do to change it yeah it's that feels pretty scary you know now even though i know that this experience will end, now, again, I have to say that I'm more resistant to psychedelics than most people. I have a pretty thick skull, as I told you before, and it takes a lot to get through to me.

I keep getting worried that we keep talking about psychedelics and there's so much more that I want to say. No, but there's plenty of time. Don't worry about it. Okay, great. So in March of this year, I did a mushroom ceremony with some indigenous Canadians on their land.

It was one of the deepest experiences of my whole life. But the dose that I took was triple or quadruple the dose that most people take. Just because it takes a lot. What was the dose? 16 grams. Whoa. That's going deep. And it took me deep.

It was beautiful. It was great. It was a great experience of my life. How long did it last? About seven, eight hours, something like that. And, you know, it rains. And then I sat outside with one of my indigenous friends, who I'd never met before, but we were blood brothers right away.

And it was this beautiful mountain and bison grazing in the field and the sunset. And, oh, my God, the beauty of it all. bison grazing in the field in the sunset and oh my god the beauty of it all and and the and the lovingness of it all you know and the um companionship and the camaraderie of it all and these people have really suffered and and their suffering was right there as well they asked me to participate to help them with the trauma part. So it was one of the most poignant, but also most beautiful experiences of my life. But it took a lot to get me there. Yeah, the North American indigenous cultures, and I think you could say the same about Australia

and some of these other countries that have been occupied. It's one of the most devastating things in modern times, and it's not discussed. We have relegated them to reservations, and they're kind of removed from the cultural conversation as far as people in this country that are troubled. We think often of slavery, which is also horrific. We think often of immigrants from other countries that are disparaged and experience racism but we don't think about the native indigenous people that were here that had everything taken away from them that's the colonial mindset is that the indigenous people and they don't matter right you know I read this book about Quanah Parker do you know that name yeah sure yeah was it the Empire the summer moon Right. You know, I read this book about Quanah Parker. Do you know that name? Yeah, sure.

Yeah. Was it The Empire of the… Summer Moon. Summer Moon, yeah. Yeah. Beautiful book. Yeah, we have a photograph of Quanah Parker outside. Was that him out there?

Mm-hmm. Okay, yeah. And I quote him in this book, and I do talk a lot about not just the indigenous experience, but also the wisdom they had and they have. If only we were willing to learn what they have to teach not that we have to give up our science and our medicine and our technological achievements but my god if you could infuse some of that with the wisdom that they have to offer us but we're so bloody arrogant yeah primitive we have nothing to

learn from them you know and yet yet they have so much to teach. They do. I mean, and they most certainly had an incredible way of living with nature. Yeah. They were also incredibly ruthless and also to other North American tribes. I mean, the way they lived their life was absolutely savage and barbaric. Sort of like the white man, no? Sort of. I mean, there's certainly parallels to all sorts

of conquerors in the way they treat their victims. It seems to be a human characteristic of cruelty and I think part of that is based on the fear of being conquered yourself or the fear of

being captured and killed is based on the fear of being conquered yourself or the fear of you know of being captured and killed and being have other someone's someone else's will imposed upon you so they impose it upon others I know they were quite capable of terrible cruelties I wouldn't put them any different from anybody else on that level I mean when I think of all the tortures and massacres and cruelties you know that people it's a human characteristic well it's human characteristic under certain conditions yes yeah for sure well it's unfortunately it's more common like the the human cruelty

you know that whether or not it exists in cultures is more common than not at a certain stage of history, that's true. I might give you an argument that it needs to be that way. In small band hunter-gatherer groups, it doesn't seem to be quite like that. Until they're invaded. Until they're invaded, or until they go too large and the territory gets a matter of competition.

So I do think that, and I do discuss this as well, I do think that we're very much creatures of our environment. And so that what shows up as human nature is very often human nature as it is determined or influenced by a by a certain culture a certain set of circumstances Yeah, it's um But what when you think about the way human beings evolved it seems like we have a Brain and a body that really is designed for these small groups of humans, like 200 people. That's right.

That seems like... That's the design. Yeah. That seems like when we're in symbiosis, when we're in harmony, when everything is working and it works well, that's when it works well. Exactly. When you get to Los Angeles, you know, this indifferent mass of human beings that's when it works well. Exactly. When you get to Los Angeles, you know, this indifferent mass of human beings that's impossible to scale. When you look at the numbers of like New York

City, people stacked on top of each other and the indifference they show towards each other and the disdain they have for other people, because other people, instead of becoming a valuable part of the community, they become a detriment to your ability to move around. That's all true. And then the question is, can we somehow learn what we've lost and meld that with modern civilization? You know?

That's the real question. No. In this culture, where the general belief is that greed and competition and aggressive interaction, no, I'm good, thank you, and selfishness and aggression are the way to make it, it's very difficult for people to get to that place of communal kindness. It's very difficult for people to get to that place of communal kindness. But when you talk about human nature, you talked about the kindness that you think you've attained or found that you've attained through psychedelic work, for example.

I don't know if you can answer this question, but I'd be curious. Which feels more like yourself, this kinder state of being or kind of the aggression aggressive i gotta be the biggest mf on the block which which are they both equally you or no which one feels more like you the kind part yeah the other part is just a means to an end it's trying to accomplish a goal it's trying to fill a goal. It's trying to fill a hole that can never be filled. Exactly. And that's the workaholic. But that's also the thing that we cherish in this society. We cherish the outlier, the over-performer, the one person who can push the boundaries past and above and beyond all others. But sometimes at the expense

of others. Yes. Most of the times, I believe, at the expense of others and certainly at the expense of their own peace. Exactly. You very rarely find a workaholic, supremely motivated, conqueror-type person who's truly happy. But that's the whole point. And that's why I talk about the myth of normal. That what we assume is normal in society is completely unnatural and unhealthy for human beings. It's a myth that it's normal. Hence the title of your book.

That's the title of the book. Yeah, so that kindness then is actually much closer to who we are as human beings than all that other stuff. Well, it's certainly when you feel the best. You don't feel the best when you're dominating people. You feel the best when you're in sync with people. Exactly.

And you're happy and you're having friends. Like my favorite moments in life is laughing with my family or laughing with my friends. That's my favorite moments in life, just having a good time. And whose isn't? Yeah, everybody's is. That's what we're really supposed to do. Yeah.

But then there's also this sort of inherent desire to achieve success. And what is that success? Problem solving, accomplishing goals, creating things. There's this desire that human beings sort of inherently have to do these things. That's part of our nature as well. That's why we've created so many amazing things, whether in science or technology or art or music or anything else.

But that doesn't have to be at the expense of everybody else. Right. It should be morally and ethically pursued. That's also why we hate fraud, right? When someone is stealing money and they have all the success, but it turns out that what they've done is like done something illegal.

Yeah. Like pyramid schemes or something where someone's using this sort of desire to succeed as a justification to victimize others. Yeah. But you just described the corporate world. Yes. Narcissism. Yeah. It's narcissism.

Corporate narcissism. Yeah. Well, somebody calls a sociopathy. You know, and so that, we live in a world where, like you talked about sugar, for example. Well, there was this book, I think a few years ago, called Salt, Sugar, and Fat, or something like that. That was the title of it, by an American journalist, who shows that the food corporations quite deliberately set out to find what they call the sweet spot, just the right combination of sugar, salt, and fat that's going to make people addictive to their products,

which is going to kill them. Yeah. So these corporations are quite willing to make people sick. And so I was talking to a colleague of mine, Rob Lustig, who wrote a book called The Hacking of the American Mind. a book called The Hacking of the American Mind. And it's how the corporations deliberately create products that make people addicted at the risk of making them sick. And so what kind of minds would deliberately set up to sell products and advertise them

and to manipulate the market, that will actually kill people. And this is respectable corporations with philanthropists at the heads of their boards and so on. Yes. That's the world we live in. Yeah, that's very dark. And that's also the pharmaceutical companies. Pharmaceutical companies, yeah. I was just watching this very disturbing commercial yeah um yesterday with children and it was talking about adhd and it showed a kid that

was not paying attention in class and it showed these kids like playing around and doing things they weren't supposed to be doing yes and then they introduced this medication and then you have the child raising their hand and then you this medication and then you have the child raising their hand and then you have everyone clapping and you have the child with a big smile on their face and you've medicated your child to be a successful and integrated person in society shall i shall i spot off about adhd for yes please that was my first book on ADHD. It's the American scattered or scattered minds, depending on which edition you get. And that was after I was diagnosed with it myself in my 50s. What does it mean?

ADHD? Yeah. What is it exactly? Is it real? Oh, it's real. But what does it mean? Like if someone has ADHD, it's not like you have herpes, right? Like you can say, oh, you got a disease. What is it? Well, that's the whole point is that the medical

profession and a lot of the so-called experts think about it as a disease. Another one of these inherited diseases. In fact, they say it's the most heritable mental illness there is. the most heritable mental illness there is. And I say it's neither an illness nor is it heritable. So the Hallmark are difficulty paying attention when you're not motivated. So kind of tuning out, like that kid in the commercial. Like me. Okay, poor impulse control,

so that you tend to act out whatever emotion arises. And sometimes the hyperactivity, difficulty sitting still and then to fidget and all that and that described me to a tee and but as soon as I learned about the diagnosis I knew something this is not a disease and it's not heritable despite the fact that some of my kids were diagnosed with it. What is it? So tuning out is not a disease. So let me ask you a question, if I may. Okay.

If I were to stress you right now, create stress, emotional difficulty or tension for you right now, what would be your options of dealing with that, of dealing with me? What would be your options? I could get upset or I could leave. Exactly. You could fight back, flight or fight, yeah? But what if you didn't have those options?

Yeah, then you're stuck. And what does the brain do when you're stuck like that? It gets distracted. It tunes out. Yeah, it tunes out. You want to do other things, think about other things. In other words, it's a coping mechanism. Yeah, it's normal i mean the the idea that your child who is uh you know an eight nine year old ball

of energy filled with you know hormones and life and thoughts and things they enjoy and then you make them sit down all day in this unnatural state in a classroom with fluorescent lights and stare at a teacher that's unmotivated and underpaid and is teaching something in a very boring and non-entertaining way. And then if this kid doesn't lock in like a zombie, we need to medicate them. Yeah. Well, the other part of it is that if you look at my infancy and it sounds like yours, that if you look at my infancy and it sounds like yours we spent our first year or two under very difficult circumstances a lot of stress infants can't help but absorb the stress of their parents right they can't help it what does an infant do could i have escaped or fought back could you have all we could do is tune out yes but when is this tuning out happening when our brain is being

developed right in our brain this is the part that nobody taught me in medical school but it turns out that brain science now teaches us that the human brain develops under the impact of the environment so the the most salient feature of the environment that shapes the circuits of the human brain is actually the relationship with the parents. And if the parents are present and emotionally attuned and available, the child's brain is developed properly. But the parents are stressed.

The child absorbs the stress. What can they do with it? They tune out. And that tuning out thing is programmed into the brain. And then 10 years later or 50 years later, we say, you you got this disease. No you don't. You've got a coping mechanism

that's no longer working for you but it had a function when it first came along. So this whole idea and by the way, if a family comes to me with their ADHD child, I'll say to them, what you've got here is a very sensitive child. That sensitive child is picking up on all the vibes, energies, and stresses in your family.

You want to help this child? Deal with the whole family. Look at the parental relationship. Look at what stress is there in your life. Look at how you react to the child. Do you understand the child's behavior or the emotions that the child is having or you're just trying to control the child's behaviors look at all that and very often parents will tell me after they've read that book on ADHD is they've totally changed their relationship to their child the

child changes what a surprise mmm but you go to most doctors you got this disease here's the pill and by the way I took those medications and they helped me for a while. You know, so I'm not anti- When you were in your 50s. Yeah, yeah. I'm not anti-medication. Which ones did you take?

I took Ritalin, which I can tell you the story. Sure. So, you know, one of the hallmarks of ADHD is poor impulse control, right? So, I found out about ADHD, and even before I was diagnosed, I took Ritalin. Why did you take it before you were diagnosed? Because I'm a doctor, and I could, hey? Oh, so you diagnosed yourself. Well, I did.

So you at least assumed that you had that, didn't you? Yeah, I knew I had it. But not only that, also because I had poor impulse control. I never practiced medicine that way. If you came to me for any problem, my first impulse would never be to write you a prescription, unless it was obvious that you needed it for an infection or something. I'd sit down with you and talk to you about what's going on here.

But not me. Poor impulse regulation. So I went to a colleague of mine, a medical colleague. I said, hey, Bev, I think I've got ADHD. Can you give me some Ritalin? So she writes me a prescription. Then I took it on a higher than recommended initial dose. Because, I mean, if a little bit is good, then more must be even better.

And again, it's not how I practice medicine. But looking to myself, that's a totally different ballgame. So I felt immediately present and calm and grounded and focused. Yeah. And it's a stimulant. And I went, well, it calms the ADHD brain. Then I go home and my wife says, you look stoned.

Because you're calm. Yeah. Well, because I got this glassy-eyed expression. And within a couple of days, the Ritalin made me very depressed. That's one of its potential side effects. So I did see a psychiatrist. I was formally diagnosed, and they gave me dexedrine.

And I took that for a while. That's an amphetamine, isn't it? Yeah, it's an amphetamine. It's another stimulant. And it did help me. I became a much more efficient workaholic. I could do even worse. It didn't change any of my emotional issues,

but it made me more focused and so on. It helped me write my first book. But I haven't taken them for decades. Because also I know that the brain can change if you treat it right. So this reliance on medications that we have is a real poverty of the spirit, a real poverty of imagination, a poverty of medical education. The average doctor never learns this stuff.

The average physician never gets a single lecture on brain development, how the brain develops in interaction with the environment. So when you're seeing, let alone do they hear about trauma, they don't hardly at all. they hear about trauma. They don't, hardly at all. So when they see an adult with ADHD or depression or addiction or bipolar conditions or, for that matter, autoimmune illness or anything else, they don't think of trauma. They just think of this disease. And they think that the diagnosis explains everything,

but the diagnosis don't explain anything. Because think about it. Let's say Gabor or Joe goes to a doctor and they diagnose with ADHD. Well, why is, what are the harm of ADHD? Well, tuning out, poor impulse regulation, maybe hyperactivity. Why does Gabor have poor impulse control, hyperactivity why does gabor have poor impulse control uh hyper activity and uh tuning out because he's got adhd how do we know he's got adhd because he's got

poor impulse control and tunes out and he's hyperactive why is he hyperactive tunes that have poor impulse control he's got adhd how do we know he's got adhd because you know it doesn't it's circular it doesn't explain it doesn't explain anything diagnosis describe things and that they're they can be helpful that way but they don't explain yeah one of the things that people get so they get it they get treated for and they get diagnosed with is anxiety. Yeah. And that one drives me nuts. Yeah.

It drives me nuts because people pretend that anxiety is a disease. Yeah, it's not. And I'm like, my God, the world should make you anxious if you're a sensitive, introspective person. If you're just looking at the world itself and you don't put it in perspective, like the world's filled with anxiety. The anxiety is future problem solving. You're thinking about all the things that can go wrong.

You're thinking about your life in a potentially devastating way. And that's not a disease. That's just a way you look at the world and people getting diagnosed with it. Well, I won't quite agree with you on that one. In what way? I felt anxious at times. Sure. The world every day is the same.

The world is the same, but the way you look at it is not the same, right? That's the whole point. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So the world is giving you anxiety. No, the world is not giving me anxiety. Right. You're giving yourself anxiety by looking at the world, right? By how I look at the world.

Yes. Because I can look at the same world one day and feel grounded and connected. And I may have all kinds of concerns about what's happening in the world, but my nervous system won't be on edge. My adrenaline won't be flowing. I won't be anxious.

That's my point is that it's not a disease. It isn't a disease. Right. So remember I talked about those brain circuits of lust and care and rage and seeking and so on. One of the brain circuits that we have is described by a very prominent late neuroscientist, Yak Panksepp, is for panic and grief. Panic and grief are the normal responses of the young human being or the young animal when care isn't available. So when the parents are stressed, distracted, economically or politically or because of their own unresolved trauma or whatever's going on in their lives, and they don't respond to the child's distress, They don't pick up the child when they're crying.

They make the child be alone when the child is upset. The child's panic circuits get activated, as they should be, because when the child's panic circuits get activated, they cry for help. So it's necessary for survival. A young animal should feel panic when the adult is unavailable. In a rational world, in a sane world, that child would be responded to. But when children, as in our society, are not responded to in their distress, the panic becomes built into their nervous system,

and now you have a lot of anxious people. And that's why more and more kids are being diagnosed. You're right. It's not a disease. It's a response to the environment. And the thought process of like leaving a child alone when the child's crying, is that to toughen the kid up? Is the thought process that you don't want to encourage this sort of behavior

because then they'll do it all the time? And then you'll develop an indulgent child like what is the thought process the thought process is that the child's behavior is the problem and so we have to fix the behavior by controlling it now actually the opposite is true because if you pick up the child when the child has distress, physical or emotional distress, you're teaching the child that the world is safe and they don't have to be anxious about it and they can just ask for help.

And it doesn't entrench kind of crying manipulative behavior. How it works, Dr. Daniel Siegel, who's a psychiatrist at UCLA and a very prolific author and mind researcher, he says in his book, The Developing Mind, that the child uses the mature circuits of the adult brain to regulate its own immature, unregulated circuits. So when the adults show up in a calm, loving way,

the child downloads that into his own nervous system, and then he's not going to be an infant forever. At some point he's going to be a mature adult who knows how to take care of themselves. That's a natural process. We don't have to teach kids to be an infant forever. At some point, he's going to be a mature adult who knows how to take care of themselves. That's a natural process. We don't have to teach kids to be independent. Independent is nature's agenda because the parents are going to die. At some point, the mother bear is going to disappear.

That bear cub has to be able to look after themselves in a mature, confident way. That's nature's natural agenda. What the mother bear needs to do is to meet the needs of that infant bear so the infant bear can mature. So if we meet the child's needs, they're going to mature out of that helpless state with a sense of self-regulation and confidence in their own capacity.

But when you don't pick kids up, what you teach them is that the world is not available, that they're alone, and that they're helpless. Talk about a formula for anxiety. Hmm. What about the concept of coddling children? And what about the concept of creating, you know, what someone would call a mama's boy, someone who is scared of the outside world and just wants comfort and attention and just wants to be sheltered from stress and anxiety all the time. They just want to be alone with their mother and their parents. Yeah, it happens. But why does it happen?

Why does it happen? So there's a study that I quote in the book where they looked at thousands or several hundred women, new mothers, and how they related to their infants. And most of them related very well. Some were not that available, and some were extra doting and extra coddling, you might say, with their infants. They looked at the adults 35 years later. The people that were the most independent and successful and self-actualized were the ones that were super loved by their mothers okay now and then and the conclusion of the researchers was you can't love children too much now the case that you describe is not

too much loving but loving that comes from a very anxious place. So these mothers that coddle their kids when the kids doesn't need coddling, they're not doing it because the child needs it. They're doing it because they need it. They're doing it because they were not coddled enough. They're anxious, and they pass that anxiety onto the child. You don't create those dependent kids by loving them.

You create them by imposing your own agenda on them, your own anxieties on them. So those are the mama's boys, if you want to call them that. But the mama's boy is just a very anxious person who downloaded his parents or her parents' anxieties. That makes sense. Because the kids that I know that grew up like that, their mothers were terrified of everything. Yeah. Yeah. And so they, boy, but how do you get out of that?

If you're, you know, you've developed this, these patterns of thinking that are based on a mother that is incredibly anxious and scared of the world. And then you sort of adopted these thoughts and, you know, they call you a mama's boy and that you're coddled. Like, how does someone break out of that? Well, there was a Greek playwright, Aeschylus, who wrote about drama about 2,500 years ago. And in one of his plays, The Agamemnon, he says that the way Zeus, the way the master, the God created us, was that we have to suffer, suffer into truth. And with most people I find that at some point, like me and perhaps like yourself, some suffering happens that says, okay, you're not going in the right direction. Yeah. So again, it's got to begin with this understanding that what I'm going through is creating suffering for myself and people around me. And maybe it doesn't have to be this way.

There's got to be that recognition. Now, once you get that recognition, the sky's the limit. Because now there's all kinds of therapies and possibilities. I mean, I think a wonderful, I don't like this phrase mama's boy, but it describes maybe a certain kind of personality. What if they did martial arts? What if they worked out? Yeah. What if they developed some confidence in their own bodies to start with?

Because they don't have confidence in their bodies. Right. There's all kinds of things they could do. Yeah, that's a big factor. Once you get that there's an issue, let alone you can go for therapy, you can do the trauma work, like whatever. You can do the psychedelics. You can do EMDR.

You can do somatic experiencing. You can do any number of, you can do the therapy that I teach, compassion and inquiry. You can do the martial arts. You can meditate. You can do yoga. You can go into nature. I teach, compassion and inquiry. You can do the martial arts. You can meditate. You can do yoga. You can go into nature. But you need to do something. But you've got to do something.

Yeah. And that is the problem. And some of these people, unfortunately, they turn to drugs. Because they're so overwhelmed, they want a complete escape from the moment. Yeah. Well, and they turn to drugs or they turn to eating or they turn to shopping like I did or shopping. Oh yeah. That was your thing. I had a significant shopping addiction. Yeah. Really? Oh yeah. Uh, I shopped for, I, I talk about this in my book

on addiction. I, uh, I would shop for classical compact discs. You laugh, but some days I spend thousands of dollars, literally thousands of dollars a day. Did you have the money? Well, I was a doctor, hey? Yeah, so you could afford these compact discs. And you know how the addicted mind works. It's brilliant. It justifies one addiction by another. I'd say, but I'm working so hard, I deserve to pleasure myself. Right. So one addiction justified the other, you see. But once, I tell you, I left a woman in labor to get a symphony from the downtown store. And I missed the delivery. Oh, my God. That's how addicted I was to shopping.

But did you think that that classical disc was going to go away? Like, why did you go get it? Does the any addict think? Wow, that's a weird addiction. I've never even heard of anybody being addicted to compact discs. Well, there are people addicted to shopping. Yes. And the addiction is not to the object that you're buying,

because if it was to the object, you would just go home and enjoy it. Right. The addiction is to the acquisition. Now, what happens when you're looking for something and you're excited? You know what happens? The level of dopamine, which is one of these brain chemicals, elevates in the brain, which is just like taking an amphetamine. So it's the thrill. It's the thrill. And so the gambler, the workaholic, the shopaholic, the sexaholic, any addict, substance addict, they're not after the actual, as much as after that thrill, that seeking,

that dopamine hit, the pornographer, they're after that dopamine hit. Now dopamine, which is the seeking chemical in our brain, the one that makes life vital and interesting and makes us explore novel objects or seek a sexual partner or seek food, those dopamine circuits develop or don't develop based on what happens to you very early in life. And so that children that don't get the proper experiences, they might be lacking dopamine. Now they have to seek the thrill of the stimulant drug or the exciting activity or the dangerous rock climbing

so they can feel really present and grounded. Oh, wow. Or the shopping or the compactness. And it's always about the next thing because you're looking after that dopamine hit. I was just watching this documentary the alpinist have you seen it i've heard about it yeah it's about a young man who was a free solo climber and did he die who died yeah he died in an avalanche yeah um he was

constantly pushing the boundaries of like what what he could get away with and he was free soloing these rock faces and then that wasn't dangerous enough so he moved to ice climbing yes and so he's with no rope and just these axes climbing these picks climbing up glaciers climbing up in and one scene there was this ice that was detached from the face of the cliff yes so it was separated by several feet you could see the gap in between the ice and the face of the cliff and he's climbing the ice you could break off at any second it's not permanent and he's just digging in his pick and pulling himself up this and then apparently he had gone to the top with this other guy and on the way down they died in an avalanche no i bet if you interviewed him and i've seen interviews with these people yeah uh the free divers and the free climbers and all what's happening during the experience i'm totally present yes i'm at one with life

you know there's no separation i'm grounded yeah totally focused i'm fully alive why because it triggers the dopamine in their brain so you feel like people like that probably have had something happen when they were younger where their body doesn't develop dopamine properly under normal circumstances i'm convinced of it well that makes sense. I've had Alex Honnold on several times, and he is the guy from, what is the documentary? Is it Free Solo? Yeah, the documentary Free Solo, and he's very famous for climbing El Capitan

and just sticking his hands in these cracks of the walls and climbing up with no ropes. And he's a very calm guy. It's very interesting. He's like sort of calm and mellow. And, you know, when you talk to him about climbing and he's like, no, it's like you're pretty relaxed. It's pretty chilled out.

And they're clearly addicted to that. They're doing it constantly. They travel around the world to do it. And risking their lives. Yeah, risking their lives. Can I read you a quote? Yeah, sure, please. So if I take a moment to look for it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, sure. It's on my cell phone here. This is, I carry so many quotes on my cell phone because I'm always trying to teach myself stuff. So this is free diving. Let me just look for free diving. Free diving.

No, not do-ving, diving. This is something that you saved on your phone? Yeah. Yeah, I have a thousand things saved on my phone i have whole books that i've dictated to myself done on my book on my phone isn't that amazing because you store that and this whole tiny thing you keep in your pocket it's incredible and i keep trying to teach myself stuff i think if i just dictate it maybe i'll learn it but guess what next time i read it why wasn't this here before of course it it was. Yeah, of course it was. Anyways, this is a woman called Natalia Molchanova.

She died at age 53 in August 2015, freediving. She is one of the world's leading freedivers. And here's what she says about the experience. Freediving is not only a sport, it's a way to understand who you are. When we go down, if we don't think, we understand we are whole. If we don't think, so the mind just gets out of the way, we understand that we are whole. We are one with the world.

When we think, we are separate. On the surface, it's natural to think, and we have many information inside. We need to reset sometime. Free diving helps to do that. In other words, free diving gave her this experience of unity and oneness and the quietness of the mind but the question is why do we have to go such extreme limits there's some extreme um lengths yeah to find that state you know and when i read that quote to a couple of friends of mine who are fierce meditators in a way that i'm not, they said, that's what we get when we meditate.

You know, but these people are serious meditators. But that state of oneness, that's just the highest state we can experience, isn't it? Yeah. When we get that we're not these separate individuals. And this society creates this, what Dan Siegel calls the myth of the solo self, that we're all just individual separate little creatures struggling to make it against competition and in a fearful race with everybody else.

And so that we get separated from ourselves, which is the essence of trauma, and we get separated from each other. And then we have these peak experiences and we keep seeking these big experiences because we don't know how to make it real in our own lives one of the things you find out in competition is that the real competition is with yourself yes you are competing against other people but you're competing with yourself to improve upon your performance against other people, but you're competing with yourself to improve upon your performance against other people. You're not really competing with other people. And once you realize that it's a

real revelation, you realize like, oh, I'm fighting my own demons. These people are just, this is a mechanism for me to be able to find that in me. Yes, which also means that there's no real loss, is there? Right. I mean, if you've done your best. Maybe you can do better, but there's no failure is what I mean. There is, but in failure there are lessons. It's beneficial. Even though failure feels bad

because you didn't accomplish what you wanted to accomplish. The motivation that you get from that and the revelations and the knowledge that you get from that are crucial to your development as a human being and in whatever your chosen pursuit is. Well, let me argue with you again if I may.

Please. So, I mean, you work out and I know you talk about you have this brutal physical workout program and all that. I don't do weights, and you can see in the relative size of our arms as to which of the two of us does resistance training. I just swim. I don't do weights. Now, if you and I had a wrestling match right now, or even a taekwondo match, which I've never studied,

Or even a taekwondo match, which I've never studied. But I did my best to show up as alert and as powerful as I could. And you defeated me. Would I be a failure? Well, it's not fair. Okay. And competition, one of the things that you learn about competition is that you need to scale it. That's true.

You know, that's why we have divisions. We have weight classes. And also have, uh, belt rankings. So you would assume that someone who is a white belt is a relative beginner. That's one of the reasons why when we're talking about people who cheat, sandbagging is one of the most reprehensible things amongst competitors. And what a sandbagging would be is imagine if you had a black belt in judo and you played somebody who's and no and then you entered into a jiu-jitsu competition you would technically be a white belt in jiu-jitsu but you would be very experienced in grappling and submissions and you'd be dominant and you would just tear through the field of people that were also white belts and people would be angry at you justifiably so because you're violating the the rules of this scalable competition and through the scalable

competition you're supposed to be met with surmountable challenges things that you can overcome things and lessons you can learn and even if you get dominated by someone what you learn is that that potential is within a human being. You know, one of my most profound experiences that I talked about many times is when I first started doing jujitsu, I got dominated by this guy who was, you know, he's like an intermediate jujitsu player, but the overwhelming control that he had over me and the dominance over me was so eye-opening because I didn't know that a person could do that to me. And now learning that, I knew that that potential

was in a human being. He wasn't like physically gifted. He wasn't much stronger than me or bigger than me. He was just much better at this thing that we were both doing. And I realized that on the path, he was many miles ahead of me and that I could go down that path and achieve what he is doing. And that was very, it was very enlightening. Fair enough. When you talk about sandbagging, it reminded me of this Paul Newman movie called The Hustler. Yes. You know, the-

Yeah. Big John, you think this boy's a hustler? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I've seen that movie a hundred times. Yeah. It's a wonderful film. Yeah. I play pool. So that- Okay. That is a big part of pool playing is people pretending they're not as good as they are. But that's a desperation thing and a gambling thing. There's a lot involved in that too.

But to go back to the idea of failure, so let me ask you this question. Usain Bolt. If you line up at the 100-meter race, so the 200-meter race against Usain Bolt. Right. And you come in second, are you a failure? Well, you didn't beat him. But are you a failure? Well, it depends on where your performance threshold lies.

But nobody's going to be as good as him. That's not true. Someone will be as good as him. Eventually. Yes, and that's the whole purpose of doing that, the whole purpose of records. But you're chasing a very specific thing there though you're chasing extreme excellence yeah yeah and if you choose to be that person that chases extreme excellence in a very narrow and rigid discipline yeah there's a very narrow and rigid discipline it's very comprehensive but it's very narrow and rigid

that's running in a straight line as fast as you can yeah um someone has to be the best and if you choose to do that thing and you are not physically gifted then you have a problem because there are some things that are dependent upon your physiology they're depending upon the size of your limbs the length of your limbs for sure your genetics and some you some people for some people that threshold is insurmountable well and this is where genetics does come into it i mean we have certain capabilities and you know i but all i'm saying is in my mind coming in second to that guy is no failure as long as i've done my best as long as the person in the next lane is doing their best. Sure. They've succeeded. They have succeeded in a way.

There's a great quote that I remember when my early years of Taekwondo where my instructor said that martial arts are a vehicle for developing your human potential and that through overcoming these difficult obstacles and the fear of competition and learning that with discipline and focus you can get better, it can elevate your ability to do everything.

It isn't so much that also, I get that, and isn't so much also being completely present and focused and connected to your body and grounded and responsive to what's happening in the moment. Yes, you have to be in the moment. You can't be thinking too much. You rely on your training and your focus and the ability to maintain this mindset. Yeah, which is so missing from our lives in general.

Yeah, well, it's also one of the things that's missing from our lives is physically difficult pursuits, which I think we've categorized things into two ways, things that are intellectually difficult, which we praise, and things that are physically difficult, which we think of as being like base and, you know, less consequential to your overall development as a human being. But I don't think that's the case because I think that physical difficulties stress the mind in a way that we don't appreciate. Don't we value our athletes and our athletics

and the people that can do incredible things? Sure we do, but we also dismiss them as being intellectually inferior. One of the ways that people justify that an athlete is better than them at this thing is by categorizing them as a dumb jock. Oh, gosh. I read sometimes the blog of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He's no intellectual midget, you know?

Of course not. I mean, to be great at something, I mean, whether or not he applies that to the rest of his life as well, that's where it gets interesting. Yeah. Because some people don't. They only focus on being the greatest at whatever, whether it's basketball or golf. And they don't think about their life in general as being a project as well. They think about this one thing only. And you know what? what I might say that that certainly could have been said of me at a certain

point that of me at a certain point where I would be really focused on being very good at a certain task or a certain area of endeavor which is to say medicine and healing but I wasn't applying the lessons to my own life right and I think a lot of us get compartmentalized that way. Yes. You know? Yes. We don't take our wisdom into our own lives. But I think a lot of us need mentors and we need people who have already gone down the path a little further than they have to tell them, hey, this is what's going to come up and this is how I've dealt with it and this is what you can learn from my mistakes without having to repeat them I think one of the significant losses as a study that we've sustained

is the loss of elders I mean traditional cultures would have elders and yes we don't talk about elders we talk about the elderly right we define them in terms of their age but but but if you look at traditional cultures the elders have huge status. Yes, and they should. And as they ought to, their experience. It also means they don't get shunted to the side and get made to feel useless. Right. And develop dementia, you know. Right.

Because they're active and involved in the community. Mm-hmm. And we've lost so much with the loss of the elder and the passing of tradition. Yes. We're so focused on progress, which has brought incredible advances, that again we sort of cut off from one part of ourselves, which is rooted in tradition and rooted in wisdom. So what if we could have both? What if we could have both wisdom

and progress at the same time? I think it's possible. It's certainly possible. I mean, I've always said that about the idea of an ethical moral capitalism is that the competition of capitalism isn't the problem. The competition is the end all be all, like only win win only get ahead greed is good the gordon gecko yeah mantra i think that uh people get lost in the achievement of the goal as being the ultimate thing that's going to bring them happiness and it's never the case well now you have the corporations we talked about before and uh what's his name mil Milton Friedman, this Nobel Prize winning economist. And he said that the only legitimate

business of a corporation is to make a profit. Yes. And that's how they look at it. And that's one of the reasons why they can justify horrific acts. Yeah. And it's also one of the reasons why a person inside of that corporation feels separate from the actual horrific acts. There's a diffusion of responsibility and being attached to a group you know I

am just one of these people I am just a manager of this region and I that's all I do I mean I have to abide by my shareholders needs in the book I interview a guy who used to be vice president for human relations for IKEA. And he found out about my work about 10, 11 years ago and he said, I want to talk to you.

He called me at home and I thought he was just a strange guy with an accent. You know, when you get known a little bit, all kinds of people want a piece of you. And I thought, here's another. But anyway, he came out to vancouver from back east and we had we had sitting with lunch at my house and my wife is there and ray says ray my wife says to him his name is wolf and ray says all for what is it that you do and wolf saysf says, oh, I work with this company, maybe you've heard about it, called IKEA.

And my wife just about jumped off her seat because she'd just been to IKEA that morning buying some furniture. But Ulf says that for decades, all he lived for was to be successful within the company and he totally lost himself. He had no value, he said, that wasn't associated with his success as an executive.

And he says it was an empty existence. And he says he was making himself sick. So he gave it up. But he talked about what it's like inside that world. And he's uniquely, he's a gifted photographer. So he started doing photography and he's a very healthy man. started doing photography and he's, you know, he's a very healthy man, but he had to really learn after decades that everything he'd been done had been done for some external. And in this culture, we're so driven to validate our existence by impressing others, by trying

to make ourselves successful by the standards that are laid down for us by external forces that have nothing to do with our real needs and who we actually are as human beings, that it's almost impossible not to fall into that trap. It's very, very difficult not to fall into that trap, particularly if you're invested in a career path and you've achieved a certain amount of success. And then you have responsibilities and you have bills.

You have mortgages. Not only that, you also have the whole world telling you how great you are. Yeah. So when my wife would walk into a department store or anywhere with a credit card and they'd say, or anywhere with a credit card and they'd say, you know, are you the wife of, oh, isn't he wonderful?

And she was just gritting her teeth because the same wonderful guy who's such a success out there is not like that at home. In fact, it's at the expense of the home that his success is in some ways achieved. So there's that. So not only do we have bills to pay,

we also even get all this validation for the way that we abandon ourselves. Yeah, and oftentimes you don't concern yourself with the appreciation of your loved ones because you get it no matter what. You live with them, you get it, you expect it. But you concentrate so hard on this thing that you're pursuing whether it's climbing the corporate ladder becoming a physician and you know working so hard constantly day in day out and that's the only way you get any measure of this feeling of of value that's right. It's when you try and get that sense of value

from the outside, which if you had been valued just for existing from the moment you were born, you wouldn't have to keep doing. You wouldn't have to keep doing it. But the thing is like so many people from that terrible childhood have developed this ability to pursue excellence. And then they have shaped and enhanced and influenced so many other people's lives because of their work, whether it's their art or whether it's their sport or whatever. Something that they've done, some way they've accomplished things has been incredibly influential to other people, yet they came from this horrific trauma. Well, that's true. And the question is, can I balance that with more self-awareness and a more expansive experience of life where they're narrowly focused?

Let me tell you a story, and let me ask you what you think about it. Okay. If I told you about a four-year-old girl who is bullied by neighborhood kids. You've got daughters, don't you? Yes. So, imagine your four-year-old daughter being bullied by neighborhood kids and one of them runs into the house to their mom and say, for protection. And the mom said to her,

there's no room for cowards in this house. Now you get out and deal with it. How would you see that? Well, it's abusive. Okay. You're setting the kid up to be not protected and that you don't care. And also this is a horrific aspect of human nature,

that desire to gang up on kids, a group of people gang up on people and bully them. So, speaking of that, you would see that interaction with the mom is abusive and traumatizing. Yes. Okay, this story was told on public television in the United States in a forum of a cheering audience millions of people watching on television at the Democratic Convention

in 2016 when Hillary Clinton was nominated and she told and it was the voice of God Morgan Freeman who actually narrated this document bio documentary about her and this was presented as a wonderful example of resilience building. And so what I'm saying, trauma is so normalized in this culture that even when this horrific incident is being depicted on television in front

of millions of people, people think this is wonderful. And nobody, nobody, nobody, nobody commented on it. Now 65 years later or 60 years later, the same candidate develops pneumonia during the campaign. I don't know if you remember that, when she got pneumonia. You remember what she did?

What? She sucked it up. She didn't tell anybody about it until she collapsed in the street with dehydration. Now, the supposed lesson was this taught me strength and resilience and independence and self-reliance. So a lot of the success that we sometimes perceive in this society comes at a huge human cost. And we don't even recognize it. It's so normal, we don't even recognize it.

I'm not talking about politics now. Well, I am talking about politics. These are very often our politicians, by the way. But I'm not talking about policies of whether I support her or somebody else. I'm talking about the human experience that's being depicted and totally normalized in this culture. Yeah. And that example is, that is a problem that people do think that that's a way to handle a situation like that where a child's being bullied, to tell the child to go out there and face those bullies.

Yeah. A four-year-old. Yeah. And then you look at the end result, you have this extremely unlikable woman who- She's built a defense around herself. The unlikability that people pick up on, the unrelatability, is this hard shell that you have to develop to protect yourself. It's a simple trauma response. Yes. And when you look at it that way, you just see a suffering human being. And it's even sadder because she's old and she doesn't recognize this pathway.

She doesn't recognize where she is and why. Well, her father used to beat the kids. And she doesn't see that as trauma. Yeah. No, I'm not picking her up. It's a different... By the way, I'm sorry. I'm not... I know what you're saying. You're not picking on her. I'm not picking on her. It's a different... By the way, I'm sorry, I'm not...

I know what you're saying. You're not picking on her. I'm not picking on her. I'm just giving a public example of what happens. The child abuse, the beating of the kids was standard. Yeah. That's what's really crazy. It's like if you go back to the 1960s, the 1950s, beating kids for doing something wrong was normal it was

what everybody did yeah well I mean how much of an effect did that have on people well there was a study this week just about that about how traumatizing spanking kids is yeah I had a conversation with someone the other day and they were just like talking about how they spanked their kids and I'm like I didn't know what to do. I wasn't sure that I should just put my foot down say hey, you should never do that You know, why'd you do that? I shouldn't I didn't want to admonish them. You might ask them if they're open to an opinion Yeah, well, it was just one of those things but it's so difficult isn't it because people get so defensive Mm-hmm, but I'm telling you the studies have been done over and over and over again yes about spanking and its effect its

effect can be as bad as more severe form of abuse yeah i could i can completely see how that would be the case i just don't think it's ever required you know, uh, I wasn't really spanked. I mean, maybe a couple of times when I was really young, but it was nothing serious. Wow. But you know what I'm saying? Like it wasn't like I wasn't held down and beaten.

Wait a minute. Now who's saying that? Nothing serious. Me as an adult. Me now. Yeah. Me as an adult. But,

but think of your kids. Yes. But let's say one, let's say you did that to one of your children Would you ever say to her this is nothing serious? No, I would never do that I mean you wouldn't do that. I don't do it and I don't even and I would never even consider it Well, I try to have conversations with my kids and I have since they were really young I have conversations with them though. I talk to them like I would talk to you. Yeah, and although I'm

much more you know expressive and lenient and kind and and I tell them how much I love them and the only reason why I'm having this conversation with you is because this is just an issue that people have and one of the things that I always bring up with my kids is whatever you've done I've done it so if you've lied, if like when I caught my kid lying to me once, one of my daughters, and I said, I used to lie to my parents all the time. It's totally normal. But what I'm telling you is you don't have to lie to me. And it's better for you if you don't lie. If you just address things that you've done that were wrong or incorrect or, you know, unwise, let's just talk about them. I'm not going to judge you on a mistake because you're a human being and

you're 12 and human beings make mistakes. But what's important to know is that I will praise you for telling me the truth if it's difficult. That's very good. Because I think it's, it's, it's a very valuable lesson for a kid. Because otherwise you pretend you think you got away with it, and then you live with that lie. Of course. Yeah. Well, there's the German philosopher Nietzsche writes somewhere

that people lie their way of reality when they're being hurt by reality. And so there's certain politicians who are known for lying. Yes. Well, we know about their childhoods, really traumatic, really abusive. What kind of childhood did Biden have? There was an article in the New Yorker magazine about the Biden family, generations of alcoholism.

Well, that makes sense. And other forms of manipulation and so on and and so when you look at hunter Biden right and hunters actually mentioned my work because his own addictions he he came to some understanding about the traumatic basis of his addiction problem but um that addiction on hunter's part is just the downloading of multiple generations of family suffering so it's not anybody's fault you're not pointing fingers at anybody. But there's trauma in that family. And there's no American president in recent memory that didn't have significant trauma in their childhoods. And it's affected, of course, how they conduct politics. You know,

when it shows up. I mean, I don't know if you know the name Bessel van der Kolk. He's a psychiatrist. There's a perennial bestseller in the New York Times called The Body Keeps the Score, which is about trauma. And this is a book about trauma that's been bestselling for five years and every week in the New York Times. And Bessel told me that Donald Trump is a poster boy for trauma, which he is in a certain way, because even often when people say that he's lying, but by the way, there's Trump supporters here.

I'm not arguing politics here. I'm just talking about- Talking about a human being. I'm talking about a human being. When they say that he's lying, I don't even think he's lying consciously much of the time. The guy who wrote The Art of the Deal with him, a guy called Tony Schwartz,

once said that this man doesn't know the difference between truth and lie because if he wants something to be true, he'll believe it. Now, what other class of human beings will believe when they want something to be true? Children. Yes. Now, Trump had a terrible childhood. childhood and his his his niece Mary Trump was a psychologist whose father drank himself to death was Trump's brother and he drank himself to death so traumatized was he in the Tom family origin well one of Trump's responses to that well first of all poor attention just his attention is all over the place

that's a typical ADHD response I'm not diagnosing him. I'm just saying I recognize that there's a response to trauma. But the other is that he's got difficulty telling truth from reality sometimes because he wants something to be so true. Because his early years were so difficult, he couldn't face the truth of it. And so what we're seeing in our politics very often are highly traumatized people, you know, who then have to act out their trauma on the public level. I don't care which party you're talking about. I'm not being partisan here. I'm just saying how I see it. Well, it's one of the more difficult aspects of modern politics is that the people that choose to pursue that level of adulation and attention

and power are the people that should never have it. That's the whole point. Yeah. That's why it's so crazy. It's this wild pursuit. And every four years we hope for a new leader, someone to rise, who's going to make sense of it all and fix it all. And it just doesn't happen. Which kind of, which is true. And it also points to a real dynamic in political life that we're on a, on a political level, we're much more immature than we might be as individuals. So we're like, we're looking to the mother figure or the father figure to fix it all

for us. Yeah. Instead of us asking, well, what's going on here? So we're looking to the mother figure or the father figure to fix it all for us. Instead of us asking, well, what's going on here communally? What's going on on a social level or cultural level? How do we all play a role in somehow making it better? We say, oh, let's just elect the right daddy or the right mommy, and they're going to make it okay. And then four years later, we're disappointed. So we elect another mommy or daddy. And then four years later, we're disappointed.

So they elect another mommy or daddy. And we're also locked into this tribal ideological thinking where you can justify the lies of the person on your side because they're on your team. That's right. And so you say, say, Trump. Right. Now, Trump was more egregious about it. I mean, he was talking about grabbing people by the pussy because I can get away with it. Yeah, but he was caught on microphone saying that.

Yeah, it's true. I guarantee you Clinton has had similar conversations. That's a good point. But the point I'm really making is that... I have to say, not that I'm defending Trump here. There's nothing to defend. To me, it's a sign of dysfunction. Right. But he was criticized for it far more severely

than clinton ever was for the very same behavior you know so that and it works both ways that people tend to criticize in the others in the other side that which will completely excuse in their own side yes which makes political debates so toxic. Well, no one's being honest. And we just, we decide what team we like and that's our tribe. And that's also a negative consequence of our development, how we all evolved in these small tribal groups is that the outsiders are threatening, but you are protected by whatever group you align with. And you see that with the blue no matter who or red till dead. You see that from either ideological position. They would support whoever's on their

side. You know, there's a psychologist at Notre Dame University she's retired now her name is Darcia Narvaez and she studied hunter-gatherer groups it might be interesting for you to talk to her once hmm she studied them internationally studying historically and I don't want to speak on her behalf but she could give you a very interesting what's her name again I'll write it down for you afterwards. It's Darcia Narvez. And actually, she's written a new book, which when it comes out,

you really might want to talk to her. She asked me to write the foreword for it. And the book is called The Evolved Nest. And it'll be published next year by North Atlantic Books. And I'm happy to give you her name. Okay, yeah. That sounds great.

She's got a huge body of work. She's written many wonderful books. She can talk really she can talk really um maybe i'm talking fast this must be all the caffeine i'm doing you're not talking too fast it's great oh that's good anyway darcia could really tell you about her studies of hunter-gatherer groups and not only about that but about how how our evolution has mirrored and paralleled the evolution of other mammals and how much we have in common with other animals when it comes to rearing the young and interacting with each other and so on a very she's a very fascinating person to talk with well i wouldn't be surprised that our evolution mirrors other mammals. Yeah.

It's like we are mammals. We are animals, no matter what we think of ourselves. We're just this weird mammal that happens to be at least amongst the ones walking on Earth the most intelligent.

Yes, and unfortunately, once that intelligence becomes disconnected from our emotional lives, it becomes a dangerous weapon, which is largely what's happened. I'm talking about our real emotional lives. Darcy's got this concept called, she says that we are species atypical, which means that we're actually the only species that is capable of creating

environments that actually hurt us. Most species will seek out and cultivate and mind, like beavers will create environments that will support the protection and nurturing of their young. They build these dams. They build, they create ponds. They make, you know, we create environments that actually hurt us. Yeah. So she's a species atypical.

That's true, right? I mean, we create ghettos and we create horrible, toxic air quality because of the way we develop power in our cities. And, yeah. Yeah. And then we justify it by whatever pursuit we're involved in. You know, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. We're also the, I mean, look, I mean, as a Jewish kid growing up in Eastern Europe, with the awareness of what had happened, you know, I had some awareness of what had happened.

My grandfather was 54, and he was a wonderful doctor in a town, and he was taken to Auschwitz and died that same day. So I grew up with this huge question in my mind of just how can people do this? And yin beings are the only ones that will gratuitously and for no practical reason turn on each other and they do this habitually it's not even like conquest and war i mean that experience didn't serve anybody's needs. It had no purpose other than the acting out of pure hatred and insanity by one people against another. But this happens all the time in human life.

And so my quest as an individual and as a physician and just as an observer is why do we do this and what do we have to learn about ourselves so that we can break this chain of trauma? I think people need to hear it discussed in a way that it makes sense in their mind. Like what you're saying here today I think is going to radically impact a lot of people that are listening to this because you're saying things that resonate.

It works in their mind. They're like, oh, ha, oh, that makes sense. Okay, now I understand it. And then once you've intellectualized that, once you have these ideas in your head, now when confronted by what would be a typical behavior, a pattern that you had fallen into, then you can recognize it and say, oh, this is why I'm doing this. And then the process of change is gradual and slow. What I think psychedelics, one of the ways they help, and I agree with you that they're only a small part of this process of change, but they allow you to completely detach from the normal patterns of life in a way that is inescapable. Like when you're having a DMT experience or a psilocybin experience,

it's, and one of the weird things is that the most profound of these experiences, or many of the most profound, mimic human neurochemistry. That's the whole point. Yes. Yeah. I mean, that's what psilocybin does. That's what dimethyltrypt neurochemistry. That's the whole point. Yes. Yeah, I mean, that's what psilocybin does. That's what dimethyltryptamine does. It's all these things. And we have even cannabinoid receptors in our brains for cannabis.

Yes, yes. And, you know, there's undeniable benefits for some people with these things, but it's not a panacea. It's not as simple as, like, take this, you'll be fine. Well, I mean mean two things occurred to me when you said that what was the first thing um oh yeah when you're talking about people recognizing i think what's really important here is that when people look at their lives and where they've lied or they've let themselves down or others, that they examine their experience compassionately. Not with self-judgment of a moral condemnation of themselves, but, hmm, why did I do that? Yeah.

What made me do that? Not as a way of excusing it, but as a way of understanding it so I don't have to do it again. So that's the first point. You talked about using natural chemistry. So let's look at opiate addiction. It's a really interesting example. So people are addicted to heroin. And I worked with a lot of heroin addicts in Vancouver's downtown east side, which is North America's most consolidated area of drug use. I mean, if you've never been there, it's an eye opener. I've heard it's horrible.

Yeah. So that's why I was a physician there for 12 years. And I was the doctor at North America's, at that time, only supervised injection site, where people would bring their drugs and inject themselves with heroin, with clean needles, sterile water. And if they overdose, they'd be resuscitated. So opiate addictions and what you said about natural human chemistry. So why do you get people get hooked on opiates? Well, opium works in the human brain because we have receptors for it. But why do we have receptors from a plant

that comes from Afghanistan? Well, we don't. We have, as you said, receptors, I should say, our own internal opiate system. This is our own natural chemical. Now, why do we have opiates? Well, if you understand opiate addiction you have to look at what do our natural opiates which are called endorphins and endorphins are it means endogenous morphine like substance So why do we have endorphins? What do endorphins do? But the first thing they do is they're pain relievers.

And they relieve not only physical pain, but emotional pain. So people have this natural painkiller, which is good. You know, if I bang my knee, then these endorphins... By the way, when people cut themselves... That's what they're doing? They're looking after the endorphin head. Wow. No.

So the pain relievers, physical and emotional pain relievers, that's the first thing they do. The second thing they do is they make possible the experience of pleasure and reward and joy and elation. So those are important experiences because life is tough. What would our lives be like if we had no joy, elation, and pleasure? So endorphins help with that experience. The third thing they do is the most important thing.

They make possible this little thing called love. Endorphins promote the loving contact between mother or father and infant. So when mother and dad or mother or dad are looking into the infant's eyes and the infant is smiling up at them, both the infant and the parent gets an endorphin hit. Now, without that, if you take infant mice and you knock out their endorphin receptors, these little mice will not cry for their mothers on separation.

What would that mean in the wild? Death. Their death. That's how important the endorphins are yeah now if you take human beings who didn't have those early experiences that promoted the proper development of endorphin circuits you got a sitting duck for opiate addiction when they do heroin they feel normal for the first time in their lives as many people have told me russell brand told me about this experience of love that he had when he did endorphin.

When he did heroin, you mean? Yeah, when he did heroin, yeah, sorry. And when I was working in detox at that facility I told you about, this big, muscled guy. Imagine your body in a 6'4 guy and earring and tattoos and shaved head and just tough looking as anything and he was coming in for detox from heroin I said what does it do for you and he said doc I don't know how to tell you this but it's like you're sick and you're ill

with a fever and your mother wraps you in a warm blanket, sits you on her lap and gives you a warm chicken soup, that's what the heroin feels like. Love. Love, yeah. And when somebody told me, this sex trade worker with HIV, I said, what does it do for you? She said, when I first did heroin, it felt like a warm, soft hug. In other words, mother, father, love, parenting. Why do people get addicted to heroin?

Because they didn't have those experiences. And very often they had really negative and abusive experiences. And then we punish these people. We ostracize them. We cast them out of society. It's still a struggle in the United States to establish safe injection sites where people can use clean water so they don't pass each other with HIV. I mean, with that backward. Yeah.

And then there's the illegalization of iboga. Yeah. Ibogaine and also psilocybin and ayahuasca have been shown to help people cure addiction and to have some sort of a center where you have trained experts that can guide people through these things. And then there's the problem with these experts because they become a subject to all of the human flawed instincts of the guru mentality, and then they become this revered person because they've introduced this person into this world of psychedelics, and their ego grows, and they feed off the adulation and attention, and then they get lost.

I've seen psychedelic shamans even abuse, sexually abuse their not that i've seen it i know of it very directly personally yeah i've heard of it as well i've heard of it as well and some of these retreats where you go to these other countries so you have to really be have some due diligence before you go to a place and this happens of course in the spiritual leadership work all the buddhist masters that have abused their clients or exploited their clients, the Catholic priests who have... It's a power thing, right?

The psychiatrists who have, the doctors who have, the politicians who have. It's just once you have power and you don't know yourself, it doesn't matter how good you are and how much you know and how much wisdom you might even have, but if you're not integrated, you might very fall into the trap of using your power for selfish purposes. And that's what these people do. Yeah, that's a weird instinct that human beings have because it never ends well.

It's mapped out. There's been so many instances of these cult-like situations or cult leaders. It never ends well. No, it doesn't. Never. And yet people still go down that path because in that moment when they're in control of their flock and when they're getting all this adulation and, you know, they're doing whatever they want to do, they feel like they're superior. They're invincible. They're significant. They're significant.

They're something special. Yeah. Yeah. And one sees that all the time. You see it in athletics. Yeah. There's so many athletes that I know that were abused by coaches and experts

and the very famous case, the infamous case of Larry Nassar, the doctor who abused all these young women in the acrobatic, the acrobats. He got away with it for years and years and years, which is, again, part of what the system does, is it drops people of their internal power, and they surrender it to others, and they don't even think to complain.

Right. Yeah. Yeah, they don't think that they have even think to complain. Right. Yeah. Yeah, they don't think that they have the ability to complain. There's so many people that have power over them. That's right. And they're also holding this position of a spot on the Olympic team, and you're going to compete, represent the United States in gymnastics, and so you just deal with it.

and gymnastics and so you just deal with it yeah yeah the the power dynamic of human beings having power over other human beings in that way specifically in regards to psychedelics is one of the more disturbing things to me because i've seen this abusive thing happen in people that should know better they should know better I mean, they're supposedly on this journey and yet they're involved in this thing where they're clearly, they're extracting an enormous amount of adulation out of these people and they're using it in this very transparent way. And when you hear them talk, it's so so obvious and anyone who doesn't know any better or doesn't know them rather and they they want like what do you think's going on here what is that a cult like immediately like a meat because it's it's got that aspect of it it's like but can

become yeah and the people that's that that's a weird instinct too because we we're always leaning towards a tribal leader you know that's part of our our heritage of developing in these tribes darcy and nervous could talk to you about that yeah because the tribal leaders weren't all-powerful rulers they were servants that may have been good at leading a war party but that didn't give them authority to rule right lawyer over the others you know so well look what we can say is that human beings are incredibly complex beings and, uh, we've got these incredible intellects and, uh, the more we come, again, you talked about the kindness, you know,

that you found in yourself and that you recognize is closer to you through nature than your previous persona yeah when we develop the power or we develop the intellect or any aspects of ourselves but we get cut off from the heart we become very dangerous creatures and neuroscientifically speaking we think of the brain as sort of the ruler of everything we actually we have three brains at least three brains we have a brain up here then there's a brain in the heart there's a nervous system in the heart that has got important predictive and and knowledge so is the gut. Ideally, the gut and the heart and the nervous system up here

will be all connected and in sync. And if we are, we're very grounded and present and wise. And if we're not, if we cut off anyone from the others, and that's what trauma does, is it cuts us into little parts. So we're no longer this whole. And that means that certain parts of ourselves can then take over and rule the roost to the detriment of ourselves and to others. And that's the essence of trauma, this disconnection from our whole selves.

our whole selves. So essentially, human beings are this incredibly complex, almost organic machine that doesn't come with an operating system. Doesn't come with a, yeah, it doesn't come with a, well, it comes with an operating system. Well, excuse me, not an operating system,

an operating manual. That's exactly right. It doesn't come with a programming. So it's how that operating system gets programmed by the environment that determines so much of what we behave like and what we love, what we hate, what we accept, what we deny. Again, that's the essence of trauma.

And so the subtitle is Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. How do we get back to that wholeness? That's my whole, not just mine, but it's one of my, that's the essential question. with this book provide people with the tools and the understanding to recognize these inherent flaws that human beings have and these traps that they fall into and give them an understanding of how to lead their life in a way that's more harmonious. That's as good a summation of the book as I could give you. Yeah. That's a very valuable thing to do for people because there's so many people that they just don't know what to do.

And they don't have any outlet other than psychiatrists. And psychiatrists oftentimes immediately put them on drugs. Well, so again, I talk about that in the book. So there's this modern trend of what's called biological psychiatry. Which is all about, let's change the biology of your brain by giving you this pill.

What they're not trained in is to understand is that the biology of the brain is determined by the environment. So the brain develops an interaction with the environment and is in a lifelong interactive relationship with it, both the internal environment and the external environment. So rather than blaming the biology of the brain let's look at what shapes the biology so in the book i talk

about i don't know if you're a comedian do you know who daryl hammond was sure yeah no daryl yeah so daryl's in the book oh is he yeah yeah so daryl had a documentary about his life called cracked up um which is what netflix for is still available on Netflix. And Daryl, in his 20s, developed a mental health condition. And over the next two decades or more, he was seen by 40 different psychiatrists. What kind of mental health condition?

Well, they called it psychosis. They called it bipolar illness. He was given a whole lot of diagnoses, typically, and all these medications. Until finally, one psychiatrist in New York said to him, I don't recall what you have, a disease. Something terrible happened to you. Now, Daryl was abused severely by his mother throughout his childhood.

And he says, it was a hallelujah moment for me but it had taken him decades and three dozen psychiatrists to find him suddenly said to him something happened to you and and what's you what you're experiencing is a response to what happened to you so i interviewed daryl for the book you know and he's gone a long way towards having dealt with his trauma but nobody for all those decades is all about take this pill or take that pill yeah this diagnosis that diagnosis it's so typical has Darrell had psychedelic experiences first of all even if I knew I couldn't tell you oh because you're a doctor no because it's somebody's private life that I don't know right you know well if he's talked about it publicly but i don't know that he has so i haven't i haven't heard him i haven't heard him talk about

psychedelics i have no knowledge so if he had talked about publicly and if i'd heard about it i would naturally say yes but i i just don't know yeah um the it's all based on pain. I mean, it seems like everything that we're talking about, all these problems are coming out of trauma. So there's a lot of physical illness. Yeah. Like when you do the research, the more adversity you had as a childhood, the more risk you are for addiction, for mental health issues, for relational issues, and also for autoimmune disease and malignancy. relational issues, and also for autoimmune disease and malignancy. So, for example, there was a study out of Harvard University, I think three years ago, women with severe PTSD have double the risk of ovarian cancer.

Really? Yeah. Double. Double. What about other cancers? In my experience, and I worked in palliative care for a while as well, looking up to two million people, and I've done the research. A lot of middle-agency is related to trauma. Because what's the mechanism?

Is it that it affects your immune system because you're severely stressed? Well, let me give you an example. Sure. So let's say a child is sexually abused, you know. The natural reaction would be rage. Can they afford to be rageful? If they were rageful, what would happen to them? At the hands of the abuser? They'd get punished even further.

Exactly. Therefore, the defense mechanism is to suppress the rage. Okay? further exactly therefore the defense mechanism is to suppress the rage okay that's just a natural defense of the organism mm-hmm okay no scientifically speaking I'll tell you a secret that most physicians never hear about despite decades of research and thousands of research papers and elegant science the mind and the body are not separable. What happens in the mind happens in the body and vice versa. They're one unit. In fact, one great researcher, Candice Pert, called it body-mind.

It's one unit. So our emotional system is part and parcel of the same apparatus as governs our immune system and our nervous system and our hormonal apparatus it's all one system it's not separate there are different manifestations of the same system now what is the role of a healthy anger like we've already talked about is to protect your boundaries What is the role of emotions in general? It's to let in what's healthy and nurturing and welcome and to keep out what is not. Is that clear enough? Is that okay?

What is the role of the immune system? Fight off intruders. And to let in what's nurturing and healthy. Right. When you take vitamins and your supplements, you don't want your immune system attacking that. So it's to let in what's nurturing and healthy, keep out what is dangerous and toxic.

The immune system and the emotional system have the same role. Because they're one unit, when you repress anger, you're also suppressing your immune system. That's been demonstrated in the laboratory now when you do that your defense against malignancy goes down because your system immune system is supposed to recognize the malignant transformation which happens in our bodies all the time by the way it's an of nature, but a healthy immune system will say, well, that's a foreigner, that cell. I'm going to destroy it.

When you repress healthy anger because you're programmed to do so because some parenting expert told your parents that an angry child should be banished from your presence or because the child was abused and to survive the abuse, they had to repress their healthy self-defense. Then they learn to suppress their anger all their lives that represses the immune

system now the immune system turns against you or it can not fight off malignancy the the physiology is straightforward it's elegant it's been worked out most physicians never hear this. Now there was a study out of Massachusetts, I think, which I quote in the book. I think 2,000 women were followed over 10 years. Followed over 10 years. Those who were happily married and didn't express their emotions were four times as likely to die

as those who were happily married. But they did talk about their feelings. Four times? Four times, yeah. You can't separate your emotional life from your physiological life. Right. So when you look at the question of why do women have 70% to 80% of autoimmune disease, they have much more likely to get rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma, lupus,

chronic fatigue, and so on and so forth. It's because women in this society are particularly acculturated not to be angry. It's also why black people have more illness in society, because they can't be angry. For a black person to be angry is to cause danger. And so if you look at the biological markers, they're different, not because of race, but because of racism. And none of that has to do with diet?

Well, yes. In a certain sense it does, but it's not purely the diet. It's part of a whole mix of influences. So diet is a factor. That is absolutely a factor. And the emotions. So as you know, for example, women who are, because I've heard you talk about it, people who are obese are more likely to get COVID, right? Yes.

But who gets obese? People who are abused. Yeah. And why are they eating too much? To cover up their feelings. Exactly. Yeah. So it's all connected. Yeah. So the obesity epidemic in our society is an epidemic worldwide, by the way, as globalized capitalism extends its influence internationally.

Obesity is a huge problem in China now. It didn't used to be. Really? It's a huge problem in Mexico. It didn't used to be. It's happening worldwide. It's a huge problem in Mexico. It didn't used to be. It's happening worldwide. It's an epidemic. But what's happening

is that, number one, people are more and more isolated, more and more stressed. Now they eat to soothe the stress. And then the,

in the goodness of their hearts, the sugar companies will come along and say, well, have this food. It'll make you feel better. A sweet, salt sugar companies will come along and say, well, have this food. It'll make you feel better.

That sweet, salt, fat combination. So the system works elegantly. Hoo, boy, and it's just exploiting these openings. Well, it creates the problem in the first place, and then it exploits the openings that it creates. You couldn't design a better system if you wanted to, A, stress be profit after stress do you have hope that we can sort this system out and that we can develop a better system do

you think that that's I believe in human beings I believe that your experience you've experienced healing you've experienced healing, you've experienced an opening of kindness in yourself. I have, I don't claim to be perfect, I don't think you do, but we would say that we've come a long way. Now if we can, why can't anybody? So I think that human beings, I have a lot of belief in the human potential.

I just think we have to recognize what the problem is and move towards conditions that will support that potential rather than inhibit it. So, yeah, I believe in the possibilities of human beings. viable field of study and an option to understand and to look into all of the things that bother them and what is actually happening? What are the underlying factors that are leading me to these bad decisions? What are the underlying factors that lead me to this general feeling of distress and being upset? Well, I think people need a map to themselves and um i think my work and the work of others that i highly respect is to offer people a map to understand themselves so that they can navigate their lives with some information rather than blindly yeah yeah and that's uh that's all we can do you know all you can do is sort of give people another viable option and give people an understanding of why the current options are so unsatisfactory and what caused them and why they're there and how you could avoid these problems.

Yes. And how you can get better. Yes. Should we end it right there? We can end it right here. I couldn't think of a better way to end it. It's a can get better. Yes. Should we end it right there? We can end it right here. I couldn't think of a better way to end it. It's a good way to end it. Well, thank you again.

Thank you for being here. And thank you again for all your work. You've really done some amazing, amazing stuff. And it's like just have someone with your ability to express yourself. Put that kind of information out there is incredibly valuable to people. So thank you. Well, thank you for giving me the opportunity.

Please, let's do it again sometime. And the myth of normal, is this out currently? Is it out right now? September the 13th. September the 13th. So that's like two days, right? No, it's five days. Oh, what's today?

Seventh. I don't know what's going on. The eighth. We're the eighth. So it's five days. Yeah. Okay. So in five days. Oh, what's today? I don't know what's going on. The 8th. So it's five days. Yeah. Okay. So in five days.

So thank you very much. And did you do an audio version of this as well? There's an audio version, which I got to mention. My co-writer is my brilliant son, Daniel. And he also narrates the audio version because he's a really talented actor and voice person. An award-winning narrator of books. So Daniel did the audio version, which will be available the same date as

the book is. Beautiful. Shout out to Daniel. Alright, thank you. Appreciate you. Take care. Bye, everybody. ... ... ... Bye.