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

other people are capable of controlling your mind we think that money means freedom but for many people money starts to mean bondage think about what you're doing you're giving up all this pleasure early on to have an unmitigated hedonistic pleasurable life after the age of 30 and it doesn't work what we're seeing is a whol scale failure of our traditional institutions there's one major aspect of human psychology that I think is critical Dr K healthy gamer Alo thank you so much for coming on the iced coffee hour we really appreciate it yeah of course thank you so much for having me back I had so much fun last time our last episode did so incredibly well that one of the top comments is to have you back so here you are so we're doing a deep dive we're going miles deep everybody this is going to be a banger episode thanks again for coming on you have this viral clip about your waist needing to be above your knees when you're sitting and apparently it's very advant ous if you're sitting and watching this you better have your waist above your knees why is it so important usually what happens is our knees are higher than our waist so we have these kinds of chairs where we kind of lean back right so if you lean back your butt is lower and then your knees kind of go up and this feels comfortable you kind of have this curve but if if you kind of look at it your center of gravity changes and is and that's why we hunch over so I don't know if this kind of makes sense but then basically what happens is if you sit if you elevate your hips and your hips are higher than your knees your back will naturally be straight so everyone thinks that posture is about like training right but posture is about physics if we sort of think a little bit about this table this table doesn't need a train the reason that it's stable is because the physics align and if you look at our spine the way to maintain a straight spine without any effort is to basically have your knees lower than your hips because it Alters your C center of gravity what's the point of good posture when you really get down to it is it just looking better or is there a feeling that you have when there's all kinds of reasons why you want a good posture everything from like biology to spirituality for example like on the spiritual end of the spectrum we have this energy that's seated at the base of our spine that when it rises to the top of our head we become enlightened so if that's something you're interested in you can do that but from a very physical standpoint just biological standpoint if we look at our body the basic problem is that weight should be supported by bone not muscle right so like really simple so if I for example if I do this and you push down you can put like 100 pounds of force on my arm and my arm will be fine but if you put five PBS of force like this my arm will go down so if you sort of look at it we want the bones of our body to support our weight and when we have bad posture when your spine is curved now suddenly the weight of your upper torso is over here because your spine is curved whereas if you have your spine like this and all of the weight of your body is over here then your muscles can relax right because they're not carrying the load of your body so what we tend to see a lot is like tension in the trapezius and around the neck muscles we'll see problems in our our scaling muscles and things like that like all these back problems or because we don't sit properly because our our back is our spine is designed to support our weight not our Muses why why does it feel so good to slouch it's true Jack feels comfortable comfortable like this I could not agree with you I have a problem every time I work what I do is especially when I'm reviewing podcasts or researching a guest I kick up my feet on my desk and I lean all the way back just because it feels so amazing but I feel like I'm ruining no no no so so let's understand a couple things okay so why does something feel good because that is what the Cent that's where our center of gravity and our weight distribution is that's why it feels good so let's talk about you for second so when you kick your feet up and you relax back what you're actually doing is straightening your spine does that make sense like when you go like this th this is straightening my spine right now like if you kind of like that's what happens with these chairs as we we we lean back and then if you want sitting up to feel good all you need to do is if you grab a pillow and you sit on it right now I guarantee you you will feel much more comfortable with a straight back I don't know if this makes sense but if you have to force yourself to sit up that means that you are using muscles to make your posture erect which does not feel relaxing because it is actually a muscular contraction so the way to feel comfortable sitting up is to elevate your hips and keep your knees below them and then if you sit like that it will feel natural and relaxed to sit up straight that's fascinating very interesting so the simplest thing that you can do is literally stick a pillow under your butt and make sure that your knees are lower and you will feel a very natural straightening of the spine so one of the most dangerous positions to be in is when you're working on your laptop and your kind of like leaned over and doing that that's not a very good one no it's not yeah I mean cuz what what's happening is you're you're getting so if you think about it like if I'm leaning over like this you got how is my head how is my body being held up my body is being held up by these muscles right and then we also see changes in our neck muscles so when I lean forward for example and I go like this now what's happening is this is literally what my head is like this is what I'm doing I'm craning my neck up right so I'm going like this it's a little bit exaggerated but that's literally what we do I could imagine everyone watching right now suddenly adjusting themselves yeah yeah so that's that's where you don't have to do it and even if you look at some interesting things I don't know if yall are familiar with like the Lotus posture in meditation right so this is the one where you're you're cross-legged almost you're cross legged but I mean I it's hard to demonstate but you know the whole point is that you actually have your foot on your thigh so I'll I'll give you all an example like did you guys notice a change in my posture just now so here's here's non Lotus right right what do you see I'm doing sling a little bit and then I do this and like this feels easier you look better too taller you look taller and more confident I I if you guys under the table I'm adopting half Lotus so what I'm I'm liter I guess we can't see that but GG we need the just trust them yeah foot cam okay okay that's you guys you guys got to practice half foot Lotus foot cam only fans the foot cam for I actually had someone reach out yesterday feet pick did you actually yeah yesterday this is not the first time no this is not the first time they said they wanted the soles of my feet which is interesting cuz I always thought it was the top of your foot which is the the toes and the top of your feet and the composition but this person asked for The Souls of my feet I asked how much he said $75 I can't lie I'm tempted that's a different why don't I get those no one reaches out for my feed because man you're you're fiance you have a fiance you you can't be doing this stuff that's that's adultery okay me on the other hand as a bachor I can send out as many feet picks as I want I just feel left out all I want to ask you are you happy yes and how do you know you're happy so how do you know you're unhappy say maybe some pressure in different areas of your body sure probably like this weird pressure verbally to be like uttering more negative things that you feel like you're not necessarily in control of like words all of the sudden are connotated negatively that are usually pretty neutral or positive words um could be a sense of sadness dread okay so let's understand what happiness is okay so people are like oh my God like what is the meaning of life I think it's actually pretty simple so let's like understand so first thing is sometimes we have biological or psychological needs but just because we have those needs and they are not met does not necessarily mean that we're unhappy so let's say that I am um waiting for my food at a restaurant and I kind of know that okay like the food is coming and and there are two states of mind that you can be sort of in that situation where you're hungry in both situations but just because you're hungry there are times where you're hungry and you're unhappy you're hungry and there are also times where you sort of know that okay like I'm hungry this is part of what I'm like let's say I'm going for a hike and at the end of my hike I feel really hungry and even though I feel really hungry at the end of the hike I'm totally fine with it because I know I'm going to sit down soon I'm going to eat something it's going to be delicious the fact that I've been hiking all day actually will improve the enhancement or will en enhance the taste of the food so even though my biological condition of being hungry versus let's say I'm I'm hungry and I'm waiting at a restaurant and the food is 15 minutes late 20 20 minutes late 45 minutes late in these two situations the biology of hungriness is the same the the signals of leptin and growlin in your same in your brain are going to be identical and yet in one situation you can be happy and in another situation you can be unhappy so let's actually look at it the other way we have a lot of people who will indulge their biological signals right so if I feel like eating a Twinkie I eat a Twinkie and then I have some degree of happiness but over time the more Twinkies that I eat the less happy I will become this is what we see with video games it's what we see with drug use it's what we see with basically like any kind of physical Indulgence satisfaction of biological needs does not equate happiness so then like kind of the question becomes what do y'all think is the source of Happiness gosh stumped us on that one the source of Happiness yeah satisfaction from our biological or physiological needs is not sufficient for happiness right and you guys mentioned like so are you all happy yeah I think it varies I'm I'm happy right now yeah what so what makes you happy right now let's talk about that I just I love talking to you I feel like you're you have so much information that I just I just want to absorb every time I talk to you I just learn excitement I'm happy to be here in Austin we just both took incredible vacations Graham took his first vacation in years a proper vacation a proper vacation right where he wasn't like doing it for work rated purposes and just enjoying it same here first one in years where I felt like I could just like do away with work and not worry about it and I would say that all has like residual happiness in it inner peace I feel like I'm at peace right now okay so let's understand that right so you went on a vacation mhm and were you happy during your vacation the happiest I've been in my life why so gram while we're on the topic of mental health I accidentally recently sprained my ankle playing basketball and I ended up having to book multiple different doctor's appointments just to get it checked out going through this I realized just how hard it is to get a hold of a doctor let alone finding a doctor that accepts new patients and accepts your insurance well that's where Zach do comes in Zach do is a free app and website where you can search and compare highly rated in network doctors near you and instantly book appointments with them online all you have to do is download the app type in the problem that you're experiencing select a date and time that you 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time in probably four or five years where I had two weeks where I could just like ah you know like it's all being taken care of I don't have to worry about it okay so let's understand that so like basically it makes sense right you were on vacation and that's why you're happy and human beings like vacations because and and why do we like vacations because vacations make us happy and yet are you on vacation now no no this not and you said you're happy now so how does that work I I think it's living in the moment being in the present one-pointed Consciousness okay I'm not thinking right now what I have to do tomorrow okay what I have to do a week from now I'm just here with you in this conversation right so that's like so that's sort of the right answer but let's understand it right because being in the present moment can also lead to all kinds of challenges so for example I once worked with a patient who had a boyfriend who was really into being in the present moment so he was like oh man like I'm at this party and there's this other girl who's not you and I want to be in the present moment and I'm going to be in the I'm I'm vibing with this chick right now so you know we're going to we're going to I'm going to be unfaithful to you but this is not really infidelity because this is just my value of being in the present moment right so there's like all kinds of impulse gratification that can can also lead to unhappiness I think there's a a lot of misunderstanding about what being in the present really is but I think this is the essence of it yall are right right so if we sort of look at it and I ask you what is the problem with work the problem with the work is the stress related to work so it is the absence of stress that leads to happiness we can say and the reason that a lot of people think that vacations are the source of happiness is because vacations are a circumstance that is has the odds of being less stressful right does that make sense but I don't know who you went on vacation with but you can go on vacation with certain people and it's not going to be stressfree and that'll destroy your happiness so then the question kind of becomes okay so it's not biology it's not necessarily biological needs being met um it's not necessarily the absence of work or the presence of work because like this is fun like I'm happy in this moment right so then the question is like when we say stress what is the actual Nuts and Bolts experience of stress I think I've noticed a stark shift in my general happiness when I felt like I was okay let's go shoot this podcast I want to go do this I want to go do this and I feel like I'm like the engine and now I feel like I've become the oil in the machine where the engine is going to keep running and I have to because I'm you know I got the golden handcuffs with like an incredible job and I feel like you feel similarly where with the main Channel especially where okay I have to post three times a week cuz it pays well I'm helping out a bunch of people and I'm not necessarily the engine anymore I kind of just have to give my input rather than being the spearhead of the main Channel like always excited to put out this new piece of content yeah so we can kind of unpack that in a couple of different ways one is that see when when you feel excited about something you're usually focused on the task as opposed to the outcome so like now Graham's problem is that he has a thing and if unless he continues to act he will lose the thing does that make sense mhm so the moment that we have a thing in life and we are afraid of losing it even though you put in all this work it's about like avoiding a loss that's unhappy right whereas if we look at okay before we started a thing so we have no idea where like this could be a terrible podcast this could be a great podcast we have no [ __ ] idea right and yet we show up here and we say hey Let's do let's create this thing we don't know if this is going to be good we don't know if this is going to be bad the more that the three of us stress about topping the last podcast the worse it's going to be the more unhappy it's going to be so instead what we're going to do is we're going to sit here we're going to have a conversation it could be good it could be bad who the hell knows right because none of us can predict the future so when we talk about happiness I think one of the biggest things that we sort of trip up in which confuses a lot of people because we think okay if I make more money if I get a promotion if I have a beautiful job as a podcaster or content creator right which are golden handcuffs how does does that work everyone strives for this and even at the beginning it's fun so what changes the the it changes the moment that you have a thing see it's so free when you'all are starting a podcast because you've got nothing to lose you're just we're going to create something right I have nothing that I can lose and then the moment that you have something now you're afraid of losing it so now we become attached to the world and we think that money means freedom but for many people money starts to mean bondage because now it's like I'm afraid that someone's going to take my money am I going to lose my money I can't do this I can't do that like it's all kinds of stuff right and it's it's kind of weird so I think it really comes down to a couple things living in the present is one we'll talk about what that means if youall want I think another thing is basically attachment so this is in in Sanskrit they call this Vaga and what we sort of discover is that you can be detached from positive and negative things and in both cases it'll be good so if I sort of like accept that okay I have to get let's say like a vaccine or I have to have surgery or something like that there's some amount of physical pain that comes with that but the moment that I accept that okay like this is going to happen I can't avoid this physical pain then I'll be fine with it but if I keep stressing oh my God this is going to hurt so much and I won't be able to do this and I won't be able to do this I won't be able to I airgo I have an attachment to something that I will not be able to get I'm losing something does that make sense it does so everyone sort of thinks about you know even if you look at something like a breakup right so why are people hesitant to break up because I will lose this relationship and so in that loss aversion they end up staying in a relationship and then they end up being like unhappy because they're trying to run away from unhappiness which is one of the S fastest ways to become unhappy is attachment ever good is it ever healthy to be attached to something it depends on what your goal is so when you say healthy if the goal is happiness the answer is no if the goal is worldly success the answer can be yes so it depends on what your goal is so um you know when I decided to have kids I was really struggling because I was like oh my God like do I want to be detached from my kids I had kids and then I realized okay like I'm supposed to be attached to this the moment that I start loving my kids is the moment that I like open myself to a world of hurt right because if things go bad then I'm unhappy and if things go good then I'm happy so now what I've done is I've taken my contentment and I have surrendered it to the outcomes of this external human being and so then what I kind of did is detach from that attachment and I sort of said okay in this life I've chosen to have kids this is what I've signed up for which means that one day I could be heartbroken one day I could be sad one day I could be mad when I took the when I decided to have children is when I opened myself up to a world of joy and a world of hurt and so even in that I have a lot of Peace because this is what I signed up for right it could go well it could go bad and and the key thing is decid in to roll the dice with your eyes wide open it's like okay I'm going to do this and this means that my life could be screwed or it could be happy and chances are it's going to be all of the above so it's kind of about surrendering to the outcome yeah because you can't control the outcome right I know this kind of sounds kind of weird it's a hard thing to grasp that you cannot control the outcome because I still feel like like if a podcast does poorly for us like we could have done more research we could have done this we could have done that and I think that there is you know and we do have attachment to the outcome and that does affect the way that we feel and in other areas of life as well like you can always work harder you can always do more yeah I've always felt like you should take responsibility for everything that happens so if let's just say this podcast sucks like Jack said that's then on us to improve on that and we should have done something better or we could have done something better to prevent that from happening yeah so I think this is where there's a sunscript concept called karma far so karma means action and far means fruit and what this sort of means means is that as human beings all we control is our actions we don't control the outcomes of our actions so and this is kind of like there's a there's a Nuance to this because let's say I plant a seed and I water it every day does it turn into a plant depends on the seed depends on some circumstances circumstances right if you water it properly it's not just the watering but it's also if you're giving all sunlight absolutely right so there's a lot of factors that are outside of my control the other thing is that I could take a handful of seeds I could throw them out into Wilderness and I could walk away and will those seeds grow possibly absolutely right so this is the main thing that we don't understand in life is that we control a lot so we're entitled to our actions and so you should take the right action but I mean I've seen this so many times where you know couples going through marriage counseling and like one partner in the relationship can basically do everything right doesn't save the marriage right so you need both Partners trying to do everything right and as a human being you can't control how invest your partner is in the relationship that's a choice that they make so this is what's what's kind of subtle I'm not saying that as human beings we can't do something but even then if we sort of look at it there are a lot of human beings let's say like let's say money right so there are some human beings on the planet who work very hard and therefore we think get a lot of money but there are a lot of human beings on the planet who don't work very hard who who end up with a lot of money so how do you like reconcile that right like I how does that work so I I think kind of the the tldr which you're right it's hard to understand and we can get into more details if yall want but you know basically if you really look at it all you can control are your actions like y all worked really hard to set up this podcast but what if I showed up hung over that's not in your control so you can optimize all kinds of things but there's going to be some element that you don't control and in my experience it turns out that that element that you don't control is probably 99% which a lot of people don't understand which is fair enough that's a really hard pill to swallow I feel like in today's culture where everyone says that you will be happy when you get the lambo when you end up running a business when you have the hot wife or whatever when you're in like you know a non- monogamous relationship you have 10 wives like everyone says that that's what's going to make you happy but that's all completely outcome oriented and to shift that over into not you know surrendering to the outcome and placing your happiness and the things that you do I feel like is like the exact opposite of everything that's being spread yeah and I think like is the happiness in the world increasing or decreasing decreasing right so we have tons of Mental Health Data that supports that and oh like that's an interesting correlation is it causation I I tend to think so but like I mean like if if all this stuff worked then I I I don't know if this kind of makes sense you take your favorite influencer who who is all into fancy cars and this and that and like you just ask yourself like how happy does this person really seem oftentimes if you get to meet these people a lot of them are very discontent and then the the interesting thing is that you'll you know there's there's a thousand happy people out there who are like taking their kids to the playground slightly overweight drive like a Toyota or a Honda or like you know nothing fancy and they're like quite content in life so guys as Dr Kay knows as we know and probably some of you guys know this too that running a business can be incredibly tough and trying to stay 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nets.com to get your own kpi checklist for free today nets.com sisted thank you so much netw site and back to the episode for people who don't know who you are could you give us a two-minute background why they should listen to you I mean um I don't know that they should listen to me is number one but I'm Dr K I'm all Oak I sort of struggle with video game addiction a lot failed out of college um went to India planned on becoming a monk for about seven years or did monk training for about seven years and then that didn't really work out um met my wife so decided to go to medical school uh went to med school became a psychiatrist trained at Harvard I was faculty there for a couple years and then a lot of what my area of interest is is integrating some of these Eastern monk Concepts Buddhist Hindu Concepts about spirituality and stuff into psychiatric practice so now the kind of work that I do is is really about like understanding the Mind from both like a neuroscience clinical perspective and from like a spiritual perspective and what I found is that like and we see this actually in the field of Psychiatry so right now in Psychiatry we have something called the third wave of psychotherapy so the first wave of psychotherapy was psychoanalysis which was like Freud and Yung and these kinds of people and then we had these behaviorists that came along and so you have people like Aaron who developed cognitive behavioral therapy which is like in in the first wave it was like oh you have all the stuff going on in the unconscious if we fix the unconscious then we'll fix you and the behaviorists were like we don't know if any of that stuff is actually real it's all like theoretical we have no data behind it instead what we should focus on is behavior so if you can get an alcoholic to literally stop drinking alcohol every day You've Won MH now we have something called the third wave which is the injection of minor Eastern Concepts into Psychotherapy so dialectical Behavioral therapy acceptance and commitment therapy these are basically therapists usually who study the Eastern stuff in some way and then realize that there is something missing in therapy and when they add this Eastern component the outcomes from the therapies that they develop start to improve quite a bit so what are those you just mentioned two Eastern therapies can we break those down a little bit so let's say someone is struggling with some sort of mental illness okay let's let's say like a eating disorder or something like that how can you impose Eastern based therapy into somebody like that so so let's take the example of dialectical behavioral therapy so dialectical behavioral therapy is something that is designed to look at something called the dialectic so a lot of people struggle with like opposite things being true so for example like if I'm angry at you it's very hard for some people to believe that I love you at the same time so to hold two opposite things to be true at the same time is very difficult right is this person good or is this person bad and generally speaking the challenge is that we fluctuate between the two so if you have a unhealthy relationship the reason that you stay in it is because sometimes the relationship is really good and sometimes the relationship is really bad and then people really struggle they're like should I stay in this relationship should I break up like should I stay or should I go and the problem is that when the relationship is good you want to stay and when the relationship is bad you want to go and so what we naturally do as human beings is we try to like put all of that data into an equation and then there's an equal sign and then there's a decision on the right side so we try to integrate all of this stuff and try to like make a decision have some kind of final conclusion but that's not what life is so dialectical behavioral therapy trains people to understand that two opposite things can be true that a relationship can be both healthy and unhealthy at the same time this is actually rooted in an Eastern concept called ad vanta which is non-duality so if I were to say like is this cup a good cup or a bad cup it's a cup it's a good cup right so so yeah the ad vant says that there's no such thing as good or bad if you really think about it like if you walk outside and you see nature there's no good nature or bad nature there's no good rain or bad rain when does rain become good or bad well if there's a drought we interpret that rain as good if I am not expecting rain and I'm walking outside and then rain starts I view that rain is bad so if you really look at it good or bad is created by the human mind it is not an intrinsic quality of reality and the more that you realize that good and bad is created by your mind suddenly you have the power to create good or get rid of bad because it's created in here the action is just the world is just the world it's the way that we receive the world the way that we interpret the the world that makes it good or bad so I know that too is like something that's wild but just to give you all an example so I you know when I graduated from college I had a 2.5 GPA and at the time there was no circumstance in which I thought that a 2.5 is superior to a 4.0 right there's no way except when I wind up at Harvard and so suddenly my story is different because if I was a 4.0 kid I would have been like the other 5,000 kids who were there but I'm a 2.5 kid so suddenly even in terms of like personal brand building and like my experience like that 2.5 is actually more valuable than a 4.0 because I figured out how to figure do this stuff with a 2.5 right I'm not one of these kids who like always was good at studying and super smart and like dedicated and hardworking and all this kind of stuff so one of the things I've learned in my life is there is no such thing as good or bad there's just what happens and it's the way that we interpret this which there's good data about that ultimately determines our happiness whether things are successful or not all kinds of things so going back to DBT DBT basically introduces this concept in a pretty watered down way and even if you look at the practices in DBT which are very like meditative practices that are grounding literally like the practices are something like you know holding an ice cube and if you hold an ice cube the the physical sensation is actually unpleasant but holding the Ice Cube kind of focuses your mind and you even start to embrace things that are physically un unpleasant and the moment that you can Embrace some something that is unpleasant that thing no longer controls you does that kind of make sense because when something when you when some when you avoid things that are unpleasant you lose control over your life because then unpleasant determines your actions so the whole point of some of these practices like DBT is to embrace things that are unpleasant to recognize that there's no such thing as good or bad and if you really look at like what really controls a lot of people's lives it's like running away from bad and running towards good but then suddenly like you can't you don't lose you don't have any control because if something is good you have to move towards it if something is bad you have to run away from it so you don't actually have freedom in that life because you're just you're just like a bacteria that's moving away from a noxious stimuli and moving towards a a pleasant stimuli yeah so when should people go to therapy versus work on it on their own uh so I think that there's a very common misconception about therapy which is that therapy is about treatment so the first thing to understand is that as a clinician the diagnostic value that I bring is like 50% of the value so I I think that you know we should probably have a society where people have like you know we have physical annual physicals right which is like once a year we just check you out but if we really look at society today you know a 21-year-old doesn't need a physical evaluation on a yearly basis what we need way more is a mental evaluation on a yearly basis so I I think one thing to understand is I think basically everyone should try therapy whether you think your something's wrong with you or not because the whole point is that a therapist can tell you okay are are there problems here which we can work on are there ways that I can help you is there something actually going on um some of the most sad experiences I've had in therapy are people who come in for one problem and then discover that there is something that they thought was completely normal which has been like wrong their whole life so a good example of something like this is like adult diagnosis of ADHD where people have been struggling their whole life with this and they never understood that like oh this is actually something that can be fixed like this can be treated in this fundamental struggle that I've had my whole life can be corrected so I I think that everyone is it's good to go for an evaluation but I think that I as far as your question of you know when should you do it yourself and when should you do therapy I I don't think that I kind of I don't see it that way so I think that therapy is to be done in conjunction with what you do yourself so the worst cases I've had of therap therapy patients or when people come in and they're like therapize me whoops right they're like just fix me yeah and when they don't put in the effort like I can't you know I see them once a week and then there's 100 whatever hours that they're awake during the week where they don't do any work and it doesn't do any good some people in therapy for a decade and they just show up expecting the therapy to be done in the room and they don't make changes to their external life which doesn't work yeah what do you think about NLP I was listening to a podcast with Tony Robbins who said that there was a person who went in with a fear of snakes and they had been working with a therapist for 10 15 years and they're still just as afraid of snakes and Tony Robbins claims that in 30 minutes he cured her fear of snakes on stage using NLP what are your thoughts on something like that I I think we sort of know that the science of NLP is kind of pseudo science so if we look at it like um the theories of NLP have not been borne out to be kind of correct uh but there's a lot of caveats to this so so we got to dive in a little bit so the first is that we certainly know some of the premises of ml NLP are that our actions and our words are somehow tied and that's absolutely true so if you look at like just basic psycho theapy techniques like if you pay attention to someone's words it will give you an idea of what is going on in their mind even predict certain kinds of behaviors so there's definitely like you can use language diagnostically for sure to sort of get a sense of where someone is now when you look at something like Tony Robbins curing someone of their snakes I think that that's probably real so like in the sense that this person had a very real clinical outcome um I've seen that a lot so my area of Interest was evidence-based complimentary alternative medicine so for example like I encountered a patient who had stage four metastatic cancer who basically was going to die right so it's like not really treatable so they decided that they were going to spend the last 3 to six months of their life living in a monastery and learning to play the flute they're like I'm dead there's nothing I can do about it they go to this Monastery they do yoga and meditation every day they learned to play the FL flute and then 5 years later like they're still alive so no one knows like what happened there mechanistically so one thing that I've learned about all these stories about complimentary and alternative medicine is that there are absolutely success stories that defy scientific understanding in the Moment The Challenge though is if we're looking at whether something is scientific or not the question is one of reliability so now the question becomes if Tony Robbins takes a thousand people who have a thousand different phobias can he reliably cure them of their phobia and then the next question becomes if we take if if this is really NLP then theoretically we should be able to teach it to a thousand other people people who should have the same success rate as Tony Robbins does and I think when you do that it doesn't work right so we have not reliably been able to teach let's say A large group of people NLP who can reliably get the outcomes that maybe Tony Robbins achieves I haven't looked at his data I have no idea like what his sample size is what his success rate is we have no idea what the duration of the Cure of the phobia is right so like even in that moment if someone if they then bring out a snake and that person is fine what happens a year later what happens 5 years later what happens 10 years later so a lot of times like these people who are very like um and I'm not trying to dog on Tony Robbins here but I I'm just pointing out that their outcomes are not filtered through a traditional scientific lens and so the mechanisms don't seem to be 100% correct from what the NLP theorists do I think that people who do NLP will frequently get good outcomes with with certain people but the question is what is really the mechanism of that and we don't really know so we know that for example placebo effect is incredibly powerful so when someone pays and we also know that the more that you pay for something the more the stronger the placebo effect is so if someone pays like 10 grand to go to this person and really believes that things are going to be really powerful so I've seen like spiritual gurus in India that people will go through a lot of you know they'll travel all across the world they're disabled so they have to like track up to some mountain and then they see this person for 5 minutes the guru touches them and then they're like cured I've seen that kind of stuff yeah so I think that there's all kinds of mechanisms around belief and faith and like all kinds of other stuff that seems to be responsible for clinical Improvement but not in a reliable way that's the real challenge so don't you think that then still makes it a treatment if someone truly believes it's going to work doesn't then that just mean it works yes and no because we know that the placebo effect isn't 100% but yeah I mean there are some people who have even sort of talked about so there's one person when I was doing research at Harvard there's this great guy named Ted capu and Ted cap chuk is a is a uh he's trained in traditional Chinese medicine but he's also faculty at at Harvard so he does Placebo research and he his research is super cool so what he does is he'll go to someone and he'll say I'm going to give you something that's a placebo and then he says we also have all this data that Placebo can potentially improve your symptoms and can even like cure you potentially and the reason that I'm giving it to you is because I believe it will substantially improve your symptoms even though it's fake so he did a beautiful study where he did this and people got better right so like you're right basically that that you know there's some element to this I think the real challenge that we look for in medicine is reliability so how consistently does that work so in the case of something like anti-depressant medication it seems like it's quite consistent and even 70% of the therapeutic value of anti-depressants appears to be be Placebo H we spoke about happiness a little bit in the beginning of the episode I have a question I was reading a book called stumbling on happiness I had a whole segment on this about how do people know if they are happy or sad when they've only lived as themselves what if they think they're truly happy but in terms of the universe they're only a six out of 10 in terms of reality why do you assume that the happiness is objective why do you assume that there's an objective scale of happiness because it's a term that we use to describe a certain feeling that like we've all kind of like I think it's perspective you could probably have someone in a really terrible condition who's Happy from their perspective and you could have someone with an amazing life who's just unhappy so so I mean like I I think this is a really good ignorant question apologies I'll no I'll take it so like let's understand this okay so so if you say a 10 out of 10 happiness how like as a scientist I'm asking how do you define what are the variables that correlate with a 10 out of 10 happiness well I just the only as a scientist yeah like well so so if you're saying that something is objective right so if if happiness can be objectively rated from 0 to 10 then there have to be variables that correlate with it I don't think you could say it's objective but I think you could take a big enough sample size of people with like the law of big numbers and come to a certain agreed upon spectrum of happiness yes and then someone maybe as an outlier of that thinks that they're on the higher end when in actuality they could be doing other things to make themselves happier yeah so we do that and when we do that that kind of falls apart I think I'm not an expert in happiness research so so take this with a grain of salt so let's so we know that for example happiness is correlates with quality of life right but then if we look at it the measure of quality of life is fundamentally subjective so if you like ask people like are you happy at the end of the day what what you what you discover it's it's an objective measure of a subjective feeling so I think the question is kind of like I don't think the question really computes once you really get to my scientific understanding of it and then this is also where we can tunnel into what is the nature of Happiness so let's assume that what you're saying is true M so let's say I think I'm happy okay so let's say that I'm I'm married and I I believe I have a good marriage and then I see someone else and now as you're presuming I see I realize oh my God there is so a marriage can be so much better so now I've become I've become objectively aware and that destroys my subjective happiness right that's the presump am I understanding this correctly kind of yeah yeah okay so now let's understand what is the nature of my unhappiness in that moment what is it that is actually making me unhappy comparison right absolutely right so now what's started to happen is I I have created a unfulfilled want and I'm chasing that want and I'm letting my unfulfilled want dictate my happiness so I think that this is where it it sort of Falls in my opinion and I may be losing you all a little bit but it kind of falls apart because what is the nature of the unhappiness now I see something that I want that I don't have but this is like this is really common even if we go to like any let's say middle school and there's a very popular type of sneakers right and then some kids have it and they're happy and some kids don't have it and they're unhappy but the whole point of like understanding the real source of happiness is that just because you don't have something there are particular skills that you can or perspectives that you can gain that will allow you to be happy in spite of not having the sneakers and I think the only thing that we're talking about here is once I see okay this person has this in the marriage that I don't have now this makes me unhappy but the way that you relate to things that you do not have in life ultimately determine your happiness that makes sense and it's kind of hard to articulate this but you can still somewhat isolate it down to certain variables and certain changes in your life that you can make to become happier and my whole point is if you take a large enough sample size like I think it said in the book that I was reading they did a study where they got like one person or whatever and they gave them an Oreo cookie they're like measure happiness before you eat the cookie measure it after the cookie and it was like someone that went to from a four to a six or something like that and you can't say that for everyone in this on this planet that's now a four after eating an Oreo you're a six but if you measure this across 10 million people and then you average out the the Delta the difference between before and after Oreo consumption then you can generally say that this is probably how you're going to feel after eating an Oreo cookie right and you could do that with other certain variables like what is your relationship with desire what things do you desire in life right now or are you content and then you can map that out across 10 million people and then you say okay well relationship to desire has a stronger correlation with happiness than okay beautiful so now we get to a really important fundamental what is the relationship between a populationbased conclusion an average and your life I would say it's a good heuristic in what way um something to consider when trying to increase my own happiness okay so like I think this is really important to understand so if we look at like populationbased recommendations right so like if I were to take every person in the city that we're in right now I were to take their articles of clothing I were to average their articles of clothing and I were to make a recommendation that everyone should wear gray Mock and then would that correlate with like everyone in the world like so we take all this this pile of data we average what everyone is doing and we say this is the average that we discover and then we use that as a recommendation and everyone started wearing gray mocks do you think that there happiness with their clothing would increase or decrease decrease but I also think that that's slightly different whereas like clothing is a little bit more like subjective and higher variance whereas an Oreo cookie is an Oreo cookie fair enough right so so you can make the argument that an Oreo cookie has a stronger dopamine a more consistent dopaminergic release sure than uh a gray mock or clothing or things like that so that that's a fair point but I I think my big learning as a clinician is that popul based medicine cannot be applied to an individual there's this whole kind of concept of something called external validity which is kind of this concept of we can do a study and we can learn something about a population but just because it's true of a population in fact we sort of know that it's not necessarily true for an individual and you're kind of spoton where you can say okay what's true for a population should be used as a compass for exploration right that's what kind of so that I agree with completely but the whole point is when we're doing a compass for exploration there still to be a translation to the individual that makes sense okay so yeah I was saying it shouldn't be used as like Dogma yeah like you know the population based medicine but it's a fantastic tool to use to challenge your own beliefs and maybe to guide you like you said like a compass in the right direction and then this is where like I'm going to kind of support your point 100% and tank what I was saying earlier because even if we look at this yogic perspective what the yogic perspective says is that there is a uniform to look inside yeah to look inside and that there is a there is a consistent subjective path that will lead to happiness right so which makes it kind of objective because they believe that Detachment living in the present I mean we just sort of torpedoed what I was saying earlier it's slightly different because one is like an Oreo cookie whereas the other one is like you said it's so it's subjective to the individual but you can objectify that by saying it's for everybody but it's sort of so I think the other problem with the or the example of the Oreo cookie is that it is not happiness it is pleasure yeah okay that's fine right so so dopamine doesn't correlate with contentment dopamine just correlates with pleasure and so this is where I think that why I asked the the first question of like okay when you say that there is an objective scale of Happiness what are the variables of that and what we know from happiness research is a lot of that is subjective and then the question becomes okay if happiness is subjective and not objective then if you want to be happy do you need to do internal work or external work and the whole the whole scam right now we come full circle to this idea of everyone telling you if you if you [ __ ] more [ __ ] and you drive faster cars and you have more money and you have a bigger dick you will be happy these are all objective measures and I don't think many of those people are very happy I mean some of them are but generally speaking I mean I've worked with a lot of them and they're usually not very I mean that's why they end up coming to me in the first place right but there could be a sample size selection bias there um but and so now we kind of come full circle to where I think there is actually like there are certain biological psychological and spiritual laws and we know what constitutes happiness but the work is largely subjective the whole problem with the world is that we Chase external things that give us pleasure or dopamine and we think that those are happiness because no one ever teaches us What happiness truly is and so we go chasing these things but the basic problem with an Oreo cookie is that your dopamine is temporary right so then the the Oreo goes away and then you want another Oreo and then you eat another Oreo and then you get more dopamine and then you eat a third Oreo now you're developing dopam energic tolerance now you've eaten four Oreos because you need to eat two extra Oreos to get the happiness of the first Oreo and now you've eaten six Oreos because you're chasing this pleasure of an Oreo and now you're feeling guilty because you've eaten six Oreos that's interesting so I feel like a good a good guy guideline would be how do you feel without any stimuli if you're just sitting by yourself without anything good job oh is that you asked me you asked me a question at the beginning what was the first question of the podcast you asked me are you happy yes and what did I say you said yes and you asked how do I know and there was a and then so what's the answer that you just came up with what were you saying because you're able to feel content and happy Pleasant positive without any stimuli yes not just without any stimuli so now we're going to take it one step further so thank you very much for answering your own question not only with in the absence of stimuli but then a certain Tranquility in the absence of stimuli which remains exactly the same in with with stimuli whether it is positive or negative so to be tranquil in the face of pleasure to be tranquil in the face of pain for pleasure and pain to be exactly the same and when you have that then you'll be happy kind of sounds like stoicism in a sense sense it is it's very similar right so now let's just think about the implications of this so if I react the same to Pleasure and Pain suddenly all of my problems in life like literally go away it's easy for me to work because playing a video game or doing work gives me the same amount of Joy imagine how [ __ ] overpowered that is so that's literally like what changed in my life is that I used to chase video games and now for example like I have a book coming out in two weeks and I started writing my second book like 4 days ago and that is just as enjoyable to me as playing a video game how do people get to that point if they're starting off from scratch like never done any work on themselves how do they get to where you are now you all know I choose function over fashion any day of the week but every once in a while I get the best of both worlds and yeah I'm talking about this Tech t-shirt that I'm wearing from our sponsor Insider clothing the T-shirt has a very simple minimalistic design so you could wear it with anything the material is also very light and soft which I love and it's levels above a normal men's t-shirt because it adapts to your body has anti-sweat technology and has antibacterial action that prevents odor-causing bacteria does that mean I don't ever need to wash it Jack please wash it and the color is not going to fade if you do do I ever need to iron it no you don't need to iron it okay so what you're saying is I should order some more I actually think you should I think it looks good on you should also get some other colors too because they have six different options the tech t-shirt comes in sizes small through double XL and ships all around the world G crucial question do we have a promo code yes all you got to do is go to insider. cl/ iedc coffe hour and use the code iced 15 for 15% off your order once again that's insider. cl/ IED coffee hour all one word and use promo code iced 15 for 15% off guys try it out it's 15% off you're going to absolutely love it Insider clothing thank you so much back to the episode how do people get to that point if they're starting off from scratch like never done any work on themselves how do they get to where you are so how do you get to that point what a great question so this is going to sound kind of weird but we're way closer than we think but I'll try to like lay it out so the first thing to understand is like first just observe your internal State and then what I would say is like if you kind of like let's we can do this now so I want you to just like close your eyes for a second okay and what do you feel like the sensation of touch what do I just what anything I would say my fingers feel a little tingly okay just a physical sensation or we're talking about like a a mind I feel pretty happy I feel where does that happiness originate from I would say it's my chest okay right so now what I'm going to do can I have your hand M okay so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to pinch you jack okay now this is going to cause pain okay so does this hurt no I'm going to pinch you hard I'm pinching very hard okay does that hurt I mean it's dis it's you know not really comfortable what's happening to the sensation in your chest uh I would say I'm not really focusing so much on it okay focusing more on the pinching okay very good right so now this is important so the sensation in your chest doesn't go away you can open your I cream so sensation in your chest doesn't go away but what happens now you've basically stumbled upon the source of all meditative Traditions which is that we get distracted from our Tranquility that's the problem in life it's just distraction so the more that you are centered in here the happier you will be and that's the beginning and end of it so I'll give you all an example right so let's say that you're having a good day and then what makes a good day a bad day is that you get pulled outside of yourself now I have to think about this upload over here now I'm going on vacation with this person and this person is waking up late you are not sitting within yourself you start to think about the outside world is this podcast going to be good is it not going to be good are we sitting here just having a conversation as long as we're sitting here just having a conversation we're going to be happy we are grounded we are centered we are in the present call whatever you want and the moment that our mind starts to go to other places this is when unhappiness will set in because now I have to fix this or not fix this even as we go towards positive things we will be unhappy it's so funny you said that because when you had me close my eyes and you're asking me like what you feel in the moment it was for me a bit of anxiety because I checked uh as you were adjusting the levels I checked all my notifications and I saw like no I it's Market's closed today but I saw like five text messages I'm like oh I I should respond to this and I got to and you're right it just took me out of the Moment by seeing like the to-do list that's waiting for yeah breaking the fourth wall so it's it's it's crazy right so like this is this is the essence of it is that what we need to do is we need to understand that the more that you are grounded within yourself and if we literally like even we can look at extreme cases of psychosis like hallucinations so what is happening so I I I really enjoy working with patients with who are actively psychotic it's kind of scary for a lot of people but I love that like my meditative training helps me a lot right so with all these people what's literally happening is they have such powerful external stimuli they have sounds they have visions they have all this kind of stuff that pulls them away from themselves and they get literally caught up because they think that the devil is chasing them so I had a patient who thought the devil was chasing them and they were so focused on the devil that they ran down the hallway and jumped out of a third floor window and like broke both of their legs right so they are so caught up in this external stimulus and this is what happens with us oh my God did this person text me back you're thinking about it I'm thinking about this I'm thinking about this thinking about this my mind is not in here my mind is all in the outside world am I going to do okay on the test am I not going to do okay on the test now when you sit down and you take a test if you were just simply absorbed with the question at hand even then you're a little bit externalized but there's less externalization if I'm thinking about this question and the next question and the next question and my grade and my you know my GPA and my desires to be a doctor and my desires to do this and then make all this money the more external I become does that make sense the more my stress increases the more my anxiety increases so what we want to do is just come back to you and even if we look at the things that we enjoy like orgasm so orgasm is a moment where we are with us right don't look at me when orgas let's talk about that take from the team Take My Hand the other one other one and then you guys let's talk about you guys need to hold hands too ring of now we're going to talk about how orgasm is us we're going to do this to get Go Jack just stares at me so so now now now let's let's think about that right so so when you say you're uncomfortable where did your mind go I I thought of Jack looking at me when you were talking about that okay right so so but once again so now let let let's try again hold take my hand take my hand okay you guys okay now now okay so so notice the discomfort where is the discomfort Jack's hands are sweating okay so that's just a that's just a sensation right that's just a sensation it's not good or bad yeah right so now close your eyes okay take a deep breath and breathe out so notice that nervous energy going out right so this is deeply uncomfortable and just notice that discomfort where is the discomfort my hands okay so that's okay so like just notice that your hands are discomfort they're going to be uncomfortable cuz you [ __ ] invited me back and like GG right so this is nothing you can do about it now you guys open this and so now just okay so what's happening to the comfort in your hands I want to pull my hands away okay so now so now you're thinking about trying to change something so I want you to focus on your chest gram focus on your chest and now breathe in and out of it right so you want to pull the hand away you want to avoid the stimulus maybe this won't work who knows but just just accept it right so we're just holding hands that's all we're doing there's nothing weird about it like it's sure it's [ __ ] weird but there this is just a physical sensation in your hands right so you can you can put your hand you can grab a wet towel you know you can you can grab all kinds of stuff and like what's slowly happening are things getting worse are things getting better slightly better but I don't think they're going to get a 100% good okay so that's totally fine so now let's open our eyes we can let go yall are free okay so now notice the relief flooding in yes okay so there's so much relief right so this is actually how we start so the first thing is that this was uncomfortable for you it seems like Jack got better than you did faster which is fine so everyone starts somewhere but now what you've been able to do is even if it doesn't get better you have tolerated discomfort I feel like it was forced I think we it wasn't like a is the next voluntary sure right but you were still tolerating it right so I I forced you into it cuz GG and and so you're asking how do you do this you start by not responding to these external things that shape your behavior so even if there's discomfort on the inside you can learn to tolerate it is the first step and once I can learn to tolerate dis discomfort then a lot has changed so I had a problem with this where basically I thought all this fell apart when I got nauseous so I got food poisoning a couple years ago and then like I became nauseous and I was like there's no [ __ ] tolerating this like accepting it it doesn't work when you're feeling physically bad and then a year ago I got I got food poisoning again and I actually found that it actually works pretty well you can just tolerate the discomfort there's nothing you can do about it you're kind of grounded with it you're tranquil with it like there this is going to hurt it's going to feel uncomfortable but I don't know if this kind of makes sense when you were feeling uncomfortable your mind wanted to run away right you wanted to run away from this stimulus and so the moment that you practice first of all tolerating the discomfort even if it's forced then you will get used to it like just like you get used to a sauna or anything any other kind of physical sensation you can acclimatize to it and as you acclimatize to it it will affect you less as it affects you less now you no longer need to let go and so now what's going on is in your case being unable to let go is creating so much suffering and so how do we conquer that suffering by being okay with not letting go which is practiced in a very simple way like this yeah a couple of really simple things in in case that sounded weird for everyone so one is um so I think meditative practice and practicing literally training your mind to be in the present and tolerate discomfort is like really really good so part of the reason that we meditate for let's say 30 minutes in Lotus posture is that as you meditate 15 minutes 20 minutes your body starts crying out I want to move I want to do this and there's a beautiful meditation practice for this that we can do here if yall want called GES theam it's going to take a little while like maybe about 3 or 4 minutes if yall want to give it a shot but how do we do this so I think meditative practice is good I think a certain amount of introspection is good to also understand okay what is it that really makes me unhappy and it's not the object it is notice the pattern or process of unhappiness so as a simple example when your mind is moving fast versus when your mind is moving slow which one is more likely to be unhappy fast really I think fast to be happier how so fast um more to do what going on right so this be more occupied yeah okay so so if we sort of look at it right so generally speaking the speed of the mind will lead to an absence of Tranquility but excitement is absolutely has fast mind anxiety has fast mind right but if we think about excitement excitement is also externally oriented it's pleasure oriented it's super hype let's party let's do this let's do this let's go crazy let's everybody have fun and so this is where we get back to ad vanta where the yogis say that excitement and anxiety are equally bad right they're two sides of the same coin which is an absence of Tranquility so as we start to understand that excitement leads to a fast mind anxiety leads to a fast mind so how do we become happy we actually slow down the rate of our mind and we we sort of know this psychiatrically too that is you kind of calm down right as you as you're calm and your mind is calmer then you will be more content but you won't necessarily engage in more pleasure so I think a lot of it is internal observation a lot of it is like practicing being kind of tranquil or grounded or in the moment there's some amount of Tolerance of discomfort there are all kinds of like complex meditative Traditions that there's a stepwise process of you know ASAS and breathing exercises and all kinds of different stuff got it now since we have a lot of business owners entrepreneurs on the podcast how much sacrifice do you think is required to be successful in a lot of those areas what do you mean by S sacrifice in what area you hear the general mindset and I think almost everyone is who's really Ultra successful has said this that you need to get give something up to focus on the one thing if you want to succeed at it that there's always going to be someone out there who's going to outwork you do a little bit more maybe that means you can't have the social life that you want to means S A lot of the time is a pretty big sacrifice you could sacrifice sleep I mean there's a lot of things that you could give up in favor of pursuing an outcome that is greater than the average what's the point of pursuing an outcome desire of that outcome okay so I mean I think if your goal is desire of an outcome then by all means make sacrifice but what I have found in my life is that the fewer sacrifices that I make the more successful I become so I think relentlessly pursuing a desire can absolutely come with a lot of sacrifice but what I found is but I don't think that's the only way to reach success so like you know I I don't make many sacrifices now in a sense I make a lot but they don't feel like sacrifices I just make choices that's all it is and then I decide to myself so sacrifice see you can't make a sacrifice in unless you're attached to something does that make sense mhm so it kind of makes sense that as you become less attached to things you don't sacrifice because it's kind of H so going back to the book example when you can enjoy writing a book just as much as you enjoy playing a video game are you making a sacrific by not playing the video game no right so there are times where so so speaking of of the book right so there I had a couple of full-time jobs and I work really hard but I don't suffer right there's a big so there are times where you know my editor sent me like a draft of the manuscript and and like I had a full like work schedule I was working like 70 hours a week but they need this draft of the manuscript within like one week so you know I spent a couple of nights not sleeping and that's a choice that I made and I dealt with the fatigue the next day so you can work really hard but it's kind of like that's just a choice that you make I don't have to you can argue that that's a sacrifice but I don't have to make the sacrifice right I I just have to choose would I rather have sleep or would I rather work what what is more important to me in this moment and being tranquil in the face of both of those decisions makes it not a sacrifice I don't know if that makes sense or if this is so foreign kind of so you're basically saying that you should enjoy what you're doing so much or have the outcome be such a big part of your objective that it's not really a sacrifice because you're getting what you want and that just comes with the territory yeah but I'm not focused on an outcome okay so someone asked me recently like you have this book coming out are you nervous and I said no and they they were like really confused by that and they're like how aren't you nervous like what if the book does well or what if it does doesn't do well I was just thinking about it right so like the book is written whether it does well or doesn't do well is completely out of my control if I wrote a shitty book the book is shitty that's just it right does that make sense so like what's the point in stressing over whether the book is good or bad like it I I I did I applied the effort that I was willing to apply to write it and so this is my karma I've decided to write this book and it's either good or bad now that's done so I think this is where I I kind of have a different perspective where people say you have to make all these sacrifices to achieve this outcome and it's like yeah if you want to achieve the outcome you have to make some of those sacrifices agreed but the question is why do you want the outcome in the first place are you looking for happiness because then it's silly because you don't have to get the outcome to get the happiness and this is this the crazy thing is when I work with people like this right so what what happens they have a problem of I'm sure you all understand this moving goalposts oh my God subscribers on YouTube are we done time to retire no now we need two and once you get 2 million are you happy no yeah you're very happy because it it it took you two and a half years so in my case it took us like two and a half years to get our first million it took one year a little of 15 months to get our second million so we're improving the rate at which we're AC acquiring subscribers but now what happens is even I've gone even though I've improved 2 and a half years for 1 million one year for 2 million now what what happens next how much time do I give myself for the third million one year less so think about what's happening the more successful I become the more I'm making my life difficult and the more unhappiness that I'm buying for myself it's stupid right but this is what we all do and now they say oh I have to make sacrifices you're damn right if it takes you 2 and A2 years to get 1 million one year to get 2 million and 6 months to get 3 million you're right that the more successful you become the more sacrifices you have to make and then they say in order to get 3 million subscribers I had to sacrifice this and I had to sacrifice this and I had to sacrifice this and they're right but why why do you well sometimes I feel like the benefit outweighs the sacrifice in the long term in what what dimension of benefit uh I think in my case it was working throughout my 20s not really having much of a social life I could look back now and I have zero regrets but I really enjoyed working I loved it uh I think the same could also be applied to diet like this year I've gotten really into eating healthy and like last night I I chose the the low calorie chicken thing even though the higher calorie one would have tasted better okay so like little things like yeah but so so now you're like you're sort of I think you're in a sense proving my point but let's let's understand this okay so the first thing is I was a degenerate in my 20s and and like I don't regret that because if I really think about it so I had friends who I used to feel intimidated by because they were in these accelerated med school programs where they start med school at 18 they fully finish residency training by like 32 or something like that and so then like they get the advantage of retiring early right so it's like I'm going to work really hard in my 20s and 30s so I can retire in my 50s and it's like just think about this for a second would you rather work in the decade of your 20s and take the 50s off or would you rather have fun in your 20s and work in your 50s which time is actually more valuable to me I would say my 50s but that's because I could look forward to it and that's something that I know will be like I I feel like I take a lot of comfort in knowing that the future is secure he also gets a lot of his enjoyment and relaxation and stuff like for example for me I love going out and playing sports and competing and like doing crazier things whereas he provide he likes things that can be can be done like in the 50s through 80s whereas I love Le you know what I mean yeah yeah but but so so so this this is kind of what I'm saying and that makes perfect sense right but if we really look at like so even if we pay attention to some of your statements you said I really got into diet yeah and so if you really pay attention to that what that means is that you are deriving enjoyment from something that is unenjoyable right you are getting some overall yes overall absolutely and that's how you can choose to eat the low calorie thing because that your Tranquility is not determined by the high calorie thing you got into this and even when you say I enjoyed working in my 20s I enjoyed making the sacrifices well then it's not a sacrifice like like sure objectively it's a sacrifice because you're not working but this is exactly my point is that whether you are happy or unhappy depends on the attitude towards the action not the action itself so can people Force themselves to think a certain way like let's just say they want to be CEO of this company and they know that they have to work 15 years can they trick their mind into yes and no you can't force yourself to think a certain way you can't trick your mind but you can absolutely consistently change the way that you think so let's pay attention to the language as well and this says so much about you because you force yourself to do all kinds of [ __ ] don't you Graham yeah because your mind has a natural tendency and you have to re in that tendency you have to control it there's conflict in the mind that's not peace this is exactly what all these people do they force themselves to work really hard but the mind doesn't want to work hard so you force yourself that's bad because it's not tranquil the whole point is imagine if you could love it then you're not forcing yourself at all and how do you get to the point of loving work you pay attention to your internal experience of work and what the [ __ ] you're looking for you pay attention and you will realize something crazy that chasing an outcome is never good if you really pay attention because this is where we get to the problem once you achieve it what's next more more more so I I've done a lot of work with imposter syndrome right so I and I I mean so I I went to medical school at Tufts and I I trained in for residency at Harvard so I was at four years at Tufts and four years at Harvard there's way more impostor syndrome at Harvard than there is a TFT there's way more I've never seen a homeless person with impostor syndrome I've never seen a degenerate unemployed 25-year-old with impostor syndrome there are all kinds of challenges in order to have impostor syndrome you have to be successful and not feel like a success on the inside that's literally what imposter syndrome is I've achieved all of these things but internally I don't feel achievement I feel like everything is going to come crashing apart they have no security about the future because they're imposters they don't realize objectively that you can't trick everyone into getting to where you are people just aren't that stupid you actually deserve to be here because you know unless you're like straight up cheating all the time or something like that and so what people don't understand is that like a lot of your happiness in life comes from your internal State and we sort of figure this out in certain ways right at the very beginning after a breakup you feel devastated and then over time you begin to realize oh like you know that the relationship was just over it was like time for it to end I'm okay with it now I'm in a better place the objectivity of the relationship ending is the same in both situations it's the way that you see the relationship that determines whether you are happy or unhappy and then everyone thinks okay I have to have if I find a better person I will find a better relationship and that's true to a certain degree but I've seen plenty of people who carry the problems with them from one relationship into the next so kind of coming back to like what we're talking about here like I think it's fine I mean a lot of people will say you have to make sacrifices to achieve certain things that makes sense right if I want to like have 10 tomato plants I need to plant 10 Tomatoes or 10 tomato seeds so there there's a certain amount of work that correlates with with outcome I think the real tragedy is that when we're stressed about sacrifices it doesn't actually improve our performance in fact it negatively impacts our performance the more stressed you are the more impostor syndrome you have the more worried you are on some level it improves performance but it makes things like the Flow State harder so for example like I used to stress in med school and the more stressed I became the harder it became to study and then I started I let go and I said I'm going to just study two hours a day and I'm just going to optimize my studying of like two hours a day in med school and I studied for two hours at the end of the day I ended up getting an award for academic achievement at the end of med school and like I studied like 20% of what most of my colleagues did and that's because the mind was efficient when I sat down to study I was not stressed out so I could fully focus on the material I'm not worrying about my grade on the test I'm just hey I have to learn this stuff so this is where I think a lot of these people who make a ton of sacrifices don't realize that there's like an incredible inefficiency to stressing over an outcome and how do you get into that flow state is there is there a trick that you could do the one thing I've tried doing and this is a Tony Robinson is anchoring my flow state to certain music and then when I hear that music I could play which in my case is Philip Glass I Love Philip Glass I play Philip Glass and for whatever reason it takes me into or helps me get into that state where I could focus and get work done because that's all I listen to that and Danny Elfman oddly enough but those two I put that on and I could work really well yeah so I I think that's a great question so I I'll sort of address it in two ways the first is let's understand that a state of mind is in influenced by the environment this is number one so if I'm trying to study in like a burning building like it's going to be hard to get into a flow state but let's tunnel down into what is literally happening in my mind when I'm in a burning building what do youall think got to get out okay so what am I thinking about getting out okay right so as long as my mind is thinking about something else it's going to be hard to get into a flow state so now we have it very simply you just need to learn how to focus and we'll talk about that in a second so absolutely environmental AIDS so just as an example there is a particular kind I have about three or four different kinds of incense at home there is one kind of incense that I use when I meditate and only when I meditate so we know from the biology of things that certain uh environmental anchors will facilitate a focused mind so that's absolutely true so whether it's music I have like I have a a you know like a writing beats um like playlist that I listen to when I'm like in a writing mode so there you can absolutely use environmental triggers to facilitate a flow state but I think the biggest thing to facilitate a flow state is to practice concentration so concentration is a mental skill just like dribbling in basketball we just don't practice it and so as you practice meditation I mean as you practice concentration which is oftentimes done through meditation you will train your mind to focus on one thing and if we go back to the burning building thing what is my mind actually focusing on it's not focusing on the things that I'm studying it's focusing on the burning building so all we need to enter a flow state is to concentrate and have one-pointedness of the mind got it and how often do you have to change your environment because I found myself if I work in the same room for let's just say six months it that room starts to have less of an effect on me and I have to move somewhere else to get a new sense of inspiration and so I've like I found myself moving around the house every few months to to get myself in that same state what you're talking about is the relationship between internal and external right so you're saying that for some amount of time this external stimulus creates this state of mind and then once my mind acclimatizes to this external stimulus then I require a new external stimulus to freshen things up correct okay but is there an internal component to that so can you change the way that you internally receive different environments I don't know if I can okay so let me give you an example sure okay so I'll just simple example so I'm a first year intern working at the Massachusetts General Hospital I'm on call in the emergency room there is a guy who is high on methamphetamine and cocaine who is in a locked Bay and I step into the locked Bay to evaluate this person this is a very powerful external environment right the guy is yelling at me [ __ ] you like you know all this kind of stuff I'm going to kill you I'm going to do this I'm going to I'm rip your head off and I'm going to poop in your real thing okay someone told this one time so this is an external environment that affects me now it as an intern this scares the [ __ ] out of me as a fourth year resident I'm fine with it does that make sense so the external environment is the same but the internal response to that environment can be adapted can be strengthed yes okay so this is the first thing to understand is that how often do you need to change the environment that depends on the internal too it's there two sides to there two variables in this equation so you can also anyone can kind of do do this where like you know some people have difficulty with flying let's say but as you get used to it your internal environment changes and your tolerance of the external environment changes so as I get used to hiking as I get used to working out as my internal environment changes then the external environment doesn't have to change anymore does that make sense so that's number one so just to give you a simple example of this I stayed in an asham for three months asham is the same environment literally the same food every single day for 3 months for the first week I hated the food for the next then I tolerated the food then I got incredibly bored of the food and by the third month I loved the food so I don't know you guys drink coffee every day right how much variety do you need in your coffee zero okay then W right so this is a really important thing to understand we all assume see this is the basic problem we make is we look at our lives and we say I need to change my environment at X interval but you accept that as fact because that is your observation oh I heard something that changing your environment Sparks creativity yeah only if you don't know how to spark creativity internally right that's my whole point sure okay right so you only need other hanging out with other people inspires you that's only if you can't find your inspiration internally so very practically we'll get to how often you should change things and stuff like that but I I mean this is a really key point right so if we have an untrained internal self then we become more dependent on the environment to trigger Us in the right way does that make sense so when you say I have to change my environment and there's all kinds of physiology that's that's countering to what I'm saying so just let's run through a couple of those things so one thing is for example plant aerosols are reductive for anxiety anytime you spend time indoors your ciliary muscles in your eyes are like like contract quite a bit so we want to look at things like the Horizon and far objects to even literally relax the muscles in our eyes when we relax the ciliary muscles in our eyes it has all kinds of interesting positive benefits for stress reduction and all this kind of stuff there's no question that a change of environment is healthy like generally speaking but I I I want yall to Come Away with this understanding of how important your external circumstances are relate to how stable your internal environment is so literally as a psychiatrist you know like if you have an untrained person and they're sitting with someone who's depressed you'll get depressed too you'll get emotionally exhausted and so then people will come to the conclusion that I need to hang out with these people this is too much of this person makes perfect sense right you need variety with the people that you hang out with and yet at the same time if you train yourself internally you need no change in environment you have yogis that are sitting in caves in the Himalayas they've been sitting there for 30 years they don't need any change why because this has changed when you control this you don't need anything from the outside right this is how you even get people who will do things like hunger strikes like think about a hunger strike it's incredibly hard to do but you just need to be able to tolerate this internal thing without a problem so practically how long how often do you need your environment to change I'd say you tell me because for different people their internal stability is going to be different you'll figure out what works for you I for example try to take a walk every single day so I find find that 1 hour of outdoor time is very healthy for me um so I think everyone should get some outdoor time sunlight Vitamin D all that stuff is great but I think it's it's sort of variable and it kind of depends and I'd say that the the key takeaway here is that the answer is variable and you sort of figure out what works for you and that also that if you can't achieve what environmental changes you need then you can change internally too so a good example of this is like if so if you've got shitty roommates right you can't change your roommate right away but you can learn how to deal with a shitty roommate internally MH and what are your thoughts on the entrepreneurial grind set do you think that is healthy and do you think it's healthy that it seems as though younger and younger people are getting into things like monk mode and what is monk mode you want to explain that jck monk mode it's like a term used to describe cuz like monks are about relinquishing desire and for pleasure and stuff like that and attachment to outcome and monk mode is like okay I'm going to relinquish going out playing sports with my friends you know having unhealthy foods and stuff like that and just grinding and building this Ecom store that's going to make me $7,000 a month in passive income have you not heard of the term monk mode I have heard the term but I don't know what exactly what it means so here here's I I think it's in a sense it's silly so let's just understand all you're doing is giving up some desire for a different desire yeah it's really about eliminating all distraction any dopamine high that you could get any pleasure and you you just focus on one thing which is in this case it's usually work rated yeah work related Shopify store related it's almost always associated with Shopify for some reason just like you know when you're 30 you can then have a laptop in the Bahamas in a pool with that in Amazon FBA for whatever reason so look I mean so I I I don't think it's bad right but I I think let's understand really what is so here's the crazy thing so I think a lot of people strive for freedom but what they really mean by freedom is slavery so let's say that at 30 years old you achieve whatever monk mode is supposed to help you achieve and you have a billion dollars in the bank what does your life look like then sounds like Freedom okay what is so tell me what freedom is ability of choice choice of what to make the choices that you feel like you want to do in that moment okay so now let's understand what keeps you from making the choices that you want to make and 20s before you have a billion dollars probably money would be a big source of that so right now my internal self has a desire right I have a desire and I'm unable to gratify that desire because of my circumstances MH so all these people who want to be billionaires by the age of 30 they are gaining external freedom to become internal slaves now you are going to be a slave to your desire because you have nothing holding you back so if I want to do one line of coke I can afford it if I want to fly first class I can do it if I want to buy a private jet I can do it if I want to go here I can do it if I want to go here I can do it I've worked with people who are billionaires the worst thing is you will become a slave to your internal desire you're giving up all this pleasure early on to have an unmitigated [ __ ] hedonistic pleasurable life after the age of 30 and it doesn't work so they okay I want to go to the Bahamas now I'm going to go to Japan I'm going to stay in the suite think about what you're doing you're just becoming a slave to your internal self now the Mind wants this now the mine gets upset because the presidential suite is not available and why the [ __ ] did I make a billion dollars if I can't get the presidential suite then you're on the phone with your personal assistant hey [ __ ] you you didn't book this thing long enough that's not happiness and I've seen this right I've seen this with like princes from the Mina region I've seen this with billionaires who retire and this is where like a lot of times what happens is is sometimes billionaires will realize that this doesn't work and then they try to adopt some kind of broader like now I'm going to make the world a better place so that's how they kind of make a substitute for it but this is really crazy and I really want yall to think about this that all the only reason we want external freedom is to indulge our internal self then I can do whatever I want to and no one can tell me no but that's Indulgence too a a kid who is 18 years old who has the desire to play a video game instead of going to class they're internally indulging that's what they're doing an opiate addict is internally indulging and so everyone is looking for this external Freedom only to bind themselves completely to internal slavery is that makes sense it does but then how do you win because I feel like if you don't do that then you're at the whims of let's just say a boss a job that you have to be at maybe circumstances that you just don't enjoy that you would want to change now we're coming full circle because the way that you win the way that you win and I've had bosses that I really dislike right and so then what happens is like why do we get stuck with a boss that we really dislike the reason we get stuck is because we're a slaved to this oh my God I have to stay in this job why because I'm afraid that if I leave this job I don't have security I don't have this I don't have this or there's some weird psychological thing where like I need approval from my boss so that I don't like them but then I need their approval it's all kind of crap it's all being a slave to this internal thing so the more that you master your internal environment I recognize I have a boss that I have to deal with for one year but already from one month in I'm planning my exit and then I just recognize okay I've got 11 months of this that I have to deal with so be it and so once you sort of recognize that then you'll be you'll be impervious to your boss so I I know that I mean this happened for me like very specifically there was a moment in medical school where I was in the operating room and I was doing vascular surgery and there was an attending so attending is like your boss who was an absolute [ __ ] and this guy I was doing something called retracting so we're doing a a surgery on the kateed artery and so the the attending Nick something and there starts to be blood and so this this patient is like the the the artery that feeds their brain with blood is now leaking which means that their brain is not receiving blood the attending starts panicking is sort of in control and then I'm sitting across the table right so the table is over there or standing across the table and I'm holding something back I see the source of the bleed I know exactly where it is and then I make the mistake of a third-year medical student which is I open my mouth and I say excuse me doctor whatever I think I and then they cut me off and they say medical student when I want your opinion I will ask for it and I'm like all right bro I see where the bleed is I know you're looking for the bleed if you don't want my help in finding it that's on you and everyone the other medical students were terrified they were like oh my God you misspoke this guy could [ __ ] fail you he could do this he could do this your future could be Jeopardy and I'm like look I'm here to save lives I'm here to learn how to save lives lives there's a patient who's like literally not getting blood flow to their brain and I tried to do something about it I'm fine with this if he wants to kick me out of medical school he can kick me out of medical school that's fine so what I mean by this is like we have all of these like [ __ ] people around us and how do we be okay with that you have to be internally okay with it this person could have absolutely ruined my medical career turns out that they didn't right so they kind of I think I got enough of the sentence out where they were kind of panicked and stressed but like I said I can see and then he was like when I want your opinion I'll ask for it and then he immediately like within 60 seconds he like looked at where my perspective was and he found it and he fixed the bleed this is what I mean is we have these [ __ ] bosses the more internally tranquil you are the better off you're going to be and just because you're internally tranquil doesn't mean that you have to tolerate the circumstance so then you make moves you make changes it's easy MH right but it's easy to make a change when you're not like caught up emotionally with your your boss being an [ __ ] couldn't you say it's easier though to make that change if you have $5 million absolutely so does doesn't that seem like a worthwhile pursuit to have a financial cushion to be able to make those changes without the fear of the Financial Security absolutely so I I think striving for security is good I mean don't get me wrong but I mean y'all are asking me but this is kind of what I found is that you don't have to be mentally suffering or sacrificed to get that Financial Security that's the whole point right like your internal like so so getting Financial Security is about external actions it's not about how you feel on the inside does that make sense if you if you do the work you will get the money hopefully right right we can't really control it yeah and so all I'm advocating for is that you do all the right things but the whole point is that if your internal motivation is a desire is this kind of thing is a fear even right so like if my if I'm afraid and that's what drives me to save a lot of money even when I have a lot of money do you think my fear will go away to some degree it might and then to some degree it'll still be there because what if I lose it yeah right and and so that that's where like ultimately I think being internally tranquil allows you to free your mind and then be objective and with the way that you live your life and it makes your decisions actually better and where would you say that fits with burnout people who are pursuing something and then all of a sudden they just feel tired of it yeah so burnout it it completely counters burnout so I'm probably like at this point a specialist in Burnout so I we worked with 500 content creators and content creators get burnt out and we're really good at reducing their burnout so here's the thing to understand burnout is caused by one thing extreme effort with a lack of reward so what what causes Physicians so I as a doctor so I'll work a 30-hour shift in a hospital and I'll be fine with it like that's like 30 hours just think about that I'll go to a hospital on Friday at 6:00 p.m. and I leave like Sunday morning or something like that so this is this is almost an a week's worth of a normal human beings work that I'm doing in a little I mean I can't do it in 24 hours in basically a day and six additional hours and this is normal for us as doctors and we don't burn out what burns me out when I have to talk to an insurance company to try to get approval for a medication for my patient this burns like a 30 minute 45 minute call where I'm sitting on hold with an insurance company creates more burnout than 30 hours of work and so if you look at the science of burnout what causes burnout is when someone tries something really hard is invested in something and then they don't get it so if you look at like content creators why are they so burnt out despite all the success that you have yall know this that there's always this voice in the back of your mind that you're never content and then you do all this stuff and then these people are [ __ ] they're they're stalking you and they're they're like you know like I'm sure you guys get like internet hate people are sending you request quest for pictures of your feet you know and you like that kind of thing but like hey so if we really look look at burnout burnout is about internal expectation being dashed by the external world that's literally what the science of burnout tells us so what burns out employees is when they try really hard and then their boss doesn't see their value it's not the effort it is the dashed effort and then what we sort of know about burnout is the the solution to burnout is not to actually reduce your workload because that doesn't sort of work because what happens is when people reduce their workload by going on a vacation then they come back and they're like back to the grind and then even if they start like reducing their workload it sort of doesn't work out it can but what really works well is detaching sort of saying like Okay this is the most that I'm willing to do and like the rest of it can go sort itself out like I'm not responsible for this thing being successful right I work on a team with six people I'm not responsible for the success of of the project the more that one person on a team of six feels responsible for the success of the project the more burnt out they're going to be so you just do your part you recognize this is my part I'm even going to do more than my part I'll do 20% of the work even though I'm one out of a team of six and that's okay you won't get burnt out so let me try to just summarize especially when it comes to burnout so let's just like take a look at a standard scenario okay so let's say I have a goal so I'm one of these kids who's like 13 or whatever and I'm adopting this monk mode grind set so let's just play that through so I have a goal I strive for the goal I sacrifice for the goal I have all these internal impulses that I give up for the achievement of this goal now when I achieve the goal I feel good but I'm not done right because as we talked about there's like you know the first million then there's the two Mill second million there's the third million and so then I have to adopt a a new goal so I move the goal post and now I need to do more so if you sort of look at it it like I'm sacrificing all of my present to achieve something and then in that achievement I will be happy right that's why I do it I'll have security all of all this kind of but the moment that I achieve this thing I move the goal post and then I keep moving again and I keep moving again and I keep moving again and then before you realize it you've spent 10 years of your life sacrificing for a goal that keeps moving and then you're kind of like never happy and then you end up burnt out because you've given up so much and so the whole point though is that if you look at some people who do this kind of work who do achieve a lot of great things their process of work is enjoyable right that like what makes me feel good and and hopefully you all understand this there's a difference between the joy of a podcast that has really good metrics and the joy of having a conversation that you feel good about at the end of the day so when we did our last podcast I had no idea how good it was going to do but I felt great about it mhm and this is exactly what I'm talking about is that everyone who's on this monk mode grind set or I need a sacrifice to achieve this you're like I want happiness over there and I will get it when I get there but any kind of goal-based happiness you don't stop you always need more that's just the nature of the mind with the Oreos with all these other things let me ask you this we had Grant Cardone on the podcast a few months ago and he had his daughter with him and we brought her on and Jack asked a question do you want daughter to be happy and he said no I want her to be productive because if she's productive she will be happy what are your thoughts on that do you find that people are happier if they find themselves productive I think as weird as it sounds I would be inclined to agree with him but there's a big difference yeah so when you use the word and this is why I think definitions are so important when you say happiness what does that mean because if Grant Cardone is envisioning this kind of like billionaire playboy lifestyle as a corlette for happiness which is what our society tells us I think she's going to be miserable my whole point is that when you can be content with productivity right that's the whole point is it's about the action it's like I woke up today and I I was in the hospitals this is what I mean like if I'm on 30-hour call I feel good about that I'm physically exhausted I'm hungry I'm cranky but when I go home I feel so good I came here to try to help human beings and for the last 30 hours I've done this all of the sweat and the toil of the last five years six years eight years that I've spent studying and going to the library and doing all this kind of stuff all of this has come to fruition because I get to exist in this moment and apply everything that I've learned that's where contentment comes from and this is where like even now you know I'm quite happy I'm not even striving for more success honestly I'm not and yet I'm very productive and the reason is because like it's you know this is what I this is I I derive my enjoyment from the the process of work in the moment that you start start deriving your enjoyment from the process of work first of all you become impervious to outcomes you also get rid of this crap likee comparison because you can't make a comparison without outcomes does that make sense so like all these things and when they say comparison is the thief of Joy so yeah because and how do you get past all that is you focus on the action itself and you also realize you can't control the outcome and then you get to this all this present stuff and stuff like that whereas you know what I would kind of say for my daughters is that I want them to understand that Joy can come from productivity not the product of productivity and the moment that you understand that you are will be in incredibly productive and you'll be incredibly happy and this is why I have a problem with the people who say you have to sacrifice because they have there's this idea that you can't have both and in my experience the two are actually very highly correlated when you see people who are spiritually developed right so you have a lot of these entrepreneurs and stuff who will like meditate and they'll say I'm way more productive and I'm way happier we know from studies on meditation that you don't sacrifice happiness for productivity in fact the two go hand in hand that's what the flow state is it's a state of contentment and a state of high productivity so our Optimal Performance actually comes from a lack of sacrifice it's crazy so why is it then that we're more afraid of losing what we have than gaining something or winning so this is great there's a super cool neuroscientific mechanism so law subversion is a very powerful evolutionary like psychological feature so if you look at your brain this is absolutely insane so let's say you're anticipating a task like let's say like I don't know just pick something what are we doing what's something I'm trying to achieve a million subscribers okay so let's say I'm trying to achieve a million subscribers so this is what's really wild about the brain so do you all know when I achieve a million sub subscribers do you know which which part of my brain activates I don't know how no idea dopamine nucleus succumbent okay so the pleasure that we get from let's say an achievement like a million subscribers that's the nucleus acumin and dopamine do you all know which part of the brain activates if we screw up amydala lyic system fear anxiety stress okay these are two parts of the brain there's the part of our brain that gives us pleasure and there's the part of our brain that gives us pain so here's what's crazy in a hypothetical example before you achieve a million subscribers you can actually experience pain like so your your the circuits of your brain your amydala will light up even with a hypothetical danger does that kind of make sense so like you can experience the pain of a potential loss in the present in your brain that part of your brain that brain could that part of your brain can light up and it is as if you were experiencing the loss so there is no difference in your brain between a hypothetical loss and an actual loss do you all get that m literally the part of your brain that feels the pain can activate even in a hypothetical but you cannot activate the nucleus succumb with a hypothetical the nucleus succumb and dopamine you can't imagine playing a game and get a dopamine rush but you can absolutely imagine getting dumped and feel the pain of that so if we look at our brain it's lopsided so our brain can experience hypothetical pains as real pain but it cannot experience hypothetical gains or pleasure as real pleasure so we're we're mismatched and this is evolutionarily because we want we want potential problems to be something that we Retreat from from an evolutionary standpoint right so if we kind of think about it like I I want to imagine the pain of petting a tiger and that that tiger like attacks me and hurts me and then I I want to run away from it so we also know this from like studies of neuroeconomics where this principle gets played out where we know that basically your brain can calculate the likelihood of a success but we also know that your brain actually purposely screws up the numbers so what your brain does when it's calculating the likelihood of success it makes you think that things are going to be twice as bad as they actually are and half as good as they actually are and people have literally done experiments on neuroeconomics where they'll do these kinds of things where if I ask y'all I'm sure yall are kind of familiar with this you know Graham would you rather have a million dollar guarant or coin flip and if it's heads you get 5 million and if it's tails you get 0 million which one would you pick in my case the heads or tails okay yeah well you're rare right most of us most people will pick the guaranteed win right over the chance of even a a probabilistically higher reward right and that that's just all neuroeconomics so this is kind of like that's the problem is that the potential losses our brain does not function I mean it functions properly but it's actually like is not tied to reality yeah does that answer your question it does one thing I've observed in my own personal life is that a massive differentiator between those who appear to be better off and worse off in life is someone's response to a negative situation are people biologically predisposed to a positive or negative reflection on a negative event or is it something that is forced or learned how can people experience something negative and see it as a positive rather than be binded by the trauma okay so let me try to see if I understand your question MH so there's a group of different people let's say there's two different people and they face one situation and the circumstances are the same but the way that human beings respond to negative circumstances differentiates their like trajectory in life is that fair to say I think it's and I think it's you because Graham for one has experienced plenty of failure he wouldn't say that it's failure though because he learns from it and utilizes it and leverages it later in his life to become more successful whereas other people that could have experienced the exact same failure could be binded by the trauma of the failure and then it prevents them and then from becoming successful later in their life and and harms them and I I don't know like if it's just arbitrarily assigned at Birth where like okay you're going to be a positive reflector on negative experiences you're going to be a negative reflector on negative experiences but I've just noticed two people can go through the exact same thing and reflect on it differently in the future and it makes wild impacts in their life okay so I'm going to divide this because there's a lot of questions in here the first is what diff how do people end up different right so we can acknowledge that when someone is faced with a setback or a failure even that right so I we use two words but some human beings will refer to it as setback some human beings will refer to it as failure which is exactly what you're talking about so in one common circumstance one negative circumstance two people respond differently that's one point that we have to dig into why that happens the second point is whether change is possible and how to change and the third is why these people are different in the first place is that fair yes okay so let's start with the response so this is what we know from once again uh science of neuroeconomics so it's super cool some people what we know is that anytime there is a negative event if it is viewed on something called an intermixed time scale people will respond better if it is viewed as an end point people will respond poorly okay so like let me just explain what that means so it's exactly what we said between failure and setback so in both cases let's say I get an F on a test some people will say that this is the end and anytime the human mind has an end on some point if that end is bad then we feel really bad we it's hard to be resilient we feel really depressed so if it's like if I end on a bad note then the psychological impact is very is damaging what we know is that when two human beings get an F on a test one one of them will view that f as the end so this is like this is where my measurement stops another human being will view that F along something called an intermixed time scale which means that they're actually looking at the F in the context of the next 30 tests so when your view is more longterm as opposed to this is the end then you are going to be more resilient to setbacks yeah from my perspective I tend to view any setback as like this was meant to be and and this is just a part of what I needed to go through as a person to get to the next stage or next thing so anything that comes at me I'm like oh wow this is this is a good thing because it's teaching me or pushing me in this direction and now I could be even better because so that is a great answer and first of all you're getting you're jumping ahead so we're going to talk about why people are different but we all what we also know is that the way that you cognitively reframe your circumstance es ultimately determines like the status of your mental health and your trajectory so when we view things as setbacks right because even if we think about setback this is like on a long time scale versus a failure means it's over you can't fail until the game is over right you lose when the clock Runs Out not at the halfway mark so the other things is that you're doing there is you're cognitively reframing and so you're kind of viewing the positive in a negative sort of situation and that is healthy we know that that makes people adapt resilient and improves their trajectory so that's really good and that's what a lot of us should learn how to do the problem is that many of us can't see it that way which we'll get to so the first thing is yes there is a differential response and the way that you respond to an event once again the way that you interpret an objective set of circumstances not only affects your happiness but your success performance does that make sense so now we're cycling back to internal versus external this exactly what I've been saying all along is that when people chase a particular external outcome if that's what you're chasing then you're not going to cognitively reframe like that this is going to be the end I failed so now let's move to the second question of how to change if that first answer was sufficient okay so how to change is to basically Implement and change your internal way of thinking and your internal response to these circumstances so in in cognitive behavioral therapy for example we have um we work on something called automatic thoughts which is if you look at most human beings we don't realize that most of our thinking is manufactured not by us it is all this this is what's so tricky about it is if you think about the way that your mind works most of your mind was formed without your consent so literally if we look at trauma right so what happens in trauma is that our mind forms a conclusion but that may not be the right conclusion and the real tragedy is that most most of the conclusions that we form are actually Incorrect and so let's talk about that for a second when I go through something traumatic my mind is not functioning healthfully and yet my mind forms a conclusion so simple example is If I Grow Up in an abusive household I'm feeling emotionally hurt and I start to believe that I am not a good person I'm not worthy everything is my fault now I carry this belief but that belief is not objectively true and so the real tragedy is that the worse our self-beliefs are the more likely they are to be incorrect does that make sense it does but the problem is that for these people they feel true so how do we change that we can change that in a number of different ways one thing that we can do is reframe and re-examine the formation of these beliefs as well as emotionally digest experiences of the past so if we think about someone who says you know let's say like someone who has like more of this Alpha Beta ideology about men and dating there's a recent study that showed that incels are very confident in their belief about women's preferences and they are very wrong this is kind of Dunning Krueger if you all are familiar with that that like you know the more confident the more ignorant you are the more likely you are to be confident and if I when I work with my patients who believe that they're the worst pieces of [ __ ] on the planet their confidence is 100% their ignorance is 100% so the there's a process through which go back to like basically the inciting event so what I would kind of say for people who want to do this is when did you learn this lesson so we can't tell you that it's wrong that doesn't work that gets into conflict in the mind and it's not going to work when did you learn this how did you learn this how did you form these conclusions and then the cool thing is that when you have a 25-year-old brain examining the formative experiences of a 5-year-old brain then you can become your own therapist so then what I I'll say to people is okay imagine that you met a 5-year-old kid sure it's this way for you but what would you say to the 5-year-old who told you that they're the worst piece of [ __ ] on the planet right and even as a 25-year-old they're able to recognize wow I would say like you know there's no way that you're responsible but they're not able to tell themselves that so you have to start the process of training the Mind by sort of like externalizing things if that makes sense instead of talking to yourself imagine that this happened to a different person and I know that y'all are probably like this you more than him but you know you have a different standard for yourself than other people like other people get to make mistakes but you don't get to make mistakes so this is the mind is how the ego works so you want to start by sort of finding the origin of this belief the origin of the way that you interpret circumstances and this is really wild so I want you all to really think about this that see we interpret these circumstances the circumstances are are are adite they're non-dual they're neither good nor bad the circumstance is what the circumstance is our mind literally filters the experience of the outside world and gives us conclusions which is also something that a lot of people have difficulty understanding um and so we can go back to the origin and and try to dissolve it there the other thing that we can do is Catch it in the present so anytime you have an automatic response to something I don't know if this makes sense cuz this is so abstract so I let me make a statement see if yall understand I'm going to need your help with this so the more unaware you are of your thought process the more that thought process will control you do you agree or disagree I agree yes unless your thought process is automatically going to be like a positive sort of thing I feel like I don't think about if something negative happens I don't have to force myself to think oh like let's reframe this it just for me at this point just comes naturally okay so help me so I need your help so you guys agree with that statement help explain it to me how is that true so the more automatic you are with your thought process the less likely it is you said to be true or the less likely you should follow it right the more the the the more it will screw you up in life screw right right so it's just lack of intention and I think if you're being intentional about your thoughts and your decisions you're going to make the right decision whereas all the other stuff if it's if it's automatic it's usually deterministic so it's all of the things impressing upon your brain as you're getting older to help you make a certain decision based off of past subjective experience in an objective Universal reality okay so the more unaware you are of your thoughts the more those thoughts will shape your reality okay so let me give you just a simple example of this so there's like in the alpha beta world right there are these people and I've worked with a lot of people who are like Alphas or whatever and um like red pillars or whatnot and then are you looking at me Jack come on so so in these situations you know they'll say that okay like women are like you can't trust women like women can't be like counted on so uh 100% of people like this that I've worked with by the way have a traumatic experience with a woman like 100% not 99% 100% um which is where they form this belief now so here's the tricky thing is that once they start to believe this they become em they they protect themselves from emotionally connecting they protect themselves from emotional vulnerability they they learn to not trust does that make sense because if I trust a woman I can get taken advantage of and so then what happens is they start to form transactional relationships with women because I can't form an emotional bond so now everything becomes transactional in the moment that I start behaving in a transactional way towards women it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy does that make sense so they don't realize that they're falling into this pattern where they are adding transaction transactionality they're actually bringing it to the table and if I'm unwilling to ever trust a woman and I'm trying to get something out of them and I'll trade you x amount of money for so amount of sex right not in terms of prostitution but in terms of I'll buy you this I'll take you out this and I want to get laid if I'm going to take you to expensive dinner I better get laid they'll have the all these kinds of attitudes but what they don't realize is that this is creating self-fulfilling prophecy because any woman who wants an emotional connection will run away from you and the ones who are willing to play the transactional game are totally fine with it and then what happens now I've had relationships with 10 women all of who are fine fine with transactionality and then I conclude that this is all women want right so this is a good example of my automatic thinking which I'm not aware of actually shapes my reality so in terms of what to do with it all you have to do is be aware of the the thought process you don't even need to change it or fix it so you can go back into the past figure out how that thought formed digest it reframe it or in the present you can say okay this is my mind believing okay this is my attitude where you don't have to say this is a setback right so all you even if you say this is a failure you just need to acknowledge it in the present and something beautiful happens if you catch your mind and you elevate it to the level of Consciousness this is okay this is a failure everything is over and you don't get lost in that thought process you need to be aware of it so observe it from the outside then what you need to say is okay my mind is getting into this cycle I'm spiraling again into failure my mind feels like it's spiraling into failure and there's a big difference between you being caught up in the spiral of failure which if you really kind of think about I don't know if you guys have ever worked with someone who's like spiraled right they don't realize their spiraling that's what makes the spiraling so powerful does that make sense I don't know if this happened to you where once your mind starts spiraling in negativity you don't think you're spiraling you think you're right and other people tell you hey it's not that bad there are other fish in the sea but you're like no no no no no I don't no it's that bad so you are stuck with your thoughts you become one with your thoughts MH and you are not able to gain any outside perspective so literally all you need to do is just observe your thought pattern and something really cool happens when you observe your thought pattern the thought pattern weakens by self how so here's something to understand a habitual thought pattern is strong it's automatic it's uncontrollable right so all we need to do to dissolve a habitual thought pattern or a way of viewing the world which a way of viewing the world is the same as a habitual thought pattern because a way of viewing is is fixed right does that make sense there's a difference it's like a lens so the moment that I start observing my thought pattern the thought pattern will start to dissolve because automatic so an automatic thought pattern is automatic it can't be conscious it can't be intentional and be automatic at the same time it is either or does that make sense so all you need to do is move it from automatic to observed once it moves into observed it will start to weaken and become less automatic so there's even some interesting Neuroscience to support this a lot of people don't realize that what we view as willpower is not willpower technically the part of our brain that monitors in internal conflict is the same part of our brain that exerts willpower so technically willpower is just monitoring an internal conflict I know this sounds really bizarre but I'll give you all an example if you are trying to decide between a healthy meal and an unhealthy meal as long as you are fighting in your mind that is willpower does that kind of make sense MH and I don't know if youall have ever done this but sometimes you stop thinking about it and then you choose the wrong thing you can't choose the right right thing unless you were aware does that make sense MH and so it turns out that awareness and willpower are actually technically the same part of the brain it is the same thing subjectively we experience it as willpower but objectively it's the part of our brain that monitors internal conflict so this is what's really interesting is if you look at people who are addicted you don't have to get them to win against the alcohol all they need to do is not stop fighting and and it turns out that that not giving up the fight and winning is one of the same so when it comes to changing our reactions all we need to do is notice our reaction as we notice our reaction the strength of the reaction will weaken and then we will it'll be easier to cognitive reframe then you can also do like specific cognitive reframing exercises where you catch your automatic thinking that gets weaker and as that gets weaker then you can start behaving more intentionally and really quick for all of you guys out there sometimes I get it we're too busy to look after our health with so much going on we don't want to spend our time waiting on lines going to doctor's offices or going to the pharmacy but our sponsor HS can help him is a 100% online platform that's changing the game when it comes to men's Healthcare by providing simple and convenient access to science back treatments for erectile dysfunction hair loss weight loss and more hims offers an array of high quality options including pills or chewable options for Ed and serums sprays or oral options for hair loss and if prescribed your medication will be shipped directly to you for free and IND discrete packaging no insurance is needed and you'll pay one low price for all of your treatments online visits ongoing shipments and provider messaging you could even manage your plan track progress 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education employment or training um in China it's called laying flat and it's like a huge problem so there's like there's definitely something going on where people are like checking out of this like concept of like a job and the grind and whatever and I think the reason is because there used to be something that worked and then people basically got taken advantage of so so I think that there used to be a formula for success in the world and this formula for Success was maybe you go to college maybe you don't even and then at some point you get a good job and then getting a good job was some amount of security that if you went to a good job they would recognize your value and reward you for it and then I think what basically happened is we had this unprecedented level of economic success and growth so I kind of think about this is like if you were in college in the' 60s first of all you get to do a lot of like psychedelics in school before everything gets criminalized you kind of slide into a booming economy through like the 70s and 80s and then you retire before the 20072 2008 stock market crash so you can kind of like jobs are easy there's booming economic growth you've got a nice fat portfolio and then like you know the stock market crash happens there all these like once in A- lifetime events that we've experienced in The Last 5 Years so there was this formula for success and a whole generation of people could follow that formula and they could end up okay but I think what started to happen is that people have taken advantage of this so just like any biological system when you've got like a nice juicy thing like there will be Predators who will take advantage of it so I think a good example is that many years ago you know the federal government in the United States started guarant guaranteeing Federal loans so if you sort of think about it if I have an 18-year-old kid and the federal government is like we'll give you as much money as you need for a Federal Loan so you can you don't you can get loans for college you don't have to pay for college right I you have to pay for it but with a loan and then what happens is you look at universities are like well [ __ ] these guys have a blank check so what you've seen I think over the last 20 30 years youall may know these statistics better than I do is a huge increase in administrative costs in University and then you so you have no like free market I'm not an expert in this stuff but you have no free market stuff so you've got textbooks that are $500 because the kid can pay for it it's not like the kid can't afford it because you're guaranteeing a loan and so textbooks become $100 $200 $300 $400 $500 so someone is making a [ __ ] ton of money but it's not the student and now we have a bunch of people who are in debt and then people are talking about loan forgiveness which is fine like it's not my place to comment on whether that's good or bad the one question that I have is even if we start forgiving a bunch of loans what are we doing to control costs right so like even if you forgive everyone who's in debt now are you still guaranteeing loans and are people taking out is this next generation of 18-year-olds taking out gigantic loans to pay for college so I think this is just one example of you know like people used to you could trust your employer and your employer would like look out for you and there was somewhat of like I think a collegial relationship and now what's started to happen is everyone is trying to not everyone and this is what I think is really sad so as someone who you know we have employees at healthy gamer I don't think that we're like evil corporate overlords we're not having people like you know piss in their bottles and not being able to work we're like Rel I I think we're we try to be relatively nice but I think the challenge is that right now like so many people are taking advantage of these like traditional work environments and as more people take advantage of it we have a generation of people who are just checking out they're like this doesn't work for me like this is not worth it you know if you look at things like you know wages like for example teacher wages so teacher wages have not kept up with inflation at all and then on top of that we have this like growing technological crisis where kids are becoming more disregulated than they've ever been we also have all kinds of like fear of lawsuits so teachers cannot discipline kids and so we're we're seeing an absolute collapse I don't know if like people are seeing it like economically but I'm seeing it on the level of like teachers who are burnt out and like students who are really struggling like parents come to me no one knows what to do and like the school systems in the United States are getting absolutely screwed so I think what we're seeing is a whol scale failure of our traditional institutions we're seeing this in medicine as well where like we have all of these like medicine progresses pretty slowly so if you look at for example the average therapist gets zero hours of training in technology pornography addiction social media addiction video game addiction but these these problems are huge like 5% of the population was addicted to video games in 20121 and that's like 9% now in 2020 and the rate is probably increasing so something is going on where there used to be a formula that worked which is now no longer working and so I think the only choice that people have like it's almost like a trauma response of becoming callous right so anytime you get hurt like if you literally look at a callous it is repeated injury that then you lose nerve sensation and you kind of wall yourself off I think that's what's going on in antiwork where people have been [ __ ] so many times that they're just like I'm done with this crap where do you feel like the overlap is between that and quiet quitting do you feel like they're the same or do you feel like anti-work is just completely giving up and quiet quitting is just doing the bare minimum I I think it's it's heterogeneous so I I think what a lot of people what a lot of people do in quiet quitting is they recognize that additional effort is not rewarded so it used to be that like additional effort and I'd like to think that there are many places left where additional effort is reward MH and so what's happening with and now what started to happen is so what used to happen is okay like there are four employees and if you work hard you will get promoted and so then the default became everyone is working hard but you still only get one person who's promoted and so over time what that sort of means is there's this interesting pressure where it creates like almost like a a game theory kind of situation where I have to work harder than all of my colleagues in order to get promoted but the harder my colleagues work the harder I have to work to outpace them so this system was happening and then employers realized holy [ __ ] everyone is working way harder than they are paid for then what started happening is I think employees started taking this for granted so now we started getting things like unpaid internships are really low ball salaries and employers started to think like oh we can just lowball the [ __ ] out of people because this is now the standard that happened so much that employers started taking this for granted and then they expected it's not even going above is no longer going above going above has become the norm right does that make sense it does and so now like employers are like I remember seeing some post where someone was like my employees leave at 5:00 p.m. every day like how can I get them to stay till 8:00 p.m. and work weekends or whatever there's some like idea that everyone should be going above and beyond and so then what happens is like what's the balancing Force right so then you have employers who are taking advantage of this and then the only choice that that people sort of figure out is oh by the way even if all of us work 50% extra only one of us is getting promoted that's not a good mathematical equation so we balance that by quiet quitting do you feel like that's healthy for the employee though because I feel like that sends many people into a negative spiral where I'm going to quiet quit do the bare minimum but they're also going to be the first first to get laid off they're going to be the first to get passed up for promotion there's always there's going to be someone else who does put in that effort who is rewarded now I'm not saying in every career but overall I'd like to think that more work is rewarded long term yeah so I I think there are lots of problems with anti-work and and quiet quitting so uh the first problem is that often times these are almost traumatic responses which means people aren't thinking clearly right so what I mean by that is like if if you talk to someone who is super into antiwork or quiet quitting they're zealots usually not always but what that sort of means is they've been so hurt by the system that they have so much resentment towards this system which I think to a certain degree is fair but I don't think that it's healthy um and anytime we have kind of a traumatic response it's appropriate but it's not necessarily healthy so I think this is where when I work with people who are kind of like this what I sort of advocate for so we have like a career coaching program for example where we do a lot of this work and we see really good outcomes and it's basically helping people understand that okay I want you to objectively look at your work environment and try to see if there is what is the reward for additional effort and often times people are actually okay doing additional effort without even a financial reward as long as they can get acknowledgement right so I think about like times in my residency program where my residency program is considered like pretty rigorous or maybe even malignant I didn't really see see it that way and there were times where I worked extra and all I needed was my boss to say hey this other person was thick uh sick today thick this other person was sick today I really appreciate you stepping up that that helped us a lot I am grateful so right now what you're getting is when you have a corporate environment that expects extra there's not even gratitude so a lot of times like all you need is gratitude to do extra I don't think that everyone needs to get paid dollar for every minute that they work or whatever like that I think like it's normal and healthy in work environments for some people to give a little bit extra I gave a lot of extra in in my life I think that helped a lot I don't think it's necessarily bad and that's what I think is the real problem is that we need to sort of have a tranquil mind and really think about okay in what way do I want to give extra but I think something that's very very common is that people keep on giving extra keep on giving extra in an effort to be noticed or rewarded and then as as long as you're doing that and you're not like operating from like a clear state of like a a clear frame of mind then I think it becomes problematic so I think the other problem with doing extra and not getting rewarded is we are all narcissistic so if you look at like roommates for example so this is where I think the other problem with like anti-work and stuff stuff happens or quiet quitting is that everyone thinks that they are working harder than they are right so if we if we're both roommates and they're dishes in the sink I always both roommates believe that they're doing 60 to 75% of dishes in the sink and they think that the other human beings are slacking so the other problem that we see with this is that sometimes people who think that they're doing a great job or doing a whole lot extra that's not getting rewarded aren't able to see that they're not actually doing that much more or even this is something that I see very commonly is that there are some employers that are really really good and that gets taken for granted by the employees so I think it's really hard but like I kind of see different variants of that I understand that what do you think about posting their videos on Tik Tok or online about them getting fired I mean I think that the internet is all about righteous Fury so like I think the reason they go Mega viral is because when you see a video on Tik Tok right so this is like a 60c or 75 second clip where the narrative is fully shaped by the uploader mhm so what happens is everyone sees this and they resonate with it on an emotional level which is why it goes viral but for all these people getting fired we're not getting the other side of the story right what would the employer say like which parts of the which part of the them getting fired what percentage of it of it is uploaded is it the full thing is it not the full thing what were the H the questions that what what were the interactions that happened before what are the performance reviews like so I think see this all the time where someone makes like some kind of video and they make someone else out to be a complete [ __ ] and then there's like another side to the story so I tend to be like kind of skeptical of that stuff and usually what I think is going on is if you kind of look at it a lot of the internet is like rage bait M so this is where things get tricky because I think there is a very genuine case of like corporate evil malfeasance negligence hiring and firing but like I don't know if you all have employees but like you know I've worked in a lot of places where like sometimes employees suck too right like sometimes you have like and think about your co-workers it's not like all of your co-workers are angels who do a lot like a lot of your co-workers are [ __ ] Slackers and so like I think there's a whole my experience as a psychiatrist is that usually things are not black and white they're very multifactorial and there are a lot of different perspectives yeah so I've worked with some patients and this may be kind of like a hot button issue but I've worked with some patients who will blame some kind of discrimination either sexual discrimination racial discrimination or religious discrimination for some negative outcome in dating or the workplace and the problem is they'll say oh like everyone's racist everyone's racist everyone's racist and I'm not even saying what race we're talking about here and so then what happens if you kind of think about it there's that's absolutely a possibility and systemic racism exists but just because systemic racism exists doesn't mean that you aren't also an [ __ ] so if we're really talking about equality I think that like any ethnicity can be an [ __ ] that's interesting we did uh we heard on another podcast about the scar study have you heard this so it's a study where they had 30 people go into a job interview a real job interview but before they went into the interview they said we're actually going to put a scar right down your face and so they applied this really realistic looking scar to the face and they had them look in a mirror and they saw this this this scar that was obviously very visible and they were told you're going to go into this interview with the scar and then before they went into the interview they took the mirror away and then they said we got to do a quick touchup to the scar and they actually removed the scar in its entirety then they had the person go into the interview without knowing the scar was removed then after the interview they said did the interviewer notice your Scar and almost all of them said yeah they did do you feel like this held you back yeah it did actually did they make any comments about the scar and it was like 30% of them or 40% said they made aggressive comments or insinuated that they were not going to get hired because of the scar and it was this proof that if you go in thinking something you're going to find reasons that correlate with that even though it's not true yeah so this is this is I think case in point so I think there's one there's one major aspect of human psychology that no one is paying attention to that I think is critical so we're all aware of the value of logic we are all now aware of the value of emotion but the one thing that as a society we don't understand is the value of perception no one trains their perception so what happens what's happening in the world right now is we are all being basically indoctrinated like you know so if you look at this conflict between Israel and Palestine my one takeaway as a psychiatrist is that depending on how critical you are are of your perception that's what determines what your view is because literally what they I mean there's research on something called online drift which is basically the unequivocal tendency for any of us who are online our thoughts are being shaped and pushed towards the edge so if you start out like in the middle of a belief system the more time you spend online the more extreme you'll become that has nothing to do with whether that extreme belief is correct or incorrect we're seeing this with like antiac stuff FL Earth stuff you know I'm not saying that Israel is right or Palestine is right I'm not making a comment on that but what I sure as hell know is that the world is divided between people who are 100% in Israel and 100% Palestine and everyone is kind of like you know everyone is really sure so I think what's going on right now the biggest problem that we're seeing right now is that no one is critical of their perceptive faculties no one trains their perception so what happens if you don't Train Your perception is whatever someone else wants to convey you're just going to let sink in and so what that sort of means if we really think about that that means that other people are capable of controlling your mind and even though that sounds insane we've been doing this for years right this is what advertising is about we are going to shape your thinking we're going to shape the thinking of the customer to try to induce Behavior advertising marketing this is all forms of mind control and what's happened is that advertising marketing Neuroscience behavioral Neuroscience you know I I had had a buddy of mine who started this company a startup where he had advertisers show ads this guy is faculty at Harvard Medical School an expert in empathy research so he builds a lab where he hooks people up to eegs EKGs skin galvanic conducts he uses the highest technology that we have available to measure human response and he has these PE he hooks people up to all these machines has them watch ads has them watch versions of ads and then goes to the the company and says this is the one that will engage your customers the most this is the one that you should show so what we don't realize is that the whole world is getting very good at manipulating our mind and we don't even realize that it's happening we think that all of these thoughts are well thought out right we'll say like oh I did my research what do you mean you did your research what is your research I watched things on Tik Tok right that's not research I read things on the internet like were you actually in a laboratory like have you looked at scientific peer-reviewed papers and not just one have you looked at like 200 or 300 peer-reviewed papers on let's say like ethnic and religious conflict between Israel and Palestine like do you like because that's really what research is but no one holds to that standard so in if you look at the yogic system they say that perception is incredibly important and so what I sort of find also as a psychiatrist is that altering people's perception is one of the best things that you can do for their trajectory and happiness in life so I'm told with that scar study that the whole point of that was really about a victim mentality and that if you're told you're a victim you behave as a victim and one of the best things that you could do is not call people victims do you tend to agree with that do you think that's that's a positive that we don't acknowledge people as victims that they are just people no I I think that is a gross oversimplification of a much more subtle concept Okay so whether you call people victims or not like that has different psychological impact so let's talk about being a victim for a second so when you have someone who has been traumatized is it helpful or not helpful to think of them as a victim so the answer is it's both and it depends so let's run through this okay so many people who get traumatized don't see themselves as victims so they feel responsible for the trauma and this is a problem right so like if I if I'm in an abuse of relationship and often times the recipient of the abuse will blame themselves like that's pretty common right and so if you kind of think about it they say it's my fault it's my fault it's my fault in that situation this person is not a victim does that make sense they're the opposite of the victim because it's my fault therefore I'm in control so to help this person realize that this is not your fault and that someone else is doing something bad to you we are increasing the idea of victimhood this is helpful because because now I'm not responsible for all this negativity this negativity actually comes from this other person they are responsible for it so VI becoming a victim is good this is part of the reason that we have this kind of victim mentality on the flip side I also have trauma patients who feel too much like victims and then my job is to make them less of victims so I'll show you what this looks like see if I'm a victim that means I have no power and I have no agency and literally one of the ways that abuse of people propagate traumatic relationships is by tricking people into feeling powerless so if I'm in an abusive relationship and I'm the abuser what I'm going to do is convince my romantic partner that they are powerless without me that they can't do anything on their own they have no agency I will turn them into a victim and if I can trick them into thinking that they have no power then I've really won so in this scenario I want to make them less of a victim and this is where things get really really tricky from like a clinical perspective if someone is a victim it's not their fault but there's a very thin tight rope about it's not your fault and it is your responsibility because we want to empower these people by helping them understand actually you are responsible for this relationship in some way which is something that's very hard to sit with because there's an abuser and then there's an abusee so we don't want to give any responsibility to the abusey but I don't know how you give responsibility without power I think those two things are linked so just as a simple example you know my grandmother had a saying that this is an Indian saying that you know if you don't lock your doors at night you shouldn't complain about being robbed so there's like all kinds of other like nuances there right where there's like you have some control over whether you are a victim or not you have some actions that you can take and then there's a counterargument to that as well which is sometimes you don't so like if we kind of look at you know this is where things get devolving into you know asking for sexual assult I don't believe that because I've had patients who are like literally like you know seven years old and like they weren't asking for anything they don't even choose how they dress there are real victims my point is that it's it's a especially when dealing with trauma there's a very delicate balance between this is not my fault I have some responsibility and I have some power so does that make sense it does and so that's where when people say is victimhood mentality good or bad like I think it depends and it's like a kind of a tricky balance because you can't in order to no longer be a victim you need to have power in my experience as a psychiatrist is like giving people power is a good thing so do you feel like people have less power it seems like victim mentality has increased over the last 10 years so do you feel like that's because people feel like they have less power over their lives yeah so victimhood mentality is really interesting um because one of the things that we see is that victimhood mentality Rises with the power of Institutions so I'll give you all an example so if I'm at school and people are mentally checked out in terms of like Administration or teachers and I get bullied I cannot appeal to my teachers to save me right so then what happens is I have to like fight for myself so prior to the culture of victimhood which we have now there used to be things like the culture of Honor so why did we have like an honor culture in Japan or even in the Wild West it's because you could not trust a overarching power to correct a wrong you had to correct things yourself so if you do me wrong I'm going to do you wrong so this was kind of the culture of honor where if there's an insult to my honor I can't rely on the government to fix it like I have to fix it myself we're going to throw down so as we've seen AR rise in institutional power what we start sort of start to see is that the way to win in a conflict is by becoming a victim because how now that we have like everyone's like so cared scared about bullying and stuff if I can go to my teacher and I say this person bullied me and I can get them punished now suddenly where does the power lie the power lies in claiming to be a victim right so if I can show the teacher I'm being bullied I'm being bullied I'm being bull I'm whether I'm being bullied or not being bullied I've also seen this now where bullies will bully other people by being victims I've seen adolescents who will get their friends to all have a coordinated smear campaign of lying about another person and they will go to the administration and say this person has been XYZ towards all four of us and if they can play the victim card we protect victims right because victims deserve protection and then they end up like getting this person expelled or suspended or whatever and it's actually a form of bullying so we're seeing that that basically one way to gain power with strong Central institutions is to play as a victim that's how do you how do you yeah how do you fight that or how do CU that that seems like a very slippery slope because you want to believe the victim but if it's abused then I think it spreads skepticism on all the real victims yeah and then you don't want to go into you know every victim and be like well are you really a victim and where do you draw the line on that so it's really tricky right so I think this too is a response to a protracted period of time where we like systematically dismantled victims so if you look at the me too movement the whole point was that like people were I mean I remember someone some celebrity was like on the red carpet or something many years ago and someone you know some some entertainment reporter asked this celebrity like a question she's like what advice would you have to young girls who are trying to make it in Hollywood and she was like don't ever go to like Epstein's parties or something like that I think it was Harvey wasn't it Harvey and so she was like don't ever if you get ever get invited to a party from Weinstein like don't go yeah right and cuz he was the one who made made a lot of people in Hollywood so we have we have this culture for many many years of suppressing victims or even further victimizing victims we have this huge power Dynamic so I think we had the me too movement which I think was by and large good right because there was this syst systematic problem where like we literally had sexual predators in places like religious institutions entertainment industries that were just running a muck and like no one was doing anything to stop them because they were just so powerful so that needed to be corrected and now what's happened is that so for a long time victims were not taken seriously so I think we should take victims seriously and at the same time now what's happening just like any human beings do is that the moment that you have you know once you have like some way to gain power some people will use will abuse that power and one really good example of this is now you have false accusations of sexual assault and and things are so challenging I worked with especially so many men who will have false accusations of sexual assault how do I know they're false because they'll even like have recorded conversations or text messages where the person admits that this was false right so they'll say like hey like I hope you like it now like you dumped me and I mean I've seen those text messages from like patients of mine where people will they'll they'll essentially have former partners that are gloating now it's very possible that I suppose my my patient could have manufactured those to show me and convince me but we know that there's some false accusations of sexual assault we don't know how often it is and so now we're running into a problem where if we're kind of saying like Okay believe victim now we have sort of a situation where people are getting judged without any sort of due process it's like the allegation is enough to destroy a career and i' I've worked with people who are are simple people like School teachers like 31-year-old male school teacher punishes a 16-year-old girl for having her cell phone one too many times and the next thing that she does she's going to [ __ ] this guy this teacher doesn't understand he has no power in the relationship she makes one accusation of sexual assault his career is over right like that's what we do and and so it's a real challenge because on the flip side we also have 31-year-old teachers who are sexually abusing their students so like this is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate and like I think the problem is that that we're kind of like we used to have the pendulum over here now the pendulum maybe in the middle I don't know maybe it's over there but it's absolutely a problem how do you solve that is there a solution because that seems incredibly dangerous that you could make an allegation like that it is automatically believed and even if it's disproven it's it most people don't care to ever follow up I think Jack you gave that example of uh re Orange County yeah he's my favorite artist musician and uh he uh there was some accusations alleged against against him and I'm in all like the forums and everything in the chat rooms and everyone's like I'm never going to listen to him ever again even though it's just alleged uh and they even said like even if it comes out false that it didn't even happen I'm still never going to listen to him because you should like believe all women in this circumstance and uh then CCTV footage came out turns out it's completely false and still you see a substantial Financial impact on him you see his listen listenership down you see all of these people that like hated on him back in the day they still harness this hatred and one thing that's really interesting is I was talking to this girl uh and I told her I listen to Rex Orange County and this is after the CCTV footage came out after you know I read like the one article that was published absolving him of that wrongdoing and she was like well do you feel weird listening to him like no there's proof that this actually didn't end up happening but of course she doesn't know about it because there's millions of articles that are made alleging him of doing this crime basically making him lose in the court of public opinion and then when all this stuff comes out refuting that no one makes any media about that and no one apologizes for the incorrect allegations in the beginning either yeah so I I think there's a lot of different problems here and like solving it is going to be on the one hand hard but on the other hand I think potentially very easy it sounds weird so let's start with a couple things the first is that there's also a bias on the internet of like Corrections don't ever get propagated but like allegations get propagated so I one of my favorite quotes from Terry pratchet if youall know Terry pratchet is a lie can get all the way around the world before the truth gets its boots on that's funny and and so like I think that's true right so I I think like this is just the challenge is that no one wants to read some indetail corrective thing the Internet is just designed to trigger our emotional engagement right and then you have these people who will say like believe women like even if so so if you have people who are saying believe women unequivocally irrespective of proof what you're going to have is a subset I think minority of women who are likely on the more sociopathic scale which by the way Recent research shows is closer to one: one um who will take advantage of that right so if we say like believe all white people or believe all brown people or believe all doctors we also have doctors who are pedling all kinds of bad crap because everyone has so much faith in doctors so anytime you have a unequivocal acceptance of a class of people some people in that class will abuse that so I think we've got a couple of things that we can do to correct this the first is that like I said we need to be better about our perception so we need to be like a lot more critical of our own thoughts on the individual level so for example like people ask me you know what do I read I read a lot of primary peer-reviewed research and it's boring as [ __ ] but like that's what I read so like when I'm following a particular thing like if I'm following like a trial I will read Court transcripts I will like look to the the source of the information as as closely as possible the closer you get to the actual Source not some article about it not some post about it not some Tik Tok about it I think the closer to the truth you will be but even then there will be some level of like you know cuz that's just a court transcript and someone could all lied or whatever so that's one thing I think the second thing that we need to do is just in general be critical of our thought process is that the more sure you are about something see that this is a problem of shess it's a problem of 100% confidence it root so the more that human beings question our own beliefs whether you're anti-work or proor or late stage capitalism or communism or capitalist whatever it doesn't matter the basic problem that I see in the world today is that no one is trying to understand a perspective that is not their own so when I talk to people about things like Israel or Palestine what I never hear is is someone who's super pro Israel really trying to understand why is it that the these Palestinians these people who are pro Palestinian Palestinians believe this help me understand where you're coming from what is your experience of this because what it ends up being is an argument you are wrong no you are wrong well you did this well they did this well they did this well they did this and chances are the truth is somewhere in the middle but the basic problem is that we have a society that is becoming increasingly pmic and increasingly antagonistic no one is trying to understand everyone is trying to win and as long as you are trying to win everyone's [ __ ] because in order for one person to win one person has to lose and I've seen this in marriage like marriage counseling when one partner wins the other one loses it's a loss for the marriage we all lose I have a book coming out about video game addiction and this is where it's get such big pissing contests between parents and child kid wants to win parent wants to win and man this gets ugly when parents and children start fighting even on levels that they don't know parent is like I want you to go to gymnastics and you're going to listen to me because I'm the [ __ ] parent you're going to do what I say because I know better than you kid has no power in the situation so you know what they do psychosomatic illness now I have nausea and it's not fake they'll start throwing up if you push that kid they will end up winning they become suicidal it's a power play I've seen it gets real ugly so anytime you want to have a relationship and I think that's what we need right but between like liberals and conservatives like let's understand the other perspective instead of just assuming that everyone else is an idiot like let's acknowledge that on average these this class of people is going to be no smarter or stupider than I am and let's understand that they they're coming from somewhere so the moment that we start doing that I think all these problems will go away I don't you think it's human nature though I I feel like what you're saying sounds really good but I think if you if you try to put it in practice no one's going to do that I mean it might be 1% of people that could actually see a story like that and think critically about it I feel like even though it's true what you're saying realistically people are just not going to do it people are going to be people they're going to see the headlines they're going to feed into the drama they're going to think I'm right they're wrong and it's going to be a battle like how can we actually make a meaningful change on this where that thought come from I think the people are just going to be people I I think it takes to to have the majority so like 51% take what you said and actually apply it just from everything that I've seen very few people will actually do anything with it I think of even our audience I'd say maybe at this point probably 35 40% of people are watching this probably 35% so we've already lost the majority of people who clicked on the episode are still here and then of those 35 I'd say realistically 10% so so so here's my point is that I want you to critically examine that belief which is exactly what I'm saying you are with lack of faith in humanity which is fair enough you're not wrong right but this is exactly what I mean right is if you pay attention to your instinctive reaction is that's not going to work but that's that that I guess that's been my experience throughout everything in my entire life has has shown me that most people are just going to yeah and and you can take an a some someone who's pro-israel someone who's Pro Palestine someone who's conservative someone who's liberal someone who's a flat earther and they will say the same thing that you said which it has been my overwhelming experience that the Earth is flat they will literally use the same language right and here's all the data that I've seen yeah so this is exactly what I'm talking about is when we have these instinctive reactions we need to be critical of them but let me address it okay cool so as a clinician what I've seen is that I don't trust populations but I trust individuals and and this is like this is where there's like if you look at all this data right like you know we we're looking at let's say mental health is getting so much worse there's a crisis there's all this kind of stuff and and like even what we've done at healthy gamer we've had a huge huge unbelievable positive impact M right 5 million people unique users watch us every month because they want to be better human beings with the momentum towards this is growing towards wanting to understand your perception so we recently launched like memberships right and we were like concerned because like this is costs extra money and that to we didn't realize so stupid I didn't realize that the more free stuff is easy to do if you're doing it for a small number of people but the larger you grow the more expensive free stuff becomes and so we started this membership thing and like we're Amazed by how PE how much people are into it because it's really advanced stuff and and so what I'm sort of found is that like don't give up on people like don't do it like you don't need to change 51% of people stop trying to change 51% of people change one person anytime I do an interview I'm just talking to one person and oh this is pretty cool like a million people get benefited from this you and I are having a conversation I'm not talking to the 35% of people who are still here I'm talking to you I only need to convince you and what we've seen is that if I can convince you or if we can engage there can absolutely be a ripple or scaling effect from this conversation which you absolutely know right that's what yall do yall have scaling effects you have one conversation with one person and a million people benefit from it literally so don't give up on people yet but we'll get to that okay so I I think this is what I'm saying is with the internet we can change one person and we can have a scalable effect at the rate of a million so I think this is also where you're right because the assumptions that you're making are not utilizing the technology that we've utilized so when we look at healthy gamer I have faith because I have helped more people in four years of doing healthy gamer I've helped literally probably a thousand times or even a 100 thousand times more people than I could in a lifetime of clinical practice clinical practice I can help 40 people a week tops right so like even one YouTube video with 200,000 views is going to help more than that so I think there's scaling effects that we haven't taken advantage of yet but let's go back to this what was your original point that they're just not going to do it yeah that that the overwhelming majority are still going to be people and that even if we we reach a million people it's it's 0 2% of the US population and that it's not enough to make it's part of human nature yeah like you're going against the grain and what like ascribe their belief system to themselves they want to identify with a certain set of beliefs and feel attacked when their belief systems attack because it's a part of their you're right so we have one really really good thing going for us this would be an unsolvable problem except for one difference which is that human beings are probably the best living organism on the planet that has the capability to go against their own nature so if you look at like my favorite example of this is vegan dogs so you'll have all these people who raise like vegan dogs right and they're like oh they don't even like meat anymore and they'll do some kind of experiment where there's like meat and then there's like vegan food and then the dog even if they've been eating vegan crap their whole life they'll go to the meat so if you look at like what really separates humans from other beings and this may not be biologically true I mean who knows like maybe even Dolphins can do some of this stuff we don't really know right but one thing that I've seen human beings do time and time and time again is go against our nature now you can also make a biological reductionist argument that that you're not really going against your nature but I mean like on a surface level so case in point my human brain which is 99% similar to like a monkey's brain or even a cow's brain or a lion's brain wants to eat a Twinkie but I have the ability to resist so even if human nature is this way the key thing about human nature about humans is that we can go against human nature and I think a lot of what becoming a successful human is is actually learning to conquer our nature this whole podcast what have we been talking about I have this natural desire to to accomplish this goal I'm looking what everyone else is doing and I want to do that too and we're talking about all the Neuroscience that supports it I have loss aversion my amydala activates dopamine the nature of dopamine is it results in behavioral reinforcement so this first time I shoot up heroin I'm going to want it again I'm going to want it again I'm going to want it again this is human nature this is our biology we know this and yet people become sober and yet people Conquer video game addiction and yet people conquer porn addiction and yet people who hate each other and are racist who've been conditioned to be this way because we are tribal by our Evolution we can fight against that so I have hope because we have something within us that can conquer our own nature now once again you can make an argument that that too is a part of our nature but even if you make that argument then we can still overcome human nature so that's the second thing right so I have faith that we can do this next point that I would make is that yall are saying even if we affect a million people that's not enough yeah you're right if the three of us affect a million people we haven't transformed the world but we've definitely increased we've affected way more than three people but if all we if three of us can affect a million people we don't need all we need is 0.1% of the population right if we can change 0.1% of the population and this is what I've seen as a clinician is that if you can take one human being who's been trauma ized and has low self-esteem and you can help them believe in themselves and learn to love themselves the Ripple effects that you will see are astronomic right this person who used to be I I had a a patient who was addicted to opiates and started to write dystopian fiction and became a therapist and like amazing human being and transforming this one person this person how now has a clinical practice where they see they see 40 people a month I mean a week mhm and they write fiction through which they're very successfully writing dystopian fiction which is resonating emotionally with like millions of people and so like I made one alteration in one human being so don't underestimate the power of a single human being well well said I appreciate that yeah and that's where like if we're not careful we'll slip into this automatic thinking of its 0.1% I mean who the [ __ ] made you responsible for 100% of the population bro if you can affect 0.1% that is an overwhelming Victory so how do you I feel like we're so caught up in these certain like agendas and thought processes and like automated thinking and every single time we bring something up you're like well it's not necessarily that way and you provide like a slam dunk gr throws you the alleyoop you catch it in midair double-handed 360 slam dunk yeah like how do we reframe our mind to be able to be doing the dunking rather than the alley oing so you've already done it you see what you just did now you've risen against meta like I don't know if this makes sense I don't know if anyone's following does it's awaren yes yeah you gained awareness oh my God so originally it's this thought process was automatically accepted and we debunked that I'm not right by the way you guys know that right like Graham may be right I could be wrong I'm not saying I'm right so we did that once we did that twice we did that three times and now we're We're Off to the Races because you've said hold on a second how do I no longer need Dr K to do this for me and the moment that you act ask that question now you've truly B boarded the train of change so now you started to realize holy [ __ ] this is a pattern of automatic thinking in my mind how do I fix this pattern of automatic thinking and like I know it sounds crazy but that's the biggest the most difficult step do you think social media is a net positive or negative in this day and age probably net negative I would tend to agree I agree so I think what's happened with social media is it's kind of like you know back in the day there was a doctor who discovered that we could put cocaine into cough syrup and like opiates into cough syrup and it's like cocaines are like great neural stimulants right so they'll help you stay sharp so anytime human beings develop something it tends to run a little bit wild and we recognize the benefits before we recognize the dangers but over time thankfully so far the human race has discovered the the nuclear bomb or the hydrogen bomb or whatever and we like we dropped a couple right and then we were like okay this is maybe not a great idea and maybe we'll still end the nuclear war but I think we're we're doing this thing where technology has has infected our world like an invasive species and it's grown out of control and we have not utilize technology for mental health promotion while we've utilized mental uh technology for mental health Decay and so as we start really understanding how to to harness technology for Humanity's benefit that's when things will start turning around do you think we're destroying our minds by Doom scrolling yes I tend to believe that when you talk about the nuclear bomb I I can't help but compare that to social media today and it seems as though that is our mental nuclear bomb that we're going to realize 20 years from now how detrimental it is even to put a child in front of not 20 we already know yeah abely but we're not doing anything about it it seems it seems like individuals on a small scale might delete certain apps or limit their their scrolling but it seems on a on a wide scale it's so prevalent it's so prevalent but we are doing something about it right so so I think that like so just to give you a couple of examples so the American Psychiatric association has an app advisory committee so the American Psychiatric association is starting to develop guidelines for like healthy usage of apps or or I think that what they're doing is developing a advisory for people who want want to make mental health apps so there there are institutions that have been slow to start but they're doing good work now um I recently met some some uh the some of the co-founders of I think moms against media addiction right so there are other Grassroots movements there are some policy changes that are starting to happen um so I think right now like basically technology like got a head start and like humanity is like starting to turn the corner I hope or at least we're moving towards turning the corner and even the fact that like we're successful on YouTube is proof of that right CU here we are like on the internet talking about developing a healthy relationship with technology and like people are into that I think individual humans understand that this is a problem and so as people develop resources like I think we're moving in the right direction what do you think about YouTube channels that primarily focus on finding an event that has happened usually a fairly nuanced event and there's so many of them out there and in fact I talked we talked to lwig about this recently because you know he has Mogul Mill so I'll say I'll say Mogul Mill because we talked about it during the episode where he finds some event that's happening covers the event usually to elicit a response in the audience that sort of whole Niche on YouTube what what are your general thoughts on that I mean I think human beings love to know what's going on with other human beings so like I mean would I say that these I don't think MOG Mogul mail is bad um like by any means I mean I think there are worse versions like so I think generally speaking human beings are looking for commentary on things that are going on and we as human beings are very social creatures which means we love to gossip so you know 6,000 years ago gossip involved like us like sitting around a fire and maybe going for a walk and I'm like oh did you know that Jack did this and like Graham did you know that Jack is selling pictures of his feet and like this kind of stuff and then then what what what happened is we had you know we had things like I guess like National inquire or whatever like we have these gossip magazines and then we just have the most recent incarnation of drama oriented channels and in the same way that we had these magazines these tabloids right that would like pick particular people offer a completely unnuanced view crap on them we literally have Paparazzi that will follow people around and try to find the one unflattering picture which they then they will sell there will be an appetite for this stuff so people will make it I think that the internet just amplifies so I think that like you know the the signal that we get from like the internet is going to be more potent than we what we get from a tabloid so I don't think that they're healthy and at the same time like that's kind of like it's just scratching an evolutionary itch so I don't think that they're good and I think often times these people are like quite toxic because they will be you know especially some of the ones like so I've worked with a lot of creators who will have you know some of these channels like actually a couple of them are now banned because they are so so insightful of like harassment so they'll say oh this person did this and they're they're so terrible and they're taking advantage of this and they're doing this and then like all the people on the all the angry people on the internet will then go and harass them so I think that they're bad but I I mean I think they're also like human nature here's a good question is a Creator responsible for Their audience I don't think you can be responsible for another human being but I think that all human beings are responsible for their actions and so we should think as creators about the implications of our actions so I I I think that you should as a Creator you should behave with responsibility but I don't think you can hold a Creator accountable for like something that one of their di hard fans does what you can hold a Creator accountable for is what they say right right so if I tell my my audience hey this guy is an [ __ ] and I think they suck like it would be nice if someone did XYZ right so like I think what we're responsible for are our actions and I I think that especially with creators I mean there's so many strange parasocial relationships like I've had people like who are like actively psychotic like show up at my house because they thought that I was sending them messages over the internet and I don't think I'm respons for that person's behavior um you know so I I I don't think creators are responsible but I think that I think every human being because if you kind of think about it right so if we say that the Creator is responsible does that mean that the member of Their audience is not responsible does that make sense it does so so I I think that we're responsible for what we say but I don't think you can hold us and if we if I tell someone in my audience to go dock someone then that's a different story because I should be held responsible for what I do as a creator do you see any issue with the violence that's so prevalent now on uh Instagram reals well I don't know what's I Jack's the only one who gets this algorithm I'm not the only person people people watching this podcast know exactly what I'm talking about never seen there's going to be I'm going to say like I'm just going to throw out guesses here 60% of the people have no idea what I'm talking about 40% know exactly what I'm talking about there is an algorithm that you get on on Instagram that just like every fifth reel is some heinous disgusting graphic Gore filled video of something some evil thing happening in United States and these have tens of millions of views and people like they like the videos they engage with the videos and then you go to the comments in every single one is like day 135 of seeing someone die on my Instagram feed okay do you see anything wrong that could happen psychologically with being exposed to violence online even though it's not actually in front of you but seeing that online and if so what kind yeah I mean I I I don't know what exactly because I'm not 100% sure but so let's understand a couple of things so remember that platforms engage their users through fluctuating their emotions so this is why you see it every fifth video so if you saw every video as violent it wouldn't work but the more that I alternate between cute cat videos heartwarming daddy daughter videos and gory violent videos the more addicted people will be to like their feet so we just sort of know I don't know how much like core primary research there is to this is sort of an extrapolation in clinical work is that basically they pingpong our emotions so it's like cat video outrage cat video outrage um so I think that that's unhealthy in the sense that like people are becoming more addicted and their emotions are like Ping ponging all over the place which I don't think is healthy from a physiologic stand standpoint so we tend to see with a lot of people who use this kind of technology is that whatever emotions life is generating do not get addressed or processed because we're dealing with all the ups and downs of like internet stuff so we know that if you're feeling bad in your life and you start using any platform that has emotional engagement your brain will not process what you are going through and instead it will be distracted by this ping in Emotion so that I think is pretty unhealthy I don't know I mean I can't really extrapolate out what effect that would have from a violence perspective like I think there's a reason why Karen videos get so propagated right because we like to see people there's some amount of shod and Freud you know we like to see people doing really bad things and getting punished and we it makes us feel Superior it helps us feel narcissistic I think one of the reassuring things is it appears that especially when it comes to video games like playing violent video games do not increase violence I think the the counterargument to that is that I think that there's a lot of like prank videos and stuff where people are being like harmful to others which catches on but I don't think it's like you're increasing a violent tendency I think that's more like peer pressure and MIM mimicking other human behavior as opposed to really like creating violent tendencies I think most of the people that I see who are being violent on prank videos I don't think they have like malice in their heart I think that they're just completely empathetic and don't realize that another human being will not enjoy this because their brain is so like caught up in the narcissistic view of like I'm going to make content and I'm a Creator and I have to make content and it's okay because everybody else does it and stuff like that but that's really outside of my realm of like that that feels like a prediction that's hard for me to make based on clinical experience right and scientific research I want to talk briefly about porn okay it's a topic we've discussed on this podcast a lot of people think it's not an issue a lot of people think it is an issue is it an issue fundamentally and if not when does it become an issue what do you mean by fundamentally like just exposure to porn period is just bad for your brain you're feeding yourself whatever positive hormonal influences or whatever from this you know thing online that you're seeing and potentially maybe just even one exposure could have this other effect where you're like okay well maybe I don't need to pursue a romantic relationship or maybe you're in one and just exposure to one can be dangerous to that relationship that you're in versus like you know you can do it casually and then at a certain point it becomes a problem so I I think the first thing to understand is that just like anything else that can be addictive or harmful an individual's relationship to it can be highly variable so I'm not of the mind that porn is unequivocally harmful so I do think in some ways like from a spiritual perspective I think it's harmful but from like a physiologic neuroscientific or like hard like mental health perspective I don't know that it is unequivocally harmful um I think a lot of people can have relatively healthy relationships with pornography masturbation Etc um that being said I think that the way that porn is advancing is becoming increasingly problematic so if we look at some of these like interesting studies what we see is that the reason pornography is getting worse is because they are tapping into this neuroscientific principle called a supernormal stimulus so if we look at our brain our brain likes certain things and it dislikes other things so what human beings have figured out is we can take the natural level of like and we can modify it in some way that hyperactivates are physiology so a good example of this is something like high fructose corn syrup or like you know saturated fats so what people will literally do in Laboratories is they will like mess with saccharides or sugars and they'll mess with fats until they can create something that is more delicious than anything you will find in the natural world this is where Twinkies come from now what what's happening is people are doing this with pornography so if you look at the trend in pornography it is Bec more more what more everything like the dicks are getting bigger the tits are getting bigger like the colors are getting brighter the sounds are getting louder it's becoming virtual reality it's becoming more immersive there's more jiggling there's more like all kinds of stuff is getting like enhanced the second thing that we're having is we're having a really good way to scratch whatever itch anyone has so it used to to be that we were all protected by the fact that there was not the perfect porn for me like we're limited by the amount of pornography production but now what's happening is that we have so many people making so many different kinds of porn that you can sort of scratch your brain in the eight or nine specific places that are genetically and like developmentally just work for you so I want like feet picks plus this plus this minus this minus this so we are we are starting to develop such Niche pornography that like it is getting even more engaging okay right jack right why you asking right for me so I'm gonna ask right for you so so then so then the next thing that we're starting to do is one example of that is if we look at something like only fans now we're adding a layer to pornography that we've never had before parasocial relationship so you can have people who've been obsessed with let's say celebrities politicians musicians pornographic actors or actresses so you've always had human beings who are obsessed but now so if you look at the slice of human beings that are obsessed with someone that you cannot ever interact with that slice is pretty small enter only fans enter parasocial relationships now I can interact with this person this person can interact back so this starts scratching our the brain's need for a social connection like in order for us to have a social connection there has to be well doesn't have to be but the more interaction we have the stronger the social connection becomes so with only fans we're seeing I I've seen unfortunately this is like really scary you know I've seen a lot of like troubles in marriage with with like it was one thing I mean there's a certain amount of insecurity that sometimes Partners can have with their partner watching porn like why can't I satisfy all your sexual needs sometimes honestly the answer is because you're not willing to do the sexual things that I want and you know that's something that we don't really say very often right because you're a pervert for wanting these things and I don't want to indulge you um so that that's part of the reason that people watch porn because partners are not willing to offer what someone wants so then they get it from somewhere else um but now what we're starting to see is I I've seen a lot of like marriages really get rocked by like the social and emotional connection and the financial connection to a particular only fans Creator right or other whatever pornography delivery system we use and so so now like like you can be unfaithful to your partner by engaging with this person by paying this person you know and things like that I think there's a lot of like predatory behavior um going both ways so there's a lot of like abuse of people who are pornographic content creators but then there's also a lot of like taking advantage of people who are like lonely and isolated and have money and you're sort of like paying for affection so I think it's getting like super toxic and very predatory as well um and this is what we know is that see the more like itches I can scratch in your brain the more addictive something is going to be so if we look at video games there used to be no Community element but as video games have added a community element now like they're more addictive so this is what we're seeing with pornography so things are getting worse and we're like scratching those itches more profoundly I think we're ruining more brains more quickly there's very little regulation around pornography so the access to pornography is is going through the roof and then the last thing to consider as we mentioned about the supernormal stimulus is as we create more of a supernormal stimulus the dopaminergic and emotional consequences in our brain are increasing so as I watch pornography that is supernormal my brain acclimatizes to that and it becomes difficult for me to engage in a healthy sexual or romantic relationship I'm guessing your general thoughts on porn in a relationship are are not black and white as far as like you can watch it in a relationship and the relationship's still healthy as well as you can't watch it a relationship the relationship still fine it's probably more a case-by casee basis you would be right I want to know your thoughts on and I'm guessing it's probably going to be very similar to open relationships so you can be with a partner married as well as exploring other romantic relationships with other people guessing your thought process is it's not black and white is that that true yeah so I don't think it's black and white but I generally speaking this is what I will say I I think I am I don't think anti is the right word I think the general conception of paully Amory and things like that being good and okay I think it probably harms a lot more people than can make it work is is what I would say so this is what's really interesting so I was just looking at a metaanalysis on poly Amory and in open relationships and the metaanalysis basically found that polyamory is like pretty good people feel mentally better people feel physically better people feel more fulfilled so like they basically showed that the data suggests that polyamorous relationships are positive so you can look at that metanalysis and you can say wow polyamory is good but there is such a catastrophic misstep in the research which is that these people are studying poly immerse relationships so can yall detect what the catastrophic bias in the research is yeah they're only getting the people where it works exactly so this is a Nuance which I think will be lost on the internet no i' I've seen very few or no studies of people who tried polyamory for whom it was a disaster so this is where from anecdotal evidence and clinical evidence this is what I see a lot more of is that one partner has some kind of dissatis action in the relationship so if I'm dissatisfied in my relationship and I say let's open the relationship why so that I can have my desires satisfied remember what we said about being a slave to our internal desires that's a bad thing and so then what happens is instead of fixing the problem in my relationship I bring a third person into the equation and as someone who's done a fair amount small amount honestly of things like couples counseling making a relationship work with two [ __ ] up human beings is hard enough the moment that you add a third person to the equation it becomes exponentially difficult and then like we don't really have good I'm not saying that it can't work and i' I've worked with some people who have successful polyamorous relationships and like I think I'm not going to comment but there's some people who used to be poster children for successful polyamorous relationships will which will then sometimes fall apart so I I don't think we really have good data on really what the impact is but I suspect that there is a very vocal minority of people who are able to succeed in polyamorous relationships I think succeeding in a polyamorous relationship is probably objectively harder than succeeding in a monogamous relationship is my guess just because the emotional bandwidth required is different um but I I've seen it done for sure the challenge is that we don't really have good guidelines the other challenge is that we will use polyamorous relationships as masks for like other unsavory things so if I just as an example like I said you know if I'm unhealthy unhappy in my relationship and I open up my relationship I'm not actually solving the problem so if I decide that I'm not sexually satisfied and I'm just going to start a polyamorous relationship often times what I see is that one partner is basically forced into it right where like they feel like guilt y for not saying no and especially because now we're making such a value judgment on polyamorous relationships as positive that like if you're anti-p polyamorous relationship you don't want your partner to be fulfilled or whatever I've seen some really bad examples of this bad in the sense of like harmful of like you know Partners who will come out as even gay so they they're in a heterosexual marriage and they'll like come out as gay and then you know so they want to start having homosexual relationship ship outside of this heteronormative marriage and then if the part if if the if the heterosexual partner who's married is not in favor of that they're viewed as homophobic right which I think there's a different perspective which is that hey we agreed to do this thing and I recognize that that's not what you wanted but or that's not who you are which is totally fine but like you know this thing may need to end like you I think there's a different perspective of like you know that there just it's weird right so I think there's a lot of weird value judgments going on with it um but you know we'll see I I think what we sort of know my take is that human beings are probably supposed to be something close to serial monogamists so it's not that you have to be with one person until the end of life but we have to remember that you know that the the for majority of human history human lifespan is like 35 like 35 right so until death do us part used to mean like maybe 20 years on the topic so I think we're sort of moving beyond our evolutionary constraints in terms of what our lives are and we're starting to see some changes related to that do you think porn is creating incels or is contributing to that sort of behavior yeah for sure can women be incels yes the original incel was a woman the person who coined the term incel the first incel on the planet was a woman could you explain this yeah like tell us the back story on this I know nothing about it so the term Insel yeah the person who invented the concept was a woman so she said I'm involuntarily celibate and then much like much of society the men showed up and took it away right so then like like so so the the the first and now we have fem cells right which are female incels which is really bad cultural appropriation because the original inel was was a woman it's messed up um so I I think I think there was someone who had some kind of website or something and and so she was talking about being involuntarily celibate and the original incels were a group of women and because if you kind of think about it right there's also this premise that oh women can get laid whenever they want to so there was a group of women who were like we can't get laid whenever we want to we get rejected by men this is not nice this is not good and then the some dudes showed up and we're like [ __ ] yeah let's go they should have just hung out I know imag there ACH got it laid me too all right let's everyone says that it doesn't work like that everyone is like why don't the female incels and the male incels get together and it's because often times if you look at incels they have standards that are unrealistic and this is where the pornography comes in so I think there's also all kinds of weird [ __ ] like I can't really comment from a peer reviewed literature standpoint because now we're getting into the dark corners of incel psychology that come from Clinical experience and if you look at pornography there are so many themes of male dominance abuse I mean we even have pornography which is like visibly abusive right and and so like when when when you have someone who has a lot of resentment and I'm assuming a male incel watching a certain kind of pornography that is usually heterosexual um you know it it prop there's a lot of like weird it's hard to describe but there's like there's a like sometimes like Angry sex is like very engaging and so so that that it's almost like some people feel this resentment towards a group of people and watching these people get sexually demeaned is very gratifying is very validating is very like resonating is kind of what I would say but I I don't know that that applies to all incels or even the majority of incels we're talking about like you know asking someone who is an incel when you watch pornography like what do you like about it and and some people that I've worked with will say like you know it feels righteous to watch like this is unfair and and then there's also some amount of identification and aspirations of like I want to be the dude with the big dick that is doing this to women because I'm so angry at women I want to slap them around I want to do this and things like that so like there's some there's a lot of fantasy component too on the topic of relationships this is a question I've had for a super long time in my life is it ever appropriate or right if you have power over someone else or maybe you don't have power over over them but you know that you can make a decision for them that you think would be better for them to do that or is it just asking them them questions and eventually praying that they come to the realization that they need to do a certain something to make themselves better off so can you make a decision for your partner even if they don't want it let's say you're talking to a girl okay and you don't think that you're very good for this person but she's fine for you but you think would genuinely be better off with you out of their life okay you can make that decision to say hey I'm cutting this off I'm not good for you even though you're getting pleasure from it and they think they're getting pleasure from that but deep down you may know that you're not the best thing for this person at this moment in their life so I think I'm going to run against the grain where I think it is I think if you look at the reality of successful monogamous heterosexual relationships probably homosexual relationships as well often times one partner will overrule the other because they know better so I think that is probably like a positive attribute within a relationship because if you look at it fundamentally the whole point of a relationship is that I'm good at some stuff and you're good at some stuff I know things better in this Dimension and you know things better in this Dimension and so usually probably like the unit is Superior because one person is making decisions over here and one person is making decisions over here so I think on balance I may be like maybe cancelled but I think it's okay to make decisions for your partner um I had a I had a really and and and I say that as being someone in a relationship where my wife makes decisions for me at times which I think are good and then I make decisions for her which I think are good and I think we even discovered through our relationship that like we have a where we say hey this is one of those times when you need to listen like so we even have a signal where I say like hey this is one of those times and she says this is one one of those times and then so the moment that she says that I acknowledge that in the past she has been right and I have been wrong and she had a certain confidence I had a certain confidence and that that works out well for us and then sometimes this made me look like a real abusive [ __ ] because we used to go eat Mexican food and then there would be this situation where she would like finish everything on her plate and then for the next 2 hours she would literally be groaning in pain from overeating so she could not like move or function she had to like put the seat back all the way so she would like overeat to the point of physical pain and then there I am a 21-year-old dude on a date with like an or maybe a 22-year- old dude on a date with a 19-year-old chick and I'm telling her to put the fork down cuz she's had enough right and and the whole like restaurant looks at me and thinks that I'm the complete [ __ ] from you know like oh my God this controlling dude and the hilarious thing is that then she started doing it on purpose and she's like started overeating and overeating and overeating more to try to put me in a situation where everyone would think I was the [ __ ] and anyway so it's a very loving relationship my point is that I I do think there are times where like Partners it's okay for a partner to make a decision now the real problem with that is the moment that you say that you open the door to all kinds of abuse because how do you know when it's okay for you to overrule your partner when do you become controlling how do you have autonomy that's the problem but I think the real important thing to remember is that just because we like autonomy does not mean that human beings are actually equal in a relationship with all competencies that is like probably a scientific fact that one partner is going to know better when it comes to a particular thing than another and that both Partners may not be aware of that Gap in knowledge does that make sense that's like a statistical fact of probably most things in the relationship and what I tend to find is that healthy relationship are the ones where both partners are able to acknowledge that in some way so there is almost a willingness to be overruled which is kind of like the key thing that we go for what about white lying I think lying is bad in every single circumstance even if you know 100% if I'm 100% honest with this person they will go do something that's either self-destructive they'll go do something destructive to somebody else this is not going to help anybody in this circumstance aside from maybe some like not transgressing some ethical guideline of being honest or being dishonest so here's what I would say so I I say lying is bad from a spiritual perspective not a practical or psychological perspective um so I think that there's like a Sanskrit concept of Satya which means truth and just to give you all an example of like how powerful truthfulness is so if I told y'all tomorrow that it is physically impossible for you to lie how would that change your behavior I feel like not much really yeah same okay no I would probably change some some things yeah right so so then then here's the question the way that you would change your behavior do you think that would make your life better or worse I don't know I feel worse I feel like mine would be pretty much the same okay so in my experience see why do we lie we lie to try to avoid conflict sure so even more than that avoid consequences or literally to control others right so if we look at it if I tell you the truth you may behave this way or this way but if I lie I narrow the possibilities of your response so if you really looking look at it why do we lie we lie to control other people literally that duh right it sounds weird when I say it like that but anytime you okay like I'm going to lie to my partner about having an affair so that they don't divorce me so I'm I'm taking Choice away from another human being when every time I like to them so what I found the more truthful I've become is once you commit to truth you cannot do any of the things that you have to lie to protect which is usually a good thing in my experience now we're going to get to your point because what about negative consequences and white lies and why lying to for the protection of others so I can see why your life may get worse but in my experience committing to truth is generally speaking a very very good thing agree right so then like if if so I remember you know I used to lie about fast food because I felt embarrassed and and my wife would ask me she's like oh like what did you eat and then cuz she's like making dinner but I had fast food at 3: p.m. and I'm like oh [ __ ] and so I was like yeah and and then so if I really think about it but like if I lie about fast food it makes it easier we usually lie about things that we shouldn't be doing bluntly right MH and so then if you kind of think about it if you stop lying about the things that you shouldn't be doing that means that you stop doing them if you really commit to truthfulness and so I tend to find that there is a very positive impact to committing to SATA or truth but this is a spiritual lens this is about not what you're talking about right so your example is a little bit different so let's talk about your example of like white lies and the whole point of a white lie is that it's harmless or even protects other people generally speaking I have found that lying to people to protect them generally I used to think that that was okay and the more times I test it the less valuable it becomes so as a simple example you know like let's just use a really common example people will come into my office and they'll say I'm suicidal because I have no reason to live now in this moment I'll tell me okay so tell me about your life okay they say I have I have no girlfriend I have no job I'm overweight I'm addicted to pornography I'm addicted to video games I'm addicted I I have no prospects I'm 32 years old I have no nothing in my life now the instinctive response In This Moment is to say hey live I believe you can accomplish a lot and then what I found as a psychiatrist is to actually like speak honestly and I could say yeah I can see why you would want to kill yourself because you literally do not have a life worth living your life seems like an absolute mess and I can totally understand why you would not want to live this shitty existence anymore it sounds like you're bouncing between dopaminergic activities to forget how bad your life is but eventually the dopamine tolerance builds up and the the reality of how shitty your life is breaks through so this sounds like a terrible thing to say as a psychiatrist right and then I ask them one question do you want to change that if you want to change that I am committed to helping you have a life that is worth living and this I find works way better because then the choice is theirs look bro you're telling me your life is [ __ ] I met you 30 minutes ago it's not my place to say that your life is worth living but if you tell me that you want to change your life and you're tired of living this life this is what I will tell you as a psychiatrist one option is to kill yourself that's one way to get out of this life the other option is to build a different life and that's what I think you should do so that's a good example of like you know if this person is coming to me for me for my assessment and another good example is things like cancer right where like you want to protect people from the diagnosis but I think like now you don't want to protect people from the diagnosis even children so I may be in the minority here but I even find that talking to my CH talking to CH children patients who are seven 8 n years old it's it kind of I'm getting emotional because I'm thinking about these experien I haven't had much of them but it's like so amazing how how we underestimate what children are capable of and furthermore how terrifying it is for a child who is so empathic because at seven you don't have anything except for empathy your mind doesn't work you don't understand any logic but your parents are sitting there telling you with a smiling face that you're going to be okay but you can tell that your parents are paranoid it [ __ ] children up man it really screws them up to be hearing one thing in every signal they're sitting there in the ICU with all these tubes hooked up to them and their parents are coming in with trying to hold back tears and saying everything is going to be okay it's so confusing for the kid what's the alternative to that saying that hey there's a 30% chance you're not going to make it I feel like worse I feel like it's better in that circumstance to say you will be okay because it gives them the maybe the placebo belief that if they say I'm going to be okay I trust my parents they wouldn't lie to me I believe I'm going to be okay yeah so I I think the placebo effect gets tanked pretty quickly because of the empathic circuitry at play because what you're actually getting what that child is actually receiving is like no hope right so so I I know know it sounds crazy and I may be I may be wrong here because it's not an extensive area of clinical experience suicidal people I feel good about um and by the way for suicidal people like you know if the person tells me like I'm going to kill myself I will also tell them I'll be honest I said I'm not going to let you right so I'll say like I'm going to send you the hospital I'm going to hospital I've done this a thousand times yeah I'm going to hospitalize you against your will because I do not think this is right I understand that you think it's right but like I do not think it is right and I impose I am imposing my will on you which thankfully you know the laws of this country allow me to do I am taking away your freedom and forcing you to live this miserable existence all I ask is that in the next 10 days you give me a chance to try to show you that this can be fixed because I've done this for a hundred people before you and we've made progress I know that you think it's hopeless but I think that there's hope and you don't have to agree with me I'm in charge so I think that degree of honesty so like I would never lie to a patient but you'll absolutely take their freedoms away that's what we do as Psy so in in the case of a child I think it's even explaining to them like hey like you know it's a good chance that your life is going to end soon and you know you may not be like you probably have maybe 6 months to a year and like what do you understand about death like what do you think that is and then also asking the kid because think about this right if we never ask the kid if you have 6 months left what do you want to do you have all these parents who are making decisions for the kid mhm that oh this is what they're going to like and this is what they're going to like we don't we don't even we take the kid we take the last year of Freedom that the kid has and we take it away it's restricted enough from the chemotherapy and whatever the else [ __ ] they're getting and I I know I'm getting emotional but like I mean I've seen some really powerful stuff that has changed my mind that kids are very understanding they're very smart and we shouldn't take that away that's what I think now um and I think when when these when these examples come I think it makes a lot of sense like logically mhm that we shouldn't do this right of course like protect the child but I I think kids are tough like I've seen so many seven-year-olds 8-year-olds 9-year-olds who've gone through so much trauma so much abuse they're much more resilient than we give them credit for do you feel like more children do better in terms of their illness being told that they're going to be okay or they do better being told here are the chances here's the reality what do you want to do so so in the case of oncologic patients I really can't answer that question because I'm not an oncologist right so my sample size is incredibly small and also my involvement with these CH children is as a psychiatric consultant so what this means is that there is some problem already which the oncology team then calls the Psychiatry team to help out with so I have a very skewed sample size one of the things that I think I I would say though is my guess is that it's good so if you look at the field of paliative care the field of paliative care is is sub a specialty of medicine where people these are doctors that help people die so paliative care is called in when terminal diagnosis is there so it's not even about maintaining life and generally speaking the vast majority of paliative care physicians that I've worked with are i' I don't think I've ever heard a single one say like you should lie to a patient the thing is they get so good with truth that you don't need to lie that's another thing that we sort of slip up on is that we're not good at telling the truth like we don't practice it we don't know how to do it properly which is why we lie like kids start lying at such a young age right so we we we get very bad if think about it this way if I have a hard truth that I need to say and I dodge that by lying I'm never going to get good at telling hard truths and then what happens is hard truths become harmful because I'm not good at them right and so what I found as a psychiatrist is that telling the truth like it's hard but you get good at it and and then like it works out pretty well how do people accept that they're going to die in those circumstances or that they have a high chance of not making it like to me if I'm told something like that I don't know how I would be able to cope with that yeah so you wouldn't so how do people accept it the answer is with help okay right so the whole point is that you're going to have people there who will help you accept it so I for whatever reason I don't know why I've had a lot of like terminal situations just in my practice this isn't NE my patients it's often times patients who are who have spouses or family members or even kids or parents who have cancer or whatever right so I deal with death a lot and I think that maybe the patients come to me because I have some perspective on it but I think this is where what we know is like you know in order to understand how to deal with death we have to understand a little bit about what life is what death is you know and it starts with something simple as like so Graham let's ask you so if you had a terminal diagnosis tomorrow what what how do you think you'd respond terrible in what way I would feel like I'm didn't live to my full potential and there's still so much that I feel like I have to live for okay so then we would talk about that sure right and and like and so do you think that regret can be overcome yeah okay right so the the theoretical thing is there do you think that in this life you will accomplish everything that you want to accomplish no of course not so the the the basic measuring stick is the same you can overcome regret and you're not going to accomplish everything anyway right so so it's it's doable it's hard there's help um there's for example like the Tibetan book of living and and dying so we can also like so I draw heavily on spiritual perspectives which are really good yeah so we'll talk a little bit about that and then science if that's okay so the first is that we have there are some fundamental fears and one of the fundamental fears that we have I forget the pronunciation of this AB abesa or something like a I'm not pronouncing it right this is the fear of death and there's a group of people there's this book called The Tibetan book of living and dying where they sort of say that if you look at your life basically all of your fears and regrets stem from the fear of death so if we look at something as simple as a desire why do I want this thing now because my time is limited right so if I don't get this thing now I may not get it later and then it may be too late so any problem in your life where you think it's not enough why isn't it enough because it I won't be able to get it later does that make sense it I won't have enough time M I need to do it now oh should I marry this person or not marry this person I don't want to waste the best years of my life you only have to worry about wasting the best years of your life if your life is limited if you have an infinite amount of time you can waste as much time as you want this by the way is why people procrastinate the moment that you have an infinite amount of time I can do it tomorrow I can do it tomorrow I can do it tomorrow people procrastinate so there's a certain Liberation from Infinity and if we look at human beings what is it that takes Infinity away from us it is death so once you understand and Conquer your fear of death all of your other fears or problems will melt away this is sort of the theory behind the Tibetan book of living and dying I think it works pretty well so then they have a whole process of kind of overcoming that um so I think that works from kind of a spiritual perspective from a practical or scientific perspective what we know is that having a internal Compass to make sense of life is protective against death so for some people this is God for some people this is the theory of reincarnation and even you can be an atheist it doesn't matter you just need to have some understanding of life that includes death in some way and I've worked with people who are biological reductionists or atheists who are very comfortable with death and they say this is just what I get right so I'm going to accomplish as much as I can I am Stardust I'm a speck in the universe and the grand scheme of billion years I'm completely insignificant so what what does it matter the whole point is you can believe in God you can believe in reincarnation you can believe in biological reductionism but you as a human being should be centered in that belief and that you can absolutely get people to and it starts with something as simple as what I told you which is that are you going to get to do everything that you want in life no and is there some way to deal with regret yes so since they're theoretically possible now it just becomes a matter of degrees right does that make sense it does and so it's doable what role do you think religion plays in that and how important do you think it is to be spiritual or be religious so great question so I think that religion is a easy way for people to get a compass in life so remember that the scientifically important thing is that you have some kind of comprehensive and internally consistent system does that make sense these are the two requirements that you need so it has to account for everything that happens and it needs to be non-contradictory so that's really all you need so generally speaking we used to use religion as a pretty packaged way of getting and receiving that also if we look at different cognitive temperaments some people are more devotional by Nature they're more faith oriented they're less questioning less logical doesn't mean that they're like illogical it just means that in the value system of what's important to them they're comfortable with not knowing they're comfortable with faith so religion is good in that way but I don't think you need to be religious and in fact we've seen that with like atheism and things like that it's just it's just an easily packaged set of beliefs um we know that religion is protective in a lot of ways right because it does give us this this Compass it gives us resilience religion is also associated with a lot of positive mental health benefits that may not be due to the beliefs themselves but congregations Community a place to go someone you can confide in being able to talk to God the other scientific advantage of religion is that it's usually speaking the way that we offer meditative practice so for the majority of human history meditative and concentration practices were accomplished through religion so you'll have like you know the hiic Jews who will like rock back and forth which has a whole physiology associated with it so I think if you look at religion there's a lot of very concrete benefits to it I think in the world that we live in today you don't necessarily need religion um I think spirituality even know how you define that so I tend to Define spirituality as that the pursuit of that which is nonmaterial and also non-mental so if we look at like layers of existence I believe that there is a material layer to existence there is a psychological layer to existence and then there is or energetic layer to existence is a better way to put it and that there is a Consciousness layer to existence so the exploration of that third dimension is the practice of spirituality that I think is very helpful um but once again you don't necessarily need it you can have religion you can have spirituality you can have neither how does seeing so many people in crisis or so much tragedy throughout your life because if you look at the concentration of Just Your World experience versus Graham or my world experience you have a very strong concentration of so much like negative stuff just due to your profession how has that affected your own personal life and how do you keep an abstraction so you don't let that in yeah so first of all I I don't try to keep it out so so I I I know it's kind of paradoxical but I think it's had an overwhelmingly positive effect on me and I think it'll have an overwhelmingly positive effect on most people assuming they're able to maintain some degree of Tranquility so I remember when I was in med school I was I asked my mom cuz I I had this case of a a pediatric patient pediatric oncology and so I asked my mom who's a pediatrician like H how are you able to do this like because it was so emotionally raw and like so sad and it's like kids right it's like dying kids and she was like well what I like about Pediatrics is like they get better so she was telling me that she had a patient who had basically been run over by like a tractor okay so like not a car like a tractor so some part of their body leg or something like that and she was like yeah he's going to be okay cuz like kids heal like they they're still you know their brains are still plastic their brains are still growing there's like all kinds of like kids will heal and so I know it sounds weird but we think that a lot of this negativity like how do you deal with the negativity so I actually find that it's some of the best like success stories so I've had patients that have been sexually abused since childhood you know who will come in suicidal cutting I met them on the inpatient unit when they were kind of at their worst and I'm thinking about one patient in particular who would say like I'm kind of [ __ ] up and so then as the weeks went by I would start asking her like basically every time she came in like how are you today and she we'd kind of develop this Rapport where she'd say I'm [ __ ] up or I'm less [ __ ] up and then over time like she's actually does great and like ends up you know forming healthy relationships and has kids and and people get better and so I I know that there's this idea that okay you're working with all these people who are sick like how do you not get worn down but I I want youall to just think for a second about the worst person that you've seen that you've like gotten to know and you take these cases which are like probably worse than what a lot of people will see in their in their regular life and you see that person get better how does that change your perspective on life and so if anything I found that the the more you know I work with incels who end up getting laid and getting married and then it gives you so much hope that all these people are coming in but you've seen human beings recover and then this is the other thing that I I think sometimes we don't pay attention to so we don't pay attention to the mechanics of what really really weighs us down and like even if something as bad as happening the thing going well is not necessarily what fixes people or gives people hope it's actually sharing a negative experience so you have these situations of people going through things like genocide or you know death in the family like let's use something way simpler the death in the family is never going to get better y'all get that like no one's coming back to life unless you're Jesus and yet families survive families actually get closer together people like become more tightly bonded they start to appreciate life even more even though this negative outcome is never getting better so I think sometimes what happens when people look at the negativity that a psychiatrist goes through is they look at this and they say this one thing seems so scary but the whole point is that that which you don't understand is going to seem scarier and so what I've actually found is that like the more I do this kind of work like the easier it is I mean the person that yall are seeing in front of you is I'm made from this work right it's seeing human beings strive and sometimes fail and sometimes succeed but man it gives you a ton of Hope because now I know that okay these problems are not unsolvable I'd probably say that out of the you know several hundred patients I've worked very closely with I'd say that three of them have been people that I've quote unquote failed with but even then if you say that that's maybe let's say 1% it's not that like that's my failure right it doesn't mean that those people are hopeless it just means that like I I mean my error rate's got to be somewhere above 1% so there's still even hope there the last thing that I would say is from a very practical perspective we are very poorly trained at dealing with other people's emotional energy we don't get trained in this at all um so there are some practical techniques that I tend to engage in that really keep me centered so it's kind of like you know if you're you have to be like a rock in the ocean and so the whole reason that crisis disre regulates everyone including me is if I feel untether so when you get swept up in someone else's crisis that's when it's going to affect you but the more that you can kind of stay grounded which there are very practical techniques that you can kind of engage in to sort of help with that and then it becomes it's completely different how much of human behavior would you say is genetic versus environment it seems like some people are genetically dispositioned to feel certain ways whether that be uh you know sadness happiness their baselines are a little bit higher in terms of where they are we had Chris Williamson on and he there's apparently a bunch of studies that have actually gotten like direct percentages for you know we can map out all of the physical traits like height eye color and stuff like that but for a lot of mental ones or like career ones as well yeah so I I mean I think I don't I don't I don't view it as a percentage so in medicine the way that we think about it is the genetics gives you your probability and then the environment gives you the actual result so let's like just take an example of like something called the bracka mutation so the bracka mutation has a very high risk of breast cancer so when people have a bad genetic braa makeup they'll even recommend prophylactic mastectomies so even before you have cancer the risk of cancer is so high that the safest thing to do is to remove usually both breasts so bilateral mastectomies so in that situation we have a very strong genetic effect in other situations we'll have I I basically think about genes and and and environment is permissive so even if we look at things like let's say anxiety we know that there's a predisposition um towards anxiety based on certain things so there's certain like for example ion Transporters that predispose you to depression or can be protective against depression so we've mapped out a lot of this stuff but I I think what we sort of know is that you know the gene plus environment it's not like what percentage is what if that kind of makes sense we need both of them so if you have a certain kind of Gene but you have a protective environment you may not manifest with that phenotype and if you have a high-risk uh or if you have a low-risk gene and you have a very bad environment you'll still manifest with that phenotype I think from a clinical perspective it's not useful to engage in that for me at least not yet so I because I can't do anything about either one right mhm um so we can shape environment from here on out but like I want to know what differences with mental health have you notice going from small scale like one-on-one client you versus going public and making a YouTube channel and taking in information from a bunch of people not only those who feel so compelled to go actually see a clinician but those who maybe have mild interest in mental health and they go and they watch one of your YouTube videos how has it shifted your perspective so I would start by saying almost like I don't see much of a difference but there is I mean I think that like the two experiences have been quite resonant so one thing I've learned a lot from from doing public work but I I don't think that so here's an example of what I've learned I think the so in in psychiatric diagnosis we have sort of a threshold of diagnosis right so if you meet let's say five out of nine criteria you get diagnosed with a mood disorder like major depressive disorder so if you have four out of nine you don't get the diagnosis so in Psychiatry we have a very artificial binary nature to mental illness so we say you have an anxiety disorder or you don't have an anxiety disorder it's very binary the one thing that I realized from doing public work is that there is a vast majority literally over 50% of people who have subclinical mental health Health illnesses and what does that mean subclinical that means that they've got like 50% of the illness so that means that there are a lot of people who are struggling in some way but they are not struggling to the point where that it where it impairs their function and they meet the threshold of diagnosis so what I've really found is that what I've really appreciated is that in the world today we're so focused on mental illness we're not focused on mental health and that mental health is more than the treatment of mental illness and if you want to understand why mental illness is getting worse the main mistake we're making with mental illness in my opinion is that we focused on diagnosis so we've waited we've taken this subset of the population that has five out of nine things going wrong and then we treat them we don't do anything for people who have one thing wrong two things wrong three things wrong or four things wrong so you can get 80% of the way to a mental health diagnosis and have no support or no intervention and when we have a society where 80% of the problems are not being addressed in the average human being this is the problem right so we don't have a mental health focused Society hell even Psychiatry is not about mental health it's about the alleviation or buffering against mental illness so if you look at the physical world we're doing a good job compared to the mental world look at how often we have gyms we have healthy food we have smoothie places we have all kinds of places where you can get healthy food you can exercise you can take care of your body how do you take care of your mind no one knows we hell we even have physical education one of your eight classes in school is like using your body and there isn't any class on using your mind so I've come to an appreciation of how widespread these problems are that we ignore in Psychiatry do you think that's just because physical bodies tend to respond the same way but our minds don't no like no our minds respond the same way too but don't you feel like everyone is so individualized like you could tell one person something they're not going to get it you could tell another person something they're not going to get it but if you reframe it in such a way that's personalized to them maybe then it clicks like I feel like everyone's minds are kind of wired differently well everyone's bodies are kind of wired differently right to to a certain degree but I think if you put people let's say like on the treadmill walking you know five miles a day a lot of them are going to have similar results or you give them the same weights based on their height they're going to have similar results I think the same is true of the mind I think I think the problem is that our understanding of the body far outweighs our understanding of the mind so if you look at it like we know that like so let's just take a biological reductionist view for a second so like how different is your brain from Jack's brain pretty much the same we all have an amydala we all have a nucleus succumbent we all have a frontal lobe we know that there are certain changes in the way that things are connected but that's true of the physical body as well we know some people have kidneys that don't work quite as well some people have livers that do this we know that some people will have they're they're literally the way that their blood vessels are wired or is actually like different there are variations in the way that you know does your right coronary artery feed this percentage of your heart or does it feed this percentage of your heart there's a lot of variation within people's bodies and you can know this because you can look at to people and know two people look exactly the same I would say the same is true of the Mind the fundamental pieces of the Mind are the same so this is where I would kind of say that like you know you say okay you have to phrase things this way you have to phrase things that way I would say that the physical analogy of that is sure if you force everyone to lift weights but like look at people's preferences for exercise if you want to practically get someone to exercise some people like swimming some people like lifting weights some people like J jogging some people like running like it depends right so I I I've actually found that I mean the whole reason that we can I can do my job is because I can meet a new person and I have some idea of how their mind works and that's true of all therapists we know that there are things like automatic thoughts we know of the impact of trauma we know what trauma effects in your brain all this kind of stuff got it one thing that we talked about last episode which was probably one of my favorite things was ayurvedic medic ayurve treatment and how you essentially what you do is you determine yourself as a certain kind of Constitution and then based off of that Constitution you can remedy any ailment based off of like some archetypal um medicine treatment for that exact Constitution how would you describe the pros and cons of ivetic medicine relative to Western medicine a great question so okay so con number one of ivetic medicine is that it may be wrong so like if we look at the biggest advantage of Western allopathic or what we would call scientific medicine is it is the most reliable system that Humanity has ever developed so if you look at medicine 99% of what we believe in W Western medicine has has historically been wrong but we are also the system of medicine that is the best at detecting our own errors this is I think the best thing about science so if you look at like science and we look at medicine you know for example we had this medication called and man the lamide was great for nausea was so good for nausea and we used it in patients with cancer and we're like this is a miracle drop nausea and so then some some doctor was like you know what you know who else gets nauseous a lot you know who gets nauseous a lot people that take the drug no that's what it cures pregnant ladies they're like oh like like morning sickness this is great let's start giving these pregnant ladies the lamide and it turns out that when you start giving pregnant ladies the lamide they give birth to babies without AR arms or legs right so we had this miracle drug and then Western medicine realized that this is bad so if you look at what's really good about Western medicine we're pretty confident that we're right so the first problem with ayurveda is that we don't know which parts of ayurva are like more correct and which parts are less correct so we know for example that ayurva has some treatments where they'll administer heavy metals and they believe that if you take something like Mercury or Arsenic and then you boil it in clarified cows butter for 6 hours that makes the Arsenic safe so they'll have a lot of these different beliefs and interventions that we just don't know what's actually working and what doesn't that's the biggest weakness with ayurva there isn't a whole lot of evidence base for the fundamental theories of ayurva because they're non-physical which is kind of weird but um so that that's really the biggest weakness we don't know really what works what doesn't we don't know how how correct or incorrect cor it is from an objective level because they that's just not how they operate which is a maybe a conversation for a different day the biggest Advantage which I think Western medicine is moving towards ayurva is that in Western medicine we separate a disease process from a person so we have treatments for depression right so we can say that this is populationbased medicine we can take a thousand people with depression we can give them ssris and we will see a let's say 40% Improvement in depressive symptoms this is a population based approach all science can tell us or Western medicine can tell us Western medicine cannot make predictions about an individual because because it is based on a population now the interesting thing about ayurva is ayurva says that a disease cannot exist outside of a person and so what they do in their system of medicine is treatment is very individualized now this is something that is so hard to understand because we think that Western medicine is individualized but this is sort of like if you've grown up eating uh you know know speaking English the concept if you've never heard of a different language you can't imagine what a different language would be like so I'll try to explain this we try to think that in Western medicine a disease obviously can be you know like exists within people duh right but that's not actually how we treat it so I'll give you all an example in Western medicine the gold standard of how we collect information is something called a randomized controlled trial or RCT have you all heard of this okay so randomized control trial is like the best level of evidence so in a randomized controlled trial do you know what controlled means mhm what does it mean that means it's the group that hasn't been affected by something yeah so what we try to do is not just that but we try to control for all of the variables so we try to do is control for age we control for race we control for ethnicity we control for socioeconomic status we remove some people from The Trial so for example like um you know if we're doing a trial on depression we'll remove people who are in heart failure does that make sense M because the heart failure will affect will mess up the trial so if you really look at what controlling does it removes individuality does that make sense because all the individual factors we removing because we're trying to isolate the disease process and we're trying to remove all individuality from the equation and so then what we end up with was is an objective populationbased answer which works on average but since we've removed all individuality from the equation we can't practice individual medicine because all we have is General conclusions ayurva is the exact opposite so ayurva says individuality is Paramount and that you cannot a depression in two different people will look different will manifest in different ways and I think this is what we practically find as clinicians is we have to become miniature amateur ayic Physicians because we know that actual patients don't respond to the medication the way that they're supposed to in Trials so the the good thing thing about ayurve is that it's very individualized which means that you can make better predictions faster because our system of diagnosis is not of a disease it's of a person so how is this person different and so we can make our interventions that are more tailored to an individual as opposed to treating a disease because if 10 people walk into a psychopharmacologist office they get diagnosed with depression the psy psychopharmacologist will give all time of them the same medicine whereas an ayurve physician will give different people different medication or interventions even for the same symptom of ulcers because they'll say that in ulcers in this person they have a hyperactive immune system in this person they have this problem in this person they have this problem and even though the symptom is the same the treatment will actually be different because they don't work on the level of symptom they work on the level of what's what is the root problem within the person so how can someone find out more about ayurve medicine how would you recommend like what resource and on top of I know that's kind of a weird question but I'm sure a lot of people they're interested going to be by this and they want to look further into it and then on top of that just broadly which classifications are there and how do you know which one you are okay so uh great questions but real problematic answers so the first problem so now we get to another problem with ayic medicine which is that Western medicine has a very good skill floor so we do not let people become doctors unless there is a minimum level of competence the problem in the ayur veic system is that there my sense is that there's a high degree of variability between ivetic practitioners so it there isn't like I think that like a lot of ivetic doctors are may not be very good it's hard for me to really judge but I think that one thing we're really good at in the west is standardization so if you like you know if you buy a car like the car is going to be pretty reliable like I have a bottle of water here like I'm pretty sure like I know what you know the solute concentration is going to be pretty reliable in the West we were all about standardizing not about individualizing so that's where I would I would give people caution to explore ayurva because even as a medical doctor and an expert in evidence-based complimenting alternative medicine whatever that means I am hesitant I'm careful about when I recommend ayurva to patients because there is so much variability I've seen some people who really don't know what they're talking about some people who know what they're talking about I myself see an ayic physician I send all my family's members to an AIC physician I had some really bad postco symptoms which like my Western doctor couldn't like really do much about and my ayurve doctor like had me back to normal in 30 days um and there's also some really interesting research that they have where ayur veic doctors claim that they can predict which based on your Constitution what kind of complications of covid you'll have so I don't know if you guys remember this but some people will get brain fog some people will get clots some people will get lung problems and they can predict and apparently intervene but I haven't seen good data to support that because the research infrastructure is also not very good so where can you go to learn about ayurva um I think that David froley has a book called ayurvedic healing which I think is really good because it it's someone who speaks English first of all and also understands ayurva pretty well but David fley I think has a fair amount of what I would call fiery bias so you got to take that with a grain of salt the short answer is for the majority of the audiences that I am familiar with I do not think that they're good resources that's the honest to God answer so with the level of complexity depth support logic that we are used to in the west when we consume information that doesn't exist in ayurva so ayurva has texts like jarak samita but there is a there's no there's no justification of anything there's in fact very little explanation these are all sutras which means they'll basically they'll give equations but they don't extrapolate at all so so for example like what would be you know a 500 page textbook like if you have like let's say a textbook on physics that has FAL ma a eal mc^2 FAL GMM over R2 you have all these equations and then we have all these chapters but the itic text will just have the equations they'll just list them and they won't explain a damn thing so they have a lot of like you know the essence of the knowledge but poor extrapolation so it's hard to learn because in the East we didn't learn from books we learned through a lineage a par like a guru disciple tradition so that's really where the knowledge is so if you want to learn you have to find a guru ayic healing I think is a good book that introduces the concepts let's do kayam we can try Kish theorem but it's going to be hard yeah okay so let's let's do Kish theorem maybe it'll work maybe it won't if people are listening to this at home I would not recommend doing Gish theorem at the end of like listening to something for 3 hours because it's quite intense so so let's start with a a quick background so remember that Dr K's whole argument is that the external World gives us happiness and unhappiness which is what we think most of the time right so this is why I chase a particular I want to date this particular person I want to drive this car I want to get this amount of money Financial Security whatever so Dr K's approach is that that's not quite as much as we think so more of it is internal what question of it is internal is a question that you all have to answer so we are going to go through a practice which will do a couple of things the first is is it will train us for a tolerance of discomfort which once we are able to tolerate discomfort then we no longer need to give into discomfort and then we have control over our lives because if I say like okay like eat a kale salad and you say I don't like kale but if whether you liked or what you liked or didn't like didn't matter to you like when my kid says let's play pretend I want you to the be the monster I want you to be the princess it makes no difference to me so I can do both it's very easy right so you gain freedom when you are don't have to give in to your likes and dislikes so part of that is practicing the tolerance of discomfort um the other good Advantage is when we do that we will strengthen our frontal lobes because we will have all these impulses we will have all these signals and we're going to restrain them but hopefully if we're lucky we'll learn something else okay which we're going to see if we can do so what I want yall to do is sit up straight neck straight back straight spine straight yall can do this at home okay I want you to close your eyes you can fold your hands in front of you in your lap okay and now what we're going to do is take a moment to work out whatever Kinks you have and now what we're going to do is be still soam means Stillness and Gaya means body body so what we're going to do is don't move at all okay so at the very beginning you may sort of notice that's a little bit difficult and what I want yall to do is start to tell me what it feels like to be still how hard is it it's pretty hard I feel like little micro movements okay so now we're at the stage of micro movement so I'm going to start walking yall through it okay so just notice that either are little movements that you're trying to restrain we've been doing this for about let's say 30 seconds we're going to continue doing it and then what you'll notice is that your body is sending you more signals it's becoming a little bit more unpleasant and then in your mind you may have a reaction as well which is I'm not going to fail the ego begins to arise I will succeed I'm not going to give into this I'm going to win I'm going to learn whatever I need to do I'm going to learn how to meditate so I can become successful and I can go monk mode and grind set all these things arise so now your mind begins to try to overcome your physical Sensations you see what it is doing is giving you reasons not to give up it's telling you all the benefits because if it didn't tell you that then you'd stop becoming more uncomfortable I say it's about the same okay so we'll wait until it starts to become more uncomfortable y'all let me know I'm worried I could do this for a while I'm not particularly comfortable right now all right okay right so you feel the discomfort right and what do you want to do Jack so no creasing your eyebrows no no there you go right so tell me your experience Jack um what I want to do right now mhm or what do you feel like um I mean I it's so hard not to um what do I feel like what do you feel in your body what are the signals that your body is sending you uh that it it just wants to like start kind of like running around expelling energy okay so now what I want you to both of yall to do is I want you to start to breathe in slowly feel the cold air as it enters your nostril and then as you exhale you feel the warmth and now breathe again and now notice that as you breathe in that moment of breath as it's going in and going out you have some relief from the bodily signals are youall getting that mhm right so now like what's starting to happen is in between breaths there's like more torture you're starting to feel like you know the aches pains nervous energy you're starting to feel uncomfortable but as you breathe in notice that that gets a little bit better so now sink into that breath this is going to be your boat in a storm so you're going to get rocked around but you have one area of stability lean into that breath nice deep breath feel that coolness come in see it it kind of flush into you and breathe out maintaining perfect Stillness of the body it's going to be difficult but you've got this one anchor this is going to keep you tied and so the signals around you are increasing the back is aching the arms feel strange you're getting sweaty you didn't notice that you were holding your body body in some way but now you're locked into it you feel uncomfortable and lean into the breath find Solace is the breath helping mhm and then now what's going to happen is things are going to get harder are things getting harder I would say I'm still in the the breath is just nice okay okay so now let's wait for things to get harder so as you say the breath is getting nice like just notice how much you're gravitating towards it if that kind of makes sense right that the worse things get in your body the more relief breath provides we've been doing this for longer so theoretically things should be worse right the longer that you hold it the worse that it gets but what is the breath doing for you is that keeping me kind of grounded right and so now what we're going to do is five minutes 10 minutes 15 minutes and so as your body gets worse the breath becomes more enjoyable becomes more of a refuge more of a Solace does that make sense so now we can I'll leave you all here we don't have to continue more but this is the purpose of the practice so you can go go ahead and come back and the crazy thing there so here's here's what I want y'all to really understand you breathe how did it feel to breathe pretty good it was really relaxing for me I had no difficulty whatsoever okay yeah so more for you than for you so this is where meditation is too to be individualized but see breath gives you like the only thing that was holding you was the Breath Right mhm and so we think about it we go our entire lives breathing but how much do we enjoy it not a one not at all we take it for granted and yet look at how how much joy relief like I don't know about y'all we didn't do it long enough because of you know but really you do Kish theum for 15 minutes and it becomes a torture and as you do kai for 15 minutes and it's torturous the breath becomes a salve it becomes cooling it becomes a refuge it becomes ecstatic and what are we actually doing here we're experiencing suffering and ecstasy at the same time in the same moment in what is giving us ecstasy is it a million dollars is it a Lambo is it big guns no it's all it is is our breath so the really powerful thing about Kash theorem which if you do this practice for 15 minutes 20 minutes 30 minutes without moving you will discover that there is ecstasy from breath alone you don't need anything and once you practice this every day for like a month where you're sitting still for 20 minutes and it's a torture it's a torture it's a torture torture and then even you can try holding your breath and holy [ __ ] you're going to put yourself in so much pain and then breathe and then you'll begin to realize that like How Deeply uncomfortable is this and how much pleasure comes from and what are we doing we are doing nothing you're not doing anything you're not succeeding you're not failing you're doing literally you're sitting there with your eyes closed and look at the struggle everything is internal the relief is internal the victory is internal the failure is internal if someone looks from the outside what are they going to see nothing what benefit is this going to give you nothing but you can fight an entire War within yourself you can find Victory you can find relief you can find Solace and once you realize this holy [ __ ] whatever the external world throws at you doesn't matter because you have it all in here you can create ecstasy anytime you want to right in here and all you need is your breath Gish theorem will teach you this so you asked a question earlier you you guys have been asking the whole time how do you get someone to understand what do you do I can't explain it you just have to do it right if you really do kayes theorem or some other meditative practice you will discover that literally your experience of life is internal I don't know if this makes sense but you look at the outside world and you think something brings you happiness or unhappiness but how what literally happens so if I look at a piece of paper that's a test and it has an A on it this is ink on a piece of paper how does this bring happiness it's ink on a piece of paper it brings happiness how because this I see so I have a sight of something does this visual stimulus is this pleasurable to the eyes do I look at this and say wow look at this piece of paper with an A on it what a work of art look at how wonderful it is no where does the happiness come from so it's not the eyes it's not the paper then where can it come from inside m it is the association that I have with this what this means to me it is the meaning that I attach to a piece of paper which is what brings the happiness so I had a patient who was upset that she didn't have a thigh gap do you guys know what a thigh gap is right and so like this is something that is in her mind I'm not saying that people won't treat her differently the world will treat you whatever way that it wants to but make no mistake that the world can treat you a particular way it doesn't have to be you know like I'm walking down the street and a homeless person tells me I'm a dumbass this is an insult do I get bent out of shape do some people get bent out of shape absolutely do other people be like wow this person's crazy the stimulus is the same it is the way that you respond to it that dictates whether you get into an argument with a homeless person or you just continue walking by so all of this is what's crazy is I'm going to go ahead and say 99% because I can't say 100% but all of these things you guys talk about money what is money it's a number in a bank account do you control inflation maybe it'll be worth half as much what if the market goes down what if the market crashes what if there's a nuclear war there's all kinds of things that we get caught up in all this stuff but if you really look at yourself all of your unhappiness doesn't happen from the outside something from the outside enters the inside it crosses a barrier and when it get when it crosses a barrier you attach things to it and it is what you attach to the outside world that is where your suffering or Joy comes from right if I get a phone call from a friend of mine says hey [ __ ] what's up the signal is the same it is what does the hay [ __ ] mean to me so this is what's crazy and then if you really think about it we think that the but the world is this way but hold on a second when the world conditions you what is it actually doing it is shaping your internal reaction that's what conditioning is but it's not the world the world shapes your internal reaction your internal reaction results in happiness or sadness so all you need to do is recondition yourself recondition yourself in no amount of suffering in the world will affect you right so you asked me a question earlier how do I do it with all these suicidal people all the time it's because when this person does well I condition myself I say look at this isn't this amazing that this person was so screwed in life and look at what they can accomplish look at the Testament of the human spirit and if someone else comes along now everything comes full circle because we talk about cognitive reframing it is the way that you choose to see the world which ultimately determines your experience of life when we talk about the internet what is the basic problem with the internet the internet removes our ability to see the world the way that it is it biases us that's what it's doing we're all getting shaped conditioned by the internet this is why people are upset about thigh gaps people have had no thigh gap for the history of humanity and human beings have been okay with it but and then people will say but this is the world that I live in and people will judge me but how much do you care about other people's judgment that can be shaped right so all of this starts very simply with gayes theorum GES theorum will change the way that you experience something fundamental as breath that which you take for granted which brings you no joy no pleasure nothing it is a completely neutral stimulus you can find joy in that and if you can find joy in the completely neutral and even then in kayes theorem you will long for the practice because you'll love that Joy you'll tolerate the discomfort and you will love the practice and you will choose to sit down for 20 minutes and torture your body for 20 minutes as it cries out to you that I want to move I want to move I want to move holy [ __ ] if you can do that then nothing will stop you because anything that the world says your mind will will tell you this will hurt it will not stop you because hurt is nothing to you it is the way that you deal with it amazing that was awesome thank you that perfect way to end an episode this has been one of the the best I think the best podcast first of all it's the longest podcast we've ever done but this is one of the few where it's just time seems stopped beginning to end okay thank you so much thank you that was incredible anything you want to talk about I know the book and you're writing another one right now I mean so we have a guide to trauma coming out so I think that a lot of people who want to understand a um see here's one thing to understand so when we look at Psychiatry we think it's in the mind but the one thing that I've learned about trauma is that so much of it is physiological so I think part of the reason that mental health is getting worse is because we try to treat mental health only in the mind but the Mind exists within a body there's a whole nervous system that contributes to the function of your your mind so we made a guide on trauma because I have seen some amazing results when people start focusing on the whole dimension of a human being which is kind of what we dig into like how to rewire your physiology how to change your thinking a lot of this conditional thinking that we kind of talk about we'll sort of talk we explain how to sort of shape all that stuff so there's a lot of stuff in there because if you really look at trauma what trauma is is it is the way that you adapt to your circumstances so you change a human being when you survive trauma and those adaptations become maladaptations so the the trauma guide is really our best attempt at teaching people how human beings get wired and once you understand how the wiring happens it will help you rewire perfect so we'll link to all of your information Down Below in the description whatever you want there it'll be there thank you so much if you've actually made it to the very end of the episode if you're actually watching this right now please comment let us know how many people made it to the very end of this we really appreciate it if you're not already subscribed also just make sure to subscribe because it's totally free we're closing in on a million subscribers so if you want to be a part of that it's it's free just click the button thank you so much shout out Caleb hammer for letting us use this studio shout out Noah for being behind the the monitor right now working for free thank you guys till next time