Speaker 1: Fifty percent of people under the age of thirties still
Speaker 1: live with their parents. Seventy percent of people in their
Speaker 1: twenties are going through something called a quarter life crisis.
Speaker 1: He's a Harvard trained psychiatrist.
Speaker 2: Which specializes in modern mental health.
Speaker 1: Meet doctor k It's the man behind Healthy Gamer and
Speaker 1: the voice helping millions navigate the digital world.
Speaker 3: What does someone do with the feeling of feeling being
Speaker 3: left behind people.
Speaker 1: Who feel like they're not enough. That feeling comes from
Speaker 1: trying to make other people happy and failing.
Speaker 3: Humans need to grow, We need to pursue something, We
Speaker 3: need to move in a certain direction to stay a
Speaker 3: lot of true or fulks.
Speaker 1: Chasing growth is not the same as growing. A lot
Speaker 1: of people get focused on doing, but they don't pay
Speaker 1: attention to what's happening.
Speaker 3: What does it even mean to be a man right now?
Speaker 1: A lot of masculinity right now is men trying to
Speaker 1: become as manly as possible in the alpha sense, and
Speaker 1: that doesn't translate over in happiness, and that doesn't work.
Speaker 3: When you look at people who are growing up right now,
Speaker 3: people in their twenties and thirties, why is it that
Speaker 3: they're confused, lonely hurt when externally everything seems to look okay.
Speaker 3: The number one health and wellness.
Speaker 2: Podcast Jay Sheeddy Jay Sheddy Sey Only Set.
Speaker 3: Hey, everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the place you
Speaker 3: come to become the happier, healthier and more healed. I'm
Speaker 3: so grateful because today's guest is someone that I've been
Speaker 3: really really looking forward to talking to. I've watched a
Speaker 3: ton of his interviews, what's a ton of his videos.
Speaker 3: He's got millions and millions of subscribers, millions and millions
Speaker 3: of views online. He's the author of How to Raise
Speaker 3: a Healthy Gamer. If you haven't got a copy of
Speaker 3: the book, make sure you grab one. After today's conversation,
Speaker 3: I'm talking about the one the Only doctor K, Doctor K.
Speaker 3: It is great to have you on on Purpose. I've
Speaker 3: genuinely looked forward to this. I find your reflections to
Speaker 3: be poignant, powerful, direct, there's no bs, and you're so
Speaker 3: well informed and well studied and set that it's pretty
Speaker 3: hard to debate and argue with you in a good way.
Speaker 3: So thank you so much well the work you've done.
Speaker 1: I mean, thank you so much for having me. I
Speaker 1: think you know I similarly really appreciate the work that
Speaker 1: you do. You know, I'm so curious about you, actually
Speaker 1: because I see a lot of the work that you do,
Speaker 1: and I know about you know, your I think it
Speaker 1: was your first book, and so I think we may
Speaker 1: have a little bit of a shared history, which I'm
Speaker 1: super curious about. But I really appreciate the opportunity to
Speaker 1: be here and would love to support the mission of
Speaker 1: your podcast.
Speaker 3: Oh, thank you so much, and we should definitely dive
Speaker 3: into that. I'd love to learn. Tell me, tell me,
Speaker 3: tell me about some of the shed history that you know.
Speaker 1: So I understand that you grew up. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you grew up or you have some sort of
Speaker 1: spiritual training or you grew up with spiritual training. I'm
Speaker 1: really curious about how you made the decision to walk
Speaker 1: away from that and sort of where what kind of
Speaker 1: spiritual tradition you come from. Yeah, I see the way
Speaker 1: that you embody some of these concepts and and it's
Speaker 1: sort of it's baked into the assumptions that you have
Speaker 1: when you approach the world. Even just meeting you and
Speaker 1: some of the stuff that we just did. You know,
Speaker 1: I think you live some of this stuff. But I'm
Speaker 1: super curious about you know how you got to be
Speaker 1: where you are.
Speaker 3: Well, we'll get into it. Yeah, yeah, we'll get into it. Yeah.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I think the place I wanted to start
Speaker 3: with you is I find it so fascinating that you
Speaker 3: focus so much on young people and young men in general.
Speaker 3: And I feel that when you look at people who
Speaker 3: are growing up right now, when you look at people
Speaker 3: in their twenties and thirties, why is it that they're
Speaker 3: secretly confused, lonely hr when externally everything seems to look okay.
Speaker 1: So a lot of the people that I work with,
Speaker 1: I think, externally things don't look okay. I think that
Speaker 1: was more true a few years ago. I think now
Speaker 1: we're starting to become more and more aware that things
Speaker 1: are even externally not okay. But I'm totally with you.
Speaker 1: I think you know. I was just reading a paper
Speaker 1: about this guy named Eric Erickson, who sort of talks
Speaker 1: about the state that we go through in life. He
Speaker 1: was a psychologist or psychiatrist, and so he said that
Speaker 1: a lot of people are going through something called a
Speaker 1: noiseless crisis.
Speaker 3: Soortant to me.
Speaker 1: A lot of people that you look at are going
Speaker 1: through a crisis that you will never see. So we're
Speaker 1: sort of familiar with this idea of a mid life crisis.
Speaker 1: This is when men like me and you, you know,
Speaker 1: we maybe hit our forties, maybe hit our fifties, we're
Speaker 1: maybe paying a mortgage, we don't get to do what
Speaker 1: we want, will maybe dye our hair, buy a convertible
Speaker 1: and start driving really fast. But what I think is
Speaker 1: happening way more. And there was an interesting study on
Speaker 1: LinkedIn that found that seventy percent of people in their
Speaker 1: twenties or going through something called a quarter life crisis.
Speaker 1: So this is a time when you're sort of like,
Speaker 1: you sort of took all the right steps, you did
Speaker 1: what you should do, but you wake up one day
Speaker 1: and you realize this is not the life that I want.
Speaker 1: So I think we're seeing a ton of that, and
Speaker 1: I think that one of the main reasons for that
Speaker 1: is that the answers that the generation before before gave
Speaker 1: us used to work. So like when I was growing up,
Speaker 1: you know, my parents were like super like, oh, look,
Speaker 1: you have to be a doctor. And then this sort
Speaker 1: of idea of going to college, getting educated, you'll get
Speaker 1: a good job, and then you'll be able to buy
Speaker 1: a house and happily. Ever after kind of stuff. But
Speaker 1: I think that formula doesn't work anymore. I think our
Speaker 1: institutions have started to fail us. Not in a negative way,
Speaker 1: but I think if you look at the way that
Speaker 1: psychiatry develops, you know, we'll do research for twenty or
Speaker 1: thirty years before we figure something out. And there's still
Speaker 1: studies being published on Facebook today. And I don't mean Meta,
Speaker 1: I mean Facebook. So this was a trial that started
Speaker 1: like eight years ago that they're like publishing the results now.
Speaker 1: So the rate of change in the world is rapidly
Speaker 1: increasing and we don't really know how to deal with it,
Speaker 1: and young people are getting absolutely crushed.
Speaker 3: And it's that affecting are you saying it's affecting our identity?
Speaker 3: Like you said before, there was almost a path that
Speaker 3: was laid out yep, And so you had these milestones effectively,
Speaker 3: I go to college, I graduate, or get married at
Speaker 3: a certain age, or buy a house at a certain age,
Speaker 3: or retire a cern age. There were these milestones that
Speaker 3: were laid out for you. And now, whether you go
Speaker 3: to college or not, there's basically no milestones because the
Speaker 3: goals have changed, the targets have changed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I don't even know if I think the
Speaker 1: targets have changed, but I think the bigger problem is
Speaker 1: the targets aren't meetable anymore. So, just as a simple example,
Speaker 1: when I went to college, it costs about five thousand
Speaker 1: dollars a semester. Yeah, six thousand dollars, I think. So,
Speaker 1: you know, college costs me. It took me five and
Speaker 1: a half years to graduate, so it cost me somewhere
Speaker 1: around thirty thousand dollars to get an undergraduate degree. I
Speaker 1: mean that's the cost of one year now, right, So
Speaker 1: costs are increasing a lot if you look at this
Speaker 1: idea of like, you know, getting married by a certain age.
Speaker 1: And I have so many patients who really struggle with
Speaker 1: this because they feel like they're late. They're like fifty
Speaker 1: percent of people under the age of thirty still live
Speaker 1: with their parents. So if you sort of think about
Speaker 1: how does that cast say that again, fifty percent of
Speaker 1: people under the age of thirty who are adults still
Speaker 1: live with their parents.
Speaker 3: Wow, I didn't know that, right. So people in the US,
Speaker 3: like India.
Speaker 1: And it's an economic thing because it used to be
Speaker 1: that you can like, I mean think about you know,
Speaker 1: we're here in New York, like rents are crazy, like
Speaker 1: you can pay like three thousand dollars for like a closet,
Speaker 1: you know. So now it's just not people are finishing college.
Speaker 1: They have a ton of debt, there's inflation, people are
Speaker 1: not able to get jobs. And then if you think
Speaker 1: about the cascading effect, if I want to date, right
Speaker 1: and I'm like a twenty seven year old dude, and
Speaker 1: then like if the date goes well, it's like do
Speaker 1: you want to come back to my place? And then
Speaker 1: we go back to my place that like my BA
Speaker 1: is there, you know, and then it's kind of like
Speaker 1: you can't really, you know, do that. So we're seeing
Speaker 1: sort of this epidemic of loneliness. We're seeing this like
Speaker 1: dating and mating crisis amongst like men and women, and
Speaker 1: a lot of young men are struggling a lot of
Speaker 1: young women are struggling to and so like, I think
Speaker 1: the world that we lived in is changed, and we
Speaker 1: need new answers, we need new paths to navigate this world.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I love what you said about how the targets
Speaker 3: are just unmetable. Yeah, because that's why people feel behind,
Speaker 3: It's why they feel late, it's why they feel they'll
Speaker 3: never get there. I now we're all using chat GPT.
Speaker 3: But a couple of years ago, when I was writing
Speaker 3: my second book, I started it off by talking about
Speaker 3: how if you type in on Google, the first thing
Speaker 3: when you type in will I ever which is obviously
Speaker 3: a question about your future and possibility, The first thing
Speaker 3: that comes up is will I ever find love?
Speaker 1: Wow?
Speaker 3: And the second thing that comes up is will I
Speaker 3: ever be enough? Wow? Those are the top two questions wow.
Speaker 3: And when you look at that and you think wow,
Speaker 3: like love and self worth like they are right up
Speaker 3: there as the top two most Google things at that time.
Speaker 3: Now on chat GPT, I'm sure we'll get so much
Speaker 3: more data. But I love what you said about unmet needs.
Speaker 3: What does someone do with the feeling of feeling late,
Speaker 3: of feeling behind, or feeling being left behind?
Speaker 1: So this is why I was excited to come here
Speaker 1: today because you didn't ask me why, you asked what
Speaker 1: does someone do?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: And I think that's what sort of exemplifies what I
Speaker 1: appreciate about you, is that you're always focused on what
Speaker 1: to do, not necessarily why things happen. So I think
Speaker 1: you know, if you have that feeling, there are a
Speaker 1: couple of important things to do The first is that
Speaker 1: that feeling has to do with your sense of identity.
Speaker 1: So where do you get these expectations? Who do you
Speaker 1: think you are? And I don't mean that sounds so bad,
Speaker 1: but like, really, who do you think you are? How
Speaker 1: do you understand who you are? And this is what
Speaker 1: we see in people who have a quarter life crisis
Speaker 1: is that they are too busy with identification that they
Speaker 1: don't understand identity. Now, I know that's kind of confusing,
Speaker 1: but if we think about identification, what does that mean?
Speaker 1: That means that I'm going to look outside of me
Speaker 1: and I'm going to find a group of people and
Speaker 1: I'm going to say my identity is, like I'm one
Speaker 1: of these people out right, Like I'm a goth kid,
Speaker 1: or I'm super into football, or I'm a gamer right,
Speaker 1: or I'm an inceel like there are all kinds of
Speaker 1: ways that we can identify. We can identify with a
Speaker 1: political party, but identification and identity are two different things.
Speaker 1: And I think that when people feel like they are behind,
Speaker 1: they have this expectation. They're looking outside and they're saying
Speaker 1: this is what I should be, But their information about
Speaker 1: who they are comes from what they see outside of them,
Speaker 1: And the most important thing that you can do, I
Speaker 1: know it sounds kind of generic, is to look within
Speaker 1: and I mean really think about, you know, how do
Speaker 1: I feel about myself? What do I want in life?
Speaker 1: I oftentimes find that people who feel like they're not
Speaker 1: enough that feeling comes from trying to make other people
Speaker 1: happy and failing. Right, So, if my parents want me
Speaker 1: to be a doctor and I don't go to medical school,
Speaker 1: which is what happened in my case, you know, then
Speaker 1: you've let them down. And we get so much our
Speaker 1: our core sense of identity, the way we're socialized usually
Speaker 1: comes from people outside of us. So there's a lot
Speaker 1: of research on things like attachment theory, where a child
Speaker 1: knows what they feel based on reflection from people around them.
Speaker 1: And my favorite example of this is, like, you know,
Speaker 1: when I remember when I had a two year old
Speaker 1: daughter and she was like running around and then she
Speaker 1: would fall, and then in a moment, what she would
Speaker 1: do is look around, and if everyone else is like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, are you okay, she'd start crying. But
Speaker 1: if everyone is laughing, she'd get up and start laughing too.
Speaker 1: So we learn so much about ourselves from the people
Speaker 1: around us. I think the problem is that the expectations
Speaker 1: that everyone places on us are no longer meetable in
Speaker 1: the same way. So what you really need to do
Speaker 1: is ask yourself, you know, who am I living for?
Speaker 1: What do I want? What are the expectations that I've
Speaker 1: internalized that form my value? And then I also tend
Speaker 1: to use a lot of meditation practices, So I really
Speaker 1: like for people who have identity problems, people have narcissism
Speaker 1: or low self esteem, I'll do a certain kind of
Speaker 1: meditation practice called shunya, which is Shunya means void or nothingness,
Speaker 1: and so they sort of you cultivate this experience of
Speaker 1: like complete emptiness. And when you cultivate that experience of emptiness,
Speaker 1: there's a part of your brain called the default mode network,
Speaker 1: and this is the part of your brain that thinks
Speaker 1: about you. So like, you know, your brain thinks about
Speaker 1: all kinds of things. I'm paying attention to you, but
Speaker 1: they're sometimes when we reflect on ourselves, what do I
Speaker 1: think of myself? The really interesting thing is that the
Speaker 1: default mode network, this self reflective capability, is hyperactive when
Speaker 1: you're very depressed. So when people are super depressed, what
Speaker 1: are they thinking about? A lot of people think that
Speaker 1: they're thinking about how the world is falling apart. They're
Speaker 1: really thinking about themselves. I'm a loser, I'm pathetic. I've
Speaker 1: had patience who will come in and say, you know,
Speaker 1: my family would be better off without me, Like I'm
Speaker 1: hurting my kids by existing, so I'm going to kill myself.
Speaker 1: Like you know, they think so negatively and you can't
Speaker 1: get them to stop. And so the interesting thing is
Speaker 1: is we treat depression. The default mode network deactivates as
Speaker 1: you do meditations, and I think Shunya is a specific
Speaker 1: meditation that I suspect activates this pretty quickly. You stop
Speaker 1: thinking about yourself, and when you stop sort of hyper focusing,
Speaker 1: then this is I know it's kind of paradoxical, but
Speaker 1: when we think about ourselves, what we're really doing is
Speaker 1: we're internalizing expectations. Then you start getting data from within
Speaker 1: that's not the same as thinking about yourself. It is
Speaker 1: actually paying attention to yourself. And then you start to
Speaker 1: get these internal signals and you get some amount of quietness,
Speaker 1: some amount of stillness, some amount of groundedness, and then
Speaker 1: people start to move in the right direction. You start
Speaker 1: to feel better.
Speaker 3: Talk to me about that difference between paying attention to
Speaker 3: yourself and thinking about yourself. What are the different thoughts
Speaker 3: and emotions and feelings that are connected to each?
Speaker 1: Oh beautiful. So thoughts, emotions, and feelings are all thinking
Speaker 1: about yourself. When I think about myself, I'm literally having thoughts.
Speaker 1: All oak is good, all oak is bad, all oak
Speaker 1: is beautiful, all oak is ugly. That's all thinking about yourself.
Speaker 1: Getting information from within is not thinking about right. So
Speaker 1: if I think about something, I am over here and
Speaker 1: the thing is over there. So the object of what
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about happens to be me, but the thinking
Speaker 1: is happening over here. I am using my mind to
Speaker 1: think about myself. So it's kind of like if you
Speaker 1: look at your reflection in a mirror, you don't see yourself.
Speaker 1: You are seeing a reflection of yourself. What you're really
Speaker 1: seeing is a mirror. Right. So what I think people
Speaker 1: and people get stuck in this right because they're thinking
Speaker 1: about themselves a lot. Instead, what they need to do
Speaker 1: is pay attention to themselves. Now, paying attention means observing,
Speaker 1: not thinking. Just watch and something really interesting happens. So
Speaker 1: I work with some patients who have schizophrenia and they
Speaker 1: become psychotic, and it's really interesting. So when I was
Speaker 1: back at Harvard, I was trying to to develop meditation
Speaker 1: protocols for particular mental illnesses. So if you suffer from depression,
Speaker 1: you know what kind of meditation do you do? And
Speaker 1: anxiety and stuff? And I turned that all into a guide.
Speaker 1: But when I have patients with psychosis, what I would
Speaker 1: try to so these are people who are having hallucinations
Speaker 1: and delusions, and what I would really focus on with
Speaker 1: them is they would get so caught up in it, right,
Speaker 1: And in psychiatry we try to make the hallucinations go away.
Speaker 1: That's a good treatment, you know, that can be very
Speaker 1: good treatment. But the other thing that I would add
Speaker 1: to medications and things like that is let's learn how
Speaker 1: to just watch it without getting pulled into it if
Speaker 1: they're there, like, so what right? Can you just continue
Speaker 1: to focus on this? Can you shift your attention away
Speaker 1: from it? So simply observing gives us distance. So there
Speaker 1: are other patients that I have that will get so
Speaker 1: caught up in something. And maybe you know your listeners
Speaker 1: have situations where like someone gets dumped and then your
Speaker 1: friend comes to you, they're like, oh my god, like
Speaker 1: my life is over. My life is ever take a
Speaker 1: step back, like, get some perspective. So as we observe things,
Speaker 1: the bite comes out of it. We start to gain
Speaker 1: a little bit of distance from it, and so you
Speaker 1: can just witness Okay, I'm feeling anxious today, right, So
Speaker 1: this is very different if I say my life is
Speaker 1: falling apart versus saying there's a part of me that
Speaker 1: feels like my life is falling apart. That doesn't make
Speaker 1: it true. Thoughts aren't facts, so that observation is a
Speaker 1: little bit different. It's actually a skill uses a different
Speaker 1: part of the brain, and as people start doing that,
Speaker 1: they get some distance, they get some perspective. And the
Speaker 1: really interesting thing is when that part of the brain activates,
Speaker 1: it's like your anterior singular cortex, the part of your
Speaker 1: brain that experiences emotion like you're amygdala. This is like
Speaker 1: your threat center, your survival center that actually starts to
Speaker 1: calm down. So people will literally as you turn this
Speaker 1: part of the brain on, this other part of the
Speaker 1: brain will naturally turn off.
Speaker 3: Well yeah, it's almost like thinking has an element of you,
Speaker 3: attaching your story and prediction and projection unto yourself and
Speaker 3: observing is just watching the story. It's almost like there's
Speaker 3: not even a story. Actually, you're just watching it, just seeing.
Speaker 1: It's a beautiful way to put it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Right, So you're right that your mind attaches a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff, right, And this is why I'm curious about
Speaker 1: your background. But you know, in Sanskrit than in the
Speaker 1: Eastern spiritual traditions, we have this concept of detachment or
Speaker 1: vit agya. And what we sort of notice is if
Speaker 1: you really think about what the source of your suffering is,
Speaker 1: it's there can be pain, but usually what really messes
Speaker 1: people up are the implications of what happens.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Oh, if like if this person says they're if this
Speaker 1: person doesn't return my text within the hour, what does
Speaker 1: that mean? That means they don't like me. That means
Speaker 1: they think they're better than me, That means they're more
Speaker 1: important people. We attach all kinds of things, and it
Speaker 1: happens really rapidly, it happens subconsciously. That's really where our
Speaker 1: suffering comes from.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well said, Yeah. The Buddha called it the second arrow.
Speaker 3: Like the first arrow, it hurts it's things, and then
Speaker 3: the second arrow is the meaning the story, the implication
Speaker 3: that you have not even checked, you've not fact checked,
Speaker 3: you've not observed, and there it is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I'm glad you brought up that example because
Speaker 1: I was reading that text recently. I didn't realize, I think.
Speaker 1: So we talk about the second arrow a lot in psychiatry,
Speaker 1: which is this concept that you life sends you the
Speaker 1: first arrow. You can't control whether you get dumped or not,
Speaker 1: but it is the implication that you attach. Right, So
Speaker 1: if I get dumped, that's a fact that there's some
Speaker 1: amount of pain, some amount of grief. But then you
Speaker 1: start to tell yourself, I'm a loser, I'm not good enough,
Speaker 1: I'm not good enough, I'll always be alone. Those kinds
Speaker 1: of thoughts are what you add to the equation, the
Speaker 1: really fascinating thing about how to stop doing that. So
Speaker 1: this is why it was blown away. I recently read.
Speaker 1: I realized i'd never like, actually looked at the teachings
Speaker 1: of the Buddha. What I had done is everyone talks
Speaker 1: about the teachings of the Buddha, right, but it's like
Speaker 1: other people talking about the boos. So what I didn't
Speaker 1: realize is the bod that actually says the second arrow.
Speaker 1: So we in psychiatry we talk about this is how
Speaker 1: you avoid pain and negative emotions. The bod that says
Speaker 1: the problem with the second arrow is also your positive emotions.
Speaker 1: He says, you should stop attaching that to your positive
Speaker 1: emotions as well. So when something good happens to your life,
Speaker 1: we get excited about it, he says, don't do that.
Speaker 1: So if you get a promotion that means I'm going
Speaker 1: to do this, and that means I'm going to do this,
Speaker 1: and that means I'm going to do this, stop doing
Speaker 1: all that promotion is That's all it is. It has
Speaker 1: no implications. And the really fascinating thing is this is
Speaker 1: why it's so hard for people. Everyone wants the associations
Speaker 1: of the good stuff, but nobody wants to give up
Speaker 1: the associations of the bad stuff. That's not how the
Speaker 1: brain works. If you want to decouple those two things,
Speaker 1: take something in your life that is good and look
Speaker 1: at why you're excited about it, and then let go
Speaker 1: of that excitement. It happened, that's it. Observe it. It's
Speaker 1: in the past. It doesn't mean anything about your future.
Speaker 1: And if you yourself on both sides of those coins
Speaker 1: at that coin, then your mastery will increase. Way more quickly.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely, it's as you know as well. It's the
Speaker 3: definition of equanimity in the Gita of the idea that
Speaker 3: one's not disturbed by happiness or distress. And that's really
Speaker 3: interesting use of words. It's like, how could you ever
Speaker 3: be disturbed by happiness? But that's how you are because
Speaker 3: you created so much additional meaning, which now when it
Speaker 3: didn't happen, the promotion didn't even make you happy anymore.
Speaker 3: You believe the promotion was your right towards some bigger,
Speaker 3: greater thing, and now you can't even experience the joy
Speaker 3: of that moment.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, And that's what I see, you know, I have
Speaker 1: kind of like a couple different buckets of patients. And
Speaker 1: the interesting thing is I have people who are like
Speaker 1: twenty nine years old living at home, you know, in
Speaker 1: their mom's basement, playing video games and watching pornography all day.
Speaker 1: And then I also have like executives and CEOs and
Speaker 1: startup founders, and they do exactly that. They attach a
Speaker 1: lot of things to their happiness, so they end up
Speaker 1: moving the goalposts. One promotion isn't enough. Now I need
Speaker 1: another one. Now I need another one, Now I need
Speaker 1: another one. And it's beautiful, you know the quote from
Speaker 1: the Githa that you said, because I think what does
Speaker 1: it mean to be disturbed by happiness? Literally the way
Speaker 1: that I try to work with these people is a
Speaker 1: disturbance is anything that creates a change in your mind.
Speaker 1: So your natural state is to be still. Think about
Speaker 1: when you watch a sunset, you know, or you're just
Speaker 1: like completely peaceful, like you're just there with yourself. And
Speaker 1: even when you get a promotion that creates a disturbance,
Speaker 1: and the moment that you create a disturbance, you're no
Speaker 1: longer still, You're no longer at peace, and you may
Speaker 1: be signing yourself up for future disappointment.
Speaker 3: What I'm really intrigued by is how do you kind
Speaker 3: of factor that thought in with growth? Because it's almost
Speaker 3: like humans need to grow, we need to pursue something,
Speaker 3: We need to move in a certain direction to stay alive.
Speaker 1: True of for us, I think that's the most common way.
Speaker 3: Right, So what's a healthier way or what would be
Speaker 3: the better way?
Speaker 1: Healthier? Better is a tricky language, Yeah, so what's so
Speaker 1: I think that so this is really confused. I'm glad
Speaker 1: you asked this because I think chasing growth is not
Speaker 1: the same as growing. A lot of people get focused
Speaker 1: on doing, but they don't pay attention to what's happening.
Speaker 1: So I see this all the time in patients with addiction,
Speaker 1: where like you know, you're they're doing something like a
Speaker 1: substance or pornography or something like that, but they're not
Speaker 1: really paying attention to how does pornography or the substance
Speaker 1: rewire my brain? If I crush up opiates and snort
Speaker 1: them right now? What am I signing myself up for tomorrow?
Speaker 1: What is the human I am creating? What is the
Speaker 1: life I will inherit if I take this action today?
Speaker 1: And the interesting thing there is, once you start paying
Speaker 1: attention to that, it's not really about growing, it's not
Speaker 1: about getting anywhere. It's just what do I want to
Speaker 1: inherit tomorrow? That's a great way I think to think
Speaker 1: about it, right, I think like actually super short term,
Speaker 1: so I think wanting growth, ambition, goals. These are wonderful motivators,
Speaker 1: but they won't bring you happiness. Right, So you can
Speaker 1: get satisfaction of the ego through achievement, But then you've
Speaker 1: done something really sneaky, which is that you've made the
Speaker 1: lever of satisfaction in your life, gratification of the ego.
Speaker 1: So I want to chase this. I want to get promoted,
Speaker 1: but that's really tricky. Like, sure, you can get promoted
Speaker 1: and you can feel really good, but now you are
Speaker 1: training your brain to feel good when you get something.
Speaker 1: And so this is something that no amount of promotions
Speaker 1: will ever be enough.
Speaker 3: It's less about what's happening and who you're becoming and
Speaker 3: what you're inheriting, and more about what you're doing. And
Speaker 3: that's why we get addicted to doing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, so we get addicted to doing because we
Speaker 1: want our internal state to change. Right, So if I'm like,
Speaker 1: if I'm not happy, if I do something about it,
Speaker 1: then my circumstances will change. If I get her flowers
Speaker 1: one more time, she'll say yes when I ask her
Speaker 1: out on a date. But what we're really doing is
Speaker 1: we're putting the control of our life. We're putting our
Speaker 1: internal happiness or contentment based on how the world responds
Speaker 1: to me. So I'm not saying that you shouldn't act,
Speaker 1: which a lot of people will say, like should you
Speaker 1: not act? Which, actually, if you do this right will
Speaker 1: be where you end up. And that's what happened to
Speaker 1: the Buda, right, So he said, like, I'm going to
Speaker 1: walk this spiritual path, walked away from his wife, walked
Speaker 1: away from his son. And so I think that there
Speaker 1: is a certain part of this path that is not
Speaker 1: conducive to life that you will start to change so much,
Speaker 1: you will start to stop caring so much about the
Speaker 1: things that everyone around you cares that it can become
Speaker 1: really difficult.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's what I was going to say, that
Speaker 3: even if we go back to the simple idea at
Speaker 3: the beginning, where you said, if you know who you are,
Speaker 3: you can start to choose your own values, almost your
Speaker 3: own metrics, your own milestones that aren't based on your parents' society,
Speaker 3: the things around you. But the challenge with that is
Speaker 3: you're fighting against decades and decades of wiring that is
Speaker 3: encouraging you to move at these milestones, to move at
Speaker 3: this pace, to be married by this age, to have
Speaker 3: kids by this age. And so it's such a struggle.
Speaker 3: Sometimes it can feel because you're like, wait a minute,
Speaker 3: I'm trying to follow my whatever it is, but over
Speaker 3: here there's this chart that feels like it's ranking me constantly.
Speaker 3: That doesn't just disappear. How do we hold on to
Speaker 3: our values and a new vision in a world that
Speaker 3: has a very clear script you should follow.
Speaker 1: So it's a great question. I guess this is where
Speaker 1: like I'd like to just share my experience, which is
Speaker 1: really weird. So I think that I got to where
Speaker 1: I am by making a series of terrible decisions, and
Speaker 1: I strongly encourage everybody else to consider doing the same.
Speaker 1: So I spent seven years starting to become a monk
Speaker 1: and then decided to walk away from that. Right, So
Speaker 1: this is like abandoning this path that I spent so
Speaker 1: much time putting into. Decided that I fell in love
Speaker 1: and the whole met my wife and was not super
Speaker 1: interested in bromachadia celibacy, and so you know, did that
Speaker 1: and then ended up going to medical school. Towards the
Speaker 1: end of medical school, I was going to do holistic
Speaker 1: oncology and do like evidence based complementary alternative medicine for
Speaker 1: cancer treatment. My dad was a cancer doctor, so I
Speaker 1: was like, I learned all this stuff in India, and
Speaker 1: I was like, let's secure cancer with like herbs and
Speaker 1: yoga and meditation and chemotherapy. And then towards the end
Speaker 1: of it, I fell in love with psychiatry, and even
Speaker 1: my family was like actually super against it. They're like
Speaker 1: this is crazy. Like my mom the doctor was like,
Speaker 1: you're going to go crazy if you spend time with
Speaker 1: crazy people all the time, right, why don't you like
Speaker 1: be a real doctor, like new cardiology. Look, it's the
Speaker 1: second point. Wife was watching Gray's Anatomy. She wanted to
Speaker 1: me to be a neurosurgeon. I was like, same organ,
Speaker 1: but maybe in a different way. And so I sort
Speaker 1: of walked away. I'd done a bunch of research and
Speaker 1: things like that, and so I sort of walked away
Speaker 1: from that path and like at the eleventh hour sort
Speaker 1: of tried to apply for psychiatry, ended up getting lucky,
Speaker 1: and then I wound up at Harvard and I was
Speaker 1: like faculty at Harvard Medical School and was like, you know,
Speaker 1: working on these meditation protocols and stuff like that. And
Speaker 1: then I kind of started streaming one day talking to
Speaker 1: like broke gamers on the internet because I realized, like
Speaker 1: no one's really helping them, and so like walked away
Speaker 1: from like that academic career. And then the weird thing
Speaker 1: is like that sort of picked up in a weird way.
Speaker 1: So I think that what a lot of people don't
Speaker 1: realize is that so here I am. You're kind of saying, okay,
Speaker 1: so how do I the world wants me to be this?
Speaker 1: This is what I want to be, and there's a
Speaker 1: fundamental mismatch. Even if I'm going to do this, I'm
Speaker 1: going to piss off the world and what I've seen
Speaker 1: not only in myself but also my patients who I
Speaker 1: encourage this path for. I was really worried because I
Speaker 1: realized that about forty percent of my patients within eighteen
Speaker 1: months of coming to see me will make a career change.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: And I was like worried that I'm biasing them in
Speaker 1: some way, Like am I like shaping them? But I
Speaker 1: think once you start to realize, okay, this is the
Speaker 1: direction that I want to move. Once you cast some
Speaker 1: of those things off and you start moving in your direction,
Speaker 1: you get so much positive internal feedback, like, yeah, people
Speaker 1: around you were upset, but you are grounded. And if
Speaker 1: you really think about when you feel the most out
Speaker 1: of control in life, it's because you let the opinions
Speaker 1: of other people disturb this. But as long as you
Speaker 1: were secure in what you're doing, if you really lean
Speaker 1: into that, and there's so much positive feedback, like it
Speaker 1: the first time I started streaming on Twitch and you know,
Speaker 1: like there were five people there. It felt so good
Speaker 1: to talk to them. It just felt right, felt right
Speaker 1: in here. And the biggest thing getting in the way
Speaker 1: of that in today's society is we use technology to
Speaker 1: dull what's going on in here. I'm feeling anxious, like
Speaker 1: I'm on the subway, I'm bored. I don't like feeling bored.
Speaker 1: Let me pull out my phone. I'm feeling anxious. Let
Speaker 1: me pull out my phone. Oh my god, my boss
Speaker 1: just told me, like, ah, let me pull out my phone.
Speaker 1: So we do so many things with technology that dull
Speaker 1: our sense of self. We don't like to be with
Speaker 1: ourselves anymore. I saw a super scary study. People are
Speaker 1: spending so much time on the toilet with their phone.
Speaker 1: It's increasing the risk of hemorrhoids by about sixty five percent.
Speaker 1: Oh and they're not even pushing, They're just sitting there.
Speaker 1: And if you stay in that position in your body,
Speaker 1: it puts pressure on the blood vessels. And like, sitting
Speaker 1: on the toilet with your phone is giving people hemorrhoids.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, it's super scary, and it does something
Speaker 1: similar to your mind too. I don't know why, but.
Speaker 3: As I'm listening to you, I'm just thinking, like, that's
Speaker 3: really the core of all of it. And you talked
Speaker 3: about the ego self at the beginning. It's almost like
Speaker 3: the reason why we're so obsessed with what everyone thinks
Speaker 3: about us is because of the egos right there. So
Speaker 3: if I was to ask you, what if someone do
Speaker 3: to truly stop caring what people think? Because there's usefulness
Speaker 3: in caring what people think. It's what helps the world
Speaker 3: stay sane to some degree. But at the same time,
Speaker 3: there's a part of you with what you're saying, which
Speaker 3: I love. Is this idea of love. I love the
Speaker 3: explanation you gave between Hey, when I was live on
Speaker 3: Twitch for five people, it felt right here, and then
Speaker 3: the opposite to that, which is, I don't feel good
Speaker 3: right here, so I'm going to numb myself with technology
Speaker 3: or you said, dull yourself. How do we even get
Speaker 3: to that clarity that I like doing this right now
Speaker 3: because I think we've all become so clouded. And I'm
Speaker 3: sure you see this with the people you help and
Speaker 3: serve and the millions of people online all the time
Speaker 3: that even when you encourage someone to move in a
Speaker 3: direction of noticing what's true to them, it becomes a
Speaker 3: really difficult concept for people because I don't know what's
Speaker 3: true for me. I'm kind of I like these all
Speaker 3: these things, and I like this then, but now I'm
Speaker 3: distracted by video games. I'm now distracted by porn. I'm
Speaker 3: now like those polls are so strong that even if
Speaker 3: you're close to knowing goll I really like this five
Speaker 3: people on Twitch, the distraction of oh I wish I
Speaker 3: had a million subscribers is so strong that you get
Speaker 3: pulled away from that sense. How does someone truly know
Speaker 3: something that feels right for them to pursue in a
Speaker 3: world where they're either clouded so they don't know themselves
Speaker 3: well enough or they get distracted.
Speaker 1: I think the answer is sort of in the question.
Speaker 1: And I think this is why it's fun to talk
Speaker 1: to you, because you ask questions with certain concepts in mind.
Speaker 1: So I think you know, I don't know what I feel,
Speaker 1: So let's understand that first, right, So if you want
Speaker 1: to understand what you really want because you are getting distracted,
Speaker 1: like and it happens to me too, I'll see you
Speaker 1: know now that I'm in like whatever room I'm in,
Speaker 1: I make comparisons. Right, Oh, this doctor is doing this,
Speaker 1: this influencer is doing this. So the first thing to
Speaker 1: understand is that where you spend your attention is going
Speaker 1: to be where you get information. So literally, like if
Speaker 1: I numb your tongue, like if I'm doing dental surgery,
Speaker 1: like you know, you can't talk, you can't chew. So
Speaker 1: one of the key concepts is awareness precedes control. And
Speaker 1: you kind of pointed this out that if we look
Speaker 1: at what's happening in our world, where is our perception going,
Speaker 1: where is our attention going, It's always going outside of us.
Speaker 1: You know when I was in med school, I started
Speaker 1: med school at the age of twenty eight, which was behind,
Speaker 1: and so I was like, oh my god, Like I
Speaker 1: have to be efficient. I have to be efficient. Everyone
Speaker 1: is so concerned with productivity in efficiency. I think it's
Speaker 1: one of the most damaging things in the world. Because
Speaker 1: now I'm listening to a podcast on the way to
Speaker 1: the train, I'm reading on the train, listening to a
Speaker 1: lecture on the way to lecture Hall, paying attention into
Speaker 1: lecture Hall, Like every moment I can be productive I
Speaker 1: can be efficient, but my attention is outside of me,
Speaker 1: so I get bad. I Basically the other thing to
Speaker 1: understand about the mind is the mind never wears out.
Speaker 1: It rusts the faculties that you do not use, you
Speaker 1: will lose. This is why we forget languages that we
Speaker 1: don't practice right. So our attention is going outside of us,
Speaker 1: getting pulled away by things like technology. And then once
Speaker 1: we start to if I spend all of my time
Speaker 1: thinking about what everybody else is doing, I will not
Speaker 1: have a good sense of myself. So the first thing
Speaker 1: we need to do is internalize our awareness. The second
Speaker 1: thing to understand is that internalizing our awareness why don't
Speaker 1: we do that because it's usually painful. So I don't
Speaker 1: know why the world is designed this way. But when
Speaker 1: a patient comes to me and sits in therapy, they
Speaker 1: don't have a breakthrough first and then cry a lot
Speaker 1: at the end. They cry a lot, they face their trauma,
Speaker 1: they face their negative emotions, and then the good stuff
Speaker 1: is at the end. So the reason people don't like
Speaker 1: to look within themselves, we actually try really hard to
Speaker 1: never look within ourselves because there's usually a lot of
Speaker 1: pain in there. Like I remember when I was at
Speaker 1: the height of my video game addiction. I was like
Speaker 1: eighteen years old, and I know for an eighteen for
Speaker 1: a whole year, I never went to sleep. I always
Speaker 1: passed out if I got into bed, And what would
Speaker 1: happen if I was idle? Thoughts would start to flow, like,
Speaker 1: you're screwing up your life. You know a month has
Speaker 1: gone by, you haven't gone to a single class in
Speaker 1: a month. You're screwing everything up. I could see that
Speaker 1: I was destroying my life and I was powerless to
Speaker 1: stop it, so shame and guilt would flood my mind,
Speaker 1: and I hated that. So I would play until five
Speaker 1: point thirty in the morning, six in the morning, so
Speaker 1: I was so exhausted that I would just pass out
Speaker 1: immediately because if I was awake for even five minutes,
Speaker 1: my mind would turn on and I would be awake
Speaker 1: for hours in absolute torture. So we don't like to
Speaker 1: look within ourselves because looking within ourselves is painful. This
Speaker 1: is where there has to be this ugly part. And
Speaker 1: from a neuroscience perspective, what's going on is we're doing
Speaker 1: so much emotional suppression through technological devices. That's what they do, right,
Speaker 1: So if you're feeling anxious and you pull out your
Speaker 1: phone and you like laugh at cats, then like suddenly
Speaker 1: you feel better. So it shuts that stuff off. So
Speaker 1: as we shut off these circuits of the brain, we
Speaker 1: have to rewaken them. And this is probably from an
Speaker 1: evolutionary perspective. I don't know if this kind of makes sense,
Speaker 1: but negative emotions keep us alive more than positive emotions.
Speaker 1: So our brain has a bias to experience the negative
Speaker 1: over the positive. So the first thing we have to
Speaker 1: do is move our attention away from the outside world.
Speaker 1: Spend some time with yourself. No music, no headphones, no
Speaker 1: podcast nothing like that. I mean, I love podcasts, love
Speaker 1: this podcast, but spend some time. You know, after you
Speaker 1: listen to this episode, sit in silence, let yourself absorb.
Speaker 1: Second thing is, if you sit with yourself, what's going
Speaker 1: to come up is a lot and negativity. But that
Speaker 1: negativity has to come out before it disappears. So when
Speaker 1: I'm sitting with a patient who has a history of trauma,
Speaker 1: the trauma is like stuck inside them and they use
Speaker 1: so many defense mechanisms to bury it. We want to
Speaker 1: bring that stuff up. We want to have you crying
Speaker 1: and stuff like that and then let it go. And
Speaker 1: then underneath all the negativity you will find that voice,
Speaker 1: that internal sense of really what you want right when
Speaker 1: you have a good cry at the end of that,
Speaker 1: like you'll have a sense of peace and you'll be like, Okay,
Speaker 1: like this sucks. Now that I've sat with it, what
Speaker 1: am I going to do about it? And it's amazing
Speaker 1: how it happens. You don't have to do it. All
Speaker 1: you have to do is create the right circumstances. And
Speaker 1: in the same way that your body the moment that
Speaker 1: you swallow a piece of food, your body takes care
Speaker 1: of the rest. If you give your mind the right environment,
Speaker 1: it is designed to heal, just like a cut on
Speaker 1: my arm. It will get rid of those negative emotions.
Speaker 1: You just need to stop getting in the way.
Speaker 3: That's such a That is a really brilliant explanation. Never
Speaker 3: heard it put that way so well. It's I love
Speaker 3: the idea that your mind is already designed to repair
Speaker 3: and heal itself, and if it's given the right parameters
Speaker 3: and the right set up and the right environment, it
Speaker 3: will naturally find its way.
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
Speaker 3: But the key part that you put there is the
Speaker 3: pain and the discomfort is the prerequisite for a breakthrough
Speaker 3: and our ability to sit in that is the part
Speaker 3: that makes a contingent as to whether we'll actually rise
Speaker 3: above from it.
Speaker 1: Yes, So I think just one other example, So I
Speaker 1: want you all to think about when you get food poisoning,
Speaker 1: what does your body do It feels nauseous, I'm going
Speaker 1: to vomit the nausea and vomiting is doesn't feel good,
Speaker 1: but it is healthy. And so sometimes what I'll also do,
Speaker 1: like when my kids get food poisoning is oh wait,
Speaker 1: I won't give them anti nausea meds unless they're in
Speaker 1: risk of dehydration. So there are times where you have
Speaker 1: to stop what the mind naturally does. But generally speaking,
Speaker 1: we want the mind like, think about it for a second.
Speaker 1: Every time you stop, if anxiety arises, your mind is
Speaker 1: trying to get rid of it. It's trying to vomit
Speaker 1: it out. Why does your mind keep doing that? Why
Speaker 1: does it keep going there? Because that's the problem it's
Speaker 1: trying to solve.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let's go back to the ego now, sure, because
Speaker 3: you don't want to. I didn't want you to miss
Speaker 3: out on that pot the ego I raised because I
Speaker 3: was saying that we were saying that a part of
Speaker 3: us has to stop caring what people think in order
Speaker 3: to even pursue this path. I'm assuming when you were
Speaker 3: studying to become a monk for seven years, where was
Speaker 3: that intentional desire coming for you?
Speaker 1: Where was the intention of to be a monk coming?
Speaker 3: Yeah? It was coming from the ego, right, Talk to
Speaker 3: me about that. YEA, that doesn't make sense to the outside.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, So yeah, I mean, here's what happened
Speaker 1: in my life. So I went to college. So growing
Speaker 1: up I was like kind of gifted, so never really
Speaker 1: like learned how to study. And then my parents, you know,
Speaker 1: were like, oh, you have to be doctor Raluk. And
Speaker 1: then I remember when I was fifteen years old. I
Speaker 1: was at a party one day and some adult asked me, like,
Speaker 1: what do you want to be when you grow up?
Speaker 1: And I said I want to be a doctor. And
Speaker 1: they were like what A, Like wow, Like you're going
Speaker 1: to be a doctor, Like that's so amazing, right, And
Speaker 1: so my ego loved that. I was like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: I just say I'm going to be a doctor and
Speaker 1: people are going to be like, wow, you have so
Speaker 1: much potential. I loved hearing that and then but my
Speaker 1: heart really wasn't in it. It was like ego. So
Speaker 1: then when like I got to college, I was like, ah,
Speaker 1: like whatever, And so then what started to have and
Speaker 1: something weird happened. As I started to fail fell in
Speaker 1: the video game addiction. I started to feel a lot
Speaker 1: of shame, and then all of my friends like left
Speaker 1: me behind. I remember I went to a Christmas party
Speaker 1: where there was a friend of mine fro high school,
Speaker 1: and I hadn't seen her in a few years, and
Speaker 1: I was like, what are you doing? And she's like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, I just finished med school, Like I'm going
Speaker 1: to start ophthalmology residency in like a month. She's like,
Speaker 1: what are you up to? And I'm like, I'm applying
Speaker 1: to medical school for the third year in a row.
Speaker 1: I've been rejected an eighty times. What ended up happening
Speaker 1: is my ego was so low or like it was
Speaker 1: so bruised that I pulled a really interesting trick that
Speaker 1: happens in spirituality, where I said, I'm going.
Speaker 2: To be not material anymore. All of these materialistic people
Speaker 2: are chasing these materials. You want to be a doctor
Speaker 2: for money and fame and pride and all of this.
Speaker 2: I'm going to be better. I'm going to let go
Speaker 2: of materialism. I'm going to rise above you.
Speaker 1: I'm going to be swami, I'm going to be Yogi,
Speaker 1: I'm going to be great. But it was really ego,
Speaker 1: So that's the original. So I fell in love with
Speaker 1: it in a genuine way. But also so what kept
Speaker 1: me there was like, this is the way that I win,
Speaker 1: This is the way that I catch up. This is
Speaker 1: the way that I impress people. So it took a lot.
Speaker 3: Of both of them that way, because even exactly right.
Speaker 1: So that's what's sneaking out the ego. It'll twist and turn.
Speaker 1: That sort of happened for a while. Thankfully I had
Speaker 1: some really excellent teachers. I did a lot of meditation practice,
Speaker 1: and I kind of discovered that years later that oh,
Speaker 1: this is actually like my ego. So that was my journey.
Speaker 1: And then then I actually like let go of the
Speaker 1: ego quite a bit. I stopped caring about my grades.
Speaker 1: And we'll get to that in a second. So I
Speaker 1: ended up getting into medical school and I tried to
Speaker 1: take my vows. So when I was twenty one years old,
Speaker 1: I went to my guru and I said, you know,
Speaker 1: I want to become a monk, like can I take
Speaker 1: my vows? And his response was really interesting. He said,
Speaker 1: becoming a monk is about giving up your life. But
Speaker 1: you don't have a life worth giving up. Your life
Speaker 1: is empty, Like you haven't done anything. What are you
Speaker 1: giving up nothing? It's an escape. So he said, go
Speaker 1: back to the US, get a doctoral degree, and if
Speaker 1: you still want to do it when you're thirty, we'll
Speaker 1: take you. You can come back every summer. We'll continue
Speaker 1: teaching you practices, you can continue learning, you can walk
Speaker 1: that path, but we're not going to let you take vows.
Speaker 1: So I said, okay, fine deal. So I went back
Speaker 1: focused on getting a doctoral degree. So I decided to
Speaker 1: go to medical school. That's a little bit silly because
Speaker 1: my wife wanted to be married to a doctor. I
Speaker 1: was like dating her, so I was like, all right,
Speaker 1: might as well, which is like so funny because you
Speaker 1: know everyone thinks like, oh, like you have some deep No.
Speaker 1: I was just like I got to get a doctoral degree,
Speaker 1: and like this chick that I like wants me to
Speaker 1: be a doctor, so like let me do that because
Speaker 1: she's going to think that's hot. So I mean, it
Speaker 1: was so like simple, right, So as I start really
Speaker 1: focusing on the work, and then I think I sort
Speaker 1: of let go of my ego. And so you kind
Speaker 1: of talked about, you know, how do you stop caring? So,
Speaker 1: like you said, you should care. So I care a
Speaker 1: lot about what people think, but I don't let it
Speaker 1: determine my identity. So people say negative things to me
Speaker 1: all the time. I got reprimanded by the Medical Board
Speaker 1: of Massachusetts. I think that's a good thing. I think
Speaker 1: that's a healthy thing. I think that sometimes in life
Speaker 1: I make mistakes, and I think sometimes in life I
Speaker 1: behave in a non perfect way, and so I value
Speaker 1: what people think. But I also accept that I'm not perfect, right,
Speaker 1: So of course I'm going to make mistakes. I try
Speaker 1: not to let it affect my sense of me. And
Speaker 1: that's the key differentiator, because what a lot of people do.
Speaker 1: This is the biggest mistake I think you can make,
Speaker 1: is if you're this is what happens right, people are
Speaker 1: like I care so much what people think, So how
Speaker 1: do I fix that? I stop caring what people think,
Speaker 1: and then you turn yourself into an asshole, and then
Speaker 1: that causes lots of problems. And so the problem is
Speaker 1: either end of the pendulum is a bad idea. So
Speaker 1: receive what people think, also add some context to it.
Speaker 1: Don't just take it at face value. Where is this
Speaker 1: person's criticism coming from. Ninety percent of the criticism I
Speaker 1: get is projection. Right, they see in me something that
Speaker 1: they don't like, but that's not really who I am.
Speaker 1: So accept the criticism and then also recognize that just
Speaker 1: because someone says something about you, even if it's true,
Speaker 1: that's not who you are. Right. It's an attribute of you,
Speaker 1: But at your core, you're just a regular human being
Speaker 1: trying to navigate this world doing the best that you can.
Speaker 1: And the moment that you accept yourself is that nothing great,
Speaker 1: but also nothing terrible. Things become way easier.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it seems like for most people following, whether they
Speaker 3: call it ego or whether they call it something that
Speaker 3: gets them the result they want. I get to marry
Speaker 3: the girl I want to the guy I want, or
Speaker 3: it gets me a promotion, it gets me some more money,
Speaker 3: helps me move to the city. It almost feels like
Speaker 3: that's a base level motivator that pretty much all of
Speaker 3: us function on. Yeah, it's almost like the general operating
Speaker 3: system of the world, which is I need to get
Speaker 3: this to get this, and it ether serves you because
Speaker 3: you get there and you get the girl, or it
Speaker 3: doesn't serve you because you don't get it. And then
Speaker 3: that's where people turn towards depression and other things as well.
Speaker 3: Like that's it's almost like when your ego is not
Speaker 3: fulfilled for what it may think, it may end up
Speaker 3: moving towards being disheart and depressed and lonely.
Speaker 1: Absolutely so, I think ego opens the door to those things,
Speaker 1: and there is a ton of evidence for that. And
Speaker 1: I love your observation that this is the default way.
Speaker 1: I think that's what That's how far physical evolution got us.
Speaker 1: So if you look at like how human beings evolved, like,
Speaker 1: you know, we evolved to care what people around us think, right,
Speaker 1: So exodus from the tribe, ostracization from the tribe meant
Speaker 1: death when we were like growing up and couldn't take
Speaker 1: care of ourselves and things like that, so we lived
Speaker 1: in these very tribal communities. I think society has changed
Speaker 1: so much because in those tribal communities we cared a
Speaker 1: lot about the judgment of other people, but we also
Speaker 1: had a lot of baseline connection, you know. I remember
Speaker 1: I had a friend who was like one of the
Speaker 1: earliest streamers, and I asked him why he quit, and
Speaker 1: he said, well, because people on the internet are assholes.
Speaker 1: And he's like, you know, when I used to play
Speaker 1: games in arcades, like if you're mean to everybody, no
Speaker 1: one's ever going to play with you. But on the
Speaker 1: internet you can be mean to anyone. There's no consequence.
Speaker 1: So we used to have this Our brain evolved for
Speaker 1: some amount of like caring what people think, but some
Speaker 1: amount of default connection. People just don't give up on you.
Speaker 1: In today's world, people are so replaceable. So those things
Speaker 1: worked when they were both there. Now we have an
Speaker 1: imbalance where people are so replaceable. Everybody ghosts everybody online
Speaker 1: dating is like I can keep on. I don't have
Speaker 1: to choose between ten people, one hundred people, a thousand people.
Speaker 1: The number of options jay is infinite. I can keep scrolling,
Speaker 1: keep scrolling, keep scrolling until I find what I want.
Speaker 1: So that sort of thing has really changed. And so
Speaker 1: now what we have to do is learn a new
Speaker 1: way to relate to people to form our identity. And
Speaker 1: then arguably you can talk about like this is the
Speaker 1: limit of physical evolution, and there's a whole weird spiritual
Speaker 1: perspective on spiritual evolution. But I do think that, like,
Speaker 1: this is a skill, and this is why we're seeing
Speaker 1: an explosion of mindfulness, right, I mean it is transformative
Speaker 1: for you, transformative for me that these concepts are what
Speaker 1: you need to survive and thrive in today's world.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's almost scary when you put it like that though,
Speaker 3: where you're like, and I love that example of Yeah,
Speaker 3: if you were playing a video game at an arcade, generally,
Speaker 3: if you were decent, people would crowd around you and
Speaker 3: watch and cheer you on. If you're about it's something,
Speaker 3: maybe one person would walk past and laugh or make
Speaker 3: fun of you. And now, of course that's escalated, and
Speaker 3: that's what leads to learneliness because people are well, I
Speaker 3: don't want to put myself out there. I don't want
Speaker 3: to go on that dating app. I don't want to
Speaker 3: make a video. I don't want to chase my passion
Speaker 3: because actually, if I do that, there's going to be
Speaker 3: hundreds of thousands of peace people, or forget that, there's
Speaker 3: going to be just the ten people around me, my
Speaker 3: own family that disagrees with what I'm doing. And so
Speaker 3: if someone's in that state right now where they're like,
Speaker 3: I'm scared about putting myself out there from a let's
Speaker 3: choose dating because you brought up dating. I'm scared of
Speaker 3: putting myself out there from a dating perspective because I
Speaker 3: think I'm replaceable. I'm actually scared of even believing that
Speaker 3: real connection exists. I don't even know if there's someone
Speaker 3: out there for me. How do I even begin to
Speaker 3: work against the math and the algorithm, which feels like
Speaker 3: it's set up against me.
Speaker 1: This is the first time I'm going to say I
Speaker 1: don't know. So I think dating is the one thing
Speaker 1: I've been focused a lot on for the last year.
Speaker 1: But in terms of what I understand and what I know,
Speaker 1: I got lucky, so like I found my hopefully life
Speaker 1: partner before things got really really hard, and I think,
Speaker 1: if you're not someone, so this is the one area
Speaker 1: where I kind of feel like I don't know. So
Speaker 1: some of the things that I'll do, and this is why,
Speaker 1: like I kind of make the content that I do
Speaker 1: is you know, I made this guide to meditation, and
Speaker 1: what the best answer I have is start to use
Speaker 1: some of these concepts, start to internalize some of these skills.
Speaker 1: If we look at the way in which dating in
Speaker 1: today's world scars you, that involves hits to your ego,
Speaker 1: that involves these things like some Scots and there's we
Speaker 1: have a trauma guide to where we kind of go
Speaker 1: into that. But if we kind of think about, like
Speaker 1: why is dating so hard? This is the a sunskrit
Speaker 1: concept of something called a some scot. So this is
Speaker 1: kind of like a trauma. So if you kind of
Speaker 1: think about every person that you date, you're not just
Speaker 1: dating that person. You're carrying the emotional baggage of all
Speaker 1: of your experiences. And this is why online dating is
Speaker 1: such a mess, because if you go to date someone online,
Speaker 1: they're not judging you based on you. They're judging you
Speaker 1: based on all of their past experiences and yours and yours. Right,
Speaker 1: So when someone doesn't text you back, your mind attaches
Speaker 1: associations to that, right, like, oh, this means they're ghosting me. Well,
Speaker 1: why do you interpret that as ghosting? Because I've been
Speaker 1: ghosted before and it hurts so much. So as we
Speaker 1: go through life, we start accumulating baggage, and then what
Speaker 1: happens is we're not dealing with a person, we're interpreting
Speaker 1: that person. And I'm sure there are people in the
Speaker 1: audience who have felt this, where people don't judge you
Speaker 1: for you, they look at some tiny fraction of you
Speaker 1: and they inject all of their negative experiences with people
Speaker 1: like that, all men are dangerous, all women you can't
Speaker 1: trust women. Right, So where do these generalizations come from?
Speaker 1: And we see this so much, get this kind of
Speaker 1: indoctrination using social media, But the root, the psychological injury
Speaker 1: is there. And so the best thing that I know
Speaker 1: how to do is teach people. Let's give you a
Speaker 1: course in yourself. This is how you work. And that's
Speaker 1: really what I learned in India when I was here
Speaker 1: in the United States, They'll teach me about physics, They'll
Speaker 1: teach me about chemistry. No one could explain to me.
Speaker 1: I want to wake up at eight am, but I
Speaker 1: never do. I want to stop playing video games, but
Speaker 1: I can't control myself. And so as we teach people,
Speaker 1: like it's interesting because we have a lot of in
Speaker 1: cells that have been coming into our community for the
Speaker 1: last few years, and like they're starting to get better
Speaker 1: as you teach people. This is how I work, This
Speaker 1: is where my ego comes from. I want a relationship
Speaker 1: so bad that I'm going to tolerate abuse because I'm
Speaker 1: scared of loneliness. I would rather be abused than alone.
Speaker 1: So once you start to understand these things about yourself,
Speaker 1: once you start to dissolve your ego a little bit,
Speaker 1: once you start to realize what your s scars are,
Speaker 1: what is the emotional baggage that you carry around that
Speaker 1: sabotages all of your interactions. And the way that you
Speaker 1: know this happens is because the same crap keeps happening
Speaker 1: to you over and over again. This person takes advantage
Speaker 1: of you. This person takes advantage of you. This person
Speaker 1: takes advantage of you. That's because you were sending out
Speaker 1: a signal that they are picking up on, because they
Speaker 1: test boundaries. They'll treat you a little bit inappropriately and
Speaker 1: you'll take it, or they detect that you're a people
Speaker 1: pleaser and that you don't. You can't tolerate someone being upset.
Speaker 1: This is one of the huge, one of the biggest
Speaker 1: things that I think people we've trained people to do
Speaker 1: is tolerate. People have now become intolerant of the dissatisfaction
Speaker 1: of others. If somebody doesn't like me, I can't handle
Speaker 1: that anymore. And so as you start to realize some
Speaker 1: of these patterns, then I think you form yourself into
Speaker 1: a better human being. And then fingers crossed, it's up
Speaker 1: to karma or God or the universe or whatever or
Speaker 1: the algorithm. But I think the best thing that I
Speaker 1: know how to tell people is turn yourself into the
Speaker 1: healthiest human you can and then the rest of it
Speaker 1: is kind of out of your control.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I actually find that approach quite refreshing, and I
Speaker 3: think it's true. You just get a better radar, you
Speaker 3: get a better ability to spot frequency. And I don't
Speaker 3: mean on a spiritual level, I just mean on a
Speaker 3: general human level. Like you just said, you set up
Speaker 3: your boundaries better. You have better barriers, you have better
Speaker 3: filters early on. You don't allow someone with bad behavior
Speaker 3: to last longer than they should. Absolutely, and all of
Speaker 3: those things save you from wasting time and energy. And
Speaker 3: I think one of the biggest things is you don't
Speaker 3: allow your old kind of a Hollywood Romance Disney version
Speaker 3: that was programmed into you to rerun the program every
Speaker 3: time it feels that way. So I think so much
Speaker 3: of this goes back to that same thing. It's like,
Speaker 3: how do you not let that old circuitry take over again,
Speaker 3: even if you've learned all these new principles and you're
Speaker 3: meditating and your mindful and all this stuff, but it
Speaker 3: can just flip back yep, because it's so hardwired and
Speaker 3: that ultimately sometimes you see people who are doing all
Speaker 3: the right work, but they meet someone that they found
Speaker 3: attractive traditionally and then everything's gone out of the window. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I think it's really uncomfortable. It's a beautiful example
Speaker 1: because you kind of do everything that you're supposed to do,
Speaker 1: but you never do the one thing you need to do.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I see this all the time in my patients, and
Speaker 1: you offered I think the best example, which is you
Speaker 1: find someone that you're attracted to, and what a lot
Speaker 1: of people need to do is start looking at people
Speaker 1: that are not attracted to. Don't just accept that attraction,
Speaker 1: because when you follow that kind of attraction, it gets
Speaker 1: you back into the cycle. I'm going to meditate and
Speaker 1: I'm going to do this, and I'm going to do this,
Speaker 1: but then this kind of person shows up and I'm
Speaker 1: going to make the same damn mistake again. Right, So
Speaker 1: it feels so counterintuitive. I think another thing, Like, so
Speaker 1: sometimes my patients will come in we'll talk about, you know,
Speaker 1: dating and relationships, and they'll be like, you know, but
Speaker 1: but it sounds like, doctor k You're saying I shouldn't
Speaker 1: be myself, and I'm like, yeah, you should. I think
Speaker 1: being yourself. I know this sounds kind of weird, but
Speaker 1: let me explain, being yourself is one of the worst
Speaker 1: things that you can do. Like what created this version
Speaker 1: of you? A lot of unconscious programming, a lot of
Speaker 1: social conditioning, a lot of trauma. Right, all of these
Speaker 1: things have turned you into the current version of you.
Speaker 1: So I think the real you is way more formless
Speaker 1: and ego lists and all that kind of stuff we
Speaker 1: actually need to dismantle. Don't just be this set of patterns.
Speaker 1: That's what they oftentimes mean. They say, like, you know,
Speaker 1: if you can't handle me at my worst, you don't
Speaker 1: deserve me at my best. So I'm going to continue
Speaker 1: acting at my worst. This is what we tell people nowadays.
Speaker 1: I think that's a terrible idea, and we wonder why
Speaker 1: there's such a dating and mating crisis when everyone's like,
Speaker 1: I'm just going to be me. If you don't like me,
Speaker 1: you can move on. I'm going to move on too.
Speaker 1: Everyone is replaceable. I don't need to change, right, So
Speaker 1: I think we need to take a step back from
Speaker 1: that and try to really turn yourself into the best
Speaker 1: human being that you know how to be, and then
Speaker 1: I think things will turn around, which is what I
Speaker 1: see pretty consistently.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, at least you have the tools. Yeah, like
Speaker 3: you said, they may not, they may not solve all
Speaker 3: your problems, but at least you have the tools to
Speaker 3: know what to do with it. What do you what
Speaker 3: do you think it means? You talk so much about masculinity,
Speaker 3: which I really appreciate because I think it's an area
Speaker 3: that the country as a whole that we both live
Speaker 3: in is dealing with right now. Yeah, the world's dealing
Speaker 3: with it, for sure. What does it even mean to
Speaker 3: be a man right now? I don't know? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, I mean, I I don't.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what's confusing people, I guess is the question.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, I I mean I don't prescribe so masculinity.
Speaker 1: My understanding of, like the scientific or literature definition is
Speaker 1: like it's like the set of you know, behaviors and
Speaker 1: expectations that we put on men that's not that's not
Speaker 1: the lens that I work. So if you ask me
Speaker 1: about masculinity, I'd say, like, go ask someone else. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm going to talk about it, but like just to
Speaker 1: be clear, you know, I'm a clinician. Yeah, so my my,
Speaker 1: I'm zoomed into one person at a time. So what
Speaker 1: I think is going on right now? You know, I
Speaker 1: had a really interesting video come out recently that got
Speaker 1: a lot of controversy about why women prefer beta males.
Speaker 1: So this is like a big thing where everyone's like,
Speaker 1: I'm going to be alpha, and there's so much weird
Speaker 1: science that people don't understand. So as one simple example
Speaker 1: of like a lot of what masculinity like, everyone wants
Speaker 1: to be ripped. So there's a great study that looked
Speaker 1: at something called drive for muscularity. So this is not
Speaker 1: how muscular you are, but how much you want to
Speaker 1: be muscular. So the higher your drive for muscularity is,
Speaker 1: the lower you're a likelihood of entering a long term relationship.
Speaker 1: You can enter short term relationships, higher likelihood of divorce.
Speaker 1: And I think there's there's a lot of like cross
Speaker 1: talk where like a lot of women are saying what
Speaker 1: we want is like safety, not some dude who's like
Speaker 1: super cut, and so there's a lot of confusion about
Speaker 1: what it means to be a man. I think one
Speaker 1: of the reasons why there's confusion is because of sort
Speaker 1: of the way that men and women operate. So there's
Speaker 1: a part of men that focuses on intra male competition.
Speaker 1: So I'm going to talk a little bit about animals,
Speaker 1: and I don't think that translates over one hundred percent,
Speaker 1: so big caveat there. But if you look at sort
Speaker 1: of like you know, a lion pride, right, the males
Speaker 1: will fight amongst themselves, and then one male will rise
Speaker 1: to the top and then he becomes the male of
Speaker 1: the pride. So there's this idea that, like men will
Speaker 1: fight amongst each other, they'll create a hierarchy and then
Speaker 1: that'll make them attractive to women. And I certainly know
Speaker 1: that it was really weird. Once I got married and
Speaker 1: started wearing a wedding ring, I got way more female attention.
Speaker 1: So I think there's some element of that's true. But
Speaker 1: I think that having spent a lot of time working
Speaker 1: with female patients, everyone's an individual. We're not just like
Speaker 1: products of our biology and I think this is what
Speaker 1: really confuses men, is that we can fight amongst ourselves.
Speaker 1: But that's not actually what women want, that's not what
Speaker 1: they actually make their selections based off of. So I
Speaker 1: think a lot of masculinity right now is men trying
Speaker 1: to become as manly as possible in the alpha sense.
Speaker 1: And I think that people get super confused because like,
Speaker 1: that doesn't translate over into happiness. And if it doesn't
Speaker 1: translate over into happiness, you know these dudes, like I've
Speaker 1: worked with so many men who like are super into
Speaker 1: transactional relationships because they really think that human females, that
Speaker 1: these general principles of how lions select mates will translate
Speaker 1: over to an individual person who has unique genetics, unique history,
Speaker 1: and that doesn't work. So they approach this relationship transaction
Speaker 1: of the will thing like, oh, all women want is
Speaker 1: like money. So if I approach a relationship from a
Speaker 1: transactional perspective, if I see a woman as just a
Speaker 1: biological uterus, the women who want a partnership will run away.
Speaker 1: The women who have enough confidence will be like, this
Speaker 1: guy's an asshole, they'll leave, and so all you'll be
Speaker 1: left with is women who also view relation ships in
Speaker 1: a transactional way, and then that will sort of feed
Speaker 1: into giving you this idea of like, Okay, this is
Speaker 1: all women want, because all the women who don't want
Speaker 1: that will never date you in the first place. So
Speaker 1: I think we're seeing a lot of these like mechanisms
Speaker 1: at play. I think a lot of this masculinity is
Speaker 1: because we expect a lot from men, but as men
Speaker 1: are failing those expectations because I think they're unreasonable, we're
Speaker 1: not really giving them an alternative. So I think, you know,
Speaker 1: research shows that most women still want to date a
Speaker 1: man who makes more money than they do, but sixty
Speaker 1: plus percent of people who go to college are now women.
Speaker 1: So what's happened is men are in this really tough
Speaker 1: spot where the expectations from men have not changed, but
Speaker 1: society has changed, so we can't meet those expectations anymore,
Speaker 1: and so that there's this really interesting gap. And when
Speaker 1: people feel crushed, when they feel rejected, the ego activates.
Speaker 1: We fall into all of these like unhealthy behaviors like
Speaker 1: pornography and drugs and video games and stuff like that
Speaker 1: to soothe our internal environment. We don't teach boys or
Speaker 1: men emotional regulation skills. And so I think there's like
Speaker 1: just a confluence of a thousand things going on and
Speaker 1: men are getting like crushed and squeezed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean, and I appreciate. I know you're
Speaker 3: a clinician. I just find your perspective on some of
Speaker 3: these more societal challenges to be you know, great observations.
Speaker 3: And I feel similarly, it's almost like it's what we
Speaker 3: talked about. We talked about there were targets. Somehow some
Speaker 3: of those targets have remained, but they feel unmeutable yep.
Speaker 3: And then there are moving targets which you keep trying
Speaker 3: to place. I need to get more buff, I need
Speaker 3: to get more ripped, I need to get more money,
Speaker 3: whatever it may be, and they become arbitrary, abstract targets.
Speaker 3: What's happening for women on the other side, because society
Speaker 3: has also changed and their desires.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think they're getting equally screwed. As society is changing,
Speaker 1: women are facing particular challenges, men are facing particular challenges.
Speaker 1: And one of the beautiful things we've seen in our
Speaker 1: community is the more that we understand that, I think,
Speaker 1: the better off things get.
Speaker 3: That's the conversation that needs to be.
Speaker 1: Had yeah, so it's beautiful. I remember a post that
Speaker 1: someone once made, so there was a woman who's very
Speaker 1: attractive who said, you know, I'm an incredibly attractive, physical,
Speaker 1: physically attractive woman. I feel so incredibly alone. Every time
Speaker 1: I meet someone. They don't see me, they don't care
Speaker 1: about me. They just care about the way that I
Speaker 1: look and things like that. So people always around me,
Speaker 1: but they're like using me constantly. And then the really
Speaker 1: funny thing is like there was an incel in our
Speaker 1: subreddit who was like, wow, like the way you're describing loneliness,
Speaker 1: that's exactly how I feel. I never image that like
Speaker 1: a ten out of ten attractive women could feel the
Speaker 1: way that I feel. And it was like a really
Speaker 1: beautiful moment, like of weird connection over the internet. I
Speaker 1: think one of the key things that women are struggling
Speaker 1: with right now is first of all, safety. So I
Speaker 1: think that men are getting very aggressive, men are getting
Speaker 1: very angry, and there's some reasons for that. I think
Speaker 1: that's not something that's a problem, but I think it's
Speaker 1: the only card men have to play in today's society.
Speaker 1: So I think their safety is kind of the number
Speaker 1: one priority or like the number one danger that a
Speaker 1: lot of like women face, and I think it's something
Speaker 1: that a lot of men like can't understand. So I
Speaker 1: remember getting frustrated because I was like walking behind a
Speaker 1: woman and we were walking, so I was walking down
Speaker 1: in New York City actually, and she like turned ahead
Speaker 1: of me, and it was nighttime, but I'm like walking
Speaker 1: behind her. We're walking at the same pace. And then
Speaker 1: you know, later on, someone kind of tells me like, oh,
Speaker 1: you shouldn't do that because it seems like you're following her,
Speaker 1: and so then they're like, what you should do is
Speaker 1: past her. So then I started walking really fast and
Speaker 1: someone else tells me, like, you should never do that
Speaker 1: because now you're like it seems like you're walking fast,
Speaker 1: you're getting you know, you're getting closer to her. So
Speaker 1: then it's like, what am I supposed to And they're like,
Speaker 1: you should cross the street. And then I crossed the street,
Speaker 1: but then like.
Speaker 3: Then you go run over.
Speaker 1: I didn't get run over, but then there's another woman
Speaker 1: on the other side of the street. It's like because
Speaker 1: it turns out, but I'm just like like zig zag
Speaker 1: zagging back and forth. So but I think the reason
Speaker 1: that they feel this way is because they things are unsafe,
Speaker 1: and a lot of men feel like they women don't
Speaker 1: give them a chance. And it's kind of like, imagine
Speaker 1: that a third of the people that walk into your
Speaker 1: store are going to steal from you. How would you
Speaker 1: relate to that. I think a lot of men just
Speaker 1: don't understand the statistics around how easy it is to
Speaker 1: become a victim. If you're a woman in this world,
Speaker 1: you can become a victim as a man too. I
Speaker 1: don't think we take you know, cases of male sexual
Speaker 1: assault victims, even by women and teachers and things like that.
Speaker 1: We don't take that seriously, which is a real problem.
Speaker 1: But I think that's one thing that they're really struggling with.
Speaker 1: I think another thing that they're really struggling with is
Speaker 1: that there is a lack of good men that women
Speaker 1: are looking for partnership. They're looking for companionship, and a
Speaker 1: lot of men have become angry. And this is where, like,
Speaker 1: you know, people will say, like, we blame them. I
Speaker 1: think that's the big mistake that we make. I think
Speaker 1: the reason that so many men are struggling right now
Speaker 1: is because they're the one demographic that we as a
Speaker 1: society don't help so the one thing that hasn't changed
Speaker 1: this is maybe the most damaging thing, is we expect
Speaker 1: men to solve their own problems. So sixty percent of
Speaker 1: people who go to college or women where the male
Speaker 1: only scholarships. We don't want, we don't need those because
Speaker 1: men have privilege. And I think this is what's really
Speaker 1: scary is you know, I see this a lot because
Speaker 1: I'll have CEOs come into my office and then like
Speaker 1: I'll go and work in jail, and right, most of
Speaker 1: the people in jail are men. And so when we
Speaker 1: talk about male privilege, which is real, the key thing
Speaker 1: is like it affects men, some men a lot, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't affect others. So the majority of workplace injuries,
Speaker 1: you know, things like that, like that, those are all men.
Speaker 1: And so I think that we need to sort of
Speaker 1: stop thinking about, yes, male privilege exists, but it may
Speaker 1: be insufficient to compensate. And this is how people think.
Speaker 1: They think that if there's privilege, that means that there
Speaker 1: isn't hurt, right, but like it, those things don't even out.
Speaker 1: One thing I appreciate about medicine is things are very multifactorial.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of variables here and just because you're
Speaker 1: rich doesn't mean that like that has great advantages. But
Speaker 1: if you get cancer, you still have cancer. It's not
Speaker 1: like being rich cancels out cancer. It may help in
Speaker 1: a very significant way, which unfortunately I've seen. There's some
Speaker 1: degree of like connection there, but one doesn't replace the other.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, And I think you took it to the
Speaker 3: high ground there, which I really appreciate, which is that's
Speaker 3: the compensation. And that's why I asked about both. The
Speaker 3: conversation that needs to be had is how do we
Speaker 3: just understand each other better because generally what we find,
Speaker 3: and it's easier because it's clickbait, gets more views, gets
Speaker 3: more attentions, is the small echo chambers of one or
Speaker 3: the other. That we could be sitting here as a
Speaker 3: conversation as men having a conversation about how women have
Speaker 3: let us down, or we could be having a conversation
Speaker 3: about how men are terrible, because then that makes us
Speaker 3: look like better men, and both are not helpful for
Speaker 3: society because we're just going to sit on the opposite
Speaker 3: sides of the bridge and just point fingers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm with you, So I think that you know
Speaker 1: that's what happens, is like that's literally what we see
Speaker 1: is like then, you know, male only spaces will highlight
Speaker 1: how women are saying that men are all trash and them.
Speaker 3: And men need to make seven figures or whatever. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Right, so everyone's just pointing the finger at each other,
Speaker 1: and I think I think you're spot on that. What
Speaker 1: we really try to do is just understand, yeah, sort
Speaker 1: of recognize that every human being doesn't matter if you're
Speaker 1: a man, it doesn't matter if you're a woman. You
Speaker 1: have a unique set of advantages, you have a unique
Speaker 1: set of challenges. Let's understand who you are. Let's give
Speaker 1: you the basic set of skills of self understanding, dissolving
Speaker 1: your ego, emotional regulation, and if you like work on
Speaker 1: this stuff. I think that's the best way is to
Speaker 1: become a healthy human, an independent human. I think that
Speaker 1: sets you up for the best kind of relationship.
Speaker 3: I think that speaks to a big issue right now.
Speaker 3: I'd love to know how you work with people on this,
Speaker 3: because it's a big part of self understanding. Is there's
Speaker 3: such a challenge we have with raising the mind from
Speaker 3: judgment to understanding. It's so much easier to judge, blame,
Speaker 3: point fingers, shift responsibility to make sense of someone through
Speaker 3: very little amounts of information to have a projection on them.
Speaker 3: How do we encourage How do you encourage your clients?
Speaker 3: How do you encourage your patients and people you meet
Speaker 3: to rise from judgment to understanding In a world where
Speaker 3: we don't have time, we don't have energy for that,
Speaker 3: it requires so much more effort.
Speaker 1: So I don't know about time, but it does require
Speaker 1: more energy, and it does require more effort until you
Speaker 1: learn how to do it. So I once had a
Speaker 1: patient who I was in training at the time. They
Speaker 1: were an adolescent and they had all kinds of behavioral problems.
Speaker 1: So this is a kid who would start fights, would
Speaker 1: smear feces all over the bathroom at school, and like
Speaker 1: what everyone does. This is so sad. But when someone
Speaker 1: does something really crappy, what we want to do is
Speaker 1: punish them. But if you want to stop that behavior,
Speaker 1: what you really need is compassion. So if you sort
Speaker 1: of think about judgment, judgment is like a narrowing, right,
Speaker 1: So I'm saying like you are bad. So there are
Speaker 1: a couple of things that create judgment in the brain.
Speaker 1: The first is activation of negative emotion. If my adrenaline
Speaker 1: is high or if I feel angry or afraid or anxious,
Speaker 1: this does something really interesting. It narrows our peripheral vision
Speaker 1: from one hundred and eighty degrees to thirty degrees. So literally,
Speaker 1: if I were angry with you right now, I would
Speaker 1: be zoomed in on you because you were the threat.
Speaker 1: You were the danger. The really interesting thing is that
Speaker 1: it does that psychologically too. We stop seeing context. When
Speaker 1: this person dumped me.
Speaker 3: Oh so good.
Speaker 1: I didn't think about what's going on in there or
Speaker 1: not even dumped. When this person said no, I don't
Speaker 1: want to go on a date, I didn't think about
Speaker 1: what's going on in their life. I didn't think about
Speaker 1: the way I smell. I didn't think about any of
Speaker 1: those things. All I see is that hurt, and it
Speaker 1: causes me to see red well, and then I will
Speaker 1: snap into judgment. And this is evolutionary, by the way,
Speaker 1: So when a tiger, when I'm like work in the
Speaker 1: fields and a tiger shows up, I don't want to
Speaker 1: be like hmm, I wonder how the tiger's feeling today.
Speaker 1: Is the tiger hungry? Is they not hungry? This is evolutionary.
Speaker 1: Fear and anger cause us to zoom in see black
Speaker 1: and white and act before we think, which is the
Speaker 1: only way that we survive. So what we really need
Speaker 1: to do to stop judgment is to lower those emotions.
Speaker 1: And we see this so much with Israel, Palestine, Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, men, women, right,
Speaker 1: everyone is angry. Everyone is fighting for survival. And when
Speaker 1: you fight for survival, there's no room for compassion. There's
Speaker 1: no room for empathy, there's no room for understanding. So
Speaker 1: what we need to do is two things. One is,
Speaker 1: if someone is coming at you really hard, try to
Speaker 1: be compassionate. And this is what's really interesting. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like weird, like being trained as a psychiatrist, Like
Speaker 1: we get trained in this stuff formally it's really hard
Speaker 1: to do. But when a patient comes into my office,
Speaker 1: you know, like like you're terrible, and psychiatrists are all terrible,
Speaker 1: and like, you know, like I hate being here and
Speaker 1: I don't need to be here, and all y'all you're
Speaker 1: just trying to scam me, like big farm is paining
Speaker 1: you to fill people up with meds. The natural reaction
Speaker 1: is like no, they're not. No, I'm not you know, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: no no. But I'll be like okay, hold on a second,
Speaker 1: I can see you're really upset. But tell me, like
Speaker 1: why you hate psychiatrists so much? Like what have been
Speaker 1: your experience is? I really like to understand. And when
Speaker 1: someone comes at you with hard emotional energy, if you
Speaker 1: sort of make yourself like water, if you kind of
Speaker 1: give them that space, they kind of deflate. Right. So
Speaker 1: if I come at you like you know, I argue
Speaker 1: with my wife all the time, and if I come
Speaker 1: at her hard, like she's done an awesome job recently
Speaker 1: of like really handling my anger where I would come
Speaker 1: at her hard and she would fight back, right, And
Speaker 1: if she comes at me hard, like I'll fight back,
Speaker 1: We've done a really good job of like giving each
Speaker 1: other space. But like I get you your pissed, Like,
Speaker 1: tell me more, let me understand, help me understand. So
Speaker 1: don't respond to that negative energy with like a negative
Speaker 1: emotional energy. It'll narrow your view and for those that
Speaker 1: you judge. So, if someone is coming at you, I
Speaker 1: think you got to cool off a little bit, right, So,
Speaker 1: and then if someone is coming at you, try to
Speaker 1: be compassionate towards them. Now, this is where a lot
Speaker 1: of people get tripped up because they think compassion means
Speaker 1: giving them what they want. So sometimes people will come
Speaker 1: in and will be like, I need riddlin, I need
Speaker 1: adderall I need it. I need it, I need it.
Speaker 1: Don't you understand, Doc, If you don't give me this,
Speaker 1: everything's going to fall apart and things like that. And
Speaker 1: I'm like, okay, look, I already prescribed you once. I
Speaker 1: told you that if you lose your medication I'm not
Speaker 1: going to prescribe it to you again. I totally feel
Speaker 1: that these consequences are there. I'm not going to give
Speaker 1: you more meds, right but I recognize that doing that
Speaker 1: is going to put you in a really tough spot.
Speaker 1: I'm going to hold my boundary, but with compassion. What
Speaker 1: else can I do? Do you want to non stimulant medication?
Speaker 1: Do you want to do some other things? Do you
Speaker 1: want me to write a letter to your professor telling
Speaker 1: you that your ADHD is particularly bad right now? I
Speaker 1: don't have to include details of your clanico history, but say,
Speaker 1: can you please give them an extension for medical reasons.
Speaker 1: I'm happy to work with you. I'm going to hold
Speaker 1: my boundary, but I'm going to be as compassionate as possible.
Speaker 1: And what a lot of people think is that compassion
Speaker 1: means letting people run all over you. That's not what
Speaker 1: it means. So you want to be compassion, but you
Speaker 1: want to be stable. Now, if you are feeling judgmental,
Speaker 1: I think, take a step back, take a breath. Also,
Speaker 1: pay attention to the way that you are indoctrinating your mind. Right, So,
Speaker 1: if we're spending a lot of time on social media,
Speaker 1: if we're like spending time in echo chambers, your judgment
Speaker 1: is going to be through the roof. And oftentimes if
Speaker 1: you are judging someone else, sit down and let them
Speaker 1: add their human context to your projection. You think, this
Speaker 1: person is doing this, and they're doing this, and they're
Speaker 1: like this, and they're like this, and all women are
Speaker 1: like this, all men are like this. No, I don't
Speaker 1: know about all men or all women. But this human
Speaker 1: being is not all of those things. There is unique
Speaker 1: human being. And as you train yourself, and it ain't easy,
Speaker 1: this is where doing some emotional regulation practices and things
Speaker 1: like that not should thee bran I am and activating
Speaker 1: your para sympathetic nervous system and stuff. We have a
Speaker 1: guide to meditation. It's all about that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: But I'm sure, you're familiar with you know, alternate hostile
Speaker 1: breathing and things. So as you do those kinds of
Speaker 1: things and you like emotionally regulators you calm down, then
Speaker 1: you'll be able to do that. But that requires a
Speaker 1: lot of energy and effort. Like you're spot on, reacting
Speaker 1: is really easy. One of the most draining things. So
Speaker 1: if you look at willpower as a battery, one of
Speaker 1: the top drainers of willpower is regulating your emotions. It
Speaker 1: is the most emotionally taxing thing you can do, so
Speaker 1: it's hard, but then you'll get better at it.
Speaker 3: That's a brilliant answer. The idea that anxiety, anger, and
Speaker 3: fear narrow your viewpoint and therefore don't give you the
Speaker 3: ability to see everything else in the context around it
Speaker 3: is such a such a useful lesson to know why
Speaker 3: that's happening and how to regulate. And I'm thinking about
Speaker 3: talking about your wife. I was thinking about some of
Speaker 3: my wife. She sent me an idea recently for a
Speaker 3: new venture that she wanted to start, and in my
Speaker 3: head all the fear and anxiety went off, and I
Speaker 3: messaged back and I was like, yeah, no, but I
Speaker 3: don't think it's gonna work, Like, you know, she just
Speaker 3: shared an idea. She's like, I'm really excited about this.
Speaker 3: And my response was like, yeah, I don't think that's
Speaker 3: gonna work. And here are all the reasons why it's not
Speaker 3: gonna work, and maybe we could do it in like
Speaker 3: five years, like all this stuff. And then again, my yeah,
Speaker 3: my wife's amazing at this, and she just called me
Speaker 3: out in the most compassionate, loving way, and she was
Speaker 3: just like, hey, I was just showing something I was
Speaker 3: excited about. I wasn't saying we have to do it.
Speaker 3: I wasn't saying we need to do it. And I
Speaker 3: would have just loved for you to just at least
Speaker 3: hear my idea out right, to just give me the
Speaker 3: space to say, oh, tell me about your idea, tell
Speaker 3: me what you're excited about, rather than And it's so
Speaker 3: interesting because even though I would generally naturally do that,
Speaker 3: in that moment, my anxiety. The reason why I didn't. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm now reflecting back was my anxiety and my fear.
Speaker 3: My there wasn't any anger, but my anxiety and fear
Speaker 3: were high. Yeah, and therefore my response was not helpful.
Speaker 3: And therefore, if my wife had not been as evolved
Speaker 3: as she is, then we would have just had a
Speaker 3: full blown argument about nothing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The one thing that really shocks me is how much
Speaker 1: yogic training and psychiatry training don't prepare me to be
Speaker 1: a good husband, like being a good husband and a father. Actually,
Speaker 1: so what.
Speaker 3: It does, Preva?
Speaker 1: I mean, So that's that's the crazy thing, man, I think,
Speaker 1: Like I thought I was like, oh, I got this
Speaker 1: stuff on on lockdown, you know, like I'm yogi and
Speaker 1: I'm knocked at it, like great, it's going to be. No,
Speaker 1: it's like it's really hard. Like my wife brings out
Speaker 1: like some of my worst tendencies and I really have
Speaker 1: to work on it, and she's awesome. It's like I
Speaker 1: turn into a different person around her in like not
Speaker 1: a good way, you know. And so I think that's
Speaker 1: also healthy in a sense because she's not a patient
Speaker 1: of mine. She's not like a client or someone in
Speaker 1: a meditation class or whatever. And when I go into
Speaker 1: psychiatrist mode, it pisses her off a lot of course,
Speaker 1: like oh tell me how you feel. Yeah, So I
Speaker 1: think it's it's it's hard for everyone, myself concluded, and
Speaker 1: it's been shocking, Like how much you really have to
Speaker 1: train like I have to train myself like every single
Speaker 1: day to try to be a better husband.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I think because that's I think it's so
Speaker 3: common that the person that you love the most in
Speaker 3: the world sadly gets to see the worst of you,
Speaker 3: absolutely man, the totality of you, the three sixty degree
Speaker 3: view of you. And there's a beauty to that too,
Speaker 3: because you feel you can show it to them. You
Speaker 3: can't show that to anyone else. And obviously we don't
Speaker 3: want Again, I'm not encouraging or condoning physical verbal abuse
Speaker 3: in any way, and that's not what I mean. But
Speaker 3: there's a beauty in being able to show your full
Speaker 3: self to someone with the vulnerability of it, as long
Speaker 3: as it's not harming them. Yeah, and for them to
Speaker 3: help you with then for you to help them back.
Speaker 3: That's why I think that is that one relationship. I
Speaker 3: don't think anyone knows me better than my wife. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's the only person who knows what you're doing at
Speaker 3: six am and what you're doing at midnight, and you
Speaker 3: know everything else in between, and so it's beautiful. But
Speaker 3: I wanted to touch something with you that I wanted
Speaker 3: to talk to you about actually, because I've watched so
Speaker 3: many of the interviews and I've been today's my intention
Speaker 3: and my focus has been to really mind that spiritual
Speaker 3: clinician side in you and to find some of that
Speaker 3: maybe more etherory or stuff, which is such a deep
Speaker 3: expand as well, because I think the two compliment each
Speaker 3: other so wonderfully. In your expertise, what is that spiritual
Speaker 3: evolution that's being demanded of humanity right now? When you
Speaker 3: mentioned it earlier, like we've kind of reached the peak
Speaker 3: of our material evolution based on ego development. What is
Speaker 3: the spiritual evolution that we're being invited to?
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I think this is where, like I got
Speaker 1: to start with a big disclaimer, So I think this
Speaker 1: is where, like we're talking about spiritual evolution, which is
Speaker 1: not clear whether this stuff even exists or a scientific perspective.
Speaker 1: So I may touch on studies and things like that
Speaker 1: on neuroscience and meditation and brain changes sort of some
Speaker 1: evidence of this stuff, but there's a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: in the spiritual traditions which there's no scientific evidence for.
Speaker 1: So before I even started med school, I was in
Speaker 1: a Yeah, yet I was in a tai Chi lab,
Speaker 1: a Neuroscience ti Chi Lab at Harvard, and so we
Speaker 1: were trying to understand this like concept of chi or
Speaker 1: branna or life energy. And so the really interesting thing
Speaker 1: about this kind of stuff is that there's no scientific
Speaker 1: evidence that it exists. But when you do a practice
Speaker 1: that supposedly activates this stuff, it outperforms physical exercise like
Speaker 1: yoga for example, right or taichi. So we were studying
Speaker 1: tai chi and so there seems to be like something
Speaker 1: where like the health benefit is greater than physical exercise,
Speaker 1: but we can't really detect.
Speaker 3: What are you measuring to know that it's greater than
Speaker 3: physical exercise.
Speaker 1: I mean it depends. So you know, one of my
Speaker 1: early mentors was, uh, doctor Wong has a great paper
Speaker 1: in the New England Journal of Medicine on tai chi
Speaker 1: and arthritis. So she's just measuring the improvement of arthritis
Speaker 1: if I give tai chi, if I do exercise, and
Speaker 1: chiese superior. So I was trying to study the mechanism
Speaker 1: of that, and the mechanism is super interesting. So I
Speaker 1: was in a chronic pain lab, and the really interesting
Speaker 1: thing about chronic pain is that it locks your brain
Speaker 1: into like one part of your body so someone who
Speaker 1: has chronic pain, they're always thinking about what hurts.
Speaker 3: YEA, so true.
Speaker 1: And then what happens when we do yoga tai chi
Speaker 1: is that we're putting our body in different places to
Speaker 1: where I'm like, if I'm standing on one leg and
Speaker 1: twisting myself into a pretzel, my brain is focusing on
Speaker 1: other parts of my body and that trains my brain
Speaker 1: to move away from the hurting part. And then once
Speaker 1: I move away from the hurting part, then I feel
Speaker 1: it less and so the pain actually feels better. And
Speaker 1: this is also what we do mentally with yoga and stuff.
Speaker 1: It's like, let me move away from this ruminant of thinking,
Speaker 1: let me return my attention to the breath. So you're
Speaker 1: literally training your brain to do what you tell it to.
Speaker 3: But it's just what you said right at the beginning,
Speaker 3: which was thinking about yourself as is paying attention.
Speaker 1: Absolutely right. So the beautiful thing about yoga and tai
Speaker 1: chi is that they force you to observe yourself because
Speaker 1: once you stand on one leg, so you can do
Speaker 1: a simple like so I'll challenge everybody in your audience
Speaker 1: to just raise their arm. That's it. I just want
Speaker 1: them to raise their arm. And we're just going to
Speaker 1: continue talking. Okay, We're just going to have a conversation,
Speaker 1: and over time, what's going to happen. You don't have
Speaker 1: to do that because I want to converse with you, you
Speaker 1: won't be able to converse, right, So people are going
Speaker 1: to pay attention if they're still doing it, and then
Speaker 1: the longer we go, they're not going to be able
Speaker 1: to hear anything we're saying. We're forcing our attention over here,
Speaker 1: so the change of our attention becomes really really important. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I was talking about tai Chie and chronic pain, but
Speaker 1: you asked a question about for physical and spiritual evolution.
Speaker 1: So the first thing to understand is why have we
Speaker 1: stopped physically evolving? Because we started shaping our environment. So
Speaker 1: evolution happens in order for us to adapt to our environment.
Speaker 1: But once I start building cars, creating air conditioning, having
Speaker 1: cell phones, what we are doing is we are shaping
Speaker 1: our environment to let whatever I am now continue to exist.
Speaker 1: This way, I don't need to grow, right if I
Speaker 1: shape my environment around me. If I'm a narcissist and
Speaker 1: I surround myself by people who will say, yes, you're great,
Speaker 1: you're great, You're great, I will never need to conquer
Speaker 1: that narcissism. So I think there's a couple of things
Speaker 1: going on in terms of spiritual evolution, and those things
Speaker 1: are somewhat reliable to completely crazy. So like take this
Speaker 1: with a grain of salt. So I think the first
Speaker 1: thing is that first stage of spiritual evolution is that
Speaker 1: since we're shaping our environment in this way, our environment
Speaker 1: is making lots of changes to our brain and lots
Speaker 1: of changes to our mind. So this is why we
Speaker 1: have a mental health crisis, Like it's so weird. Right.
Speaker 1: Science is progressing. We have more neuroscience papers than ever before.
Speaker 1: We have so many fMRI labs and things like that.
Speaker 1: Our understanding of the brain in the mind is increasing,
Speaker 1: but people are getting worse. So the next stage of
Speaker 1: evolution that we need in your own life, I use
Speaker 1: the word loosely but maybe not so much, but is
Speaker 1: actually like evolving your mind, right, And I know that
Speaker 1: sounds kind of weird, like evolving your brain, like learning
Speaker 1: how to change yourself, which is what evolution is to
Speaker 1: survive and thrive in this level of the world around us.
Speaker 1: So this starts with stuff like ego. Like we talked
Speaker 1: about emotional regulation not letting these su scars or emotional
Speaker 1: baggage pile up. You have to do a ton of
Speaker 1: mental training to survive in today's world. Then there's like
Speaker 1: other weird things going on. So like the other weird
Speaker 1: stuff is like when you start talk to talk more
Speaker 1: about these spiritual traditions, so weird stuff. There's a study
Speaker 1: that was done on DMT that ninety two percent of
Speaker 1: DMT users will encounter other worldly beings. Now we have
Speaker 1: no scientific evidence of this, except I think this is
Speaker 1: kind of could be argue to scientific evidence. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying it's it's it's complete evidence. But now what we
Speaker 1: have is we have something like a telescope. If I
Speaker 1: like look through a microscope. If I look through a
Speaker 1: microscope and I see a lot of bacteria, you can't
Speaker 1: see that with the naked eye. But if I use
Speaker 1: this technology, I can see something that my normal perception
Speaker 1: cannot allow me to see. So I think what we're
Speaker 1: starting to do with meditation is this is a spiritual technology,
Speaker 1: and there are some meditation techniques that will give you
Speaker 1: insight into your past lives. That has been very helpful
Speaker 1: for some of my patients with trauma that they have
Speaker 1: this trauma that doesn't come from this life. It actually
Speaker 1: seems like it sort of comes from past life. I
Speaker 1: can go into detail. I know it's unbelievable, but there's
Speaker 1: a great researcher out of the University of Virginia who's
Speaker 1: been looking at like past life research. Occasionally some crazy
Speaker 1: scientists will get into the stuff. So I think that
Speaker 1: we are sort of being able to detect things that
Speaker 1: are kind of beyond it. And I think this is
Speaker 1: where things get kind of weird. But like, it's so strange.
Speaker 1: But if I was talking to a bunch of my
Speaker 1: friends who are neuroscientists cert neurologists, and I was asking them,
Speaker 1: what proof do we have that thoughts exist? From a
Speaker 1: scientific perspective, we have none. We can't detect thoughts right
Speaker 1: we can what is an fMRI or an EEG detect.
Speaker 1: EEG detects electrological activity in the brain, fMRI detects blood float.
Speaker 1: Neither of those things are thoughts. So it's kind of weird,
Speaker 1: but we have no proof of the existence of thoughts.
Speaker 1: So I was trying to figure out, Okay, what's going on?
Speaker 1: Then scientifically, some people think it's like imagination. I think
Speaker 1: what's going on is that there's a certain realm of
Speaker 1: human experience which we can't detect with an instrument yet.
Speaker 1: So this is subjective experience, it's consciousness, it's thinking, and
Speaker 1: so I think that we don't have a measurement of consciousness.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. This is where
Speaker 1: a lot of people, I think, disagree with me. So
Speaker 1: some people say, since we can't detect it scientifically, that
Speaker 1: means it doesn't exist. I think that human beings can
Speaker 1: observe it. It's a conserve human experience. Everyone can observe
Speaker 1: their own thinking. I think it exists. We just haven't
Speaker 1: developed the ruler for consciousness yet. So the other area
Speaker 1: of spiritual evolution is to evolve your consciousness. So to
Speaker 1: take your conscious experience, use some of these more esoteric
Speaker 1: meditation techniques, which is usually how this is done, like Kundalini,
Speaker 1: sadna and stuff like that. So as you do these
Speaker 1: weird kind of like jukras, sadhnas and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: you will start to have it's hard to describe a
Speaker 1: change in your subjective experience of the world. So as
Speaker 1: I move through the world, right, I try, but I
Speaker 1: also like start to see, Okay, bad stuff happens to me,
Speaker 1: I'm not so worried about it anymore. This is a
Speaker 1: negative garma. That's sort of the logical way to explain it,
Speaker 1: but that's not how it feels on the inside. So
Speaker 1: I recognize that there are periods of my life where
Speaker 1: like negative garments are manifesting. So I'm like, let them come,
Speaker 1: let them come, let them come, like I'm going to
Speaker 1: work through it. I have to work through this stuff.
Speaker 1: There's some kind of bad energy out there, and I
Speaker 1: realize how indefensible that is, but I really think that's
Speaker 1: what's going on. And so a lot of people are
Speaker 1: needing to evolve. They're hungry for this evolution. They're hungry
Speaker 1: for like this world around me. Even if we talk
Speaker 1: about growth and goals and ambitions, this is not satisfying.
Speaker 1: They need to grow in a different dimension. And I
Speaker 1: don't mean that like, oh there's like alternate. I mean
Speaker 1: like there is material growth, there is professional growth, there's
Speaker 1: academic growth, and there is growth just within you. To
Speaker 1: be able to experience different kinds of things, to be
Speaker 1: able to understand like how you connect to other people.
Speaker 1: That's a level of spiritual evolution. And when I work
Speaker 1: with my patients, what I oftentimes you know, will start
Speaker 1: with is like meditations to help them treat depression. But
Speaker 1: eventually it's like, Okay, if you're depressed because you know,
Speaker 1: you think you're a loser, let's see if we can
Speaker 1: cultivate an experience of cosmic connectedness. And if you have
Speaker 1: that experience, and this is also what we know from psychedelics.
Speaker 1: You can use a psychedelic that's not healing. Specifically, you
Speaker 1: can ask someone what happened to you when you were
Speaker 1: using the psychedelic If they had an ego death experience,
Speaker 1: that correlates with treatment improvement, and treatment refractory depression, that
Speaker 1: improvement that correlates with improvement in trauma. But if all
Speaker 1: you see is colors and synesthesia and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: clinical symptoms don't appear to get better. And this is
Speaker 1: what we know from our traditions, right, is like, as
Speaker 1: you have these higher senses of consciousness, the ahumgaara, the
Speaker 1: ego starts to dissolve your atma blends with the cosmic soul,
Speaker 1: and like we can sort of duplicate that in a
Speaker 1: lab now, at least the subjective experience of it. Then
Speaker 1: that gets to the question of is that subjective experience
Speaker 1: real or not. I think it's absolutely functionally useful. We
Speaker 1: can detect the change, we can detect the health benefit
Speaker 1: in it. So I think that spiritual evolution that we're
Speaker 1: seeing is like at the level of consciousness, and hopefully
Speaker 1: I've tried to explain that in a somewhat mechanistic or
Speaker 1: technical way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's fascinating.
Speaker 1: I also think this is where I get weird. I
Speaker 1: think it's weird. But if you look at the world,
Speaker 1: we're all moving this direction, like meditation is exploding. Right.
Speaker 1: We have, like you know, champions of it like you,
Speaker 1: and you've spread a lot of knowledge about it. Like
Speaker 1: something weird is going on. Where from a scientific perspective,
Speaker 1: it makes sense that we have all these like technology
Speaker 1: things and we need some kind of antidote to that.
Speaker 1: From a neurochemical perspective, I think that makes sense. But
Speaker 1: I do feel like we're all being called to meditate more.
Speaker 3: It goes back to that same point that you brought
Speaker 3: up earlier. We're all being called to do this, but
Speaker 3: then we struggle to do it, and we can't. We try.
Speaker 3: Once we let go, we know we need to work out.
Speaker 3: Everyone knows they need ten thousand steps today, we don't
Speaker 3: get ten thousand steps today. Everyone knows they need to
Speaker 3: eat better, but we still, you know, making all the
Speaker 3: phossephood companies rich and wealthy. What's the disconnect there?
Speaker 1: So I think the biggest disconnect is information doesn't change behavior. So, like,
Speaker 1: you know, I had a patient once. This was bad,
Speaker 1: But I had a patient once who was I was
Speaker 1: a medical student. And so they come in and they smoke,
Speaker 1: and I try to tell him, hey, so like smoking
Speaker 1: will give you lung cancer, smoking will give you heart disease.
Speaker 1: And he's like, yeah, doc, I know. And I was like,
Speaker 1: I'm a medical student. He's like yeah, I know, but
Speaker 1: you're a doc. Basically, it's like, yeah, Doc, I know.
Speaker 1: He's like, I'll stop, I'll quit. I promise. Comes in
Speaker 1: a month later, as you're smoking. Oh yeah, I know,
Speaker 1: I'm supposed to. It's not working. And I was like, okay,
Speaker 1: maybe he wants some medication for that, and he's like, sure, doc,
Speaker 1: give you the medication. Comes in a month later. Are
Speaker 1: you taking the macage? Not really? Okay, let's give you Like,
Speaker 1: let's try a nicotine gum, Like, let's try this, he's
Speaker 1: not doing it, not doing it, not doing it. So
Speaker 1: I was, you know, working with my preceptor, and I
Speaker 1: read some about addiction and things like that, and I realized, like,
Speaker 1: you have to you have to motivate him. And so
Speaker 1: next time he comes in, I take a different approach.
Speaker 1: I'm like, so tell me about yourself, tell me about
Speaker 1: you know, what you're excited about. And he's like, you know,
Speaker 1: I love being a father. I have three daughters, and
Speaker 1: you know, I'll die happy the moment that the last
Speaker 1: one is married because I know they're being taken care
Speaker 1: of and it's going to be such a great day day,
Speaker 1: Like my oldest daughter is married, it was awesome, Like
Speaker 1: walking her down the aisle was one of the best
Speaker 1: experiences I've ever had. And I asked him, oh, great
Speaker 1: when you're when your second daughter gets married, do you
Speaker 1: want to be wheeling an oxygen tank behind you? And
Speaker 1: do you want to be pushed in a wheelchair when
Speaker 1: your third daughter gets married? And he was like no, right,
Speaker 1: Like I said something that was so mean. I was like,
Speaker 1: that's what's going to happen if you don't stop smoking,
Speaker 1: And so that was brutal. I wouldn't recommend it. I
Speaker 1: was still learning. I was still a medical student. But
Speaker 1: I think a lot of behavioral change comes from like
Speaker 1: motivation within. You have to have a good reason to
Speaker 1: do it, not in like an intellectual like, oh this
Speaker 1: is like I'm not going to get cancer forty years
Speaker 1: from now. Your brain doesn't understan answer. This is what
Speaker 1: people don't get when I tell you, like, do this
Speaker 1: or you'll get cancer. How does your brain know what
Speaker 1: cancer feels like? So if you touch a hot pan,
Speaker 1: your brain knows they're like okay, and then it's hard
Speaker 1: to touch a hot man. But how does your brain
Speaker 1: know this like hypothetical thing. It doesn't. So information goes
Speaker 1: into this one part of our brain that really doesn't
Speaker 1: shape our behavior. What shapes our behaviors emotions. So if
Speaker 1: you think about when you get angry, then everyone's telling
Speaker 1: you not to act. Stop, slow down, don't act that
Speaker 1: we need to get angry you feel like acting. So
Speaker 1: the first thing is that we need to focus more
Speaker 1: on finding like our right like the right emotional reason,
Speaker 1: like what is the reason for your change? What really
Speaker 1: drives you to change. The more you connect with that,
Speaker 1: then the information will become useful. There's another really interesting.
Speaker 3: Man, that's awesome. Yeah, it's so great.
Speaker 1: One other thing that I would say is a lot
Speaker 1: of people don't realize. I don't know if this is sense,
Speaker 1: but there's something called ambivalence, which is when we're internally conflicted,
Speaker 1: and anytime somebody wants to change, there's a part of
Speaker 1: us that wants to change, but there's a part of
Speaker 1: us that doesn't want to do So when we want
Speaker 1: to change, I tend to think about the benefit. So
Speaker 1: in this moment, my brain is telling me like, oh, like,
Speaker 1: we want to get let's get healthy. So you're thinking
Speaker 1: about the benefit when you start, but as you start,
Speaker 1: you see the cost. So when I go to the gym,
Speaker 1: all it is is suffering. And so then what happens
Speaker 1: is like the cost gets really big in my mind
Speaker 1: because I'm reaping the cost. Now, I'm feeling the cost.
Speaker 1: Now this is really hard and the benefit is far away.
Speaker 1: So when I get started, I think about the goal,
Speaker 1: I think about the benefit, but I'm not really appreciating
Speaker 1: the costs. When I actually do it, I feel the cost,
Speaker 1: but don't think about the benefit. So one of the
Speaker 1: biggest mistakes that you can make is thinking about the
Speaker 1: benefit when you want to do something interesting. So instead
Speaker 1: what you should do is actually focus on the cost.
Speaker 1: Tell yourself, Okay, this is going to be hard, right,
Speaker 1: Like it's going to suck going to the gym and
Speaker 1: accept the cost upfront. Do I want this thing? Yes,
Speaker 1: but you need to balance it so when we have
Speaker 1: high expectations, we're going to have low follow through. And
Speaker 1: when we have low expectations, if you say to yourself, look,
Speaker 1: this is going to suck, I'm going to do it anyway.
Speaker 1: That's the approach you should take. Now a lot of
Speaker 1: people will say, like, but I don't do it anyway,
Speaker 1: And that's where you need to really dig for a reason.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that reason being the idea that emotion shifts behavior
Speaker 3: and figuring out what that emotion is is so critical.
Speaker 3: Like I'm thinking about most of my spiritual aspirations come
Speaker 3: from a deep sense of gratitude, Like that's the emotion.
Speaker 3: It's like a gratitude to my teachers, the people that
Speaker 3: have invested so much time into my life when I
Speaker 3: didn't deserve it, people that are far more enlightened and
Speaker 3: far more well read, and people have actually dedicated their
Speaker 3: life who found it? You just that I found so
Speaker 3: useful and we're so kind to give me time and energy.
Speaker 3: That's kind of what it carries from, because I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 3: and then there are certain other things which coming back
Speaker 3: to health. Yeah, knowing that hey, all my friends are
Speaker 3: getting cancer at forty or fifty years.
Speaker 1: Old or oh my god, is that actually happening?
Speaker 3: A lot of them are sadly sadly yeah, yeah, really
Speaker 3: sad truth to recognize. Oh yeah, I would like to
Speaker 3: if I can avoid that. What's that going to take?
Speaker 3: What does that mean? What do I need to shift?
Speaker 3: What do I need to you know? And so then
Speaker 3: there's certain motivator is like gratitude that are like these beautiful,
Speaker 3: wonderful feelings. And then, like you said with the oxygen
Speaker 3: tank example, and the wheelchair, there's certain emotions that are
Speaker 3: much more fear based, yeah, and worry field and both
Speaker 3: are useful for different things.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't rely on fear.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, it's a good one to get going. Yeah,
Speaker 3: good one to get going.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean I think it's it's it's so
Speaker 1: interesting I wonder if like, so this is you know,
Speaker 1: when I work with people, I find first of all
Speaker 1: that that's really common that there's some things, some emotional
Speaker 1: valances that they can really connect to that get them moving.
Speaker 1: And so usually what we try to do is connect that. Right, So,
Speaker 1: is there some way to tap into gratitude about you've
Speaker 1: been given this body and you know, like you know,
Speaker 1: like what do you owe with this body? Or something
Speaker 1: like that. So I think if you sort of think
Speaker 1: about the emotions that really get you going, and for
Speaker 1: a lot of men, like for example, it's anger, which
Speaker 1: can actually be good, right, channeling that anger oftentimes that
Speaker 1: will help people bridge the gap of if there's one
Speaker 1: thing that does get you going, can you tie that
Speaker 1: to a thing that you want to do?
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, yeah, yeah. I've always broken it down as
Speaker 3: the in the buggle to get to the modes of
Speaker 3: material nature are there, and so you have motive ignorance,
Speaker 3: motive passion, motor goodness, and pure goodness. So Thomas Rogerson Suburne,
Speaker 3: I've always seen that angers like a tum us motivat. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's like it's it's it's not ideal, but it gets
Speaker 3: you going. Yeah, absolutely, And then Rogers is more of
Speaker 3: a motive passion is kind of like having a goal,
Speaker 3: having a desire or having an ambition like I want
Speaker 3: to get a six pack, I want to be a millionaire, whatever.
Speaker 3: But then above that is goodness and pure goodness, which
Speaker 3: is more like love, gratitude, all these emotions that our
Speaker 3: overall have a much more healthier impact and have more
Speaker 3: longevity to them. Yeah, they don't die when you get there.
Speaker 1: The really interesting thing is that I think if you
Speaker 1: use satviic emotions, your material success could be way lower.
Speaker 3: Yeah for sure.
Speaker 1: Right, So as you start operating from love and as
Speaker 1: you become a little bit more detached, you may not
Speaker 1: achieve as much, but you'll be happier.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah. Whereas if you have a lot of motive
Speaker 3: passion in your life, yeah, you'd be much more successful, but.
Speaker 1: You also have ulcers.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. I really like
Speaker 3: the idea about just going back to that mental training
Speaker 3: piece around. Yeah, the emotion. What's at the root of
Speaker 3: our addiction to pornography right now, Like, what's in the
Speaker 3: root of that from a coal point of view, or
Speaker 3: at the.
Speaker 1: Root is meaninglessness. So this is what a lot of
Speaker 1: people don't realize. They think that pornography addiction is about sexuality.
Speaker 1: They think it's about being horny. They think it's about lust.
Speaker 1: It's not lust. So you know, one of the top
Speaker 1: variables is too One of the top variables for addiction
Speaker 1: to pornography is lack of purpose, lack of meaning. So
Speaker 1: when I was designing our coaching program, I was seeing
Speaker 1: that there's a lot of new problems, but they have
Speaker 1: these roots that are a little bit different. So in psychiatry,
Speaker 1: they don't teach us how to find purpose. But our
Speaker 1: initial pilot's study of one four hundred and fifty three
Speaker 1: people found a sixty eight percent increase in purpose and
Speaker 1: direction in life at twenty weeks. So that's also where
Speaker 1: you got to stick with it for a while. Doesn't
Speaker 1: happen overnight. So I think what's going on is to
Speaker 1: be like blunt about it. When you are addicted to porn,
Speaker 1: you got to have a reason to not watch. So
Speaker 1: what happens with pornography addiction. A lot of people don't
Speaker 1: realize what this looks like. They think it's like automatically
Speaker 1: associated with lust and masturbation. Oftentimes it's on the second screen.
Speaker 1: So we're seeing a big explosion of it with like
Speaker 1: work from home, people will really use it to regulate
Speaker 1: their emotions. That's really the number one reason. So if
Speaker 1: we think about sex and what it does to our brain,
Speaker 1: if I'm feeling anxious, if I'm a man biological male,
Speaker 1: and if my testosterone is intact and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: you know we will oftentimes if we get sexually activated,
Speaker 1: all of our negative emotions go away. And it's such
Speaker 1: a powerful activator. It's like the most powerful biological way
Speaker 1: to shut off your negative emotional circuitry. Happens immediately like
Speaker 1: once you get horny, right, and a lot of guys,
Speaker 1: and sorry if this is a bit vulgar, but you
Speaker 1: know we'll experience this post not clarity, and literally what
Speaker 1: happens in your brain is when these sexual circuits activate,
Speaker 1: they suppress everything else, including our risk assessment circuitry, which
Speaker 1: is why we make really bad decisions. They shut off
Speaker 1: everything else. They shut off your reasoning, they shut off
Speaker 1: your logic, they shut off your risk assessment, they shut
Speaker 1: off your anxiety, they shut off your fear. So what
Speaker 1: we're seeing is that as people become more directionless and
Speaker 1: as their capacity to handle negative emotions decreases, they get
Speaker 1: addicted to pornography because it's the most accessible biological tool
Speaker 1: that you can use and it doesn't involve you know,
Speaker 1: opiates and spending money and things like that usually.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And what are the negative effects of pornography anyway
Speaker 3: that we're seeing, because if someone's watching this and going, well,
Speaker 3: it's not that bad anyway, it switches off helps me
Speaker 3: emotionally regulate.
Speaker 1: Yes, So I think the scariest one for me is
Speaker 1: the rise of a rectile dysfunction under the age of thirty,
Speaker 1: so erectils. Yeah, yeah, so a rectiled dysfunction under the
Speaker 1: age of thirty used to be five percent, right, So
Speaker 1: as men were in society, we tend to think like
Speaker 1: as you get right, like once you have kids, once
Speaker 1: you have grandkids, like that. It doesn't work the way
Speaker 1: it used to do, right, But actually, what we're starting
Speaker 1: to see is the rate some studies suggest a rate
Speaker 1: of twenty percent of people under the age of thirty
Speaker 1: boys men will have rectile disfunction. And the reason that
Speaker 1: happens it's kind of also a little bit of vulgar,
Speaker 1: but it's medical. So the hand grip strength, the PSI
Speaker 1: the pounds per square inch of your hand can be
Speaker 1: like one twenty one thirty. The vagina has a PSI
Speaker 1: of like fifteen to thirty. So literally, what the way
Speaker 1: you define a rectile dysfunction is it is the inability
Speaker 1: to maintain erection until the completion of the sexual act.
Speaker 1: So what we're seeing is that when boys start using
Speaker 1: pornography and masturbating at a very young age without lubrication
Speaker 1: and stuff like that, their body gets trained for a
Speaker 1: certain kind of stimulus in order to complete the sexual act.
Speaker 1: And when they engage in a sexual relationship there penis
Speaker 1: doesn't know how to handle like it just just just
Speaker 1: not enough. And then eventually they'll go at it. They'll
Speaker 1: go at it, they'll go at it, they'll lose the erection,
Speaker 1: which is physiologic, and then what happens is we have
Speaker 1: all kinds of like shame associated with it, you know,
Speaker 1: and then like once the shame kicks in, that shame
Speaker 1: can be so powerful that the sexual drive cannot shut
Speaker 1: that down, and then you have anxiety around sex and
Speaker 1: things like that, and it can really mess up people's relationships.
Speaker 3: What's the mental training for someone who's saying, Okay, well
Speaker 3: I want to disconnect from porn, I want to detach,
Speaker 3: but I'm not going to find purpose tomorrow. So what's
Speaker 3: the stop gap.
Speaker 1: There is no stop gap, and you have to stop
Speaker 1: thinking about things happening tomorrow. Honestly, that's where you start.
Speaker 1: So you know, our approach to pornography has three major pillars,
Speaker 1: and I think you have to tackle all three. So
Speaker 1: the first is like a very standard addiction oriented structure,
Speaker 1: where like if you're trying to quit alcohol, you got
Speaker 1: to stop going to bars. So from a structural standpoint,
Speaker 1: what I recommend everyone is that they, you know, log
Speaker 1: out of all their devices, use only one device for pornography,
Speaker 1: and restrict your pornography used to like one or two
Speaker 1: hours of the day, so it has to like stop
Speaker 1: infecting every part of your life. That's the first part
Speaker 1: we're going to kind of restrict it. The second thing
Speaker 1: is emotional regulation. So as long as your brain requires
Speaker 1: pornography to manage your emotional your emotions, it's you're never
Speaker 1: going to be able to quit.
Speaker 3: So you need to.
Speaker 1: Develop alternate skills to manage your emotions. These can be
Speaker 1: things like meditation practices, even going for a walk, stuff
Speaker 1: like that. One thing that I also really recommend to
Speaker 1: people is that they give themselves time to think before
Speaker 1: before they go to sleep, So spend an hour of
Speaker 1: idle time. I love pacing. We need a lot of
Speaker 1: time to process emotions. You can also do things like
Speaker 1: dream journals. So dreams are one of the main ways
Speaker 1: that our brain processes emotions. So that emotional regulation is
Speaker 1: number two in the The third thing is finding meaning
Speaker 1: or purpose. So watch more episodes of On Purpose with
Speaker 1: Jay Shetty. So as you develop that purpose, You're right,
Speaker 1: it's not going to happen overnight. We see that it
Speaker 1: takes about twenty weeks. That's when people weeks.
Speaker 3: Is amazing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it's focused.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: So what we did is we took some of these
Speaker 1: like clinical things that used to be used to treat depression,
Speaker 1: and we shift those the same conversational techniques exploratory techniques
Speaker 1: to finding something like purpose. And that works incredibly well.
Speaker 1: And then we can go into the details of you
Speaker 1: know what that involves.
Speaker 3: I was going to ask you that that was my
Speaker 3: next question. How do you how do you define purpose?
Speaker 3: What are you looking at in the twenty weeks? What
Speaker 3: are you trying to get people?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: So, so the funny thing about purpose is like, it's
Speaker 1: not what everyone thinks it is. So the way you
Speaker 1: find purpose is like really kind of counterintuitive. So it
Speaker 1: actually involves, Actually I don't know what purpose is. Maybe
Speaker 1: we can ask you, But what we know is what
Speaker 1: are the scientific mechanisms. So if I take someone who
Speaker 1: has no purpose in life, and I take someone who
Speaker 1: has purpose in life, what do they do differently? Yes,
Speaker 1: that's what we try to change. So the first thing
Speaker 1: is self direction. So people, as long as you, as
Speaker 1: long as life is happening to you and you are
Speaker 1: not making choices, if you are forced to make choices,
Speaker 1: you will feel out of direction. So this is kind
Speaker 1: of counterintuitive, but the first thing I tell people to
Speaker 1: do is start making choices. And then the first question
Speaker 1: that they asked me is how do I know what's
Speaker 1: right or wrong? That's not actually doesn't matter. What matters
Speaker 1: in your brain is that you choose. And the whole
Speaker 1: point this is really insidious. If you think about right
Speaker 1: or wrong, if you figure out right or wrong, you're
Speaker 1: not making the choice. The world tells you this is
Speaker 1: right and this is wrong. That's the world making the
Speaker 1: choice for you. This is right and this is wrong.
Speaker 1: So forget about right or wrong and just make a choice.
Speaker 1: I don't care what it is. Choose Macha instead, of coffee.
Speaker 1: Put your left shoe on first instead of your right shoe.
Speaker 1: Start brushing with your left teet or your left hand.
Speaker 1: So you need to start making choices. There's a beautiful
Speaker 1: element about anxiety that we can talk about there. It'll
Speaker 1: also like drastically help your anxiety. Second thing that you
Speaker 1: need to do is stretch your capacity. So we feel
Speaker 1: like we have purpose in life because it's not purpose,
Speaker 1: but this is like literally what the scientific makeup of
Speaker 1: purpose is stretching your capacity. So we always feel overwhelmed.
Speaker 1: I don't want to do it. I want to do
Speaker 1: the bare minimum. We're a society of people who do
Speaker 1: the bare minimum. We're a society of people who companies
Speaker 1: use chat, GPT, and AI to review applications. Now everyone
Speaker 1: is using AI to apply for jobs. It's just AI
Speaker 1: talking to AI. We're trying to do as little as possible,
Speaker 1: and we're seeing an epidemic of purposelessness. We're seeing an
Speaker 1: epidemic of pornography use. But that's because in your brain,
Speaker 1: these two things are connected. The moment you stretch your capacities.
Speaker 1: Once again, it doesn't matter what you're doing. If you
Speaker 1: swim ten ten laps, swim eleven if you are wake
Speaker 1: up at seven at seven o'clock every day, wake up
Speaker 1: at six point fifty nine. This is the beautiful thing.
Speaker 1: The content of what you do is completely irrel not
Speaker 1: completely that's not wrong, that's wrong. But the key thing
Speaker 1: is that you stretch your capacities. I didn't think I
Speaker 1: was capable of this. You don't even have to succeed,
Speaker 1: you just have to stretch it. I didn't think I
Speaker 1: could do this. Turns out I was wrong. At least
Speaker 1: I tried. When you start thinking in this way, right
Speaker 1: when I ask someone, you know, if I like a
Speaker 1: quick thought experiment, we're always afraid of giving it all
Speaker 1: or all in failing. But when you give it, you're all.
Speaker 1: How do you usually feel? You can usually sleep at
Speaker 1: night as long as some of this stuff like ego
Speaker 1: and stuff doesn't get in the way. Right, at least
Speaker 1: I tried my best. That can give you a good sense.
Speaker 1: That's a hard lesson I learned in med school because
Speaker 1: or in residencies like you know, what helps me sleep
Speaker 1: at night is not whether the patient lives or dies.
Speaker 1: Did I give it my all? Did I do everything
Speaker 1: within my power to try to help this person? And
Speaker 1: if I did the rest is out of my hands. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: so you have to stretch your capacities. The third thing,
Speaker 1: and this is the hardest one, relatedness, So people have
Speaker 1: to be able to see you and respond to the
Speaker 1: real you. It doesn't necessarily have to be positive. A
Speaker 1: certain amount of acceptedness accepting that person is good, but
Speaker 1: other people has to be able to see who you are.
Speaker 1: And that's really hard because people don't have the attention
Speaker 1: for that. Everyone's on their cell phones. So I think
Speaker 1: if you do, if you cultivate these three things, your
Speaker 1: sense of purpose will increase in life.
Speaker 3: That's fresh. I like that. I like that you've used
Speaker 3: what you'd see is the difference between a purposeful person
Speaker 3: and someone who doesn't have purpose to find to what
Speaker 3: paths to travel?
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, I think the really confusing thing is when
Speaker 1: people think about purpose, Like if I were to ask you, Jay,
Speaker 1: what is your purpose? How would you answer that?
Speaker 3: If you ask me what is my purpose? Yeah? So
Speaker 3: my purpose would be to make ancient wisdom accessible, relevant
Speaker 3: and practical for the modern birth.
Speaker 1: Perfect right, So that's what most people think it is.
Speaker 1: They think it's like this thing, yeah for sure, right,
Speaker 1: But this is what I want people to understand if
Speaker 1: you really think about it, how do you know that
Speaker 1: you have purpose or you don't have purpose?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not it's.
Speaker 1: An internal feeling. Like I wake up every day, Like
Speaker 1: my guess is you wake up and you're like, I
Speaker 1: have purpose. Yes, it's an internal feeling. So how do
Speaker 1: we cultivate that internal feeling with these three things?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I love that. I think it's beautiful. I really
Speaker 3: really like those three things, and they come closely to
Speaker 3: some of the things I've thought about before as well,
Speaker 3: in I think there's a need, and your people get
Speaker 3: it because they're part of your community. But I think
Speaker 3: belonging is such a first step in purpose. Like even
Speaker 3: you know, recently, Air I took out pickleball, and I
Speaker 3: feel like I'm part of the La pickleball scene and
Speaker 3: I'll just walk up to a court and I can
Speaker 3: just go play with anyone. You don't have to know
Speaker 3: each other's names. I don't know what job they have,
Speaker 3: they don't know what I do, and you're playing pickaball together.
Speaker 3: And there's a sense of belonging which makes me feel
Speaker 3: automatically link to something bigger than me. So belonging isn't
Speaker 3: a sense of I have friends. Belonging is I feel
Speaker 3: connected to something that is beyond me and beyond this person,
Speaker 3: and I think that's such a part of purpose. The
Speaker 3: second one, which is aligns with what you're saying to me,
Speaker 3: is learning. But really it's what you're saying, it's that
Speaker 3: challenge to stretch my capability to try something new every day.
Speaker 3: That idea of curiosity is so key to it, as
Speaker 3: well as a habit that this one's really important for me.
Speaker 3: It's people who feel independently useful. So now you're part
Speaker 3: of this bigger thing, but you know what you do.
Speaker 3: So I'm the guy who brings the pickleballs, I'm the
Speaker 3: guy who puts the net out right, like I have
Speaker 3: a use that is unique to me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So you know what's really fascinating is I love
Speaker 1: And I'm amazed that my guess is that you did not, like,
Speaker 1: read a bunch of scientific literature to come up with
Speaker 1: these things.
Speaker 3: I've read enough, but I didn't use it to But
Speaker 3: I'm definitely I'm always reading.
Speaker 1: I know you're you're quite well read and stuff.
Speaker 3: I enjoy reading it, you know, socie.
Speaker 1: But it's not like you're like, let me read a
Speaker 1: thousand papers. That's how I came up with your right.
Speaker 1: And so what I think is really beautiful is your
Speaker 1: things can be mapped onto my things. And what the
Speaker 1: data shows your independent exploration. Sure you're reading a lot,
Speaker 1: you are, you keep up with signs and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: but you're looking at your experience and you have belonging
Speaker 1: this which is correlated with relatedness.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: You have this curiosity which causes you to stretch. You
Speaker 1: have this independent usefulness which is autonomy, which is making choices.
Speaker 1: I'm going to go ahead, no one needs to ask me,
Speaker 1: and you find a utility like you know. And so
Speaker 1: I think it's really beautiful, Like like, I love hearing
Speaker 1: that because that shows me that if people pay attention right,
Speaker 1: if they do what you did, which not to devalue
Speaker 1: what you did, but I think is easier than what
Speaker 1: I did. You don't have to read a thousand papers
Speaker 1: on purpose to understand what it is right. You can
Speaker 1: pay it tension to yourself. You can do some amount
Speaker 1: of reading. You can listen to a few podcasts and
Speaker 1: that is enough for you to find the right answers.
Speaker 1: And it's crazy because you hit all three. You didn't
Speaker 1: come up with four. You didn't come up with two.
Speaker 1: You came up with three, and it's all the same buckets.
Speaker 1: Really amazing. I have two more, really okay, So that's
Speaker 1: actually really cool too, because if you've got two more,
Speaker 1: I wonder if we're missing something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I'm not, and I'm not saying you are.
Speaker 3: This is just my own refinra.
Speaker 1: No no no, but I mean I would bat money we are,
Speaker 1: so tell me what. Okay.
Speaker 3: So having a sense of give back, having a sense
Speaker 3: of being involved in other people's well being, which goes
Speaker 3: back to you've it's really beautiful because I've heard that
Speaker 3: idea before, but not as strongly and concretely. This idea
Speaker 3: of you explaining what it means to not think about
Speaker 3: yourself today is just like really cut through for me,
Speaker 3: which is so powerful because it's been explained in a
Speaker 3: clinical way, I think. And that's what that service element is.
Speaker 3: It's like all those first things were still about in
Speaker 3: once belonging was beyond you is think about something bigger
Speaker 3: than you. But this one's a key part. It's like,
Speaker 3: how are you doing things for things which are not
Speaker 3: about you. I'm not thinking about how I'm useful, I'm
Speaker 3: not thinking about this I'm trying to think about someone else,
Speaker 3: so service. And then the fifth one comes back to
Speaker 3: our point earlier on detachment, which is surrender. I use
Speaker 3: the word surrender because it falls into my five acronym
Speaker 3: that I have, But the last is surrender because there's
Speaker 3: such a need for ultimately that detachment from what you
Speaker 3: just so beautifully said that at the end of the day,
Speaker 3: I can't decide whether I'm going to save someone's life
Speaker 3: or not. The only thing I can be satisfied is
Speaker 3: I gave it my all, and that, to me is
Speaker 3: what surrender really is. The ability to say I did
Speaker 3: everything and now I'm holding my hands up and I'm
Speaker 3: living with the results because I can't control what's going
Speaker 3: on exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think there's plenty of science for your
Speaker 1: last two. I think the interesting thing is the scientific
Speaker 1: literature doesn't thus far has not tied that to the
Speaker 1: concept of purpose. Yeah, but I think, especially like you know,
Speaker 1: service is really interesting. There's a study that found multiple
Speaker 1: studies that found that people who suffer from major depressive
Speaker 1: disorder and are depressed, one of the best things they
Speaker 1: can do to improve their depression is help other people.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, yes, yeah, right.
Speaker 1: So there's something really special about being a part of
Speaker 1: a community. Giving back in some way has profound positive
Speaker 1: effects on our brand.
Speaker 3: It's so great for self esteem. It affects all the
Speaker 3: I think we used to argue this stupid debate over
Speaker 3: can something ever truly be selfless service? Because you're doing
Speaker 3: it for yourself and imagine not interested in that question.
Speaker 3: It's more interesting to me the fact that if you
Speaker 3: were useful, you'd feel more useful where you'd be more
Speaker 3: useful and you do more for others, and that is
Speaker 3: a positive cycle for people who have depression or a
Speaker 3: struggling with feelings of not being worthy enough or not
Speaker 3: mattering that idea. When you look at it through suicide,
Speaker 3: it's like I didn't matter anymore. I didn't feel like
Speaker 3: I was needed anymore.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, you know.
Speaker 3: It's like you don't want people to go through those
Speaker 3: feelings and emotions.
Speaker 1: There's a I love what you said, and let me
Speaker 1: know if we're like, no, I love it. Pickleball is
Speaker 1: going back and forth too much. But you know, I
Speaker 1: love this concept of service because I think many of
Speaker 1: the questions you asked me, I think this is the answer.
Speaker 1: So when you engage in service that dissolves your ego.
Speaker 1: So if people are wondering, how can I stop caring
Speaker 1: about other people? Give yourself in service, right, don't do
Speaker 1: what they want. That's not really service. Service is not
Speaker 1: giving someone that they want. It is doing what you
Speaker 1: feel like for the benefit of others. It comes from you,
Speaker 1: and you're saying like, this isn't for me, this is
Speaker 1: for other people. And if you kind of think about
Speaker 1: how do I stop caring about what other people think?
Speaker 1: That is a selfish selflessness, right. I'm trying to make
Speaker 1: other people happy so that they'll leave me alone, they'll
Speaker 1: treat me with respect, they'll tell me I'm great. That's
Speaker 1: actually selfish. But service is giving without expectation, giving, and
Speaker 1: that's the whole point, right, And so I think service
Speaker 1: is a beautiful way to decrease the humguard because it's
Speaker 1: not about me anymore. And there's a really interesting neuroscience
Speaker 1: to this, which is literally, when you were engaged in service,
Speaker 1: the minutes that your brain are not thinking about you increases.
Speaker 1: And for so much of our life, social media and
Speaker 1: all this kind of stuff, we are constantly thinking about ourselves.
Speaker 1: So literally, to spend time to give your break or
Speaker 1: your brain. A break from thinking about you, worrying about you,
Speaker 1: just focusing on somebody else is profoundly helpful for your
Speaker 1: default mode network and your ego.
Speaker 3: Doctor K, I could talk to you vow is I'm
Speaker 3: going to need to book you in again. This is
Speaker 3: so much fun and we didn't even There's so many
Speaker 3: things we can talk about. But we end every own
Speaker 3: purpose interview with a final five at these questions have
Speaker 3: to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum. Okay,
Speaker 3: So doctor K thes a you a final five.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's do it.
Speaker 3: Question number one is what is the best advice You've
Speaker 3: ever heard or received or given?
Speaker 1: Best advice I've ever heard or received or given? Can
Speaker 1: we go to the second one? Well, I think about that.
Speaker 3: The second one's harder. Usually, what is the worst advice
Speaker 3: you've ever heard, received, or given?
Speaker 1: The thing that's top mind for me right now is
Speaker 1: be yourself.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's what I agree. It's fully bad advice. I'm
Speaker 3: so glad you said that, because I was on tour
Speaker 3: earlier this year and I literally said downstage, I was like,
Speaker 3: if anyone ever tells you to be yourself, it is
Speaker 3: the worst advice over That makes me happy. Question number three,
Speaker 3: what's something that you used to believe to be true
Speaker 3: that you don't anymore.
Speaker 1: I'm great, it's a good answer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a great answer.
Speaker 1: I'm really not That's how I.
Speaker 3: Can relate to I'll put my hand up with that.
Speaker 3: That's a great answer. Question number four, what's something that
Speaker 3: other people don't agree with you on but you'd fight
Speaker 3: for till the end.
Speaker 1: I don't know that I would fight for this, But
Speaker 1: I think the biggest thing is, like some of my like,
Speaker 1: I think that this consciousness stuff is real. I think
Speaker 1: there's a whole dimension of like human existence that science
Speaker 1: cannot I get one answer, one word, but I think
Speaker 1: that there is a whole I think that I believe
Speaker 1: there's a layer of reality that can only be experienced subjectively.
Speaker 3: Great answer. Fifth and final question. If you could be
Speaker 3: asked this every guest has ever been on the show.
Speaker 3: If you could create one law that everyone in the
Speaker 3: world had to follow, what would it be.
Speaker 1: I would never do that, I really wouldn't.
Speaker 3: I'll edit for you. If you could create one habit
Speaker 3: that you wish everyone in the world would follow, what
Speaker 3: would it be.
Speaker 1: I understand you're trying to help me out here. But
Speaker 1: you know, answer, I am, I am so a verse
Speaker 1: to doing one thing forever. Everyone interesting, right, Like, I
Speaker 1: just don't think like yeah interesting, and I think I
Speaker 1: really think like, I mean, I've learned this the hard way.
Speaker 1: The moment I assume that anyone who walks in my
Speaker 1: office is even a little bit overlapping with someone else
Speaker 1: is the moment that the great answer?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I love that. Do you want to give the
Speaker 3: best advice again?
Speaker 1: Yeah? So best advice I would give is focus more
Speaker 1: on what is happening and less on what you're doing.
Speaker 3: Focus more on what is happening and less on what
Speaker 3: you're doing. Yeah, I like that. Observe, observe, focus on
Speaker 3: the observation, focus on the experience.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, just to explain a little bit, right, touched it. So,
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people don't realize what the
Speaker 1: consequences of their actions are. So just to give you
Speaker 1: a really simple example, we have a bunch of you know,
Speaker 1: kids that are on iPads right now, and so a
Speaker 1: lot of times what parents don't realize is, like, you know,
Speaker 1: when your kid throws a temper tantrum and you give
Speaker 1: them the iPad to calm them down, you're just training
Speaker 1: them to throw a temper tantrum. For kids that are
Speaker 1: slightly older, a lot of parents will be like, hey,
Speaker 1: come down for dinner, Come down for dinner, Come down
Speaker 1: for dinner. Kid doesn't show up for dinner, they're fifteen
Speaker 1: minutes late. You go up there, you unplug the PlayStation,
Speaker 1: and you're like, no PlayStation for a month. So what
Speaker 1: you're actually training your child to do is ignore your
Speaker 1: words and until you unplug the PlayStation. Does that kind
Speaker 1: of make sense. Yeah, So like the first six times
Speaker 1: you say something, you're not reinforcing that at all, right,
Speaker 1: So you're actually training them to ignore what you say,
Speaker 1: which is why you have to cont and then you
Speaker 1: have to take a drastic action to get them to listen.
Speaker 1: And parents feel insane because now I'm having to go
Speaker 1: up and yell at you all the time in order
Speaker 1: to get you do to anything. That's because when you
Speaker 1: speak gently, there is no consequence. So tie the consequence
Speaker 1: to the gentle, not the consequence to the yelling, because
Speaker 1: if you tie the consequence to the yelling, you'll have
Speaker 1: to yell again. That's the way they they'll get trained.
Speaker 1: So pay attention to what is happening, not what you're doing.
Speaker 3: That's a great explanation. I love that the book is
Speaker 3: called how to Raise a Healthy Gamer and Power Struggles,
Speaker 3: break bad screen habits, and transform your relationship with the kids.
Speaker 3: Doctor K. Subscribe on YouTube as well. If you don't
Speaker 3: subscribe to doctor K channel already, Doctor K, You're gonna
Speaker 3: have to come back and do it a bunch of
Speaker 3: more episodes because we didn't even talk about kids today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we didn't talk about kids, and I still want
Speaker 1: to hear so much. I mean, it's it's amazing. You know,
Speaker 1: your background with the GETA and stuff like that, so
Speaker 1: I'm super curious because you seem super grounded in that
Speaker 1: and and I haven't even read the whole thing, so
Speaker 1: I want to learn about that.
Speaker 3: More than have you to. Now we know each other,
Speaker 3: so yeah, we should connect offline as well.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, dude.
Speaker 3: Yeah, such a pleasure. Man, You're amazing. If you love
Speaker 3: this episode, you'll love my interview with doctor Gabo Matte
Speaker 3: on understanding your trauma and how to heal emotional wounds
Speaker 3: to start moving on from the past. Everything in nature
Speaker 3: grows only where it's vulnerable, So a tree doesn't grow
Speaker 3: where it's hard and thick does it. It goes where
Speaker 3: it's soft and green and vulnerable.