#298: Dr. Gabor Mate - New Paradigms, Ayahuasca, and Redefining Addiction

Dr. Gabor Maté (@DrGaborMate https://twitter.com/drgabormate) is a physician who specializes in neurology, psychiatry, and psychology. He's well known for studying and treating addiction. Dr. Maté has written several books, including the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/155643880X/offsitoftimfe-20. His work has been published internationally in 20 languages, and he's received the Hubert Evans Prize for Literary Non-Fiction; an Honorary Degree (Law) from the University of Northern British Columbia; an Outstanding Alumnus Award from Simon Fraser University; and the 2012 Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award from Mothers Against Teen Violence. He is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Criminology, Simon Fraser University. I've wanted to invite Dr. Maté to this podcast for a while because he is not only an expert in the pathologies of addiction, but he's experimented with -- and used successfully -- tools that are perhaps outside the realm of traditional psychiatry. He is also a co-founder, along with Vicky Dulai, of Compassion for Addiction https://www.compassion4addiction.org/, a group that advocates for a new way to understand and treat addiction. Enjoy! This podcast is brought to you by Ascent Protein https://www.ascentprotein.com/tim, the only US-based company that offers native proteins — both whey and micellar casein — directly to the consumer for improved muscle health and performance. Because the product is sourced from Ascent’s parent company, Leprino Foods — the largest producer of mozzarella cheese in the world — it’s entirely free of artificial ingredients and completely bypasses the bleaching process common to most other whey products on the market. 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• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  No, this is inappropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:03Tim Ferriss?

  subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink A G one, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 1:22Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job each and every episode to interview world-class performers, world-class experts from any range of disciplines to tease out the habits, routines, lessons, approaches, etc. that you can use. This episode features Dr. Gabor Maté. You can find him at drgabormate, G A B O R M A T E dot com, also on Facebook, forward slash Dr. Gabor Maté. Gabor is a physician who specializes in neurology, psychiatry, and psychology. He is well-known for his study and treatment of addiction. Dr. Maté has written several bestselling books, including the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, subtitle, Close

• 2:07Tim Ferriss?

  Encounters with Addiction. His works have Been published internationally in 20 languages. Dr. Mate has received the Hubert Evans Nonfiction Prize, an honorary degree from the University of Northern British Columbia, and the 2012 Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award for Mothers Against Teen Violence. He's an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Criminology at Simon Fraser University. And I've wanted to have him on the podcast for some time now because he is not only an expert in the so-called pathologies of addiction, but looks at it very, very differently, and also has experimented and used successfully tools that are perhaps outside the realm

• 2:48Tim Ferriss?

  of traditional psychiatry, including, for instance, the psychedelic brew known as ayahuasca. He is also a co-founder, along with Vicky Dulai, of Compassion for Addiction, which is an organization that advocates for a new way to understand and treat addiction. Their mission is to raise awareness and become a resource for organizations, people, and treatment modalities that are working to increase compassion and reduce the stigma around addiction. We get into that in our conversation. We also talk about how, even though you might not consider yourself an addict, if we look at compulsive behaviors, thought patterns, and so on, there are, of course, many shared similarities and shared treatments. Compassion for Addiction, and you can learn more about that at compassionfor, the number

• 3:33Tim Ferriss?

  four, addiction.org, will provide education and training to those working on the front lines of treating people suffering with addiction. This population includes counselors, social workers, nurses, psychologists, and doctors. Check that out, compassionfor, the number four, addiction.org. I really enjoyed this conversation. It took place in Austin, Texas, at the LZR facility, which was and is perhaps also known as the La Zona Rosa, and it was courtesy of the help of John Price. So, John, thank you very much for letting us use your beautiful facility, and you guys can learn more about that facility. Check it out at LZRATX.com.

• 4:20Tim Ferriss?

  It's lzeratx.com. They have an incredible space for venues related to music, for events. They have any number of different rooms and locations where you can shoot film and perform music, interviews, et cetera. So take a look, check them out, and hope that helps you out, John. lzeratx.com. Without further ado, let us get to Dr. Gabor Maté.

• 4:48Tim Ferriss?

  Gabor, welcome to the show.

• 4:49Gabor Maté?

  Tim, it's a great pleasure to be here. Thank you.

• 4:51Tim Ferriss?

  I have been looking forward to this conversation for a really long time, and I wanted to make an attempt at least to do it right. So I wanted to have the video and the audio and everything else, because I think the work you're doing is very important. And we're going to cover a lot of ground, which I'm very excited to cover, because I think it's a real contribution, and you have tools and frameworks can really help people. I thought we might start with books. And the reason I thought that could be a fun place to start, my audience loves books, number one, but number two, in Tribe of Mentors, the last book that I wrote, or that my guest wrote, you were featured. And I thought that many of the books you mentioned paint a picture of your life experience and also your life's

• 5:35Tim Ferriss?

  work in many ways. And we can go in any particular order, but I thought maybe it would make sense to start with The Scourge of the Swastika. And that was one that you mentioned had had an impact on you, or that perhaps you recommended on occasion. Why is that?

• 5:54Gabor Maté?

  Well, so this has to do with my family's history. I grew up, was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1944, in January, two months before the Germans occupied the country. And Hungary at that time was the only country in Eastern Europe where the Jewish population had not been annihilated. And now it was our turn. So I was two months of age.

• 6:15Gabor Maté?

  The day after the German army marched into Budapest, my mother phoned the pediatrician to say, "Would you please come and see Gabor? Of course, he's crying all the time." And the pediatrician said, "Of course, I will come, but I should tell you, all my Jewish babies were crying." And of course, that's the infants picking up on their mother's terror and stress. And that's how I spent the first year of my life, which has had a huge impact on my development and my lifelong struggles with depression, ADHD, self shame, and other issues. Jumping ahead now, I knew very little about that history. My parents didn't say much about it as I was growing up.

• 6:59Gabor Maté?

  I knew my grandparents had been killed in Auschwitz. I knew my father had been in forced labor, and I never saw him for a year and a half. But beyond that, I knew not much about the details. Until I was about nine or 10, maybe 11 years old, and there was a book on my parents' shelf in Budapest with the title "The Scourge of the Sostika", which was written by a British civil servant and a member of the House of Lords. This man had served at the British Army, and he was the first book, published in the 50s, that detailed the Nazi crimes. And I climbed up on a chair, took down the book, when I was, I think, 10 or 11, began to read it, saw photographs of the horrors of the concentration camps

• 7:42Gabor Maté?

  and the extermination details in Eastern Europe. And all of a sudden, I swooned, because I got what happened to my family. And that question of how can people do such things to other human beings would strike me every day. And almost every day, this thought occurred to me for years and years and years. And almost every day, I almost got dizzy with the question. So why people suffer? And why people make other people suffer? And what is the origin of all that? Has been a motivating question in my life. So that's why that book was so important to me.

• 8:18Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you.

• 8:19Gabor Maté?

  And I have to say that, you know, my life's work has been motivated by that question. As a medical doctor, I'm always looking at, well, what is it that makes people be the way they are? Why do we become cruel? Why do we become victims? Why do we become perpetrators? What drives us? What kind of insanity covers our basic human nature, which I believe to be good and positive? And what happens to us?

• 8:52Tim Ferriss?

  We're gonna spend a lot of time in that territory, for sure.

• 8:55Gabor Maté?

  Okay.

• 8:56Tim Ferriss?

  So you mentioned sanity or insanity. I'm not sure if that's a good segue to Don Quixote, but I'll let you choose the next one. So there are a few that came up, and you described them in brief in the pages of the book, but, for instance, the background you just gave me was much more in-depth. So we have a few, and these are gonna strike folks as eclectic. Winnie the Pooh, The Dhammapada, The Drama of the Gifted Child, and Don Quixote. Which one of those would you like to explain next?

• 9:25Gabor Maté?

  Let's go with Winnie the Pooh.

• 9:26Tim Ferriss?

  Let's go with Winnie the Pooh.

• 9:27Gabor Maté?

  Yeah. So that was one of the seminal books of my childhood, and my parents would have read to me long before I even knew how to read. The Hungarian title is Mitzi Mozko, and it was translated-

• 9:39Tim Ferriss?

  Mitzi Mosko.

• 9:39Gabor Maté?

  Mitzi Mozko, Mitzi the Bear. And the translator is a great Hungarian humorist. So if anything, the Hungarian book is even funnier than the original English, which is not something one usually says about translations. But what struck me about Pooh, of course, was, number one, that there was this bear of little brains who was somehow so much wiser than everybody else. So fundamentally, he found a peace inside, despite the fact that his intellect is just under-functioning.

• 10:11Gabor Maté?

  Number one. Number two, there was this relationship with the little boy, Christopher Robin.

• 10:20Gabor Maté?

  And there's a passage towards the end of the book where Christopher Robin, I don't even know the real story, in fact, there's a movie about it right now. But Christopher Robin's father, A.A. Melon, was a writer, and he bought these toys for his son to make stories about them. And Christopher Robin actually suffered because he was secondary to his father's career. They did not have a good relationship. So these characters that the father made up kind of dominated and squeezed out Christopher Robin's own life. And he himself became a bookseller later on in his life and he wrote about his autobiography. So there's something about the dysfunctionality in father-son relationship.

• 11:04Gabor Maté?

  But in the book, Christopher is playing with his toys and then he starts to grow up and he has to go to school. And he won't be able to play with his toys anymore. And at the very end of the book, there's a passage where, the book ends with, "But wherever they go in the enchanted forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing together." And that was just bringing tears to my eyes for decades upon decades upon decades. Until recently, I had an experience, actually a psychedelic experience, when I realized that there's nothing to mourn because I'm both the bear and the little boy.

• 11:46Gabor Maté?

  And I always will be playing, that nothing is lost. But when I read that book, there was a sense of loss. When I read that passage, there was something's being lost. Childhood innocence is being lost, playfulness is being lost, which resonated with my own childhood because I did lose innocence and playfulness very early in life. So both for the fun and the humor, then of course there's Eeyore, for whom everything always goes badly. And there's a part of me that's totally Eeyore, always expecting the worst and "Nothing will ever work out for me and never mind, leave me alone, I'm okay with my own suffering." You know, that sort of determined victim attitude. That was also very much germane to my inner experience. So that book just spoke to me and made me laugh, and it still does.

• 12:30Gabor Maté?

  It's one of the funniest books ever written and one of the wisest as well.

• 12:35Tim Ferriss?

  I need to, I've only, I'm ashamed to say this, but I've only seen the cartoon. So I know, I know.

• 12:42Gabor Maté?

  Well, listen, listen, one of the sins that Walt Disney is gonna be burning in hell for the rest of existence is what he did with those stories. Cause he Disneyfied them.

• 12:52Tim Ferriss?

  Disneyfied them, yeah.

• 12:53Gabor Maté?

  You gotta read the original.

• 12:54Tim Ferriss?

  I need to read the original.

• 12:55Gabor Maté?

  And you would laugh your head off.

• 12:57Tim Ferriss?

  Alright, I'm in, I'm in. I wish I spoke Hungarian so I could read the translation.

• 13:03Tim Ferriss?

  Which of these would you like to, and we can certainly touch on other books, but, so we have three, three remaining on my list. Dhammapada, The Drama of the Gifted Child, and Don Quixote.

• 13:13Gabor Maté?

  Well, let's go to The Drama of the Gifted Child. So The Drama of the Gifted Child is by a Swiss, German Jewish Swiss psychotherapist named Alice Miller, who was for three decades a psychoanalyst. But she realized that the Freudian psychoanalytic method wasn't helping anybody get better because it ignored trauma. So The Drama of the Gifted Child, the German title of which was Prisoners of Childhood, was really all about the fact that stuff happens to us as children, negative things happen, then we adapt to those things by taking on certain defensive ways of being, and then we leave the rest of our lives from those defensive modes.

• 13:58Gabor Maté?

  So we're not actually experiencing the present, we're constantly reliving the past from a perspective that we acquired when we were helpless and vulnerable children. And when she says the gifted child, she means the sensitive child. So the more sensitive the child is, the more he or she feels the pain and stress of the environment, and the more affected they are, and the more that shapes their lives. And that book came along for me when I was in my 40s, and I was a successful doctor, and I was a father, but I was depressed, I was anxious, I was a driven workaholic. You wouldn't have known that when you saw me on the job, but inside me, I was discouraged, I had difficulties in my marriage with my children, I felt they were afraid of me,

• 14:43Gabor Maté?

  and they were because of my rages. And that book helped me understand, it was the first book to help me understand where all that came from. So that was, for me, as for many other people, a seminal read. And really... My whole work since then has been to help liberate people from that prison that childhood often imposes on so many of us.

• 15:06Tim Ferriss?

  This book has come up repeatedly in my life as a recommendation, as a recommended

• 15:11Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 15:12Tim Ferriss?

  book from friends who benefited from it.

• 15:15Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 15:15Tim Ferriss?

  Who are very, certainly from any outward perspective, highly functioning.

• 15:21Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 15:21Tim Ferriss?

  In some cases, world-class performers in their fields. And I'm, in retrospect, sad that I ignored those recommendations. But it was in part because I didn't like the pairing of gifted child. I didn't want to label myself gifted child. We could certainly psychoanalyze that. But I was like, hmm, if this is a book written for people who are in, say, gifted and talented programs, or have some God-given talent, for whatever reason, I had a resistance to that, so I didn't read it. But the prisoners of childhood makes a lot more sense. Well, to me, anyway.

• 15:58Gabor Maté?

  Well, I think it's a more accurate title. But there's two things I would say in response. First of all, why do you resist your own giftedness? You're clearly gifted. So why would you not want to find out about that?

• 16:09Tim Ferriss?

  Don't know.

• 16:10Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, so that's something you might want to consider.

• 16:12Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 16:13Gabor Maté?

  Number one. Number two, really what she means is the sensitive child.

• 16:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so sensitive, that would draw me in because I've had, we don't have to necessarily go down this rabbit hole right now, but I've had a number of my friends recently ask me, when did you know you were so sensitive?

• 16:28Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 16:29Tim Ferriss?

  And not sensitive in a, in a hyperreactive way, not in a negative way, just in a perceptive way. And I'd never thought of myself, it would never have occurred to me to label myself sensitive. And just in the last year, I've been thinking about that. So the sensitive child would make more sense, or be more appealing to me.

• 16:47Gabor Maté?

  Well, you have to think of sensitive in terms of its word origin. Now, the word sensitive came from a Latin word, sincere, to feel.

• 16:53Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:54Gabor Maté?

  So the sensitive person feels more.

• 16:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 16:57Gabor Maté?

  So the example I often give is, and that can lead to both very positive and very difficult consequences. For example, if I tapped you on the shoulder right now, you wouldn't feel any pain at all. But if you were not furring your shirt and your skin was exposed, furthermore, if you had a burn on your shoulders, so your nerve endings were close to the surface, if I attacked you with the same force, you'd feel extreme excruciating pain, even though the external event was no different.

• 17:26Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 17:27Gabor Maté?

  So sensitivity magnifies the pain that we have. Sensitivity also leads to more creativity. So very often, the most creative people also have the most pain, which is why so many creative people escape from their pain through all kinds of dysfunctions like addictions and so on. So there's a real link between creativity and sensitivity, and creativity and sensitivity and suffering at the same time. That's the first point I would make. Now, the other thing goes back to what you said about these people that you know who are high performers. Look at that word performers. What does it mean to perform? One meaning of it is to put on a show.

• 18:02Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, that's one meaning.

• 18:03Gabor Maté?

  And I would have been one of these people who was a high performer. In other words, look at us from the outside. Successful chiropractor, director of a palliative care unit at a major hospital, national columnist for Canadian newspaper, writing medical columns, performing at a high level. And inside, again, anxious, frustrated, depressed, discouraged. And in my personal life, a lot of suffering. So a lot of people who perform well are actually deeply troubled inside. And of course, there's many famous examples of that. Some of the greatest performers like Presley or Marilyn Monroe and any number of people like the name.

• 18:48Gabor Maté?

  That's what they were, they were performers. And even for themselves, they hid their own suffering.

• 18:53Tim Ferriss?

  Well, we are sitting in a venue right now recording this that is now known as LZR. And there is a mural of Prince outside because he performed, one of his, as I understand it, last performances in this venue.

• 19:09Gabor Maté?

  Really?

• 19:09Tim Ferriss?

  Before he passed away.

• 19:11Gabor Maté?

  And before he overdosed.

• 19:12Tim Ferriss?

  Before he overdosed.

• 19:13Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 19:13Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly. And we can certainly come back to this. But part of the reason I wanted to... Big piece of the reason I wanted to have you on this show was that I spent, I'm in a much better place now for many reasons that may be outside of this interview, but feeling the exact same way you just described.

• 19:34Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 19:35Tim Ferriss?

  Outwardly successful, inwardly tortured.

• 19:37Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 19:38Tim Ferriss?

  How do you answer the question if someone meets you and you just have a short interaction, what do you do?

• 19:46Gabor Maté?

  What do I do?

• 19:47Tim Ferriss?

  If someone asks you, what do you do?

• 19:48Gabor Maté?

  Maybe self-serving, but somebody once called me a people whisperer.

• 19:53Tim Ferriss?

  People whisperer.

• 19:53Gabor Maté?

  I do have a gift for seeing inside. Because I've studied, I'm also sensitive in some ways, and I've also studied myself very deeply, I've had to, because my life just wasn't working. And as a medical doctor, I've worked with all manner of conditions, terminal diseases, newborns, families, physical illnesses, mental dysfunctions. I spent 12 years working with addictions. I spent time exploring my own and other people's ADHD. And so I work with people to bring out the truth of their experience, so that they're no longer prisoners of their childhood, but that they can make a conscious choice about

• 20:34Gabor Maté?

  how to live in the present moment, not based on how they were programmed in childhood. And but for that, you have to do it in a way that the dog whisperer do, in a very compassionate way. Otherwise, people just shut down and they shrivel up and they protect themselves. So that's what I do. And I know, I also write and I speak publicly and so on, but the intent is always to bring insight and liberation to people.

• 21:02Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm going to come back to the medicine, because I'd love to know when your journey into medicine began. But first, since I know my listeners will say, but you forgot the other two books. What about the other two books? The Dhammapada, Don Quixote, in any order you like.

• 21:21Gabor Maté?

  Well, let's go in the order that I discovered them, which is Don Quixote, which again, I read that as a child and then reread many times as an adult. And he's my favorite character. So Quixote is this deluded.

• 21:34Gabor Maté?

  Spanish, small nobleman, who wants to revive the age of chivalry and chivalric knighthood. So he gets this broken down horse called Rosinante, and he has lance and his sword, and he gets this squire called Sancho Panza on his donkey, and off they go to these adventures. And he does not see reality. He thinks windmills are giants, and he attacks them. And of course, he gets hurt. And he keeps getting hurt, because he doesn't see reality. But, his heart is purely committed to liberating people, to truth, to justice, to fighting oppressors, to liberating the oppressed.

• 22:19Gabor Maté?

  So here's this guy, who really wants to do good in the world, and he's just deluded in his vision, but he's far truer and deeper and more human than all the people that scoff at him and laugh at him. So, what a great character. And the book is both poignant and very funny. And he's one of the great creations of world literature. And of course, again, you know, that yearning for justice has always burned in my heart, owing to what happened to me and what I witnessed. And the Dhammapada? The Dhammapada is the Buddha's collection of sayings, and it begins with, basically, the idea

• 23:03Gabor Maté?

  that we create the world with our minds. He says, "Everything is thought and believed." So, how we see the world determines the world that we live in. So if I see the world as a horrible place, quoting the current president of the United States, then I will be defensive and aggrandizing and selfish, because I want to take before they take from me. I want to attack before I get attacked. I'll always be looking out for myself, because the world is not to be trusted. So if that's the world you live in, that's the world you're going to create. And the Buddha was a great psychologist, and he recognized that our perceptions shaped the world that we live in. Now, what he didn't say, and that's where modern psychology comes in,

• 23:46Gabor Maté?

  is that before, with our mind, we create the world, the world creates our minds. So that the kind of world that we live in is very much shaped by our early experiences. Buddha didn't say that. But interestingly enough, when you think about his search for truth, what happened to him? If you read his biography, his mother died before he was a week old. So he's lost his most important relationship. So his life began with suffering. And then he spent all his life trying to

• 24:17Gabor Maté?

  find the nature of suffering and how to transcend suffering and how to get beyond it. And this is how he

• 24:25Gabor Maté?

  ended up with this particular method of meditation and contemplation and truth-seeking. So that book was written 2,500 years ago. And psychologically, we're still trying to catch up to the wisdom in it.

• 24:36Tim Ferriss?

  So let's talk about wisdom or perhaps science first.

• 24:41Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 24:41Tim Ferriss?

  And maybe they're related in some fashion, although I know we'll dig into certainly some things that might be missing. When did medicine enter your life or an interest in medicine? An interest in being a doctor, either of those things?

• 24:54Gabor Maté?

  Well, I've speculated on that and there's a number of sources. Strangely enough, or not so strangely enough, my grandfather, who was killed in Auschwitz in his 50s, happened to be a writer and a doctor. Grandson ends up as a writer and a doctor. So I think part of it was me trying to fill a hole in my mother's life. That was a devastating blow to her. This is not conscious, but I'm speculating, looking back. It's not that she ever said, "You have to become a doctor." It's not that she ever said, "You have to follow in your grandfather's footsteps." But I think consciously I stepped into that role. Number one. Number two,

• 25:35Gabor Maté?

  another reason is that as a Jew in Eastern Europe, you had every reason to feel insecure. And my mother never failed to tell me that as a doctor, you carry your profession in your hands. So you don't have to have a business, you don't have to have riches, you just have to have the knowledge. And then you can go anywhere in the world and you'll be okay. Beyond that, healing and making this world a better place and help people lead healthy lives was just an ideal of mine. Then there was egotistical reasons. Let's face it, doctors get respect. They have a role. They have a good income. People look up to them. And they have a sense of authority that I think I lacked in my own life.

• 26:18Gabor Maté?

  So it was a combination of unconscious reasons and idealistic reasons and egotistical reasons. But all I know is that all my life I had wanted to be nothing else but a doctor. I always grew up knowing I'll be a physician.

• 26:35Speaker 05

  And when you were studying medicine, what did you think your specialty or specialties might be?

• 26:43Gabor Maté?

  Well, first of all, I should say I didn't end up following the dream because in my late teens, I just couldn't concentrate and study hard enough to get through the sciences. I could get through them, but I couldn't get the high marks needed to get to medical school. So I actually taught high school for three years. I taught English and history for three years. And then I would wake up and there'd be this voice in me, "You gotta be a doctor. You gotta be a doctor." And so then I went back to medical school and did a lot of hard work. Having been an older student in medical school and being interested in history and literature and the larger picture, I always wanted to put medicine in the context of history, in the context of society, in the context of human experience, not just as an isolated

• 27:26Gabor Maté?

  science, but as part of the broader human experience. And I was interested right away in the beginning in the connections between emotions and illness, between social factors and health and so on. So I was always a larger-picture person. And so that was with me already in medical school.

• 27:50Speaker 05

  So the integration of mind and body as opposed to the sort of Cartesian duality and separation of mind and body?

• 27:56Gabor Maté?

  Exactly. Not that anything in medical school prepared me for that. I mean, in medical school, you just don't get that information at all. But that was always my interest and then when I started practicing. If your eyes are at all open, you just can't, you can't help but to see it. That who gets sick and who doesn't isn't accidental. And who gets cancer, who doesn't, isn't accidental. And who gets addicted and who doesn't, isn't accidental. In other words, there's reasons. And those reasons go beyond the individual. And it has to do with their emotional lives and their relationships and the society and the culture that they live in. So more and more over the decades, my own personal struggles and my medical experience showed me that these connections are important.

• 28:39Tim Ferriss?

  How did you end up in palliative care? And I suppose for those people listening who don't know what palliative care is, perhaps you could give just a brief explanation of what that is. Some people might think of it as hospice care, which I'm not, I don't think are necessarily identical. But how did you end up? What was the road to palliative care? And what is palliative care?

• 29:03Gabor Maté?

  So I was a family physician and a very driven one. And also I have ADD, which means that you want to move around and have distant experiences. You know, because you get tired of the same thing. And really, in retrospect, I might say that there's some guidance in all this, but how it occurred was a series of accidents. So I happened to be walking down the hall of Vancouver's major hospital when the current director of palliative care said, "I'm quitting. How would you like to come and work in palliative care?" And I said, "Sure." You know, I didn't take, it took me not a moment to think about it.

• 29:38Tim Ferriss?

  He was just looking for someone to grab?

• 29:40Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, palliative care, sure, thank you. What is that? And deeply meaningful work. Because when people are facing death, they also come up against the truth of their lives. And

• 29:56Gabor Maté?

  If you can face death, you can face life.

• 29:59Tim Ferriss?

  In palliative care, meaning you're helping people to transition with terminal illness?

• 30:03Gabor Maté?

  These are people with terminal illness for whom nothing curative or healing is gonna happen in the sense of physical healing. So they need to be helped with their symptoms, whether they're pain, or debility, or weakness, or nausea. But also you have to help them go through the psychological process of adjusting to a very short future. And the people that get done to palliative care work, the nurses, and then the doctors, tend to be a special breed. It's not, because many doctors are not comfortable with death. They're not comfortable with not being able to do something to save somebody. So you have to develop a lot of patience and a lot of acceptance.

• 30:46Gabor Maté?

  You have to let go of your power to change things. So it's deeply meaningful and deeply transformative work. And you also have to work with a lot of people with multiple different attitudes towards life and death, religious, non-religious, spiritual, non-spiritual, in denial, in acceptance, and all the stages in between. So it was beautiful, beautiful work, and I, one of the highlights of my medical career. All the same time, I was still doing my family practice.

• 31:18Tim Ferriss?

  And when did, when did a focus on addiction, or an acute interest in addiction, start to steer your medical practice?

• 31:29Gabor Maté?

  So as a family physician, I've always had substance addicts in my practice, just a few. And again, it was an accident. I got fired from a palliative care job. And my argument is that I was fired for gross competence. I was, I was just too damn good at it. But also for gross arrogance. In other words, with my spontaneous and insightful and rather radical, non-traditional style, I could have great results, and often did, in palliative care.

• 32:00Tim Ferriss?

  If I may interrupt for one second, what would be, or might be, an example of your approach that others thought was radical, or something you would say, or something you would do with a patient that's, that got great results, but that would seem very radical to others?

• 32:15Gabor Maté?

  Well, I would engage them in deep conversations. Stuff would come up that would be painful, but would be transformative.

• 32:22Gabor Maté?

  Physically, I would just use methods that had not been proven, but occurred right to me, and they seemed to be helpful in helping people out of pain or deal with issues and so on.

• 32:35Gabor Maté?

  I was very open and multiple approaches. I wasn't just following things by the book. So that was my competence. The arrogance was that I had a very busy life. I was still delivering babies, running my family practice. So I would get into palliative care. And then the nurses said working with me was like working in the eye of a tornado. And other physicians who didn't have my attitude or my particular mindset would legitimately question what I was doing. But I would regard all such questioning as an attack rather than as an inquiry. And I would react like a bulldog who's being threatened. And that's the arrogance. And that's what ended up leading me to be fired.

• 33:19Gabor Maté?

  And it was a great firing because as always, I learned a lot about myself. Took me a while. But it took, and then three weeks after I was fired, I got this phone call from a clinic in Vancouver's downtown east side. Now, the downtown east side of Vancouver is North America's most concentrated area of drug use. We have more injection users in a few square block radius than anywhere in North America. So I get this call saying, how would you like to come and work down here? And this is three weeks after I was fired from palliative care. Had I not been fired, I couldn't have taken that other job, which then led me to the high point for my career, which is working 12 years with addicted population and eventually leaving family practice and doing that full time. So who orchestrated all this? I have no idea. But it was a beautiful progression.

• 34:06Tim Ferriss?

  Something that's come up quite a bit in interviews on this podcast is some variation of sometimes you need life to save you from what you want, to give you what you need.

• 34:15Gabor Maté?

  Exactly.

• 34:16Tim Ferriss?

  And I think about that a lot. At the very least, it's a pain relieving lens through which to view events that unfold. How?

• 34:26Tim Ferriss?

  How do you define addiction? Or maybe a better question is, what is addiction? And along with that, if you want to tackle it, what are poor definitions of addiction or misconceptions?

• 34:40Gabor Maté?

  Fair enough. So, an addiction is a complex psychological, physiological process, but which manifests in any behavior that a person enjoys, finds relief in, and therefore craves in the short term, but suffers negative consequences in the long term and doesn't give up despite the negative consequences. So craving, pleasure, relief in the short term, negative consequences in the long term, inability to give it up. Now, notice I have said nothing about substances. I said any behavior. So it could be related to cocaine, crystal meth, heroin, fentanyl, marijuana, nicotine, alcohol, whatever. Could also be sex, gambling, internet, relationships,

• 35:22Gabor Maté?

  shopping, eating, work, extreme sports, working out, pornography, any number of human activities. So I said any behavior. Now, the official definition of addiction, and according to the American Society for Addiction Medicine, it's a primary brain disorder. It arises in the brain largely due to genetic reasons. This is how they see it. And I say that's just not true. The other popular idea about addiction is that it's a choice that somebody makes, that people choose to be addicted, which is what the legal system is based on. Because if people are not choosing, what are we punishing them for? Although I think the medical definition is closer to the truth,

• 36:07Gabor Maté?

  I don't see it as just genetic disorder and I don't see it as a primary brain disorder. So let me perhaps show you why, if that's okay. So I give you this definition of addiction. Again, craving, relief, pleasure, short term, negative consequences, long term, inability to give it up. Would you be willing to tell me if you've ever had an addiction in your life? I don't care what, to what, I'm not asking what.

• 36:26Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, I can say yes, and I can tell you exactly what it was. So, I, in high school, so I suffered from what I suppose most people would consider depressive periods beginning at latest age 10.

• 36:44Gabor Maté?

  Right.

• 36:45Tim Ferriss?

  And never found relief from that until I was...

• 36:53Tim Ferriss?

  Competing in wrestling, very seriously, in high school, all throughout high school. And an older teammate introduced me to ephedrine.

• 37:02Speaker 05

  A stimulant.

• 37:04Tim Ferriss?

  Ephedrine hydrochloride, which, for those people who are curious, is, well, at least at one point, ephedrine was found, or at the very least pseudoephedrine, in something called primatine mist used for asthma. And I think they also mixed it with guaifenesin. Nonetheless, the reason you cannot buy, in many places, large amounts of primatine mist is because people freebasted it into methamphetamine.

• 37:29Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 37:30Tim Ferriss?

  So you have ephedrine, which is a very strong stimulant, combined with caffeine and aspirin. And when you combine those three, it's not an incremental increase in effect. It's, I mean, it's probably logarithmic. It's a very synergistic effect.

• 37:43Speaker 05

  Exponentially.

• 37:44Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly. And he was recommending it for increased endurance, and there is some effect, although it's also very, highly thermogenic, which wasn't good for me. So it made me really hot, which was already a weakness of mine. But it ended up providing me with relief. It was a very strong stimulant, and I began to not only use it for sports, but self-medicate using it.

• 38:09Speaker 05

  Okay, so, great. So let me quickly ask you, what did it do for you? Relief from what?

• 38:15Tim Ferriss?

  It's, it's, it made me, or at least contributed to euphoria, optimism, energy. So I didn't, I didn't, I didn't feel the symptoms of what, in retrospect, I would call depression, the lethargy, the pessimistic lens through which I viewed things.

• 38:41Speaker 05

  Fair enough.

• 38:42Tim Ferriss?

  It seemed to magically just erase all of that in about 30 minutes.

• 38:45Speaker 05

  So euphoria literally means a good feeling?

• 38:48Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 38:49Speaker 05

  It gave you energy, it made you feel good, it made you optimistic.

• 38:54Tim Ferriss?

  Also improved sports performance.

• 38:55Speaker 05

  I'm sure it did.

• 38:58Gabor Maté?

  Are those good things or bad things to feel optimistic?

• 39:01Tim Ferriss?

  Those are all good things.

• 39:02Gabor Maté?

  Okay, in other words, the addiction wasn't your primary problem. Your primary problem was that you were depressed.

• 39:07Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 39:08Gabor Maté?

  That you lacked a sense of well-being, that you lacked energy.

• 39:12Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 39:12Gabor Maté?

  So in other words, the addiction is not the primary problem. It's an attempt to solve a problem.

• 39:16Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 39:17Gabor Maté?

  And then the real question is, how did the problem arise?

• 39:20Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 39:20Gabor Maté?

  In other words, this is where my theory is that it's always rooted in childhood trauma and that the addiction is an attempt to deal with the effects of childhood trauma, which it does temporarily while it creates even more problems in the long term.

• 39:32Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 39:33Gabor Maté?

  I would have one more side question for you, given that stimulant was your drug of choice. This may not be true for you, but do you think, with respect, you might have ADHD as a kid?

• 39:44Tim Ferriss?

  Quite possibly.

• 39:45Gabor Maté?

  Because typically, people with ADHD self-medicate with stimulants.

• 39:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 39:49Gabor Maté?

  Because how do we treat ADHD now? We give people stimulants.

• 39:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Ritalin, methamphetamine.

• 39:53Gabor Maté?

  Ritalin, methamphetamine. So a lot of people that choose stimulants as self-medication, like nicotine and caffeine and crystal meth and efedrine, are actually self-medicating idiots.

• 40:03Tim Ferriss?

  So it's very likely?

• 40:04Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 40:05Tim Ferriss?

  And I was punished by teachers for, I wouldn't say not paying attention, but being interested in other things in class. So I remember very distinctly my kindergarten teacher, I'll name her by name because it's shameful, Mrs. Bevan, or Mrs. Bevan. I refused to learn the alphabet because she wouldn't give me a good reason why I needed to learn the alphabet. It was just, you need to learn the alphabet. So she made me eat soap in front of the class and put me at the bad table. She got me at the bad table. But I was always interested in doing many, many, many things. And in fact, the reason, one of the reasons that I started wrestling is because I was very hyperactive. And as I believe the story goes, other mothers recommended to my mom that she put me into

• 40:48Tim Ferriss?

  something called kiddie wrestling to drain my batteries before I got home. So that makes perfect sense. I've never been drawn to depressants, never been drawn to opiates. In fact, after surgeries, I get very sick if I'm given Vicodin or anything like that. So I've opted out. I've never personally had any issues with alcohol, although a lot of people do. It's always been a draw to stimulants. And once the, we don't have to go down this path because I want to, I want you to be able to focus on.

• 41:20Tim Ferriss?

  On these definitions, but where I got myself into trouble was having never been physically addicted to any substance before. I started using the ECA stack once a day. My friend was using it twice a day. I started using it twice a day, then I started using it three times a day. And you develop a tolerance very quickly.

• 41:37Gabor Maté?

  Right. You have to take more and more.

• 41:39Tim Ferriss?

  And if you stop, the withdrawal symptoms are awful. So I had never experienced that. So I continued after sports to use this. And certainly in the long term, there are some very nasty side effects. But I didn't stop for many, many years.

• 41:55Gabor Maté?

  Well, so there's a great link between ADD and addictions, and not just because they both begin with the same three letters. And I can tell you about my own ADHD. And this is where we go back to childhood again. So that tuning out, that absent-mindedness, that desire to scatter your attention all over the place, that's not a disease. They say it's an inherited disease. The hell it is. That tuning out, that divided attention is actually... But let me give you a personal question again. If I were to become abusive towards you right now, verbally or otherwise, what would be your options, right now?

• 42:32Tim Ferriss?

  I could ignore.

• 42:33Gabor Maté?

  Well, but that's not what you would do first, is it?

• 42:37Tim Ferriss?

  Not likely. I mean, I would, right now, I would probably just listen and pause. I shut down often if I get attacked verbally, because I don't want to respond with rage, which has historically been my response.

• 42:50Gabor Maté?

  I hear you, but let's get a bit more basic about it. The rational response, if I were to become abusive, would be for you to just assert yourself, saying, "Don't talk to me that way."

• 43:01Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 43:02Gabor Maté?

  Or it would be to leave, saying, "Listen to you is over." And if for some reason you had not the strength to do either of those, there's other people in the room here with us, you could ask for help.

• 43:13Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 43:14Gabor Maté?

  But what if you couldn't escape, fight back, or seek help? Then you would shut down or tune out.

• 43:19Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 43:20Gabor Maté?

  In other words, the tuning out is simply a defensive response on the part of the brain. Now, put me back into my infancy, where my mother is so grief-stricken that I'm crying because she's in pain. And I'll read you a quote here, if I may.

• 43:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, please.

• 43:35Gabor Maté?

  And this has to do with the sensitive child.

• 43:40Gabor Maté?

  The child is very open and can feel the pain and suffering going on in its immediate environment. The child is aware of his own body and can also feel the tension, rigidity and pain in the body of the mother of anyone else he's with. If the mother's suffering, the baby suffers too. The pain never gets discharged. The organism does not develop the confidence that it can regulate itself, that things will happen the way they should. Hence, lack of optimism. Okay, now. My mother didn't abuse me. She did her best to look after me, but she was stressed, depressed, terrorized, grief-stricken.

• 44:23Gabor Maté?

  I'm picking that up as a sensitive infant. Can I fight back, change the situation, or escape? No. None of those. What can I do? Nothing I can do. My brain will tune out as a way of dealing with the stress. So I'm not talking about abuse here. I'm just talking about stressed mothering or parenting. The child's brain then will tune out. When is the child's brain tuning out? When the brain is developing. So the tuning out then becomes programmed and is the default setting. And that's why ADD. So it's not an inherited disease. It's not a disease at all. It begins as a coping mechanism, which then gets programmed in the brain. And as a lot of these early coping mechanisms function, they help you in the short term create problems in the long term.

• 45:08Gabor Maté?

  And that's ADD is one of these examples. And of course, it also makes you more prone to be addicted, because now, when you tune out, life becomes less interesting, you shut down emotionally, you protect yourself, now you feel depressed. What does depression actually mean? You said you were depressed. What does depression mean? To depress something is to push it down. What do people push down in depression? They push down their emotions. Why would they? Because the emotions are too painful. So even depression becomes a coping mechanism. You push it down so you don't feel the pain. But then later on, that interferes with your life functioning. So it all begins as a coping mechanism and later on becomes a source of dysfunction.

• 45:50Gabor Maté?

  And all this is happening when the brain is actually developing, which we can talk about later. So these are the links I began to make, including after I was diagnosed with it. So and then despite the fact that a couple of my kids were diagnosed, I knew that this wasn't a genetic disease. That what it is actually is a coping mechanism, which got programmed into the brain. And then when I read the literature on brain development, wow. Turns out the human brain is shaped by the environment and particularly by the adult-child relationships. And so it all began to make perfect sense to me.

• 46:25Tim Ferriss?

  There are a few things I'd love to underscore or reiterate. Because I think they're very astute and very helpful. And certainly, if I had had some of these reframes, I think that I would have been able to be proactive with working on a lot of my own issues much, much earlier.

• 46:49Gabor Maté?

  Me too, by the way.

• 46:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. For instance, we can come back to this. I'm actually just going to mention two things and then we can, we can go where that takes us. But the first is rather than asking why the addiction, asking why the pain. So instead of looking at the, the consequences, looking at the causes. And not confusing the, the symptoms with the causes. So instead of asking why the addiction, asking why the pain. And the, the other, this, this might take a moment for me to read, but I think it's worth reading. And I should say that Compassion for Addiction, this is an organization co-founded by you yourself and Vicky. I'm gonna make a guess. I've never actually said her last name, but Dulai or Dulai.

• 47:34Tim Ferriss?

  Vicky, just for, for context, for folks who are wondering, was actually the very first person about five years ago to recommend that we meet. And I took a note of it in a notebook I still have. And that's part of the reason that I reached out for the book. And just because we may revisit this, I met Vicky at a gathering at

• 47:58Tim Ferriss?

  The home of someone named George Sarlo. Right. Who has a lot and who shares a lot of common background with you and certainly common interests, but we'll come back to that. The part that I wanted to read is the following, and I'm going to make an attempt here. So, "The mainstream view of addiction," you mentioned this, "compared to the clinical perspectives, that addiction is a matter of individual choice, moral failure, or weakness, which is why so many approaches are based on deterrence and punishment, which includes self-help approaches, for that matter, that I've attempted myself. The clinical view is that addiction is a disease of the brain with disordered brain circuits and behaviors, an accurate yet narrow perspective."

• 48:39Tim Ferriss?

  So, I think that's a really important line, an accurate yet narrow perspective. So, perhaps accurate but incomplete. "It is accurate that the addicted brain is demonstrably a physiologically dysfunctional brain, but narrow because it seeks to explain the dysfunction in strictly physiological and biochemical terms, without recognizing the emotional and social component of how the brain works." And this was really driven home for me recently. In the last several years, I've gotten to know Tony Robbins. Yes. And I attended an event not too long ago with several of my very close friends called Date with Destiny.

• 49:18Tim Ferriss?

  And at this event, he asked the audience of about 5,000 people, "How many people here know someone who takes antidepressants?" Pretty much every hand goes up. "How many people here know someone who takes antidepressants yet is still depressed?" And it was probably 80% of the people who raised their hands the first time. And I personally know quite a few people who take antidepressants, which seem to help on some level. Although the tolerance for some of these pharmaceuticals can also be developed very quickly, and yet...

• 49:55Tim Ferriss?

  If my experience is anything like the experience of, or I should say if the experiences of other people is anything like my personal experience with friends, let's say, who have depression, you witness these thought patterns and verbal patterns that can take them from the highest high or just a baseline of optimism and drive them back into depression. And so they're just, it seems to be just from an empirical or observational standpoint, more to the story. And so I really appreciate you putting into words what I've grasped to try to understand and also convey. So with this definition of addiction, how do you work with patients?

• 50:40Gabor Maté?

  Well, let's go back to what I said, what you quoted me saying, not why the addiction, but why the pain. So if we understand that addiction in every case is rooted in some painful internal experience. And that when you ask people, what does the addiction do for you? They'll say, it numbs me, it soothes the pain, it makes me feel connected with other people, it gives me a sense of control, it gives me inner peace. Well, the lack of inner peace, the lack of control, the lack of connection, they're all forms of emotional pain. If I ask the question, not why the addiction, but why the pain,

• 51:23Gabor Maté?

  then that leads to an examination of that person's life, rather than looking just at their brain chemistry. So I'm quoted from an article that appeared in the Journal of Pediatrics, which is the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. It's about as prestigious as you can get. 2012. The article comes from the Harvard Center on the Developing Child. Again, a prestigious child development research institution at Harvard University.

• 51:53Gabor Maté?

  This article did not present new information so much as it elegantly summarized decades of research. And notice what they say. They say, "Growing scientific evidence demonstrates that social and physical environments that threaten human development because of scarcity, stress, or instability can lead to short-term physiologic and psychological adjustments that are necessary for immediate survival and adaptation, but which may come at a significant cost to long-term outcomes in learning, behavior, health, and longevity." That's what I was saying before, that those early adaptations, like pushing down your feelings, when the feelings are too painful, will help you as an infant, as a young child,

• 52:37Gabor Maté?

  but then they cause problems later on. The tuning out that you do to protect you from the stress in your environment, if you're very sensitive, it doesn't take a lot of stress, helps you endure, but in the long term becomes a problem. That's exactly what they're saying. Now, I'll jump a few pages ahead to what they say about brain development, and this is so crucial, and it's so crucial because they still don't teach this in medical schools, even though scientifically, it's not even vaguely controversial. The human brain develops in interaction with the environment. It's not genetically programmed purely. Here's what they say. "The architecture of the brain is constructed to an ongoing process that begins before birth, continues into adulthood, and establishes either a sturdy or a fragile foundation for

• 53:20Gabor Maté?

  all the health, learning, and behavior that follow." Not some of the health learning, all the health learning. Now, notice what they say. First of all, "The architecture of the brain is constructed to an ongoing process that begins before birth," which already means what happens in the womb already has an impact on you. So if your mother is stressed, and she's got high levels of stress hormone, that's already affecting your brain development. And when you think of all the stressed pregnant women out there, no wonder we're seeing so many kids in trouble. And we know from American studies, international studies, that when mothers are stressed, their placenta will naturally have more cortisol and adrenaline, the stress hormone. Those kids would be more likely to have stress issues later on, abnormal stress hormone

• 54:02Gabor Maté?

  levels even at one year of age, behavioral problems, learning problems, and so on, which tells us a lot as to why adoptive kids have so many more problems. That's another issue. But the next paragraph is key. The interactions of genes and experiences literally shapes the circuitry of the developing brain and is critically influenced by, in other words, the circuitry, the chemistry of the brain, and which centers and which circuits and which systems develop, and which neurochemicals will be present in what quantities, depends on the early environment, and is critically influenced by the mutual responsiveness of adult-child relationships, particularly in the early childhood years.

• 54:44Gabor Maté?

  In other words, the most important influence shaping the physiological development of the brain is the quality of parent-child relationships. Now, when parents are stressed, or distracted, or workaholics, like I was a young parent, if there's instability, economic troubles, relationship troubles, unresolved trauma on the part of the parent, loving parents who are just stressed, that'll interfere with the child's brain development. That's why we're seeing so much more ADHD now, so much more autism, and so much more other problems, because of stress in society that affects the parenting environment. In other words, yes, there's physiological problems with the brain, but it's not a genetic issue. It's related to early experience. So when you look at brain scans of adults that are troubled, brain scans, as you do

• 55:29Gabor Maté?

  in addicts, you're not just looking at the impact of addiction, you're also looking at the impact of childhood trauma and childhood stress. And this has been shown over and over and over and over again. So there's no separation between the physiology and the psychology. So if you come to me as an addict, and you say, "I got such and such," and I ask you, "What does it do for you?" And you say, "It numbs the pain," then my question is, "Where did you develop the pain? What happened?" And then we have an inquiry, and now it no longer becomes a shameful thing that you chose this, nor does it mean that you're stuck with it because you've got this genetic problem. We get it as an adaptive response to something that happened, and we can heal that. The reason why...

• 56:12Gabor Maté?

  Addiction treatment is failing is because physicians don't understand this. They keep dealing with the effects, which is the addiction and the behaviors, which are the effects of the addiction, but not the cause, which is the childhood distress. And the impact of childhood distress that carry into adulthood, in other words, how we stay prisoners of childhood. And so, present methods of treatment in psychiatry and addiction medicine in childhood psychiatry deal with effects rather than causes. And this is why we're so ineffective at it.

• 56:46Tim Ferriss?

  I've, I've many questions.

• 56:48Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 56:49Tim Ferriss?

  So the, you know, the first is just to, to underscore something, which is, you know, the, our software, the genetics play a role.

• 56:57Gabor Maté?

  They do.

• 56:58Tim Ferriss?

  But it's, it's not a comprehensive explanation for what we're discussing.

• 57:03Gabor Maté?

  Genes can predispose, but they don't predetermine.

• 57:05Tim Ferriss?

  Right, exactly.

• 57:06Gabor Maté?

  No, there are very few genetic diseases. There's one runs in my family, muscular dystrophy. If you got the gene, you'll have the disease. My, my mother had it.

• 57:13Tim Ferriss?

  Right, so that would be predetermined.

• 57:14Gabor Maté?

  That's just predetermined. Very rare, those diseases.

• 57:21Gabor Maté?

  Let me tell you an interesting study from either Australia or New Zealand. They looked at a group of people for aggression. They found that the most aggressive people had a certain gene variant.

• 57:33Gabor Maté?

  Do you think they found the gene for aggression? No, they didn't, because the least aggressive people in the group had the same gene. So the most aggressive and the least aggressive shared the same gene as compared to the average. The gene could not have been for aggression. Now, if you actually looked at the life histories of those people, the most aggressive people had been brought up in troubled, sometimes abusive, but always very stressed homes. The least aggressive were brought up in very nurturing homes. What was the gene for? Sensitivity. The more sensitive you are, the more you're gonna be affected. When you're brought up in a peaceful home, you're gonna be that much more peaceful. When you're brought up in a, in a, in a stormy home, you're gonna be that much more aggressive.

• 58:19Gabor Maté?

  So, there are these predispositions, but they're not for specific illnesses. They are for temperament.

• 58:25Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 58:25Gabor Maté?

  Which means that you're gonna be more or less affected by the environment. And so, yeah, there are some predisposing genes, but we know both from animal studies and monkey studies and human studies, that even you find a gene that for similar reasons predisposes somebody to addiction. If that animal, or if that human being is brought up in a good nurturing circumstances, their risk of addiction is no greater than creatures without that gene.

• 58:50Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 58:51Gabor Maté?

  So, it's just not a genetic disease. And the fact that it runs in families doesn't prove anything. Because, you know, as I always point out, I'm a medical doctor, and if two of my kids become medical doctors, which is no danger whatsoever, but if they did, that wouldn't prove that the practice of medicine is a genetic disease.

• 59:09Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right. It's, it's, it's not a, it's not a catch-all explanation. Also, you have, I mean, because of a few of the books I've written, I hear a lot of stories, both successful and unsuccessful, about people attempting to lose weight. And they'll often say, "Well, it runs in my family. Like, my parents are fat, my grandparents are fat." And I'll say, "Do you have pets?" And they'll say, "Yes." I'll say, "Are your pets overweight?" And they're like, "Yeah, my pets are fat." I'm like, "Okay." Well, it's clearly, clearly not just a genetic issue.

• 59:39Gabor Maté?

  Well, may I say something on that?

• 59:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 59:41Gabor Maté?

  Well, have you heard about the adverse childhood experience studies? The ACE studies?

• 59:46Tim Ferriss?

  The average child?

• 59:47Gabor Maté?

  Adverse, adverse childhood experience studies.

• 59:50Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I haven't, but I feel like there's a questionnaire or a

• 59:53Gabor Maté?

  There is.

• 59:54Tim Ferriss?

  There's a test that you can take.

• 59:55Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, there is. So, the adverse childhood experience studies were done in California with, I think, seventeen, fourteen or seventeen thousand adults, mostly Caucasians, half of them university educated. And they looked at the relationship between childhood adversity and adult outcomes. And an adverse childhood experience was defined as physical, or sexual, or emotional abuse, a divorce, a parent being jailed, violence in the family, a parent being addicted, a parent being mentally ill,

• 1:00:24Gabor Maté?

  a parent dying.

• 1:00:27Gabor Maté?

  These were the main ones. And for each of these adverse childhood experiences, the risk of addiction goes up exponentially, the risk of autoimmune diseases go up, the risk of depression goes up, the risk of ADHD goes up, the risk of relationship problems, STDs, everything goes up. Now, you know how these studies started? These studies started in an obesity clinic. Dr. Vincent Felitti, who's a San Diego internist, wonderful guy, deep thinker and researcher. They noticed that at this clinic, with rigorous dietary control and exercise, they could help people lose weight. But what do you think they couldn't do?

• 1:01:08Tim Ferriss?

  They couldn't ensure they continue those behaviors when they leave.

• 1:01:11Gabor Maté?

  Exactly, they couldn't help them keep it off. And then Felitti did something that's, I have to say, is unusual for a medical doctor. He listened to his patients. And they said, "Don't you get it? We're stuffing down our pain. This is all based on childhood trauma." And so obesity itself is a response to childhood trauma. It's just another addiction. I could talk about it in many ways, but... And the adverse childhood experiences studies have been repeated numerous times now in other countries, always with the same results. And so that the obesity epidemic right now is not just an epidemic of junk foods and sedentary lifestyles. That is true.

• 1:01:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, those are contributing factors, but...

• 1:01:56Gabor Maté?

  But the underlying basis is people stuff soothing their stresses in their lives. And so it's really an epidemic of stress.

• 1:02:02Tim Ferriss?

  So let me return to another point, or one thing you said in passing, which I'd love to dig into a little bit. And that was how, at the time, say, the example I think we were discussing... Well, actually, before that, let me mention one thing. So I've had my entire, my full genome sequenced. A predisposition to alcoholism is very prevalent in my family from a genetic standpoint, just from a software basis. However, I mentioned earlier, I never had issues with alcoholism, with stimulants. So just as, just as a footnote, but what I was going to, what I'd love to ask you, and then I'd really love to hear what you do with patients once you start looking at their pain and the tools you use or the approaches you use.

• 1:02:46Tim Ferriss?

  But one of the... Epiphanies for me in the last, very recent year or two, has been looking at my coping mechanisms very differently. And what I mean by that is, for a very long time, I had certain behaviors, certain defaults that I hated, which of course means I'm hating a part of myself. That's right. And that included anger, rage responses, use of stimulants, you name it.

• 1:03:23Tim Ferriss?

  A close friend of mine, who is a therapist, but I've never, I've never engaged him as a therapist. And there are certainly plenty of bad therapists out there, which I think is a separate topic. Nonetheless, he was helping, and I'm sure we'll get back to this, but in preparation for a very controlled, supervised psychedelic experience, he was helping another friend of ours prepare. Is this with MDMA? This is with ayahuasca. With ayahuasca, okay. And this person had a number of addictions. And she hated these addictions. And she said, "I hate these. I realize they're terrible. They've ruined my life. They're ruining my life."

• 1:04:07Tim Ferriss?

  And it was all a negative relationship to these behaviors. And he said, "Did these ever serve you? Did these ever help? What did these do for you?" Exactly. And she described how they helped her cope with very difficult circumstances early on. And he said, "Perhaps what you should do as an exercise, and what we can do, is for you to effectively thank those behaviors for the role they played and for the necessity they filled. And to then recognize, you know, thank them for their duty effectively, but to let them go because they're no longer needed." And that was a huge eye-opener for me.

• 1:04:50Tim Ferriss?

  And I began to, this is coinciding with a number of things, and I don't want to take us off the rails, but began to...

• 1:04:58Tim Ferriss?

  Use something called loving kindness meditation, or meta, M E T T A meditation, which I was introduced to by a gentleman from Google, actually, or formerly Google, Ched Mankten, and then also Jack Kornfield, who really reiterated it for me.

• 1:05:11Gabor Maté?

  Of course.

• 1:05:11Tim Ferriss?

  But I never applied it to myself. I always applied this loving kindness meditation to other people.

• 1:05:15Gabor Maté?

  Right.

• 1:05:16Tim Ferriss?

  And what was recommended is that I apply that loving kindness to the younger Tim, to the other versions of Tim, who had these behaviors that I had grown to hate and resent, and to actually thank them for the role they played. For instance, that rage, that anger, was the fuel that got me out of Long Island. And where I grew up, there are a lot of serious drug issues, particularly with opiates. My best friend died of fentanyl. Many of my friends were addicted to opiates, who I grew up with. Many have died. And I got out because I was angry. In part, I think that was the fuel. But that fuel ended up, over the long term, being very corrosive.

• 1:05:55Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56Tim Ferriss?

  But to, in a way, to reconcile myself with that, I had to stop resenting it. And I suppose it's maybe more of a confession than a question, but your comment brought it to mind. And maybe as a segue, I'd just love to hear, and we can take it anywhere we want, of course, but once you have shifted the focus from why the addiction to why the pain, and you start to work with someone, what approaches have you found to help? What tools?

• 1:06:30Gabor Maté?

  Well, so I very much salute your friend's approach. It's exactly the approach I would take myself. And I call it compassionate inquiry. So inquire in a compassionate way. Not, "Why did I do this?", but, "Hmm, why did I do this?"

• 1:06:47Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:06:48Gabor Maté?

  The first one is not a question. It's a statement. It's a self-condemnation. The second one is a question. "Hmm, wonder why I did this? Ah, it suited my pain." And so what your friend said, that it served you, so thank it, love it.

• 1:07:03Gabor Maté?

  But let go of it is absolutely right. I call it the stupid friend. The stupid friend is the one who helped you in a particular way at a certain time, but it can't learn that that way doesn't function anymore. Right. That instead of helping, now it's hurting. So it's a friend because it's really trying to help, but it's stupid because it's not learning that you're no longer that three-year-old, or that five-year-old, or that fifteen-year-old. You know? So now this leads to the question of trauma. Because it's one thing to recognize that all this originates in childhood pain. It's quite another to transform that pain. And for that, we have to understand what trauma is. So people often think that trauma is what happens to you.

• 1:07:44Gabor Maté?

  So trauma is a divorce when you were small and your parents fighting. Trauma is your mother's depression. Trauma is your father's alcoholism. Trauma is your parents' argumentation. Trauma is physical or sexual abuse or some loss. Those aren't the traumas. Those are traumatic. But the trauma is not what happens to you. The trauma is what happens inside you. And as a result of these traumatic events, what happens inside you is you get disconnected from your emotions and you're disconnected from your body. And you have difficulty being in the present moment. And you develop a negative view of your world, and a negative view of yourself,

• 1:08:27Gabor Maté?

  and a defensive view of other people. And these perspectives keep showing up in your life in the present because they're the stupid friends. And so the issue is not just to recognize what happened ten, fifteen, thirty, however many years ago, but to actually recognize the manifestations in the present moment and to transcend them. And how do you do that? By reconnecting with yourself. By restoring the connection with your body primarily and with your emotions that you lost. And once you do... When you found these things again, then you have what we call recovery. Because what does it mean to recover something? It means to find it again. So what is it that people find when they recover?

• 1:09:11Gabor Maté?

  They find themselves. And the loss of self is the essence of trauma. So the real purpose of addiction treatment, mental health treatment, any kind of healing, is reconnection.

• 1:09:24Tim Ferriss?

  For people who are listening and want to reconnect with themselves, with their bodies, for instance, what recommendations might you have? Whether that's things they can do or resources they can can look to? Or both, or something else? What recommendations? Because I'm sure, I could actually, I am 100% sure, because I've had people come on and for the very first time on this podcast, talk about sexual abuse they endured as children and what they did to help recover from that. Many people listening, I am sure, have addictions, both traumatic past experiences and trauma.

• 1:10:09Tim Ferriss?

  What recommendations could you make for them?

• 1:10:12Gabor Maté?

  Sure. So I want to say first of all that for trauma, you don't need terribly traumatic events. So there's two ways to look at trauma. One is that bad things happened that shouldn't have. We've talked about those. But the other way to get traumatized is when good things happened that should have happened. So if the good things didn't happen, that should have happened, sorry. So when you look at that.

• 1:10:34Tim Ferriss?

  The trauma of omission.

• 1:10:35Gabor Maté?

  Trauma of omission, where the parents, not that they didn't love you, not that they didn't do their best, but they were too stressed, traumatized, distracted themselves. Then you didn't get the kind of attention and the kind of acceptance and the kind of attuned being with that you needed. That itself can make you disconnect from yourself. The child needs that acceptance, that connection, that attunement. Our brain development requires it, our emotional development demands it. And when we don't get it, not because the parents don't love us, but simply because of their own issues, we can also suffer that disconnection. So that's what I call developmental trauma. And now, how do we connect? Well, there are many, many forms of therapy. It's very difficult for anybody to do this on their own.

• 1:11:20Gabor Maté?

  Some people do it. I certainly couldn't do it on my own. I've needed a lot of help in terms of therapy. That helps you understand what happened to me. And so that there's a reason for it. So that, if there's a reason for it, then it's no longer me. I'm not somebody to be ashamed of. I'm just somebody who developed along certain lines for some very good reasons. But it's not in my deepest character, and it's not who I am, and I don't have to be that way. That's a relief to know. It's also not that I'm genetically programmed, so I'm doomed to stay that way. You know? Number one. Number two, you have to reconnect with the body. There are various body therapies. My friend Peter Levine and his somatic experiencing.

• 1:12:05Gabor Maté?

  Walking Tiger, is that one of his books? Waking the Tiger. Waking the Tiger. Waking the Tiger was his first book, and he's written many wonderful books since then. That's the somatic experience. Somatic Experiencing, his method is called, which he developed. It's brilliant. There is EMDR, Eye Movement Decentralization Reprogramming, which is a way of bypassing the conscious mind and getting to the emotional brain. And quicker than talk therapy by itself can do. So it's combined with talk therapy, but it takes you past just a conscious, defensive, egoic mind. There is emotional freedom tapping that people do.

• 1:12:48Gabor Maté?

  There's various variations on that. There is motor sensory integration techniques. There is, then there is the traditional therapies like yoga. Now, yoga was not simply a physical modality when it first developed. Yoga actually means unity. So the very essence of yoga is to regain that unity, not just with ourselves, but also with the larger creation. And so yoga, when it's practiced in its intended way, not just the hot yoga where you get a good workout, that's great, I'm not against it. But I'm talking about intentional yoga with a meditative aspect to it, which is taught by a number of disciplines, bodywork of all kinds.

• 1:13:32Speaker 05

  I'm just gonna hit pause for one second. Do you practice yoga? And if so, what type do you practice?

• 1:13:35Gabor Maté?

  So I have always said that with my ADHD, I'm not a yoga person, I can't do it. Until a year and a half ago, I met actually a yogi, his name is Sadhguru. And he's an Indian yogi with a big following. I was very skeptical. But I met the guy. I now have a 50-minute daily yoga practice, which I did this morning before coming to the interview. And this made an enormous difference in my life. With my ADHD mind, I really have trouble just sitting there. When I sit on the meditation cushion, my mind is like all over the place. But with the yoga, which is more body-based, I can stay much more present. There is a meditational component to it.

• 1:14:15Gabor Maté?

  And so the answer is yes. If you had asked me 18 months ago, I would have said no. I support it, but I don't do it. But now I'm actually a very committed practitioner. And it really has made a difference.

• 1:14:27Speaker 05

  Is there a particular... Is it a particular type of yoga that people could Google or learn more about?

• 1:14:35Gabor Maté?

  Well, so I'm not a yoga expert. And there's many forms of yoga that other people, more knowledgeable than I am, could recommend. But the one I learned is called Inner Engineering. And it's taught by either Sadhguru or his followers. And you can look up Inner Engineering online.

• 1:14:50Speaker 05

  Inner Engineering.

• 1:14:51Gabor Maté?

  When I recommended it to friends and others, everybody's been only been grateful. So I can highly recommend it. Typically, there is to me what seems to be a cult around the guy, which I don't take too particularly. But he's the genuine article in terms of having a deep experience and being able to try and transmit that experience to others. And creating a... Practical system around it. So it's worked for me. I'm not here to recruit anybody else, but since you're asking.

• 1:15:16Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, it's just my fans appreciate. Well, you know, I'm not going to blame it on my fans. I like specifics.

• 1:15:21Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, so Inner Engineering, you can look up online.

• 1:15:24Tim Ferriss?

  Great.

• 1:15:24Gabor Maté?

  And it's taught here in the States and in Canada internationally, actually.

• 1:15:28Tim Ferriss?

  And I, but I did interrupt you. You were about to mention, I think, another technique or modality that can help. We talked about, for instance, the somatic experience, EMDR, Emotional Freedom, tapping, motor sensory integration technique or techniques, yoga, and then there's something coming up after that.

• 1:15:45Gabor Maté?

  Well, about 10 years ago, I began to work with psychedelics. Now, if you're 15 years ago, you were to ask me, will I ever be working with psychedelics as a healing modality, I would have said, you're out of your mind. But then through a series of events, I became aware of the potential role of psychedelics in healing. And I've been doing work with them now for 10 years. And they're another potent method. And they're not for everybody. And I have to emphasize that whatever modality you choose of a psychedelic nature, you have to do it with adept practitioners with deep integrity and deep knowledge and experience.

• 1:16:27Gabor Maté?

  But in such hands and in such a context, it's can be like a super highway to self-awareness. Not in isolation, but it opens doors that otherwise might take years. And so it's not unusual for me to conduct a psychedelic session with somebody or a series of sessions, either in a group or individual setting, and have them say, that was like 10 years of psychotherapy in one day. And I've had the same experience myself. So again, it's not to be isolated from other kinds of work, and it has to be integrated, but it's not a potent way of working. And of course, as I know you're personally aware, there's an

• 1:17:06Gabor Maté?

  increasing movement amongst psychologists, therapists, psychiatrists, medical doctors, other healers to find ways of incorporating psychedelic healing in the larger therapeutic scheme.

• 1:17:19Tim Ferriss?

  So Gabor, you mentioned a series of events leading you to psychedelics or to consider psychedelics potentially as a healing or medical modality. If you're able to, could you describe any of those events?

• 1:17:36Gabor Maté?

  Sure, so in two thousand and eight, my book on addiction, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Close and Converse with Addiction, was published in Canada and very quickly it became a number one national bestseller, subsequently published in the States as well. And I was on a book tour and people kept asking me, "What do you know about addictions and ayahuasca as a treatment?" Ayahuasca being a Peruvian, or Amazonian vine that's made into a brew that has psychedelic properties. I knew nothing. The next speech, or the next event, somebody else would ask, "What do you know about ayahuasca and the tree of addiction?" I finally started getting annoyed with it, like, "Leave me alone. I've just written a book, I've spent years researching it,

• 1:18:18Gabor Maté?

  my life experience and all kinds of scientific exploration went into it. Ask me about something I know about." And then I realized that maybe the universe was knocking on my door. And somebody said, "Did you know you could experience it here in Vancouver?" There was a Peruvian shaman leading some ceremonies up in Vancouver. So who am I to say no? And I jumped right in and I sat in this tent with fifty other people. Fifty? Yeah, that's how they set it up. It's not what I recommend, but that's how they set it up. They played beautiful music and there was a little baby in the room.

• 1:19:00Gabor Maté?

  Mother and dad were there for the experience. The baby was in the room and the baby was cooing away and tears started flowing down my face. And these were not tears of sorrow, they were tears of joy. And I got in touch with such profound love that I had never consciously experienced before. And there were tears of love. And it wasn't love for anybody in particular, it was just love. And then I saw in all the ways that I had closed my heart against love in my life and how I betrayed love in my personal relationship with my spouse and my children and in other ways.

• 1:19:42Gabor Maté?

  So I just got this experience of love as something profound and universal and life-defining, but something from which I've been cut off in so many ways. And I got it.

• 1:20:03Gabor Maté?

  Because I close my heart against love precisely because when I was vulnerable and small, I'd been so hurt owing to my mother's states of mind. She couldn't respond to me where I needed to be responded to, not her fault, but she couldn't. And then when I was a year old, she gave me to a stranger to save my life, and I didn't see her for a month, which is a huge-

• 1:20:25Tim Ferriss?

  Explain that for a second.

• 1:20:26Gabor Maté?

  So again, it's Budapest, Hungary, Second World War, January, the Russians have circled Budapest and are fighting the Germans. The government in power is a right-wing fascist, anti-Semitic military force. And even though the deportations of Jews had stopped, the Germans had annihilated half a million Hungarian Jews in three or four months. But now the Hungarian fascists were killing Jews in Budapest, including in the house where my mother and I were living. So my mother gave me to a stranger in the street, a Christian woman, because she didn't know if she'd be dead or alive next day.

• 1:21:01Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 1:21:02Gabor Maté?

  Or that I would be. And I was quite sick. So I didn't see her for a month, which I experienced as a deep abandonment. How else could I experience it? So my heart closes against love. And I got all this. And so I got that if this plant, this plant that, as you say, manifests the mind, can show me both the ways in which I've closed off from myself, and that I don't need to, because the love is still there, what healing potential it has. Now, I wish I could say that after that experience, I became a loving husband and a loving human being. I didn't. It's not that simple, you know, as my wife

• 1:21:45Gabor Maté?

  could tell you. Nevertheless, it opened the door for me. And I got right away. Now, however, the thought that I had was that I had no induction, I had no introduction, I had no processing afterwards. Ayahuasca is a medicinal plant that has been used in the Amazon basin for hundreds of years, maybe longer, in its cultural context.

• 1:22:12Gabor Maté?

  In a tribe, in a village where people know each other, where they know the shaman, where they share the same assumptions and the same history. That's not the same as a bunch of Westerners, strangers to each other, coming together for one night drinking the stuff and then going their separate ways.

• 1:22:26Gabor Maté?

  Agreed. So immediately the question that came up for me was how can we create a setting that at least resembles as best we can fashion the original setting? So we came up with the idea of a retreat, where a small number of people get together with properly trained shamans, who have integrity and experience, deep experience, and with me facilitating people's preparation and their post-ceremony integration. And so I've been doing that now for ten years. And a lot of learning involved. We made mistakes, but it evolved. And the essence of it is that people don't come into it cold.

• 1:23:10Gabor Maté?

  They come into it with preparation in a safe setting, where pretty soon that group becomes a family to each other, which means that not only do they love each other and support each other, but they also trigger each other. I mean, basically, I tell people, "Guess what? You're back and you found your origin. And everything you've hated about your family origin is gonna show up here." Yeah. But in the context where it's safe for that to happen. Right. And so I've seen a lot of great healing. I've had people with multiple suicide attempts heal from depression. I've seen people get much better with their autoimmune diseases. I've seen people deal with all kinds of addictions and life issues, relationship problems, come out of it much more themselves, much more able to deal with these issues

• 1:23:54Gabor Maté?

  so long as the proper integration is done afterwards. So that was my personal experience. Now, that then introduced me to the whole world of psychedelics. And I realized that there's a lot of research being done these days. There's this organization, MAPS, Multi-Disciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which is a group of psychologists, psychiatrists, medical doctors, therapists, counselors, interested people to study scientifically the role of psychedelics in healing. And as you're probably aware, interesting studies have been done around psilocybin, mushrooms, and endo-life anxiety.

• 1:24:35Gabor Maté?

  Studies have been done which are revolutionary in using MDMA assisted psychotherapy, MDMA being the medical name for, technical name for ecstasy. Again, in the right setting with the right leadership, these have proven to be very powerful modalities of healing. And so there's a whole new resurgence of psychedelic research in a number of different areas, some of them man-made, some of them plant-based. But there's a whole world that I was introduced to and I've learned a lot in the last 10 years. And again, I both practice it in my own healing work and I'm interested in it also as a participant.

• 1:25:16Tim Ferriss?

  I'd love to add a few things to your second comment and then ask a bunch of questions about the first.

• 1:25:22Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:23Tim Ferriss?

  So for people who are, and I'll maybe direct this to camera because I don't usually have cameras, so I'll just do this. For people who are, actually no, that's too weird. All right. For people who are, I don't know where to look. Definitely keep that in. For people who are interested in learning more about the current scientific studies and mechanisms of action related to some of these compounds and what is being done, there are a number of very interesting and very competent organizations as far as I can tell. MAPS is one that you mentioned and I'll actually be seeing the founder Rick Doblin in just a few days' time.

• 1:26:08Tim Ferriss?

  There is the Hefter Institute.

• 1:26:10Gabor Maté?

  Yes.

• 1:26:11Tim Ferriss?

  Which I've worked with primarily run by MDs and PhDs, or at least the board and so on, is comprised of scientists and medical doctors. It was through the Hefter Foundation and also directly with Johns Hopkins, so I've had some involvement with.

• 1:26:25Gabor Maté?

  The Sol seven.

• 1:26:26Tim Ferriss?

  With Sol seven studies.

• 1:26:27Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:28Tim Ferriss?

  And actually, thank you to many of you, sorry about smacking the mic, to many of you in my audience who helped through a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for a study at Johns Hopkins related to treatment-resistant depression.

• 1:26:41Gabor Maté?

  Yes.

• 1:26:42Tim Ferriss?

  And Sol seven. So Hefter Institute. Excellent organization to look into and then USONA also, which I believe is primarily focused on psilocybin, whereas MAPS at this point has done great work on many levels, including helping to facilitate MDMA, being designated a breakthrough therapy and effectively getting fast-tracked into phase three trials.

• 1:27:05Gabor Maté?

  By the FDA.

• 1:27:06Tim Ferriss?

  That's right.

• 1:27:07Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:08Tim Ferriss?

  And these are all organizations that I would encourage people to look into. And it's really an exciting time and also a fragile time as it relates to these compounds, which have certainly demonstrated historically, accepting MDMA. Let's just look at the studies, many of which were done, starting in, say, 50s and 60s, looking at the clinical efficacy of using these compounds for everything ranging from alcoholism to nicotine addiction to many of the things that you mentioned.

• 1:27:42Gabor Maté?

  But what is little known, but that Bill Wilson, Dr. Bill, who founded, one of the founders of AA.

• 1:27:48Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:27:49Gabor Maté?

  Actually had some powerful LSD experiences.

• 1:27:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:53Gabor Maté?

  Which helped him in his spiritual growth.

• 1:27:56Tim Ferriss?

  He wanted to make one of the steps.

• 1:27:57Gabor Maté?

  Within AA, they don't talk about that very much, but it's a fact. If I may parenthetically say, as much as I support the 12 steps, what AA also doesn't tend to talk about is the trauma that first causes the addiction. And Bill Wilson himself was a traumatized child. He was abandoned by his parents when he was very young. And so it's interesting that AA, for all the good work that it does do, which I support, I don't support people being forced into any particular form of treatment, but as a self-chosen form of treatment, it can be very helpful to many people. But they don't talk about two very interesting things, which is, one is the psychedelic part and the other is the trauma part.

• 1:28:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. It's, for me, just looking at my own childhood experiences and exploring recovery, defined as you defined it.

• 1:28:48Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:49Tim Ferriss?

  In the last several years, especially in the last six months, it's been fascinating and frustrating to discover and try to piece together these various elements. But the...

• 1:29:04Gabor Maté?

  What is the frustrating part?

• 1:29:07Tim Ferriss?

  That there is, well, it may exist, but I couldn't find one-stop shopping that checked all the boxes.

• 1:29:15Gabor Maté?

  They ain't any.

• 1:29:16Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So it's been an exercise in collecting various tools and piecing them together. Like you said, AA does incredible work. What they have done in terms of a distributed, free service with social accountability and support is incredible.

• 1:29:33Gabor Maté?

  Absolutely.

• 1:29:35Tim Ferriss?

  The psychedelic component, which Bill actually wanted to, as I understand it, make one of the steps in AA, needless to say, it was hard to get widespread leadership support for that, and then you have the trauma piece. So these are all tools in the toolkit that people can use for their own bespoke approach in some respects. Coming back to the ayahuasca specifically, and I should, just as a caveat, point out because I do think that these tools, I know these tools are very powerful. I have firsthand familiarity from past experiences and have been very engaged with this scientific community for some time now. They can be misused. There are many charlatans.

• 1:30:18Gabor Maté?

  Unfortunately, there's more than that. There are some very powerful healers, shamans, who unfortunately exploit people sexually and financially.

• 1:30:27Tim Ferriss?

  Very common.

• 1:30:28Gabor Maté?

  And this is, of course, not just restricted to the ayahuasca world. It also happens in the spiritual world. How many spiritual leaders with tremendous power, tremendous healing influence have at the same time exploited men and women and created all kinds of further trauma? So unfortunately, when you have that much power and you haven't totally done your integration work, you can start misusing that power. And that happens in all of the healing modalities, as we know, but it certainly happens in the psychedelic world as well.

• 1:31:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yep. It's very, I wish I could say it's rare, it's not, but it's something to safeguard against, especially when you're in that vulnerable state. So I would actually recommend that people see a documentary called Kumare, which is very much worth watching. The brief overview is it's an Indian filmmaker who begins studying various gurus and healers in the US in hopes of, I believe the original impetus was to simply do a documentary on charlatans. And then he went to India and he said, "They're just as bad here." And he said, "99% are just as bad or worse."

• 1:31:43Tim Ferriss?

  And he decides to make himself a guru as an experiment. And it's a very thought-provoking documentary that I think will...

• 1:31:52Gabor Maté?

  He becomes a kind of fake guru, right?

• 1:31:54Tim Ferriss?

  That's right.

• 1:31:54Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, I remember it, yeah.

• 1:31:55Tim Ferriss?

  And then he unveils it. I don't want to give too much away, but it's very well done, very worth watching because it helps to prepare you, I think psychologically, to not lose yourself in a dangerous way.

• 1:32:08Gabor Maté?

  And here's the problem, you see. What I said about the essence of trauma is that you lose connection to yourself. And that means you lose connection to your gut feelings.

• 1:32:18Tim Ferriss?

  Right, yes.

• 1:32:19Gabor Maté?

  Now, as long as your gut feelings are with you and you honor them, they'll protect you. But the very essence of trauma is the loss of that. Which means that when you lose connection to your gut feelings, then you're very vulnerable to being exploited. And when you talk to people who were exploited in any context, psychedelic or not, if you ask them, "Do you have any kind of vague sense that this is not quite right?" They'll say, "Yeah, but I didn't listen to it."

• 1:32:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:32:46Gabor Maté?

  And the fact that they didn't listen to it is already a marker of trauma. So since it's traumatized people, which is most of us, who seek healing, it's also vulnerable people who seek healing. And this is what some of these people can exploit. So the very portal into healing, which is opening up the vulnerability...

• 1:33:08Gabor Maté?

  That we've shut down against is also the portal for potential loss. So people have to do their due diligence.

• 1:33:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:14Gabor Maté?

  And I'm not trying to create paranoia here, but people just should be careful.

• 1:33:19Tim Ferriss?

  You just mentioned something that I'd really love to just pause and emphasize. You mentioned a few things. So number one is that your gut feeling slash physiological intuition can help you. And that's something that for many reasons, I completely muted or ignored for a very long time. So it's been a process of getting reacquainted with that. And I would say two things that I found helpful. And if you have any comments on the second in particular, I'd love to hear. One was dramatically decreasing my caffeine intake, which I found was almost like turning up the volume on static.

• 1:34:02Tim Ferriss?

  It made it very difficult for me to read or feel other things.

• 1:34:06Gabor Maté?

  That's right.

• 1:34:07Tim Ferriss?

  I was using it maybe for many reasons, but it had the side effect at least of muting. Maybe that was why I did it subconsciously, many of these feelings. The second was, in fact, a video that was recommended to me, but it corresponds to a book called The Gift of Fear by Gavin DeBecker. And who actually owns a company that does protective services and executive security. So you have to keep in mind, maybe you don't always want to ask a barber if you need a haircut. So keeping that in mind, it also, in brief, points to the benefits of some of these reactions

• 1:34:51Tim Ferriss?

  or emotional states that we are prone to labeling negative.

• 1:34:54Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:56Tim Ferriss?

  And the...

• 1:35:00Tim Ferriss?

  As you said, not to make anyone paranoid, but rather to inform them, these are currently existent risks. And one of the hopes, certainly with, say, ultimately better researching these compounds after they've been really unfairly, but for understandable reasons politicized and put into the same schedule in the United States as heroin and cocaine to have them rescheduled so that they are prescribable. If then that happens, the ability to certify therapists, to regulate and to maintain a broad type of quality control goes up.

• 1:35:44Tim Ferriss?

  So that's also, you know, one of the hopes is that that will decrease the likelihood of bad actors and allow appropriate punishment for bad actors.

• 1:35:55Gabor Maté?

  Mind you, as we know, even in legalized legitimate professions.

• 1:36:01Tim Ferriss?

  It still happens.

• 1:36:01Gabor Maté?

  Stuff happens, you know, so ultimately, you know, gut feelings are still the best response. And let me address first why we shut down our gut feelings, if I may.

• 1:36:12Tim Ferriss?

  Please.

• 1:36:13Gabor Maté?

  So, a human being has two fundamental needs, apart from the physical needs, in infancy, in childhood. One is for attachment. Now, attachment is the closeness and proximity with another human being for the sake of being looked after, or for the sake of looking after the other. Now, human beings, as mammals and even birds, are creatures of attachment. We have to connect and attach because otherwise we don't survive. If there's nobody that's motivated to take care of us, to attach to us that way, and we're not motivated to attach to others, we just can't survive.

• 1:36:52Gabor Maté?

  One of the things is that the endorphins, which are the body's internal opiate chemicals, which heroin and all the other opiates resemble, they help to facilitate attachment. So if you take infant mice and you knock out their endorphin receptors so they don't have endorphin opiate activity in their brain, they won't cry for help and separate from their mothers, which would mean that they would die in the wild.

• 1:37:22Gabor Maté?

  And which goes back to what happens in early in childhood when there's stress and trauma, these endorphin systems don't develop. And then when people do heroin, it feels like a warm, soft hug to them. They feel love and connection for the first time. That's why it's so powerful.

• 1:37:38Gabor Maté?

  But, so we have this need for attachment, which obviously the human infant, who is the most helpless, the most dependent, the least mature of any creature in the universe at birth,

• 1:37:49Gabor Maté?

  cannot survive without the attachment. And that attachment relationship, given that we have the longest period of development of any creature, you know, well into adolescence and beyond, attachment is not a negotiable need.

• 1:38:05Gabor Maté?

  But we have another need, which is authenticity. Now authenticity, out of the self, means being connected to ourselves, just knowing what we feel and being able to act on it. So, that means our gut feelings. So, let's look at how human beings evolved. For hundreds of thousands of years, and for a hundred thousand years or so of this species existing on Earth, how did we live? We didn't live in cities and houses and so on. We lived out there in the wild, until very recently, in human existence. Now, just how long do you survive in the wild if you're not connected to your gut feelings? Not very long. Not very long. If you start using your intellect instead of your gut feelings, you just don't survive.

• 1:38:47Gabor Maté?

  So that's a powerful survival need as well. So attachment is a survival need. Authenticity is a survival need. But what happens if your authenticity threatens your attachment relationships? For example, as a two-year-old, you get angry because you didn't get that cookie before dinner. But your parents can't handle anger because they grew up in homes when there was rage holism and they're terrified that the very expression of anger. So they give you the message that good little kids don't get angry. The message you receive is not that good little kids don't get angry, but that angry little kids don't get loved. Because your parents are not solemn, they won't look at you, they talk to you in a harsh way, you're not getting loved. Not experiencing love at that moment, no. But you've got to stay attached.

• 1:39:31Gabor Maté?

  Guess what you're going to suppress? The authenticity every time. And this is how we lose connection to ourselves and to our gut feelings. So that, strangely enough, that very dynamic, which is essential for human survival in a natural setting, now becomes a threat to our survival in this more modern setting, where to stay authentic is to threaten attachment. And so we give up our authenticity and then we wonder who the hell we are and whose life is this? And who's experiencing all this? And this life doesn't, you know, and who am I really? And so that's where the reconnection has to happen. That's where the healing happens, is with that reconnection. But it's because of that conflict, that tragic conflict in childhood between authenticity

• 1:40:13Gabor Maté?

  and attachment, that most of us face, that we lose ourselves and lose connection to our gut feelings.

• 1:40:21Tim Ferriss?

  There's so many directions we can go with this. And I'm really glad you shared that because that had an enormous... That observation has had an enormous impact on some of my close friends and something I was only exposed to, really, today because our mutual friend, Vicky, recommended that I ask you to expand on it. What I'd love to return to, if we can...

• 1:40:45Gabor Maté?

  Can I say something?

• 1:40:46Tim Ferriss?

  Of course.

• 1:40:47Gabor Maté?

  Sorry. In this building, there's a picture of Elvis Presley.

• 1:40:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 1:40:51Gabor Maté?

  So there's a song of his that I play at my retreats and my events all the time. It's called "Any Way You Love Me." Remember how it goes?

• 1:40:59Tim Ferriss?

  I don't.

• 1:41:00Gabor Maté?

  I could actually play it for you, but it goes, "Any way you love me, that's the way I'll be. In your hands, my heart is clay. I'll be strong as a mountain or weak as a..."

• 1:41:11Gabor Maté?

  Willow tree. I'll be powerful, I'll be like a little baby. Any way you want me, that's how I will be. Now, that's considered a love song. It isn't. It's a lack of love song. It's a song that says, "Just attach to me. I'll give up anything about myself, just accept me the way you want me to be." It's a saddest song. And when you hear him sing it, there's deep sadness in it. And some of the power of Presley actually came from his own suffering. He wasn't just singing a song. He was actually infusing it with all the emotions of loss. So even though it's presented like a love song, it's actually a song about the loss of love. And that's the situation of the infant who says,

• 1:41:55Gabor Maté?

  "Just love me. I'll be anything you want me to be." And that's the tragic conflict between attachment and authenticity.

• 1:42:04Tim Ferriss?

  So this ties into exactly where I was going.

• 1:42:06Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:08Tim Ferriss?

  Which is related to your pre and post work with psychedelics.

• 1:42:14Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:15Tim Ferriss?

  And for people who are watching this or listening to it, I'm returning to this not because I want to hammer home psychedelics. They're not for everyone. And in my experience, the vast majority, or I should say, in my observation, the vast majority of psychedelic use is very irresponsible. And I would not recommend. Because you... It can certainly cause a good amount of harm, if not done in a supervised, safe fashion. But the pre and post work could apply to many modalities. I mean, it does in this case, this example that we're about to talk about, apply to psychedelics. But it could...

• 1:43:00Tim Ferriss?

  And correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like it could very easily apply to going into any intense or unusual modality.

• 1:43:07Gabor Maté?

  Oh, like vipassana meditation.

• 1:43:09Tim Ferriss?

  Like vipassana.

• 1:43:10Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:10Tim Ferriss?

  Like this Date with Destiny, Tony Robbins, I mentioned, which is certainly intense and very, very different, very powerful. That's why I'm coming back to this. But we can discuss it as it applies specifically to psychedelics and even specifically to ayahuasca, if that is the primary.

• 1:43:30Tim Ferriss?

  That's the primary compound we're talking about, which is really, just for people who are wondering, it's, uh, one of the reasons ayahuasca is really tricky is that it is unlike, say, I'm gonna get off topic for a second, but it's still on topic. It's not quite like mushrooms and what people consider the primary psychoactive molecule of psilocybin. It's a bit different. It's more of an old fashioned. Like if you go to a bar and you order vodka and soda, pretty much everywhere you go, vodka and soda.

• 1:44:03Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:03Tim Ferriss?

  Very similar.

• 1:44:04Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:04Tim Ferriss?

  Assuming the pour is the same.

• 1:44:05Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:06Tim Ferriss?

  Ayahuasca is more like an old fashioned. There are few ingredients that are almost always there. So if you go to, let's say, I wanna say Pucalpa or other parts of Peru, it's going to be mostly the ayahuasca vine plus a plant called chacruna.

• 1:44:22Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:23Tim Ferriss?

  Or a psycotrieviridis, which is a DMT, I think, I suppose it must be NNDMT containing plant, which is made orally active through the MAO inhibitors, monomine oxidase inhibitors in the vine. How they figured that out is a whole separate story, which is kinda wild. The plants told them is the short version.

• 1:44:44Gabor Maté?

  I know, although I have a science, scientific friend who gave me a startlingly simple explanation, which

• 1:44:50Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, well, let's

• 1:44:51Gabor Maté?

  Which makes more sense to the Western mind.

• 1:44:53Tim Ferriss?

  What is

• 1:44:53Gabor Maté?

  When I was in Peru, they also told me the plants told us, which on some level I accept. But I just wanna say something here, because we're talking in an extended way about the psychedelics. I don't wanna create the impression that this is most of my life or work.

• 1:45:05Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:45:06Gabor Maté?

  It isn't. I do this stuff one or two or three weeks a year. So it's not like the major part of what I do. But it is a very interesting part, because it illuminates everything else that I do. In a sense that it goes very deep. Now, this scientific friend of mine, the science friend of mine says, actually, they were, let's say, using the ayahuasca and boiling it up, because ayahuasca itself, the vine, has some psychedelic properties on its own, without the chacruna.

• 1:45:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, very strong auditory in particular.

• 1:45:36Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, so then what happens is some leaves of chacruna fall into it. Inevitably, over hundreds of years, that's gonna happen. Now they say, "Oh, well, this combination is even more powerful."

• 1:45:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:48Gabor Maté?

  So it need not be as esoteric.

• 1:45:50Tim Ferriss?

  That's true.

• 1:45:50Gabor Maté?

  It could have been a rather simple discovery.

• 1:45:53Tim Ferriss?

  For sure.

• 1:45:55Gabor Maté?

  So who knows what the real story is?

• 1:45:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:58Gabor Maté?

  But in any case, the preparation and the processing.

• 1:46:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:01Gabor Maté?

  So...

• 1:46:02Tim Ferriss?

  And I was just gonna add one thing to that, which is, that is one combination. You then also have, in certain regions of... And it's found in other places outside of Peru.

• 1:46:13Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:14Tim Ferriss?

  Most certainly. And the largest ayahuasca as sacrament-based churches are actually out of Brazil.

• 1:46:19Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:20Tim Ferriss?

  But the... It can also be ayahuasca vine plus yahay, which is a different plant. Also DMT-containing, but a...

• 1:46:30Tim Ferriss?

  For some people, substantially different experience.

• 1:46:33Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:33Tim Ferriss?

  And then, the only reason I'm mentioning this is so that people are aware of why I am particularly concerned when people are cavalier about, "Hey, my friend's ordering some ayahuasca from Hawaii, and we're gonna put it in a slow cooker and have it at his house this weekend." I'm like, "Bad, bad idea." Many, many centers, even well-intentioned centers in Peru, will also put other things in the brew because they think that foreigners want more of X. So they'll put coca leaves, they'll put... So think cocaine, coca leaves. They'll put toé, which is even... Datura, which is even scarier in some respects. Coca not that scary. So just be aware that when you say ayahuasca...

• 1:47:18Tim Ferriss?

  Not you, but when people think ayahuasca, it is not a standardized dose that you're getting.

• 1:47:22Gabor Maté?

  And recently, I was at a retreat in Costa Rica, where really, four different nights, they had ceremonies, and each time with a different concoction.

• 1:47:29Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, God.

• 1:47:30Gabor Maté?

  So one night with the Peruvian shipibo tradition preparation. One night with the yahay from Colombia.

• 1:47:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:37Gabor Maté?

  And, you know, it's who prepares it, how much they bullet for, what combination, what intention, and so on. So that's by and large true.

• 1:47:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:48Gabor Maté?

  And really...

• 1:47:52Gabor Maté?

  The people I've worked with, they, you know, it's always, not that it's always the same drink every night, but it's pretty much the same preparation.

• 1:47:58Tim Ferriss?

  Same preparation, yeah. And so I took us down a little rabbit hole, but the question I have is with all of your clinical experience, you know, recognizing that this is a therapy, but it's an adjunct therapy, it's not used in isolation.

• 1:48:12Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:12Tim Ferriss?

  And you've, through trial and error and design, come to a place now where you have maybe certain best practices or approaches to the pre and post work. Could you tell us about either or both of those?

• 1:48:30Gabor Maté?

  Sure.

• 1:48:31Tim Ferriss?

  And, you know, ideally, maybe exercises or questions people could think about on their own. I know it's hard to recommend that in isolation perhaps, but I'd love to hear any details that you're willing to share about the pre and post.

• 1:48:48Gabor Maté?

  Sure.

• 1:48:49Tim Ferriss?

  Because it's so, so important. I just, it's hard to, for me at least, in my limited experience even, to overemphasize.

• 1:48:57Gabor Maté?

  Well, with ayahuasca specifically, which is not the only modality I work with, but with that specifically, there's a physical preparation. For example, no caffeine for a period of time, no red meat, cutting down on salt,

• 1:49:13Gabor Maté?

  excluding dairy products. So there's a physical preparation, just to cleanse the body and to make it more receptive to the ayahuasca.

• 1:49:22Gabor Maté?

  From the emotional and psychological point of view, you want somebody to really formulate an intention. What actually I want out of this experience, because intention is everything. So it's not like I'm gonna take this stuff and let's see what happens. Why am I here for? Why am I coming? What is my intention in going there? What do I want to find out? What issues am I working with? So intention setting and really considering, what is my purpose in undertaking this experience?

• 1:49:50Gabor Maté?

  When people arrive, we don't just plunge into ceremony.

• 1:49:55Gabor Maté?

  In my ayahuasca retreats, we have a day and a half of group preparation. So everybody articulates their intention, why they're there, and we deeply explore how that intention arose, and what in their lives brought them to this point, and what issues they need to deal with.

• 1:50:16Gabor Maté?

  My way of working is to get people very deeply to their core issues, which they may not be even aware of, but again, through this process I call compassionate inquiry. And this is true whether I'm working with plants or not. They get to see what it is that they're really seeking. And what are they seeking? They're seeking themselves. They're seeking reconnection, ultimately. But there's steps that you go through. And then we help them set a specific intention for that first ceremony. And the specific intention is, what do I want to learn tonight? Not just what I want to learn in general, but what I want to learn tonight. Some people want to learn about... Tell me about my fear.

• 1:51:01Gabor Maté?

  Teach me about my pain.

• 1:51:06Gabor Maté?

  Show me what love is. Show me what courage is. Show me what my strength is. See, it's not that the ayahuasca comes with an agenda.

• 1:51:18Gabor Maté?

  It works through you, and it manifests what's in you. So that your intention, the more specific it is to where you are in life at that moment, the more effective it's going to be. And then the shamans work with you during the ceremony, and they chant to you based on what they're picking up from you at that moment. They work with you energetically. Sometimes they work hands-on as well. And you both have your own experience, and you share the group energy.

• 1:51:52Gabor Maté?

  And then people go to sleep, and the next day, and then the following day, we then process what happened to you, what visions came to you. Now, some people will have visions. Some people with more prosaic minds like me, have they ever got visions? I did originally get visions, but it's been years since I've seen anything. Some people have bodily experiences. Some people go to intense emotional states, which in my view are always memories of maybe...

• 1:52:24Gabor Maté?

  Forgotten memories, but indwelling memories of very early experiences, intense. Some people have beautiful entities coming and teaching them, you know Jaguars and Anacondas or various angelic entities. I've never been blessed with that. I used to get frustrated, but actually whatever experience you have, that's the experience you need to have. And for me, it's not about the visions or anything, it's about what is the teaching. And the teaching is always there. And the purpose of the processing is to help you find the teaching that was imparted to you by whatever experience you had, not about comparing your experience to the night before, or two nights before, or to the experience

• 1:53:05Gabor Maté?

  of other people. It's your specific experience, what does it mean in your life? So this is, and now, post-retreat, then, again, whether you do a program like the Pasana, whether you do the Landmark Forum, or whether you do a Hoffman Process, or whether you do any kind of transformational work, or a meditation retreat, if you don't integrate what you've learned into your life, and you build up some practice around it, it's going to become a memory, a nice memory.

• 1:53:36Speaker 05

  At best, right?

• 1:53:37Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:38Speaker 05

  I mean, if you go straight back into making hypercritical decisions impulsively, 12 hours later also could be very destructive.

• 1:53:46Gabor Maté?

  Absolutely. So, the more integration we can, and in general, in psychedelic work, this question of integration is becoming more and more recognized, and more and more practiced. So, integration means keeping in touch with people that can help you stay on track, keeping in touch with the group that you shared the experience with, putting some practice into your life such as journaling, meditation, yoga. Perhaps you're going to return and do some more plant work, or perhaps you won't, that's entirely up to you, there's no prescription to be made there. But, the point is to go from experience that is discreet and time limited, to some kind of integration that is, that happens over time.

• 1:54:32Tim Ferriss?

  How do you format that integration? Are you interacting with the people on your retreat once a week for four weeks? Or you have two sessions in the following week? What does the actual format look like?

• 1:54:45Gabor Maté?

  Well, that's evolving and that's different for different people. But in general, I would say that if you can talk to somebody regularly over time, and if you can maintain your contact with the groups, like a Facebook group, Facebook group where people share experiences. If you take on certain practices and you do them together, or at least you do them simultaneously, and then you talk, share about the practices. These are all forms of integration.

• 1:55:11Tim Ferriss?

  Which, and we've mentioned this a few times, applies to more than just the modality of using plant medicine.

• 1:55:17Gabor Maté?

  Absolutely.

• 1:55:18Tim Ferriss?

  So after this, not to sound like a broken record, but this is very recent, after going to this Tony Robbins event with a number of people, including, we have a photo online, so I think he's fine with me saying it, Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb, Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, was sitting right behind me. He wasn't part of the group, but he's a friend, at least an acquaintance, getting to know each other. In any case, we kept a group text.

• 1:55:46Gabor Maté?

  Great.

• 1:55:47Tim Ferriss?

  Going afterwards to hold each other accountable and also to set follow-up group calls.

• 1:55:51Gabor Maté?

  Right.

• 1:55:52Tim Ferriss?

  And so on. A number of things I'd really like to underscore because you mentioned them, and I'd like to reiterate their importance, and also how they transcend the plant medicine work. The psychedelics. The first is, you mentioned intentions. And I'll just, I'll just share my experience and also a number of recommendations that helped me tremendously.

• 1:56:20Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:21Tim Ferriss?

  With plant medicine work, but then life in general, which is you set a clear intention, but the clear intention is not the same as an expectation.

• 1:56:32Gabor Maté?

  That's right.

• 1:56:33Tim Ferriss?

  And if you go in to, and you have an expectation you can't let go of.

• 1:56:38Gabor Maté?

  That's right.

• 1:56:38Tim Ferriss?

  You end up, many people end up trying to white-knuckle the experience.

• 1:56:42Gabor Maté?

  And that's true in general in life, and it's very true for plant experiences. So if you get there, that this is gonna happen, that's gonna, this should happen. And some people sit there the whole night resisting their experience, because it doesn't meet their expectations.

• 1:56:52Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So there's, there's a, there's a card. It's a little card that I was given as a gift, which I didn't come to appreciate fully until maybe a year or two ago. I've been carrying it a long time. And it was given to me by an ex-girlfriend, and it says, "The task which hinders your task is your task." And so you mentioned a few things, and you said, "Well, that is the work for that night." And I've come to know a few people I respect as... I hesitate to use the word, but they're really only two or three people I have personally met I would feel comfortable calling a shaman. And they all have minimum 10, 15 years' experience in a traditional apprenticeship setting.

• 1:57:35Gabor Maté?

  And by the way, that means deep, personal work.

• 1:57:38Tim Ferriss?

  Very deep.

• 1:57:39Gabor Maté?

  That means sitting in a jungle by yourself, being beaten by mosquitoes.

• 1:57:42Tim Ferriss?

  Doing...

• 1:57:43Gabor Maté?

  That means drinking various plants, tobacco and other plants, beyond ayahuasca, and really preparing. I know somebody on that path right now, let me tell you.

• 1:57:52Tim Ferriss?

  Very deep.

• 1:57:53Gabor Maté?

  It's deep, committed work. It's not for the faint-hearted.

• 1:57:55Tim Ferriss?

  Very, very intense.

• 1:57:56Gabor Maté?

  I would never do it.

• 1:57:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's very intense. Very, very intense. And I mean, there are people who do 15 months of isolation, dieting various plants, no sex, no salt, no pork, no red meat.

• 1:58:05Gabor Maté?

  Absolutely.

• 1:58:06Tim Ferriss?

  And you know the drill. We won't get into it right now. And what... They've shared a few examples with me of, say, I've never... Well, that's not true, but I have always, in the past, shied away from large groups. That's why I was taken aback with mentioning 50 people. It seems very common in any group, especially larger groups, and this is true in psychedelics or at Vipassana retreats. They actually... The nickname for it that was given at the 10-day silent retreat I did at Spirit Rock was the Vipassana Vendetta, where you decide that someone who's sitting close to you is coughing too loudly, or clears their throat

• 1:58:47Tim Ferriss?

  too often, or whatever, and it starts to... You start to perseverate and think about it incessantly, and maybe get angry about it.

• 1:58:54Gabor Maté?

  Instead of watching your own reactions.

• 1:58:56Tim Ferriss?

  Instead of watching your reaction. And the example that was given to me by this particular, I'm just gonna say ayahuasca to simplify things. Ayahuasca, someone who works with ayahuasca, was, he told me about this Westerner came down, I guess they're kinda Westerners too, they're just south of the border, so Northern American who came down and was furious that someone in the group wouldn't shut up with their screaming. He was just furious about this. And there are a number of ways an organizer can handle that, but he took the guy outside and he said, "That person is your work tonight."

• 1:59:35Gabor Maté?

  Absolutely.

• 1:59:36Tim Ferriss?

  And if you think about that reframe, and how to view something that perhaps historically you would respond to as a problem, or an annoyance, or offensive, to view that, and there are certain times when you have to fight and stand up for yourself, I'm not saying you shouldn't, but I think that in my case, and in the cases of many folks, we fight too often, we wear ourselves out, we get upset too often. How can you view that as a gift? How can you view that as your work?

• 2:00:06Gabor Maté?

  Well, can I again give you a quote?

• 2:00:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, please.

• 2:00:09Gabor Maté?

  Which I love, it's one of my, from one of my favorite teachers, and his name is A.H. Allmas. And he says, "Your conflicts, all the difficult things, the problematic situations in your life are not chance or haphazard. They're actually yours. They're specifically yours, designed specifically for you by a part of you that loves you more than anything else. The part of you that loves you more than anything else has created roadblocks to lead you to yourself. You're not gonna, you're not gonna go in the right direction unless there's something pricking you on the side saying, telling you, 'Look here, this way.' That part of you loves you so much that it doesn't want you to lose the chance. It will go to extreme measures to wake you up, it will make you suffer greatly if you don't listen. What else can it do?

• 2:00:54Gabor Maté?

  That's its purpose." And I found this to be true of physical illness, and mental problems, and everything, you've gotta see, what is the teaching here? So we can look at all these things as problems to get rid of, which is what the personality wants to do, or we can look at them as learning opportunities, which is what your true self wants to do. Now, two things. One is you talked about intention in life. So my wife and I had a holiday recently in Costa Rica. Partly it was a working holiday, but partly it was just a holiday. Traditionally, we've had terrible times during holidays. Partly because of my workaholism, and once I go into a holiday, I just collapse. And now, my wife is dragging a corpse around on holiday, you know?

• 2:01:39Gabor Maté?

  Because I'm a workaholic, you know, and I had unclear space. So this time, we actually went into a holiday with intention. This is not to do with psychedelics, just to do with that we set an intention. What is our intention? And if we have an intention, I've learned from a couple of very wise teachers, what structures do we want to set up to support our intention? And how are we going to handle when there's kind of disagreement or conflict? We had a beautiful holiday, because it was the first intentional holiday that we've had. So that intention in life in general is absolutely essential. Like, every morning, what is my actual intention? So the problem, the upset, so, wanna do a bit of an exercise?

• 2:02:18Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 2:02:19Gabor Maté?

  Okay, and then, you know, if you don't like it, just tell me. When was the last, this is something I do in my groups, or when I speak, or in the song, when I teach. So I ask people to tell me some recent episode when they're upset with somebody with their lives. And something that they're open to sharing, so it doesn't have to be anything stored it or thing, but just something, you know, whether it's your spouse, partner, the bus driver, I don't care who.

• 2:02:45Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 2:02:46Gabor Maté?

  A friend.

• 2:02:47Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 2:02:48Gabor Maté?

  So are you willing to go there?

• 2:02:49Tim Ferriss?

  Anything.

• 2:02:50Gabor Maté?

  Okay.

• 2:02:51Tim Ferriss?

  I can share anything?

• 2:02:52Gabor Maté?

  Just where you're upset with somebody.

• 2:02:53Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, yes.

• 2:02:54Gabor Maté?

  Okay, so what happened?

• 2:02:55Tim Ferriss?

  Describe it.

• 2:02:56Gabor Maté?

  What happened, yeah?

• 2:02:57Tim Ferriss?

  All right, there were a number of issues in my home, broken aspects of the home, things that were falling apart or needed to be fixed.

• 2:03:07Gabor Maté?

  Physically?

• 2:03:08Tim Ferriss?

  Physically.

• 2:03:09Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:03:10Tim Ferriss?

  Right, and I had hired someone to do these things.

• 2:03:11Gabor Maté?

  Right.

• 2:03:12Tim Ferriss?

  While I was gone.

• 2:03:13Gabor Maté?

  Okay.

• 2:03:14Tim Ferriss?

  And I came back and none of them were fixed.

• 2:03:15Gabor Maté?

  Okay, and your emotional reaction was?

• 2:03:17Tim Ferriss?

  Anger.

• 2:03:18Gabor Maté?

  Rage. Anger, okay. Anything else besides anger?

• 2:03:22Tim Ferriss?

  I think they're close cousins.

• 2:03:28Tim Ferriss?

  Frustration.

• 2:03:29Gabor Maté?

  Frustration is frustration is anger, yeah?

• 2:03:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I was disappointed.

• 2:03:35Gabor Maté?

  Disappointed is sadness.

• 2:03:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's a different feeling. So I was disappointed in myself also because I started to look at how maybe.

• 2:03:43Gabor Maté?

  Well disappointed is not so much an emotion as a state of mind. I'm asking what the emotions were. What's inside disappointment?

• 2:03:52Gabor Maté?

  Something didn't happen, I want it to happen, how do I feel?

• 2:03:56Gabor Maté?

  Isn't there sadness there?

• 2:03:58Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, yeah, there's sadness.

• 2:04:00Gabor Maté?

  I'm not talking into it, I'm just asking.

• 2:04:01Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I suppose I'm, I might be confusing state of mind and states of mind and emotions. I'm not sure how to.

• 2:04:07Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, so I'm looking at the raw emotion.

• 2:04:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, sadness.

• 2:04:12Gabor Maté?

  So there's anger and sadness, those are the emotions.

• 2:04:14Tim Ferriss?

  Let's, let's go with that.

• 2:04:15Gabor Maté?

  Okay, so I'm gonna ask you a silly question. What were you sad and angry about?

• 2:04:23Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I suppose the answer, which is not the right answer I'm expecting, was I was angry that someone had made commitments to me and not fulfilled those commitments.

• 2:04:35Gabor Maté?

  Okay, well, that's what happened. They had made the commitment in the phone, but that doesn't tell me what you were sad or angry about.

• 2:04:43Gabor Maté?

  What, what, what does that mean that they didn't fulfill their commitments?

• 2:04:47Tim Ferriss?

  Meant that they didn't care about me, they didn't, that they didn't respect me.

• 2:04:57Gabor Maté?

  So they didn't care about you and didn't respect you. What kind of person doesn't get cared or respected?

• 2:05:07Tim Ferriss?

  I might need a lifeline here. I don't know, someone who doesn't deserve to be cared for or respected.

• 2:05:12Gabor Maté?

  Exactly, someone who's unworthy, right?

• 2:05:14Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 2:05:15Gabor Maté?

  With respect and, and, and care. Okay, now, if there are other people here, which there usually are when I do this exercise, I would ask them, okay, we just listened to Tim tell us about this experience. Are there other reasons why this other person might not have done the work that has nothing to do with him or her not caring about Tim or not respecting him? So what other reasons might there be?

• 2:05:38Tim Ferriss?

  A million and one.

• 2:05:38Gabor Maté?

  Name one.

• 2:05:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, he could have, he could be in the hospital.

• 2:05:42Gabor Maté?

  He could be in the hospital.

• 2:05:43Tim Ferriss?

  His partner carried one, could have been in a car accident.

• 2:05:46Gabor Maté?

  Exactly.

• 2:05:47Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, he had a flight delay and got caught on Puerto Rico during a hurricane.

• 2:05:52Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, he's got ADHD.

• 2:05:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:54Gabor Maté?

  Uh, he, and he can't follow through. Um, he's under stress and he couldn't.

• 2:06:00Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:06:00Gabor Maté?

  Okay, okay, okay, now.

• 2:06:01Tim Ferriss?

  The email that I was supposed to send is sitting in drafts and I thought I'd sent it, but in fact, he never received it. I mean.

• 2:06:06Gabor Maté?

  Okay, and any number of possibilities.

• 2:06:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:08Gabor Maté?

  Now, of all the possibilities that you've just outlined, including that they don't care about you or respect you, which is the worst one?

• 2:06:19Tim Ferriss?

  The one I immediately defaulted to.

• 2:06:22Gabor Maté?

  Right.

• 2:06:22Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I mean, the worst.

• 2:06:24Gabor Maté?

  Well, no, no, no, no.

• 2:06:26Tim Ferriss?

  If the guy's dead, then it's, it's bad, but.

• 2:06:27Gabor Maté?

  No, no, but internally.

• 2:06:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, internally, the worst assumption is the one that I immediately made.

• 2:06:31Gabor Maté?

  Exactly. So, let's notice something. A, you, I should say we, because we're all like this, we don't respond to what happens. We respond to our perception of what happens.

• 2:06:41Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:06:42Gabor Maté?

  Okay, that's what the Buddha said. It's with our minds you create the world. So that, um, if you'd found out he had ADHD, or, or he was stressed, or, you know, you might have been sad for him, but would not have been angry and you would not have been sad. Okay, uh, you, you might have, you know, so, first of all, we don't respond to what happens. We respond to our perception of what happens, to our interpretation of what happens. Number one. Number two, of all the possible interpretations, we choose the worst one.

• 2:07:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:12Gabor Maté?

  Number two. Thirdly, what I just said isn't true. We didn't choose it. It's not like you went through all these possibilities and you said.

• 2:07:19Tim Ferriss?

  Was it multiple choice? I chose option D.

• 2:07:21Gabor Maté?

  Oh, no, he doesn't care about me. He doesn't respect me. You didn't do that. Your brain jumped there automatically, right? The question is why?

• 2:07:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:28Gabor Maté?

  Now, here's the learning. First time in your life that you felt hurt and angry, that you, when you perceived somebody didn't care about you or didn't respect you? Or has it happened before?

• 2:07:39Tim Ferriss?

  This is where the exercise might, might, might go sideways. I'm, I'm gonna hit pause on that. I think that's probably for more of a conversation over wine.

• 2:07:47Gabor Maté?

  But you'd probably agree it's not the first time.

• 2:07:49Tim Ferriss?

  It's not the first time.

• 2:07:50Gabor Maté?

  Very good. And most people I talk to, um, it goes back way back.

• 2:07:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, this goes way back.

• 2:07:57Gabor Maté?

  Into childhood.

• 2:07:58Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:07:58Gabor Maté?

  Okay? And that's what trauma is. We don't respond to the present moment. We respond to the past.

• 2:08:08Gabor Maté?

  Now, but along the lines of our discussion, it's a beautiful learning opportunity. Now you get to know. Now, what if you assumed for a moment that you're the most lovable, most worthy of care, most worthy of respect person in the history of the universe? And this guy doesn't do your homework. What's your response?

• 2:08:32Tim Ferriss?

  Any number of the other options which does not trigger an intense negative emotional state. None of those other options would trigger that.

• 2:08:40Gabor Maté?

  So, something in you, I would argue, still believes that you're not worthy of care and respect. And that's what gets triggered. So who's the one that doesn't care about you? And who's the one that doesn't think you're worthy of respect?

• 2:08:54Tim Ferriss?

  No, it'd be me.

• 2:08:55Gabor Maté?

  It'd be you.

• 2:08:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:56Gabor Maté?

  Now, that's a learning.

• 2:08:57Tim Ferriss?

  No, it is.

• 2:08:57Gabor Maté?

  And this is exactly what you're talking about. You're saying how these difficult things, how these problems are always teaching opportunities. And that's the beauty of healing, is that when you reframe things and you actually see the source within ourselves, all of a sudden, that's liberating. Because guess what? If you're feeling that way because this guy did this or didn't do that, that makes you a victim.

• 2:09:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 2:09:22Gabor Maté?

  But if you see that you're the source, now you're powerful.

• 2:09:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you're empowered.

• 2:09:26Gabor Maté?

  You're empowered, exactly.

• 2:09:28Tim Ferriss?

  This is something that a friend of mine here in Austin, Robert Rodriguez, recently said to me in a very similar way. I mean, it was a completely different context. He was actually telling a story about someone else who was constantly blaming people for everything in the film world. And he said, "If you are the victim and it's everyone else's fault, you're powerless." And he said, "But keep in mind, every time you're pointing a finger at someone," and I'd never heard this, I know it now after the fact that there are other people who've said this, but he said, "Every time you're pointing a finger at someone, keep in mind that there are three fingers pointing back at you."

• 2:10:01Gabor Maté?

  Exactly.

• 2:10:02Tim Ferriss?

  And I thought about that, I was like, "Wow."

• 2:10:04Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 2:10:05Tim Ferriss?

  That's just a good

• 2:10:06Gabor Maté?

  That's great.

• 2:10:06Tim Ferriss?

  sentence to keep in mind.

• 2:10:08Gabor Maté?

  No, this is a recording studio sometime? Was it?

• 2:10:12Tim Ferriss?

  This, yeah, they do recordings.

• 2:10:14Gabor Maté?

  Did they record in the past or just? I just, did Johnny Cash ever record here by any chance?

• 2:10:20Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I don't know if Johnny Cash was ever here. I would say it's possible because they've been around for a long time.

• 2:10:25Gabor Maté?

  The reason I ask is because he's got a song that I play. At all my events, it's gonna, in your mind it's called. This is, it all goes done in your mind. It's on the soundtrack of Dead Man Walking. And I think he wrote it himself. It all goes done in your mind. And it goes, one foot in the fire, one foot on Jacob's ladder, another in the fire. It all goes done in your mind. So whether you're going to hell, or you're on the way to heaven, it all happens up here. Which is such a powerful teaching, because this is what we can work on. You know, if we're, if we're victims of the world. Ramana Maharshi, who's a great Indian guru, he said something like, "If your foot hurts when you walk outside, you can do two things.

• 2:11:08Gabor Maté?

  One is to wrap the whole world in burlap, or you can get a pair of shoes." So in other words, you can see yourself as the victim of the world and trying to change the world, so that they won't hurt you anymore. Or you can actually empower yourself. And that's what the healing is all about.

• 2:11:29Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I will say, the reason I wanted to have you on now is because I've been so focused on trying to navigate these things myself over the last several years, but most intensely over the last several months. And I wanted to be ready to have this conversation with you.

• 2:11:52Gabor Maté?

  And how are you doing so far?

• 2:11:54Tim Ferriss?

  I'm great. I'm great. I'm great. I'm doing very well. I think I'm the sanest, and arguably in the best place I've been, maybe ever. So I feel very good.

• 2:12:05Gabor Maté?

  That's very good. Which means that, that healing is just available. It's just possible. You know, I, I got an email a few months ago. From a woman called Bettina Göring. Now Herman Göring was the chief of the Luftwaffe under Hitler.

• 2:12:24Tim Ferriss?

  Oh my god, that's right. I was just wondering where I knew that name.

• 2:12:26Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, and, and he was the head of the Gestapo. Just an opiate addict, by the way. And a very clever, very ruthless man.

• 2:12:40Gabor Maté?

  His great niece sent me an email a few months ago to thank me for my work. And she's been through her own process. Imagine the karma she was carrying.

• 2:12:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:51Gabor Maté?

  And all the healing she has had to do. So there was her grand, her, her great uncle trying to kill me and my people. And there's the great niece making contact with me.

• 2:13:05Gabor Maté?

  And to me, just in your example, in my example, in the example of so many people I know, it's not like I'm a baked piece of cake, you know? It's gonna continue as long as I live. But I experienced internally the goodness and the healing that's available to us. And I didn't used to, and I, and I used to think I could help heal everybody, but, but that I was beyond healing myself. That was, that was my core belief, you know?

• 2:13:29Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it's been my core belief for the last 10 years.

• 2:13:30Gabor Maté?

  Okay. It just ain't true.

• 2:13:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:34Gabor Maté?

  And anybody listening, I just want to know, it doesn't matter what state of mind you're in, it doesn't matter what you're experiencing.

• 2:13:42Gabor Maté?

  It's human, it, uh, it is transmutable, it is transformable. Because that true self that you got disconnected from is still available to you. So it's not a question of just talking about what happened in the past. It's a question of how do we reconnect to ourselves? And what you're describing about your own state, if, if, if I can put it in one sentence, you'd probably agree with me, that you're probably much more connected to yourself than you used to be.

• 2:14:08Tim Ferriss?

  A hundred percent.

• 2:14:08Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:09Tim Ferriss?

  A hundred percent.

• 2:14:09Gabor Maté?

  That's the, that's the.

• 2:14:10Tim Ferriss?

  That's the prerequisite. I mean, that's, that's why I feel the way I described.

• 2:14:13Gabor Maté?

  Exactly.

• 2:14:15Tim Ferriss?

  Gabor, I really want to encourage people to learn more about you and your work. And there's, there's certainly a number of places they could start. Where would you suggest people dig more deeply? Is there a particular book of your books you would suggest they start with? Is there a particular social media handle where they can pay attention and learn?

• 2:14:40Tim Ferriss?

  Various announcements and see what you share of your work and others?

• 2:14:44Gabor Maté?

  Well, thanks for asking. The simplest thing is my website, www.dr.gabormati.com, D R G A B O R M A T I dot com, where my speaking events and I travel, I'll be in North America and five countries abroad this year. My speaking events are listed, chapters of my books are available, write-ups about my books, articles I've written, I've multiple talks on YouTube that people have filmed and posted, seen by hundreds of thousands of people. I have a Facebook video that somebody did about my work that's been seen 12 million times now. So there's all kinds of ways to discover me on Facebook, on YouTube, at my

• 2:15:26Gabor Maté?

  website. And I would also really hope that people check out my books, of which I've written four. The first one, the American title is Scattered, and it's about ADHD. And I wrote it after my own diagnosis. And pretty much what I've said earlier, that I don't see it as an inherited disease. I do see it as a response to family, multi-generational and social stress in sensitive children. People say, "You're blaming the parents." I'm not blaming the parents. I don't blame myself, but I know how stressed my family was when I was a workaholic doctor. And so that's my first book. And when you say, "Well,

• 2:16:08Gabor Maté?

  why are we looking at the percentage of kids with ADHD going up so fast?" It's not because of any genetic problem. Genes don't change in a population over five or 10 years. It's a social problem. There's much more stress in the culture now. There's much less connection in the culture now. The less connected people are, and the more stress there is, the more pressure there is on sensitive kids. So that's Scattered. Another parenting book of mine is the work of a brilliant psychologist, friend of mine, Gordon Neufeld, Dr. Neufeld, who is the world's leading developmental psychologist, as far as I'm personally concerned. And I say this advisedly. And the book is called Hold On To Your Kids: Why Parents Need To Matter More Than Peers. That's been published in over twenty languages now.

• 2:16:52Gabor Maté?

  And it's about the fact that since kids need attachment, the attachment need is the primary drive that we have. And we've talked about that. It's like a duckling. When the duckling hatches from the egg, the duckling would prefer to attach an imprint on the mother duck. But what will he do if the mother duck is not around? He'll imprint on a toy, or a dog, or a horse. Our kids, because the parents are too distracted and stressed in our society, and aren't so much anymore physically as during human evolution, now find themselves in the company of other kids. Guess what they imprint on? Their peer group. And now you have immature creatures influencing each other immoderately. And this happens through the social media. It happens in personal contact. And as that happens, the parents get pushed into the background.

• 2:17:37Gabor Maté?

  They get more and more frustrated. Now they get more authoritarian, or they just give up. And kids, therefore, don't grow up. They don't mature, and they develop all kinds of problems. Not because their parents don't love them, but simply because in this culture, the connection between the kids and the parents have been really disturbed. And how to restore that connection is the subject of Hold On To Your Kids. So, three of my books I wrote on my own. This one I wrote with Gordon. My next book, which is on the mind-body unity and health and illness, and that's a conversation I could have another time. But again, where I show that cancer, autoimmune disease, ALS, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, colitis, Crohn's disease, chronic fatigue, Faber-Malchow,

• 2:18:20Gabor Maté?

  are not accidental and separate physical events. They have to do with the scientifically proven fact that mind and body can't be separated. And when things happen emotionally, they will also happen physiologically. In fact, it can't be any other way. And that the emotional system in our brains, in our bodies, and part and parcel of the same system that also governs the immunity, neurological response, and hormonal response. And therefore, when our lifelink patterns of emotional repression

• 2:18:53Gabor Maté?

  When people have to suppress themselves in order to maintain their attachments, that will have a negative impact on their immune system, on their hormonal apparatus, on their nervous systems as well. And that book is called When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress Disease Connection. And that's been published in over twenty countries internationally as well, including in the US. My final and to my mind, my favorite book is the most recent, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, which explores addiction not from the point of view of a disease model or a choice model, but how it is a response to childhood loss, stress and trauma, and how to address that, and also how to deal with...

• 2:19:36Gabor Maté?

  If you look at the United States right now, you know what the facts are? The most common cause of death under the age of fifty is now overdose. And in the US, every three weeks you have the equivalent of a 9/11. Every three weeks a 9/11, in terms of the number of people dying. Now, where's the public outcry? Where's the resources? Where's the political will? Where's the mobilization of the media and all the public health energies compared to what happened after 9/11? And we're having this every three weeks. And why? Because the treatment profession, the medical profession, and politicians and the legal profession does not understand trauma and its relationship to addiction. The average medical student doesn't even hear the word "trauma" in four years of education, doesn't even hear the word, let alone get a lecture on it, let alone get

• 2:20:21Gabor Maté?

  a course about it. The stuff I taught you about brain development is still not taught in most medical schools. So we have this response to addiction, which is just dealing with the effects, the behaviors, controlling the manifestations, and not dealing with the causative factors. That's why people don't get better. And if you look at why right now, it's because social stress has increased, economic insecurity has increased. You don't look at where do the overdose happens more, it's where areas where there's despondency and despair. Totally. And so that's the book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. Other than that... Lots of my talks are on YouTube, but I think the best hub to check all this stuff out is my website.

• 2:21:01Gabor Maté?

  And I hope to generate a podcast, a regular podcast fairly soon. If the people around me can twist my arm strong enough and organize me well enough to do it, there'll be a podcast. And I hope that'll be up soon, but knowing myself, I don't want to make any promises, but that'll certainly be listed at my website if it happens soon.

• 2:21:21Tim Ferriss?

  And could you give your website URL one more time?

• 2:21:23Gabor Maté?

  Okay, Dr. Gabor Maté.

• 2:21:25Tim Ferriss?

  And Dr. Gabor Maté dot com. And to everybody listening and watching, there's the camera. I will also put that in the show notes. So for everyone, everything we've discussed, the books, the resources, organizations, everything, including your website, which will be at the very top, will be listed in the show notes, which you can find at tim.blog/podcast. And it'll be right at the top, so all of that will be very easy to find. Just in closing, and we may very well end up doing a round two at some point, it wouldn't surprise me, even if it's off camera, certainly, we'd love to spend more time together.

• 2:22:04Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any final closing words or a request or suggestion to the audience? Anything for people listening that you would like them to consider after they finish this interview?

• 2:22:18Gabor Maté?

  Yeah. Okay. I hope people will listen to this into you in a very personal sense, not just as an interesting experience, but as possibly pertaining to themselves. And that the discussion with you will help people look at themselves in maybe a new way with what I call compassionate inquiry. So rather than self judgment about stuff that went wrong, or they did to themselves or others, they get curious, what made me do that? They get curious compassionately, because we were all born innocent and we were all born, just wanted to be loving and loved.

• 2:23:03Gabor Maté?

  And then something happens. And then it's a hard road back. But I hope that this conversation helps people reconnect with that path, or encourage them to continue on it.

• 2:23:18Gabor Maté?

  And then secondly, not to see it as an individual issue. It's a social issue. We live in a society that really does disconnect people. And so it's not just an individual problem or an individual family problem. It's multi-generational. We never even talked about the multi-generational nature of trauma, what it is. We pass this on from one generation to the next, not because we intend to, but because we can't help it. So it needs to be looked at in deep, over the generations, and broadly as the function of a whole society. Now, let me give you one quick example, if I may.

• 2:23:49Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 2:23:49Gabor Maté?

  A study last year showed that American black women, the more experienced of racism they have, the greater the risk of asthma. And what does that tell us? What do we give people to control their asthma? We give them inhalers that contain a copy of adrenaline and a copy of cortisol? The stress hormones. In other words, asthma has everything to do with stress. I'm not going through the scientific details now, I could, but I won't. But it shows this question. Is the asthma of an American black woman an individual disease? Or is it the dysfunction of entire society? And obviously, it's the latter. So that the Buddha said,

• 2:24:31Gabor Maté?

  "That without the many, they cannot be the one; without the one, they cannot be the many." And he talked about the interconnected core arising of phenomena. So we are social creatures, our brains are wired together. Dr. Dan Siegel talks about interpersonal neurobiology. We're not isolated creatures. So whatever you're dealing with, you have to look at not just the individual internal environment, but also the broader social and cultural environment, of which you're one particular manifestation. And as our mutual friend, Drew Polish, so fervently wants, we need to change the conversation around these issues, particularly, for example, around addiction, from a blaming and shaming and ostracizing and just medical model perspective to one that takes into account trauma and social issues,

• 2:25:16Gabor Maté?

  and which brings compassion into it. And that must be the same for our mental health issues as well. And whatever we look at, we have to look at both the individual and the broader context.

• 2:25:26Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for that. And you mentioned...

• 2:25:30Tim Ferriss?

  How we all begin loving and wanting to be loved, or needing love, and then something happens and it's a hard road back. And what I'd like to add to that is it's a hard road back, but it's a worthwhile road back. And it is possible to find your way back. If you had told me that a year ago, I would have completely dismissed it, but I'm in a different place now. And I would just like to thank you for helping people to navigate that. And it's very meaningful work that you do.

• 2:26:02Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you.

• 2:26:03Tim Ferriss?

  And thank you for taking the time today as well.

• 2:26:05Tim Ferriss?

  It's a great pleasure to speak with you. Thank you.

• 2:26:07Tim Ferriss?

  And to everybody listening and watching, as I mentioned before, definitely also visit the show notes. Revisit this. This is not a one and done, something you listen to and then you go on as if you never heard it. Please look at the show notes, look at Gabor's work, and you can find all of that at tim.blog/podcast. And to everybody listening, I would just say, as always, thank you so much for joining in.

• 2:26:36Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 2:27:18Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by 99designs. Whether you need a logo, custom website, app, book cover, or anything else, 99designs was created to make great design accessible to everyone, that's you, and to make the process as easy as possible. I've used 99designs for years now. I've used them for book covers, some mockups for The 4-Hour Body, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller,

• 2:27:59Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:28:41Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:29:24Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:30:10Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:30:55Tim Ferriss?

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