Addiction Is Not A Choice: Dr. Gabor Maté’s Call for A Compassionate & Holistic Approach To Healing

What if everything you presuppose about addiction is wrong? Enter Gabor Maté. World renowned lecturer, physician and bestselling author, today's guest is a highly distinguished, in demand and at times controversial authority with a wealth of expertise on a range of topics that span addiction, stress and childhood development. With over twelve years of first hand experience working up close and personal on Vancouver's skid row with patients severely challenged by hard core drug addictions, mental illness and HIV, Dr. Maté has cultivated a powerful yet eminently commonsensical perspective on this devastating affliction that contravenes conventional medical dogma. A perspective that begins with a single edict: Addiction is not a choice. Moreover, addiction has little to do with illicit substances. It's just not about drugs. Or gambling, or shopping, or porn or whatever behavior happens to, in the words of Dr. Maté, incinerate the lives of millions. Instead, addiction is about the emotional pain behind the behavior. And healing is about confronting the past and untangling the circumstances that drive the individual to self-medicate in maddening defiance of all reason and logic. Based on cutting edge science, case studies and a wealth of personal experience, Dr. Maté concludes that addiction is a predisposition programmed in early years — an infestation that lurks miles beyond choice. A disease rooted neither in genetics nor free will but rather in environmental factors that hard wire brain neurochemistry during formative childhood development. Accordingly, those that suffer should not be shamed or criminalized, but instead treated in the same way we approach anyone suffering from cancer or an autoimmune disease — not with blame but rather with compassion, sympathy and medical intervention. As an author, Dr. Maté has written extensively on the subjects of addiction, early childhood development & trauma, attention deficit disorder, and the relationship between stress and disease. His most recent award-winning book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction* (a #1 bestseller in Canada) mixes personal stories with science to present a radical re-envisioning of addiction not as a discrete phenomenon confined to an unfortunate or weak-willed few, but as a continuum that runs throughout (and perhaps underpins) our society at large; not a medical “condition” distinct from the lives it affects, but rather the result of a complex interplay among personal history, emotional, and neurological development, brain chemistry, and the drugs (and behaviors) of addiction. In other words, it's complicated. There is no miracle cure. There is no quick fix. But hope breathes in compassion and self-understanding — the first key to promoting healing and wellness, Dr. Maté's work — and this book in particular — have been absolutely revelatory in helping me better understand myself, my personal history with addiction, and my ever evolving quest for greater well being. He changed my life. And I truly believe his message holds the power to improve the lives of anyone personally or tangentially impacted by addiction. And let's face it — in this day and age that includes almost everyone. Enjoy! Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Gabor Maté?

  Addiction in every case, whether it's the severe addiction of the heroin addicts that I dealt with, or the respectable addictions of the workaholic, these are always based in trauma.

• 1:16Rich Roll?

  That is physician, author, and addiction medicine specialist, Gabor Maté. And this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:33Gabor Maté?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:37Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. What's going on? How are you? It is Rich Roll. This is my podcast. Welcome. Thank you for tuning in. I greatly appreciate it. What do we do here? Well, each week, I sit down with the rule-breakers, the paradigm-breakers, the people that are pushing the boundaries, who are moving things forward in the world of health, nutrition, diet, science, technology. Basically, people who inspire me.

• 2:05Rich Roll?

  To do and be better. And that's kind of the theme, the underlying theme behind all of this, to help all of us unlock and unleash our best, most authentic self. Thanks so much to all of you guys who have been spreading the word about the podcast. It really means a lot to me. If you haven't done so already, take a moment, give us a review on iTunes. That really helps us out a lot, ironically, for some bizarre reason in terms of the whole iTunes algorithm thing. And thank you for using the Amazon banner ad at ritual.com for all your Amazon purchases. Greatly appreciate that as well. It doesn't cost you anything extra. Just a really cool, easy, simple way to support this mission. Thank you so much to everybody who has made that a practice. I just got off a plane from

• 2:48Rich Roll?

  Europe, from Paris. I'm in Boston right now. I'm giving a speech in like an hour at the Boston Veg Fest. I can't tell if it's three o'clock in the afternoon or three o'clock in the morning. I'm so upside down in terms of time. So I just thought I would take a moment and record the intro to this week's podcast in my hotel room here in Boston. You can hear the sirens outside and perhaps the cleaning staff outside my door. Not the quietest environment to record, but hey, we're going with it, right? And I'm just happy and proud to share with you today's conversation. This one I've been anticipating for quite some time. I'm really excited about it. The amazing, world-renowned, bestselling

• 3:29Rich Roll?

  author, lecturer, and addiction medicine specialist, Dr. Gabor Maté on the show today. This guy has really shifted my perspective on addiction, drug addiction in particular, behavior addiction, through his amazing bestselling books. He is a guy who's on the cutting edge of addiction medicine research with some really fascinating, somewhat controversial, but I think quite revelatory ideas about the nexus, in particular, the nexus between early childhood development and drug and behavior addictions later in life. And I'm going to get into it a little bit more in a minute, but first.

• 4:12Rich Roll?

  All right, Gabor Maté. Very excited to have this gentleman on the show today. I've been an admirer and a follower for some time. Who is he? Well, he's a physician, a renowned speaker, bestselling author, and very distinguished and sought-after, and at times controversial, expert in the conversations that swirl and revolve around drugs, addiction, stress, childhood development, treatment, and therapy. This is a guy with over 20 years of medical practice in family and palliative care, a guy who has decades of intimate firsthand experience working with and treating super hardcore drug addicts, people that are also often challenged by things like mental illness and HIV.

• 4:56Rich Roll?

  He is also the bestselling author of a number of books on addiction, early childhood development and trauma, attention deficit disorder, and the relationship between stress and disease. I'm going to put links up to all of these books in the show notes, so definitely go to check that out. His most recent award-winning book is called "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction." This book was a number one bestseller in Canada and absolutely revelatory for myself. It changed my life, and I think it has the potential to have that impact on anybody who experiences addiction firsthand, or has close ones in their life who suffer, which is pretty much everybody these days.

• 5:41Rich Roll?

  I find Dr. Maté's insights really compelling, specifically his reliance on cutting-edge science as well as case studies and his own personal experience to explore the idea that the source of addictions is not to be found in the genes, but originates instead in the early childhood environment, that addiction is complex, that there is no quick fix, and that we should be advocating for a more compassionate approach to addicts' addiction and treatment. Dr. Maté is a super busy guy. It took a little bit of effort to lock him down for this interview. He was gracious enough to grant me one hour, and so I made the trip up to Vancouver just to do the interview, and I'm really glad I did. I loved meeting him, I loved talking to him, and I really hope that I made the best of

• 6:26Rich Roll?

  this opportunity for you guys. So, without further ado, enjoy my conversation with Dr. Gabor Maté.

• 6:40Rich Roll?

  Thank you so much for taking the time. I know you're a busy guy. I've been wanting to sit down with you for quite some time, so I really appreciate it. Fascinated by your work. You've been an inspiration to me in helping to understand, or better understand, my own travails and struggles and triumphs through addiction, and your work is important. So, thank you.

• 7:04Gabor Maté?

  A pleasure to be here.

• 7:05Rich Roll?

  I thought we could start out with kind of explaining a little bit about, before we get into, there's so many things I want to talk about, but just, you know, in reference to your book, "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts," you have such a beautiful poetic way that you open it in explaining what that title means in the context of the Buddhist wheel of life. So, could you sort of elaborate on that?

• 7:28Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, so in some Buddhist cosmologies, we're seen as cycling through six realms in our lives as human beings. There's the human realm, which is our ordinary selves. You might say our everyday selves. There's the animal realm, which is our drives, our appetites, our urges, our sexuality, our need to eat, and so on. There are other realms, including the hell realm, which is that of suffering, rage, despair, terror, all the

• 8:10Gabor Maté?

  uncomfortable emotions that humans can experience to the nth degree. There are other realms, but the Hungry Ghosts realm is one in which the creatures are depicted as ones with small, tiny mouths, scrawny necks, so very narrow gullets, and huge, empty bellies. So...

• 8:30Gabor Maté?

  They can never get enough, so they're always hungry. And they're ghosts. They're always like, they're sort of haunting their lives, looking for fulfillment from the outside, but never being able to achieve it, of course. And that's the realm of addictions.

• 8:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's so haunting and specific and perfectly captures, you know, I think what my experience has been, you know, that empty cavernous black hole that you're constantly feeding and yet can never be satiated.

• 8:58Gabor Maté?

  You know, what's interesting is I'm just rereading for the, I don't know how many times, Dante's Inferno. And Dante begins his journey by being stuck, being lost, and barring his way from getting back onto the right path. It's this ravenous she-wolf that the more she eats, the hungrier she gets. So this image of the hungry creature, insatiable, as being

• 9:30Gabor Maté?

  in the way of our spiritual growth in ourselves is obviously universal.

• 9:37Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 9:38Gabor Maté?

  Because Dante's coming from a medieval Christian perspective.

• 9:41Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right.

• 9:41Gabor Maté?

  But he's talking about the same thing. And the very first,

• 9:47Gabor Maté?

  the second circle of hell in Dante, as people suffer because of their karmic accumulation on earth, are people who are gluttonous. And because they put all their attention on trying to feed themselves, rather than on

• 10:09Rich Roll?

  From the external.

• 10:10Gabor Maté?

  From the outside. So that this idea of the suffering that we create for ourselves by seeking satisfaction, fulfillment, and satiation from the outside.

• 10:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 10:19Gabor Maté?

  It's absolutely universal.

• 10:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and kind of taking that image and lining it up against the people that you will see, like if you've ever experienced being around, you know, hardcore addicts, that hollowness of the eyes, and you know, you have amazing pictures in your book that Really capture, you know, what that, what that is like, like you can just, you, you, you know, that sort of explanation from the Buddhist wheel is so apropos to that real life experience of, of what you see if you go to Skid Row or do the work that you do and the people that you interact with.

• 10:53Gabor Maté?

  Well, and not only Skid Row, I mean,

• 10:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 10:56Gabor Maté?

  I don't know if you ever looked at her prime minister recently, but he's got, he's got hollowed dead eyes as well.

• 11:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and it's interesting how it's become like this sort of fodder for the internet and a sort of meme and a joke, but you know, it's really, it's, it's quite tragic because meanwhile, this guy's on a, you know, he's on a march towards death.

• 11:16Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 11:16Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 11:17Gabor Maté?

  But it, but really, my, my contention is that we enter the hungry ghost realm, and I think we all do, depending when and for how long and to a degree, but we all do, it's our escape from the hell realm.

• 11:33Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:34Gabor Maté?

  So that if, if we didn't go there, we'd be in hell.

• 11:37Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 11:37Gabor Maté?

  So it's, it's, it's a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to, to overcome the suffering of hell.

• 11:46Rich Roll?

  Right, and I think that, that kind of dovetails nicely into, you know, really a foundational aspect of your work, which is reframing the question around addiction. And instead of asking, you know, why the addiction, asking, you know, why the pain? And, and this sort of more expansive perspective on what addiction is. So maybe elaborate on, on your perspective of, of what's wrong with our kind of conventional wisdom around the idea of addiction and where your kind of philosophy and ideas come in.

• 12:17Gabor Maté?

  Well, traditional wisdom around addiction is either the legalistic one that has it as a bad choice that people make from which they have to be deterred by means of... Severe punishment, hence we got the so-called criminal justice system, which by the way, I think is a good title. It is a criminal system. The justice system is criminal, the way it tweets people.

• 12:42Rich Roll?

  Well, specifically addicts, sort of traumatizing, further traumatizing the people that are most traumatized.

• 12:47Gabor Maté?

  That's the whole point, yeah, and who make up a large percentage of the jail population. So in Canada, it's not surprising, and the same thing is in the States. In Canada, thirty percent of our jail population is First Nations origin. Whereas average, you only make up five percent of the Canadian population. So we're taking the most traumatized people and we're jailing them, and we think that's justice.

• 13:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's like crazy statistics in Saskatchewan, right?

• 13:12Gabor Maté?

  Well, in the Prairie Province, it's even higher, yeah. It's just like sixty, seventy, eighty percent of the people in jail are natives. They're ten percent, fifteen percent of the population.

• 13:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 13:22Gabor Maté?

  Now, the point though is that that's the legalistic view, that addiction is a choice, and people need to be punished when they engage in addiction behaved, addiction-related behaviors. They're very addiction being illegal. Now, the other perspective that seems different is that addiction is a brain disease that you largely inherit. So it's not your fault because you can't help what genes you inherit, but it's a disease of the brain that arises in the brain, partly for genetic, partly for other reasons.

• 13:55Gabor Maté?

  And what both of those perspectives share though, as different as they are, what they share is that in either case, we're looking at people's life histories. And we're not looking at social history, or the history of a country, or a nation. So who are the populations that are most severely affected and what happened to them? And who are the individuals that are most severely affected and what happened to them? Now, my perspective is that.

• 14:21Gabor Maté?

  Addictions are attempts to soothe pain in every case. In fact, the drugs are specifically painkillers, cocaine, numps and nerve endings, opiates, heroin, these are painkillers, alcohol is a painkiller, cannabis is a painkiller. Crystal meth diverts you from the experience of emotional suffering by making you feel more alive and excited temporarily. So it's always not why the addiction, as you said, but why the pain? Keith Richards, when he was talking about his heroin habit in his book, Life, which is his autobiography, he said, and I'm almost quoting him verbatim, he said, "The contortions we go through just not to be ourselves for a few hours." Now, why would people not want to be themselves? Because they're not comfortable in their own skins?

• 15:06Gabor Maté?

  Why are they not comfortable in their own skins? Because they suffered in their own skins at some point when they couldn't help it. So what I'm saying is that addiction in every case, whether it's the severe addiction of the heroin addicts that I dealt with, or the respectable addictions of the workaholic, or, I'm probably free to mention that you talked about your own addiction at some point to extreme endurance sports, and these are always based in trauma. So any attempt to escape the present moment has to do with discomfort that we incurred as children. And there are degrees of discomfort, degrees of trauma, but fundamentally, addiction is

• 15:51Gabor Maté?

  always an attempt to escape suffering. So it's not the problem. The addiction is not the problem.

• 15:57Rich Roll?

  No, the addiction is the manifestation of the addiction is the solution to the problem.

• 16:02Gabor Maté?

  It's an attempt.

• 16:03Rich Roll?

  And it works until it doesn't work anymore.

• 16:05Gabor Maté?

  It works temporarily. In fact, that's my definition of addiction. You know, it's a temporary relief, pleasure.

• 16:13Gabor Maté?

  craving that is satisfied momentarily, but creates negative consequences in the long term and you can't give it up. That's what an addiction is. But yeah, that's what it is. It's an attempted solution. It's not the primary problem. And so to say that addiction is a primary brain disease, which is the official medical perspective that I was trained in, misses the whole point. But then again, the medical profession notoriously does not understand trauma.

• 16:40Rich Roll?

  Well, it's not. It's it's focused isn't directed in that in that in that locus sphere, I suppose.

• 16:46Gabor Maté?

  Well, but only as a as a as an artifact of denial, because the research is totally clear. Like, it's not. It's not that I'm giving you personal insights. I mean, I am. But these insights are very much also supported and grounded in vast body of literature. And whether we're talking about addiction or cancer, you can you can look back to negative childhood experiences and and and so that. But I'm telling you, I lecture to medical students, and in all their years of medical school, nobody ever talks to them about trauma. They don't hear the word trauma.

• 17:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:19Gabor Maté?

  Can you believe that?

• 17:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 17:20Gabor Maté?

  That in 2015, students at UBC don't hear the word trauma unless I say to them in the one lecture that I give them in five years and four years. And the same thing is true in large universities in the States as well. So that the denial of trauma is endemic to medical practice and in this society.

• 17:37Rich Roll?

  Well, I want to get into all the childhood development stuff in the in the sort of traumas that that, you know, incite this kind of behavior in so many people. But before we do that, I think it's worth kind of exploring, you know, the more expansive idea of definition that you adhere to in the sense that, you know, our dialogue around addiction and addiction disease really is focused on substance, right? But on some level, it can be argued, and I know that you argue that addiction really is a much more, you know, mass, cultural, societal issue that can be applicable, not just substances, but transcend substances to any kind of behavior pattern that

• 18:21Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 18:21Rich Roll?

  provides that dopamine release and ultimately negative consequences in your life.

• 18:26Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, and I'm not the first one to raise that point. The point was raised decades ago, that that addictions, the drug addiction is one particular manifestation. But that really You can be addicted to sex, obviously gambling, a whole lot of respectable things like work and

• 18:42Rich Roll?

  Anything that takes you out of the moment and provides that temporary relief.

• 18:46Gabor Maté?

  Now, what I have done in this book is brought together the scientific evidence for the first time. But not only is this true psychologically, it's also true even physiologically. So that if you look at the brains of sex addicts, or shopping addicts, or food addicts, it's the same circuits that are involved, as are involved in drug addiction. So even on a level of physiological changes in the brain, we're looking at the same changes. Just that some people use and need chemicals to achieve those changes, other people get it through behaviors. But the gambler is still after a dopamine hit, dopamine being the incentive motivation chemical. He's not after the money, because if it was about the money, he would quit after he wins his first jackpot.

• 19:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 19:28Gabor Maté?

  But it's about actually the dopamine hit that he gets, that temporary state of elation and excitement that he gets when he's engaged in the activity. So all addictions, whether they're behaviors, or substances, or whatever they are, they serve the same psychological purpose of escape from suffering and pain, discomfort with the self, and they activate the same brain circuits with the same neurochemicals. So there's only one universal addiction process. Drug addiction being a small, small manifestation of that.

• 20:04Rich Roll?

  Right, and because it's so divorced from logic and rational thinking, I think that's what prevents a lot of people from really truly understanding it and why the conversation around it has to do with judgment and shame and criminology.

• 20:20Gabor Maté?

  Well, I think if you want to explore that minefield, we can. I think on an individual level, the judgment and the disdain for drug addicts is actually well expressed by Jesus when he says, "Don't be hypocrite," he says. That's the word he uses. He says, "Before you try to remove the sliver from your brother's eye, remove the pole from your own eye." And so what it is, is that when there's something we don't like about ourselves... Then we'll look at that same thing in somebody else and reject it. And imagine that we're different. So the workaholic businessman, or the workaholic doctor for that matter,

• 21:05Gabor Maté?

  or the shopaholic man or woman.

• 21:09Rich Roll?

  The guy who spends $8,000 on CDs.

• 21:12Gabor Maté?

  CDs in a week, I've heard of people like that. And, you know, they like to think of themselves as superior to the drug addict. And yet, the dynamic is the same, which is being in the grip of a compulsion that you can't control, and that has negative consequences. And you don't have the power, at least you perceive that you don't have the power, to regulate yourself. And so we see that in somebody else. And it's so easy then to look at the externals, which is that somebody's in the back alley in the downtown east side of Vancouver, shooting up with heroin or cocaine. Oh, they're different from the rest of us. No, they're not. They're only different in their expression of their addiction.

• 21:55Gabor Maté?

  And they're also different in their socioeconomic background often. And also, of course, in the degree of trauma that they experience as children.

• 22:05Rich Roll?

  Well, let's talk about backgrounds and, you know, your perspective on the root of addictive behavior patterns that start to form and take place in early childhood development. And the experience, or the environment, or the child-rearing, you know, habitat of a young person that begins actually in fetus, according to how you're looking at this.

• 22:32Gabor Maté?

  Well, I have to emphasize again that, yes, it's according to how I look at it, but it's not a personal view. I'm just talking about the research literature. I'm talking about the evidence. So what we know is that already in utero, the emotional states of the mother affect the neurological and development of the infant. So when mothers are highly stressed, that infant is experiencing a lot of stress hormones reaching him or her through the umbilical cord. And that interferes with healthy brain development. And then when a child is born into a situation of stress,

• 23:15Gabor Maté?

  many more things happen that further affects brain development. So that the first fact to really recognize here, which is again, is not taught in the medical schools yet, even though scientifically, it's not even vaguely controversial anymore, is that the brain develops an interaction with the environment. So when we talk about addiction as a brain disease, yes, there's truth to that, but what shapes the brain is the environment. And the necessary condition for healthy brain development is non-stressed parents who can really connect with the child. So you can see in our society, why so many people are affected, because how many parents are non-stressed? How many parents have the kind of support that traditional societies used to provide,

• 23:57Gabor Maté?

  the clan, the tribe, the extended family, where the child is always around adults or looking after him? You know, not that I want to romanticize the past, or nor that we can go back to it, but we've lost something. And so in this society, which is so disconnected, alienated, parents are, even if they're together, and forty percent of the time, they're not, but even if they are, they're both having to go to work, they're both under severe strain economically very often, relationship stresses, the spiritual emptiness in people's lives, kids are being born into situations that no longer support healthy brain development. If on top of that, they're actually abused, which is what happens to most severe addicts,

• 24:39Gabor Maté?

  this specific abuse in a certain form of physical beating, sexual exploitation, abandonment, neglect, emotional torment, that plays havoc, not only with the personality development, not only does it give you a lot of pain, that later you have to just soothe somehow, but it also distorts your brain development. And then, so now you have the template for addiction.

• 25:02Rich Roll?

  Right, and so, I mean, what happens specifically, some sort of... Um, you know, emotional defense mechanism uh is cultivated in the brain chemistry that that leads to, you know, repressing that that painful experience or how does that work?

• 25:18Gabor Maté?

  Well, okay, so let's separate emotional experiences and defenses from physiological chemical events, okay? So on a chemical level, take a substance like cocaine or crystal meth or nicotine or caffeine. These are stimulants. They elevate the level of a chemical in the brain, which we referred to already called dopamine. And dopamine is the incentive, vitality, excitement molecule. Without that, we're listless, bored, um, amotivated, disinterested, inert. So the dopamine circuitry is crucial to human life and human motivation.

• 25:59Gabor Maté?

  But the development of the dopamine circuitry depends on the presence of a nurturing parent. So if you take infant monkeys and they measure their dopamine level one week after separation from their mother, their dopamine levels are significantly diminished. And dopamine receptors are diminished when there's a lot of stress around. And you can, or you can isolate monkeys or rats and put them into an isolation cage and then measure the dopamine receptors a month later, it's significantly diminished. So the, so the brain is responsive to the environment and especially in early childhood. So there's the chemical effects. That's not the only one, but that's one of the major ones. But then there's the psychological defenses.

• 26:42Gabor Maté?

  So that a child under severe emotional stress has got very limited resources to deal with that. They can't fight back, they can't escape, and they can't change the situation. So now the brain kicks in with its automatic defenses. One of them is emotional shutdown. So now you no longer feel the emotion because they're too painful. But if you don't feel emotion, life becomes very dull and boring. Now you have to do drugs to feel better.

• 27:11Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 27:14Gabor Maté?

  Or you might tune out as a way of

• 27:20Gabor Maté?

  not experiencing the stress. So you adapt by tuning out. But if that gets programmed into your brain, later on, you've got this condition called ADD.

• 27:30Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 27:31Gabor Maté?

  Which is characterized by extreme tuning out.

• 27:33Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right.

• 27:34Gabor Maté?

  So what happens is that these early defenses help kids survive the immediate stress, but become sources of dysfunction later on.

• 27:42Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, and I have people in my life that I know that come from, you know, a background of pretty significant emotional stress. And anytime I observe them in a scenario in which any kind of conflict, even if it's very modest.

• 27:58Gabor Maté?

  They'll detach.

• 27:58Rich Roll?

  They detach, it's almost like they go into a fugue state.

• 28:01Gabor Maté?

  Exactly.

• 28:02Rich Roll?

  And you can't even reach them, and they're trying to protect themselves.

• 28:06Gabor Maté?

  Well, they're not trying to do anything, they're not even doing it.

• 28:08Rich Roll?

  It's not conscious.

• 28:09Gabor Maté?

  No, the brain is doing it. So the brain goes into automatic defense mode, which is programmed in childhood.

• 28:15Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 28:15Gabor Maté?

  So the point again being, as you said, that early adaptations become sources of pathology and dysfunction later on. So we have to keep in mind that this is happening at least on two levels. There's the brain physiological level, which I've already talked about, and then there's the psychoemotional level, and the two go along together. And we can also talk about the relational level, like what happens to people that are hurt in their relationships, is that either they withdraw from a relationship at the first sign of problems, or they desperately throw themselves into a relationship, hoping to be rescued. One or the other, now they become sex and relationship addicts.

• 28:55Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 28:57Gabor Maté?

  It happens on a spiritual level, where I think...

• 29:03Gabor Maté?

  Increasingly, we can agree that human beings have a need for meaning, at least in life, a need for connection, for belonging, a larger sense than just the isolated ego. Well, when you're hurt, or when you're traumatized, or just when you suffer, you tend to isolate, and you lose that connection. And so there's, whether it's physiological, psychological, emotional, physiological, spiritual, relational, and you have to look at addiction on all these levels, you're hobbled, you're disabled, you're impaired. And then addiction is a desperate attempt to

• 29:47Gabor Maté?

  avoid the impacts of all that.

• 29:49Rich Roll?

  Right. In trying to better understand, you know, my own addiction, and journey through sobriety, and kind of taking, you know, the information and the wisdom that you provide, you know, I look back on my childhood development and my background, and, you know, certainly, it's an easy case when you can, you know, in the example that you raised of hardcore drug addicts that almost invariably come from some form of abuse, whether emotional or physical. In my case, I was raised by two loving parents that are still together. There's no, you know, great indicia of alcoholism in my genetic background.

• 30:32Rich Roll?

  And so, I can't like, it's been challenging for me to play the victim, or to, I'm sorry, to place blame on any particular person, or my parents. It's also an uncomfortable feeling to even examine that. You know, certainly, I could say, well, my parents were stressed, or, you know.

• 30:51Gabor Maté?

  Do you want to examine?

• 30:53Rich Roll?

  I don't know, sometimes my parents listen to the podcast.

• 30:56Gabor Maté?

  Well, so what?

• 30:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so.

• 30:58Gabor Maté?

  Okay, but look, first of all, how you phrase it. You said, first of all, play the victim. Okay, now that's a telling phrase. Okay.

• 31:08Rich Roll?

  In what, in what way?

• 31:10Gabor Maté?

  You're distancing yourself from something. Okay, you're actually denying your own vulnerability. It's not a question of playing victim. It's a question of what happened to you when you were vulnerable. Secondly, you talk about avoiding blaming parents. Who the heck wants to blame parents? I don't blame parents. I screwed up my kids, but I don't blame myself. I did my very best. I was a loving parent. You know?

• 31:32Rich Roll?

  Well, I would think on some level, every parent, no parents are perfect, right? They're all like, sort of, you know, creating emotional stress for their children.

• 31:38Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, but I'm telling you, but I'm telling you very specifically.

• 31:42Gabor Maté?

  And I just had this conversation with somebody else before I came here. It usually takes me less than five minutes, usually only three, to show somebody how they suffered when they didn't think they did. And that's not because I make up anything, but it's because people protect themselves from their own suffering as a way of protecting their relationship with their parents.

• 32:07Gabor Maté?

  And so you have a fear of alienating your parents.

• 32:09Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 32:10Gabor Maté?

  As a result of which, perhaps you haven't delved into your own experience deeply enough to really understand it yet. Now, you know, whether you want to do that here on air, it's totally up to you. But I'm just saying, that's the dynamic that I perceive all the time. And I'm also telling you, it's not about blaming your parents. It's not about denying that they loved you. It's not about denying that they did their very best. We're not interested in them at all, actually, in this conversation. As either good guys or bad guys. We're just interested, what was the experience of the child? And what was the impact of that experience on the child?

• 32:46Gabor Maté?

  This question of either being victims or blaming others, I don't speak that language. I'm not totally interested in, in, in, in either victim, or either seeing people as victims or as blaming anybody.

• 32:57Rich Roll?

  Right, well, well, let's play this out. So, I mean, I certainly kind of identify with, with, you know, the hungry ghost idea, as I said earlier. And, you know, I was a kid who was always pretty sensitive and, and...

• 33:09Gabor Maté?

  Okay, so you're sensitive.

• 33:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 33:11Gabor Maté?

  So what does that mean, so what does that mean to be sensitive?

• 33:13Rich Roll?

  It means that I'm easily impacted by external stimuli.

• 33:17Gabor Maté?

  That's exactly what it is.

• 33:18Rich Roll?

  That influence my emotional well-being.

• 33:19Gabor Maté?

  That's exactly what it is. So sensitive comes from a Latin word, sincere to feel. So the sensitive child feels more. So less has to happen. If, if you... If I touch you on the shoulder right now with my fingers tapped you lightly, you'd have no pain at all. But if your shoulder was bare with a burn on it, so your nerve endings were close to the surface, so you were thin-skinned, and if I tapped you with the same force, now what would you feel?

• 33:44Rich Roll?

  Pain, of course.

• 33:45Gabor Maté?

  Severe pain. And the external stimulus was the same. To anybody looking at it from the outside, what happened? What happens is that you're very sensitive, okay? That's the genetic factor. It's the only genetic factor, by the way, okay? So nobody's genetically condemned to addiction, but some people are born more sensitive than others.

• 34:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there can be a predisposition, but not a predeterminism.

• 34:09Gabor Maté?

  And that predisposition is a sensitivity. It's not actually a predisposition to a specific addiction either. It's just a sensitivity. But carry on, so you were a sensitive child, so, okay?

• 34:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and, you know, some of the tropes that you hear in recovery, you know, always feeling like everyone else had a roadmap for life and kind of feeling isolated and alone and having difficulty making friends and connecting with people.

• 34:32Gabor Maté?

  Okay, isolated and alone. Ever feel sad or unhappy as a kid?

• 34:38Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 34:39Gabor Maté?

  Who did you speak to about that?

• 34:41Rich Roll?

  Uh, probably nobody.

• 34:43Gabor Maté?

  Oh, don't give me the probably.

• 34:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, I mean, it's been a while. You know, I would think that, let me think about that.

• 34:49Gabor Maté?

  Sounds like nobody.

• 34:52Gabor Maté?

  Okay?

• 34:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I was definitely a kid lost in my own thoughts and in my own world.

• 34:57Gabor Maté?

  Okay, well, so stay with me for a minute.

• 35:02Gabor Maté?

  You don't have children yet, I take it?

• 35:03Rich Roll?

  No, I do have kids.

• 35:04Gabor Maté?

  Okay, you do have kids, okay, great. How old are they?

• 35:06Rich Roll?

  I have two daughters that are eight and eleven, and I have two stepsons.

• 35:11Gabor Maté?

  Okay, so you tell me, if they're feeling sad and lonely, who do you want them to talk to?

• 35:17Rich Roll?

  I want them to talk to me and my wife.

• 35:19Gabor Maté?

  Right. And if you found out through some third source that your children were sad and lonely, but they hadn't talked to you, how would you understand that?

• 35:27Rich Roll?

  Uh, it would be heartbreaking.

• 35:29Gabor Maté?

  No, no, but I'm not talking, yes, it would be, but how would you explain it? How would you understand it?

• 35:33Rich Roll?

  How would I understand what they're going through?

• 35:35Gabor Maté?

  How would you understand why they haven't talked to you?

• 35:40Rich Roll?

  I think I would understand them as feeling unsafe in having that kind of dialogue.

• 35:45Gabor Maté?

  And how does a child feel when they're unsafe with their parents?

• 35:48Rich Roll?

  When they feel unsafe, they feel anxious.

• 35:52Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 35:52Rich Roll?

  They feel...

• 35:55Gabor Maté?

  Hurt?

• 35:56Rich Roll?

  Hurt, fearful perhaps.

• 35:58Gabor Maté?

  Okay, that's your childhood.

• 36:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 36:02Gabor Maté?

  If we say nothing more, you can see how a sensitive child would be deeply hurt by that situation. So by the time you have recollection, you had already learned that your parents, on the emotional level, were somehow not quite available to you. As much as they loved you, they didn't know how to make... Because whatever was happening for them, they were stressed, they were distracted, whatever was going on. But that doesn't matter, we're not blaming them, we're just saying that they couldn't give you that, what you needed.

• 36:32Rich Roll?

  Right, and I'm feeling like all this extreme discomfort right now, because I love my parents.

• 36:37Gabor Maté?

  Why would you not?

• 36:37Rich Roll?

  And I know that they did the very best that they could.

• 36:39Gabor Maté?

  And I grant you that, and I grant you that, and I grant you that.

• 36:42Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 36:43Gabor Maté?

  But, but we're not, again, we're not putting them on trial. We're just talking about what your situation was.

• 36:50Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:51Gabor Maté?

  And, and what was the impact of that situation? Now, anybody ever bullied you as a kid?

• 36:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I definitely had that experience.

• 36:58Gabor Maté?

  Okay, how old were you when you were bullied?

• 37:01Rich Roll?

  I think a lot of that started when I switched schools from a school that was relatively nurturing to my proclivities to kind of a macho kind of sports-focused school where I felt very unsafe throughout, from like 7th grade to 12th grade.

• 37:20Gabor Maté?

  So you felt bullied there?

• 37:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 37:22Gabor Maté?

  Who did you speak to about that?

• 37:24Rich Roll?

  I did talk to my mom.

• 37:25Gabor Maté?

  How soon?

• 37:27Rich Roll?

  I would, I would speak to her after any kind of incident would occur at school.

• 37:30Gabor Maté?

  And what would happen when you did?

• 37:32Rich Roll?

  She would comfort me, but I would return to the school.

• 37:35Gabor Maté?

  Okay, now if your kid was bullied on a chronic basis, and they complained to you about it, what would you like to do about it?

• 37:44Rich Roll?

  I mean, I would do anything, I would jump in front of a train. I would, I would probably change our environment.

• 37:49Gabor Maté?

  Okay.

• 37:52Gabor Maté?

  So you learned that it was futile to complain. Again, you were left alone with it. Guess what you became? An endurance athlete. A macho endurance athlete who drove himself.

• 38:04Rich Roll?

  Right, I mean, I think my first, uh, my first drug of choice was I discovered the, the sport of swimming, uh, when I was like 12 or 14 and, and that was my comfort, you know, underwater. I even wrote my college essay about it, like the, the, that was the safe place that I could go.

• 38:19Gabor Maté?

  Underwater?

• 38:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, where nobody could get to me.

• 38:22Gabor Maté?

  Okay.

• 38:22Rich Roll?

  Which further isolated me, of course. I mean, but I had friends and I had a community there.

• 38:26Gabor Maté?

  I, I, I got it. I don't know if you read about this woman who died a few months ago, a free diver, a Russian woman. Did you read that story?

• 38:34Rich Roll?

  I did, yeah.

• 38:35Gabor Maté?

  Do you know what she said?

• 38:36Rich Roll?

  No, I don't.

• 38:38Gabor Maté?

  Why? It's on my cellphone here somewhere, because I copied it out. She said that underwater, you feel at one with the universe and your mind stops and you're just totally present.

• 38:51Gabor Maté?

  But she had to go there to achieve that state. Now, that state is the state that we all strive for, under or over water. She could only get it underwater. She ended up dying. No. I'm not cautioning people against free diving. I'm just saying that

• 39:10Gabor Maté?

  she too was looking for, it wasn't just the physical thrill. She was actually looking for spiritual release. And that's what you're describing as well.

• 39:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's no question that, that, that is what that was about. Of course, unconsciously at the time.

• 39:22Gabor Maté?

  Of course, unconsciously.

• 39:23Rich Roll?

  And I, and I was being rewarded for it. And so then I would, I would double down on my commitment to that.

• 39:28Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, and I wasn't the athlete that you were, so I got rewarded for my intellectual skills. And, you know, so that's what I built up, you know, so, and, and, and, and, and being helped.

• 39:38Rich Roll?

  And that's your safe place.

• 39:39Gabor Maté?

  And that's my safe, that's also my addiction then, you know, thinking too much, helping people and all that, you know, so we all use what we've got in order to uh, somehow divert ourselves from our pain and, and, and, and so, look, what I'm saying to you is that, and I'm not going to ask you more questions about your childhood, but can you possibly get that you've already revealed enough to see why you might have been in emotional pain as a child?

• 40:11Rich Roll?

  Yes, of course.

• 40:12Gabor Maté?

  Okay, that's all.

• 40:19Rich Roll?

  I would surmise that most children experience some kind of emotional pain growing up. It's unavoidable. So what is the distinguishing factor?

• 40:30Gabor Maté?

  It is avoidable, but not in this society. You know, there are societies that don't hurt their kids like the way we do.

• 40:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and there's a whole interesting conversation that we can have about materialism and toxic culture that I know you speak to.

• 40:43Gabor Maté?

  My next book. But in any case, you're quite right. In this society, very few escape that, which is why addictions are so rife in our society. So we're not saying there's anything uniquely horrible about your experience. On the contrary, a lot of people had it a lot worse, if you want to compare suffering, which I don't believe in, by the way. But the point is that we're not, it's no point me coming to you. Now, you tell me, if at age 11, or age 6, you feel sad and lonely, and you come and say to me, "Gabor, I feel sad and lonely," would it be any use for me to tell you, "Oh, don't worry about it. It's the same for everybody"? Is that what you need to hear?

• 41:21Rich Roll?

  No, that just, that will further drive me into deeper isolation and despair.

• 41:26Gabor Maté?

  Which is what you're doing to yourself right now. You know, to say that everybody's like that. So what is everybody like that? Everybody's got their own particular experience. And we have to honor the person's experience. All I'm saying is, that's not, yes, it's true that children are often hurt, or isolated and misunderstood in our society, because we're so unconscious, and we're so disconnected as a society, and so harassed and harried and stressed as a culture. That's all true. But when it comes to understanding any one particular human being, that's not meaningful. What is meaningful is, what was their own particular experience?

• 42:08Gabor Maté?

  And if you're very sensitive, as I said earlier, less has to happen to create pain for you.

• 42:14Rich Roll?

  Right, so would that be the distinguishing factor between somebody who

• 42:19Rich Roll?

  could have had the experience that I had and then goes on to be a social drinker, or somebody who needs sort of temporary relief from time to time, but it doesn't become, you know, it doesn't rise to the level of addiction where it creates negative consequences in their life, and somebody like myself who, you know, I took it to the wall.

• 42:37Gabor Maté?

  Sensitivity could be certainly one of the factors, for sure. But there could be other factors as well. Maybe that other somebody just had the one person they could talk to who would actually understand them and validate them, maybe.

• 42:52Rich Roll?

  Right, so, community.

• 42:53Gabor Maté?

  Community, or just even human contact with anybody.

• 42:56Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 42:56Gabor Maté?

  You know, I mean, I see human contact, not that you didn't have human contact, but I mean, validating, somebody validating your experience, and what has been called a compassionate witness. So, as a matter of fact, I mean, as you well know from recovery, what makes the difference ultimately is not just one's own individual

• 43:21Gabor Maté?

  willpower and determination, but also others who can listen to you compassionately and validate your experience and not judge you.

• 43:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, my journey has been one of trying to overcome my predisposition towards self-will and self-reliance to a place of surrender, right? Because when I track back over the course of my life, it's very easy for me to make an argument that everything that happened that was good, growing up, or all the, any accomplishment that I was able to do is a result of my work ethic and doubling down and being focused to overcome whatever circumstance I was in to kind of get to the next level. You know, addiction, my alcoholism, was the first instance in which that no longer was applicable. And the more that I tried to apply myself will to this problem,

• 44:17Rich Roll?

  the deeper of a hole that I dug for myself.

• 44:20Gabor Maté?

  Right.

• 44:20Rich Roll?

  Until I could, you know, could surrender. You know, as you will hear all the time, is so closely aligned with this idea of giving up, which is so antithetical to the way that I wanted to approach my life. So it was a it was a journey to get to that place of willingness in order to entertain a different way.

• 44:37Gabor Maté?

  Well, and my point is that some people criticize the first step as, you know, admitting that you're powerless, as you know, why are you telling people that they're abused, that they're powerless? My point is the opposite, that it's when you admit that you're powerless that you gain power, that you actually, when you actually get how it is.

• 44:56Rich Roll?

  But why is it so difficult to understand that?

• 44:58Gabor Maté?

  Well, because because the people who make that argument

• 45:08Gabor Maté?

  are still identified with their childhood vulnerabilities. And so I'm never gonna make myself powerless again. They they think that powerlessness in that sense is is is opens you up to being hurt. Where actually that surrender is actually the way out of the hurt. But but let me come back to you just for a moment. So this ethic that you had that I need to do this myself and I can do this and so on. Well, think about that.

• 45:34Gabor Maté?

  Do you want your kids to have that?

• 45:36Rich Roll?

  No.

• 45:37Gabor Maté?

  How would you make sure that they don't?

• 45:42Rich Roll?

  I would I would imagine by trying to help them to understand that making your way in the world is an interdependent act, that the way, the path towards whatever your goal is or your dreams, your aspirations for your life is contingent upon the community that you cultivate.

• 46:02Gabor Maté?

  Okay, so that's intellectually true. But how will you how will you support that understanding in them?

• 46:13Rich Roll?

  I think by trying to help them foster an ethic of open communication and feeling safe with with communicating.

• 46:22Gabor Maté?

  With who?

• 46:23Rich Roll?

  Well, with with myself and my wife first and foremost, and then their siblings, and then extrapolating out from there.

• 46:28Gabor Maté?

  That's the whole point. So that's what you lacked.

• 46:33Gabor Maté?

  And therefore we developed a coping mechanism. I can do this all by myself. No, it is true that you want to foster self reliance and internal resilience and initiative. That's true.

• 46:47Gabor Maté?

  But the pathway towards doing that is the same as the pathway towards fostering

• 46:55Gabor Maté?

  relational health, which is by giving that the children the environment where they can actually feel listened to and validated and and supported. And this is what so many of us didn't get.

• 47:11Gabor Maté?

  It might be interesting for you at some point to speak with your parents and, you know, if, you know, depending on the relationship that you have with them and say, okay, look, just tell me about your marriage when I was a kid. Not never mind what you didn't do for me. Like, I know you did your very best. I love you very much. I honor you. But tell me about your lives. What was it like for you? What stresses were you under? What were you carrying from your own childhood?

• 47:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean,

• 47:33Gabor Maté?

  What was, what was happening in your larger family? You know, what were the work stresses? How was your relationship? You know, all the, all those questions.

• 47:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I think in, in, in my mother's case, she suffered a tremendous amount of trauma. In, in, in her life, she lost her father when she was still in college. And then when I was very young, she lost her brother in a car accident.

• 47:54Gabor Maté?

  Oh, my God.

• 47:54Rich Roll?

  And there's a tremendous amount of pain in her life and, and stress and it's manifested, you know, and stress and anxiety and, and being somebody who is a very risk averse. And, and I think that that manifested in my life as, as a parent who was perhaps overprotective.

• 48:14Gabor Maté?

  There's no such thing as overprotective. You can either be protective or not protective. What you're talking about is controlling. Okay, now that comes out of anxiety. She was anxious, so she wanted to protect you by controlling. But the, but the impact on you is loss of autonomy.

• 48:34Gabor Maté?

  And just imagine your poor mother's state of mind when her brother dies. She just lost her father, not that many years before. Now she's a relatively young mom, and she loses her brother in a car accident. And then she's got this small child to look after. What could be her state of mind?

• 48:51Rich Roll?

  Right, I mean, it's informed her worldview. And I think that it has, you know, made her kind of terrified of externalities that she can't control.

• 49:00Gabor Maté?

  Okay, but it also, just her state of mind, would it be sadness, grief, maybe depression, a lot of stress? And that, and sadness, grief, depression, stress, acts as a screen between the parent's love for the child and the child. And it's nothing the parent is doing on purpose. So we know, for example, that postpartum depression is a significant risk factor for child development problems. It's got nothing to do with how much the mother loves the child, how devoted she is.

• 49:40Gabor Maté?

  It just, children pick up on their parents' emotions automatically, and they imbibe, they absorb the parents' emotions, and they think it's about them. So when my mother is sad, as my mother was, because of the situation, as I write about in the book, in the Second World War, Jewish family and Nazi occupied Hungary, her grief and her unhappiness to the infant means that she's not happy with me.

• 50:11Gabor Maté?

  And so my self-esteem is undermined. Now, of course, my mother didn't love me, she loved me fiercely and desperately.

• 50:18Gabor Maté?

  But just because children absorb and are shaped by the emotional states of their parents. And those emotional states are not deliberate on the part of the parent. I mean, your mother was not a grief-struck, grieving young mother because she wanted to be. But the fact that she was, and furthermore...

• 50:46Gabor Maté?

  If you were living in a clan-based society, where there's a lot of aunts, uncles, elders, neighbors, even living on the same roof perhaps, well then, that mother who has suffered that loss has got a lot of support.

• 51:01Rich Roll?

  Right. And the impact of that one singular person on a young child's life is diminished and replaced in some part by other people that can pick up the slack and provide a tapestry of emotional support.

• 51:15Gabor Maté?

  This is exactly right, and that's why it takes a village.

• 51:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it does. You know, we've tried to cultivate that with our kids too. We have a very much of an open house kind of situation with lots of people coming in, and there's a lot of adults that are around our kids for that very reason.

• 51:30Gabor Maté?

  Wonderful.

• 51:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, which is great. And you know, we've moved away from that. It is true.

• 51:33Gabor Maté?

  It's a society we have.

• 51:35Rich Roll?

  You know, in this internet culture of seemingly never, you know, being more connected than we are, we're lonelier and more isolated than ever.

• 51:44Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, so then we talk about, well, why are... Yeah, so to go back to your original point. Yes, there are very few children in our society who are not significantly affected by these dynamics, regardless of the parents' best efforts. So, now, until we get conscious around it, and it sounds like you and your parenting had developed some consciousness, but most of us just sort of try and get by.

• 52:11Rich Roll?

  You're just trying to pay the bills and, you know, put food on the plate.

• 52:14Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, and keep the relationship going and do the right thing. And we're not conscious of what we've lost as a society. And your own consciousness was probably gained at or through dealing with your own addictions. You're probably much more conscious as a parent.

• 52:33Rich Roll?

  Oh, of course. And you know, it's that adage of, you know, being the grateful alcoholic, because it's catapulted me into, you know, a life-based, more on spiritual principles than maybe or perhaps I would have ever been introduced to, you know. But, you know, when I went away to college, I went to the other coast, and that's when I discovered drugs and alcohol. And that was the solution. That wasn't the problem. That was what made me feel whole, until, you know, it played itself out and took me to some dark places. But, you know, as that kind of unfolded...

• 53:11Rich Roll?

  You know, predictably, that's where the shame and the low self-esteem and the self-judgment and all of that comes in, is you start to bifurcate into this kind of double life existence that further isolates you and alienates you from your community.

• 53:26Gabor Maté?

  I'm almost impelled to say that you were fortunate to have become an alcoholic, because, you see, my addiction is to work and to shopping. They're respectable ones. You don't suffer the consequences to the same degree, so that you don't get the same wake-up call. No. I'm not wishing I was an alcoholic, but actually, if I'm honest about it, sometimes when I meet people who've been through recovery from severe addiction, there's a sense of envy almost, because they really have been forced by their intense suffering to go very deep with themselves.

• 54:01Rich Roll?

  Well, pain is the only thing that really motivates people to change their ways, right? So how much pain can you bear before?

• 54:08Gabor Maté?

  I know, but unfortunately, if it was only pain, there'd be a lot less suffering. It takes more than just pain. But yeah, it's true. There's a Greek, there's a line I'm reading in a Greek play I was looking through recently, where they say, "We suffer into truth." We suffer into truth, and so the more intense the suffering, sometimes the deeper the appreciation of truth. And a lot of the spiritual teachers will tell you that. I'm reading Eckhart Tolle these days, with a lot of gratitude. And he talks about how, you know, sometimes the suffering is so intense that it just burns away the ego, and then you get the truth.

• 54:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but I would say also, I'm interested in your perspective on this. So, you know, I get sober, and my sobriety is buttressed by community and the 12 steps and the principles and the sort of work that I do in that program, service-oriented, and sort of living my life premised on these spiritual principles that have, you know, really given me this amazing life that I'm very grateful for. And yet, at the same time, you know, I'm certainly not cured. You know, it's like having all of these things in place to, you know, keep me walking, you know, the correct path, it's still a process.

• 55:30Gabor Maté?

  What would cured mean to you?

• 55:33Rich Roll?

  Cured would mean that, uh, that, uh, the impulse to drink or use or to, uh, try to check out of the present through any number of behavior patterns that are inconsistent with, you know, how I would like to live my life that create negative consequences no longer enter my consciousness.

• 55:56Gabor Maté?

  So you'd like to be a Jesus or a Buddha?

• 55:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 55:58Gabor Maté?

  It's a high ambition.

• 55:59Rich Roll?

  I would, I would.

• 56:00Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, okay.

• 56:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 56:02Gabor Maté?

  Well, good luck with that.

• 56:02Rich Roll?

  So, I mean, yeah, but, but I mean, kind of in, in brass tacks, uh, you know, day-to-day life, you know, gratitude is, is a fleeting, um, experience for me, you know, my default state is not gratitude, my default state is irritability, anxiety, judgment, frustration.

• 56:19Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, my, my, my, my default state is irritability as well. Well, now, look, what you're talking about now is, um,

• 56:28Gabor Maté?

  first of all, let's just, um, eliminate the word cure here, okay? We're not talking about cure, we're talking about wholeness, okay? And, uh, it just means you have more work to do. So it's a question of how committed you are to the work. Uh, and, uh, I know for me, those are my default states as well. I can't help that, I can't help that, that's my default state, I didn't create that, that's a consequence of experiences. What I can make a choice about is how I relate to all that and how I live my life and what structures, uh, supports, practices do I engage in that helps me deal with that

• 57:11Gabor Maté?

  irritability when it arises, that urge to check out when it arises. So that, that's very much up to me. And, uh,

• 57:23Gabor Maté?

  you know, this is my fourth book and it's had tremendous response and I have my others and I, I, I travel a lot speaking all over North America and internationally. And very often people have said to me, "Boy, I wish I had read your book 30 years ago." And my joke always was, gee, maybe I should read it myself because on the one hand, I can say these things and teach people and help people, but there was this tremendous gap between my internal and personal life and what I can manifest on the stage or in a seminar room. And I can say now, but I'm seventy one. And I can say now that that gap is narrowing significantly.

• 58:08Gabor Maté?

  But that's because I'm actually doing the work.

• 58:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the aspiration is the commitment to the work and to the process, right?

• 58:15Gabor Maté?

  So if you're doing the work, then inevitably it'll pay off. And it's not helpful to talk to yourself about it's not to talk about yourself as not being cured. You're not a piece of meat. You don't have to be cured, you know, you're just need to integrate. And that's a lifelong process. And again, as Eckhart Tolle says, that for some people, it happens as a sudden illumination. That's essentially what happened to him. But for more people, it's work, it's ongoing work.

• 58:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, self-knowledge is insufficient. I could read your book cover to cover. I could read it every week for the rest of my life. But if I don't extract from your book principles that can translate into actions that I can take on a daily basis to narrow that gap, then then it's not really going to help me or anyone else, right? It's the practice.

• 59:12Gabor Maté?

  And I would point out another dimension there is that there's a difference between self-knowledge and knowledge about the self.

• 59:19Rich Roll?

  Explain that.

• 59:21Gabor Maté?

  Well, you can know about yourself intellectually, but that wouldn't be self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is experiential. Where you actually experience your true self, that's self-knowledge. It's got nothing to do with the intellect. And you're totally right.

• 59:39Gabor Maté?

  I could read all these wonderful books that I have over the years, many dozens. I could write these books full of insight and I'd say wisdom and science.

• 59:52Gabor Maté?

  That's not self-knowledge. That's knowledge about the self.

• 59:57Gabor Maté?

  And it's a different level of knowing because, you know, we have these different levels of knowing. There's the intellectual knowing, there's the intuitive knowing, and there's the experiential knowing. And the deepest one is the experiential one, when you've actually, yes, this is the self. Ah, here I am. And even then, that takes practice to maintain that space, because the world so quickly robs you of it.

• 1:00:37Rich Roll?

  Alcoholism and addiction are ciphers to compel one to, you know, face that and walk that path and undertake that journey.

• 1:00:46Gabor Maté?

  Yes.

• 1:00:48Rich Roll?

  But for, you know, I'm putting myself in the shoes of somebody who might be listening, who is not afflicted in that way, or at least not on a, I mean, in your mind, it's a spectrum.

• 1:00:57Gabor Maté?

  They're afflicted in a different way.

• 1:01:00Rich Roll?

  Different way, perhaps less severe. The idea of experiential self-knowledge, or, you know, what that journey would look like, is a foreign concept to a lot of people. Like, how does one even begin to crack the seal on what that means on a day-to-day basis?

• 1:01:16Gabor Maté?

  Well, look, I mean, the Buddha, when he sat under the Bodhi tree and meditated all those days after having followed this or that practice of severe abstention or self-flagellation and spiritual exploration, he was dealing with the problem of human suffering, which is not restricted to specific addicts only. It's a human condition, because that disconnection from the self happens to everybody, and everybody suffers. Now,

• 1:01:57Gabor Maté?

  we can cover up that suffering with the munificence of our consumer society, and that's why the desperation, by the way. But...

• 1:02:07Rich Roll?

  Right. The great Henry David Thoreau quote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and what is considered resignation is confirmed desperation."

• 1:02:17Gabor Maté?

  Yeah. So, I'm not sure that you're right about the listener who hasn't suffered addiction and afflicted in the same degree. People... In all walks of life, no somehow, and they will even say, "I just don't know myself. I don't know who I am. I don't know what's my purpose in life," and all that. So those are all states of disconnection from the self, very common in our society. So I actually think a lot of people would understand what we're talking about, even if they haven't suffered degrees of trauma and compensations for trauma, such as maybe you have, or to the degree that I have.

• 1:02:55Rich Roll?

  So in a real-world context, the process of beginning to probe into, you know, the deeper, more authentic self within, you know, what is the, what is the practice of that?

• 1:03:13Gabor Maté?

  By recognizing, well, again, since I'm reading Eckhart these days, I'll quote him. He says that mankind's greatest achievement is not our architecture and our science and our creations, but the recognition of our own insanity. So the first thing is, you've got to get that it's not working for you.

• 1:03:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:32Gabor Maté?

  I mean, if you don't get that, you just continue to tread the same.

• 1:03:37Rich Roll?

  Well, there's so, there's so many layers that have to be peeled back. I mean, we're immersed in, you know, and this gets into toxic culture and materialism, like the society in which we live in is predicated upon these ideals that are, in certain respects, you know, antithetical to, to this journey. You know, we're sort of fed this message of climbing the corporate ladder and, you know, keeping up with the Joneses and, you know, in a competitive kind of accumulation-focused and prioritized way of living that is simply, you know, fomenting more suffering and further divorcing ourselves from that, that true nature.

• 1:04:17Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, well.

• 1:04:18Rich Roll?

  So you have to be able to pierce that to even begin, I would think.

• 1:04:25Gabor Maté?

  You just have to get that you're suffering. I mean, you just have to get that, that's the first thing. If you don't know that you're suffering, you're not gonna pierce anything. You're not gonna look for anything. So the, then you can study, and if you realize that you're suffering, then you can start asking the question, "Why?" And then, you're gonna look at your own life, and you look at society, and, and, and, and everything else. But, it's gotta begin with, uh, some sense that things ain't right with you. Now, here's, um, I can give you any number of quotes. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying talks about how the selling of samsara, which is of illusion, is the major function of our society. Mm-hmm.

• 1:05:07Gabor Maté?

  And here's Thomas Merton, who is a Catholic monk and spiritual teacher, who wrote in nineteen forty-eight or fifty, something like this. It is, it says, "It is true that the materialistic society, the so-called culture that has evolved under the tender mercies of capitalism, has produced what seems to be the ultimate limit of worldliness. And nowhere perhaps, except in the analog of society of pagan Rome, has there ever been such a flowering of cheap and petty and disgusting lusts and vanities as in the world of capitalism, where there's no evil that is not fostered and encouraged for the sake of making money." Mm-hmm. You know, and, and, uh, and he talks about, you know, that

• 1:05:52Gabor Maté?

  we, we, we restrain every human limit, every desire, every human desire to the limit, um, to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest. This is sixty years before the internet, you know, or fifty years before the internet. And so that, we live in a society that, that, that feeds off the hungry ghost.

• 1:06:22Gabor Maté?

  And so we keep creating, nobody does it deliberately, although, actually, they do.

• 1:06:27Rich Roll?

  They do, yeah, I was gonna take issue with that, yeah.

• 1:06:30Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, but you know what, but they can't create the hungry ghost. They can cater to it, but they can't create it. In other words, a Coca-Cola company might tell you that the greatest joy in the world is to drink a can of Coke, which is what they're telling you, that nothing means as much as drinking a can of Coke, but you have to be hungry ghost to believe it.

• 1:06:49Rich Roll?

  Right, and that, and then comes in this, you know, the persistence of this illusion that it will lead to your happiness is astonishing. Despite, despite never reaching it, you think this is the next time where it's actually going to work.

• 1:07:02Gabor Maté?

  Well, a doctor friend of mine said that it's hard to get enough, it's impossible, it's difficult to get enough of something that almost works.

• 1:07:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah. That's the thing, right? If you can come up with that, with that very product, then you will be a master of capitalism.

• 1:07:19Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, and, and, and I kept thinking too, if only I achieved this, I attain that, if, if my books sell this many copies, or if I'm on this program, you know, or, or if I buy this many compact, this, then I'll be complete and happy.

• 1:07:34Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:07:35Gabor Maté?

  It's always that next thing, you know.

• 1:07:36Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 1:07:37Gabor Maté?

  And by the way, and as a Buddhist teacher said, just one more is the binding factor in the cycle of suffering.

• 1:07:44Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right, right. And, and it leaves me wondering if Eckhart Tolle ever, you know, checks his Amazon ranking? Or has he transcended the, the mortal coil in that regard?

• 1:07:57Gabor Maté?

  It'd be interesting to find out.

• 1:07:59Rich Roll?

  We all, we all live in the world, as does he.

• 1:08:01Gabor Maté?

  It'd be interesting to find out. My guess is that he would not be checking that.

• 1:08:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I would imagine he doesn't.

• 1:08:06Gabor Maté?

  Just the way I read him, and, and not just in his reading, but when I, when I see him, in his videos and one time in person, he doesn't strike me that he used to do that. And then even for myself, I don't need to do it either. Not that I don't ever, but it fluctuates. So the degree to which I'm impelled to do it depends on...

• 1:08:27Rich Roll?

  Well, it's a barometer of your spiritual and emotional health.

• 1:08:29Gabor Maté?

  At that moment.

• 1:08:30Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:31Gabor Maté?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 1:08:31Rich Roll?

  Right, right.

• 1:08:32Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, so no, I don't think so. I don't think that he would. I'd be very much surprised if he did.

• 1:08:36Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:38Rich Roll?

  Well, we're running out of time and there's a couple of things I still want to talk to you about. I mean, really, kind of the core undercurrent of your message with respect to how we kind of, you know, treat and perceive addicts and addiction culture is really a cry for more empathy and love. And the idea that man's natural state is one of empathy and love, right? And so when we were talking about how, you know, you and I share this predisposition to irritability or anxiety or what have you.

• 1:09:10Gabor Maté?

  Programming.

• 1:09:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's this programming. I think I heard you in another interview saying it. The idea of second nature came up. It's my second nature to be anxious, to be irritable.

• 1:09:18Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:18Rich Roll?

  And just, let's, you know, dissect that phrase, second nature, because it implies that we have a first nature.

• 1:09:25Gabor Maté?

  Exactly. And then our first nature is, according to all the scientific research,

• 1:09:31Gabor Maté?

  or at least overwhelming scientific research, is that our true nature is to be compassionate, to be sharing, to be cooperative, to be loving, actually.

• 1:09:40Rich Roll?

  None of which is championed in our, in our culture.

• 1:09:42Gabor Maté?

  Well, the opposite is championed, you know, and so that is our first nature. And we suffer precisely because we're divorced from our first nature.

• 1:09:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's that, it's that separation from that true state that is the kernel of suffering that gets fertilized.

• 1:10:02Gabor Maté?

  Yes. And so it also means that since it is our first nature, you know, true nature, even the word recovery, what does it mean? It means to find something.

• 1:10:13Rich Roll?

  Right, to return to a natural state.

• 1:10:15Gabor Maté?

  Exactly. So recovery actually is returning to who we actually are. But, but the who and the what that we are, that we got disconnected from. And that's what it means to recover. And that can be a lifelong process, but it's not a bad thing. That's not a bad thing.

• 1:10:36Rich Roll?

  It's a worthy journey to undertake.

• 1:10:38Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, yeah. Because it's not about, as with all journeys, it's not about...

• 1:10:44Gabor Maté?

  If you do it right, it's not about the destination. It's about the destination when you get there. But it's not about a destination, it's about each step along the way.

• 1:10:54Rich Roll?

  And the willingness to undertake that step.

• 1:10:57Gabor Maté?

  Yeah. And, and to keep generating that willingness. Because I can say I have the willingness Tuesday, but it's totally absent from me on Wednesday. On Wednesday, and then I, you know, then I have to, okay, what's going on here? You know, so it's just a constant willingness to engage with however it is at that moment. And whenever I've thought I've arrived somewhere, life will come along and say, buddy, you think you've arrived somewhere? Let me just show you exactly where you're at.

• 1:11:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:27Gabor Maté?

  And then something will happen that will show me exactly.

• 1:11:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that mirror will show up.

• 1:11:31Gabor Maté?

  The mirror always shows up, and it shows up pretty quickly.

• 1:11:34Rich Roll?

  Yes. All right, well, I want to close it down with one final question, which is if, if you woke up in some bizarre parallel universe and found yourself to be Surgeon General of the United States,

• 1:11:50Rich Roll?

  you know, understanding that the system is what it is and is inherently limited in that regard, you know, where would your focus be placed in terms of, of changing policy? And reframing legislation around recovery and addiction?

• 1:12:04Gabor Maté?

  I would pass a law. I would pass a law that says it's illegal to use the word addict. That every time you wanted to use the word addict, instead you had to say, he or she, you can't use as an addict. You'd have to say, he or she is a human being who suffered immensely and has turned to substances or other behaviors to soothe their suffering.

• 1:12:29Gabor Maté?

  So that every time you thought of addiction or an addict, you had to frame it in those terms. No, that immediately, that would immediately transform the conversation. And it would immediately be self-evident of how destructive, inhumane, retrograde

• 1:12:49Gabor Maté?

  our current attitudes are and our current policies are. And when I say attitudes and policies, I mean the legal ones, the psychological ones, and the medical ones.

• 1:13:02Gabor Maté?

  So we just have to reform the conversation.

• 1:13:05Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:13:05Gabor Maté?

  Reframe the conversation. And you see, I don't really believe in...

• 1:13:12Gabor Maté?

  You can't legislate compassion.

• 1:13:16Gabor Maté?

  You can legislate cruelty, but you can't legislate compassion. So my... In fact, I am part of a new nonprofit called Compassion for Addiction. And I think that actually, if we adopted that attitude of compassion, and if we talked about it in the terms that I just outlined, we would have not only a much more fruitful approach to treating addiction, we'd also be a lot happier as a society, because we'd be much more closer to who we really are, which is compassionate and social minded.

• 1:13:49Rich Roll?

  I love that. That's beautiful.

• 1:13:51Gabor Maté?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:51Rich Roll?

  Thanks for talking to me today.

• 1:13:53Gabor Maté?

  It's my pleasure. Thank you.

• 1:13:54Rich Roll?

  So many things that I had jotted down in my notebook here I wanted to talk to you about that we didn't even come close to getting to. So perhaps I can convince you to sit down with me at some future point and continue the conversation.

• 1:14:07Gabor Maté?

  Yeah, why don't we do that when my next book comes out?

• 1:14:09Rich Roll?

  That would be great. Happy to do that. I appreciate all the work that you're doing. It's making a large impact and it is changing lives. And it's inspiring to hear your message and just thank you.

• 1:14:21Gabor Maté?

  Well, thanks so much.

• 1:14:22Rich Roll?

  All right. Peace. Thanks.

• 1:14:32Rich Roll?

  Wow, that was intense. He doesn't mess about, does he? I feel like he went right to my heart, like he just penetrated directly to my core. A very pivotal conversation, I believe, in the evolution of my relationship with myself and my perception of my addiction. And I hope that you guys got something out of that, that you found it informative and instructive. He is an amazing guy. Very blessed to have spent that time with him. There were so many additional topics that I wanted to explore with him. We just didn't get to it. We didn't have the time. We didn't have the bandwidth. So hopefully, I can convince him to sit down with me.

• 1:15:12Rich Roll?

  Again, you can learn more about Dr. Mate at drgabormate.com, D R G A B O R M A T A dot com. Tons of articles there on his website. Information about all of his upcoming appearance dates are there if you want to see him in person, which I highly recommend. And please do yourself a favor and make a point of checking out Dr. Mate's books. I love In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Close Encounters with Addiction. That's perhaps my favorite of all of his books. It really speaks to me. His other books are called Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It, When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress Disease Connection, and he has a fourth book called Hold On to

• 1:15:54Rich Roll?

  Your Kids. All great books. I will put links to all of those books, plus a ton of additional articles, background, videos, and other materials and resources related to today's conversation, all up in the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. I put a ton of time into compiling these show notes, as does my colleague, Chris Swan, so please make a point of checking them out. Read up, learn more, take your knowledge base and your podcast experience beyond the earbuds, right? That's what this is all about. I'm actually going to see Dr. Mate in Los Angeles next week, on Thursday, October 29. He's doing an event with Ione Sky, the actress. I'm not sure if there's still tickets, but if you're in LA and you're

• 1:16:39Rich Roll?

  interested, maybe check it out. Check out his appearances page on his website. There's information there. And if there's tickets still available, maybe I'll see you there. If you happen to live in LA, or your travels take you through that part of the world, maybe you're going to come into town to see Dr. Mate speak, make a point of checking out a few of the businesses that I'm partnered with. Joy Cafe, it's our organic, plant-based, and gluten-free eatery in Westlake Village. You'll often see me eating lunch there, pretty much every day when I'm in town. We're also partnered with The Karma Baker, which is a vegan and gluten-free bakery, also located in Westlake Village. The podcast is a great way to serve the global community, and I'm very in touch with that right now, having just traveled through Europe.

• 1:17:22Rich Roll?

  I met so many podcast fans everywhere we went, which is really quite extraordinary. But there is also something really special about being able to serve the local community where you live. And that's why I'm involved in these businesses. They're consistent with my values and it feels really nice to kind of plant the seeds of the plant-based movement in the area where you live. So that's what that's all about. I'm really proud to be associated with these companies. So again, if you're in LA, go check them out. For all your plant power needs, visit richroll.com. Check out our new cookbook and lifestyle guide, The Plant Power Way. We've got signed copies of that, as well as signed copies of Finding Ultra. We've got Julie's guided meditation program. Hot item lately, we've got nutrition products, 100% organic cotton garments, plant-powered tech tees. We've

• 1:18:05Rich Roll?

  got sticker packs, temporary tattoos. We've got limited edition art prints. Basically, all kinds of cool stuff to help you take your life and your health to the next level. Check out my online courses at mindbodygreen.com. Thank you for supporting the show, for telling your friends, for sharing it on social media, and for always using the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. Thanks so much, you guys. I'm looking forward to getting back home in a couple of days. This has been a long time on the road. And it's tough, it's tricky to try to put this podcast up twice a week when you're traveling and in different time zones and all of that. It's definitely not been easy, but I'm proud that I've been able to pretty much keep to the schedule. And I am looking forward to

• 1:18:47Rich Roll?

  so many great conversations that I'm going to be bringing to you guys over the next couple of weeks. So thanks so much for taking this ride with me and I'll see you guys soon. Peace. Plants.