Dr. K on Fixing Your Anxiety, Redpill Men Are Good, & Beating Cheap Dopamine

YERRR – the boys linked up with Healthy Gamer GG for a marathon deep dive into the mind, ego, and trauma. Dr. K makes this episode part therapy, part philosophy, part “bro-yap,” and it gets real. Dr. Alok Kanojia and the boys are talking: – Mid-life crisis and almost becoming a monk – Emotional baggage, procrastination, and why diagnoses don’t always work – Guilt, sadness, autism spectrum, and male anger – Talk therapy vs. podcasts, estrogen, and Red Pill 2.0 – Psychedelics, meditation, breathwork, and power posing – Regulating ambition, ego, and the shame/anxiety cocktail we all carry It’s raw, funny, and kind of life-changing. All that and more on this week’s episode of FLAGRANT. INDULGE. 0:00 Intro 1:39 Dr K's middle life crisis 5:55 Studying to be a monk + Success 9:24 Ashram, Purging + Feeling Control 15:24 Brown love + Actions over results 20:44 Learn everything before specialising 22:54 Ego driving decisions + Emotional baggage 29:56 What is the mind? Yogic method 41:53 Emotional coping + Not even trying 49:38 Diagnoses aren't working 51:07 Understanding motivation + Ping Ponging Content 55:05 Procrastination + IQ v EQ 59:42 Samskara & Guilt + Male Sadness & Anger 1:09:17 Autism spectrum + Sadness 1:13:14 Talk therapy is gold standard for women 1:16:30 Podcasts let bros YAP + Estrogen 1:20:26 Demonising homosexuality + Overburdening wives 1:24:43 Aversion to touch, ARFID + Kiss test 1:29:52 Fixing samskara + Red Pill 2.0 1:39:19 CBT, Looping + Awareness is enough 1:45:32 Psychedelics + Dealing with that stuff 1:51:16 Confidence, Disabling Ego + Ket v meditation 1:57:44 How to meditate, EFT + Power posing 2:06:52 Breathwork + Emptying the well 2:09:00 Anxiety & Shame 2:30:37 Regulating ambition + Responsibility Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:26Speaker 01

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• 0:55Speaker 02

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• 1:23Speaker 03

  People who have anxiety have a very low heart rate variability. This has nothing to do with what you're worried about. This is the way that you're physiologically wired. So what you need to do is there's like a red pill 2.0 that's kind of like happening right now, which I think is actually quite healthy.

• 1:36Speaker 04

  Really?

• 1:37Speaker 03

  So I think there's a lot of good stuff in there. If there was not good stuff in there, it would not be growing, right? That's why you're angry all the time.

• 1:44Speaker 04

  Oh no, that's true.

• 1:45Mark Gagnon?

  He's reading you.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  All those women being yapping. But look at all these podcast bros, right? So at some point, we started demonizing homosexuality. And when we started doing that, men stopped touching each other. We can't just do this.

• 1:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  We gotta do like a...

• 2:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's gotta be borderline aggressive. It's gotta be like, ah.

• 2:03Speaker 03

  Borderline aggressive or borderline homosexual. We can't touch someone unless it's a joke. I want a girlfriend, I want a girlfriend, I want a girlfriend. Just a bro. Like, there's no way you can get this person to fall in love with you. Go be the best person that you can and accept that sometimes they're gonna say no. So we could all kiss each other on the cheek and we could ask each other, what is your experience of this?

• 2:23Mark Gagnon?

  This has been a great podcast, guys.

• 2:26Speaker 06

  See, this is where he blames his autism. That's why I don't believe it's autistic. He's just black and homophobic.

• 2:32Speaker 03

  I don't even know how to respond.

• 2:36Speaker 06

  What's up, everybody? On the podcast today, we are honored to have healthy gamer GG, also known as Dr. K. If you're not Indian, and if you are Indian, Dr. Alok Kanojia, he's a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, maybe a monk, judging by the way he's sitting, I believe him, and the single best source to address mental health in today's doom-scrolling society. He's here to fix Alex's autism, my anger, and Mark's paralyzing fear of conflict. Guys, give it up for Dr. Alok Kanojia.

• 3:03Speaker 03

  How are you, sir? So autism, paralyzing fear of conflict, and...

• 3:07Speaker 06

  Just general anger and anger.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 3:10Speaker 06

  I don't even know, I'm angry.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  You're gonna speedrun this.

• 3:13Speaker 06

  But if I got a grudge, it ain't, it ain't, I'm not letting go of it. Like Andrew, who's normally in this seat, he's like, as I've gotten more successful, especially if I get more successful than the person I didn't like, I let go of it. I don't.

• 3:27Speaker 06

  I still am like, nah, fuck that guy.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay.

• 3:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, are we talking about that?

• 3:36Speaker 06

  Okay, so here's...

• 3:37Mark Gagnon?

  Fix him.

• 3:38Speaker 06

  You, yeah, they have a real problem with this, even though I'm right 95% of the time, these guys can't handle it. But, point is, yours, I listened to your Diary of a CEO, I thought it was awesome, I think you're awesome, I've listened to a couple of your videos, but I feel like, and I was just saying this to you, I feel like you're in a different place than you were a year ago when you recorded. There is a, you said I've connected more to my spirituality, I'm looking at, you're sitting in half lotus.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 4:01Speaker 06

  You got the rakhshon, I don't think you had that on. You were in a suit, you were like, now you're in the black tea. What's going on?

• 4:08Speaker 03

  So probably, so I went through a midlife crisis a couple of years ago, or started a midlife crisis. We'll see whether I'm done or not. And, you know, this is something that I think, first thing that a lot of people don't understand is that it's like developmentally appropriate. So there are periods of time in our lives where we have to go through crises. I think we're seeing a lot of quarter-life crises now. You know, the classic perception of a midlife crisis is like, dude is... in his 40s, check, you know, starts buys a sports car like dyes his hair, maybe is going through a divorce or something like that. So I think we tend to like, first of all, pathologize it a lot. We say that this is a bad thing. But I think that many people, you know, there are periods in your life where like you are operating based on a certain strategy.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  And then you reach a certain point and you're like, that strategy is not working. Yeah, there's a ceiling on it. Yeah, or it's just like you feel like you're taking all the right steps and you sort of end up in the wrong place. Right? Which is oftentimes how we like live our lives. So we're both brown. And so when I was growing up, it's like, I look, you're going to be a doctor. You did it, I did not. Yeah, so but I mean, I did it super late. So I started med school at 28. Yeah. And so I remember like, you know, going going home for Christmas one day and and I was like 24, 25 at the time and. You know, one of my friends from high school, I was like, hey, what are you up to? And she's like, you know, I'm in my first year of ophthalmology residency. And she's like, what are you up to? And I'm like, I'm applying to medical school for the third time. Yeah. You know. Oh, you'd applied three times.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, I got rejected from 120 medical schools. Wow.

• 5:44Speaker 03

  It's not too late, man.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Right? So so and that's what happens, right? I mean, we joke about it. Yeah. But that's really what happens, especially like men are, you know, taught to be a particular thing. And then you do all of those things. And you end up in a place where you're kind of like, what am I doing here? Like, what's the point? Yeah. So was somewhat unhappy, which is kind of ironic because we, you know, I was successful. Yeah.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  But then as like stuff started happening, it sort of felt like it was growing out of control in a good way. So I started streaming back in 2019 and sort of like. Blew up during the pandemic.

• 6:24Speaker 06

  Right.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  And then a couple of years later, you know, we started this company and we have like this research division and we have this coaching program and, you know, I'm going on these podcasts and stuff and I was like, I don't know if this is actually what I want to do.

• 6:35Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  Right. So what happens is like opportunities start coming towards you.

• 6:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  And I think a big lesson that I've learned is like walking away from good things is how you achieve peace and freedom in life.

• 6:47Speaker 06

  Wow. Yeah.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  Right. So you're like, someone sends you like a good opportunity and you're like, oh, I should really take advantage of this.

• 6:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  But is that really what you want to do?

• 6:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:57Speaker 03

  So went through sort of a midlife crisis, had a lot of problems in my marriage at the time too. I was just unhappy and I think my wife is awesome. I think she dealt with it really well. And then started to really engage in spiritual practice. So was coasting for a long time. So I spent about seven years studying to become a monk. And then basically like went to med school and all that good stuff and then was like in residency.

• 7:19Speaker 06

  What is studying to become a monk?

• 7:21Speaker 03

  So when I was failing out of college.

• 7:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  So now I'm 19 years old, just finished my sophomore year, have like a 2.0 GPA. You know, my parents had tried kind of everything. They tried like tough love. They tried like, you know, being loving and supportive, but I was just playing video games for 16 to 20 hours a day, joined a fraternity. I mean, it was great. Like.

• 7:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  I actually don't regret it at all. I think if you want to, you know, if you want to screw up, your twenties is the time to do it.

• 7:50Speaker 06

  That is true.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  And I also think it's really weird because like, especially like a lot of Indian people, you know, they'll be like, oh, like I gotta like get all my stuff done and I'm like super like type A, right?

• 8:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  And so what they're, the earlier I start working, the earlier I can retire.

• 8:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:06Speaker 03

  You're trading your twenties for more free, you're giving up the freedom in your twenties for more freedom in your sixties?

• 8:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  That doesn't sound like a good trade.

• 8:14Speaker 06

  No, it's not. I, I think we define, we are taught by our parents and they didn't mean to, but we're kind of taught success is one metric. It is financial and academic and whatever, and that's it.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:24Speaker 06

  There's not like a 360 degree view of what success is for us. Like success is being a great father. Like if you're a billionaire and not a great father, I think most Indians would still be like, look at that guy. But most Indian parents, or at least we would look at that as that's successful. But now I'm learning that's failure. If my wife hates me and I have kids who don't, who resent me, it don't matter what I do in my career. I'm, I failed.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think that that's a virtue of the world they grew up in and a virtue of the world that we grew up in, right? So my parents, you know, emigrated from India and like my dad, you know, grew up living in like an eight by 10 room with like nine people. So they would sleep like outside the house in the stairwell. Like, so they'd put out like sleeping, not sleeping bags, but you know, god knows. Yeah. Know what that is, but they put out like basically like their beds, they would sleep like in the stairwell, like every, you know, area where you kind of climb up and then, you know, you kind of turn around. So it'd be like one or two people sleeping there. Right. And so they grew up in a, in a situation where like success was survival. Yeah. Like financial success, financial stability. And security.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  Security, absolutely. So, you know, my grandmother would tell me that like we'd run out of money on the 25th of every month. And like out of money. And so you have to figure out how to like stretch for like five or six more days. So I think that they grew up with a set of value system, a value system that was sort of determined by the system around them. I think the reason we all, I don't know about y'all, but you know, I'm making assumptions about Akash, but I can't imagine your path to being a comedian was like. Looked upon favorably? Yeah. No. Right? No. And, and so we have to learn a different system and I think that's why people are struggling so much because like the rules that applied 20 or 30 years ago about how

• 10:12Speaker 03

  to become successful at the top of the list is go to college, get a good job. Right now, that doesn't work anymore. Like you, you show up with a ton of debt, jobs are being replaced by AI. You know, like 50% of people under the age of 30 are living at home, buying a house is like not really a possibility for most people of like the Gen Z millennial generation. So like all the old rules don't work. And so we have to discover a new set of rules. And, and that's what I really tried to start helping people with on the internet. I realized we got far away from. No, dude, not at all.

• 10:46Mark Gagnon?

  Oh, yeah. So just before we get too far, so you said you were doing bad in school and then that's when you like left.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, so my dad, I still remember the conversation. We'd been talking for like, like three hours and it was like one in the morning and he was like, oh look, you need to go to India. Yeah. And, and I was like. That's your solution to everything. Yeah, well, so I think it was a good one. So, so I was like, why? And he's like, you just need to go. And that was the one time in my life that I just like listened to him. And so about 10 days later, I think eight days later, I was, you know, getting on a plane. And then went to a part of India that I've never been to before, don't speak the language there. You know, got picked up like, so I remember like walking out of the airport. And like, I didn't understand like who was picking me up.

• 11:30Speaker 06

  Where in India?

• 11:31Speaker 03

  Bangalore.

• 11:31Speaker 06

  Bangalore, oh, okay, okay.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  So I still remember like, there was no one with a sign or anything. Like I just walked out of the airport and I was just like there waiting with my suitcases. And there was a, you know, a bunch of people milling about. I don't know if y'all have ever been to India, and then eventually everyone left.

• 11:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  And there was like one guy there.

• 11:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  And he walked up to me and we like kind of shook hands. He didn't tell me his name and he started walking and I started following him. And it's like, he's there to pick up someone. He doesn't know who he's there to pick up. I'm there to be picked up. So I just got in a car with this stranger and we started driving.

• 12:03Speaker 06

  Sorry, this might not be important. Why'd you go to Bangalore? To me, it's the most western city, so maybe that's why I would go.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  No, so I was going to an ashram outside of Bangalore. So I flew into Bangalore.

• 12:11Speaker 06

  Okay, got it.

• 12:12Speaker 03

  And.

• 12:13Mark Gagnon?

  This is like reverse Home Alone, like instead of them leaving you behind.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  Absolutely, so they just sent me, right? And I was like desperate. I mean, I had tried so hard to like get control of my life, like. I didn't understand, you know, I remember like every morning I would set my alarm clock. And like my alarm would go off at like 7:00 AM. Cause I don't know if you guys have ever done this, but I started signing up for 8:00 AM classes. Because I thought like, okay, like if I sign up for an 8:00 AM class, then I have to wake up, right? And then if I, if I get up early, then like, then I can take control of my day.

• 12:42Mark Gagnon?

  I tried that one semester, it didn't work.

• 12:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, right, it's so interesting. So I like would try to set up all these structures around me to like get me to do the things that I couldn't make myself do. And that just failed catastrophically. I, you know, the alarm clock would go off, I'd turn it off, I'd go back to sleep. What I discovered interestingly enough is the best way to sleep through my alarm clock and avoid all the guilt and shame was to go to sleep at like 5:00. Then I was so dead tired.

• 13:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  So dead tired that it feels impossible to get out. And I'd just be like, okay, I'll get out of bed tomorrow. Then since I have this morning class load, I wake up around 1:00 or 2:00 o'clock. I, oh, if I get my ass out of bed, I can go to like one class at 2:30. But I've missed the whole day. Like might as well just start fresh tomorrow.

• 13:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then the cycle would continue.

• 13:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  So I went to an ashram.

• 13:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, okay.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  And I still remember the first, is it okay that I'm telling stories?

• 13:38Speaker 06

  Not it. Yeah, everything, whatever you want to do, where would it?

• 13:41Speaker 03

  So, you know, I still remember, like, I got to the ashram around like 3 a.m. There was no, no power. So like their power had gone out. So they like took me to a room and like there was a bed and and then I go to sleep, the moon was out. And then I wake up a little bit later because there's this bell ringing, like someone's ringing a bell. I look outside, the moon is still up. I'm like, I don't know what time it is.

• 14:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  I didn't have a cellphone back then.

• 14:05Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  This is 2003.

• 14:07Speaker 06

  Oh, that's a long time ago. Okay.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  So, and then I walk outside and I see that there are people milling about. I hear like toilets flushing, things like that. So I'm like, okay, I guess I have to get ready. And then, you know, I start walking with the, just following the herd of people in the moonlight. And then I hear this.

• 14:25Speaker 03

  Like, what was that? And then I hear.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  And then I'm like, that sounds like vomiting. And then I hear a lot of it, like people like. Like six, seven, eight, 10, 12 people. And then I'm following these people and I see there's like a ditch.

• 14:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  With a row of people vomiting like liters of stuff into the ditch.

• 14:46Speaker 06

  Fuck.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  And there's a group of people walking behind them, like kind of patting them on the shoulder and being like, oh, you're just like, okay, like. And I'm like, what's going on? Did I, did I come to the plague? Like, what's happening?

• 14:56Speaker 06

  Did they eat the street food?

• 14:59Speaker 03

  So it turns out it's a yogic practice called Vamandhuti, where you drink a bunch of isotonic water, so like basically like saline water with electrolytes. And then you vomit it out and it like cleans out your whole system. Oh shit, you was right. And so it was just this weird, like bizarre, like kind of esoteric yogic practice. And what I found in India was basically a system to understand why I could not control myself. Like, I wanted to get up, but I wouldn't get up. And so, how does that work? Like, if you want something, why don't you do it? You know, it's like such a simple thing. Yeah. But we don't teach this stuff. Right. So, fell in love with it because I felt in control for the first time in my life.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  You know, found someone who was something like a guru who just really helped me immensely. And then, I decided, uh, three months later, um, that I was gonna become a monk. So I went to one of my teachers and I said, "I'm ready to become a monk, gonna take my vows." And so, the, my teacher said, you know, "Becoming a monk is about giving up a life, and you don't have a life to give up." You're like, "Nothing." Damn. God damn. So, he said to me- That's the most Indian parent shit ever. "You're a loser, what are you giving up?" So, he said, uh, you know, "I'll teach you, so you can come back every summer and every December, um, and you'll continue learning, like, you can progress and do like more advanced spiritual practices

• 16:28Speaker 03

  and things like that, but you're also gonna go get a doctoral degree. And then if you decide at the age of thirty that you wanna take your vows, if you still wanna do it nine years later, you can still continue learning, then we'll take you." Okay. So I was like, "Okay." So then I went back to the US and I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna go get a doctoral degree." Met my wife, um, she's Indian.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  Right, so, so- I knew I liked this guy. I knew I liked this guy.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  He's a Brown Love guy.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  I love Brown Love. I, I also love Brown Love.

• 17:02Speaker 04

  You're learning. You didn't even know you loved it.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. This guy acts like a monk, dude.

• 17:09Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 17:10Speaker 04

  It's the first time he's ever said Brown Love in his life.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  When I'm really doing Brown Love, I don't know if I look like a monk.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  Y'all gotta check out the OnlyFans.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  Uh, which is interesting, 'cause actually, well, one of the things that we discussed like literally a week ago, my wife was like, you know, "We should really start an OnlyFans." And, and she's CEO of Healthy Gamer, so she's my boss. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I, I, she wasn't meeting- This guy's so Indian, it's unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable, dude. Right, yeah.

• 17:37Speaker 04

  We need to talk about the Kama Sutra, by the way, but that's a later conversation.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 17:39Speaker 04

  We can talk about that.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. So, yeah, she was saying like, you know, you should like start helping people on OnlyFans. And anyway, so going back to the monk story, so then I went back and I met her and then, you know, promptly fell head over heels. We were dating for a couple of years. And then at some point I was like, okay, I have to get a doctoral degree. And she was like, I want to be married. She was watching Grey's Anatomy at the time and she was like, I want to be married to a neurosurgeon. So I was like, why the hell not? That's so cute. It's so funny because people think that, you know, the early when I like was, I majored in pre-med, obviously. Yeah. But like, I was like, oh, I'm going to be doctor. You know, like, I'm going to be best doctor. I'm going to go to Harvard. I'm going to be the best. And then years later, it's like, we're gonna do this so that we can get laid until we're

• 18:25Speaker 03

  30 years old and then we're gonna give it all up. And so I was also like telling her, I was like, you know, there's no like long-term potential here because like I really want to become a monk and that's my path in life. She's like, yeah, whatever. She was like, okay, fine. Like she did not bother her at all. And so ended up going to med school and then really didn't care about like grades and stuff because I wasn't like, you know, oriented towards that stuff at that point. And then it was actually kind of embarrassing because my mentor called me after like the day of graduation. He's like, where are you? And I was like, oh, I, you know, I'm not coming to the dinner or whatever. And he's like, you're like, I'm presenting an award for you. Like, why aren't you here? And I was like, oh, shit.

• 19:08Speaker 03

  Cause I didn't even know, like, I'd never looked at my grades, like, so I ended up winning a couple of awards. How do you not look at your grades? Uh, yeah, so like that's a big part of like spiritual practice is not being oriented towards the outcome of your actions. Okay. Right? So you focus on the action itself. Yeah. And so everyone around me, I still remember like the first year of med school, I like kind of came in, I was a little bit older. It's a bunch of like 22, 24 year old kids. Yeah. I was 28 at the time. And then they're so paranoid about like grades, grades, grades. There are a bunch of these like, you know, brown kids and Asian kids and white kids and black kids and Hispanic kids and they're all oriented. Not a bunch.

• 19:44Speaker 04

  In order, by the way.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  So it's funny you say that. So I still remember my, the day I walked into intern orientation at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Like a third of the room was brown. A third of the room was Asian.

• 20:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  Like East Asian, and then a third of the room was everything else. And I was like, this is insane.

• 20:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, taking our jobs.

• 20:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  Absolutely, man. All over the world. I mean, it's a big problem right now.

• 20:13Speaker 04

  What is someone talking about?

• 20:16Speaker 03

  And then they also litter all over the place.

• 20:18Speaker 04

  Wait, what?

• 20:18Speaker 03

  Like brown people? Have you guys not heard about this? It's a real problem.

• 20:21Speaker 06

  I remember going to India.

• 20:22Speaker 04

  You said it, not me.

• 20:23Speaker 06

  Second time I went to India, I'm in my uncle's house. I had like a wrapper of some junk food, obviously, because I'm fat. And I was like, hey, where should I throw this away? I don't see a trash can. He's like, I gotta throw it outside.

• 20:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  No way.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  It's, it's.

• 20:36Speaker 04

  I did see a video of a hotel, I think, in Mumbai where a girl brought her trash down. The guy goes, oh, thank you so much. And then tossed it over the fence. And I was like, well, what's their culture? Not gonna judge.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like when you have 1.4 billion people, like maintaining civil order is like super hard.

• 20:53Speaker 06

  A little tricky.

• 20:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  Anyway, so I don't remember where I was.

• 20:58Speaker 06

  You're in med school, you're getting an award, you miss it.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, so.

• 21:02Speaker 06

  So you just know that you passed. That's all you know.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I knew I had passed. Like, you know, you sit down and you take a test, you know whether you know the answers or not. I didn't know about this, didn't know about this. And really, I mean, when I was in med school, my orientation was like, okay, I'm gonna be a doctor one day. You know, I'm gonna just try to learn as much as I can, because I'm not gonna like, practice. I don't know if I'm gonna practice for long, but. And then was 30 years old when I was still in med school and had gotten married at that point, I think, yeah. So decided to get married, decided not to become a monk. So. But really was just about, and this is what I even tell like the medical students and stuff that, you know, I'll mentor. I think a lot of people think like medical school is all about getting grades because this is the way we've been conditioned, right?

• 21:48Speaker 03

  So like you gotta get A's in high school. You gotta make the decision to become a doctor at the age of 15. Yeah. And then you gotta be like, do good in high school so you can get into a good college. Right. Be at the top of your class in college so that you can, you know, so your grades, grades, grades, grades, grades. Parents, parents, parents, parents, parents. So all these kids are like oriented towards getting good grades, but like I still remember I was doing interviews for residency. So I was like on a flight and then there's like, you know, you hear this intercom and it's like, is there a doctor on the plane? And I was like, like I'm a fourth year medical student. I'm not a doctor. Yeah. And then like, I'm like, okay, hopefully somebody else will answer. Yeah. And then like a few minutes later, they're like, is there a doctor on the plane? And I was like, oh shit. Yeah.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  You know, so then I like ring the call bell and I go to the back. Thankfully there was another doctor on the plane. So I was like, you know, I'm a fourth year medical student, happy to help. And there's like a dude like laid out. Yes, yeah. And it's like, is he having a heart attack or a panic attack? And so I felt lucky. But that's what I sort of realized at that moment, and this is what I tell everyone who goes to medical school is one day, you could be somewhere like a wedding. Yeah. So 50% of the weddings I go to will have at least one medical emergency, you know, that are Indian because there's like hundreds of people there. And you don't get to say, I didn't study hard enough. I don't know what's wrong with you. Right. Right? At the end of the day, like the practice of medicine is like a human being walks into your office and

• 23:15Speaker 03

  if you make a mistake, like this person could die. So you should learn as much as you can about the human body. Don't just focus on the thing that you want to do. Like everyone sort of focuses on their specialty, but I strongly recommend that if you're going to be a psychiatrist, you should focus on everything else in medical school. Cause you have your whole life to learn psychiatry. But this is the last time you're going to get a chance. Like I haven't delivered a baby in like, you know, what 10, 10 years. And so every baby that I delivered, like hopefully those are the last babies that I'm going to deliver and I won't have to deliver a baby. But if you're on a cruise ship or something and some woman goes into labor, you don't get to say, yeah, I'm a medical doctor, but I'm a psychiatrist and I just know how to talk about feelings. Like I don't know how to do that. Right.

• 24:00Speaker 03

  So went through medical school and then um, how do we, why, why am I talking about my life story?

• 24:05Speaker 04

  Oh, I was wondering if you ever went like, did the whole shave head, vow of silence, all that?

• 24:11Speaker 03

  So, so the other big decision I realized is that like, after years of spiritual practice, I realized that I wanted to become a monk out of ego. So like I had failed at life, right? So I remember like being 26 and hearing from my friend who was like finishing med school and I'm like applying for the third year in a row. And then so like, you know, what happened, my ego was like, oh, these people are better than me. How do I become better than them? So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to become a monk. I'm going to become non-materialistic. Give it up. I'm better than you. You are successful, but I am a monk. I see you are chasing all of these monies. I'm better.

• 24:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 24:51Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm developing the-

• 24:53Speaker 06

  It's a fantastic accent. If mine was that good, I'd have a whole different career.

• 24:56Speaker 03

  So.

• 24:59Speaker 06

  I'd be selling out the garden right now.

• 25:02Speaker 06

  Unbelievable.

• 25:03Speaker 03

  How's your, your accent's not-

• 25:04Speaker 06

  Dude, it's not that good because my mom moved here when she was 14, so she doesn't, she has an accent, but it's not like the traditional accent. And my dad's is kinda off too. It's not like, it's so hot. I didn't have that like Indian accent in my house, so I didn't learn that.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. So what's funny is my kids will do the accent. But I don't know where they're learning it. Because we're not, we don't speak that way. My mom doesn't have it anymore. It's so weird. Like it's like genetic or something.

• 25:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, maybe.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  It's, it's so, they're like six and eight.

• 25:34Speaker 06

  I'd be a doctor if I had the accent. I'm missing this genetic component that is super Indian.

• 25:39Speaker 04

  This is because you're Pashtun this whole time. That's really what it is.

• 25:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's green eyes, dude.

• 25:41Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 25:42Speaker 06

  Fucking unbelievable.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I, I decided to, I decided that spiritual practice is like not about wearing robes and shaving your head. It's how you live on the inside. It's all like internal, like that's what it is. Like you don't, it's not about what you physically do. It's about your attitude and what happens in your mind and what happens internally. So I was like, oh, I don't need to do that.

• 26:03Speaker 04

  It seems like there's a transformative like point. Like I don't know if there's like a specific moment or it kinda happens over time. But I'm curious, were you able to sort of self diagnose the things you were going through in that period while you were in college? Dealing with this sort of lethargy and like maybe depression? Again, I don't want to diagnose you.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:19Speaker 04

  And what exactly is underlying there? And what are the tools that you used to get yourself out of that rut?

• 26:25Speaker 03

  So I can absolutely look back retrospectively and understand exactly what was going on. So I don't know if there was like a moment, but would I have qualified for clinical depression? Absolutely. If I saw a psychiatrist, like I met all the criteria, wasn't getting out of bed, all this kind of stuff. I mean, I was addicted to video games. And so I think I probably could have been diagnosed that way. But I think in terms of the understanding, I think it happened really in phases, right? So the first thing that happened was I sort of learned from a perspective of ego and stuff like that. I was like, okay, I'm like doing all this stuff out of ego, so I'm going to just devote myself to like action. So that's also where like, you know, if you, if you look at getting rejected from med school

• 27:09Speaker 03

  for basically three years in a row, a lot of people would like give up, right? But the reason you give up is because each rejection is not an individual event. It becomes a pile that you carry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? So if you look at what really weighs people down in life, it's that they accumulate stuff that they don't know how to put down. So in my case, every rejection, I'm like, oh, this is like me holding on to stuff. That's called a samskara. So I'm gonna like, let that go. I'm gonna change the way that I view this, that I have a bunch of, I have the store. Samskara? Samskara. What does that mean? Samskara is teaching, right? It's the same word, but it has a couple of different meanings.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  The way that I understand this is, so you know when we say like, oh, like I've been traumatized? Like you carry emotional baggage, right? So if you sort of look at the way that human beings work, we have emotional experiences and we internalize them in some way. We carry them around. So a great example is, I had a patient once who was engaged to be married when she found out her husband was like living a lie. So husband claimed to have a job, would leave the house every day. Or fiance, would leave the house every day, would go to his parents' place, brown guy, okay? Would go to his parents' place. We just hang out there during work hours and then would drive back. And his parents were putting money in his bank account. Wow. Yikes.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  So all of them were maintaining this lie that he's got like a career so that he can get married. And so she ends up like discovering this one day because someone sees him somewhere. And then he's, you know, he like goes to McDonald's or something and he gets spotted, I think, literally at a fast food drive through. Nice. On in a different part of town and she thinks that he's got an office over there. So she starts asking him about it and he's like, oh yeah, like I had something. But she can tell that he's kind of BSing. So then she starts digging, digging, digging. And then basically like discovers like he's not employed and his parents are in on it. And they're like depositing money in his account. That's great. That's crazy. And so she's so terrified of this, then she gets into another relationship. And then this is how she ended up in my office because she's now scared because her husband like won't let her look at her phone.

• 29:22Speaker 03

  Right? So, so she's like, she's like, I want to look at his phone and I want to make sure he's not having an affair. So the second person is not, has given her no indication that he's unfaithful. But what happens is when she sees certain things. Yeah. So when she sees him on his phone, like texting people or whatever, like late at night. Her brain has these prior experiences, which then interpret this completely normal thing with the context of her experience. Does that make sense? Yeah. So even though there's nothing wrong, I had this experience in the past. I'm carrying this experience forward and injecting it in the present.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  And if I, I don't know what y'all's like, relationships are like, but we see this all the time in relationships where like, they're not judging you. Yeah. They're, they're judging all of their past and they see their past in you. Yeah. Right? Which is why we will talk about relationship baggage. We know as a society that people like carry stuff forward. Right. So what is the mechanism through which we carry that stuff forward? That's what in Sanskrit is called samskar. This is in psychiatry, you know, we'll call it trauma. Okay. Where now you've been traumatized. So you like see the world in a different way. Let's just understand what a samskara is. Yeah. Actually, let's take a step back and understand what the mind is. So what I like about the theory of mind from yoga in the karmic religions

• 30:47Speaker 03

  is that it's kind of a DIY theory. So if we look at like, if you study psychology, it's really hard to understand like Freud's theories in terms of like what's going on in your head. So Freud was like, there's an anal stage, a phallic stage, an oral stage. Yeah. And like, I don't know what that looks like in my own life, right? I mean, maybe if we're talking about OnlyFans, but. But you know, like, a lot of these psychological concepts, if you sort of look at the way that psychiatry developed is like, you're sitting in that chair and you're talking to me. You're making observations about my mind and you're the psychiatrist. And then you develop these theories. But fundamentally, you have no idea what I'm thinking or what my mind. You don't know what my internal experience is.

• 31:29Speaker 03

  So Western psychology and psychiatry is about observation from the outside. That's how our whole system of medicine works. Yeah. Right? So how do we know if you have? And I'm trusting that you tell me everything. Uh, well, we account for the fact that I'm not telling everything, right? So that's how we learn how to detect things. But if we look at like even how do we know if you have COVID or not? We'll like, you know, do a swab, we'll take a chest x-ray. So Western medicine is like, you're over there and I'm going to look from the outside. So if you look at the application of psychological theories, it's really hard to do yourself, right? It's very hard to like therapize yourself. Right. Whereas in the yogic system, they had one bit of information which Western science doesn't have access to, which is they could observe the mind. So I know what's going on in my mind.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  None of y'all know what's going on in my mind, but I know what's going on in my mind. So the yogic system, I think, is way better if you want to do self-work, which is all what yoga is about. Like yoga is not about helping another human being. It's about my journey to enlightenment, right? I'm only working on myself. So in their system of mind, which I think is super cool, I've taught this to like eight-year-olds and it's amazing how accessible it is to people. So the first is that you've got four parts of the mind, or five. So chitta, chitta is what I would call like the sky. Like if you look at the sky, there's like clouds in it, there's the sun, there's the moon, but there's like a backdrop. So the chitta is sort of the backdrop on which other things exist. People will also call the chitta the unconscious, but I don't think that's really fair.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  Second part of the mind is something called buddhi. This is intellect. So we all have a capability of reasoning and analysis. Third part of the mind is the manas. So this is the emotional mind, also the judgmental mind, also the part of us that gives us like or not like. Okay? So just to give you a simple example, if you give me almond butter versus peanut butter, do you like almond butter or peanut butter? Peanut butter. Peanut. Peanut. Okay, so all three all like peanut butter more than almond butter. Which part of you does the liking? The muna. The manas, right? So there is this thing within us that gives us preferences. We don't choose them. It's not our intellect, it's not analysis.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  And if you pay attention to that thing, that's the same thing that gives you emotions. Because the emotions just come up. You don't choose to feel a certain way, right? It is a preference or a reaction that arises within you. Then you can analyze it, you can think about it. But if I touch you over here, that's going to make an emotional reaction. Right now you're suppressing it, right? But like as I'm touching you, like what's going on within you? Fucking get off me! Right? So that's the manas reaction, and then your buddhi is like... He's Catholic, he's afraid of how much he likes you.

• 34:14Speaker 03

  So, right, so when you feel uncomfortable, you lock down. And when you feel uncomfortable, you make a joke. Yeah. Right? So then we have this initial reaction, and then we respond to it in a particular way. Natasha's like, nope.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  So, yeah, you got lucky or in love, I might be right here. Then the third part of the mind, and this is, I think, the main thing that Western psychology sort of doesn't get right, is the third part is the ahmgar. The ahmgar is what we call ego, but is the feeling of I. So this is not whether you like peanut butter. Do you all see how liking peanut butter is qualitatively different from an emotion, which is qualitatively different from my ability to do logic? So ahmgar is, if you make the statement, "I am..." Anything that comes after the..." is your ego. That's the ahmgar. So if I say, "I'm a man," that's my ego. Now, that seems really weird, because we'll say, "Well, you are a man, because I've got..."

• 35:14Speaker 03

  So let me ask y'all. Are y'all men?

• 35:18Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 35:19Speaker 03

  How do you know?

• 35:20Speaker 04

  You can say XY chromosomes.

• 35:24Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 35:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, you could say, you know, biology, the way we operate in society.

• 35:29Speaker 03

  So let's say that you have an accident and something happened, that you no longer have a penis. Are you still a man?

• 35:35Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  Right?

• 35:38Speaker 04

  It challenges your self-scope of masculinity, certainly.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  Absolutely, right? So if you sort of think about your experience of life, like when I take a sip of this water, if all of my existence was just, let's say I was conscious for just one moment of life, which is this moment, would I be a man?

• 35:57Speaker 04

  Hmm. I don't know. You don't know.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  Right? So it's just sipping water.

• 36:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:03Speaker 03

  That's all it is. So if we really look at our lives, like whether I'm taking a dump, or eating a taco, or sipping water, right? Like 99% of our lives, me being a man is not a real thing. You wouldn't be able to detect being a man. You know, when I'm, when I pull the covers over my head, like, I'm not a man or a woman. I'm just a dude with covers over my head. So this is where a lot of like our identity, our humkar is like, this is our, it causes us a lot of problems. Uh, maybe the reason that you get angry, we'll talk about that.

• 36:38Speaker 06

  Can't wait.

• 36:39Speaker 03

  Um, conflict avoidant also.

• 36:42Speaker 04

  This notion of like the I am blank, like this is Titans like machismo, we're describing like,

• 36:47Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 36:47Speaker 04

  Uh, you know, masculinity, for example.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:49Speaker 04

  Like, I guess we can understand physiologically, people may be, you know, male or female based on like chromosomal makeup. But in terms of how that actually manifests in society, that's ego.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, so you, if I say I'm a doctor.

• 37:01Speaker 04

  Right.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  Okay. So question number one, am I me?

• 37:05Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 37:06Speaker 03

  Okay. Am I a doctor?

• 37:08Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 37:08Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 37:09Speaker 03

  Was I me before I was a doctor?

• 37:12Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 37:13Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  Okay. So is being a doctor part of me? Yes or no?

• 37:16Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 37:17Speaker 03

  It, so which part of you? It's a part of me, but so if we sort of do that exercise with every attribute of ourself, I'm successful, I'm rich. What we'll discover is that like all those things are temporary.

• 37:29Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  Right? Like I could lose my license, like I could retire and then am I still a doctor? All of the things that we think we are, are actually illusions.

• 37:38Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 37:38Speaker 03

  So like, let's say I'm a doctor. If I got trapped on a desert island for the rest of my life, would I be a doctor?

• 37:47Speaker 03

  Right?

• 37:48Speaker 06

  I would say yes.

• 37:49Speaker 03

  Why?

• 37:50Speaker 06

  His license would expire.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  Right?

• 37:52Speaker 04

  And then there's no longer a practice of.

• 37:54Speaker 06

  Oh, this is interesting. Maybe this is how I look at the world, but your achievements are something that live on, they cannot take.

• 38:00Speaker 03

  Where do they live on? Very good.

• 38:02Speaker 06

  In your, I guess in your ego or like what I've accomplished.

• 38:05Speaker 03

  So it lives on within me in my psychology.

• 38:07Speaker 06

  Yeah. What I used to say is, uh, as I climb in the career, like early, early, early on, I'd be like, oh, they, they can't ever take that away from me. Even if I don't make it, if I stop after my first good review and I don't become, I can't sustain as a comic. I did these things you can't take away from me.

• 38:21Speaker 03

  Right.

• 38:21Speaker 06

  And being a doctor is something they can't take from you.

• 38:24Speaker 03

  They can't, yeah. But so, so you notice how that structure requires a me.

• 38:30Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 38:31Speaker 03

  Right? So remember, we're talking about parts of the mind. So that's not an emotion. It's not even logic. That cannot exist unless there's a me. So that's the third structure of the mind or fourth, if you can cliche that. Then we get to some sky. So some scar is basically, I kinda think about it like emotional baggage that lives within you. So it's sort of like, when we feel powerful emotions, generally speaking, what happens is, some of those emotions go dormant. They don't disappear, right? So if I get like bitten by a dog, the next time I see a dog, I'm gonna feel fear. Where's that fear coming from? I'm not in any danger. So what happened is, when I got bit by the dog in the first place, let's say my mom or dad comes up to me, and let's say I'm a kid,

• 39:13Speaker 03

  and they're like, "Oh, you're crying, crying, you're crying, let's get you an ice cream." They get me the ice cream and suddenly I'm happy. So even though the emotion seemingly has disappeared, it can absolutely come back. So that's how a some scar works. So usually, what happens is, we go through life, we're accumulating this emotional energy which then comes up, right? We call it triggered.

• 39:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:39Speaker 03

  Right? So if I say this particular thing, just don't comment about my beard. Like, don't ever talk about my beard. You know, like that, "Oh, just like, you can say anything, but don't do this." Like, how does that work? I'm not saying whether it's like fair, or unfair, or kind, or unkind. Just, how does that work mentally? So generally speaking, what we find is that if you have a some scar, here's the first way to detect it. When you have a disproportionate emotional response to a situation.

• 40:06Speaker 06

  I've been doing that.

• 40:07Speaker 03

  Yes, you have, right? That's why you're angry all the time, because that dormant energy comes up over and over and over again. Because the source of it is in your subconscious, and you calm yourself down, you calm yourself down, you make jokes about it, you make jokes about it. Right? That's when you respond to it in the right way, but it'll bubble up.

• 40:29Speaker 06

  Oh, no, that's true.

• 40:30Mark Gagnon?

  He's reading you.

• 40:38Speaker 06

  My wife be pissing me off, and I be making jokes a lot. I'll just kinda look at her and laugh, cuz it's like, eh, I don't wanna get angry.

• 40:45Speaker 03

  See, that's beautiful. You know, the root of that...

• 40:47Speaker 06

  I've never lost my temper with any of these guys. I have a temper. But this, this thing that he... It's just fucking, whatever, dude. Whatever. It's okay.

• 40:57Speaker 06

  Okay, it's alright.

• 41:00Speaker 06

  I hate you, dude. Alright, go ahead.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  So, so here's the really interesting thing. So if you guys...

• 41:07Speaker 03

  He triggered something. He triggered.

• 41:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, I feel, I find this a bit unfair, but go ahead.

• 41:12Speaker 03

  Go ahead. You find it unfair.

• 41:13Speaker 06

  I find it a bit unfair.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  I'm misjudging you.

• 41:15Speaker 06

  I feel they're misjudging me. You're not. If you read that, then I'll, I'll believe it.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  Okay. Right. So, so which part of you gets judged?

• 41:24Speaker 03

  The intellect? The manas? Or the ego?

• 41:27Speaker 06

  The ego.

• 41:28Speaker 03

  Hundred percent.

• 41:29Speaker 06

  Hundred percent.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  And when the ego arises, anger will come with it. So these two things will happen. So another key thing to understand. So let's, let me finish this. Okay. So first thing is if you have a disproportionate emotional response.

• 41:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  That's how you know there's a samskar. Because that's not coming from now. It's coming from the past.

• 41:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 41:44Speaker 03

  Second thing to understand is when your samskar activates, your ego will activate to protect you. So when I was in college and I joined a fraternity, I was hanging with my homies. And what we would do is we'd-

• 41:58Speaker 06

  Brown fraternity?

• 41:59Speaker 03

  No.

• 41:59Speaker 06

  Damn.

• 42:00Speaker 03

  There's your spot. So, yeah, Brown fraternity, dude, there's, there, I mean, no offense to people who join Brown fraternity. They're, they're, they're like so toxic. At least they were at UT back when I was there. There was like two of them and they'd always get in the beach.

• 42:11Speaker 06

  Dude, I know probably the two Brown fraternities, there was a beta kite beta and there was fucking-

• 42:16Speaker 03

  That was my cousin.

• 42:17Speaker 06

  DSP delta.

• 42:18Speaker 03

  That's it. Right? Okay.

• 42:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  So like they would always go to Sixth Street, they'd go to clubs and then they'd always fight with each other.

• 42:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  It was like, it was just, anyway.

• 42:29Speaker 06

  Funny.

• 42:30Speaker 03

  So, so one, once you have that negative, so I, I like, I like a girl, right? And I'd be like, oh, like my, my friends would be like, who do you like? And I'd be like, oh yeah, she's hot, like whatever. Then you like ask her out and she says, no.

• 42:41Speaker 06

  Right.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  That's not good. Then what happens? Oh, your ego's- Oh, she's not worth it.

• 42:45Speaker 06

  She sucks. She's ugly.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  She sucks. Yeah, she's ugly. Like I was doing her a favor.

• 42:50Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:51Speaker 03

  Right? So how do I feel emotionally? I feel rejected. And then my ego comes in and it does one of two things. It either puts them down or it pumps me up. That's how the ego works.

• 43:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 43:03Speaker 03

  Okay? So the sequence of event is I'm going through life. I have a disproportionate emotional response. I feel a ton of emotion. Happens a ton for men, by the way.

• 43:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  Women too, but I, I see this a lot in the men that I work with. Then what happens is you'll have some kind of thought and you can pay attention. You can track this in your mind. I will start thinking negatively about somebody else. Or I will think positively about me. And then here's the really interesting thing. So if you argue with someone who says, "I didn't like her anyway," no amount of argument is gonna work, right?

• 43:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  If you didn't like her anyway, why did you ask her out? "Ah, I was just, I felt like it at the moment."

• 43:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  So this is where a lot of people get so frustrated because they'll try to use, when someone else is behaving emotionally, egotistically, and you try to point it out to them, their mind is like a steel wall. Like, there's no amount of logic

• 43:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:59Speaker 03

  that seems to work.

• 44:00Speaker 04

  The defense mechanism is so strong.

• 44:02Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 44:03Speaker 04

  Can I ask you about a third option?

• 44:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:05Speaker 04

  Or do you want to continue on this? I guess, what if you agree? Like, is it possible that a woman could reject you and you go, "You know what? She's right. I am the worst. I do suck."

• 44:16Speaker 04

  Is the ego getting attacked in that case?

• 44:18Speaker 03

  So this is where there's two, yes. So this is where there's two kinds of ego. So this is what's really interesting. So in the West, we're very familiar with narcissism, right? And narcissism is like, "I have a big ego. So I'm the best. I'm better than everybody else. Everybody should, you know, get in line to spend time with me." There's another kind of ego, this gets a bit technical, called Tamsik ego, which is just as powerful of an ego, but it is negative in direction. "I'm a loser. I'm pathetic. I'm an incel." And if you try to talk to a narcissist about how they're not the best shit on the planet, they will never understand. And if you talk to an incel, which I've done a lot, about how they're not pathetic, "You're not a loser. You're, you know, like, you've had some bad experiences,

• 45:02Speaker 03

  but believe in yourself, man." That low self-esteem is also ego, because the really strong thing is "I, I, I, I, I." And when I work with patients who are depressed, it's really interesting what they say. "I'm a loser. My family is better off without me. My kids would be so much better if I was not alive anymore. Everyone at my job hates me, but it's still me, me, me, me, me, me, me." Which is what's really interesting, because if we look at meditation and psychedelics, and their usage in treatment refractory depression. The mechanism through which they work is they shut off a part of our brain called the default mode network. This is the part of our brain that gives us self-awareness and allows us to think about ourselves and self-reflect.

• 45:44Speaker 04

  Ah.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  So when someone is hyper, or super depressed, they're constantly thinking about themselves. I'm a loser, I'm pathetic. When someone is narcissistic, they're constantly thinking about themselves. When we shut off that part of the brain, that's what correlates with healing and depression, healing from some degrees of trauma. And meditation shuts off that part of the brain, too. So then we start, "Stop thinking about myself," right? That's sort of like, "I'm not trying to get an A in class, I'm not looking at my grades, I don't care about achievement, right? It's just, I'm gonna try to learn medicine as best as I can." So once the default mode network shuts off, and this is why people with psychedelics, they feel connected to everything. "I realize I wasn't what I thought I was. This whole life, there's this bigger purpose, this grander thing.

• 46:30Speaker 03

  I used to exist like this, and now I realize that I'm so much more than that." So it's really fascinating how all these things, there's a lot of, and the reason I sort of talk about these yogic concepts is because I think there's a ton of scientific evidence for them now.

• 46:44Speaker 04

  I detoured you a little bit. You were talking about how the ego will pump you up.

• 46:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, so here's the sequence of events. First of all, you have an experience where there's more emotion than you can metabolize, and we'll get to that in a second. That emotion goes dormant. Second thing that happens is you are going about your life, and you encounter something that pisses you off, makes you way more sad. Really good example is you're walking down the street, you see two people, this happens a lot in my community, you know, I see two people holding hands, and it just makes me so angry. It's like, "What did they do to you? They did nothing." Right? That powerful jealousy arises. "I want that, I hate them for having that, I want it, I hate myself for feeling this way." There's all kinds of just emotion that comes up. Then the ego arises. So how does the ego protect us? Let's see if we can do this, okay?

• 47:35Speaker 03

  It's okay if y'all don't get it, it's a hard question, because I'm just introducing these concepts. But, for people listening at home, how does the ego protect someone? What does it say to you when you see two people holding hands and you feel incredibly jealous and incredibly angry?

• 47:52Speaker 06

  They're probably not even happy, they're probably just doing this because they don't love each other and they're pretending, or...

• 47:58Speaker 03

  That's one way of the ego.

• 48:00Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 48:02Speaker 04

  You don't need that?

• 48:04Speaker 03

  That's another way of the ego, right? We see that all the time, right? Dudes who are like, "Yeah, I don't need anybody else. I'm a pillar, I'm a mountain, I'm a stoic." Right? "I don't need anybody."

• 48:13Speaker 04

  That guy's probably gay, holding hands with a woman. You know what I mean? What's he doing that for?

• 48:16Speaker 03

  What a bitch. That's one way of doing it, right? So I think the more common way is, "I'm a loser. That's never possible for me." Okay. Right? Because- That's protective. It's 100%, right? Because if it's impossible for me to get a girlfriend, if I'm so ugly, so pathetic, what does that allow me to do?

• 48:36Speaker 03

  Not go after it, not have to- Absolutely. And when I don't go after it-

• 48:39Speaker 04

  You can't get rejected.

• 48:40Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Which means I protect myself from what? Rejection. Rejection. Pain, negative emotion. Yeah. Right? So giving up on life is actually a protective mechanism. Because then you don't have to try.

• 48:53Speaker 04

  And so when you see people that are self-sabotaging, is this going in line with this sort of thinking here?

• 48:58Speaker 03

  It could be. That's one form of self-sabotage. But there's all kinds of other reasons why people will "self-sabotage." But I think that a lot of people, so a lot of people who are stuck in life have a certain identity which excuses them from action.

• 49:17Speaker 03

  Right? So you'll look at these people and you'll see like, "Oh, like this person isn't trying. They've given up." Because giving up protects you from pain. It's also why people stay in abusive relationships. Right? Because if I just give up and I just take it, all I have to focus on is survival. And these people who have these identities that protect them from trying, these are the people, we see this so much, they're just existing. "Every day I'm on my phone, I'm playing video games, I'm using drugs, I'm doing pornography." Why? To advance the clock until I die.

• 49:48Mark Gagnon?

  So what's happening when you actually want to do something, but you're procrastinating and you're not doing it? But you actually want to do that thing? Like, say, do something productive and it's like you just find a bunch of other bullshit to do instead of the thing you actually want to do?

• 50:00Speaker 03

  So, the short answer is it depends. Okay? So it depends on... So this is where I think one of the key things that I learn and I try to teach is that good diagnosis precedes good treatment.

• 50:13Speaker 03

  So right now, if you look at the world, right, including influencers like myself, we're out there on YouTube giving people all kinds of answers. You should do this, get your testosterone tested, learn about Stoicism, take these supplements, you know, like do all these things like, and so everyone's focused on solutions. Yeah. But the problem, I mean, you learn this the hard way in medicine real quick. We're like, I tried treatment number one, it doesn't work. I tried treatment number two, it doesn't work. I tried treatment number three, doesn't work. What's the problem? My diagnosis is wrong. Hmm. So there are a ton of people out there. Why is the self-help industry so big? Because everyone is selling answers. And the reason people keep buying it is because it's not working. Because the diagnosis is incorrect. Because the diagnosis is incorrect.

• 50:58Speaker 03

  And maybe it worked for the influencer, but the influencer is different than the person listening. Absolutely. So that's another key point, right? So people will sell what worked for them, but their diagnosis could be different. And this is where the word, for words like procrastination and motivation, these things do not exist. Hmm, what do you mean? Motivation is a umbrella term that describes a ton of neuroscience deficits. Procrastination can come from many places. Neuroscience deficits is interesting. Yeah, so motivation is like, is that a deficit of willpower? Is it a deficit of emotional activation? Just to give you a couple of examples. Incentive? If I see, if I say that I'm not motivated, why is this? Oh, I thought you were saying motivation. Being motivated is deficits.

• 51:43Speaker 03

  Oh, being motivation can be a deficit too, which we can talk about, which is really interesting. But, so if I say I'm not motivated. Hmm. One place that this could come from is my emotional circuitry. So if we sort of look at what our primary source of motivation is as humans, is emotion. Okay. Right, so if I like, if I like show up at y'all's house in the middle of the night, like you're in your bathroom, and like I step inside and I'm like, hey, gosh, you said I could come by anytime, you know? And like, your reaction to that, like you're gonna be motivated to do something. Yeah. So here's the reason. Lucky, probably. Whoa, what?

• 52:29Speaker 03

  I'd be like, why are you talking like that?

• 52:33Speaker 03

  I guess I walked into that one.

• 52:36Speaker 03

  I was like, what did I expect?

• 52:37Speaker 04

  You're outside my apartment. Keep going.

• 52:40Speaker 03

  So if you sort of think about it, like most of like, like, you know, if I like slap someone across the face, I feel anger. And then I want to slap back. So if we look at like anger, anger suppresses our risk assessment circuitry, which is on purpose. Because I gotta be angry. In order to, because if I think about what's going to happen, like, you know, I need to act fast. So here's the problem is, right now in our society, we are messing up our emotional circuitry so much, especially through technology use. So everyone thinks about dopamine, but the key thing is if you spend your time, if you spend time on, let's say you scroll on your phone, do you all know what your average cell phone use is, by the way?

• 53:13Speaker 04

  Oh, it's probably high, six hours a day.

• 53:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, six hours is about average. What is your emotional experience on your phone?

• 53:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, neutral to negative. Neutral to negative is exactly what I would say. Sometimes some laughs, like sometimes some positive. I mean, it's variable, I guess. Overall, I would say. It is variable reward, right?

• 53:32Speaker 03

  No, no, no, so, so, so when you scroll on your phone, let's be precise here, okay? I'm not talking about overall. What is your emotional experience for like five minutes or 10 minutes? Uh, joy, I guess. Some joy, and then what?

• 53:46Speaker 04

  It's a sadness, probably emptiness. I think it's probably perfectly neutral. It's probably a slot machine, right? Like, it's...

• 53:51Speaker 03

  So you guys are thinking, you guys are thinking, it's probably, no, I want you to pay attention to your experience. Don't think about, forget about slot machine or random reinforcement schedule. If you look at the internet, what we see is there's variable emotional engagement. That's what all the algorithms do. So you see some terrible shit happening. People are dying over here, there's inflation, you know, this prime president is saying this, this prime minister is doing this, then you see cat videos, then I see my boy Akash show up on some short because he was at the Comedy Cellar or whatever, right? And then I'm laughing over there and I scroll and they give me something else. So what happens is there's a ping pong, if you really pay attention, they will ping pong you. And if they don't ping pong you, what you will do is switch to a different app that does a better job of ping pong.

• 54:32Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 54:33Speaker 03

  Right? So I'll see, I'm following some, some, you know, person on Instagram who's showing me a lot of flesh, and then some people make me feel really good, some people actually make me feel really bad, right? So there's a ping pong of emotions. Then what happens is it exhausts our emotional circuitry. So when I'm sitting in therapy with a patient, really powerful session or a podcast, I'm drained afterward. I'm emotionally activated. We're expressing so much emotion. And so then, once my emotional battery is empty, there's no motivation left. What is it that gets us doing things in life? I'm excited, I'm curious, or I'm angry. I'm never gonna let that guy.

• 55:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 55:15Speaker 03

  This, my girlfriend dumped me and now she's dating a different dude. I'm gonna get sexier, I'm gonna get a hair transplant, I'm a show her.

• 55:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 55:24Speaker 03

  Right? So, so much of motivation comes from emotion. And then there's the dopaminergic circuitry, which is a completely different system. But this is when we talk about reward and stuff like that. So when we talk about something like procrastination, oftentimes procrastination is correlated with things like perfectionism. So are you perfectionistic? Do you, do you need it to be perfect before you get started? Right, so I have to figure everything out and then I wanna do it. Now, why are we perfectionistic?

• 55:54Speaker 06

  That's how I used to be.

• 55:55Speaker 03

  Right?

• 55:56Speaker 06

  Because insecurity of, I don't wanna get rejected, I don't wanna fail, I have to face that failure, so I procrastinate.

• 56:01Speaker 03

  Absolutely, right? So, so if you can't afford to fail, then it needs to be perfect. So perfectionism is an antidote to anxiety. Because anxiety is like, this could go wrong, this could go wrong, this could go, this could go wrong. How do I fix this problem? I make it perfect. Then there's no room for anything to go wrong. And so if I become perfectionistic, now everything has to be perfect before I get started. That means I'm procrastinating because getting things perfect is hard. Right, so I, I, I know so many people who are like, they wanna do something, but they wanna do it perfectly.

• 56:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 56:38Speaker 03

  There are other reasons that we can procrastinate. So I think oftentimes procrastination is about emotional avoidance. So, my favorite example of this is something that I struggled with a lot and I'm on the receiving end of, or I used to be, when I was faculty and teaching, is like, sometimes, you know, you have to email a professor, hey, can I get an extension? But what if they say no?

• 56:58Speaker 06

  Right.

• 56:58Speaker 03

  So there's this part of your brain that is like, this is a bad outcome. If I never send the email, I can never get rejected. So there's a certain amount of emotional avoidance in procrastination. So if you're trying to overcome procrastination, a couple of things that you can do is, do you have anxiety? Or is there an emotional consequence that you're avoiding?

• 57:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 57:20Speaker 03

  Why are you avoiding that emotional consequence? Because of a samskar. Because you know that if you're in that situation, there's gonna be a ton of emotional stuff that you can't handle.

• 57:30Speaker 04

  And so, once you've identified that some score, how do you ameliorate that?

• 57:34Speaker 03

  So it involves a couple of steps. The first is, notice it, right? So notice that, okay, this is a disproportionate emotional reaction. Second thing is, observe what your ego does. And this is the other part that I was getting to. Then the ego hijacks the intellect. The ego goes to the intellect and says, hey, bro, we're feeling terrible about ourselves. I need you to help me feel better. So give me a very, very selective logic that justifies why this bitch doesn't deserve us. And then the intellect is like, yes, sir.

• 58:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:09Speaker 03

  She does this, she does this, she does this, she does this.

• 58:12Speaker 04

  And the smarter you are, the more reasons you can come up with.

• 58:14Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So this is why higher IQ is associated with depression. Higher IQ is associated with procrastination. Right? So higher IQ has become really maladaptive in our current world because our EQ does not balance. Right? So we don't know enough. As people become hyper-intellectualized, they lean into their IQ, they lean into their IQ. There's a really great study that showed that how well you understand your diagnosis correlates with the degree of suicidality that you have. So if you're smart and you can look at your life and you can project out, I, you know, I never dated a girl in high school. I never dated a girl in college because it was COVID.

• 58:59Speaker 03

  Now I'm 23 years old. I've had no experience, the likelihood. And then I read all this stuff on the internet and I see how bad things are. I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life. That is a hard calculation to argue against if you're super smart because you're right.

• 59:12Speaker 04

  Statistically.

• 59:15Speaker 03

  What I mean is that your, if you have high IQ, the likelihood that you make a correct calculation is higher than if you have moderate IQ or lower IQ. There's still cognitive biases at play.

• 59:29Speaker 04

  It's easy to feel hopeless, I think, if you're really, if you are smarter because you just look at the state of the world and you're like, what is all this for?

• 59:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, so IQ also correlates with like existential depression.

• 59:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:38Speaker 03

  So I did a whole lecture about that that was fantastic. It's on YouTube, but. And, and so there's all these problems that we think of IQ as just like a good thing. And generally speaking, it is a good thing. But you need an EQ to balance it. And the reason that people with high IQ tend to be emotionally stunted is because early on, when you're like a kid, You learn what you're good at and then you use that thing. Right? So if I'm right-handed, I don't go around using my left hand for things.

• 1:00:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:00:07Speaker 03

  My brain defaults to the most efficient thing possible. So then we start using our intellect, we start using our intellect, we start using our intellect. And then our emotional circuits become underdeveloped.

• 1:00:17Speaker 04

  Hmm, okay. That's really interesting. Now, in this case, why is the... I'm sorry, what is the term again for this baggage? The samskar. Why is it different than the munas? Is that what it is?

• 1:00:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, so munas is where we experience the like or dislike. It's where we experience the emotion. But the munas just creates emotion right now. So I'll give you a simple example. So the first time I touched your leg, there was no baggage, right? But now if I do this, what's happening?

• 1:00:48Speaker 04

  Like, oh, he's gonna grab my thigh again?

• 1:00:49Speaker 03

  Right, but I'm not grabbing your thigh.

• 1:00:51Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  But you're feeling emotion. Now, where did that come from? Some of it comes from this experience. Some of it comes from the last experience, which you haven't metabolized. So it is a storehouse of emotion. That's what a samskar is. And then it activates.

• 1:01:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. But now, is it not the inverse of like, my mom would make me a specific soup, and I would have it, and it reminded me of this time I would spend with my mom?

• 1:01:15Speaker 03

  You can have positive samskars too.

• 1:01:16Speaker 04

  So that would be allocated under samskar?

• 1:01:19Speaker 03

  Absolutely, right? So when you have a disproportionate reaction, emotional reaction, that's what a samskar is. They're all negative.

• 1:01:25Speaker 04

  Good or bad, yeah.

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:28Speaker 06

  This is interesting, because through therapy, I've learned, and I know, I guess you're a proponent of therapy, but maybe not all... One thing I learned, my wife and I, if we got in like a really explosive argument, usually it'd be me, because she'll like get annoyed and say stuff, and she's just getting annoyed and venting. I would take it as, "I'm not good enough." Because that's what I, my samskar was, "I'm not good enough." So I had to learn when I would explode, and I've gotten much better at this. Take a little pause, and I'll literally just write a thing out to myself, "Hey, I'm good enough," and she knows that. This is not about that. She's just frustrated that X, Y, Z. If I take 10 minutes, I can come back and be like, "Okay, I think I see what you're feeling. I was feeling this, but I understand you were feeling that." Cool.

• 1:02:03Speaker 03

  Great, so now let's ask y'all a tough question.

• 1:02:08Speaker 03

  Why, you said that when she gets mad at you, you feel like you're not good enough?

• 1:02:12Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  Why does he feel that way?

• 1:02:16Speaker 03

  What in his history would create emotional experiences of him being insufficient?

• 1:02:23Speaker 04

  I could think of a few things.

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, like what?

• 1:02:25Speaker 04

  I mean, can we share like?

• 1:02:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:28Speaker 04

  I mean, like Akash just talked about his relationship with his father.

• 1:02:31Speaker 03

  Great.

• 1:02:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, I grew up in a house where there was like abuse and I felt like I could have stopped it or done something and I didn't and I carry that a little bit. I also think there's a little survivor's remorse that I'm here and I see they're doing better now. But like my mom's family in India, I remember going there 2008 and they were studying with the fucking torch and I'm like, I'm here with electricity and a house and whatever and I can't become a doctor, I can't X, Y, Z and these guys studying by torch cannot and I carry a lot of guilt of like, why did I get that blessed here to be born here?

• 1:03:06Speaker 03

  Now, the question for you, when I sit like this, how do you feel?

• 1:03:11Speaker 06

  Not good enough, not Indian enough.

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  There we go. You guys see it? So he, he shows it as respect. He's like, oh, you're a real Indian.

• 1:03:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Speaker 03

  And I'm bad as fuck. I'm like every Indian parent's dream and every Indian kid's nightmare. I wear this, I sit like this, I became a doctor at Harvard Medical School.

• 1:03:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:03:31Speaker 03

  Oh my God, right?

• 1:03:34Speaker 06

  Indian kids would always get straight A's. I would not.

• 1:03:37Speaker 03

  Right? So all of that, every time, every single time.

• 1:03:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:03:42Speaker 03

  You get an 88 or an 86.

• 1:03:45Speaker 06

  78.

• 1:03:45Speaker 03

  78, right?

• 1:03:46Speaker 06

  You can go.

• 1:03:48Speaker 03

  Akash and you feel bad.

• 1:03:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:03:50Speaker 03

  And so these some scars accumulate over time and now they're so big that when you see things and these things, the reason that you use anger, this is really important to understand. So men do something very special with anger. We turn all of our negative emotions into anger, which is why men are so angry.

• 1:04:10Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 1:04:11Speaker 03

  So now, let me ask you all, what is the evolutionary function of sadness?

• 1:04:17Speaker 03

  What does sadness make us do?

• 1:04:19Speaker 04

  I mean, we cry, we-

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  Good, excellent.

• 1:04:22Speaker 04

  The connection with grief, maybe? To process-

• 1:04:26Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no. Don't use psychological talk.

• 1:04:29Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:04:30Speaker 03

  No psychological talk.

• 1:04:30Speaker 06

  I can't think of an evolutionary advantage to grief. I can think of sadness.

• 1:04:34Speaker 03

  No, no, not grief sadness.

• 1:04:35Speaker 06

  I can't think, I can think of one for anger. I go do things.

• 1:04:38Speaker 03

  What does sadness do?

• 1:04:41Speaker 03

  When I am sad, so first of all, sadness has high visibility, high auditory stuff, right?

• 1:04:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:49Speaker 03

  You can see someone is sad, you can hear someone is sad. So sadness is the most outward-facing emotion, if you really look at it. Now, when you see someone crying on a park bench, what do you do?

• 1:05:03Speaker 04

  I mean, you want to go and pat him on the back and be like, "Here, you-"

• 1:05:06Speaker 06

  If you're in New York long enough, you're like, "Shut the fuck up."

• 1:05:08Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:05:09Speaker 04

  At the very least, you want to know what happened.

• 1:05:10Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:05:11Speaker 04

  Like, instinctually, you see someone cry-

• 1:05:12Speaker 03

  So if we look at the evolutionary purpose of sadness, I feel sad because I can't handle something, I'm hurting. Fundamentally, we feel sad when we can't handle the world around us. So what do we do? We signal for help. SOS.

• 1:05:27Speaker 03

  And then people, what do we feel like as human beings? Because we're communal animals? I want to find out, "Hey, what's going on? Oh, my God, are you doing okay?" It is a signal for help when you feel like you can't handle the world around you. That's literally what sadness does. Right? Why does a kid cry? Because they're like, "Hey, I need help." Now, this is a really tricky thing. When a man needs help, what does society do?

• 1:05:52Speaker 06

  What does society do?

• 1:05:54Speaker 03

  So when I signal, when I'm a dude-

• 1:05:56Speaker 06

  And you cry?

• 1:05:57Speaker 03

  And I'm crying, what's gonna happen?

• 1:05:58Speaker 04

  Rub, see, rub dirt in it.

• 1:06:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:06:01Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:06:01Speaker 06

  Roll up. You make fun of you.

• 1:06:03Speaker 03

  Right, what are you crying about? Men are privileged.

• 1:06:05Speaker 04

  I'll give you something to cry about.

• 1:06:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Speaker 03

  Right, so, so we don't respond to men. So we have, there's one really troubling thing in our society right now, which is that we expect men to solve their own problems. We don't help men, right? So male rates of matriculation, so their ability to go to college is like, I think 60-plus percent of people in college are women, but there's no male-only scholarships, or very few. Right, we're not trying to fix that problem.

• 1:06:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  Male suicide has been four times the rate of female suicide for the last 60-plus years. That's not a problem if there's any real systemic movement around. Right, so we expect men to help themselves.

• 1:06:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:06:40Speaker 03

  So what men learn is that when I cry, it doesn't work. So- Sadness is a signal for help. And so what we do is we turn it into anger. It's the only masculine way, masculine acceptable way to. And it's not even about masculine acceptability. I think it even goes deeper than that. What is the purpose of anger? What is anger? Like rectifying injustice? Very, okay, so rectifying, right? So sadness makes me do what? Cry. Good. And that makes me do what? To fix my problems. Get help? Nothing. Nothing in America? Nothing. Right? So sadness is like, I'm not, I'm not doing the problem. You guys fix it. It's a dead end. Okay. But what does anger make me do? I fix it. Rectify. Yeah. Now I'm gonna do it. Now I'm gonna show them. Anger is a motivating emotion.

• 1:07:26Speaker 03

  Right? So anytime we feel angry, we feel like doing something. Right? And oftentimes when people get really, really angry, we tell them, don't do anything. But what do you wanna do when you get pissed? Oh gosh. Anything, everything, all of it. Right? So it's a, so this is where what we've learned as men is like, okay, the sadness signal doesn't work. So instead, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna transmute that into anger. And once it gets transmuted into anger, now I have the motivation to fix this problem because ain't no one gonna fix it for me. Guy!

• 1:07:59Mark Gagnon?

  Let me just jump in, not to throw you off, but like, I grew up feeling that I can't show emotion, it's weakness, and for probably up until my mid twenties, would never cry. And I kinda felt like emotionless at times. And so now I'm way more secure in myself. I'm in a better place. I actually force myself to cry. Like I'll purposely watch a sad movie because I just need to feel something, make sure that's still in there. And then I feel way better after I get those tears out. Why am I doing that? What the hell's wrong with me?

• 1:08:30Speaker 03

  What makes you think there's something wrong with you?

• 1:08:31Mark Gagnon?

  Well, diagnose me. Why am I doing that?

• 1:08:34Speaker 03

  There's something wrong with him. There's something.

• 1:08:35Mark Gagnon?

  There's something off.

• 1:08:36Speaker 03

  He texted me. He said, what was, he had texted me the name of Homer, Homer Bound two days ago. What do you think is, what do you think is wrong with you? I'm confused about why you view that as something that's wrong.

• 1:08:46Mark Gagnon?

  Initially, I would do it because I was worried that I was emotionless.

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:08:50Mark Gagnon?

  And then I was like, oh, okay, I feel something when I watch these sad movies. And then it actually felt good when I felt something. So I'm like, oh, let me pick a time and place where I can get it out. And now it's like I have some nice balance in my life. Like I'm happy, I have high highs.

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  Do you feel like you have a lot of sadness in your heart way deep down?

• 1:09:10Mark Gagnon?

  Hmm, like if I look at the state of the world and stuff like that, yeah, that'll make me sad.

• 1:09:16Speaker 03

  Okay, but do you feel like you carry sadness, not the state of the world? But do you have, if the world was a good place, would you still be sad on the inside?

• 1:09:23Mark Gagnon?

  I don't think so.

• 1:09:24Speaker 03

  Okay, so I think, I mean, we don't know, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind. The first is that people on the autism spectrum love anime. And the reason, one of the reasons I really think they love anime, I've worked with a ton of people who are on the spectrum, is that, so if we look at autism, autism affects the emotional circuits of our brain in a very profound way. So it affects social circuits in our brain, it affects emotional circuits in our brain. Generally speaking, the intellectual circuits are completely intact and not affected at all. So oftentimes, people with autism spectrum, this is also why people on the autism spectrum are more likely to be transgender or non-binary identity.

• 1:10:02Speaker 03

  Because people who are non-binary, our sense of gender identity comes from our emotional, like, our emotional experience, right? So like, how do you know you're a man? Well, I feel like a man. Wait, hold on a second, which part of your brain does the feeling like a man? That's fundamentally usually an emotional and social circuitry. So both of those things, there's a very high correlation between autism spectrum and being transgender. And this is why I think that there's like a good biological basis for being transgender, because we know that there's social alterations and emotional alterations. And if those two things contribute to gender identity, then we would expect if we tamper with those circuits, gender identity will be affected.

• 1:10:43Speaker 03

  Now, the reason that people watch anime is because anime tends to have a hyperactive, a hyper elevated signal of emotion. And what my patients who are on the spectrum, they just love because it helps them feel. So I think what you're doing isn't unhealthy, there's nothing wrong with you. You are doing what a hungry person does when they eat. You are discovering that there is some environmental stimuli that are almost like self-medicating, that are bringing out these emotions that you don't know how to bring out in other ways, but they absolutely need to get out. And especially when we talk about things like sadness, I mean, there's so many physiologic things with sadness that are helpful.

• 1:11:25Speaker 03

  The rate of our breathing when we become sad and we start crying and then we

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  Right, when we do that kind of thing, that alters our parasympathetic nervous system activity, ends up reducing our stress level and things like that. So there's all kinds of benefits to getting your emotions outside of you. And I think what you've discovered, like many people who are on the spectrum, is that I need a particular kind of emotional trigger to help me get that stuff out. The other really important thing there is, I think we make a huge mistake in the field of psychiatry, which is that somewhere along the way, we got into this idea that talk therapy is the gold standard. Talk therapy is the gold standard for women. Seventy percent of psychiatric patients historically have been women, seventy percent of therapists and psychiatrists historically have been women.

• 1:12:15Speaker 06

  So what do men need to do to be better off, less angry, whatever, if it's not talking?

• 1:12:20Speaker 03

  Watch anime.

• 1:12:21Speaker 06

  Really?

• 1:12:22Speaker 03

  I think talking about it is correct, but I think the way we should talk about it is different. We should use more physical language. Right? When I get dumped by my girlfriend, it feels like she kicked me in the nuts, man.

• 1:12:33Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 1:12:34Speaker 03

  Right? So we force men into using like these very like, certain kind of emotional words, which we just don't have access to. There's a couple of great studies about why men don't like to go to couples' therapy, and it's because they feel outgunned. Like...

• 1:12:49Speaker 06

  Not me, Doug. I'd be dunking on my bitch.

• 1:12:51Speaker 03

  So, so, hold on. What, what, no, hold on. Let's, what just happened?

• 1:12:58Mark Gagnon?

  He's feminine.

• 1:12:59Speaker 03

  No, he's, he's, he made a joke, right? So what just happened? Happened like this, did we see it?

• 1:13:06Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:13:07Speaker 03

  Men feel outgunned.

• 1:13:08Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 1:13:09Speaker 03

  What, does he feel outgunned in therapy? What do you all think?

• 1:13:11Speaker 04

  I'm gonna say yes.

• 1:13:13Speaker 03

  Good.

• 1:13:14Speaker 04

  Because, just like when he said that you're a real Indian, he also said that he dunks on his girl in therapy.

• 1:13:19Speaker 03

  Right? So what, is he, is he putting himself up and putting somebody else down?

• 1:13:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:24Speaker 03

  Right? I don't, that doesn't happen to me.

• 1:13:27Speaker 06

  Can I be honest with you? I feel outgunned in every other part of my relationship except when we went to couples therapy.

• 1:13:31Speaker 03

  Awesome.

• 1:13:32Speaker 06

  That's probably what it is. Because in couples therapy, if you're a comic, you just, you tend to be good with words. So she would actually have the complaint of like, he can verbalize everything really well and really coherently and I'm kind of like emotional and I can't find the words as well as him. But I think in the rest of our relationship, she'd be doing that shit perfectly.

• 1:13:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think it's a great example, sorry, I'm wrong. And I think it perfectly illustrates the point. Right, so I think 99% of people will have Akash's experience. If they're, no, not 99% of people, that's wrong. I think it's probably closer to 70%. But 70% of dudes aren't good with their words. They're not good at expressing themselves. They're not good at being emotive. Right, so Akash is all y'all are incredibly emotive. But when he laughs, he doesn't.

• 1:14:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:14:19Speaker 03

  Right, if we go back and we watch when all y'all like rolling around, I'm kind of like, this is funny. But I was kind of like, okay. So he is, he is very emotive, very in touch with, which I think is part of what comedy does, right? So you have a lot of hurt. And you have to like learn how to grapple with that hurt. I think comedy is incredibly therapeutic. Right, so you, you take that hurt and you turn it into jokes and you help people laugh and you feel connected with people. So I think you're not lucky, but your professional training, I imagine, helps you with that quite a bit, which is, which is great.

• 1:14:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:14:54Speaker 03

  I think the majority of men will feel outgunned for a couple of reasons. One is that women or girls tend to have a higher verbal fluency than boys do. So this is like, you can detect this at the age of like six. Their ability to like put things into words is better. They be yapping. They talk a lot. They do talk a lot, right? So, and we don't.

• 1:15:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:15:15Speaker 03

  Right, unless we're podcast bros. It's the one space where we're allowed to talk, right?

• 1:15:19Speaker 06

  Love yapping.

• 1:15:21Speaker 03

  So all those women be yapping. But look at all these podcast bros, right? Like, oh yeah, like we don't talk, but like except when we get together.

• 1:15:28Speaker 06

  Is that because this isn't one space where it's like acceptable for us to talk a lot?

• 1:15:32Speaker 03

  Absolutely, bro.

• 1:15:33Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 1:15:34Speaker 03

  Why do you think it's not, why is the podcast like, it's all podcast bros?

• 1:15:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:15:39Speaker 03

  Because we don't have this anymore anywhere else.

• 1:15:41Speaker 06

  Ah, it's not acceptable for guys to just get together and meet up with their boyfriends and talk.

• 1:15:47Speaker 03

  Exactly, so what do we do? And think about this, right? How do y'all select topics?

• 1:15:51Speaker 06

  What's, I guess, trending that we're interested in?

• 1:15:55Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So how do men address the issues that they deal with? We like, listen to podcasts where they address the zeitgeist that all the men are going through. So we're talking about motivation, relationships, pornography. This is all the shit that people are dealing with.

• 1:16:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:16:11Speaker 03

  So they tune in, they hear us talking about it. And this is the beautiful thing, when y'all laugh, they laugh too. They feel connected. They're not alone anymore. Y'all are doing God's work here. I say that seriously. Right? So there's a lot of emotional connection. Last thing about women that makes them better at verbal things is estrogen, the amount of estrogen in your system, it correlates with your awareness of your emotions. So, a lot of times, you know, we joke about PMS and like, when you're dating a woman and she's on her period, you know, there's like this weird, like, emotional fluctuation. That's literally because estrogen correlates with like, our ability to detect emotions. So it amplifies emotions.

• 1:16:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:16:52Speaker 03

  And this isn't just women.

• 1:16:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:16:54Speaker 03

  So I think the other thing that you can do is increase your estrogen level. Then you won't need to watch stuff. Then I'm gonna grow tits. Um, you don't need to do it that much. So there's a...

• 1:17:09Speaker 03

  That has other advantages, but...

• 1:17:13Speaker 03

  This is really fascinating. So, you know, I used to never cry when I would watch a movie. And then I had kids. And what happens, it was so weird, like, I had kids and like, I have a two-year-old and we watched like, The Lion King. And like, I started bawling.

• 1:17:28Speaker 06

  It's a movie you've seen before.

• 1:17:29Speaker 03

  It's a movie I've seen before.

• 1:17:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:17:30Speaker 03

  And I was like, crying and I was like, what the hell is going on? And now like, I cry all the time. And what I realized is like, oh, like, in order to understand my six-month infant, they don't know how to use words, I need to increase like, my empathic detection capabilities.

• 1:17:48Speaker 06

  He started crying more, and I might be saying this as a joke, he's talked about it. He started crying so much more when he had his son.

• 1:17:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So this is a universal experience for men. If we're lucky.

• 1:17:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:17:57Speaker 03

  Right? So our estrogen level actually increases when we have a kid at home.

• 1:18:01Speaker 06

  That is funny.

• 1:18:02Speaker 03

  And it helps us become...

• 1:18:07Speaker 04

  Now you don't want to grab, man.

• 1:18:09Speaker 03

  No, so to be honest. So annoyed. No, no, no, not annoyed. I was like, you guys don't understand who I am, man. What I'm gonna do, what we should do is we should signal, bro. And you go out to one side.

• 1:18:24Mark Gagnon?

  Both grabbing titties.

• 1:18:25Speaker 03

  Double team. Double team.

• 1:18:30Mark Gagnon?

  By the end of this podcast, you'll be at Eiffel Tower, right?

• 1:18:33Speaker 04

  I'm going to Taj Mahal, baby.

• 1:18:35Speaker 03

  I went to the Eiffel Tower in Taj Mahal.

• 1:18:37Speaker 04

  You never heard of Eiffel Tower?

• 1:18:39Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:18:39Speaker 04

  Okay, we'll send you an.

• 1:18:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, we'll pull up a picture.

• 1:18:43Speaker 04

  Send you an Urban Dictionary link later.

• 1:18:44Speaker 03

  Is that a direction?

• 1:18:46Speaker 04

  It's a Kama Sutri act.

• 1:18:50Mark Gagnon?

  Fake oba.

• 1:18:50Speaker 03

  I'm intrigued. Show me later.

• 1:18:52Mark Gagnon?

  You and I.

• 1:18:56Speaker 03

  Double team and a girl and two guys and then they hold, they give each other.

• 1:19:01Mark Gagnon?

  He'd be supporting the.

• 1:19:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04Mark Gagnon?

  Supporting the beings.

• 1:19:05Speaker 04

  This is lowbrow. This is crude.

• 1:19:08Speaker 03

  This is how men connect. Yes. So another really interesting thing is I think we got way worse when we, so one of the biggest things wrong with our culture right now is when we started demonizing homosexuality. So what happened when I was growing up. Just them. Is.

• 1:19:23Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:19:23Speaker 03

  Catholics. When I was, when I was growing up, like, you know, touching another dude, I remember when I went to India. I was 21 years old and I had a friend there and like, he was like, there were like, two of his friends showed up and it was just the weirdest thing.

• 1:19:37Speaker 03

  And I remember thinking, because I grew up in like, South Texas. Yeah. And so like, you know, things were gay. So like, this dude, my friend was there and he had his arm around two of his male friends. And they were both rubbing his belly.

• 1:19:49Speaker 04

  That's.

• 1:19:50Speaker 03

  And they were talking about how he's gonna get married and how he's gonna eat real well. Okay. And I was like, what is this stuff? So at some point, we started demonizing homosexuality. And when we started doing that, men stopped touching each other.

• 1:20:03Speaker 03

  And now, even as we're talking about this, right, what's the kind of touch that we do? We can't just do this.

• 1:20:08Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:20:09Speaker 03

  We gotta do like a.

• 1:20:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's gotta be borderline aggressive. It's gotta be like, ah.

• 1:20:12Speaker 03

  No, it's not borderline aggressive or borderline homosexual. Right? So these are the kinds of touches, like, I mean, you went for the tit, bro.

• 1:20:20Speaker 03

  To be funny.

• 1:20:21Speaker 06

  Funny.

• 1:20:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we've started doing this thing where we can't.

• 1:20:25Speaker 06

  It can be actually affectionate.

• 1:20:25Speaker 03

  We can't touch someone unless it's a joke.

• 1:20:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, and even the male hug is always, you don't hold, there's no like hold.

• 1:20:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think male hug is.

• 1:20:34Speaker 06

  Two pats, heterosexual, I'm not trying to fuck you. I'd give him a nice little snuff.

• 1:20:38Speaker 03

  So something weird happened where like men stopped touching each other.

• 1:20:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:20:42Speaker 03

  And like people who are gonna hear me say that are like, huh huh.

• 1:20:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:20:45Speaker 03

  Right, like, but really, and now men are so like starved for touch, women are too in today's world. But like, there's so many dudes like, I mean, I have held men in my arms as they cry in my office. And it happens a lot, and it feels great. You know, to be a dude and to cry and to just be like, held.

• 1:21:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:21:04Speaker 03

  And if men can start doing that for each other, I think our relationships with women will vastly improve.

• 1:21:10Speaker 06

  Really?

• 1:21:11Speaker 03

  Absolutely, because here's what happens, like, so a lot of men are struggling to date because the woman becomes all of the things. She's not just your life partner, your sexual partner, she also has to become your therapist. Right, so now like, when we share emotions, we only have one person, we basically will cry in front of like two people.

• 1:21:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:21:32Speaker 03

  Our wives or our moms. Right, those definitely not our dads.

• 1:21:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:21:37Speaker 03

  So we'll kind of do this thing, and so what happens is a lot of times women will feel like there's too much of an emotional burden when they they date a man. Like, because the man puts all of their emotions on the woman. So many of my female patients experience this because the man doesn't have an emotional outlet outside of his wife. And so as you start to have, as you start to deal with your own shit, outside of that, then you're like a normal human being with her.

• 1:22:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:22:03Speaker 03

  Drastically improves the quality of the relationship.

• 1:22:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, it takes some of the burden off.

• 1:22:08Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:22:09Speaker 06

  That makes a lot of sense. I'll come coddle you, little bitch. I would absolutely love that. Physical touch is my love language, I love it. Stop, now you made it weird.

• 1:22:16Speaker 03

  You hug. No, you see, oh, I want you all to pay attention to what happened. You made a joke, he was authentic, and then you said what?

• 1:22:23Speaker 06

  You rejected him.

• 1:22:24Speaker 03

  This guy made it weird.

• 1:22:25Speaker 06

  And hugs everybody he meets, and I'm I'm gay for wanting to hug. Cause you really want it.

• 1:22:34Mark Gagnon?

  Don't want it so much.

• 1:22:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think this is like an excellent, excellent example of-

• 1:22:41Speaker 06

  I've been trying to kiss him on the cheek for years, he won't let me.

• 1:22:43Mark Gagnon?

  Jesus Christ, Akash.

• 1:22:45Speaker 06

  What? I kissed Mark on the cheek when he had a baby, I kissed Hannah on the cheek, all the time.

• 1:22:49Speaker 03

  What makes you uncomfortable about Kiss?

• 1:22:51Mark Gagnon?

  His lips, they're nice.

• 1:22:53Speaker 06

  They are? I got a good set of lips, dude.

• 1:22:56Speaker 03

  You do have good lips.

• 1:22:59Mark Gagnon?

  If he had some white guy like one of these, I, whatever, that's like nothing.

• 1:23:04Speaker 06

  Would you let Moz kiss you? Moz, would you kiss Alex right now on air?

• 1:23:08Mark Gagnon?

  Moz, he gotta, gotta, gotta bottom. Now, see, now that everyone has lips also. Just have like some duct. What do you mean I don't have lips? I mean... I'm catching strays.

• 1:23:16Speaker 06

  Moz, just kiss Alex on the lips, dude.

• 1:23:18Mark Gagnon?

  No, yeah, alright, let's get back to therapy and all the good shit.

• 1:23:21Speaker 03

  We don't have to kiss anybody on the lips.

• 1:23:22Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, let's, yeah.

• 1:23:23Speaker 03

  We can do, but so the other thing is, if you're, if you're on the spectrum too, this is another important thing. People with, on the spectrum, and ADHD, their brain processes a touch in a different way. So, it's really interesting, it's fascinating. Some people with ADHD have a lot of difficulty with sex because they have something called tactile defensiveness. So the way that literally your brain processes, when you feel a physical touch, if you have ADHD or you're on the spectrum, this can be perceived as ticklish or aggressive. So like a lot of like the foreplay that we'll engage in to sort of like, you know, loosen people up, will actually like trigger weird things if you've got ADHD or autism spectrum.

• 1:24:09Speaker 03

  Another really good example of this tactile sensitivity is textures for people on the spectrum or ADHD. So I have a daughter who probably has ADHD, and you guys know what dal is?

• 1:24:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:24:21Speaker 03

  Okay, you do, okay. So dal is like an Indian lentil soup. But we put a bunch of stuff in it. We'll put like curry leaves and mustard seeds and all kinds of stuff. And so one day, a couple of years ago, you know, my wife was getting mad at my daughter because she'd made dal and she wasn't eating dal. And then I asked her a question, I said- You know, what is it that you don't like about the doll? And she doesn't know how to answer that question. And I was like, is, does it taste bad or it feels bad in your mouth? And she's like, I'm not sure. And I said, let me do something. So I took the doll and I strained it. And then I gave her the doll and I was like, how is that? And she's like, that's fine. The really interesting thing is she ate the doll.

• 1:24:57Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:57Speaker 03

  And then she can take the individual pieces that I had strained out and she ate those individually.

• 1:25:01Mark Gagnon?

  Hmm.

• 1:25:02Speaker 03

  But she just needs it separated.

• 1:25:03Mark Gagnon?

  Hmm.

• 1:25:04Speaker 03

  So there's another diagnosis called ARVID, which, uh, ARFID, which is avoidant restrictive food intake disorder, which also has this sensory difference to it. So I mean, I know we're all joking about, you know, why don't you want to get kissed?

• 1:25:17Mark Gagnon?

  Oh, you say that?

• 1:25:18Speaker 03

  But, but, uh, you know, it'd be really interesting. Like, we could do a very interesting experiment. And I'm not joking here, but I am joking too, because that's how we, that's how we test boundaries with dudes, right? I'm gonna make a joke and like, if you guys treat it as a joke, then cool, but then like, if y'all are like, okay, let's really do this. So we could all kiss each other on the cheek. And we could ask each other, what is your experience of this?

• 1:25:41Mark Gagnon?

  This has been a great podcast, guys, but...

• 1:25:44Speaker 06

  See, this is where he blames his autism. That's why I don't believe it's autistic. He's just black and homophobic.

• 1:25:51Speaker 03

  You know what I mean? I don't even know how to respond.

• 1:25:57Speaker 03

  It's like, if I say what's in my heart, y'all can say it, my ass is gonna get cancelled.

• 1:26:05Mark Gagnon?

  Let us say it. One saying for you. Nah, let us say it. Nah, he not wrong, though.

• 1:26:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:12Mark Gagnon?

  It's his culture, it's his upbringing. Culture, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:15Speaker 03

  Right, so, so, yeah.

• 1:26:18Speaker 03

  The problem is, even if that's your culture, the fundamental... I'm gonna keep going.

• 1:26:24Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:25Speaker 06

  Please, please, please.

• 1:26:27Speaker 03

  You guys can keep, it doesn't bother me, it really doesn't. But I think there's something important, because I think a lot of people struggle with this. Your body's need for oxytocin, your body's need for connection, does not change. Right, so if you grow up in a culture where you're not allowed to touch dudes, and it feels really uncomfortable for you. It feels uncomfortable at the beginning, my guess, unless you have this neurodevelopmental thing going on where there's tactile defensiveness and things like that. So we have to be careful, right? Good diagnosis precedes good treatment. So we don't want to force him into a situation because his brain is processing things differently from the way that our brains are processing.

• 1:26:59Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, no, I think it's more so, growing up, it was like taboo, guys don't touch each other. And then, being around more white guys, they do their white boy fun. And I've gotten better with it over the years.

• 1:27:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, so but does it feel, does it feel physically uncomfortable for you? Or does it feel like, like, is it just the physical sensation? Does it feel like, you know, here's the way I would describe it. So people want to understand, okay, is this like emotional for me? Or is it physical for me? If it's physical for you, if it's a sensory processing deficit, or we call it the deficit alteration. Have you all ever had like scrambled eggs with a piece of shell? Yeah. You know how like, it fucking ruins it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what it's like to be autistic and navigate through the world.

• 1:27:41Mark Gagnon?

  Hmm, that's a good ass way to put it.

• 1:27:44Speaker 03

  Right? That's how you feel, for real?

• 1:27:45Mark Gagnon?

  Sometimes, yeah.

• 1:27:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 1:27:46Mark Gagnon?

  Like a little thing could happen and that just throws me off.

• 1:27:49Speaker 03

  And it's like, it dom, it's like ruins your whole, like it doesn't matter if it was just one little bite, and there's four bites left that are totally fine. One little thing is like, ah, it just ruins it.

• 1:27:58Mark Gagnon?

  Bro, if you talk to my shorty, she can tell you thousands of instances.

• 1:28:01Speaker 03

  Right, so this is where I think we should really have a ton of compassion with people, for people on the spectrum. I apologize for not believing you. Is their life is going through a neurotypical world with fucking eggshells in their scrambled eggs all over the place. The clothes we wear, the way that we touch, the sounds that we make, right? It's like they're just fucking, their life is just a little bit shittier, but way worse. Hmm. Their experience of it is just so difficult.

• 1:28:30Speaker 04

  So in relevance to like the anger conversation we're having, what can you do to basically disengage that anger? Disengage that that is the only way that someone feels emotion?

• 1:28:42Speaker 03

  I'm gonna go back to some scar thing, then we're gonna talk about your anger because I think that's the best way to do it. Is that okay? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And let me know if you don't feel comfortable with that. So, some scar, here's the basic sequence. Disproportionate emotion. Mm-hmm. Activation of the ego. Mm-hmm. Hijacking of the intellect.

• 1:29:00Speaker 03

  So what we want to do is a couple of things. One is exactly what Akash does in therapy. So he takes a step back, removes ego from the equation, just notices what he's feeling, doesn't engage in an intellectual discussion. That's the biggest mistake that a lot of people make. All these people who are red-pilled and black-pilled, they're just operating on the intellectual level. They're not getting to the ego or the emotions underneath.

• 1:29:21Speaker 06

  Hmm, that's a great way of putting it.

• 1:29:23Speaker 03

  And so you could play that game as long as you want to, but it doesn't solve problems. It's a way of coping, and not necessarily in a bad way, but like we said, right? So if I give up on life, that allows me to protect myself. So they sort of adopt this negative worldview.

• 1:29:39Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:29:39Speaker 03

  And like then that protects them, because it's not my fault. If I'm fundamentally broken, it's not my fault.

• 1:29:47Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:29:47Speaker 03

  That I am not successful. It's not my fault that I'm single. If I'm fundamentally ugly, right? So then what we want to do is there are two important things to do. One is if you just observe the process, that is enough.

• 1:29:59Speaker 06

  I'm sorry, but just to go back to the red pill thing. They, what is, so their, their process or their cope is, it's not my fault, it's women's fault, they X, Y, Z. Is that what they do?

• 1:30:09Speaker 03

  I think they're a lot more heterogeneous than we give them credit for. They're not all one way. They used to be that way. But now I think there's, there's like a red pill 2.0 that's kind of like happening right now, which I think is actually quite healthy.

• 1:30:22Speaker 06

  Really?

• 1:30:22Speaker 03

  So if you go to red pill like subreddits and stuff, they tell each, there's a lot of encouragement. Get your ass to the gym, right? Like do something with your life, become professionally successful, and go to therapy. Like they're huge proponents of therapy now.

• 1:30:35Speaker 06

  Oh, wow, okay.

• 1:30:36Speaker 03

  So I think that there's some like adaptive.

• 1:30:38Speaker 06

  So there's an evolution of red pill that's not what it used to be, and it's potentially a good thing.

• 1:30:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think there's a lot of good stuff in there. If there was not good stuff in there, it would not be growing. Right? So anytime we see human beings changing in a particular way, that is because they are adapting to their environment. So in a world where the systems do not support men, what choice do men have? We're going to support each other.

• 1:31:04Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:31:04Speaker 03

  And I think the problem is that there's all kinds of negative emotion that gets turned into anger, which we already talked about, right? So like sadness doesn't work, crying about it doesn't work, so I'm going to get angry. And then when you get angry, it's very easy to blame someone else. There's also the humkar at play. So these people will like pump themselves up and put someone else down. Who do they pump up?

• 1:31:26Speaker 06

  Men.

• 1:31:27Speaker 03

  Who do they put down?

• 1:31:28Speaker 06

  Women.

• 1:31:28Speaker 03

  There we go. Right, so this is why I love this model. Like, y'all are a bunch of comedians. I think, smart, for sure. Right, but once you understand this model, you can understand so much human interaction around you. Right, this is the ego at play. So anytime you see someone being egotistical, the question to ask yourself is, what are they protecting themselves from?

• 1:31:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:31:50Speaker 03

  And the moment that you soothe that thing, the ego will disappear. You can disarm ego.

• 1:31:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:31:57Speaker 03

  By giving people kind of what they need. Now, fixing the samskar involves understanding the process, doing kind of what Akash said, where if you just sit down and just write your emotions. So you can use an emotional regulation technique. So if you even do like deep breathing or something like that, some like meditative stuff. We, I teach a lot of that stuff and meditation and stuff. I have these guides and things. But if you do that kind of stuff, that'll help. Because then, what is activating the ego is the emotion. So the moment that the emotion goes away, the ego will go away. And then when the ego goes away, this fucked up logic will go away. Then you'll be okay. The second thing that we want to do, this is the really cool thing. That dormant emotion can be brought to the surface and experienced fully and metabolized. So when you have like a breakthrough in therapy,

• 1:32:42Speaker 03

  right, this is where something comes up. There's a ton of emotion that comes to the surface. And it's felt and accepted, not suppressed, not distracted from. That's what we usually do, right? We bury it. But instead, what we want is like, so what's going on in therapy is like, they're talking about some time in their life where they really felt hurt. And then they're bawling, I'm holding them. You know, we're all like crying, I'm crying, they're crying. And then, how do you feel? Oh, I feel so much better. And then they walk out and like, a chunk of it is gone. So the way that, to do that is, I would recommend that people, when you feel this disproportion in emotion, ask yourself, when was the first time I felt this?

• 1:33:26Speaker 03

  And what you'll discover is that people who feel this disproportionate emotion, there's a time that happened a long time ago where they felt that way. And it was a really powerful moment for them. And so when you go back to that thing and you sort of experience that again, that gets a bit technical and there's a whole some scar digestion process that we go through in our trauma guide. But that's the essence of it, is that you go back and you re-experience those things. You bring out that emotion. And that's literally what we do in therapy is we take all these dormant emotions. And once you bring out the dormant emotions and you metabolize them, people feel healthier. That's as a riff.

• 1:34:03Speaker 04

  I spoke with a therapist and I was talking to him about early childhood experiences that I had. And he basically said, I don't want to talk about any of those. I want to give you tools to deal with the emotions you're feeling today.

• 1:34:14Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:34:15Speaker 04

  And I felt frustrated by this because I was like, my suspicion is that the reason I feel these things is because of these initial experiences I had in my childhood through, you know, family or whatever else. And I'm just now manifesting them in my adult life. And if I just dealt with it in this first instance, I could probably deal with it better. I'm curious if you've heard of these different therapy tactics?

• 1:34:33Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So, you know, I think talking about your past, I'm going to oversimplify, but that's what we call kind of the psychodynamic model, where we like, it's sort of about dormant stuff. But then more recently, what we've had is something called a cognitive behavioral model, which is like, we're just going to alter your behavior and we're going to deal with the present. And if we really look at like, what's causing problems in your life, it's not the hurt that happened before. It is the way that the hurt that happened before shows up today and affects your life. Right? So even if I like, even if Akash's, you know, his dad was mean to him or abusive or whatever, that's manifesting in the present in a particular way.

• 1:35:14Speaker 03

  And we can deal with that manifestation in the present and his problems will be solved. It is the manifestation of that hurt that really screws up your life now. But so this is kind of like saying, I guess what I could say is like, you know, if I have a well that is ejecting feces, I can clean up the feces every time it comes out.

• 1:35:38Speaker 03

  Or I can go down and empty out the well. Right, but both of them will end up with a clean surface. So in the cognitive behavioral model, I think, so some people just like that model more. That's just where their mind actually goes. And I don't know if you all caught that, but we sort of included both with some scar digestion. Right, so you can regulate the emotion directly in the moment with breathing practices. And then the humkar will deactivate, the buddhi will deactivate. We're not actually solving the samskar, we're intervening at the level of the manas. Or you can actually... Or you go back. And what I tend to find works really well is both. Right, that's what I would think. Yeah, so I mean, when I work with people, I do both. And I think also from like a yogic standpoint, yogic standpoint, they don't give a shit about what happened to you in the past.

• 1:36:23Speaker 03

  They just focus on the present. They're like, just understand what is happening. And the beautiful thing is that works like incredibly well. Even if you just understand this process and you observe it, that will take the emotional bite out of it. So I don't know if y'all get this, but when your samskar activates, you activate like a program. They'll kind of get that, like you lose control. Yeah, I do, I absolutely do. Right, there's like, oh, like now they're thinking, like you think like, they're judging me and like, I feel this way, now I'm gonna do this. Like people start operating in a really repetitive way. And if you're in a relationship and like you trigger your partner, you're like, oh shit, they're doing this shit again. And you can predict it. It's like, first they're gonna do this, then they're gonna do this, then they're gonna do this, and until they calm down, like there's nothing that we can do. Right.

• 1:37:07Speaker 03

  Right, so you can stop the, in that pattern, a big part of that pattern is a lack of awareness that it's happening. So if you go to your partner and you say, hey, you're doing this shit again, they're like, no, I'm not, you're doing this. They have no insight into it. So insight, anytime you have awareness of what goes on within you, you automatically control it. You guys want to test that? Yeah. Observe your breathing, but don't change it. Go. Impossible, I can't. You try it for like three seconds. Try for a little bit longer. Can you observe your breathing without changing it?

• 1:37:45Mark Gagnon?

  I think so, but I don't know how I was breathing before I started observing it, so I don't know necessarily.

• 1:37:52Speaker 03

  Are you controlling it if you're observing it right now?

• 1:37:54Mark Gagnon?

  Yes.

• 1:37:55Speaker 03

  Can you stop controlling it and observe it?

• 1:38:01Mark Gagnon?

  You can stop breathing.

• 1:38:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:38:03Speaker 03

  Stopping breathing is controlling it.

• 1:38:05Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I can't.

• 1:38:07Speaker 06

  This is incredibly hard for me when I focus on my breathing, like if I'm trying to meditate. I've noticed, I'm like, I feel like I'm breathing, like I'm not, now I'm in control of how I'm breathing and that's weird. I'm not just observing the breathing, I'm...

• 1:38:19Speaker 03

  Yep, right, so this is really cool. You guys have heard of this thing called enlightenment?

• 1:38:23Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:38:24Speaker 03

  The person who can observe their breath without controlling it will become enlightened. Really simple.

• 1:38:30Speaker 06

  Ahhh.

• 1:38:33Speaker 06

  Okay, so that makes me feel better because it's actually incredibly hard to do, is what I think you're saying. Because I used to be like, what the fu... Why am I so in my head that I can't even just watch myself breathe? I have to, now I'm changing it every time.

• 1:38:45Speaker 03

  Yep, so this is the beautiful thing. You cannot observe without changing, right? So even in physics, which I'm hesitant to draw correlations from, there's like this idea of the observer effect where we can't measure something without altering it in some way. So the beautiful thing is that even in your own life, if you have patterns, the moment you start observing them, they'll start to dissipate. They'll start to like, sublimate and become weaker and weaker and weaker and weaker and weaker. So this is something that in the West, we really don't understand. Awareness is enough. You don't actually need to do anything. You just need to observe, observe, and observe properly. That's a technique that's pretty hard, but as you observe what happens, as you become like, think about any problem that you've had in your life,

• 1:39:28Speaker 03

  once you really understood what was going on, it becomes way easier to handle.

• 1:39:34Speaker 06

  So even just acknowledging, "Oh, I'm in this recursive anger program."

• 1:39:37Speaker 03

  Just watch it. Take a step back and watch, "Okay, I'm feeling anger." Ah, there's the ego thought, right? And we've done it a little bit today. Like y'all, I'll ask y'all to, you know, "What is Akash feeling right now? Where does this come from?" And y'all are like, hypothesizing, hypothesizing. So if you do that process for yourself, and this is important because this isn't like analyzing. A lot of people, this is the big mistake that a lot of people make. People will analyze their problems, but observation and analysis is different. Biggest mistake that people make, they say, "Oh, I'm aware of my problem." No, you're not. You're analyzing. You're not watching them in real time. You're thinking about them retrospectively. You are analyzing them. Just watch it.

• 1:40:16Speaker 04

  And not to detour us completely, but I find that this is a benefit of psychedelics. And that I've spoken to people that have done ketamine therapy, or even prescribed ketamine therapy, like there's psychologists that do ketamine therapy. And basically, because it's a dissociative, it will strip the behavior and the emotion, or the thing that was done to you and the emotion, you're able to see the thing as a third party. And you can kind of see things objectively, and as a result of that, be able to draw new conclusions.

• 1:40:43Speaker 03

  I think he wanted our attention.

• 1:40:45Mark Gagnon?

  Oh, no, you can stay on that topic.

• 1:40:47Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:40:50Speaker 03

  So psychedelics, I think, are really great because they give us a scientific insight into things that meditation have been doing for thousands of years. So the hard thing about understanding how meditation affects your brain is that the majority of studies on meditation, in order to be, you know, like, I mean, to be non-biased, we take a bunch of random people, we teach them a meditation technique, and then we measure their results. So one of the exclusion criteria for most of the studies on meditation involve not knowing how to meditate. So what we're basically doing is we're training up a bunch of amateurs. So the hard thing is that you have some of these people who have been meditating for a very long time,

• 1:41:35Speaker 03

  and successfully too. There's a big difference between just doing it a lot and doing it successfully.

• 1:41:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:41:41Speaker 03

  And those people, we don't know how to study. So I saw this great TikTok of this yogi in the Himalayas, who's just like running around, like, basically, he's got a loincloth on. But there's a lot of stuff that people do. So there's one study that was done by the Benson-Henry Institute, I think, many years ago, that showed that you can, through yogic practices, you can alter your body temperature by nine degrees Celsius.

• 1:42:03Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:42:03Speaker 03

  Right? So there's all kinds of weird stuff, like, there are people in the Himalayas that...

• 1:42:06Speaker 04

  That's like 20 plus degrees Fahrenheit, right?

• 1:42:10Speaker 03

  Nine fifths plus 32. But I think the alteration is, you'd have to do both conversions. Right? But, so, yeah, about 20 degrees. So...

• 1:42:24Speaker 03

  There's a lot of weird stuff in yoga, but we don't know scientifically like how to study that. So the biggest, at the top of the list is like altered states of consciousness. So the cool thing about psychedelics is that people will really like them. And why? Because they give people dissociative experiences. So let's think about this. In our Vedic model of the mind, which is what I taught y'all, a lot of our problems come from which, which part of those, which of those five things? Jitta, samskar, ahankar, viti, and manas. Which one do you think causes us the most problems in life? Samskar. That's what one would think. Or ahankar. It's ahankar. So our samskar, for a particular problem, it's samskar. But when your ahankar is out of control,

• 1:43:09Speaker 03

  every dimension of your life will be a mess. That's your ego again. Ego, right? So ketamine comes in, dissociative agent. What does it do? It disconnects you from your sense of self, deactivates the default mode network, exactly what happens in the practice like shunya meditation. Shunya means void, null, or nothingness. Right? So when I'm going through my midlife crisis, what do I do? What am I doing now? Like, you know, we started this company and like, I'm actually making way less money than I would have if I just continued being a psychiatrist to like startup companies from MIT and Harvard and all this kind of stuff, was doing work at Harvard Business School and like, you know, I started working with gamers and that like felt good for a while, but like now what the fuck am I doing? Like I spend all my days in meetings and I'm not, you know, so what am I doing?

• 1:43:53Speaker 03

  So then do shunya meditation. Go back to being nothing. I'm nothing, I'm nothing, I'm nothing, I'm nothing. And really, this is beautiful because if you, I don't know if you guys can do this right now, but if you pay attention, what you'll find, I'm trying to debate. Okay, let me try this first this way. What do you feel at the core of your being?

• 1:44:16Speaker 03

  I'm talking about feel. Don't, give me an intellectual answer. Be, be, say more.

• 1:44:22Speaker 06

  Like a void, kind of like.

• 1:44:23Speaker 03

  Where?

• 1:44:24Speaker 06

  Deep in the pit of my stomach.

• 1:44:25Speaker 03

  Okay, do you all feel? Nothing?

• 1:44:29Speaker 04

  I have sometimes, I have issues with mind-body connection.

• 1:44:33Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:44:34Speaker 04

  I'm not sure.

• 1:44:35Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:44:36Speaker 04

  I have a hard time answering that.

• 1:44:37Speaker 03

  So, a lot of people will experience, like you can feel the outside, but right here, it's kind of empty. You don't feel anything. There's an absence of sensation somewhere in here. So, a really powerful shunya meditation is like, the simple way to do it is if you wanna, if you were, if you feel like you have ego, and by ego, I mean the Rajsek ego or the Thomsik ego, which means the ego where I'm really great, or I'm pathetic. There's a really beautiful practice that you can do is just focus on this, and whatever you think about yourself, send it there. Just send, whatever you feel about yourself, just send it, feel that emptiness within you if you can. And if you feel that emptiness, and this is why you shouldn't do

• 1:45:20Speaker 03

  breath meditation, you should do this. Because you have a lot within you that you're trying to get rid of. How do I stop being angry? How do I get rid of my self-esteem? Right? And you've figured out how to adapt to this stuff on the surface. You've done what his therapist tried to teach him, which is how can I functionally, how can I exist and adapt? How can I be happily married? How can I be professionally successful? How can I survive with this stuff? But the stuff is still there. You've adapted, but you haven't fixed it. And breath meditation doesn't work for you, so you need to do shunya. You need to send all that negative stuff, just send it in there, and you'll be amazed at how much things change.

• 1:45:59Speaker 06

  No, I'll absolutely try that.

• 1:46:00Speaker 04

  I think you've said this, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it was something to the effect that true confidence is not thinking, "Oh, I'm so great," or thinking like that inverse of, "Oh, I'm so terrible, the universe is conspiring against me." It is a lack of thought about yourself. It is a lack of connection to your performance. You just sort of are existing. Is that a fair assessment?

• 1:46:22Speaker 03

  Sort of, yeah. So, here's what I would say. When you are egoless, you will be incredibly confident. Right? So, if we look at like, okay, who is confident in the world? Who is the most confident person that you can think of?

• 1:46:37Speaker 03

  It's a class of people, actually. Most class, most confident people on the planet.

• 1:46:43Speaker 06

  Is it the top 1% or something?

• 1:46:45Speaker 03

  Nope. Way more common than that. Narcissists? Nope. So narcissists have a sense of inferiority. It's not old people. Oh, kids. Absolutely.

• 1:47:00Speaker 03

  And what does a kid think about themselves? If I take a one-year-old.

• 1:47:05Speaker 06

  Nothing.

• 1:47:06Speaker 03

  They have no concept of ego. They have no Amgar.

• 1:47:12Speaker 03

  And look at their confidence.

• 1:47:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:47:14Speaker 03

  It's amazing. It's almost as if. When they develop an ego, oh, you're a good boy.

• 1:47:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:47:22Speaker 03

  You are a bad boy. It doesn't matter whether you're good or bad. It's gonna create problems for both of you. I get people in my office who are failed at life, 29 years old, living in mom's basement, watching pornography all day, playing video games. And I get 44-year-olds, CEOs of billion-dollar companies. I don't know what to do next. I built this thing, I feel stuck, I wanna quit, I can't afford to quit. Other people aren't gonna be able to do it as good as I can. Now my wife expects me to be able to take her on private planes, or my husband expects me to be able to take him on private planes. The moment you add ego to the equation, ah! What happens if we give you a drug that dissociates you?

• 1:48:08Speaker 03

  disables the ego. Now depression improves. Treatment refractory depression improves. The kind of depression that doesn't respond to cognitive behavioral therapy. The kind of depression that is so deep that the regular techniques don't work. What we have to do is unplug it at its root. Disable the ego.

• 1:48:30Speaker 03

  Meditation can do it too, it's way harder.

• 1:48:32Speaker 04

  So why, in this case, would I ever meditate if I could do psychedelic drugs and achieve the same end goal?

• 1:48:40Speaker 03

  Great question, for two reasons. First is, you're not going to achieve the same end goal, you're going to move in the same direction. Second reason is because ketamine is a drug of abuse. So I remember when I was training to be a psychiatrist. You know, we got a lecture, because the nice thing about, you know, being at Mass General and Harvard and all that good stuff, is we get a lot of experts there. So, this person came to talk to us about psychedelic therapy and ketamine, actually, ketamine treatment for depression, and she's an expert in that, right? Was doing it, this is back in 2015, so back before it was cool. And so she talks to me, and she's like, "Yeah, some of my patients require ketamine infusions every single day in order to keep their depression at bay."

• 1:49:23Speaker 03

  And I was like, "Hold on a second."

• 1:49:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:49:26Speaker 03

  "That sounds like an addiction."

• 1:49:29Speaker 03

  Right? So, the problem with ketamine is that we can become dependent on it, and that's what we see. I mean, so many people abuse ketamine. Because we love that state, but it requires a drug to get there.

• 1:49:45Speaker 03

  Right? And then there are other problems with ketamine, because you're artificially doing something. It's sort of like, you know, I can give you, if you exercise, you can increase your heart rate. I can also inject you with adrenaline to increase your heart rate. Both of them involve the same physiological endpoint, which is increase in heart rate, but the mechanisms through which they achieved are very different.

• 1:50:10Speaker 04

  And I imagine the benefits to your cardiovascular health is...

• 1:50:13Speaker 03

  Night and day.

• 1:50:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:50:14Speaker 03

  In the same way, when you meditate, you're not just going to disable the default mode network, you're going to improve your frontal lobes, which allow you to focus your attention and stay on task. They're going to make you better at stopping distractibility, they're going to improve your emotional regulation. So what I tend to find with people who engage in psychedelics, is that the amount of transcendental experiences they have is very limited compared to a very experienced meditator. So a psychedelic is like getting on a helicopter. And boarding a train and going from like zero to 6,000 feet. It just goes from this place to this place. You don't get to control what happens in a psychedelic. When you meditate, you learn how to fly.

• 1:50:58Speaker 03

  So you can go beyond 6,000 feet, 10,000 feet, 12,000 feet, 20,000 feet. And you can understand things and experience things that people with psychedelics, I don't think have ever done. I've never heard of a psychedelic experience that.

• 1:51:11Speaker 04

  Takes you to that height.

• 1:51:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. I've also heard people say in relation to this, be concerned about unearned wisdom.

• 1:51:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's those kinds of truisms, which sure.

• 1:51:21Speaker 04

  Which I wonder if it's kind of sort of alluding to the same sort of sensation, that you're getting access to experiences without really learning and building the.

• 1:51:28Speaker 03

  So that's a problem. I think the other problem is that when you get a psychedelic experience, it's completely decontextualized, right? So when you meditate for a long period of time, kind of like you said, you kind of pick up things along the way. So as you pick up things along the way, it's kind of like if I, if I take you from zero to 6,000 feet and you run around, you're going to have a lot of trouble. You'll get altitude sickness. But if I want to climb, you know, it's really interesting. Many years ago, I climbed Kilimanjaro and I did it in about five or six days. And as I was looking at it, one of the things that's really interesting is the longer you take, the more successful you are. So the highest failure rates are the shortest trips. So when you take 11 days to climb to the same height, your body has more time to build red blood cells.

• 1:52:13Speaker 03

  You have more time to adapt, right? So when you meditate for a very long period of time, your, your capability to stay in that state, explore in that state.

• 1:52:23Speaker 04

  Actually utilize.

• 1:52:24Speaker 03

  Utilize the state is very different.

• 1:52:26Speaker 04

  Working out for steroids.

• 1:52:28Mark Gagnon?

  What are some tools for being able to meditate? When I was younger, I used to be in karate for many years. And I actually remember times where it's like, I felt like true meditative state where it was just like nothingness. It wouldn't be often, but I can recall the times it would happen. Now, in my adult age, I've tried a couple of times and it's like, I can't meditate for shit and I give up because it's just so frustrating. Like what's something for me per se?

• 1:52:53Speaker 03

  Okay, so I made a whole guide of meditation precisely because of this. So I think one of the biggest problems in the world right now is that we have all this mindfulness, right? So you have all these apps that basically give you basically one kind of meditation. Most of them are descended from the Zen, like the Buddhist or Zen tradition. And so, there's a lot of different types of meditation in the same. I'd kind of say like, you know, if we have American cuisine, you can have a lot of derivatives of American cuisine. Like sushi is like completely different. Dorsa is like completely different. So, I think the reason that a lot of people struggle to meditate is because they're not meditating in the right way. The reason they're not meditating in the right way is because teachers of meditation, so it used to be that if you wanted to be a teacher of meditation,

• 1:53:38Speaker 03

  you had to achieve. So, the average time it takes to become a Zen master is 30 years. Shit. And at the end of 30 years, you don't even become a master. Your master says, either you are a master or you aren't. So, right now, like the idea of investing 30 years and then not getting a degree? So, right now, the way that people teach meditation is they get certifications. And getting a certification in meditation does not mean, like, how do you guys think? What do you think it takes to get a certification in meditation? With all due respect and all my life. Right? You just have to show up. And sometimes you don't even have to do that. So, no one is saying, oh yeah, I'm gonna like, you can teach meditation because you've had transcendental experiences. You've been to 20,000 feet.

• 1:54:22Speaker 03

  Now, you understand, now you're prepared to teach. So, this is why this is a big problem because everyone is teaching meditation. Very few people are qualified. Now, in terms of you, I think this is where like we get to a lot of details, right? So, if you were to ask, like, I would need to know more about what you struggle with. So, a couple of things that I can already piece together. So, one is that, especially if you're on the spectrum, once again, the way that you manage sensory input is different. So, oftentimes, when I have patients on the spectrum, we will do very body-oriented meditations. So, what I would tell you to do is if you want to achieve a no mind state, stand on one leg. And, you know, I don't know if you guys know this, like meditation posture where you're standing on one leg

• 1:55:07Speaker 03

  and this leg is tucked in over here. I can show you all later, but. The Khatri pose, I don't know what the actual name is. Yeah, I don't know what the. So, you know, just stand on one leg for as long as you can. And then switch to the other leg. And what you'll find if you do this practice is that at the beginning.

• 1:55:26Speaker 03

  You know, you're gonna be thinking about all kinds of stuff. You're trying to focus your mind, trying to focus your mind, and your mind wanders. You don't need to try to focus your mind. Try to distract yourself, try to think about a million different things. As you stay in that pose, what do y'all think will happen?

• 1:55:39Mark Gagnon?

  Your leg's gonna get so tired, and you're gonna start thinking about...

• 1:55:43Speaker 03

  Focusing on what?

• 1:55:44Mark Gagnon?

  Just how exhausted your leg is from holding...

• 1:55:47Speaker 03

  Very good, right? So you're gonna think about that, and then you will enter a no mind state. Now, this is the piece that a lot of people miss. When you focus on one thing for an extended period of time, what does your mind do with it?

• 1:56:03Mark Gagnon?

  I don't know.

• 1:56:06Speaker 03

  When you put on your shirt first thing in the morning, you feel it?

• 1:56:09Mark Gagnon?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:56:11Speaker 03

  What happens? Do you continue to feel it all day? You're wearing it all day?

• 1:56:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, you lose awareness.

• 1:56:15Speaker 03

  You lose awareness. When I enter a crowded restaurant and I hear everyone talking, what does my brain do with that?

• 1:56:24Speaker 04

  Right. It turns into...

• 1:56:25Speaker 03

  Any constant stimulus will then disappear. So the whole point of meditation is I am trying to do one thing, because emptying my mind is impossible. If I create an empty mind, it'll be a vacuum, all kinds of thoughts will flood in. So what I try to do is I focus it on one thing, and I focus it on this thing so that everything else disappears. I'm kicking it all out. I can get down to one thought, that's it. And as I acclimatize to that thought, then that thought will disappear. And then what you will be left with is emptiness. And those times when you did martial arts, you were fully focused on the art,

• 1:57:08Speaker 03

  and at the end of full focus, becomes empty mind. So whatever it is that brings your mind to one point very, very easily is what you should do to meditate. So I asked y'all a question, what do you feel in here? You didn't feel anything, you didn't feel anything, you felt something? That's what he should do. Forget about breath meditation, not good for you.

• 1:57:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:57:31Speaker 06

  For trauma, I did a breathwork session where they like find the points and all that. And that was actually very, I found that talk therapy was really helpful. And then now I find that more helpful for like processing stuff like that.

• 1:57:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you know, that's earlier, I mentioned that, you know, we thought talk therapy was the gold standard. So I think men especially need to do a lot more stuff in their body.

• 1:57:53Speaker 06

  Ah, because my wife did it and she was like, I don't feel it like this.

• 1:57:56Speaker 03

  So this is something, I remember in 2012, I was in medical, I was in medical school. I'd done research at Harvard for a couple of years. I got an email from a cousin of mine in India and he's like, hey, there's this thing called the emotional freedom technique. Like, what do you think about it? And I was like, it sounds like it's BS. And then he's like, shouldn't we, so we got into this debate about it. I looked at some research, it didn't seem very convincing. Many years later, now we have a ton of studies on EFT, which is similar to kind of like tapping is what they call it. So there's like traumas like stored in the body in some ways. And there are now studies that actually seem like pretty solid.

• 1:58:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:58:31Speaker 03

  That there's ways of bringing stuff out through the body. We see this also in like, you know, masculine communities of when you get dumped, what do we tell people to do? Hit the gym. Right, so physically, and if we think about emotions, we think about emotions as mental, they're not mental. They're physical too. Heart rate, you know, how do you know, there's a beautiful paper, I'll see if I can send you all and you guys can link. But that maps on, I use it all the time with the men that I work with, maps every emotion to your body. So they did a beautiful paper where they like measured like what, where people feel things. And what's really cool about it is there's like a hundred emotions there. And even little things like feeling rejected, feeling disappointed, feeling angry, feeling frustrated,

• 1:59:13Speaker 03

  feeling like someone denied you something, these are all things that we call anger. But there's subtle variations in where that emotion shows up in our body.

• 1:59:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:59:22Speaker 03

  And so the really cool thing, you said you struggle with mind body stuff, but this is what's really neat is the research that I did many years ago. On mind-body stuff is that when you move the body, you activate the brain in different ways. So if I'm feeling like I have a pit in my stomach, as I move my body, literally that sensation will change. And if I fix the emotion mentally, it'll change my physiology. But if I no longer feel sad, then my physiology will calm down. If I change my body, the emotion will fix itself too. It's like a two-way street. Everything in the body is a two-way street.

• 2:00:01Speaker 04

  I've heard this about like power posing and things like that. It's like kind of the way people have corporatized and westernized it. Where like, you're feeling nervous, put your hands above your head, be in a large state. Or you're feeling sad, try to smile and it'll actually send oxytocin to your brain to make you happier. Is that related to what you're saying?

• 2:00:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think it's corporatization. But there's a really cool study about, someone was studying how we detect emotions in faces. So what they did is they took all their lab students and they had them make facial expressions. And what they specifically were measuring is how quickly can someone detect a change in your facial expression? So if I go like this, and then I go like this, if you guys slow that down and make like microsecond cuts, there's a transition from happiness to like anger, right? So when can people detect that? So they stumbled upon a really interesting finding, which is that they were training their lab people, right? So I'm doing experiments with people. So my lab assistant is like making smiling faces and angry faces.

• 2:01:02Speaker 03

  What they discovered is that when they trained the lab assistants, those lab assistants started feeling that way. So the person who had to make the angry face was pissed at everybody. And the person who was smiling a lot was happy with everybody. So everything in the brain is like reciprocal and homeostatic. Right? And if you kind of force yourself to smile, that's hard because forcing yourself to smile, if you just do it, like I go like this.

• 2:01:26Speaker 04

  It feels crazy.

• 2:01:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, it feels crazy, right? But if I go like this, right? You can tell the difference. Right? And he didn't get to see it.

• 2:01:36Speaker 06

  No, I was thinking about the breath work thing. I remember the first time I did it, my male friend had told me about it. He's like, "It's crazy." What do you like? And I was like, I was kinda skeptical. I remember going in, she starts poking around, "Do you feel anything here?" And then I felt this crazy pain, and then she would say like, "Throat around, whatever," and I did. And I just started crying. And then I remember she was like, "Okay, turn on your stomach." As I turn on my stomach, I look in a mirror, I'm pouring sweat, my eyes are puffy from crying. And I'm like, "All right, well, I'm done." And then she goes, "Okay, this is the heart of the spine. You can store a lot of trauma in here along my spine, or the heart of the back." And I was like, "What the fuck is she talking about? We're done." She starts going along the back. I felt even more crazy, even more tears. And that was, since then, it hasn't been as extreme of a thing. But it's interesting that you say men feel that more, because my wife didn't.

• 2:02:21Speaker 06

  She was like, "I don't know. I don't feel it."

• 2:02:23Speaker 03

  Right, so you feel it less because now it's out.

• 2:02:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:02:26Speaker 03

  Right, so that's emptying the well. Right, so what I love about hearing stories about this is if we come up with a model, we should be able to make predictions. So if there really is a well of emotion down below, if we get rid of it, it should be gone. And that's, then I hear stories like this, that makes me think we're kind of on the right track.

• 2:02:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, and it was, I've like, I've stopped doing talk therapy. I thought it was very helpful. But this is, seems like it's a more helpful thing now.

• 2:02:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think they help with different things.

• 2:02:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:02:53Speaker 04

  Hmm, what, can we change gears just to anxiety?

• 2:02:56Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 2:02:57Speaker 04

  That's something that I personally deal with.

• 2:02:59Speaker 06

  I think a lot of people probably deal with.

• 2:03:00Speaker 03

  Okay, so I wanna also just be cognizant of time. I'm not saying we should rush, but do we wanna talk about anger? Do we wanna talk about anxiety? Do we wanna talk about Kama Sutra?

• 2:03:10Speaker 06

  Kama Sutra, I think, I think what we feel is that most people struggle with a lot of anger and anxiety.

• 2:03:16Speaker 03

  Okay, let's talk about anger.

• 2:03:16Speaker 06

  So it, we, I think we are the conduits, hopefully, for anybody who's feeling these things. And I think these are both things. I'm on Lexapro, low dose. I've actually found it to be pretty helpful. With even that super peak anger, I don't get there the way I used to. I don't think I've gotten there early since. But like, there was an anger level that I would hit that the Lexapro's help with. I don't know if you find those things helpful or not helpful.

• 2:03:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

• 2:03:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, anxiety, I think is tied in.

• 2:03:39Speaker 03

  I prescribe medications, yeah.

• 2:03:40Speaker 06

  Okay. Oh, your psychiatrist, that's right, yeah. Okay, but yeah.

• 2:03:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, so let's talk about anxiety.

• 2:03:45Speaker 04

  So I'm curious if you have helpful tools for, I guess, assessing anxiety and trying to deal with them in different cases. So for me personally, before I have a big show, or a big meeting, or some type of life event that I'm concerned about, I'll feel intense anxiety. And then there's also sort of a secondary ambient anxiety that I'll feel generally without even really knowing it. So I don't know if there's one of those that's easier to sort of, to discuss first.

• 2:04:12Speaker 03

  What's the problem with what you described?

• 2:04:15Speaker 04

  That I will, before a show, I'll feel this anxiety that then will manifest in different ways. So if I'm feeling really anxious, then I might do nothing and I'll try to just sleep because that is a way that I cope with the anxiety. Or I'll just feel generally uncomfortable.

• 2:04:30Speaker 06

  And even onstage, if you're, I've noticed if I'm nervous, I'm less free and my performance tends to suffer.

• 2:04:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:04:37Speaker 06

  The times where I'm like, almost weirded out that I don't seem to care before I get onstage, I actually kind of do better. Sometimes I'll be so not nervous that it makes me a little nervous.

• 2:04:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:04:46Speaker 06

  But then I get up there and I'm so free that I can ride any kind of quiet tension without worrying about what it's, and then usually the set is just.

• 2:04:53Speaker 04

  Or I'll rush to a show and I get there right when I'm supposed to get onstage and I have no time to think about it and then I go on and I have a great set.

• 2:04:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:05:00Speaker 04

  Or if I'm thinking about it all day and ruminating and thinking and thinking and thinking, then there's actually a stiffness that's sort of, you know, goes along with that.

• 2:05:07Speaker 03

  Okay. So you would like to be relaxed because you want to do better or because it feels better?

• 2:05:14Speaker 04

  I think both. And I think that, I think there creates a cycle that the better I do, the better I feel.

• 2:05:19Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:05:20Speaker 04

  The better I feel, the better I do.

• 2:05:21Speaker 03

  So let's understand, there's so many ways to tackle this, but, so we're going to go through all of them.

• 2:05:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:05:28Speaker 03

  So the first thing to understand is baseline anxiety.

• 2:05:31Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:05:32Speaker 03

  So there's this measure of physiology called heart rate variability.

• 2:05:37Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:05:38Speaker 03

  Now, HRV is the variability in your heart rate.

• 2:05:41Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:05:42Speaker 03

  How much it can go up and how much it can go down. So I'm going to ask y'all a question. If I take a 29, it's a hard question, trick question. If I take a 29-year-old gamer who's sitting in their basement and I take an Olympic athlete, which one do you think has a greater heart rate variability?

• 2:05:59Speaker 04

  The Olympic athlete.

• 2:06:00Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Okay?

• 2:06:02Speaker 06

  We both had a whoop. We know.

• 2:06:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, why?

• 2:06:06Speaker 03

  Why is what?

• 2:06:07Speaker 06

  I assume it's a heart health thing. The heart is capable of.

• 2:06:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. I wonder nervous system. Yeah, so if you look at an Olympic athlete, their baseline heart rate is bradycardic. It's 40. So the capacity for their heart, their variability in their heart rate, they can go from 40 to 140. So their HRV is 100. Okay? People who have anxiety have a very low heart rate variability. They are always living high and their body's capacity to respond to stress is lower. So as your heart rate variability increases, your capacity to handle stress increases. So high HRV, good. Low HRV, bad.

• 2:06:52Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:06:53Speaker 03

  People who have baseline high anxiety have a low heart rate variability. So what we want to do is increase. This has nothing to do with what you're worried about, nothing to do with being on stage. This is the way that you're physiologically wired. Now, I really got into the stuff, not when I was working with anxiety, but when I was working with trauma. So I was working with a group of first responders for a period of a few months, and I kind of noticed they're just like always on edge. There's hypervigilance. They overreact to things. They're just very, they have very little like, you know, they go from zero to 100. That's not technically true. So a lot of people think, oh, I go from zero to 100. The person I'm dating, oh gosh, she gets so angry. He goes from zero to 100. He doesn't go from zero to 100. It's not zero. He lives at 80. Yeah.

• 2:07:37Speaker 03

  So getting to 110 is only like a plus 30, whereas the rest of us are at zero. And like, you know, we can handle 30 points. So what you need to do is alter your baseline physiology. So there's a trauma guide where I kind of like lay all this stuff out. There's a series of practices that you can do to essentially increase your HRV. Now, the way that we do it has something called physiologic stretch. That's what I kind of call it. So one thing that I'll do with my patients is I'll tell them to run for 60 seconds as hard as they can. Just stretch your physiology. Push it really hard and then relax. So, anything that you do that increases the top end will increase the bottom end. So, you want to stress your physiology. This is also why people with anxiety find that

• 2:08:21Speaker 03

  exercise is so helpful for them. That if they exercise regularly, their baseline anxiety level goes down.

• 2:08:27Mark Gagnon?

  I find this to be the case.

• 2:08:28Speaker 03

  Right? So, but this is the important thing. Good diagnosis precedes good treatment. So, your anxiety is not one mechanism, it's multiple. So, your baseline anxiety, it's beautiful the way you described it. You said, "There's actually two things." So, let's deal with each of those things. Okay? So, with this baseline anxiety, I think it's great to start with physiology and to use physiology and to understand that half the reason that we have an anxiety crisis in the world today is because the majority of people who treat anxiety have zero training in the body.

• 2:08:55Mark Gagnon?

  Okay.

• 2:08:56Speaker 03

  Right?

• 2:08:56Mark Gagnon?

  Okay.

• 2:08:57Speaker 03

  Psychologists don't learn medicine. They learn psychology. And it's not a knock on their profession.

• 2:09:03Mark Gagnon?

  But they're not going to prescribe.

• 2:09:05Speaker 03

  No, they're not. Forget about, they're not going to take anatomy.

• 2:09:08Mark Gagnon?

  They don't know.

• 2:09:08Speaker 03

  They're not going to take physiology.

• 2:09:09Mark Gagnon?

  Right.

• 2:09:10Speaker 03

  Right? And that's why I think our treatments are fundamentally not as effective as they could be. We have someone like Akash who's been to therapy. And what does he say? He said, "The moment I started focusing on my body, I got better in a completely different way."

• 2:09:22Mark Gagnon?

  But psychologists don't learn like nervous system.

• 2:09:24Speaker 03

  They'll learn nervous system, but they won't learn physiology.

• 2:09:29Speaker 03

  Right? They'll learn neuroscience. They won't learn about the four chambers of the heart. You know, your lateral circumflex artery, what it feeds and things like that. Right? That's just not part of their training.

• 2:09:40Mark Gagnon?

  That running exercise, how often do you have to do it? And for how long before you start to see the benefits of?

• 2:09:46Speaker 03

  So, the running exercise starts, you see the benefits right away. So, if you're feeling anxious and you run for 60 seconds, just run, just as hard as you can. Do push-ups, jumping guys, doesn't matter. That will activate. So, what will happen the moment that you, if you ran for your life for 60 seconds, what would happen in your physiology afterward? It would calm down. Because now we're exhausted.

• 2:10:07Speaker 03

  You're not thinking about anything. You can't be anxious, right? You're running for your life. You have one pointed mind. And then, you know, you'll start to, so it can happen immediately. But then the more you stretch your physiology, the more gradual the change will be. Generally speaking, if you do this stuff for about eight weeks, I think that's when we really start to see a lot of change.

• 2:10:25Mark Gagnon?

  And how many, like daily, three times a day, once a week?

• 2:10:28Speaker 03

  I mean, so, uh, running really hard is something that, sure, you can do once a day. If you're looking for a daily practice, I would say a mind-body practice like yoga or tai chi is better. So do 20 minutes of yoga a day, do 20 minutes of tai chi a day, you can take your pick. If you like to move, do tai chi. If you like to be still, do yoga.

• 2:10:44Mark Gagnon?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:10:45Speaker 03

  Okay? So that's baseline anxiety. Second thing we can do for baseline anxiety is some scar work. That's the well of anxiety. It's always there. You have this kind of existential dread about, you know, why are you anxious, right? Because like, oh, I can't handle things or something is wrong. There's something that you're very sensitive to. So if you do that kind of inner emotional work, that'll help too. Now, anxiety in the moment, this is where we're gonna, we're gonna do a couple of cool things. The first thing is just to change our relationship with anxiety. You see anxiety as a problem. It's not a problem. It's your friend. It's there for a reason. Everyone's like, oh, there's, and everyone has anxiety. Like, yeah, we're supposed to.

• 2:11:21Mark Gagnon?

  Right. It helps me in some ways.

• 2:11:23Speaker 03

  Right. So, changing the way that, and here's the beautiful thing. You said that it kind of becomes a vicious cycle, right? So if you set up, if you start off right, it's a vicious cycle in the right direction, virtuous cycle. Where now I'm relaxed, now I'm vibing, now I'm having a good time, now they're having a good time. That relaxes, let's just like, you know, I'm relaxed, they're having a good time, now I'm vibing, now we're vibing, now everything is great. Anxiety is the opposite. I'm nervous, I go up there, I screw up my joke, they're not laughing as much, now I get more nervous, it's a vicious cycle.

• 2:11:52Mark Gagnon?

  Yes.

• 2:11:52Speaker 03

  So you learn to fear the anxiety. You learn to panic. You have anxiety about the anxiety. That's the real problem. That's what creates the cycle. So change your relationship with anxiety. I'm anxious, right? This is my body telling me that this is important to me. This is important to me. It's okay for me to be anxious. I'm gonna go out there, I'm gonna do the best that I can. I could screw up. I may not. Out of my hands. Very foreign to people with anxiety.

• 2:12:23Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, giving up control would be concerning.

• 2:12:27Speaker 03

  Concerning, and so, practice giving up control. So I came to this podcast today. Is this important for me?

• 2:12:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. Like, think about it. Why do guests come on your podcast?

• 2:12:40Speaker 06

  It's a good platform. Get to talk about what they want to talk about.

• 2:12:43Speaker 03

  Absolutely, right? Y'all are fun to talk with. You guys have a good reach, all this kind of stuff. It's a great podcast. What if I screw up?

• 2:12:52Speaker 03

  No, really. You guys are saying hmm is if you learned something. Articulate it. What if I screw up?

• 2:12:56Speaker 06

  People might not like you. You might get negative comments. You might...

• 2:12:59Speaker 03

  So what am I gonna do about that?

• 2:13:02Speaker 06

  Nothing.

• 2:13:03Speaker 04

  You can prepare. You can think about every possible different way.

• 2:13:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I'll solve that problem when I get to it, but like, being worried about it now doesn't help me at all. Right? So I show up, and this is sort of the attitude that can get you in trouble because you don't show up to your med school graduation to get your award. But like, you know, you can just do the best that you can. The rest of it is out of your hands.

• 2:13:20Speaker 04

  But you need to have confidence that you can fix it when you get there.

• 2:13:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that's another, it's a great point. So if you look at people who have anxiety, they misestimate, they underestimate their capacity for damage control. Have you had bad sets before, Mark? You're not fucked? Why not? See, your brain doesn't connect those two dots. So literally, if people have anxiety, focus, rethink how good you are at damage control. And if you want a complete lack of anxiety, be really good at damage control. This is the big mistake that people make. When I feel anxious, I want everything to be perfect. That's not the winning strategy. The right strategy is be able to handle the shit when it gets bad.

• 2:14:06Speaker 03

  If you can handle the shit when it gets bad, it can go good, or it can go bad. Doesn't matter. And if it doesn't need to go good, then I can relax.

• 2:14:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's the thing. And I think, I do think men are maybe... I remember a friend of mine saying, "Well, women are better at making decisions." And I said, "Yeah, but at what cost?" Like, they're constantly thinking about what could go wrong. And I think men generally are just like, "I'm gonna make the decision. It might not be right. Who cares?"

• 2:14:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:14:32Speaker 06

  I think that's a thing we're a little better at.

• 2:14:34Speaker 03

  So I think we can cultivate a sense of detachment. That's kind of what I call it. And I think it's like it changes your relationship with anxiety, right? The anxiety is no longer something that you need to be anxious about. That's what you need to change. Then the rest of it is just a physiologic response in the moment. Okay, fine, I'm anxious today. Maybe I'll screw up, right? Tomorrow's another day. And this is really something that I think it's so hard for people to learn. Like, I think I learned this as a doctor because you sort of like that's how you learned that, right? So like, being a doctor is like, maybe it's similar to being a comedian, I don't know. But you're just faced with a lot of situations that there's like no way to win. Like, you know, kids with cancer and patients who kill themselves and you did everything that you could. You learn really, really quickly. One of the biggest lessons I learned in medical, in residency, really, is that we think that doctors save lives.

• 2:15:18Speaker 03

  Like, I can't save anybody's life. I don't know if you guys get this, but as a doctor, I do not have the power over life and death. What absurdity is this? Right? So as a comedian, what do you have power over? Mark?

• 2:15:31Speaker 04

  I mean, the jokes I say? The way I present myself on stage?

• 2:15:35Speaker 03

  No. The first thing you have. The second thing you don't. The way you present yourself. No, you don't, you don't have control over that.

• 2:15:41Speaker 04

  I guess the way I'm perceived, I don't have control over, but like the, my affect?

• 2:15:45Speaker 03

  You don't have control over that.

• 2:15:47Speaker 04

  Why?

• 2:15:48Speaker 03

  Because what if you're anxious? Can you just control that?

• 2:15:50Speaker 04

  No.

• 2:15:51Speaker 03

  Okay, then, just let that go. See, here's the problem with anxiety. We don't understand what we really have control over. And if you think you have control over the way that you present, well, what are we talking about, bro? We're saying that when you go on stage, you have anxiety and you don't want anxiety. It changes the way that you act, it changes the way that you talk, changes how locked up you are. You have control over that shit? No. If you did, then you wouldn't be asking this question. So oftentimes, if we look at people who are anxious about things, they believe they have control over something that they don't have control over.

• 2:16:18Mark Gagnon?

  But what if those physical things affect your performance and adds more anxiety? Like, how can you, like, I, for example, I have extreme stage fright. And we have a live show coming up in Saudi Arabia. And I'm, right now, I'm worried about the show. And it's like, I'll get fidgety, I start sweating, all that type of shit. And when I'm on stage, it gets 10 times worse. What can I do to prevent that from happening, knowing that it's going to happen?

• 2:16:44Speaker 03

  I want you to listen to what you said. How can I prevent that from happening when I know it's going to happen?

• 2:16:52Mark Gagnon?

  Every time I've been in front of a group of people.

• 2:16:56Speaker 03

  How can I rewind time? Because time keeps moving forward. Yeah. How can I prevent something that I know is going to happen? How is that?

• 2:17:06Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, it's a paradox.

• 2:17:07Speaker 03

  You can't.

• 2:17:08Mark Gagnon?

  Are there ways or like actions I can take to prevent it from happening?

• 2:17:13Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:17:14Mark Gagnon?

  So just forever, I'm always just going to sweat and get the shakes every time I go in front of people?

• 2:17:19Speaker 03

  Isn't that what your experience has been?

• 2:17:22Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, it sucks.

• 2:17:23Speaker 03

  Okay, so.

• 2:17:25Mark Gagnon?

  Fix me.

• 2:17:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is not comforting.

• 2:17:27Speaker 03

  No, hold on a second, right? I can't. Now, what are you gonna do? It can never be fixed.

• 2:17:36Mark Gagnon?

  Keep doing it or avoiding it.

• 2:17:38Speaker 03

  Right, so that's the decision you have to make. So this is the interesting thing. You are afraid of your anxiety. The problem here isn't that you're anxious, it's that you're afraid of anxiety. And here you are trying to prevent something that is inevitable. Like, bro, how can you prevent something that is inevitable? You can't. Like, I'm using your framing. I'm not trying to do some, you know, psychiatry magic on you. You're like, you see this as inevitable and you ask me to prevent it. You are setting up an unwinnable situation. And when you set up an unwinnable situation and you fail and you fail and you fail, how do you, what do you think that does to you?

• 2:18:16Speaker 06

  It confirms it and strengthens it.

• 2:18:18Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:19Speaker 03

  And you become more powerless and more powerless and more powerless. You are setting yourself up for constant failure. And then what you have at the end result is this.

• 2:18:30Speaker 03

  It happens every single time because of the way that you're doing it.

• 2:18:34Speaker 06

  So the problem with this sentence was knowing that it's going to happen. If you just said, how do I keep this from happening?

• 2:18:39Speaker 03

  No. No. It's the exact opposite. Now you get it, my dude.

• 2:18:45Mark Gagnon?

  So it's like, hey, all right, I'm gonna go on stage. I'm gonna sweat, I'm gonna shake. It is what it is.

• 2:18:51Speaker 03

  Absolutely, right? So like, look, you're a comedian. You're going to Saudi Arabia. Do you wanna go to Saudi Arabia?

• 2:18:58Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:59Speaker 03

  A little afraid, but yeah. There we go. Yes is the wrong answer. Yes and no. Yes and, yeah. I want to have gone. I want it to be behind me. I want to be done with it. That's the way you really feel about it. But there's a part of me that hates this, but I'mma do it anyway because this is who I want to be in this world. And it ain't gonna be easy. It ain't gonna be pretty. And there is no way to prevent the shit. The moment you start living life like that, your anxiety will disappear. It won't disappear physiologically, but you'll be able to handle it. Let's put it that way. Right? You can't control. This is the problem with anxiety. The reason that the human brain thinks

• 2:19:42Speaker 03

  we can solve our anxiety is because of our perception of control.

• 2:19:47Speaker 03

  What is, are you anxious about getting hit by a nuclear bomb today? No. Why not? Maybe you didn't think about it, but, right? So people will, will actually be, get anxious about things that they can't control. But, but I think a big part of anxiety is like our perception of control because if we can control something, then we can do everything right. And if we do everything right and we can control things, then it'll be perfect and then I won't have to suffer. But the moment that you're like, look, I want a girlfriend, I want a girlfriend, I want a girlfriend, just bro, like there's no way you can get this person to fall in love with you. Go be the best person that you can and accept that sometimes they're gonna say no. As you start living your life that way, and there's a lot of psychological mechanisms that I'm kind of throwing around here,

• 2:20:29Speaker 03

  or injecting into this, this thing, your relationship with anxiety will change. Right? And then you say, okay, my life is not about preventing anxiety. My life is, I want to go to Saudi Arabia. I want to try to make people laugh. There's a part of this that's gonna suck. But I'm choosing to do it anyway. Accept. Don't try to fix your anxiety. Train yourself to act in spite of it. Then you will be free. Because as long as you are trying to get rid of anxiety, if anxiety shows up, then you're fucked. No control over your life. This is something, by the way, that happens to men a lot. So as men, we are trained.

• 2:21:13Speaker 03

  To fix ourselves by changing our environment. If I feel like I'm ugly and unattractive to women, what do I do? Work out. Absolutely, I change, right? So I had a patient once, 18 years old, I was working in jail. I asked him, "Bro, how do you get in jail at the age of 18? Like, what happened?" He said, "When I was 12 years old, my dad left. I have three sisters that are older. They came to me and they said, 'You gotta be the man of the house now. Man of the house provides.'" Wow. Right? So we need this, we need this, we need this, we need this. It's time for you to step up." Now, that makes him feel... How do y'all think that makes him feel? A lot of pressure.

• 2:21:57Speaker 03

  A lot of pressure, right? Right? So it's interesting, the language that we use. We don't use emotional words. Did y'all see that? Pressure. This is the emotional experience of men. Not anger, not sadness, not frustration, pressure. This is the number one emotional experience of men, pressure. So then he starts selling drugs, because that's the only thing he can do at the age of 12. And then, the way that they treat him creates emotions with him. He feels guilty, ashamed of himself, if he doesn't bring enough money. And then, so then something really interesting happens. Whether he feels ashamed or not depends on his environment. If they're proud of him, he feels proud. And if they're disappointed in him, he feels ashamed. So if you look at what happens, what men do,

• 2:22:43Speaker 03

  we will shape our whole environment to make us feel a certain way.

• 2:22:49Speaker 03

  Right? So if someone's disappointed in me, "Ah, gosh, you have to go to medical school. You need to do yoga.

• 2:22:56Speaker 03

  I need to shape my environment to make me feel a certain way, because I can't handle the feelings in here."

• 2:23:02Speaker 03

  Does that kind of make sense? This is the way that men get emotionally manipulated all the time. Because if someone in your environment can evoke a feeling in you, they can control your behavior.

• 2:23:15Speaker 03

  Right? So if I can make you feel guilty, you're gonna do what I want. Because then I can tell you, "Oh, I love you." And then you're gonna feel better. I control you. Right? By evoking your emotions. Because we don't know. Once we have guilt on the inside, the only way, if I feel ugly, I'm gonna go to the gym. I'm gonna change the world outside of me instead of dealing with the emotion on the inside. This is how we develop body dysmorphia. It's a really interesting study. The drive for muscularity, which is how swole dudes wanna be, correlates with divorce rate, unhappiness in marriage, unhappiness in life.

• 2:23:59Speaker 03

  If I'm relying on something else to create an emotion in me, then the moment my environment changes, I change in response to it. When your dad, making your dad happy, avoiding his wrath, became the way that you felt safe.

• 2:24:15Speaker 03

  Right? That's the only way. We shape our environment to make us feel a certain way.

• 2:24:20Speaker 03

  So in this way, learn how to manage your emotions, learn how to accept your emotions, learn how to experience your emotions. You're anxious. I'm sorry, bro, that sucks. You've got the short end of the stick. You've got the short end of the genetic, shallow end of the gene pool. You're wired for anxiety. Poor guy, you're a little bit autistic. Your life is gonna suck more than other people's. I hate to break it to you, but you know this, I know this, everyone on the spectrum knows this. I'm sorry.

• 2:24:47Speaker 03

  Really am. But you're amazing. That stuff doesn't have to dictate the life that you live. Stuff is gonna be shittier for you than it would for anyone else. Is that fair? No. But you get to go to Saudi Arabia. You get to do your comedy. It's gonna suck for you, but when you're done, you're gonna love it. And that's what got you here. You haven't conquered your anxiety. And look at where you are. You don't need to conquer your anxiety. It doesn't have shit on you, my friend.

• 2:25:21Speaker 04

  How do you balance acceptance with ambition in this regard? Like, I recognize that many successful people probably have a dearth of self-esteem, and they might have some insecurity that flares up, that then compels them to do these great things. But then you also might have someone that's playing video games all day and is overweight, and maybe they just are accepting of their position. And we've recognized that both are kind of bad.

• 2:25:48Speaker 03

  So I don't think that the person who plays video games... So generally speaking, I think ambition...

• 2:25:56Speaker 03

  Okay, so I think ambition gets you to a certain point. So I think ambition is adaptive and then becomes maladaptive.

• 2:26:06Speaker 03

  So, for example, you know, I can have ambition, and that can drive me to succeed, and can even give me some degree of happiness. But like, so ambition is really good at getting me out of inaction into action, but it won't give me happiness. And we don't actually need it to start acting. So I think the problem with ambition is when we become outcome-oriented. So if I'm super ambitious, and I work towards something, and I get it, that's great. But if I'm super ambitious and I don't get it, what do you think will happen?

• 2:26:38Speaker 04

  I mean, I get frustrated and disappointed.

• 2:26:40Speaker 03

  What do you think it'll do to your motivation?

• 2:26:45Speaker 04

  If you don't get it for long enough, it'll discourage you.

• 2:26:47Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Right? So ambition will like get you part of the way there, but it's like, I would call it like toxic fuel. Like, it'll get you there, but not in a good way. So I think what works way better is actually acceptance. And when we say like the 29-year-old at home is accepting his circumstances, no, he's not. He's ignoring his circumstances. He's running away from his circumstances. So ambition is about where you want to go. Acceptance is about where you are. Ambition is about the last step you're looking to take, right? It's about achieving your goals. Acceptance is about the next step that you're gonna take. Okay, I have anxiety. It's there all the time. What am I gonna do about it? See, he thinks in terms of ambition.

• 2:27:31Speaker 03

  How do I end this problem? That's not what you want to do. What do I do about it now? What's the first step that I take? This gets like so confusing because when I work with people with trauma... Acceptance is really hard. Accept that this happened to you and take responsibility for it. And what are you gonna do about it? Right, so when I'm working with someone in an abusive relationship, one of the reasons that they're in the relationship is because their partner has taught them that they're powerless. But what you have to accept is that you're not powerless. But that's really scary. It's hard to do. Because if you accept you're not powerless and you have the power to change, what does that come with?

• 2:28:13Speaker 06

  You have to do something.

• 2:28:14Speaker 03

  Not just I have to do something. If I have the power to fix my situation, who is to blame for my situation?

• 2:28:25Speaker 06

  Myself.

• 2:28:27Speaker 03

  Right, and this is what's so weird. There's a bunch of pathological self-blame. But this is what's so tricky when someone's in an abusive relationship. You have to show them that they do have power. They do have agency. But then that comes with responsibility and people don't like that. So acceptance, I think, is way harder than people think it is. It's not just... So a lot of people think that acceptance means giving up. That's not acceptance. It's the opposite. It's like, okay, I'm done. It's giving up. That's what it is. Acceptance is saying, okay, this is the reality now and what am I gonna do about it? Right, that's the really important thing. I have to accept that my child does not love me.

• 2:29:06Speaker 06

  So they almost go hand in hand, acceptance and ambition?

• 2:29:09Speaker 03

  No, I think they actually don't go hand in hand. I think so acceptance oftentimes gets confused for apathy, like inaction. Right, so if I'm like, if I have a patient who comes in and has cancer, we need to start by accepting that you've got cancer, but that doesn't mean we're giving up.

• 2:29:22Speaker 06

  Right, it's acceptance plus responsibility. So yeah, that's what I'm saying. You accept where you are and then this is where I wanna go.

• 2:29:28Speaker 03

  Uh, no. So that's the subtlety. So where I want to go is the end. I think the most healthy way to do it is this is my next step. It's not even about the goal. It's like, this is the direction I'm gonna go. Okay, my, my child never wants to speak with me again. What do I do about that? Let me, if I want to repair my relationship with child. It's okay to think about that goal, but I think the, the most adaptive way to do it is to focus on the next action. You can have some vision and you should think about where that action leads, but don't attach yourself to that outcome. Let me start therapy.

• 2:30:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:30:01Speaker 03

  But if therapy doesn't work, so be it. And why didn't therapy work? Because I fucked it up too bad with my kid. And you accept that. You accept from the get-go that I have damaged this relationship so much that it may not be repairable. But I'm gonna do everything within my power to make it right. The moment you have that attitude, like when y'all hear me say that, right? What does it evoke within you?

• 2:30:28Speaker 03

  There's, there's ability, there's capability. There's not guaranteed success. In fact, quite the opposite. When you accept that you have very little control, a lot of people think that means apathy. I think it means freedom.

• 2:30:42Speaker 04

  It's a bit daunting, though.

• 2:30:44Speaker 03

  Very daunting.

• 2:30:46Speaker 04

  The prospect that all of my problems in life are, maybe not all, but many of them are fundamentally my own.

• 2:30:52Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:30:53Speaker 04

  And that they're my responsibility to then take the first step.

• 2:30:56Speaker 03

  Yes. It is daunting. It is also the best way to do it.

• 2:31:01Speaker 04

  It's better than the alternative, which is, I have no control and everything is happening to me.

• 2:31:05Speaker 06

  It seems initially like there's a feeling of hopelessness with that.

• 2:31:08Speaker 03

  It is.

• 2:31:09Speaker 06

  Even though, even though I understand in the end, it's not hopeless, but...

• 2:31:13Speaker 04

  The alternative is more hopeless, though.

• 2:31:15Speaker 03

  No, no, so, so let's understand why it's hopeless. Why is it hopeless?

• 2:31:19Speaker 06

  Because there's nothing I can do. This is what it is.

• 2:31:22Speaker 03

  Yes. Right? So there's hopelessness because you can't control the action, or the outcome, sorry. But there's another layer of hopelessness. Because you don't have faith in yourself. Right, so what's daunting about it? You're saying it's daunting because it's like so much work. That's only daunting, like when I, I have an eight-year-old daughter. So when my eight-year-old daughter tries to take a 50-pound suitcase up the stairs, it's daunting. But that's because she doesn't have the capability. So as you start living like this, you start to realize, okay, what is my true capability? When you face a daunting task

• 2:32:01Speaker 03

  that you feel is impossible and you even get 25% of the way there, holy shit, what it will do for your confidence.

• 2:32:12Speaker 03

  Right? Did I get what I wanted? No, but I got way further than I thought I would. In the moment that you realize, holy crap, my understanding of my capabilities is wrong. My understanding of my capabilities comes from which part of the mind?

• 2:32:32Speaker 06

  A humkar?

• 2:32:33Speaker 03

  There we go.

• 2:32:36Speaker 03

  So here I am at work, oh my God, I'm not going to get promoted. I take this dissociative agent and now I'm not worried about it anymore. I'm going to just do my best.

• 2:32:47Speaker 03

  Right? So easy. Once we let go of that ego, what am I capable of? Nothing. I showed up today. How is this podcast going to be? I have no idea. I'm just going to show up and do my best. Is it going to be good? Is it going to be bad? I had no idea what y'all would really like to sit with.

• 2:33:05Speaker 03

  First sentence out of y'all's mouth. Let's fix his anger, fix your anxiety and fix his autism. Holy shit. In two hours?

• 2:33:15Speaker 03

  That's daunting. That sounds daunting. What am I going to do about it? Let's get started. Yeah. How do you think we did?

• 2:33:24Speaker 06

  Fantastic.

• 2:33:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. Interesting.

• 2:33:27Speaker 03

  Did I know that this was going to work? Did I know? Did I prepare? No. The irony is, I did prepare, but for a lot of things we didn't talk about.

• 2:33:38Speaker 06

  Dr. Granogia, this was awesome. We would love to have you back. You are great. Do you want to plug anything? Obviously, there's a book, How to Raise a Healthy Gamer. We got to talk more about gaming and just fixing the youth. I feel like you fixed me, but let's fix the youth, too. No, part two, Andrew will be here. He has a lot to fix.

• 2:33:55Speaker 03

  Looking forward to it.

• 2:33:56Speaker 06

  Thank you so much, man.

• 2:33:57Speaker 03

  Thanks a lot, man.

• 2:33:58Speaker 06

  Thank you, brother. Thank you so much. Check them out, Healthy Gamer GG. Guys, thank y'all. See y'all next week. God bless.

• 2:34:06Speaker 07

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