#1007 - Dr K HealthyGamer - The Toxic Fuel That’s Destroying Your Motivation

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Talk to me about toxic fuel.

So if we look at motivation, a lot of the way that we motivate ourselves is using certain emotions, certain ideas of who we want to be.

Like,

I suck and

I don't want to suck.

I need to be better.

So I'll motivate myself using.

toxic fuel.

So these are motivators that will actually get you from point A to point B or maybe even point Z, but will cost you a lot in the process.

So a good example of toxic fuel is I want to live up to the expectations that people place on me.

Another excellent toxic fuel is anger.

So a lot of people will feel really motivated when they're angry.

And then if the anger goes away, then their motivation declines.

And so you're sort of stuck in this situation where the things that you need to motivate you are things that will cost you a lot in the process.

And the main reason that we sort of do that is because the sources of toxic fuel tend to be, neurologically speaking, the most powerful motivators.

So if we look at like anger, right?

Anger is a core survival mechanism.

Even things like fear, people will be motivated by fear all the time that they don't really connect these dots.

But if I think about, I don't want people to be disappointed in me, I don't want to screw up.

right so if you if you have those kinds of thoughts i see this all the time in in the medical students that i work with because they're very high in neuroticism.

They don't want to fail tests.

So that fear pushes them to stay in the library on Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night for a test on Monday.

So it gets the job done, neurologically really, really potent, but wires your motivational system in a way that will burn you out.

Why?

Why, why does it burn you out?

Yes.

Because if you sort of look at the cost, right?

So if I'm utilizing anger or fear to motivate myself, I may do the job.

So I may sort of end up on Monday morning with a prepared for a test.

But if you look at the effect on my physiology, it's drastic.

My cortisol levels are through the roof.

My adrenaline levels are through the roof.

My reticular activating system, which is like this part in the back of your brain.

Threat, threat.

Yeah.

And also wakefulness, wakefulness, wakefulness.

Like we're in danger.

We don't get a good night's sleep.

We don't want a good night's sleep.

We need to be able to wake up very, very easily.

So I think when people utilize toxic fuel, it tends to run them ragged.

I think also they tend to be very unhappy.

So here's the other problem.

So if I am motivated by fear to get an A on a test, I bounce between terrified and relief, right?

I'm moving from negative 100 back to zero.

Now the test is over.

Phew.

I feel relief.

I feel a loss of the pressure, but I don't feel grateful.

I don't feel happy.

I don't feel content.

In fact, the first thing that'll happen is I'll thank God I have a break.

When the next test rolls around, I'm going to have to do this all over again.

Yep.

What's a healthier way to look at this?

That is a long question.

It's not a simple question, but I would say setting up,

there's a couple ways to look at it.

So one is like a more scientific approach.

One is a more spiritual approach.

I'm actually going to start with the spiritual because I think that works really, really well.

Are you going to use the accent?

I can if you want me to.

Not yet.

Okay.

Early on.

Yeah,

I'll whip it out at the appropriate time.

Okay, cool.

Very good.

And then we can do the Texan.

I feel on edge that it's we can do the Texan one too.

We can do Texan or we got a couple, you know.

I was born and raised in Texas.

So

we'll, we'll try to use both of them.

Cool.

And then I have a series that will probably get me canceled if I do them.

So we're going to steer clear of those.

Unbelievable.

So let's start with the spiritual perspective.

So a lot of people are motivated based on their ego or a humgar is the Sanskrit word.

So your ego is the part of you that sort of says, I am whatever.

Like I'm a man, I'm a doctor, I trained at Harvard, I did all these things, right?

So they're parts of your, the identity that you can represent to other people.

So I want to be number one, I want to be the best, I want to be noticed, I want to be loved, right?

Those, those are all, or actually I want to be loved is a little bit different, but I want to be the best.

I want to be lovable.

These are all things that you want to be.

So anytime,

and this is good because in the West, you know, we'll sort of like praise these things.

So we'll say like, you know, if you want to be the best, you should be the best.

You should work really hard.

You know, try to be exceptional.

Try to be an entrepreneur.

Try to be a billionaire.

You know, strive for all of these things.

And I've worked with people across the spectrum from, you know, 25-year-old broke people living in their mom's basement to billionaires, founders, et cetera.

And the reason that the very successful people come to me is because they're not happy.

So you can use toxic fuel to achieve things,

but the price that you will pay will likely be your peace and your happiness.

And this is why it's so hard for people because they think, okay, if I don't have ambition, if I don't strive to be something, how am I supposed to motivate myself?

And there's a whole different system of motivation that we can talk about in a second.

But I think the key thing here is that as long as you're trying to achieve something for the ego, the ego is never satisfied.

So even if you become, I remember hearing the story about when Michael Phelps won his first gold medal, he became very intensely suicidal.

I don't know if it was true or not.

But I think if you sort of think about it, when you think, okay, now I've made it.

But if someone in the audience has made it before, what happens when you wake up the next day?

Did you see that Scott Scheiffler video?

He's a golfer.

You would adore this.

So this guy finally wins the big competition in golf that he's working toward.

And it's the press conference.

It's the press conference of the victory.

And he basically says,

I've worked my entire life for this one moment.

And at some point this evening, we're going to have to take the trash out.

And there needs to be a decision made about whether the kids' snappies are going to be changed.

And he completely breaks the illusion of success.

It's like, don't get me wrong.

Like, I do want this to happen and I care about what it is that I do.

But it's fleeting and I don't really know if it's all that worth it, to be honest.

There's a lot of costs that I pay.

And this is is the guy like in, he's on the, essentially on the podium talking about this.

So yeah, gold medalist syndrome is, is

real.

Yeah.

Right.

And it's just the nature of the ego.

So once I am number one, I wake up the next day and I'm terrified that somebody else is going to be number one, right?

If what has been motivating me is the desire to be number one, that is a motivation, motivational system that I have wired and rewired and wired again and again and again and again.

Every day I wake up, I want to be number one.

That is going to make changes in my brain to value being number one.

And then the moment I become number one, all of that motivational system to be number one, stay number one stays with you.

And then we get to the inevitable problem of, you know, staying at number one means continuing to accelerate because people are behind you, people are catching up, people will outshine you.

And so chasing someone else feels much safer than being chased.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, there's this lovely idea, I guess, that the higher that you climb, for some people, this is a better view, so to speak.

It means that more people respect me, that I get more opportunities, so on and so forth.

But the other side of that is that it's further to fall, right?

And that people are more sensitive.

Yeah.

And I think if you look at a lot of people, I mean, I try my best not to talk about people, so I'm not going to name names.

But, you know, I think if you look at a lot of very successful people,

Do they seem happy?

Do they seem content?

Or do they seem terrified of losing their spot?

Right.

So I think this is the kind of thing where it's like, we'll fall into this ego.

We're trying to be something.

And then oftentimes the ego, the nature of the ego is that it'll move the goalposts on you.

Right.

So I see this all the time in the people that I work with in finance where,

you know, when you get promoted, you need to get promoted again.

And then you need to get promoted again.

You're harder, harder, harder each time.

Absolutely.

Right.

And so

that's really challenging.

And so from a spiritual perspective, what we really want to do is eliminate the ego or reduce the ego, make the ego at a minimum controllable.

And the really interesting thing is that people may think, okay, if I reduce my ego, will I become apathetic?

Because all we know is like the spectrum of ambition on one side and apathy on the other side.

But the whole point of like meditative practice is that we're moving like along a dimension that we're not really aware of.

And that dimension can include a lot of different things.

Like service is a big one.

Another thing is to understand your dharma or your duty in life, your kharma, like what is your karma?

It's funny.

I went to the University of Texas and I was walking around on the campus.

My brother teaches there.

So I went to see his lecture, which was phenomenal.

And I was just walking around the campus and I got stopped by like three people.

And they're like, oh, hey, are you Dr.

K?

And then I kind of sat down and I talked to them.

And two of them were like, within 90 seconds, they were like, here is my big problem in life.

And so as I sort of sit down and then they're kind of surprised, right?

Because like they've been watching the YouTube channel for a while and you're just walking down the street and like this wild Dr.

K shows up.

And so that's something that on one level, if we're not careful, goes to ego.

But really when I sit with these people, these random people on the street, I don't even know if I'll remember their name.

I'll remember their story for sure, like tomorrow or the next day.

But that's like my job.

That's my dharma.

That's my duty.

So it sort of demands the best of me.

And it's not about me being great.

It's about me doing this service to other people.

And what we actually find from studies on the dissolution of ego.

So if you look at things like psychedelics, I think is one of the best sources of scientific data on this.

When people have ego death experiences using psychedelics, When people have ego death experiences through meditative practice, it tends to improve their work ethic, tends to improve their motivation.

They get super tied to intrinsic motivation, which we can talk about.

There's a bunch of fascinating science there.

But if you sort of think about ambition and ego, those are extrinsic motivators, which is another problem because if you sort of think about it, your motivation is determined by the world around you.

So when you're number one, if there's no one right at your heels, then you may coast for a while.

But then if someone starts catching up, then you're like panicking and you start running really fast.

It's a way to to feel really out of control in life.

I know I said a lot, so I'll pause.

No, dude, it's great.

I certainly think

the sensitivity to trajectory,

where was I one year ago and where am I now?

And am I moving in the right direction?

Is

very, very pernicious.

It's punitive

in a way that

a lot of people feel super acutely.

As well, I suppose

the interesting thing when people start on their journey, and I wonder whether this is

a mistake that gets made in advice giving online,

when people begin, they tend to have a lot more fear, resentment, shame, bitterness,

the need for validation.

And I think, at least in my

opinion, you need to work through some of that.

I think it's important to prove to yourself that you can do a thing in the world.

And maybe you do need to feel like, well, I have got a bit of status.

People do respect me.

People respect me for the work that I do.

And like, I'll get on to the like telec or atelic as opposed to exotelic like stuff in a little while.

So when people start, it's so difficult to begin doing anything, especially something that's a big project.

I think using whatever motivation you've got is maybe not bad to get you off the launch pad, right?

The first few inches, like use the chip on your shoulder from the kids in school, use the whatever it might be.

It's a great, great point.

And there's so much to say.

Wow.

I love talking with you, Chris.

So first of all, I completely agree.

So if we look at, there's so many interesting examples of this.

So if we look at like what's going on, you know, everyone's wondering, why are men so angry?

You know, so if you sort of think about it, we live in a society where if you're struggling, right?

So a normal human being, when they struggle,

they will express sadness.

They'll do something like cry, right?

So, if you sort of look at it from an evolutionary perspective,

sadness in crying is the highest

signal emotion.

Like, if you see someone crying, you can tell immediately that they're crying.

They're shaking, they're sobbing, they're emitting noises.

Dude, I read the best article on crying a couple of weeks ago.

It's fucking amazing.

What was in it?

It was

an, it was actually a study.

Um, it was looking at the adaptive explanation from an evolutionary perspective on why crying works.

It's a bunch of interesting things I never thought of before.

Crying is very fast onset and offset, which is kind of unique for an emotion.

Once you start crying, you have really begun.

And once you stop crying, you've really stopped.

That's not the same as something like anger or depression or anxiety, which is sort of more a wide, long bell curve.

It

is a costly signal because we understand how important vision is.

And if you've got water in your eyes, you can't really be doing much else at the same time.

So very few people would choose to do this because it makes you unbelievably vulnerable.

It's also happening on the face,

which means that it's

through the eyes as well.

So it's this signal.

But that's not like crying is.

The reason that we can create water out of our eyes is not to cry.

Right.

The reason that we have water in our eyes is to keep our eyes liberated.

But it seems that we have kind of reverse, our emotions have reverse engineered this particular type of system that already existed to now be used to express emotion in a particular way.

Absolutely.

Right.

So the human body is going to use whatever it has to accomplish whatever it needs to accomplish.

And you're spot on about, you know, the display of crying.

And you sort of talk about this, you know, your eyes, when you're watering, you're incredibly vulnerable from predators and things like that.

And even if you think about the subjective feeling when you cry, it's intense vulnerability.

We want to do it in private.

We don't want other people to see.

So there's both a very, it sounds like an evolutionary vulnerability.

I hadn't really thought about that,

as well as a very subjective feeling, which kind of lines up because usually we feel

our subjective experience mirrors what we're designed to do.

Exactly.

And so if you look at crying, it's like, it's this display for help, right?

So if you kind of think about like, even when a child, when you have a child, when you have a newborn, the parents, their sensory processing system will adapt to where you can hear your child crying from like a far distance away.

Oh, you've got super ears.

You have super ears.

And the interesting thing is, even if you're a parent, like even now when I'm at the playground.

I can tell when kids are in danger and when they're upset.

Like even if there's like 40 kids on the playground, my brain just sees that information.

And so it kind of gets rewired.

It's really interesting.

The problem is that we live in a society where generally speaking, the systemic problems that men face don't have systemic solutions.

So

men are generally speaking the one class of people that if you're a man and you have a problem, the most common answer that you get is you need to fix it yourself.

So when displays, so crying and sadness are basically signals to the people around you that you need help.

So even if you think about the subjective experience of being sad, you don't feel motivated at all, right?

When you cry, like it's going to be really frustrating when people start engaging in like pathologic crying, but because the people around them are trying to help them, trying to help them, trying to help them.

They don't seem motivated at all.

So something really interesting happens, and I see this a lot with the men that I work with, is that when you signal distress

and

people don't respond, now your brain has an interesting challenge.

So now, okay, I'm struggling.

This is not working.

I'm not motivated to fix this problem.

What can I do?

So what it does is transmutes sadness, despair into anger.

Because anger is a very motivating emotion.

So if you like stand up and you smack me across the face and I get angry, I'm prone to fight back.

Anger was, I want to defend my territory.

I want to protect myself.

I want to set things right.

And so I think what we're seeing is that since there's no space for male sadness, we are seeing an inner alchemy to turn it into anger.

And anytime I work with men, they're one of two things that I look for.

One is if they feel a ton of anger, what other emotion is underneath?

So a great example of this is, you know, maybe I'm just thinking about my college days because I was on campus today, but

when I was, when I was like a, a freshman in college, right?

Like my friends and I, like, I like this girl.

And then I ask her out on a date and then she'd say no.

And then I'd feel ashamed and rejected.

And me and my boys would start like this egotistical, like, oh, she doesn't deserve it.

Like, you deserve better.

Like, you were doing her a favor.

All this kind of machismo about, like, we're going to take that sadness and feeling of shame and rejection and we're going to bury it.

We'll also see stuff like, I'm going to show her.

I'm going to get swole.

I'm going to get successful.

And then she's going to regret it.

Right.

So if we really look at that, that's like, I'm ashamed.

I'm less than, I'm rejected.

I'm going going to turn anger into growth progress achievement yep right yep so anytime people are really really angry i think the biggest mistake that they make is they're like okay how do i be less angry that's not actually i mean it can be the right move and anger management is effective but usually what i'll do is okay what are you sad about what are you ashamed about

And as we deal with that, that's another source of almost toxic fuel because you can try to treat the anger on the surface, but as long as that shame is down there, creating the anger up above won't work.

Really interesting thing is it goes both ways.

So Freud said that depression is anger turned against the self.

So we see depression in cases where I can't afford to be angry at the people around me.

I can't afford to be angry at my parents.

Victor Frankl did some really cool work when he was, you know, with Holocaust survivors and things like that, where he sort of noticed that you can't get angry at the prison guards.

And so what do people do?

So if you, if you feel like I want to fight back because the prison guards are being abusive towards me, instead, my brain is going to realize, let's do despair.

Because when we do despair, then we don't have to move.

We're not motivated.

We don't feel like doing anything.

We're in another coping mechanism.

Absolutely.

I can either enforce my boundaries on the world or I can enforce boundaries on my own.

Yeah, I can try to artificially restrict myself.

And so, when people are really sad and when I work with people who are depressed, what are you angry about?

And when I work with people who are really angry, what are you ashamed of?

What are you guilty of?

What are you afraid of?

Wow.

That's so fascinating.

so interesting man yeah i uh

i certainly see the world as kind of being split into

broadly two groups of people those who get mad and those who get sad mad angry at the world sad angry at myself like this is my fault i should better i need to do this i would put myself in that category and then angry the interesting thing is

the angry camp is uh

It's more obvious about where the damage is done because it's kind of loud.

It's out there in the world.

It's the antisocial behavior.

It's the push over granny, set cars on fire type of behavior.

But the turned inward toward the self is one that's really destructive too.

It just happens in private a lot more.

Absolutely.

Right.

So, I mean, I think that's why we have like an epidemic of suicide.

So, I mean, we see it.

We see the effects of it, right?

So we'll say, oh, it was a real tragedy.

They struggled with depression.

But we don't, we don't see

you're spot on that.

We don't see the damage.

The really interesting thing is it's not clear to me that one is worse than the other.

I think you're you're spot on that one is more visible.

And that's a big problem because

I think, you know, men have been struggling for decades.

And now we're sort of hitting this terminal stage of like anger towards the world because nothing else seems to be working.

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It's an interesting one.

I've got an idea.

Have I told you the male sedation hypothesis?

Yeah.

Giving you this.

Okay.

You know what young male syndrome is?

Okay.

Throughout history, if you have a surplus of sexless men, especially reproductive age sexless men,

and they are unpartnered, they tend to cause problems.

They are societal disruption.

They set cars on fire and push over granny.

They get together in mobs and try to cause uprisings and such.

It's called young male syndrome.

It's pretty well studied throughout history.

And you can look at a ton of societies if they have had an imbalanced sex ratio that skews male.

Really not good.

This happened in Portugal, 1800s.

The first sons were allowed to get married.

Subsequent sons were permitted to go on galleon ships to explore the new world, i.e.

exported from the country so that they would not stick about, be disruptive, and cause issues.

Interesting.

The question that I have is, where is all of the incel violence at?

Given that we are living in a society which has the highest rates of sexlessness and uncoupledness, especially among reproductive age young men, we should see an in-kind rise in young male syndrome.

This should be lots of antisocial behavior.

This should be, this is not a request, this is not a demand.

There should be more school shootings than there are.

There should be more mass spree killers from dejected, rejected young men.

And the question is, why is young male syndrome not manifesting in the manner that we may have thought it would have done, specifically in groups as well, like getting together, causing

political uprisings, pushbacks and stuff like that.

My belief is that men are being sedated out of their status-seeking and reproductive seeking behavior through screens, porn, and video games, that they're getting a titrated dose of what they would have needed to get from the real world previously.

And it's not enough.

to make them satisfied and happy in life, but it is enough to sedate them out of going to seek that in the real world.

So porn is a titrated dose of sexual satisfaction.

Screens are a titrated dose of what coalitional behavior might be like.

Video games are a titrated dose of what status-seeking behavior might be like, also a bit coalitional too.

And I think that men are sedated out of what would have ancestrally been a huge issue.

We've created a generation of men who are no longer that dangerous, but are largely useless.

And it's like 51, 49 that you would probably prefer useless men to dangerous men.

And the only reason that you prefer it that way is because it's times of peace.

But if you ever need those guys to actually be useful, you're fucked.

So yeah, male sedation hypothesis.

Is that your hypothesis?

I love it.

So I think there's a lot there that I would totally hop on board with.

I like the way that you spoke about the titrated dose of pornography video games.

And

screen music.

Yeah.

Right.

So, and I think it's, it's lovely how you connected each of those technologies with the specific effects that they have.

So, you know, titrated dose of sexual gratification, some sense of community, which we absolutely get, get through things like Twitch and Discord.

And then video games give us a sense of achievement, agency, power, identity.

And so it's really interesting because I love hearing that from you.

And this is why I respect you so much, because in my case, I studied this stuff for years and years and years and years.

And I know you've basically almost done the same.

And then I wrote a book about it to help their parents, help parents of today's generation

understand why kids are addicted to video games and understand these precise things.

That if you understand why people are addicted to this stuff, then you can satisfy them.

What are they getting out of it?

You can give them that alternatively.

And then the gaming behavior actually collapses.

Wonderful question that people can ask themselves.

I learned this from Rick Hansen.

He did this podcast about rumination.

And he asked this question.

He said, what are you getting out of your rumination?

And it just hit me like a ton of bricks.

I was like, that's such a fucking great question.

It's like, you are getting something out of it.

Oh, absolutely.

You are getting something out of your

obsessiveness, of your thought loops, of your depression, of your anxiety.

And, you know, from rumination, maybe

it gives you a sense of control that you don't feel like you have in your actual life, or it satisfies your desire to reduce uncertainty.

That if I can think about this thing enough, then I can collapse the different ways that the future world may go.

And asking yourself this, too.

What is it?

He doesn't want to spend all of his time indoors playing video games.

Well, he kind of does.

Yeah.

He kind of does, even if it's not what's best for him, right?

Yeah.

So I think that this is where, I mean, it's, it's a great, man, so, so much stuff to talk about.

So he doesn't want to X, Y, Z.

So I think we oftentimes, when we're looking at another human's behavior, we forget that there's a lot of different layers there, right?

His nucleus accumbens, the dopaminergic circuitry may want to play video games, but there are other parts of his brain, the social emotions may feel pride, may feel shame.

His frontal lobes and the parts of his brain that calculate his trajectory, right?

We're very sensitive to

trajectory.

They may see that, I mean, that's what I experienced.

So like I was failing, skipping all my classes every single day and just saw that my life was like moving in the wrong direction.

And this is the big paradox of addiction is that as your life starts to fall apart, you become more dependent on that thing

to soothe you.

Do you watch the Charlie Sheen documentary on Netflix?

Dude, it is a tour de force.

You need to watch this thing.

I mean, Charlie Sheen is,

you know, he's a super addicted actor, like smoked crack cocaine, turned a blade on set.

It was a total nightmare to work with.

He said his life was split up into three sections.

There was partying, partying with problems and just problems.

And that was his life.

And he basically, you can see that pattern that you just said.

It's exact, it's precisely that.

Yeah, I'm going to have to check it out.

It's worth like 20 videos of analysis.

So I think it'd be super cool to hear your take on it.

But he basically, yeah, as he spirals more and more, as he,

there's this weird, like symbiotic relationship between his spiral, his drugs, his work, and the loss of control of his work.

And then, yeah, the consequences, somehow he has this, like, he's touched by, the man is fucking touched somehow he is able to just weave his way every time he fucks up he comes out the other side and things get better every time he fucks up he just misses this he's like the luckiest guy in history and um it basically taught him that there was that consequences didn't exist in in some sort of a way and as a drug addict that's really that's a really really bad lesson uh

yeah he's not the only one i mean i i think i think there are a lot of people who

have been protected from the consequences of their actions

And what it gives people a sense of, I've worked with some people like this, oftentimes people become really successful,

is that,

you know, since if everything works out, then you start to become infallible.

And, right, because the decision that you made is the right decision.

And I mean, I think in Charlie Sheen's case, I'm guessing there is enough, it sounds like there's enough self-awareness.

and suffering that kind of helps him understand what his path is like.

But for some people, there isn't that, especially depending on how psychologically defended they are.

Right.

So if you're projecting a lot, if you're displacing a lot, if you're quite narcissistic, then you will really think that everyone else is terrible.

And that since you end up on your feet, that you made the right choice.

You've got this sort of Midas touch

thing.

So just to round out that toxic fuel

talking point there,

what I'm interested in, is switching fuel sources.

So I've had this analogy in my mind for ages.

I wonder if you think that this is cool.

So you remember the old-style rockets that used to take shit into space and before we had Falcon 9 stuff, and there would be the launch rocket, big, big guy in the middle.

And then once you got off the launch pad, you got to a certain altitude, and then they would switch to the booster rockets that were the ones on the sides.

And then once it got to an even higher altitude, then those would fall away.

Typically, those are those epic shots of the two things falling off the side.

And then there's another.

And what I've been kind of fascinated by is different fuel sources at different altitudes of your journey.

And thinking about toxic fuel in the beginning, get you off the launch pad, resentment, bitterness, anxiety, chip on your shoulder, depression, need for validation, social recognition, get the girl, get Jack, do the thing.

It's like,

okay.

But what I'm particularly fascinated in is that timeline of trajectory of switching from toxic fuel to like EV.

So it beautiful.

Yeah.

So there are so much to say.

So let's start with science and then we'll move a little bit to spirituality.

So

if we look at a human being who is despairing, sad, et cetera, oftentimes they need ego and they need anger to move forward.

So depression, I mean, anger can get you out of depression.

Because they're so ossified.

They're so sort of stuck.

Well, so, so usually what happens is if we look at depression, anger is turned against the self.

And so if you're beating yourself up, that's not going to motivate you.

Well, actually, it can motivate you to do a lot, right?

So if I look at myself in the mirror and I think to myself, oh, this guy is pathetic, then I can go to the gym.

I can do all kinds of things to start to feel better, or you can get angry at other people.

But generally speaking, we know that activating anger or redirecting anger can lift you out of depression.

So oftentimes with my patients, like I said, if they come in depressed, I'll look for the anger.

Where is the anger wanting to go?

And you can sort of activate that anger.

And it is toxic fuel.

It kind of gets you from point A to point B, let's say.

Then what happens is, I like the way that you're thinking about the booster rockets, because I think we sometimes think about motivation as if it's one thing.

But motivation actually has its own developmental trajectory.

So if you look at, I think something like there was a study on LinkedIn that showed that 70% of people under the age of 30 feel like they're going through a quarter life crisis.

So if you, if you you just talk to like people in their 20s, they're not going to know what to do.

They're sort of like in some career, but they're not sure.

There's this existential threat of AI.

So we used to see a lot more midlife crises and we're starting to see a lot more quarter life crises.

I think I had two in my 20s.

Very well.

What happened to you?

I had one when I left university.

Okay.

You know, I was in full-time education for 18 years.

I did five years at uni, two degrees plus a placement years.

I was there for a long time until I was 23.

And then you just sort of get

spat out into the world and you're off these rails i knew where i needed to be at what time i had a trajectory and then

i have to define my life for myself that was a small one and then i had a much bigger one at sort of 28 29 where i realized that i probably wasn't being the person I was supposed to be.

I was running this big events company, nightlife stuff.

Everybody in this city of a million people knew who I was.

I'd stood on the front door.

I was, you know, like, I'd completed it.

I'd achieved success in a lot of the ways that society tells a young man that he should do, like

local fame, status, some financial freedom, goals, all of the things.

Like, you're the guy, you're the fuck, you're the guy.

You're the guy that runs the parties.

And I found myself increasingly leaving the front door of a thousand-person party to sit in my car across the street and watch school of life videos from Alander Boton explaining emotions jammed into my car steering wheel with the window open in case someone needed something from me.

We had a team of people that was running it, and I was like,

I think there's, I think there's something up here.

If I'm leaving the party to go and if I'm leaving that thing to come and do this thing, maybe there's something in this thing.

And that was kind of the initial genesis of me doing the self-discovery podcasty thing.

Do you remember how you felt?

Displaced.

Okay.

Uncertain.

Hopeful.

Okay.

like ex a bit exhilarated, actually, to be honest.

What did you do next?

Uh

a really complex morning routine for five years, like a really long

were you still an events planner or organizer?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I was still doing that, but I was starting to work this in more and more.

And then COVID happened and shut down all nightclubs, which was great for me.

So I started journaling, meditating, doing breathwork every day, yin yoga on a morning,

morning walks, reading, trying to read.

The first few times I sat down to read, like my body was doing this because I was just so used to the level of

hyper-arousal, I guess, from a phone that was bings and bongs and messages.

I'm like, this page doesn't even fucking move.

Like, I've got to turn it myself.

Yeah.

So, what's really interesting is your story maps onto the research like close to one-to-one.

So, this is what's really fascinating.

So, if we look at our motivational structure,

when we're kids, we actually don't have any internal sense of self.

So if you really look at it, kids are so free.

Why are they so free?

Because they're not worried about judgment.

They don't even have really self-awareness of like who I am.

They're just impulses.

And then what happens is the society around them is conditioning them, socializing them.

This is right, this is wrong.

Sit in your chair, study for your test, put your plate away, you know, make sure you hang your towel up after you shower.

So you're sort of, you get all of these influences from the outside telling you what to do.

And And then if you look at a child's brain, it's very responsive to feedback.

So if everyone says good job, you feel really, really great.

And if everyone says bad job, we see this with trauma.

That shapes you as well.

So our motivational structure when we're children and teenagers.

basically is to make the people around us happy.

That's why teenagers are so vulnerable to peer pressure because we become acutely aware that people are judging us.

It's really being a teenager is so terrifying because if you kind of think about it, you didn't realize that like when you're a five, you don't realize that people are going to judge you and will have these lasting judgments.

What I do today is going to determine how they treat me a month from now.

So the second that we hit puberty, our brain starts to change.

Those kinds of circuits in our brain start to develop.

We become hyper-aware of this.

So the first phase of our life is exactly what you said.

Like, I want to make it.

I want to be, I want to get the girls.

I want to make money.

I want to be famous.

We tend to be very externally oriented.

Then one of two things happens.

Either you kind of trundle along and sometimes things are okay for people, but the quarter life crisis is characterized by starting off by feeling like you don't belong in this life that you have created and tried to create.

You wake up one day and you're like, I wanted to be a doctor my whole life.

Now I'm in med school and I'm thinking about getting an MBA.

Like, so something doesn't feel right to you internally.

The really fascinating thing is that the second stage of resolving this is physical or mental separation from your old environment.

So it's so funny because when I work with people, like I went all the way to India to leave this environment, I traveled halfway across the world.

I came to the U.S.

You came to the U.S.

You also sat in your car when this other thing was going on.

So it doesn't have to be like a great amount of distance.

Oftentimes what people will experience is mentally checking out.

And this is where they make a huge mistake because this moment you mentally check out, you think to yourself, oh my god, how do I check back in?

How do I check back in?

How do I become productive?

How do I become passionate again?

I used to want to grind and be the best, but now I'm 26 years old and I just don't have that energy anymore.

Yep.

Mentally checking out is a necessary step to finding yourself.

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You know what's fascinating about that?

Yeah.

I learned about leverage from Naval Ravikant, that there are certain things that have, if you apply a little bit of effort to them, they give you an outsized return.

Leverage.

I got toward the end of my 20s,

about the time that I started the show, which is when I was 30,

and I learned about leverage from Naval, and I was so wistful.

I was very disappointed in myself that I had deployed like an unbelievable amount of dedication and effort to this industry and had become, you know, one of the biggest events companies in the north of the UK, maybe in the entire UK, voodoo events.

And that I'd done it.

in an industry that had basically no leverage.

The leverage was one-to-one.

You can't make the market any bigger.

There's a million people in the city, maybe 50,000 people in the age bracket on any one night.

There's 10,000 that are out.

It's a very small pie, and there's no way that you can lever that any higher.

I can't pick my event up and move it to Carlisle.

In Carlisle, there's a Chris Williamson doing exactly what I did.

Fuck you.

I know all of the people are here.

There was no leverage at all.

And I remember thinking,

I've like

I've spent that fuel.

I've blown my load prematurely in an industry that was wrong.

And then that exact same

force of nature, like make a dent in the world energy, came straight back around once the podcast became like a routine part of my life.

And I just did the same thing again after a lull in between.

Yeah, so I'm conflicted because I want to speak to that and I want to finish what I was saying.

So I'm going to speak to that first.

If that's okay, how do you understand that?

There's an interesting intersection between passion

and

opportunity.

Say more.

That

I still had lots of opportunity in the world of nightlife, but I'd spent my passion for that and I wasn't that keen on doing it anymore.

Then I had

passion for a thing, which was like learning self-development, emotions, understand yourself and the world around you, but I didn't have an opportunity.

Like I could deploy it into this thing, but it was like the project wasn't big enough.

It didn't have enough momentum.

And I didn't understand, I didn't have enough mastery to really be able to get it going.

And then, after a little bit more time in the podcast, I was able to put the passion that I wanted, and I had the opportunity to be able to sort of force that forward.

How do you understand that on like a metaphysical level?

Alignment, or is that being true to myself?

Uh,

understanding that

playing a role uh a persona um

even if it gives you objective metrics of success subjectively leaves you feeling very hollow okay so let's i think this is a beautiful example so

one of the biggest mistakes that i see people make is they have this internal

calling And I use that term carefully because it tends to have certain associations that are kind of woo-woo, and I want those.

So you have a calling,

and

then you had this conversation with Naval, and he talks to you about leverage.

And you look at your situation and you say, damn it, if only I had blown my load in an industry where there was leverage, if only I had blown my load in a thing where I could do something and continue to grow upward.

If that was a possibility,

worst mistake of your life.

Getting what you wanted in that moment, terrible.

You get what I'm saying?

So if you had the option, if in Carlisle there wasn't another Chris Williamson, and then you could have gone to Carlisle, and then you could have had a million people there, and then you could have expanded somewhere else, and you could have expanded somewhere else, you would not be here.

So one of the biggest challenges that I have when I sit with people is to try to help them understand that when you have a drive in here, your mind, based on your socialization and your conditioning, will want to express this thing in here in a certain way outside of you.

I want to do more.

I want to enhance my leverage.

I want to reach more people.

That is like an intrinsic sort of desire that you automatically apply to your current industry.

Huge mistake.

30 to 40% of my patients make a career change within 18 months of stepping into my office.

So I was really concerned that I'm like biasing them in some way.

I don't really think so.

So I liberating them in some way, yes.

Not liberating.

So I was concerned about the opposite.

That my,

I think what I am doing is liberating them.

Yes, yes, yes.

But what I was worried about, because you got to be careful, right?

So like maybe I'm like indoctrinating them.

Yeah.

Right.

So, oh, your job is bad.

Go find another job.

Go find another, right?

So you got to be careful.

So I sought a lot of supervision.

And I think what I'm doing is liberating.

It's a strong word, but, right?

So helping them understand that this fuel that you have, this passion that you have, doesn't have to manifest in this industry based on your past history.

Perfect.

That this thing in here is actually supposed to, and I use that in a woo-woo invoking way.

You know, I recognize that is like, cause I hear stories like this and

is supposed, like you were supposed to do something else.

That career was supposed to fail.

That was part of your developmental trajectory.

And when everyone is focused on the end goal, when everyone is sort of focused on external status or whatever, whatever, right?

When you're thinking about the next promotion, the next promotion and the next promotion, you've sort of boarded this train from the place that you were, which is going in a completely direction from where you really want to go.

So, and this is what's really hard for people.

I think

some of the best decisions that you can make in life are terrible decisions.

So my life, my story of success is a series of bad decision after bad decision after bad decision.

I spent seven years studying to become a monk and then I was like, you know what?

I like my wife.

I'm not a huge fan of celibacy.

I mean, she wasn't my wife at that point, right?

But I was like, I trained for seven years and I was going to throw it all away for like a girl.

You know, that's, that's a bad idea.

Like, you're throwing it all away.

And then I went to med school and I did all this alternative medicine stuff.

And at the 11th hour in med school, I was like, instead of doing holistic oncology and curing people of cancer,

I'm going to become a psychiatrist.

And fucked it again.

Hey,

absolutely.

Right.

And I got a lot of pushback from my family.

Like, they were like, you know, like my mom was like, I mean, bless her, she's wonderful.

She's a pediatrician, but she was like, if you spend a lot of time with crazy people, you're going to become crazy.

Fair assessment.

Yeah.

Inaccurate, but sure.

And then even when I was like in academic, so, you know, being at Harvard and was developing all these meditation programs for all these different mental illnesses and things like that.

And, and then like walking away from being faculty there.

It's like people grind so hard to like go to Harvard and I'm faculty and, and had an awesome career trajectory, quit to start streaming to a couple hundred people on Twitch.

Fuck it again.

Absolutely.

Right.

And so I think this is where we get locked into this idea that, okay, I need to do this kind of thing.

But really, like, I know it sounds cheesy, but following that passion in a reasonable way, right?

Recognizing that, okay, there's like some internal part of me.

You mentioned like alignment between opportunities and passion.

And if you stay locked into your current career, there's not going to be space.

Yep.

I have so much to say about that, but I know that you want to round out the quarter life.

Yeah.

So, so, so that's where, I mean, if we, even if we look at, you know, your story and my story, there's distance.

There's physical distance or mental checking out.

And I think the biggest mistake that people make is like they force themselves to check back in.

Or they look for productivity or leverage or whatever.

How can I make this thing into what I want instead of following what I want to a completely different place?

So once you gain that distance, then you need some time to like basically

germinate.

Like you got to go into this cocoon mode for a little while.

I think some of the tools that you use are big parts of that.

There are certain things, you know, certain accelerants that you can use.

I'll talk about some of that stuff in, I made this guide to meditation where I wanted to teach people these things.

So how do you find purpose?

Where do people get that?

Healthygamer.gg, Dr.

K's guide to meditation.

But I basically sort of thought about, okay, like, what are the different tools that you need to, for this introspection?

Because this introspection, introspective stuff that you talked about, you know, doing yoga, breath work, that actually will alter your brain in certain ways, help you understand things.

So then you end up, once you know who you are, once you discover who you are, then what happens is you start to craft a life around you that is in alignment with what you are in here.

So I make a life, but I don't know who I am.

I wake up in that life, it doesn't feel like it fits.

I step out of that life, discover who I am, and then re-craft.

And that's what we see with you.

That's what we see with me.

That's what I see with the hundreds of people that I've worked with.

And that you have to go through this process.

It's developmentally appropriate to feel burnt out.

It's developmentally appropriate to struggle with productivity.

Dude, I'm so excited.

I'm like, this is right in the middle of everything I've been thinking about for the obsessed about for probably the last three years.

So

like 10 things I need to say.

First one, probably the coolest quote that came out over the last few years was the magic you are looking for is in the work you're avoiding.

And my one this year is the answers that you're looking for are in the silence you're avoiding.

And I think that that seems to be true with this.

When it comes to the physical distance, that comports perfectly with what I did.

Because I had this ridiculously elaborate morning routine that lasted like two and a half hours.

What was it?

It was isolation and monk mode.

It was me

extracting myself from what was going on.

I called it the manopause, which is this get toward the end of your 20s.

We'd love it.

And

it's so fucking sick.

There it is, right?

And it feels like funny cheat.

Anyway, I love the manopause.

Getting

like a crab that sort of grows up against its shell.

David Dada talks about this in the way of the superior man.

He says, the passions that used to light you up no longer feel exciting.

And there's this sort of weird amount of shame that goes on around that.

There's sort of a scarcity mindset.

Well, I've got it.

Like for me, you know, I knew that I probably should have left nightlife three years before I did finally.

And it was really only catalyzed by the fact that COVID came along.

COVID was the best thing that could have happened to me because it shut all of the nightclubs.

It gave me a stable sleep and wake pattern for the first time in my entire adult life.

And it taught me, oh, this is what life would be like if you weren't doing that thing.

And I preferred preferred it.

I was like, fuck.

Like, okay, this is, this is, this is definitely something that I need to pay more attention to.

But without the monk mode or monk mornings, I guess we could call it.

Without those, I would have really, I would have really struggled, I think.

And this leads on to like my favorite idea from the last couple of years, which is the lonely chapter.

So the lonely chapter being a time where you are sufficiently developed that you don't resonate with your old set of friends, but not yet sufficiently developed that you have found your new set of friends and you're in this weird liminal space in the middle.

You're sort of

floating out in space, as of yet, haven't found the people that are around you.

And to stick to the kind of altitude metaphor for today, if you can imagine that you're a rocket ship and there's other rocket ships around you and they're all moving at different velocities, and you can say that as maybe a pace of personal growth.

This isn't a comment on who's better or who's worse, that someone who grows more is inherently better than other people.

There are people who don't focus on personal growth at all, that are wonderful humans, that are way more satisfied than I am with life.

But if you have a high velocity of personal growth, i.e.

if you are changing and developing very quickly, most people are not going to be like you.

And the problem is there may be somebody that's ahead of you and you're like, oh, brilliant.

We're a friend.

Oh, fuck.

Like, I've kept going.

And we're just not asking the same sorts of questions.

I can't resonate with them in the same way anymore.

And you have this choice.

Do I want to suppress this personal growth trajectory in order to fit back in with this group to

continue going to the same places?

For me, going out partying, that was something I needed to let go of.

So I did six months sober three times and then a thousand days sober.

Not that alcohol was really a big problem for me, but it was a commitment that I made that neutered partying.

and stopped me from doing that because that was an area where I just felt out of alignment.

It was like a chord that was played and one note was out and I was that note.

Everybody else was in resonance and I was like,

oh,

this doesn't feel right.

So this,

and you're like, fuck.

Okay.

I just kind of need to float on my own for a little while.

And that is again this distance.

And I think the reason that lonely chapter thing resonated so much with a lot of people that listen to the show is that

I get the sense that podcasts like Modern Wisdom is kind of a safe harbor for people who feel like they're in the lonely chapter, that they do not have anyone around them that's into personal growth.

Their friends still want to get a bag in with the boys on a weekend.

And they're like,

I've got this meditation streak.

I'm six days in.

I really don't want to fuck it on Sunday.

Like, that would be really cool for me to keep going.

And I want to, I'm learning about all of this new stuff.

And like, I've got these dreams.

Like, I might become an artist.

Like, I might change.

I might, I might go and study film.

And no one around them resonates in that way.

So, yeah, it's a safe harbor for people going through the lonely chapter in that way.

Absolutely.

And I think that there's, once again, so much.

I think the first thing I would say is that

it can be painful, but I think we sometimes

have to leave our friends behind.

We have to leave our life behind.

And in a sense, sometimes the more you do it, right, the better off you will be.

And it's so interesting.

I used to, when I was a degenerate gamer and failing out of college and stuff like that, I had a group of friends that I used to play.

a particular video game with.

And then I sort of got my shit together and then we reconnected after 20 years.

And, you know, they're doing well in life, but I think it was just interesting that I had to leave them behind.

And I think so many people are afraid to do that, right?

There's a lot of safety because we don't want to walk through that lonely chapter.

We don't want to go through that dark night of the soul, right?

Where we are alone.

But this is what's so important is that if you want like direction in life, if you want purpose in life, you sometimes have to do that.

And there's a really interesting kind of neuroscience element to this, which is, so you kind of said the answers are in the silence.

And I think silence is something that we are sorely missing in our society.

And we see this in some elements.

So we'll, you'll look at studies that say that access to green space improves mental health.

But if you look at it, what is it about the green space?

What do people do in green space?

They tend to be a lot more introspective.

They spend time with themselves.

We have such a society that pulls our attention outside of us constantly.

We're getting notifications on our phone.

And this is where, like, unfortunately, the productivity chads, they're really fucking themselves, pardon my language.

But if you're always listening, I love modern wisdom.

I make content on the internet.

But if you're always listening to a podcast, you know, like it's fine to listen to a podcast.

I think it's great to listen to podcasts.

I listen to them every day, but I also have time with myself.

The problem is for many people, time with themselves starts with something like boredom.

When you start spending time with yourself, the first thing that you're going to feel is terrible because all of the things that you have been suppressing will come out first.

And that's because the brain has a really important bias towards the negative.

So I can eat at my favorite restaurant 30 times in a row.

If I get food poisoning once,

right?

And the reason for that is because If we bias, if things were equal, we wouldn't be alive.

Like we have to be, if there's one watering hole that we used to go to that is now infected with bacteria, bacteria, we can never go there again or we don't want to go there for a long time, right?

Learn that lesson.

Yeah.

So, so we, we really, it's careful, we have to be careful because we're biased towards the negative.

And a lot of people are searching for productivity, searching for answers, looking for things, you know, looking for distractions, looking for drugs, pornography, video games.

Take your pick.

And so when you start to spend time with yourself, which is absolutely crucial, and this is where a lot of people like, what does that mean, spend time with yourself?

So I, I mean, my favorite thing is like going for a hike and like a long hike without, I mean, you can take your phone, but don't like default to listening to anything.

And spend time with yourself, expect a lot of negativity to come up.

But as that negativity comes up, underneath it, you will hear your own voice.

You will hear, so at the beginning, you'll get all this like conditioning, but then like after that, you'll get what you really want.

And there are certain meditation practices and stuff that we do that really, one of my favorite practices is, has to do with the anahat chakra.

So that's the heart chakra, where anahat means the unstruck sound so if you sort of think about it it's kind of weird because all sound that you hear involves something touching something else

but if you meditate very very deeply on silence you will start to hear it's kind of like you kind of say there's the lonely chapter right so i i love your your imagery because there's something at the other side.

So if you listen to silence deeply enough, and by deeply enough, I'm talking probably years.

So, to have a dedicated meditative practice for years, and then a lot of people are like, Well, I ain't gonna do that.

Somewhere along the way, we started to think that 15 minutes a day for like six months is gonna be sufficient for something.

I mean, you can get mental health benefits, but if you're talking about the deeper spiritual work, like,

you know, I practiced heavily for seven years before I really started heavily mean.

I mean, asana, pranayama pratyahara, dharana, dhyan, dharana, dhyan, and then kundalini yoga,

you know, listening to lectures.

There was a period of time when I first moved to Boston and got my job as a neuroscience researcher at Harvard research assistant.

You know, I still remember I was like, I don't know anyone in Boston.

I have to meet people.

So I met a bunch of people in the first two weeks.

And then I was like, well, hold on a second.

I don't have any responsibilities here.

What if I just like meditate all the time?

So, I mean, I would have a practice where I would wake up at four o'clock every morning.

I would do meditative practice for about three hours.

Then I do my work, and then I would play Skyrim, sorry, Oblivion for a couple of hours in the afternoon, and then I would go to sleep around 6 p.m.

Wow.

And I did that for like a year.

What do you reckon your lifetime meditation count is?

Have you hit 10,000 hours, do you think?

Oh, it's got to be past that.

Wow.

Congratulations.

I don't think so.

Why?

So, so

huge mistake that I see a lot too.

See, we value hours of meditation.

That's not really a good metric.

So what a lot of people don't realize is that,

you know,

quantity of time and quality of time are two very different things.

Consider it a compliment that I assumed you won, just jacking off.

Yeah.

So, so, so, I mean, I appreciate the compliment.

I'm not trying to shut you down and I apologize for that, but I think that we have this really bad misunderstanding of meditation where we think about it like reps.

So I've worked with some people that if you meditate in the right way, you'll have profound experiences within a year if it's in your gutter mind, all that kind of stuff.

There, I mean, there's a, it's funny.

I was, um,

I'm trying to figure out, and I think I've stumbled upon the neuroscience mechanism through which spiritual experiences happen.

Okay, that's a no small claim.

I know.

It's a crazy claim.

I totally get that.

But basically, and we can go into that if you want to, but that's like one hell of a tangent.

But I recognize it's a crazy claim.

I'm not saying that it's correct, but I sort of, a couple things clicked for me.

And it comes down to the endogenous production of DMT in the brain.

And so it makes sense, right?

So like once DM, if you produce DMT, then you're going to have these kinds of experiences.

So I was trying to think about, and I was looking at all these yogic practices, these really like esoteric yogic practices that people do in in the Himalayas, where they'll have a respiratory rate of like one per hour, right?

So you'll breathe once in an hour or even longer.

And

there's a lot of science to back some of these things up.

So we know that there are some practices that you can do that will increase your body temperature by nine degrees Celsius.

So there's weird stuff, right?

So in free diving, we now know that you can breathe, you know,

so we have some evidence of this stuff.

But the key thing is the quality of meditation.

So if you can use like an app for 20 minutes every day, I've never seen anyone who's like had a spiritual awakening through using a meditation app.

That doesn't mean that they're not useful.

They're really good because they're designed to work on the neurological level, not the spiritual level.

But once you start doing some of these esoteric practices and the quality of meditation,

how checked in you are.

Right.

So one great practice that I recommend to people is, just to give people an example of this, is if you gaze at a candle for 60 seconds without blinking and then you close your eyes, you'll see an after image of the candle.

Depending on how hard you try to hold that image, it'll disappear.

And if you get distracted, it'll disappear.

So it's a really weird, kind of trippy experience, but it teaches you this very interesting level of concentration that is zero effort and full focus.

It's almost paradoxical.

And then when you meditate in that way

on certain things, so if you do ohm chanting or some other practice, but you have that frame of mind, then the quality of your meditation will be way higher.

So I think that a lot of people will think like, okay, I need to crack 10,000 hours.

I'm on a streak.

And that stuff is useful.

But,

you know, I think it's you, it's important to remember that quality matters too.

Yeah.

I think as with anything,

how you do it as well as how long you do it.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Both pretty important.

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You mentioned before, in fact, before we move on, is there anything else to say about the transitioning of fuel from one to the bottom?

Yeah, so there's one major neuroscience thing that I think is useful.

So what a lot of people, so if we look at like, you know, the developmental trajectory, people start out trying to make everybody else happy.

Oh, God.

You okay?

Got it.

It's so weird.

It was not moving at all.

I must have, I must have shaken it up, or it's just so excited by this thrilling conversation that the Newtonic just needs to come out.

Yeah.

So

one last thing that I want to say.

So if you sort of look at motivation, right?

So you started out looking for status, looking to make people happy, looking to make money.

All of those things are things outside of you.

So a lot of people struggle with because they reach this point, especially in the quarter life crisis, where they kind of feel burnt out.

They don't feel motivated to chase these things anymore.

It's not fun anymore.

And then they start to ask themselves, how do I get internally motivated?

There's all the stuff that I want to do, but how do I do this stuff?

And they really struggle because they can't seem to get internally motivated.

So here's the crazy thing.

Internal and external motivation come from basically the same part of the brain.

If that part of the brain is turned on, you're externally motivated.

And if that part of the brain is turned off, you are internally motivated.

So there's like the dorsal ACC,

and there are a couple of other parts of the brain that literally like the same circuit.

Basically, your motivation is flipped into one mode, external or internal.

And what really confuses people is that if I'm trying to make everybody happy at work and my brain is flipped into an extrinsic motivation, if the switch is flipped up, that brain, I'll bring home with me.

And so I won't feel internally motivated.

And that's why the distance becomes so important.

So you need to mentally check out.

You need to get some time and space.

You're saying that the lonely chapter is a feature, not a bug.

Absolutely.

It is part of people's developmental trajectory.

And once you are,

once you're mentally checked out, this is the other thing is people don't know what to do then, right?

We just kind of wander around.

So I think this internal practice that you did, like breath work and yoga and whatever is great.

The other thing is that there are three major things that you can do.

One is just make choices.

And it's not about making the right choice or the wrong choice.

Just make choices.

You decide in here.

It doesn't matter what you decide.

There's no right or wrong.

What you're really trying to do is activate the part of your brain that exercises agency.

And then that part of the brain, now that you're used to exercising agency, you'll start to exercise more agency in life.

So you have to use life.

Life doesn't happen to me.

Absolutely.

Second thing that you need to do is stretch your capacity.

So whatever, this is where if we look at work, what do we do?

We try to work just as hard to get what we want.

We're not actually usually actively pushing ourselves.

And so what we want to do is actively push ourselves, stretch yourself in terms of what you're capable of.

It's not about meditating 10,000 hours.

Don't focus on the goal.

Focus on the here and now.

And what more can you do today?

Can I do five minutes more of meditation?

Choices, stretching.

Yeah, choices, stretching.

And the third thing, this is the hard one, relatedness.

So you have to be your authentic self, and then people have to see you for your authentic self and ideally accept you for your authentic self.

Relatedness is a good positive feedback mechanism if you become your authentic self and it's negatively responded to, which is why the distance socially is so important because you really hold back.

Absolutely.

So this is what I love about your examples is like, we've, we know this stuff.

We've mapped out the science of how this stuff works.

I mean,

I realized this with morning walk, which is the first part of this fucking monk morning that I was doing for a very long time.

I understand monk may be a protected term for you, but at least

I found that when I woke up on the wrong side of the bed, I have a tendency toward low mood, and I certainly did throughout my 20s.

I found that when I went for a walk, I came back and I was like, I feel calmer.

It was only after

five years that I heard whatever it is, the downregulation of

fear and stress areas in the brain because of locomotion through a space that's moving past you and lateral eye movement left to right, that there's something that's happening to downregulate the amygdala firing.

I was like, oh, that's some science, but obviously the science has to be true because in my experience, it's true.

If my experience is able to

feel something, if I am able to make something happen to me, that is mechanistically occurring somewhere, which means that it should be able to be studied.

Unless I'm an N of one fucking super outlier, but I get the sense that a morning walk making me feel calm is not sufficiently outrageous that nobody else is able to feel it.

So my point being, as you've gone through all of these different things, I'm thinking in my mind, okay, so choices.

What were the choices that I made?

Well,

the manopause was actually born out of, the original term for it was the fitness menopause.

This described a time when toward the end of their 20s, guys that have done a push-pull leg split, bro lifting, I only care about the way that I look, realize that they can't bend down to tie their shoes and they get tired going up a set of stairs.

They're like, I'm approaching 30, I'm chronically aware of my own mortality, I don't recover from injuries the same way that I used to.

I probably should, you know, I'll do something different.

And you see guys get into hybrid training, running, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, yoga, CrossFit, high rocks, like, you know, they, they

adjust their training style.

And typically this moves from something which is very aesthetic,

largely done in solitude.

It is not particularly focused on health or longevity.

It's not particularly pro-social.

It's very insular.

It's very narcissistic.

There's a lot of mirrors around.

It's very isolated.

Even when you think about the way that it works within the body, it's not very global.

It's very individual movements.

And that tends to flip.

All of those things tend to be different.

It's related.

It's social.

It happens in groups.

It is global movements that occur within the body.

It's something that gets your heart rate up.

A lot of these things occur outside.

So all of these these changes happened.

And I started doing CrossFit and I started doing yin yoga every single day.

And I started, I was like, okay.

And then when it comes to stretching, stretching yourself, pushing your capacity, I was reading.

I was reading different sorts of things and I was twitching as I sat down.

Just a little micro movements because my body, I have to assume my nervous system just wasn't used to this low level of stimulus.

And I thought, well, fuck.

Like, okay, this is stretching me.

This is difficult.

This is a hard book for me to read these are words that i haven't read before these are concepts that i need to wrap my head around this is really tough okay

um meditation i found uh very rewarding but super difficult the yin yoga stuff that was stretching me this the training style the conversations i was having and then the relatedness coming out the other side of this was facilitated by the fact that I wasn't partying anymore.

So I had to get a new set of friends that did different things at different times.

It was a really small circle.

Not that it was a massive circle previously, even though lots of people knew me, which I think says a lot that you can sort of be in a crowd of 2,000 people, all of whom know your name and are at your club night and still feel alone.

Absolutely.

But that change, Johnny and Youssef, who were still now on this show of, you know, nearly a thousand episodes, you'll be episode like 1,000 or something, 1,002,

are

one of the most featured guests on this entire show.

They were like up until episode 400 while I was still in the UK on all the time.

And they are outliers.

They're nerdy guys.

One's a doctor that also used to work for BlackRock as an investment banker.

One was a chartered accountant who then went on to be a national deadlift champion.

Like they were strange, dude.

They're strange guys.

And so was I.

And I found resonance in that strangeness.

And I was able to be myself in a way that I wasn't previously.

So all three of those things that you've highlighted are there.

And to be honest, most of them exist for people to be able to watch on this show because the show's now been going so long that it's kind of tracked my journey from just after I started

to now.

Yeah, so I think it's beautifully said.

What I'm sort of, what's floating to the surface for me is two things.

One is, you know, you were talking about this insular way that people work out.

So I saw some terrifying research recently that the drive for muscularity, which is the internal desire to be muscular,

is linearly correlated with divorce.

Okay, dig into that for me.

So drive for muscularity is how swole I want to be.

So the more I'm obsessed with becoming super muscular, the worse my long-term relationships are.

It doesn't seem to affect short-term relationships.

My long-term relationships, it lowers the length of my relationships and predisposes me to divorce.

Because I think it's kind of touching on this thing.

And I made a clickbaity video called Why Women Prefer Beta Males.

And it really is like, there's a ton of reasons.

You could have said said why women prefer dad bods.

Yeah, right.

So, so it's really interesting because there's this whole thing about intra-male competition and what women actually prefer.

Male competition theory as opposed to female attraction.

Yeah.

So, so like, for example, just as a simple thing, like dudes are obsessed with penis size, but the majority of,

you know, the majority of

touch sensors in the vagina are in the first three inches.

It's all you need.

And I don't know if like a lot of dudes are like, yeah, I mean, to be a bit vulgar, but they, you know, they want a big dick because of the way it affects women.

But like any woman will tell you that having your cervix touched is deeply, deeply, deeply uncomfortable.

And so there are some arguments around stretch receptors in the deeper parts of the vagina.

But generally speaking, like this penis size thing is like an intramale competition and is not, if you look at what women, this is where you got to be tricky because you can ask women what their preferences are.

So you can get survey data, but that's very different from the choices that they actually make.

So if I were to ask you,

Chris, do you want a billion dollars?

You'd say yes,

but you would not live your life as if you were waiting for a billion dollars, trying to get a billion dollars.

So there's a lot of like bad data that are not bad data, but bad interpretation of data.

And what a lot of women, so this is really interesting.

I was looking at

research on

female arousal.

So

the third most important thing, 56% of women say that help with household organization and chores is the third most arousing.

Yeah.

Right.

Number one, I think, is trust, and number two is some degree of sexual connection.

But then the third thing is like dead bedroom.

Like it's something I see in my practice quite a bit.

Dead bedroom is because of messy kitchen.

Yeah.

And the last thing is I think, you know, what we're kind of touching on to kind of wrap things up is I see too many people who are trying to take control of their lives.

I don't know if this makes sense.

You can't control your life.

It's impossible to control your life.

All you can do is control yourself.

And taking control of yourself is the most important thing that you can do to take control of your life.

But the whole problem is that I control this.

This is literally the limits of my control.

I don't control the words out of your mouth.

I don't control what's happening around me.

I control none of that.

And we spend all of this time trying to control control all kinds of things outside of us.

And what we find with the research and with your story is you started taking control of yourself.

And then the opportunities will coalesce around you.

And even if they don't, even if the external world doesn't deliver you that which you think you want, you in yourself are feeling more peaceful and you have more of this agency and you are happening to the world.

Even if the world isn't delivering that to you, which could have happened in an alternate universe,

you are okay.

Yeah.

So I think that this is where things get a little bit shady, but I think that you're right.

The world will not deliver to you what you want.

It'll deliver to you what you need.

And what I find very consistently is that, and there's research behind this, right?

When you can look at something called self-determination theory, sense of purpose, sense of satisfaction in life doesn't come from getting what you want.

It comes from...

exercising choices, stretching your capacity, connecting with other people.

You're centered in here, and then people will respond to that.

This is a beautiful thing.

It's like you don't have have to sacrifice one for the other.

I find that when you become a healthy, happy, productive human being, the opportunities will start flowing.

Dig into the

men who have muscle mass negative prediction for success in relationships.

What do you reckon is the mechanism that's going on there?

Oh, what a beautiful question.

So I think a big part of it is rigidity.

So generally speaking, the drive for muscularity comes with a lot of rigidity, right?

Structural lifestyle.

Yeah.

So, so, like, and there was this, this hilarious, like, kind of Twitter war where Ollie Murrs, I maybe, where he lost weight, yeah.

And so, William Costello was the guy that put that poll up.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I know exactly what you're talking about.

Yeah, so I wanted to get into this.

I'm so glad you brought this up.

Yeah, so, so, I, I, I, I, I did a whole piece about it.

Someone showed me that, and I was like, this is fascinating.

You know, who else was just to add this in?

Did you see Sasha Baron Cohen's personal transformation?

No, you know, Barat?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He is the lead star in a superhero movie.

Okay.

He also was recently divorced.

And he went for, you remember what he looked like in that ridiculous thing in Barat?

And he'd like,

yeah, like whatever that, I don't even know what that physique is.

It's not even dad bod, right?

Yeah, no.

And now he's got, you know, like visible four-pack abs.

He's got like, for a, I think he's 50, for a 50-year-old dude, looks fucking fantastic.

A little bit stringy, but like lean.

He's got the bicep vein coming through.

Women online,

but there was this very famous article that was like, Sasha Baron Cohen doesn't realize just how disgusting he looks to most women.

Same thing as the Ollie Murs situation.

And I became fascinated by

the failure of cross-sex mind reading.

Guys find that intimidating and something worthy of admiration and respect.

And they assume if I admire it, respect it, and understand how hard it is to get, women have to be attracted to it.

It's just a massive failure of cross-sex mind reading.

Absolutely.

So I think this is where, and so this is where we have to be a little bit tricky because there is a lot of evolutionary biology at play, but human beings tend to be really complex.

So take this with a big grain of salt.

I think as a psychiatrist, I found you can say something about men.

There has been at least one, any statement you want to make about men are dot, dot, dot, there's been at least one man in my office who does not fit that mold.

Anything you want to say about women, there's been at least one woman in my office who does not fit that mold.

So I think this is where there are certainly, there's like a bell curve, right?

But there are also averages.

So we can extrapolate average data about genders.

So the first thing is that there is this sense of intra-sex competition.

So men tend to rate themselves against other men, right?

And this is what's really interesting is,

so sometimes I...

I have all kinds of, I have access to some very interesting information.

I love being a psychiatrist because I'll talk to like, you know, know, men and women about their sexual lives, like what's it like, and not like in a pervy kind of way.

It's like, okay, you know, someone comes in and you're not happy.

What would make you like perfectly happy?

Right.

Or they solve their depression and they come in.

They're like, well, there's one last thing and it's kind of embarrassing, but I really want my husband to put his, this thing in.

this place.

And so, you know, and it's okay, let's talk about that.

Like, let's not be shameful or judgmental.

How can we have this kind of conversation?

How can we help you be happy?

So I think if you look at like like the first thing is a lot of dudes will like have certain metrics, right?

And I think we see this a lot in the alpha male kind of stuff.

And it's like, oh, men, you know, women prefer high value men.

And if you got to make money, like there's one really simple bit of general data that you can do against that.

It's kind of creepy, but you got to be a little bit careful.

Just go to a playground.

that there are dads with their kids and look at the dads.

Look at who's actually mating.

Look at who's actually reproducing.

Most dads are not high value men.

Like the majority of jacked rich six foot, six inch.

Absolutely, right?

So most people who reproduce are average height, average money, average body, right?

Here in the U.S., like 40% of dads are going to be obese.

And so that's really what people are selecting for.

And if you look at like, you know, the female response, like there are a couple of questions that you can ask for really ripped dudes.

And this is where things get really interesting.

If you see a really, really ripped dude and a dude who's moderately in shape, who do you think makes more money?

The dude that is just in shape and not really ripped because he's not spending as much time dedicating

training.

So personal trainers are going to be super ripped, but someone who's like a medical doctor who goes to the gym three days a week and works out for an hour is going to be like sort of in shape.

I think,

so if you look at what women, if you look at research on women, what they'll say is they want to feel safe.

So are you more likely to be safe with a guy who is really, really ripped or or someone who is not really ripped.

So someone who's very rigid, who's going to be more likely to judge your food choices?

Right.

So there are all these questions that you're right, that there's a failure of understanding like what is in women's minds.

And I think the main reason that we have that is because what we see in these echo chambers is men don't talk to women and women don't talk to men.

And men use their interpretation of intimidation as a proxy for women's level of attraction.

So this is an interesting one.

Do you know the David Putz study that was done on this?

I'm not sure about the reference, but maybe it's very famous and fucking fascinating.

So

men and women were brought into the lab.

They were shown photos of men.

Oh yeah, I know the study.

The men were asked, how likely do you think it is that you would be able to beat this man in a fight?

The women were asked, how attracted are you to these men?

And they rank ordered each of these.

They brought the men that the photos were of back into the lab one year later and they asked them how many sexual partners they'd had over the last 12 months.

The female ratings of attractiveness basically had zero predictive power and the male ratings of intimidation were almost exact.

I don't know this study, but there's a really fascinating study where they took faces and then altered them to increase the muscularity and adjust the muscularity up or down and the adiposity up or down.

And I think basically what the study found is that as you become more muscular, women become less interested in you.

And so they start to see you more as a threat.

I may be a little bit rusty on the precise outcome there,

but basically, like, it's really interesting because now you can, it's a very good experimental condition because it's the same face.

And all we're doing is controlling for muscularity or adiposity.

And adiposity means fat.

But adiposity doesn't seem to affect anything, but muscularity, the more muscular the face becomes, the more women are fine with a short-term relationship, but are not interested in the long-term relationship.

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a checkout that's l-i-v-e-m-o-m-e-n-t-o-us.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout I've got two studies to throw at you here so the first one is pretty recent the optimal body fat percentage for men is higher than gym bros think recent research suggests that body fat percentage is a better predictor of attractiveness than bmi or shoulder to waist ratio Ratings of physical attractiveness using a set of 15 DEXA images were rated by both females and males in three countries China Lithuania and the UK The BMI, which maximizes male attractiveness, should be around 23.2 to 24.8 kilograms per meter squared.

So people know the BMI.

Shoulder to waist ratio should be about 1.57.

So we're still talking about like pretty broad shoulders to waist.

The most attractive male bodies have a body fat percentage of 13 to 14%.

So for the average

like populace, that's pretty lean.

But for any gym bro, being able to sit at 14% is like, oh, dude, I'm laughing.

Cheesecake Factory, fucking snacks whenever I want.

Single digit body fat is not.

And Steve Stuart Williams, who put this together, said, this makes good evolutionary sense as all of these ranges are closely linked to metabolic health.

Absolutely.

So there's something, you know, I've had some cancer patients.

And if you get cancer and you don't have a little bit of pudge, you're in big trouble.

Oh, you need that backup weight.

Oh, absolutely.

Right.

So I think if we look at it from like an evolutionary biology biology perspective, which once again, you got to keep in mind that human beings have their own developmental trajectory with traumas and personality and things like that.

So people will select all make all kinds of variations.

But I think that there's something about,

you know, the way, and we're just judging based on pictures, right?

That's the other thing is that

if

the quality of information there is very poor, right?

We're just like looking at low bandwidth.

So then what happens is people have to project a lot onto the the picture.

If all I get to see is a face,

how can I infer personality, rigidity?

But I'm not surprised at all.

I mean, I think that like this is where, you know, there is like what we call like sort of media attractiveness.

And then there is the actual choices people make.

And those are two very different things.

This is why I think we are sort of in the post-bodybuilding era for a good bit of fitness subculture at the moment.

Run clubs, huge.

Hybrid training, high rocks, huge.

Well, it's like,

it's a more, especially, my perspective is that run clubs are dating organizations masquerading as fitness pursuits.

And, well, this person has friends because they turn up to the run club with other people.

I can see them holding a conversation.

They're outside.

It's nine in the morning.

They're not like dry scooping this weird powder that's got unpronounceable ingredients on the back.

It feels holistic.

It feels organic.

It feels like we're in touch with nature.

Oh, his body can move.

He's actually healthy.

You know, this type of build, I think, is very much sort of a post-Gimbro physique.

And I think that that is what's being optimized for.

Now, there's

varying levels of intensity.

If you look at somebody like Nick Baer, who is sort of the one of the leaders of this hybrid movement at the moment, lives here in Austin, Texas, the guy looks like a bodybuilder who can also run like an insane marathon pace.

But then there's people like George Heaton, who lives out in LA, British guy who owns Represent Clothing.

He's got a good lean, but runner physique.

He's not super, super jagged.

He just looks, I mean, the guy, he just doesn't stop going.

Will Googe, who currently now holds the Cross-Australia record for running, another British guy, we're fucking holding it down here.

Very much runner physique.

Like shaved head, but dresses in a very feminine fashion.

Yeah.

So keep going.

We are seeing a pivot from what used to be what guys thought women wanted, I think, which was like jacked as big as possible, like, this is what I want, to

my body's going to move well.

And this is guys that haven't, as far as I would have concerned, hit the fitness menopause.

This is 21, 22, 23-year-old guys who should be in their like biceps era, as far as I'm concerned.

So I think that's such a Jim Bro perspective.

I don't mean to be insulting.

I'm dating myself here, dude.

This is like the awful lot of people.

I think what's hilarious about this is when you look at running clubs,

which

so interesting, what you see, you're saying that these are like, you know, this is the physique people want.

I don't think the operative stuff that turns those into dating organizations is physical at all.

I don't think they're selecting for a physique.

No, right?

So, so

I just thought it was funny.

So I don't, I don't mean to, you know.

be insulting or anything.

So I apologize.

But but I think it's so interesting that what you focus on is this is the new body type, which which you point out a lot of things like there's flexibility, there's mobility, there's things like that.

And you do absolutely touch on the social things.

And that's where we have to get into the science of like, how do people fall in love?

So what it takes to fall in love is interestingly enough, physical attractiveness is not a huge part of it,

which boggles some people's minds.

So what we tend to want is

people want to feel safe, number one.

Second thing is they want usually multiple unplanned organic interactions.

This is what makes dating so hard is because there's so much pressure.

But if you sort of think about, like, I don't know how you, you know, met your girlfriend, but in the case of my wife, like, I was celibate and I just started, we just started hanging out, right?

I was like, I'm, I'm monk.

I'm going to be celibate.

So, so for me, it was like really easy.

Low pressure environment.

Completely low pressure.

I was like,

I can just be myself.

There's, there's zero chance.

I mean, she's still.

Philosophically castrated here.

Absolutely.

Right.

So, so, and it, it allowed me to be like, I was like, hey, do you like Thai food?

I'll take you to a place.

And she was like, okay.

And I wasn't trying to go on a date.

Can't believe you didn't do Indian.

Crazy.

Uh-huh.

Can't believe you didn't do Indian.

No, I mean, she gets plenty of Indian at home.

Nice.

Yeah, give her something she doesn't get at home.

No, it's kind of exotic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

So,

and she still insists that our first date was a date.

I don't, I didn't think it was a date.

We were just hanging out, right?

I was just like, okay, like, there's this person, like, let me show her around.

Like, we'll have a good time.

And so I think that there's a lot of the other big thing is platonic relationships become really important.

So if you sort of look at the way that you are viewed as a threat or not a threat, and this whole like getting a wedding ring, getting you game is like, that's real, by the way.

Like,

I don't know if there's statistics to back this up, but, you know, after I got married, the amount of female attention I got when I started wearing a wedding ring.

I mean, it's the same, I think, as when guys see a pregnant woman.

Like it is something that every single girl that I know that's pregnant is like the amount of attention that I get from guys.

Oh, really?

Yeah, apparently.

Interesting.

Couldn't them.

Fascinating.

It's just the most direct advertisement of fertility that you can see.

And I guess a guy with a dog gets like the likelihood of them getting phone numbers way higher.

So what we're talking about here, which is interesting, is what is the signal beyond the signal?

So you think a person who's in shape, right?

Bodybuilding in shape.

Beautifully put.

What is the signal?

Yeah.

that's beyond the signal.

So the first signal, like the first order effect is big muscles would feel good under hands if naked.

But the second order is rigidity, restriction, but also some discipline and ability to deal with pain and discomfort, self-motivated, agency.

Those things are cool and sexy.

But then if we can get rid of some of the restrictions there, which are like the rigidity, I bet he's going to judge me for my eating.

Maybe I'm going to feel weirdly inferior.

Maybe there's some narcissism.

There's a kind of like femininity to bodybuilding too, which I think, you know, a lot of guys.

struggle with to a degree.

Like there is something very feminine about like this obsession with looks in the mirror and this crafting of it, despite the fact that, you know, this is what I did for a very long time.

And I still massively respect, but it is.

It's like,

it's weird.

It's this weird type of masculinity, right?

It's this vanity masculinity thing.

Okay, if we can get rid of those, we can add in the pro-sociality.

We can add in all of the platonic friendships, the unplanned, oh, there's that guy.

Like, he's back, the one that we saw three weeks ago.

You know, he's got the one with the yellow shoes on.

Like, isn't he cool?

And, oh, yeah, he looked at you.

Like, that whole thing.

Yeah, that's great.

It's a good, it's a good environment.

Final thing on the the um muscularity negatively predicting long-term relationship success i did see a really interesting theory when it comes to dad bods

so um one argument might be and this is similar to what you were already saying if you're a dad who is really in shape you're applying an awful lot of effort to being in shape there is an argument to be made that to be a good dad every additional calorie of effort that you have should be deployed to your kids and to raising those being good dad.

And there is, I think, at least partly, if you see dad who's really in shape, there is this sense in the back of your mind where you're a little bit skeptical of, well,

how much effort are you applying to being a dad, given that you're maintaining 8% body fat year-round?

Yeah, so I think this is where we have to be really careful.

So I mentioned earlier that, you know, you have the survey level data, you have this like looking at face data.

And once the humanity enters the picture, once the individuality enters the picture, once you get to know someone, you start to see, oh, this person is pro-social.

They are pretty chill.

You know, like a lot of things change.

And that's where I would be careful about

reading too much into that, right?

Where, sure, you could make that argument that

if someone is super high in shape, then they're not spending enough time with their kids is kind of how I hear that.

To one degree or another.

And also the other angle of that is it is the male equivalent of wearing sexually provocative clothing, that it is an investment.

Like you've already got the wife.

Does she care that much?

Are you like one half a toe out, like two couple of toes out here?

Like, are you sort of almost scanning the field, making yourself available for other women to find attractive in the way that short-term mating would?

Or would you signal more for long-term mating, which is almost like the dad bod arc era?

Yeah, so I think it's a fascinating hypothesis.

You know, if there's data to back it up, there's data to back it up.

Totally open to it being wrong.

Just read it and thought it was interesting.

Yeah, I think it's very interesting.

So I think this is where, once again, there's a signal behind the signal, very well put.

So the way that I think about that is what are the associations?

So people are working with this, right?

You can talk about signal behind the signal.

You can talk about survey level data.

I'm a clinician.

So my sample size is usually one.

So what I would ask people is when you see this kind of body, what do you think?

What are the associations that your mind makes with it?

And this is where we see a lot of problems in dating come down to like inappropriate associations.

Oh, if a guy does this, if a guy has female friends, that means dot, dot, dot.

That's not true at all.

That is the association that your mind is producing.

And the other really interesting thing is, I don't know, like, maybe it's just the circle that I run in, but there's a lot of dudes in the last five years that I will interact with.

A lot of us have started getting in shape, but it's not to attract women besides our wives.

If anything, it's to attract our wives.

You know, and I think that like

is that a sense that

even within a relationship,

the natural male entropy toward more extreme dad bod is happening too quickly?

Is that she's made some comments that I've picked up on?

Is that this projected sense that like, cause if you're not doing it for yourself to like, I want to luck buff and you're not doing it for other women, I'm wondering where the intuition that this is something that would be good for my wife or good relationally for us, where's that come from?

It's a great question.

So

I'm going to have to think for a second.

So

I think that there's a certain amount of,

so sometimes when I'm going to talk kind of clinically for a second.

So sometimes you'll have a relationship where, you know, both partners.

So in the case of like my wife and I, I mean, like she had a couple, we had a couple of kids.

She had a couple of kids.

Right.

And then there was like COVID and we like started this whole healthy gamer thing.

And now this thing is like gigantic and we've got 30 employees, 150 coaches.

So and things just kind of blew up.

And I think what we sort of realized, I mean, for the big driver for me is my wife said that she's not allowed to die first.

So she said to me that she wants, she, she wants to.

Okay, so you're going to have to speedrun aging.

Not speedrun aging.

It just means I have to outlast her.

And the odds are against me.

Right.

So she doesn't want to die.

I mean, sorry, she wants to die first.

She doesn't want me to die.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

Oh, Oh, that's much more difficult.

Right.

So I'm pretty sure that I could make myself die more quickly.

Right, right.

So getting myself to live longer.

She wants me to outlive her.

Okay.

And I'm okay with that.

Okay.

Right.

So, so that's something.

And I also like looking at my kids.

One thing that I really appreciate is like when kids get a little bit older, like you have to work harder to keep up with them.

So, so it's like, okay, fine.

So if I'm supposed to like outlast my wife and I want to be able to like, I climbed Kilimanjaro when I was in my 20s.

I want to climb Kilimanjaro with my kids when they're old enough to do so and i think like that's going to be great i gotta gotta start taking care of myself

so i think for me that's where a lot of the drive comes from and i i think that there's like i think doing stuff for your wife is like not a bad thing

you know i know it sounds kind of weird but we're all like oh you should be self-motivated and you should want to do it for yourself like i don't know man half the shit i do is for my wife like including going to medical school it was like she wanted to be married to a doctor so why not now a lot of people will say like

huh i become a doctor absolutely i'm going to be a doctor.

So she wanted me to be a neurosurgeon, ended up with psychiatry.

So, you know, don't, don't do everything.

Yeah.

Aim for the stars landed on the.

But I, I think it's, it's interesting to think a little bit about, now, some people may listen to this and be like, oh, like, you're a simp or whatever, which is maybe fair.

But here's the way that I kind of think about it.

You know,

doing something for someone that you love,

like, when did that become a bad thing?

Bro, you have nailed it.

Right.

Fucking,

and, and when we look at even the, psychological impact of service, like the way that it affects your default mode network, the way that affects your ego.

Now, I think the problem is that a lot of people who do things for people that they love

are motivated by toxic fuel.

They're motivated by guilt.

They're motivated by shame.

They're not internally stable.

There's a big difference between doing something for someone that I love because

I want them to love me back, because I need them to love me back.

That's what makes a simp.

Not being kind to the people around you, not being kind to the woman that you're in a long-term relationship with.

And also,

that's where I also don't take everything laying down, right?

So if there are certain things that I went through something of a midlife crisis recently, I've been pretty vocal about it.

I think that's also developmentally appropriate.

I kind of realized recently that the things that I want in my life that my wife used to give me, she no longer has the bandwidth for.

So she doesn't have as much time to love because she's so busy taking care of all of the things that I love.

She takes care of my kids, takes care of my house.

I mean, I take care of them too.

I'm a present dad.

But, and so we, you know, we had this really interesting conversation where it was kind of like sad and difficult in many ways.

She feels like she's given up a huge part of who she is over the last 10 years.

She's CEO of Healthy Gamer.

This is my dream, not hers.

And so

I couldn't imagine being married to a better person.

And so the beautiful thing about like doing something for your spouse is that's only a problem if it's not reciprocated.

And what I sort of find when you ask me what motivates me is like we're almost in this not pseudo competition, but we're both moving in the right direction.

And I think we're pulling each other along.

I think the drive for muscularity becomes a problem because drive for muscularity is not about the other person.

Drive for muscularity is about what I want to see when I look in the mirror.

And for me, it's about health and longevity.

And, you know, if

my wife is happy with it, like that's just gravy.

You know, that comes with certain advantages.

I love the idea of talking about being accused of being a simp within a relationship.

This is deep.

This is deep to mine.

So

I messaged a friend a while ago, and I was talking about

how

even my

on the outside, not that often exposure to red pill advice on the internet had colored my ability to be in a relationship.

So

girlfriend is flying in to see me, haven't seen her for a while, and I was going to pick her up from the airport and I was going to take flowers.

I thought this would be really cool.

We've been dating for whatever, four months or something, five, six months.

And I'm like, this would be, she'll like this.

Like, this would be cute.

And, you know, it's going to make her feel good.

And what a cool, like, kind of.

like.

predictable but nice romantic chest yeah chicks like flowers right like yeah that's the male logic and uh i voice noted mac and Murphy.

And I was like, dude,

I got to fucking drop this on you.

This is how fucking deep the red pill ideology runs, that there is a bit in the back of my mind that asks, Am I doing this because I'm being a simp?

Like, is that me simping for my own girlfriend?

Because if you were to put a photo of that up, there is a non-zero number of people on the internet that would go simping, right?

Because doing anything that is

even remotely close to being pliable as a man for a woman.

And he just, he fucking completely reversed it on me when he replied.

And I thought he was so great.

So this isn't my idea.

He basically said that most red pill advice is exclusively for short-term mating.

And in short-term mating, if you're on the second date and you turn up with a huge fucking bouquet of flowers, that might be because you're trying to get a kind of transaction going on here.

I'm doing this thing with this huge bouquet of flowers.

Like this is, at least in the modern world, maybe it shouldn't be, but at least in the modern world, like second date, massive bouquet of flowers, like that might be a little bit much.

But there's a big difference between doing that in a committed relationship where you don't need to do this.

You're doing something nice for your partner because you want to do something nice for them, as opposed to I'm doing something nice for you in a desperate attempt to get you to like me more because I'm worried that you're not going to like me if you don't.

And this

failure of dating length mind reading.

when it comes to red pill advice on the internet is that guys who are obsessed with short-term mating

are not applying what works well for long-term mating

then they're not they're not able to um snap those two worlds together does that make sense makes a lot of sense so so i have a lot to say about this if you want to talk about this so top of the list i've worked with a lot of people who are red pill i think red pill actually gets a bad rap i think it's a lot of it is incredibly good there's a couple of things that i think twist it quite a bit so the first thing is the reason that red pillars hate simping is because each and every, and I'm talking about 100%

of red pillars or incels that I have worked with, okay?

100%, not 99%, not 98%,

each and every one of them was a simp and got burned by it.

So this is, I think the root of red pill is trauma.

So I did fall in love.

It was a genuine love.

I really went out of my way to make this person happy.

I sacrificed, I gave everything.

And boy, did I get fucked.

She didn't appreciate it.

She broke up with me.

She didn't even give me the time of day.

I tried everything.

So I think at the root of this is trauma.

And then we've already talked a little bit about how trauma can turn into things like anger and stuff like that.

So then in order to preserve your sense of ego, you have to pump yourself up or put someone else down.

That's how we maintain ego.

And both things happen.

And both things happen, right?

So then there is, then what happens is there's like this anger that goes out towards women then what happens is in order to protect myself and we'll get to that in a little i want to touch on that again but in order to protect myself i have to become emotionally divested of the relationship i can't be emotionally attached because if i get emotionally attached that means i'm going to get hurt again maybe i'll do that thing again i'll do that thing again and not maybe i will

Because that's how I am.

Every fucking red pillar on the planet is a romantic at heart.

And that's what's so hard about it.

It's the romantic pill, not the red pill.

It's the romantic pill.

And if they weren't romantic, they would not have been hurt that much.

So there's a thin line between love and hate, right?

And we know this in a neurological sense too, that if you have, if the emotional circuitry in your brain is a powerful influencer of your behavior.

If you're feeling one emotion, it'll swing your emotion or your behavior in this way.

And if it switches to another emotion, the size of the connections is the same.

So love becomes hate, right?

In the spiritual sense, we talk, call this attachment, right?

So like the more you attached you are to someone, the more invested you are, the more likely you are to love intensely, and the more likely you are to have loss intensely.

So it usually starts with trauma.

Then the problem is that they start to remove emotion.

They start to wall off certain parts of themselves because that's the only way they can protect themselves.

Then they engage in relationships.

But then something really, really scary happens, which is a huge selection bias.

If I'm someone who's only, if I see you, if I see this relationship as transactional, I'm going to approach this relationship as transactional.

If you start to get me flowers or do other kinds of things that suggest emotional connection.

A lot of times these people can have avoidant attachment too, but not always.

You know, if you start to create an emotional connection or you're interested in partnership, I get frightened because partnership means connection, partnership means vulnerability.

So then what happens is people self-select towards women who are also interested.

It's like, oh, shit, this is transactional.

I can play that game.

So the man wants a transactional relationship and there are plenty of women who are completely comfortable with that, right?

So you make the money.

I buy the shoes or purses or whatever, right?

I'm not trying to be offensive right here, but lots of women are, I mean, just show up on any any dating app and you'll see that people will send you Cash App all the time.

And there's a very transactional kind of element to dating now.

On the first date, I expect this, this, this, and this.

And if you provide these things, then presumably I'll provide something in return.

So then what happens is their worldview gets reinforced because all the women who are interested in more are not selecting for the red pill dudes.

They don't make it past the second day.

They don't.

Or even the first one, right?

So then you're selecting for people.

You have a short-term mating strategy.

You're finding people who are interested in short-term mating.

And then that reinforces your idea of what women want, what women are looking for.

A lot of the red pill stuff also involves, a lot of their techniques involve like working with people who have a history of trauma.

So when people have really low self-esteem, they're much more malleable and respond to some of these things like the way that they, they basically have a playbook that involves like finding people with anxious attachment.

and engaging in behaviors that trigger their anxious attachment.

I have a game theory of slut shaming and a game theory of simp shaming that I think

I managed to make work.

So

I read this in Tucker Max and Jeffrey Miller's book, Mate, which is about 10 years old, but is probably the best evolutionary psychology informed dating book that exists.

They said,

why does slut shaming exist and why does most of it come from women?

If that sounds like a

oddly accusational thing to say,

figure me this.

If you were to tell all men on the planet that you could turn up the dial of how slutty women were, how free they were for casual sex, how few dates they wanted before they did that, how sociosexual they were, how much sex they wanted, et cetera, et cetera, do you not think that men would take that?

I think a lot of men would, yeah,

we can turn that dial up a little bit.

That would be kind of like a good thing, right?

So at least in my opinion, I think that the enforcement of sexual standards in terms of slut shaming, i.e.

number of dates before sex, level of socio-sexuality, blah, blah, blah, I I think that the call comes from inside of the house.

I think that that's intrasexual, not intersexual, largely.

Why?

Well,

slut shaming is the price enforcement mechanism for sex that is imposed by women on women, not just by women on women, but largely by women on women.

The reason for this is if I am prepared to give out a blowjob on the third date, but you want to wait as a woman until the fifth date,

You need to lower your standards.

You need to lower the price of sex down to mine in order to be able to compete with me in the sexual marketplace.

Is every guy after a blowjob on the third date?

No, not necessarily.

But you can look at the price of sex, i.e.

how much investment is required before sex is given up, as a,

that is the

level across the entire market.

And that slut shaming, i.e.

saying you shouldn't do this, is a way to raise that price of sex again so it doesn't drop below a level that most women are happy with.

This is why if you see

studies that have a

participant that comes through dressed in a very sexually provocative manner and they ask for directions, women respond to them in a very different way than if they're dressed in a much more demure manner, regardless of whether there's men around or their partners are around or whatever it might be, that if you're seen as a potential sexual rival, women just don't seem to like that as much.

So I was like, okay, what is it about slut shaming?

What is the sort of underlying driver?

And it's women who are giving away sex without commitment, right?

We are freely giving away sex without commitment.

And other women are saying, you should wait for more commitment from this man before you give out the sex.

Or at least that is.

Okay, keep going.

Okay.

I'll do this and then you can criticize it all.

Totally open to this being wrong.

Sex without commitment.

That is what's being given away.

And

slut shaming, whether it's done by venting, gossiping, whatever it might be, stuff on the internet, all the rest of it, helps to raise that price back up so that no woman feels compelled to have to give sex below a level that most women would want to.

It's like a cartel price enforcement mechanism.

And I was like, okay, well, what's the equivalent of?

What's the what?

What's the equivalent of a slut for a guy?

And I think that it's a simp.

So if you say that the single most valuable thing that women in short-term mating have to be able to give away is sex, that's fundamentally what it is that the other half are after.

And we don't want the price of that to go down.

Well, what is it that men are able to give in short-term mating that is the most valuable thing?

And I think that it's commitment and resources.

So if a man is prepared to give away commitment and resources to a woman without sex all of the guys feel like the price of commitment and resources has now been derogated well so you're prepared to pay for her shoes and her date and her handbag and all the rest of it without having her commit to you or give you sex

how can I get commitment or sex from that woman

if the most valuable thing, which is resources, she can get for free.

She doesn't need to commit or give me sex or give anybody sex because you're handing it out for free.

And as far as I could see, this was a kind of duality between slut shaming and simp shaming.

Most simp shaming comes from inside of men.

Most slut shaming comes from inside of women.

I hear simp be thrown around by women, but on average, if you were to say to women, hey, would you like guys to like be a little bit more giving and a little bit more pliable and a little bit more whatever?

In some ways, especially for short-term mating, they would probably say yes.

That would be quite nice.

I wouldn't want it maybe in my husband because I want him to be commanding and to be a leader and so on and so forth.

But like, oh, maybe they wouldn't want them to be a bit more pliable pliable and fucking listen.

I'm not sure.

Anyway, I saw a little bit of

rhyme in these two situations.

Yeah.

So I love it.

So

we are deep in bro science here.

Yeah,

I was going to say this is this is deep in bro science.

There's some problems here that we'll point out.

Okay.

Feel free.

So first thing is

I think it's a brilliant insight that I've never encountered before that

there is a parallel between simp simp shaming and slut shaming.

That most dudes seem to be down for a little bit of sluttiness, and most women arguably are down for a little bit of simpiness.

That most of the times, like, you know, slut is arguably

like, so if I, I mean, I'm, I, so I'm, I'm going to say a couple things and I'm going to narrow things down to individuals, okay?

So when I think about like back when I was in college and in a fraternity, if a, if a guy says, oh man, she's such a slut, that's a good thing, right?

And what dudes will say is like, that guy is such a simp and that's a bad thing.

When I think about the patients that I've worked with who are women and there's this concept of slut, they tend to not like that.

So I think this is where the bro science becomes a real problem because

So I think that that's fine from an evolution from an evolutionary theory.

There is no doubt in my mind that if we look at the variables that contribute to slut shaming or simp shaming, that what you said is one of the variables.

So I think one of the biggest problems with bro science is that they tend to be like kind of one-to-one, right?

This isn't like a complex multivariable kind of equation, which is what the real world actually is.

That's what science tells us.

So let me ask you this.

And if this is not something you're comfortable with, and then we'll talk about like a more clinical perspective.

If your girlfriend saw you hanging out with someone who was deemed slutty.

And maybe you do this.

Maybe she doesn't have problems.

Maybe you're polymerised.

We have no idea.

Okay.

So maybe this example will implode.

And then I'll use a clinical example.

What do you think would be her?

First of all, would she be concerned about that?

Maybe not

concerned, not as in a risk, but I think it would certainly register on the radar.

Yeah.

What do you think would be

what would be her?

I'm not saying she is concerned like she's gonna like put limits on you or stuff but what do you think is the risk to her what would she say

reputational

in what way um if other people see you hanging around with this girl that's a wide-known slut not wearing many clothes what does that say about your level of commitment to me and how does that make me look in in return okay that's a piece of it potentially what else uh she's a potential sexual rival why are you hanging out with her okay

right so so what is the cost

Let's talk about sexual rivalry for a second.

What is the cost to her if there's a sexual rival?

Me potentially pulling resources, effort, attention, love, attraction away from her and onto somebody else.

So that sounds so non-human.

Okay.

So I'm going to take a clinical, huh?

You are speaking to me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I know.

So, so, and, and I don't know, maybe she disagrees and we're, we're putting words in her mouth, but when I, like, literally, when I have female patients come into my office because there's concern about an affair.

So I think this is what people kind of need to understand.

I'm not saying this is generalized.

I mean, I think this is generalizable.

This feels a lot more, this feels like a larger variable to me.

So

when I, maybe I'm, maybe I'm just thinking, I'm thinking about like literally a couple of patients and I'm also thinking about my own relationship.

So here's the thing.

So if you're in a committed relationship, like I've got two kids.

So the problem is that if my wife has to deal with a slut, the problem is

if I spend five minutes with her,

the next two decades of my life are going to now be split.

Because if she gets pregnant and if she has a kid, you call it resources.

You're right.

Time, attention, resources.

That feels very sterile to me.

I think what this is, is we have a family, you have children, things are going well right now.

If we had,

like, in a big way, like, our life is over, right?

The average sexual act is three to eight minutes.

Okay.

One pump and dump is all it takes to fuck my life.

Fuck her life.

Fuck our kids' lives.

Everything goes out the window with five minutes.

There's an asymmetry here.

Right?

Huge.

So like the cost of a slut is that, that they tear apart a marriage.

They tear about part, and that has very real and lived consequences.

That means divorce attorneys.

That means kids moving back and forth every week.

That means alimony.

That means, I don't know what, right?

So the amount of uncertainty and the cost of stability.

And when I think about my patients, I think like that's really what I think we get to is that this is a threat to the life that I built.

So I agree.

This only works, though, in

long-term committed relationships.

No, it doesn't.

Okay, so if you're talking

about casual sex,

I was talking about price enforcement mechanism for two single women, two single guys, talking about simps versus sluts.

I understand this is massively a threat, like intersexual competition.

The biggest threat is to women who are in relationship.

This is the thing

really, Jamie Krems, University of Arizona, has got this fucking spicy theory about why married women are so

pro-life.

They're more likely to be pro-life.

Even without kids, they're also more likely to be anti-birth control.

Because if you can raise the cost of casual sex, the likelihood that a sexually promiscuous woman is able to take your husband and fuck it, like fuck life, fuck the whole situation,

that cost is higher.

The potential cost is higher.

Whereas if she can have consequences-free sex, she can still ruin your life, but she doesn't incur a cost.

Yep.

So I think, so, so if you're, if you're restricting to short-term relationships, then I think it becomes more complicated.

But when I really think about,

so this also is like based on clinical experience, the claws that come out

are really different with mama bear in general.

So there's a really, really fascinating

aspect of progesterone.

So estrogen and progesterone are two sex hormones.

You have an ovulatory cycle.

When you become

pregnant, the placenta starts to produce progesterone.

So, progesterone is progestation.

That's the hormone that it is.

You have high levels of progesterone.

Progesterone inhibits the parts of your brain that assess risk.

specifically assess risk and specifically about like risk to yourself.

That wouldn't.

So, pregnant women are more risk-averse or less risk-averse?

Less risk-averse.

That doesn't make sense to me mechanistically.

Why would you,

during a time where you need to protect this baby growing inside of you, be less risk-averse?

Surely this is the time where you need to be eating fewer exotic foods, traveling to fewer novel locations, spending time only around friends and family.

Great, great question.

So this is where risk averse is not a uniform thing.

There's lots of ways of risk assessment.

So if you look look at, if I, if you and I fight, the likelihood that the percentage of our brain that is concerned about the long-term damage to us is going to be higher than a woman who has children and has a high level of progesterone when she's protecting her kids.

Right.

Okay.

Okay.

Right.

So I think that's what this mechanism is.

And it's pretty specific, but you'll see that there's actually like a suppression.

of the risk assessment circuitry that can happen a lot.

And that's why like, if you sort of think about who is the most dangerous creature on the planet it's mama bear mama bear don't give a fuck mama bear don't care about whether her face is scarred whether she breaks something right so so that and so there's a there's a very fierce protectiveness i got charged by an elephant in zambia a couple of years ago while i was in a canoe a hundred yards away from her kids and we got charged by an elephant yeah so here's the interesting thing when a male elephant charges you they're trying to get you to back off right so it's really interesting because even if you're, I've been charged by an elephant too.

And if you, if you speed up passage for an Indian,

if you speed up the, the rate at which you're moving away from the elephant, the elephant will chase.

But if you slow down, the elephant will slow down.

The male will slow down.

Right.

So

I don't mean that was just an interesting, that happened to me once.

It's only happened to me once as well.

And so I think like, you know, these, these, the bro science, I love the bro science.

Like, don't get me wrong.

Like, I can share that paper on drive for muscularity with you and things like that.

But I, but I, I think this is where, like, we've got to be careful and we've got to like literally like, you know, and this is what I love about the work that I do.

I'll talk to women.

So when someone shows up, right, and is like,

like touching your husband,

like touching him on the arm, touching him on the neck,

like, what is your reaction?

Like, what bothers you about it?

What are you afraid of?

Right.

So I literally have, you know, some patients who are very, very successful and very, very wealthy.

And,

you know, sometimes what happens when you are very successful and very wealthy is that people will be attracted to you, right?

In all kinds of ways for professional reasons, sexual reasons, personal reasons.

We're talking like yachts and trips and the whole nine yards.

And it's really interesting to sit with those people and talk to them about like the

women in those relationships and what they get afraid of, like what it it is that really they see another woman who's like, oh, you're so like, you're so silly.

Yeah.

And, and, and that's where, like, it in my case, like, I shut that shit down like right away.

If a woman is touching you, absolutely.

Like, don't sorry.

Like, that's not okay.

I don't say that.

What do you say?

Um,

obviously, I'm inundated with women touching me all the time.

Yeah.

So, so

what I find works really well is a reflexive disgust followed by trying to suppress it.

So, oh, it's a performative.

Oh, 100%.

Oh, this is so sick.

Right.

So, she touches me, like, oh, I'm sorry.

And she will never do it again.

You don't, oh, you're violating my boundaries.

That doesn't make me feel uncomfortable.

It's like the chase is on, bitch.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Watch me fucking violate.

Yeah, like, like, you know, oh, disgust, disgusting.

It's, it's so good, dude.

Like, shuts that shit down.

Let me give you this.

This is, this works for anybody.

This is a real niche fucking piece of advice if you are a club promoter working on the front door of a nightclub a lot of the time you are stood between a couple of big hairy gorillas who can like you know suck anybody who's being too much of a dick but you may have had to make some sort of a difficult decision at some point this person isn't coming in they are the ex-boyfriend of a girl who works for the club they have just caused a bit of bother downstairs it's so short like they feel aggrieved that they're not getting in or they've just been kicked out and you've had to tell them you're not necessarily the one that's enforcing it,

but you've had to tell them.

And you have to stand there.

And they know that you have to stand there on the front door of the club.

Now, you can fuck off inside, but usually you've got to do some work.

One of the problems is what they want is engagement.

They want you to say to them, like, you're not coming in.

Well, yeah, I am.

And it's like, well, no, these two gorillas are going to stop you.

It's like, well, you're a fucking dickhead.

I shouldn't have been kicked out.

That girl down there is the bitch in any case.

I didn't really do it.

And this has gone on.

I've stood in the front door and watched this happen for hours in the northeast of the UK cold in November, right?

Like

the this is like the endurance racing of fucking complaining, right?

And these people are drunk, so they will not remember it tomorrow, but you will.

You're yeah, so anyway,

and what they want is this, they want engagement, maybe they want a physical altercation, they want righteous retribution, they want to feel heard, they want to do all of these things.

And I tried for you know a decade and a half long career to try and find what that is.

What's the

cut through the video game cheat code to like, oh,

sorry.

The apology works wonders too.

Yeah.

Like,

oh,

um,

the everyone knows my secret.

Yeah,

that's true.

Uh, this, this completely shuts it down.

If somebody's getting in your face and they keep on shouting, they keep on shouting, they keep on shouting, the most infuriating and shutdown thing that you can say is, mate, sorry, can you, um, can you step back?

Your breath stinks.

I just need, I need a little bit of room because it is unfalsifiable.

It is a comment on their person, like their level of personal hygiene.

Nobody else around it, it immediately gets a ton of laughs.

That person usually gets way more irate and within five minutes is gone because they don't want to be known as the person who's got bad breath that keeps on shouting in people's faces.

Yeah.

So I think there's, there's something about,

you know, boundaries and stuff that when people are like a touch sociopathic or when they're hungry, like they don't care.

You know, that's a sign of weakness.

That means that you're trying to defend yourself and that means that I got under your skin.

They'll, they'll double down.

Not always, but so what I, it tends to work well.

And I, I think the kind of flip side of this, and we were talking a little bit about, you know, trauma.

So I think the other big thing with red pillars, and not just red pillars.

So there are so many men that I work with.

It was interesting.

I was having a conversation with someone where I was trying to tell them another situation of dead bedroom.

And we were talking about it and I was sort of sharing with them, like, if we sort of think about like what we know about female psychology, and this is, this is more bro science, there's a lot of variability here, but this is literally what I've seen with my patients time and time and time again.

And when I have, especially men who come into my office and they're worried about dead bedroom.

So they're like, I don't know what to do.

You know, my wife isn't interested.

And it takes some time, but like,

you know, I'll ask them, like, what do chores look like?

And there's such an, there's such a instinctive and reflexive,

I got to do more.

Are you saying this is my fault?

I'm not going going to be like a beta.

I'm not going to be a simp.

I'm not going to like,

but this is where if you kind of look at, there's a little bit of difference that we know from evolutionary biology about what leads to female arousal and what leads to male arousal.

So our, and this is where we get into the bro science, which there's a grain of salt here.

But basically, you know, dudes are oftentimes DTF.

And there's a lot of men that I've worked with that are not DTF.

And that is a really challenging thing for their partners to understand.

Like a lot of women don't understand that dudes are not always down to fuck.

Yeah.

It feels like an extra level of rejection if you as the woman instigated sex and he actually wasn't ready.

Yeah.

So, so as much as bro science would have us believe, we are actually

conscious, thinking, unique individuals.

That being said, If we look at, you know,

a man can have a child at the age of 80, right?

Like it still works.

I have a friend who had a kid at 70.

Yeah.

So

there are some biological differences.

So, you know, sex for us is oftentimes

we can push many things aside and still engage in sexual activity.

And also the cost for us is evolutionarily not the same, right?

So we have to provide and stuff like that, but it's like nine months of pregnancy and the highest risk thing that a woman will ever do is get pregnant in her life, greatest chance of death.

So for women, I think the cost is a little bit different.

And so for them, they need to feel safe.

They need to feel secure.

They need to also have their parasympathetic nervous system active.

This is what a lot of people don't understand.

Sexual, the act of sex is sympathetic nervous system, is adrenaline, is blood flow, pumping, pumping, excitement.

That's not how it starts.

Yeah, that's not how it starts.

It starts with relaxation.

This is why dudes have morning wood.

You have morning wood because your parasympathetic nervous system is active overnight.

So the first stage of sexual arousal is to be in a no-stress state.

So, when patients come into my office, dudes come into my office, they have erectile dysfunction.

First question is, how stressful is your life?

Because if your stress hormones are super active, it's hard to engage in sexual activity for men and women.

I think women, there are more men I've worked with who can engage in sexual activity when they're in a high stress state.

So, this is where stuff, and you can see studies on things like ADHD and stuff like that, where women will find a clean home to be a prerequisite to sexual activity.

There's a lot of data to support this.

And

so

it's not like you need to be a little bitch and that's why you should clean.

It's that if you're in a relationship and you've got a situation with dead bedroom, chances are, so like for women, like sex is a big time investment.

You don't have time.

You can't afford to get pregnant.

Everything else in your life is falling apart.

So when things become stable, interesting.

Right.

And so we see this also with like the changes in sexual activity post-birth.

So, for a couple of years, it's very common for things to sexually really slow down.

And that's like arguably a touch evolutionary.

I don't quite think it's that far.

But, so I think really reducing the burden and creating space for connection, creating space for emotional relatedness.

If you think about being in love or feeling secure, feeling safe, feeling

comfortable, having energy,

right?

And there are so many, there's a really fascinating study that shows that in long-term relationships, men work really hard to downregulate their sex drive and women work really hard to upregulate their sex drive.

So we try to meet somewhere in the middle.

But the really interesting thing is that the natural way to increase sex drive is to get a good night's rest.

There's also a really fascinating study Rob Henderson posted recently that was men and women disagree on how much sex they should have.

Men say that they would like to have around about twice as much sex as they are currently having, and women tend to say that they're happy with around about how much sex is going on.

This suggests that men and women diverge on their view of sex, but that they actually zero in onto the number that women want.

Men want twice as much, and women are usually typically happy.

And yeah, I have to assume that that is

if guys want more, okay, well, what are the prerequisites in order to be able to help me get more?

If resources are scarce, maybe kids have come along, fucking hell, this is hard, lots of things are going on,

reducing down the burden that isn't mission critical, i.e.

childcare,

waking up at night, nappy changing it, all the rest of the stuff, what are the other things that can occur that will lower that sort of background burden and maybe that will liberate some of the sex drive?

Yeah.

So I think the problem with a lot of people who struggle with this stuff is that they don't realize that there is a skill set that they can employ that can make them them happier.

So a lot of men feel incredibly powerless.

Like there's nothing I can do.

I don't know.

So I think this is what it gets kind of tricky is like, I don't, you know, dudes feel like they're begging.

Like it doesn't, that doesn't feel good to be horny all the time and ask your partner for sex and not get it.

Right.

It's demeaning.

It's, you feel pathetic, like you're like, you know,

and so there's a lot of powerful emotions.

There's a lot of like shame.

And all oftentimes, this is another big thing that I think we underestimate.

so I think there's a greater awareness of the emotional labor or the hidden labor that women do there's a really fascinating publication in a feminist journal about the emotional labor that men do that we don't credit them for

so there's a particular kind of emotional labor called containment which is very taxing for men that we take for granted all the time.

Is that self-regulation when something's gone awry?

Not just self-regulation, external regulation.

Okay, I'm going to to chill you out when you're

absolutely.

Right.

That's a burden that typically falls on them.

Yeah, I had a really interesting experience recently where a family member of mine is a doctor.

We're both doctors.

So this family member came into the room and was like, there's a fight going on outside.

I don't know what to do.

And she was joking about it with me later.

She was like, you know, that was a moment when I needed my attending.

So I step out of the room.

And it's so interesting because she's a incredibly capable parent,

incredibly capable sibling, incredibly capable child.

Right.

So she's amazing, probably the best mother I know.

And then when things become emotionally tense,

we expect men to step up and handle it.

Like my wife does this stuff to me all the time.

Emotional mastery is one of the

suite of traits that I think most people end up zeroing in on when you say, what is masculinity?

A control of your emotions, a mastery of emotions.

So I don't think that what most, when masculinity is not control or mastery of emotions, it's emotional suppression.

Mastery of emotions and control of emotions would be integration,

suppression, cry on command,

get angry on command.

Correct.

Sorry.

I think when people say mastery of emotions,

what they mean is this ability to not be at the mercy of them and to suppress them.

Absolutely, right?

So this is, I think it's a, I'm glad you said that because I think this is a big

misunderstanding.

Mastery is an elevated term to

transcend and include in Wolbarian language type stuff.

Yeah.

So I think it's like, it's like you should be able to cry at a movie.

You should feel free to cry at a movie if you want to.

You should be able to cry when someone is talking to you if that's the right thing.

You should be able to get yourself angry when you want to.

You should be able to allow yourself to feel sad if that's what you want.

Right.

So I think this is a big thing that's missing.

It's a lot of the work that I do with men.

And we, you know, there's a

there's a trauma guide where we talk a lot about emotional mastery as being able to feel.

Because in trauma, what happens is we have so much dissociation, we shut off our emotional circuitry.

And so we need to be able to reconnect with that.

But going back to this, there was one other thing I wanted to say.

Oh, yeah.

So emotional containment.

So I think this is something that we don't give men enough credit for, that anytime there is overflowing of emotion, usually what the male role is, is to absorb it.

You're the bucket that scoops it up.

Absolutely.

Right.

So you hold it for everyone around you.

If you go to a funeral, what you'll see, and we see this in media all the time, right?

A man will be standing and somebody else, including another man, will be crying and we're holding them.

So there's a ton of emotional containment.

that men do.

It's very taxing.

One of the biggest drains of willpower is emotional suppression.

fantastic and so i i think that women will do a lot of emotional support in terms of like

like being emotionally supportive hearing you out listening to your problems and what men do in relationships that i don't think we give them credit for this is very new research is holding the emotions for everybody around fascinating I have a question that's related to that.

I've been to a few weddings over the last couple of years.

There was also a video of Logan Paul standing at the altar as his

fiancé walked down the aisle toward him.

Every single wedding, bar one, that I've been to over the last few years, the groom that has been stirred at the front

has only cried once during the whole ceremony.

And it's been at that moment.

It's been the reveal.

They've turned around, they've seen their partner, she's white, the hair, the makeup, they're arm in arm with dad or whoever's taking her down the aisle.

And that is a moment of just

like tears.

And there's been varying levels of like,

like, you know, breakdown with regards to that.

Logan Paul was exactly the same with this.

And I became fascinated.

Like, you're at a wedding.

Weddings are,

I need distraction, right?

Sometimes at weddings, like, they can go on for a while.

It's hot.

It's tiring.

So I sit and I bro signs.

I've become fascinated by what it is about that moment that is causing men specifically to cry.

Any ideas?

Yeah.

So I think,

so I don't know if you're going to get married one day.

I hope so.

But we should talk about it and we'll see how you feel.

So I think

it's a culmination.

So I think sometimes people forget that

crying is very common when there is too much emotion.

It's not sadness.

It's just too much.

Yeah.

And so, like you said, it has a rapid turn on and a rapid turnoff.

So anytime we have a ton of emotion that we need to get rid of, crying is what we do.

People feel pretty peaceful after crying.

There's a lot of crying that happens in therapy.

So like anytime there's too much, it's tears.

And I don't know if you've seen like, and you'll see people crying in inappropriate places, right?

So like not in a bad way, but like if things are too much, people will start crying.

That's just what happens.

I mean, sometimes we yell and sometimes we scream if we're kind of reacting to that crying, but the most natural thing is to cry and it's not even feel sad.

So I think for many people, for many,

we attach such an importance to being a married man, being a married woman too.

But

I don't know.

I think there's a little bit of a difference in the way that society judges these things.

So I think, especially now, we've given women a lot more latitude to choose things.

It's nowhere near where it should be, but generally speaking,

I have many

people in my life and many people that I've worked with that will choose to get married, not get married, have kids, not have kids.

Generally speaking, it's kind of like there's more acceptance towards that.

The number of dudes

who will say, yeah, I'm 19.

I never want to work.

I want to just be a house husband.

The societal response to that is very different.

Right?

Like people just don't like that concept.

People are not accepting of that concept.

Like look at Tinder profiles, like who's like, yeah, I'm not going to, I'm unemployed.

I'm never going to be employed.

Like, I don't know.

Maybe that's a complete Chad move.

I don't know.

So, so we treat people differently.

So I think there's a lot of culmination in that moment, right?

So that's the moment where it becomes real.

Yeah.

And I think there may also be a certain amount of performative aspect.

And men just don't know what to do with all that emotion.

Like there's a lot of pressure.

Everyone's like fucking looking at you.

And so I think we just cry because I imagine if you ask someone what they're feeling, and this is why I'm saying, when you get married, we'll ask you,

but

you know, what were you feeling in that moment?

And my answer, I think the most likely answer is going to be a lot.

I was literally about to say, yeah,

lots, right?

There's just a lot of it.

Yeah.

There's joy.

There's love.

There's, oh, shit, I'm feeling too much.

Right.

There's like

self-consciousness.

And it's all just like too much.

And so then what do we do?

We signal for help.

Right.

We start crying.

And then there's also a certain manliness to crying now.

Like there's a certain amount of like tears rolling down and like, you know, holding it together.

Bravado.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a certain amount of that.

The interesting thing is, I mean, my, my wedding was pretty emotionally like neutral,

but I also viewed it kind of differently.

I was like, I'm marrying this person and I'm Indian.

So we had like an Indian wedding.

And I quickly realized that Indian weddings are not for the people getting married.

They're basically for everybody else.

So for me, like I was just psyched that I get to spend the rest of my life with, like, I don't give a shit about today.

I'm in this because of every day that will come after.

So today, whatever happens, like if it's good, if it's bad, I don't really care.

The cool thing is is that at the end of the day, I get to go home with this woman and I get to do that every day from here on out.

That's what gets me excited.

Still, what's it gets me excited?

Speaking about your profession of choice, we've seen a lot of people start to use Chat GPT as therapists.

Uh,

there was a family of a teenager who died by suicide, alleging that chat GPT is to blame, stuff like that.

What are your concerns about people using

ChatGPT as a on-hand 24-7 diagnoser of all of their mental issues?

So

what's your understanding of how ChatGPT works?

Prediction.

What is it predicting based off of?

Existing corpuses of text and now some synthetic data as well.

And how does it know when a prediction is right?

Oh, that's a good question.

I don't know.

Right.

So I'm not an expert in AI, but people have

where I'm on the board of one kind of AI startup for kids.

It's called Angel Kids.

It seems to be pretty good, but a bazillion people approached us, right?

Because everyone's using it for mental health.

So we got all these kinds of people approaching us.

Hey, let's make a Dr.

K AI.

Like, let's make a Dr.

K AI.

Let's do it.

So I talked to a couple of buddies of mine out in Silicon Valley about how does AI actually work?

So I'm sure I'm wrong because I don't, I'm not a software engineer in AI, but here's my understanding of it.

The first thing is that AI is trained on the internet.

It doesn't know how to discriminate between good information or bad information.

So if you look at these negative cases of AI, what we tend to find is that they're deep in conversations.

So if I ask ChatGPT

three questions about one topic, if we have three rounds of chat of back and forth, it tends to do pretty well.

But basically,

deep down is like Reddit and 4chan.

Like really.

So, the further down you go, the more weird the conversation gets.

And that's because my understanding is that what ChatGPT does, it rates the quality of its response based on

the response of the user.

So, what's right is what satisfies the user.

That's what it's really.

Why you end up with this tendency towards sycophancy?

Absolutely.

Right?

So,

I think I did a really cool experiment where I got together with two buddies of mine, two therapist friends, and we basically tried to get ChatGPT.

We wrote up clinical cases and we gave it to ChatGPT and asked it for a diagnosis.

It's quite good.

So I was shocked at how good it is at taking a stem of information and finding certain things in it.

But I think the problem is that basically it's never going to tell you that you're wrong unless you ask for it.

And even if you ask for it, it's going to tell you you're wrong in a way that you're okay with.

So it'll never truly challenge you.

It'll challenge you in a way that makes you feel challenged.

Here's what I've observed.

I'm not an expert.

So it does have this kind of sycophancy.

It sort of tells people what they want to hear.

I think that's why we get to these things like it'll tell you to kill yourself, right?

Because like if it's what it thinks you want.

Absolutely.

That's what it's really, really, really good at.

So, so, and if we look at like, how does a human being judge quality?

The more I agree with you, the more smart you think I am.

Yeah.

Right.

So, and people are like, oh, ChatGP discovered this about me discovered.

And it's pretty good.

And by the way, Claude, I think is like, it seems to be emotionally better.

I mean, not to say one is better than the other.

I'm not, it's not an endorsement, but literally when my clients or patients will use Claude, I think they say that it has a better memory of their past conversations and will float things to the surface.

So it seems to be like more quote unquote emotionally aware.

But I think this is a situation that's happening a lot in technology where we're inventing nuclear fission or fusion without understanding what it really does.

So we like release this stuff into the wild.

It's almost like technology is kind of like an invasive species.

I wonder whether we're going to get

a epidemic of like GPT-induced hypochondria that you, if you're the sort of person who has health anxiety, you you can have an endless number of discussions and debates with your personal virtual doctor about what this thing means and why that might happen.

And the same thing goes for relationships and every emotional issue that you're going through too.

I think almost undoubtedly, but I want to be careful there and not demonize AI.

We had that a while ago.

This has been already going on.

So if you look at like just the effect of social media and how there's this thing called online radicalization or online drift, we see a lot of problems with eating disorders.

We actually did some work with YouTube around,

you know, people with eating disorders will find plenty of content algorithms on the internet that will reinforce their eating disorder.

People who are, you know, have like side effects of medications will form communities and talk about side effects of medications.

There's a certain amount of hypochondriasis and like basically online drift where they're thinking this problem is worse and worse and worse.

We kind of see this some with things like anti-vax and some of these other health communities, right?

Where they like they become polarized.

The other issue though that I think is part of what's fueling this, which we have to acknowledge, is some of the people who are health conspiracy nuts on the internet are right.

So I think SSRI withdrawal is a really good example of this, where for many years we didn't take this concept of like, if you're on an SSRI for four years, you may have permanent changes to your

something.

We're not quite sure what.

For many years, the party line was like, it doesn't really exist.

It doesn't really exist.

There's not a whole lot of data to support it, even now.

But the more I'm sort of like, the more I've, the longer I've prescribed medication, I think some of this stuff like SSRI withdrawal and some of the ways that people discover things on the internet is amazing.

So I think part of the reason what's fueling this is that,

you know, the likelihood that a vaccine causes a bad reaction is low, low, but it does happen.

And when it does happen

and you go to your doctor and your doctor says, oh, yeah, this is not real.

The response, the effect that it has on you, and I work a lot in psychosomatic illness.

And so the number of patients who have real shit going on with them that have been told by doctors, this is not real, is astronomical.

I mean, like, there are a couple of really bad ones.

Like PCOS is a really good example.

Fibroids is a really good example.

A lot of the menstrual stuff that women will experience, like stuff around the abdominal region, too few doctors take seriously.

Plus fatigue, I would imagine, chronic fatigue syndrome.

Yeah.

You know, it's just, it's, you're imagining it.

You like CBT your way out of this fatigue.

Well, no, I actually feel tired.

I feel fatigued.

So the number one request that I get that I've never fulfilled, which is interesting because this is arguably an area of expertise of mine, is people who say, Dr.

K, what do we do if we have chronic physical illness?

If we have debilitating physical illness, can you give us some guidance?

And this is where the reason I haven't made it is because I don't have a good answer.

I've worked so much with people with chronic physical illness,

and there is very little good data.

I've seen amazing recoveries from some of these things like yoga and stuff like that.

That's why I got into all this alternative medicine stuff in the first place.

But the truth of the matter is that like, I mean, I'm not trying to like tell everyone that it's hopeless, but this is one situation where I don't think this is not like some neuroscience thing where, oh, we understand this thing now and we realize that actually you don't need to re you don't need a dopamine detox.

You need to like harness your dopamine in the right way or this external internal motivation thing.

When it comes to chronic physical illness, there's no simple answer.

And I think a lot of people really struggle with it.

One of the things that we've mentioned a bunch of times today, one of the words that's come up a lot has been self, myself, the self, so on and so forth.

I've been increasingly fascinated by what it is that we see as close to our sense of self, what it is that we don't.

This was brought up when I first started using a speech and diction coach to help me with pronunciation on the show, wanting to articulate more effectively.

And a bunch of my friends said, well, what about, you know, the way that you speak already?

What about your beautiful natural accent?

So, well, imagine if I was a saxophone player and I said that I was going to go to a teacher to improve my ability to play the the saxophone, no one would say, well, what about your beautiful, natural way of playing the saxophone now?

Are you not concerned that this is...

And it got me fascinated by the question of what is a part of our sense of self, what is closely attached to it, as in your accent, the way that you speak, and what is not, like a capacity, like how good you are on the piano or whatever else.

And why does this happen and not happen?

There was this study that I wanted to explain to you, which I thought is really fascinating.

What does our true self really mean?

The The clearest demonstration comes from a study about a man called Mark.

Mark's life was presented in two versions.

In one, he was a devout Christian who believed homosexuality was wrong but admitted he was attracted to men.

In the other, he was a liberal who believed homosexuality was perfectly acceptable but confessed to feeling repulsed by same-sex couples.

In both cases, Mark was split.

A belief pulled him one way while a feeling pulled the other.

The question to participants was simple, which side represented his true self?

Liberals almost always said the attraction to men revealed who Mark truly was, while his disgust at homosexuality was right-wing programming.

Conservatives almost always said his conviction against homosexuality revealed who he truly was, and his public support was woke peer pressure.

Basically, each group looked at the same man and saw their own values reflected back at them.

It wasn't that people consistently treated beliefs as more authentic or feelings as less genuine.

Instead, they treated whichever side lined up with their own moral compass as the real side.

This has some fascinating implications.

It suggests that authenticity isn't something that we find inside of others.

Instead, it's something that we project onto them.

What counted as Mark's essence wasn't hiding in him at all.

It existed in the values of the people that were judging him.

These fights are never about evidence.

They're about who gets to define authenticity.

And interestingly, the whole exercise only works when someone is conflicted.

If Mark had only had one belief or one feeling, no one would have hesitated to say that's who he truly is.

So conflict is the playground where we get to impose our judgments about which side counts counts as the real self.

And it just got me into this question about selfhood and what is our sense of self.

I guess that's how do other people see your sense of self too?

But we have this sense of who I truly am.

The lonely chapter, is it me before?

What do I let go of?

Do I decide to reach for the stars?

How do I know that that isn't yet another mirage I'm moving toward?

So yeah, a lot to go through there with regards to this.

Yeah, so it's beautiful because, you know, there's this idea of like, who's the real me, right?

We talked about quarter life life crisis.

We talked about,

you know, I want to do this, but I should do this.

And this is something that I really do value, right?

Like I value independence, but I love to play the guitar.

Should I become an engineer and value independence or should I play guitar and be independent that way?

Like, so people are conflicted all the time.

So this is where I think we have a great example of why surveys are terrible sources of information because they're both wrong.

So,

and I feel really confident in this.

I'm not saying I'm right, but I have a system that I think is pretty damn good.

I think happens to be correct.

So, the first thing is that

there are different parts of you.

And once you have

the conflict means like there's two things that are conflicting.

Does that kind of make sense?

So, once we understand like kind of scientifically, and I don't mean using Western science, we'll touch on that in a second, but I mean utilizing the scientific method to study the self, right?

So we're going to generate hypotheses, we're going to test them, we're going to make observations, we're going to make conclusions, et cetera.

So I'm a big fan of the yogic view of self.

And that's basically that if you look at you,

are you gay?

Are you not gay?

Are you repressed?

Are you conditioned?

I don't know.

The one thing that we know is basically what Descartes said.

cogito ergo sum, right?

I think, therefore, I am.

And I know that there's problems with the way that that gets quoted.

But if we sort of look at you and we look at me and we look at other people, the root of who you are is that you experience your life.

It is not any attribute of your life.

So you used to be a kid, then you were a club promoter.

And before you even became a man, you were still you.

Right?

Before you become a father, you're still you.

After you become a father, you're you.

So all of these like attributes of your life, the one thing that is always constant is that you're the person who wakes up in your body every morning and you're the person who goes to sleep in your body every night.

You're the person who deals with your hurt, deals with your joy, deals with your suffering.

And this is the whole problem.

We were talking about how men and women are like miscommunicating, not understanding each other.

And that's because everyone is in their own head.

The only, what makes me me is that I'm inside here.

That's it.

So this is very perplexing for people until you have some experiences.

And I think meditation is the best way to do it.

Psychedelics can kind of get you there too, but your mileage may vary, comes with some risks, right?

So if you sort of think about my experience of this moment, I have sensory perception, I have thoughts, but what happens if all of my sensory perception disappears?

And what happens if I stop thinking and I don't have emotions?

Now, if everything that you experience disappears, but you are not unconscious, That is how you will find the truest version of yourself.

So right now I'm occupied in this conversation.

You're looking at me, you're paying attention to my face, you're hearing my words.

Your attention is on me.

It is on your sensory organs.

Everyone who's listening to this is paying attention.

They're listening.

But what if there's nothing to listen to?

Well, then they're looking, right?

And there's a really interesting principle that if I close my eyes,

The percentage of my attention that goes to what I listen to, you can hear more, right?

So then what happens is what if I stop, if I'm quiet?

Then you may pay attention to the way you feel.

If I stop talking, you'll notice your body.

So we can remove one sense at a time and concentrate my attention into the other senses.

Once we get rid of all five senses, and this is really simple to understand, anything that you're, any sensory input that is constant, your mind will eventually eliminate.

So when you put on your shirt, first thing in the morning, you feel it.

When you walk into a party, you hear all the noise and then your mind drowns it out.

So when we meditate, the purpose of meditation is to use one sensory anchor to knock out everything else.

So I'm concentrating on looking at a candleflame and then I stop paying attention to what I hear.

I stop paying attention to what I feel.

And then eventually my mind will zone out of the candleflame.

So then the mind will hopefully be empty.

And the reason we use a candleflame is because that should stop thoughts and emotions too.

So if we just get rid of all senses, what we may be left with, and I don't know if people realize this, but you have an internal sense too.

You can observe, you can perceive your thoughts and your emotions, right?

So that means that there's a perceiving instrument and there's an object of perception.

So we say that there's five senses, but there's really more, way more.

There's no cusception, proprioception, but there's also the sense of internal observation.

I can look at my thoughts.

No one else can see my thoughts, right?

But I can see them.

So then we use techniques to eliminate thoughts and emotions, and then you're just left with unobstructed pure awareness.

That is really what you are.

You are that which experiences your life.

And I have never heard an argument that counters that from a simple experiential perspective.

Philosophy, I don't know, neuroscience, whatever.

But when we talk about like a human being, if you are struggling with understanding who you are, you are that which experiences your life.

That's it.

You're not the movie playing on the screen.

You're the screen itself.

Second thing is, what about all these conflicts?

So, the rest of it is just like programming or emotions or thoughts or whatever.

Is that the real you?

No.

So, when we think about it, this is where I think there are a couple of other things.

So, you know, the

homosexual person who is Christian and is repulsed by their thoughts, this is ego.

So, another big thing that gets confusing for us is we think we are our ego.

So, I think of myself as a man.

I think of myself as a doctor.

I think of myself as as a father.

But if you take

this

five seconds, the next five seconds, and anyone who's listening to this can do this too, if all you are experiencing is the next 15 seconds,

how would you know you're a man?

There's no issue of genitals.

There's no issue of peeing standing up or peeing standing down.

There's no issue of sex.

No one is judging you.

You're just sitting there listening to a podcast.

There is no manness in you in this moment.

And if you really think about about it, most of your life, it doesn't involve being a man, even if you're a man or a woman being a woman.

There are only particular times when you go on a date, when you get pregnant, you know, when you're getting somebody else pregnant, at those points, it may be relevant.

But then those are not you.

Those are just actions and experiences that you're having.

We attach.

identity to all of those things.

Then we sort of, we cobble together this idea of like who we are.

I'm a doctor.

I'm someone who loves dogs.

I'm a cat person.

I'm a dog person.

Biopsy yourself and show me where you find dog person or cat person.

It's an emergent property.

It's an abstract idea.

It's not a thing.

There's no such thing as a dog person or cat person.

Where is a dog person?

How do you know you're a dog person?

I'm a dog person because of what I think.

I'm a dog person because of the way that I perceive dogs.

That's just a perception of a dog.

It is just a positive reaction to a dog and it is a thought.

That doesn't make you a person.

Does that kind of make sense?

I know it's so weird.

It's this really counterintuitive way of thinking, but so the self doesn't exist and the rest of it is programming.

Then there's then we get into the analysis of the programming.

That's like my day job.

So people will say, you know, the worst dating advice I've ever heard is be yourself.

Like as a psychiatrist, I think that's a terrible idea.

The person that you are today

is just some random ass combination of trauma, conditioning, socialization, genetics, genetics,

right?

And like, why do we think that this version of you is like a good thing?

And oftentimes the reason people say, oh, you should be yourself because I feel so much external pressure that I drown some internal voice.

And so I should bring that internal voice up.

That's good.

But don't for a second think that the way that your genetics and the way your neurodevelopment has happened is like some great human being, right?

I think that the best human beings are intentionally made by you.

You know, as you think about, okay, what is my trauma reaction to this situation?

How am I judging these people based on how I've been socialized?

What do I think about women?

Why do I judge people harshly?

Why do I have hatred in my heart?

Those kind of introspective questions, that kind of intentional reprogramming,

that's the person that you should be.

Right?

The whole point of being human, I don't know if you've seen these, but you know, they'll have these like, my dog is vegan, and they'll give him like a vegan burger, and they'll give him like a real burger.

And then the dog always chooses like the real burger over the vegan burger.

Okay.

Like, people will do these experiments on social media.

I don't know if it's real or not.

Okay.

But like, you know, if you look at an animal,

the key thing about an animal in a human is that animals really don't go against their nature.

Right.

Yeah.

Right.

The expression of the self.

Yeah.

So like an animal like operates way more on instinct, whereas humans will do things that are against our nature.

Now, there's a counter argument to that, which is this is all neurons in the brain and it's really according to

that's a valid argument.

I think that that argument is fundamentally flawed in a couple of ways.

But generally speaking, we humans at least operate under the illusion of free will and we have the illusion that we can direct ourselves in a particular way.

And so the person that you are, the real you is actually completely empty.

That's the realist version of you.

There's nothing there.

Then what happens, and this is great, because that means that i can turn myself into whatever i want right you can and there's literally like if you look at where do your wants come from if you're an empty vessel

that that's a great question so wants come from the environment literally so i empty myself of the impact of the environment so that i can become whatever i want which is nope nope doesn't work When you empty yourself, there's no you left.

You don't want anything.

That's gone.

The you that wants is the product of the environment.

Understood.

Why do you want these shoes?

Why do you want that girlfriend?

Why do you want to have a hair transplant?

Because you want,

like, that's from perception.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You don't want to be the one bald dude when everybody else has hair.

It is

very interesting to think about how much the our sense of self is is constructed.

We're marionetted by all of these things that have 100%.

Beautiful word.

Yeah.

yeah um you have a way with words thank you yeah I um I gotta say man I've I've really really enjoyed today I've been I've eaten shit for like the last 12 months basically a lot of health challenges a lot of stuff oh my god yeah uh and the main thing like the um center of the universe of what it's impacted is my ability to remember words and speak uh so i would love i can't do this i'm not i'm not technically proficient enough but if i could i would do a uh words per minute and silence analysis on my speech on the podcast over the last 18 months.

And there will be a curve that dips so low,

probably peaking at around about February, March, and basically keeping going through all of summer and then slowly taking back up to now as treatments have started to work.

It's like complex illness stuff.

It's mold, it's Lyme disease, it's EBV, it's CMV, it's like the shit that people pick up when they move to a new country, especially one filled with environmental toxins like America, gut dysbiosis, all of this other stuff.

And the main thing that it did was it struck at my sense of self.

And my sense of self was very much wrapped up in my ability to articulate words, to speak in a precise manner, to be able to wordsmith and craft a sentence in a way that makes someone's eyes light up or elucidates a point in a manner that's like, oh, that's novel.

That's interesting.

We called it the Atlas complex.

Oh, it was the game theory of simp shaming.

Isn't this cool?

Isn't this not all the manopause?

Like, I like to do that stuff.

And it gives me a sense of, even if people think it's cringe, like I like it, right?

And I think that it's cool.

And that was taken away from me.

That was something that I've had stripped away from me.

And that was a big question I've had to ask myself about my sense of self.

I'd wrapped a lot of my sense of self up previously with being the leanest guy or the sort of most muscular guy in the room when I was in my Jimbro era,

the best known guy at the party when I was in my club promoter era.

Even this sort of odd sense to some degree of

like

the most reclusive guy when I was in the monk mode era, which is this odd sort of like isolation

projection of what other people will think about your aloofness, your absence.

And then a good bit when it came to the show,

lots of these early on for me, what were the positive reinforcements that I got?

The first ever episode I did with Jordan Peterson, he was on Shapiro's show the week after and gave this wonderful

review of the conversation we'd had.

And he said, I just had a conversation with this guy here, Chris Williamson.

He's got this kind of new podcast.

It's called Modern Wizard.

I'm like, Jordan, we're 300 episodes in.

Give me some fucking credit.

And he's like, the most crazy crazy thing, the whole conversation, there wasn't a single um uh like, you know, just phenomenally precise with his speech.

And this was in a sequence of other times that he, someone I very much admired, had said that I'd already had this predisposition.

So this was like, I don't know, a guy that has a tendency toward addiction being given like the perfect drug at age 14 or something.

I had my first line of cocaine at age 14.

Dad was an addict, granddad was an addict.

You know, it's this, a very positive, a very healthy, I think, reinforcement mechanism.

But an awful lot of my sense of self had been attached to I can craft words in a way, I can say things in a precise manner.

This was a nightmare when I went into therapy because I needed to turn off the performance of, why don't I tell you a story about how Winston Churchill's mother once met

and I need to tap into me.

But even when it comes to what I do professionally and trying to be a professional and show up and perform authentically, but, you know,

do a thing, right?

I try and do the thing.

And that felt like it was taken away from me.

Do we have a couple more minutes?

We do.

We have two minutes.

So, so

two or three things.

The first is when you had this sense of self and it was, what was your experience of losing your sense of self?

Despondency, sadness, loss.

So this is the crazy thing about ego is we get so attached to it, but anytime we have ego, it's like we're taking a neutron and we're splitting it into a positron and an electron.

There is a price to be paid.

You can think of yourself as a great person on the world.

This will happen.

Second thing is, I think about the sense of self as peeling back the layers of the onion.

What's at the bottom of all the layers of the onion?

Nothing.

And that's what happens with self.

So you peel this layer back, you peel this layer back.

And then the thing that confuses a lot of people is, if I have no sense of self, then how do I act?

And I would say, this is the real important thing that I want to say.

I think you do it all the time.

When you are walking down the street and you see someone spill over their bag of stuff, you just respond to the environment, right?

You help them with their stuff and then you move on with your day.

Some people will think, I'm a great person.

Then you're created positron and you're going to get the electron later.

But a lot of us, if you really pay attention, most of what you're doing is just responding to your environment.

If we look at where sense of self comes from, it's the stuff that we carry with us from one place to another.

It's the emotional baggage.

Now that I help this person, that means I'm a good person.

This is part of my identity.

I'm a good person.

And then your friend says, hey, can I borrow 100 bucks?

You're like, you still owe me 300 from the past.

And they're like, sorry, bro, but you're such a good friend.

And you're like, oh my God, I'm such a good friend.

Okay, take the $100.

So what we really want to do is the more empty we become, just imagine if you did not have the burden of being a good talker or bad talker.

You can still work on the craft.

You don't have to have identity.

You can, and a lot of people do this, right?

I can want to learn how to bake bread without thinking of myself as a baker just because I love the bread.

My sense of self is not wrapped up in how good last night's sourdough was.

Absolutely.

You can just say, wow, the sourdough is great.

This is the curse of the high performer.

I think if you've been positively rewarded by the world for showing up and performing in a good way,

then everything, you know, one of the best cues is that my breathwork coach here in Austin does, it's a big class.

And this wonderful lady called Mandy, she always reminds everybody at the start of the class, she says, there is no doing this right.

And I'm like, oh,

that to me strikes right at the heart of the like, I have to, I must not get it wrong.

I must optimize.

I must do all the rest of this.

I've made myself pass out in that class twice because I'm like, hey, if she says that a two-minute breath holds good, three minutes has to be like 150% as good.

Dude, we need to bring this one into land.

I'm really glad that you exist.

It's the highest compliment that I can pay you.

I'm really fucking glad that you exist.

Yeah.

Thank you so much.

I'm, I love the work that you do.

I think you really do have a way of

you're really good at minting phrases phrases that that capture

there are things that are going on in today's world that have never happened before and i think you're very good at putting words to phenomena and as much as i like you know i love the bro science and and please don't take that you know any of the criticisms i have i think it has i'm a proud bro scientist yeah but i i think it's it's wonderful how you're trying to understand this world around you and you're consuming tons of stuff like you've got the qualifications and i've got some intuition and somewhere between the two we've got got a level of insight that's maybe novel.

Yeah.

So I would say that you have more than intuition.

I mean, I think if you look at, this is where we get to the core of it, right?

So qualification is an ego, but you read a lot of research.

I read a lot of research.

It's those actions that ultimately determine this conversation.

Okay.

Where should people go?

To all of the courses, the meditations, the things?

What's best?

Yeah.

So I think if people want to understand themselves,

understand, because we didn't get to too much to practical, but I think check out Dr.

K's guide.

So we, I built, you know, I went through 300 patient charts.

I looked at what is the most effective stuff that I taught these people, and I put that together for things like depression, ADHD, anxiety.

I think the trauma one and the meditation one are going to be really important for this conversation.

So, if you're struggling with the things that we talked about, how do you fix that?

That's what we really go into in Dr.

K's Guide.

Heck yeah, I appreciate you, man.

Until next time, thank you so much.