00:00:00
Anytime we watch pornography, masturbate and get sexual stimulation, our negative emotions like fear and anxiety, that
00:00:06
part of your brain just gets suppressed. And this is where people get into a lot of trouble because suppressed emotions just grow over time. So the more guilty
00:00:12
I become, the more of a loser I become, the harder it is to date, the worse I feel about myself, the more I fall into
00:00:17
pornography. So this becomes a neurological cycle. But here's the real problem. All addictions are on the rise.
00:00:24
And this is why Dr. K is back and the Harvard trained psychiatrist is breaking down modern
00:00:30
mental health, addiction, and the non-traditional ways to break away from their cycles. There's lots of stuff
00:00:36
happening around us that affects our lives that we have no control over. For example, because of the dating and
00:00:41
mating crisis, we no longer have sexual connections, emotional connections, and there's a part of the brain that is
00:00:48
getting starved because sex is so important. So, there's something missing in our lives, and that's what is
00:00:53
necessary for addiction to grow. And this is creating huge problems because it's sort of like if I fill up your
00:00:58
stomach with unhealthy food. You don't have any micronutrients, but you're not going to crave broccoli. So that's
00:01:03
what's happening in our society. We're using porn as a substitute for relationships. And that's creating these
00:01:08
really strong societal pressures, including a mass extinction event because we've got 32-year-olds who do
00:01:14
not know how they're going to ever have children. Men are getting really, really angry. There's like this incel movement. Like women feel safer with a wild bear
00:01:21
than they do with a man. I mean there's there's a lot that I'm thinking about like what do you do about this? The whole reason we get trapped in a
00:01:27
cycle of addiction is because we have one solution to one problem. The moment that we create a second solution, a lot
00:01:33
of things change and we'll get to that. What what about psychedelics? So here's the real problem with psychedelics.
00:01:41
Listen to my regular listeners. I know you don't like it when I ask you to subscribe at the start of these conversations. I don't like saying I
00:01:46
don't like it being in there. None of us like it. It's frustrating. Do you know what's also frustrating? It's also frustrating when I go into the back end
00:01:53
of the YouTube channel and I see that 56% of you that listen frequently to this podcast haven't yet subscribed and
00:01:58
so many of you don't even know that you haven't subscribed because I see in the comment section you say to me, you go, "I didn't even realize I didn't subscribe." And that actually fuels the
00:02:05
show. It's basically like you're making a donation to the show. So that's why I ask all the time because it enables us to build and build and build and build
00:02:11
and we're going for the long term here. So, all I'd ask you is if you've seen this show before and you like it, help
00:02:16
me, help my team here. Hit the subscribe button and we'll continue to build this show for you. That's my promise. Thank
00:02:22
you to all of you guys that do subscribe. Means the world to me. Let's get on with the show. [Music]
00:02:30
Dr. K, Stephen, what's up, dude? We've obviously met several times before, but for those of you that might
00:02:35
not be familiar, who are you and what do you do? I'm a psychiatrist and what I try to do is
00:02:42
help people understand themselves because one of the harsh lessons of the
00:02:47
world that we live in today is there's lots of stuff happening around us that affects our lives that we have no
00:02:53
control over. So if you look at fundamentally, you know, there's like war, there's inflation, there's like a
00:02:59
dating and mating crisis, like whatever, there's AI, there all these like existential threats, but like you as a
00:03:05
human can do nothing about any of that. All you can really control is like the bounds of what's in here, right? That's
00:03:12
like literally the only thing that you have control over. And so, um, one of
00:03:17
the lessons I learned very early on, I I spent years studying to become a monk, was that if I can learn how to master
00:03:24
this, then the rest of the world becomes way more manageable um, at a minimum and
00:03:31
hopefully incredibly easy. Is there a step one in understanding that this is all we can control and
00:03:37
taking control of just this? Is there a first step that you went through? Yes, absolutely. Yeah. The first step is
00:03:43
uh trying to control things outside of me and failing miserably time after time after time. Check
00:03:49
because I think it's wild, right? So I I think it's like most people will try to get their boss to do something, try to
00:03:56
get their boyfriend to do something, try to get their girlfriend, and forget about boyfriend, girlfriend, this person that I am texting, right? Try to get
00:04:03
them to respond. And we spend so much of our energy trying to shape the world to
00:04:10
fit us. And this has also been the direction of like technology too where we don't want
00:04:16
to change anymore. We want the things around us to adapt to our environments
00:04:22
like air conditioning. I don't want to change my tolerance to heat. I want to
00:04:27
change the entire space that I live in to be more comfortable for me. And this
00:04:33
is creating huge problems because I want to change the environment to suit my preferences. you want to change the
00:04:39
environment to suit your preferences and then we have to be in the same room. So this is why we fight over where the
00:04:46
climate control is. And what's the risk there then of of us having this focus on changing our external environment? Obviously we're
00:04:52
going to fight, but is there any other risk in that? Is it just going to be that me and you our relationship's going to fray when you want a certain temperature and I want a different
00:04:58
temperature? That's a huge problem, right? So I think if we look at like conflict in the world, it is two groups of people
00:05:05
wanting the world to be different. So I want the boundaries of my country to be here. You want the boundaries of you
00:05:13
want to move that line somewhere else. And this is literally why wars start. So I I think that what we spend a lot of
00:05:19
time and energy in is trying to shape the world towards us. But that is not
00:05:25
fundamentally possible. And so instead like we could be investing that energy
00:05:31
into ourselves. learn how to craft myself into let's say perfection
00:05:38
loaded word which carries a lot of stuff but then the moment that you do that things become really really easy
00:05:44
things become really easy yeah so I think if you look at like um you know there's a ton of research that shows that you know happiness
00:05:51
productivity success all of these three things like come together so the one of
00:05:57
the biggest mistakes I think people make in society is like they talk about work life balance like that's wrong. Work
00:06:03
life balance implies that you have to make a sacrifice for the other thing, right? That these two I I don't think
00:06:09
that that's actually technically true. If you if you look at the way that society really I mean the way that a
00:06:14
human being really works, people who are happy with their work will feel happy
00:06:20
and they will work the best, right? The outcomes from their productivity will be higher. This is not a trade-off that we
00:06:26
need to make. The biggest problem is that most people are forced to make trade-offs and then what they try to do
00:06:33
is they try to find the perfect job. And this is what's so silly, right? People will say do what you love for work and
00:06:39
you'll never work a day in your life, right? Like people will say like if your passion becomes your job, like you'll
00:06:45
never work a day in your life. And then there are other people who also say, you know, keep your passion is your passion
00:06:51
because the moment it becomes your job, you'll start to hate it. And that's like how can both of these things be true? It's and it kind of is
00:06:58
like there's no way to win. So I think that's where like winning happens internally and once you start doing that
00:07:03
and there's tons of research about flow state and things like that that once you become happy internally even in terms of
00:07:09
relationship success you know if you carry a lot of unhappiness with you in a relationship it won't work well. So
00:07:16
internal work like will manifest outward and I don't mean that in a spiritual sense I mean that like in a I mean that
00:07:22
that is true but in in like a very concrete sense right if you show up at work and you feel happy like people will
00:07:28
like you more you'll be more productive and is so is there a second step so I understand I tried to control the world
00:07:33
I wasn't successful step two is to focus that energy inwards and take control of
00:07:40
my internal state which is difficult because it feels to us like We're very
00:07:45
much being dragged often by our temptations, the dopamine receptors in our brain or something. Yeah.
00:07:51
And we have a bad night's sleep, we wake up in a bad mood, and then we have a bad day.
00:07:56
That's how it feels. So So, and I I think if we sort of think about it, right? So, it's like uh you
00:08:02
know, I I started my car this morning. I I looked at the gas tank. There was only
00:08:07
a little bit of gas left and then I ended up on the highway without any gas. I ran out of gas. Right? That's one
00:08:13
follows the other. Like that's how it feels, right? Like I just I left and I'm like, "Oh no, I'm running low on gas." And then I run out of gas. That's what
00:08:19
happens logically, right? So how do you fix that problem? Go to the gas station. Absolutely.
00:08:25
The whole problem is if I ask you what is go to the gas, what's the equivalent in that analogy for a human being? No
00:08:32
one knows. You're like, right? So if I were to ask you, okay, you wake up, you slept poorly, you wake up, now you're in
00:08:39
a bad mood, therefore you have a bad day. you're assuming that those two things are connected. Those two things,
00:08:46
I mean, are connected, but only if you don't know how to go to the gas station. So, they're literally everything from
00:08:52
like practices to things you can eat to all kinds of things to alter that chain of causality. So, I think the second
00:08:59
step is first of all understanding what is going on inside you. How how do how
00:09:04
can you move the levers? What is the internal chain of causality? And once you understand that, then you can start
00:09:10
to implement change. And that's when it becomes easy. So if you sort of think about it like I know it sounds weird because it sounds really hard but
00:09:17
literally the difference between something hard and something easy is whether you know how to do it.
00:09:23
Right. Yeah. It's like oh like the Rubik's cube is hard. Like a Rubik's cube is hard but if you know how to do it it becomes easy.
00:09:30
So it's about really understanding where do my desires come from? Where do my temptations come from? And here you are
00:09:36
trying to control them. Forget about controlling them. Like I don't like controlling my desires. I hate it. It's
00:09:42
hard. It requires a lot of discipline. It requires a lot of willpower. What works way better is sublimating them.
00:09:48
What does that mean? Getting rid of them. How would how would you put it in the context of pornography in terms of
00:09:53
controlling that desire and being productive and not letting it consume you. Let's start with PR first principle.
00:10:01
Good diagnosis precedes good treatment. Right? So in medicine, the quality, this is what a lot of people think. Doctors
00:10:07
are about treating people, right? Medicine is about treating things. But actually 50% or more of our training is
00:10:14
in diagnosis. So you have to understand the problem. And this is not just true of doctors. This is like if I have a
00:10:20
plumber who's coming to my house, whether they can fix what the problem is depends on whether they can find the
00:10:26
problem, right? What's actually causing the leak. Then you replace that. So that's true of life in general. So if
00:10:31
you have a problem like pornography, the first thing that you have to do is understand
00:10:36
why you were addicted to it because that'll show you what you need to fix. And with pornography, I think there are
00:10:43
basically like five layers to it. The first is a societal layer. There's a
00:10:48
reason why all addictions are on the rise. There is a fundamental change in
00:10:54
society, in the way that we connect with society that makes us more addicted to stuff. So if it was in the substance
00:11:00
itself like in pornography itself then what we would see is there's a rise only in pornography addiction. But since
00:11:06
there's a rise in everything that means that something is fundamental is going on. We can get to that a little bit
00:11:11
later. Next thing that we need to do about understanding about pornography addiction is understand physiology neuroscience and psychology. So if we
00:11:19
look at pornography addiction first thing is that it is a very powerful emo emotional coping mechanism.
00:11:26
So the way that our brain is designed is like procreation kind of is the point, right? We can sort of say that like the
00:11:33
reason that life exists, the purpose of life is to procreate, which means to have kids. Yeah. Right. So So this is where if you
00:11:40
kind of look at like the way that our body and our brain are designed, it's like if the opportunity for sexual
00:11:46
relations and procreations is there, then we're going to push everything else to the side.
00:11:52
So anytime we watch pornography or we get sexual stimulation, our amygdala, which is our emotional circuit of the
00:11:59
brain, experiences negative emotions like fear and anxiety. It's also our survival center of the brain. And you
00:12:04
turn on porn. That part of your brain just gets suppressed. And this is why a
00:12:09
lot of people don't realize what a pornography addict looks like. A lot of people think it means like I'm watching
00:12:15
porn and masturbating a lot. But most pornography addicts will watch it and
00:12:20
not even necessarily masturbate or they'll watch it for hours throughout the day and aren't necessarily
00:12:26
masturbating during that time. And that's because once you have that stimulation on the side, it's kind of
00:12:32
like aromatherapy for your brain. It's kind of suppressing your amydala. It's kind of calming you down because it has
00:12:38
that neurologic effect. The reason that it has that neurologic effect is because sex is so important, right? So these
00:12:43
circuits of the brain are very powerfully activated. The other thing that is really addictive about
00:12:50
pornography is that it does cause a dopamine secretion. So orgasm feels
00:12:55
really good. And so anytime we have an orgasm, we get a a surge of dopamine. We
00:13:01
get a surge of pleasure. It feels really really good. And then the other problem that that creates and this is the curse
00:13:07
of humanity is that anytime we get pleasure we also buy ourselves craving and motivation. So when we secrete
00:13:14
dopamine in the nucleus ccumbent, it doesn't just do one thing. These three functions are fundamentally tied
00:13:21
together in our neurosircuitry. So if I, you know, drink this and I enjoy it, I
00:13:26
will want it tomorrow. That's like there's no way to escape that effect. So when I gain pleasure from pornography, I
00:13:33
am buying myself craving. I am buying myself motivation towards it in the future.
00:13:39
In the future 100%. Right? So it's it's behavioral reinforcement. And then what happens is so these are
00:13:45
the two fundamental pieces at a neuroscience level. Then what happens is we kind of find ourselves like in a trap
00:13:52
because since it is so good at these two things nothing else is as effective. And
00:13:59
we as human beings if you look at like what we're designed to do on a physiologic level it is to be efficient.
00:14:05
So why do we love unhealthy food? because we evolved in in areas where if
00:14:10
there's one bite that has 300 calories, like that bite will save you, right?
00:14:15
That's that's what allows you to survive. So, what we sort of got is like a a calorie dense neurological
00:14:23
dopamine surge from pornography. And it's also like suppresses our emotions
00:14:29
really, really, really deeply. And this is like like literally true. So, I don't know if you've ever, you know, if you've
00:14:35
been in love or like you've known friends who who are in love, but like when you're in love and you're like
00:14:40
horny for something, right? There's like this idea of postnut clarity and like pre-nut fog, I guess. So, literally the
00:14:47
way that our our lust circuitry works is it suppresses all of these other parts of the brain. It suppresses the part of
00:14:54
our brain that assesses risk. For someone that doesn't know what that means, could you be a bit bit more sort of direct?
00:15:00
Yeah. So like when you fall in love on the less vulgar side. So when you fall in love like you start to do stupid
00:15:06
things, right? Like you do stupid things when you're in love. And that's not a mistake. That's the way that it's wired
00:15:13
because evolutionarily there were basically two human beings. Okay. One who would fall in love and did not do
00:15:20
stupid things and one who did fall in love and did do stupid things. Which one
00:15:26
of those two do you think is more likely to procreate? When you say stupid things, give me an example.
00:15:31
Uh, I'm gonna ignore my job. I've just gotten financially stable and I've
00:15:37
fallen in love with someone who has a pile of credit card debt. This is a terrible idea to enter a relationship
00:15:42
with them because I've just gotten all my [ __ ] sorted out and they don't have any of their [ __ ] sorted out. So, there are all kinds of red flags that we
00:15:49
ignore on purpose because if if we didn't ignore those red flags, then we wouldn't
00:15:54
end up procreating. Got you. We don't want to be rational in that moment because rationality would say and and that's literally what
00:16:00
happens. So we have circuits of the brain that will actually inhibit and shut off the rational parts of our
00:16:07
brain. And this is where we get to postnot clarity which is this experience that many men have where after you
00:16:14
finish the sexual act you feel like very clear-headed right and so then what happens is now what's and why is that?
00:16:21
That's because the lustful parts of your brain, we're inhibiting, like literally inhibiting and and and shutting off the
00:16:28
thinking parts of your brain. And once the lustful part shuts off,
00:16:33
then we start thinking again. Probably in my early 20s was the first time I experienced postnut clarity. And it was, I think it was 2 3 a.m. in the
00:16:41
morning. Here's me talking about my masturbation. It was like 2 3:00 a.m. in the morning. And there was this person
00:16:48
that I was like vaguely interested in. I'm like super horny. I'm arranging to meet them at like 3:00 a.m. I think I'm
00:16:54
like 21 years old. And I decide to masturbate instead. And immediately after I masturbated instead, it was like
00:17:01
a completely different person inhabited my body. I was like, why? Within seconds, I was like, why the [ __ ] were
00:17:08
you going to get out of bed at 3:00 a.m. in the morning and drive for 55 minutes to meet someone you have really no interest in? And it was like that person
00:17:15
could not recognize the person I was 10 minutes earlier. And I I I remember one
00:17:20
day trying to explain this to um a woman and she couldn't understand it. And I
00:17:25
actually think she was quite offended by it because it's quite an offense offensive concept I imagine to a woman to hear that men experience a a drop in
00:17:34
interest potentially sometimes um after they masturbate.
00:17:39
Yeah. And I I think the reason it's offensive to women is because in that moment the dude is objectifying her,
00:17:45
right? Like it's like the the woman becomes a sexual object. It's you're not a human anymore. And like the reason
00:17:50
they're offended is because that's exactly what happens. In that moment, there are such powerful drivers in our
00:17:56
brain to drive us to procreate that like we don't view them as a complex human
00:18:02
being with thoughts and feelings, right? We are just really really horny. And that's literally what happens like in
00:18:08
our brain. We stop viewing them as complex objects. And so the reason they get offended is is sort of because they're right. and we start to view them
00:18:15
that way and but that's also like biological there are absolutely like societal and psychological things that we can get into in a minute but like
00:18:22
that that make things that worse but I think it's like it's understandable and it's also like how we work
00:18:27
yeah it's which is difficult to say you just I just want to be honest about it because I think if we start from a place of like total honesty about these things
00:18:34
we can actually reason up to some real solutions if we're trying to be politically correct or whatever we're never going to get to real answers here
00:18:40
absolutely and all all men I I hope will experience postnut clarity and also like
00:18:46
that doesn't make us bad men. It's a it's a physiologic thing. And I think
00:18:51
the key thing about whether you're good or bad is the way that you manage it, right? And that's kind of what I'm
00:18:57
talking about is like you have to understand what is happening in your brain in order to then willfully take a
00:19:03
step back and and sort of like think about what am I feeling? And then eventually once we understand where
00:19:09
postnut clarity comes from, we can cultivate it without having to not
00:19:15
just just this is I know we're on a little bit of a tangent here, but do women experience the inverse of postnut
00:19:20
clarity because there's a lot of oxytocin released when we have sex. So I was just just reading a study from 2021
00:19:27
in the journal of sex research and it found that women were more likely to feel emotionally connected, vulnerable and have a desire for postcoidal
00:19:34
closeness like cuddling or talking. However, men who are in long-term relationships reported feeling similarly
00:19:40
bonded to women, which is probably explains actually why I'm also down to cuddle after because she's been my
00:19:45
partner for seven years. Yeah. So, there is so much there. So, the now we're getting I mean, if you
00:19:50
want to go into that, that's the societal element, right? So there is the neuroscience of
00:19:58
pornography addiction, what it does to your brain, but there is a fundamental societal issue which is driving men
00:20:05
towards pornography and also addresses this kind of thing where relationships
00:20:10
between men and women are getting harder. And as relationships between men and women are getting harder, there's a
00:20:17
part of the the the brain more often the male brain that is getting starved for
00:20:23
something because we no longer have sexual connections, emotional connections with women. And so when we
00:20:29
get hungry for something, then the brain will try to find what it can to satisfy
00:20:34
it. Right? Right. So there there's a part of our brain that you know that drives us towards procreation but often times in a
00:20:42
real relationship it comes with a lot of other things. Yeah. Right. The problem is that when we're and this
00:20:49
gets a bit technical but when our brain wants something it usually wants a whole package. So for example like if you feel
00:20:56
hungry you don't want calories. I want to eat this and I want to eat this and I want to drink this and I want to have
00:21:02
some of this. Right? So there are lots of different things that my brain wants or my body wants and they're usually all
00:21:07
they all come together in in a real healthy way in in a sorry in a natural way which is why it's healthy. Not that
00:21:13
natural is healthy but that's what we've adapted to. The problem with pornography is that it gives us a slice of what our
00:21:20
brain craves. And the problem is once it gives you a slice once you get that sexual gratification your emotion your
00:21:27
emotional connection is not met. You have no bond. You have no feeling of safety nothing like that. that often
00:21:32
times you're filled with like regret and all kinds of guilt and things like that. And so even though you're satisfying
00:21:38
that sort of procreative drive, all of the stuff that comes with it stays unsatisfied.
00:21:43
And then the real problem is once we satisfy the procreative drive, the motivation to go and get all of those
00:21:51
other things disappears, right? So once I nut postnut clarity, I
00:21:58
don't need a relationship with anyone else. Right? I'm not willing to sacrifice to
00:22:03
deal with this person. So, so it's it's kind of like it's sort of like if I if I fill up your stomach with just unhealthy
00:22:11
food, like let's say I just give you straight calories like some highly processed like hamburger
00:22:17
wrapped in donuts or whatever and drizzled with take your pick of artery clogging stuff. After you eat that, you
00:22:25
don't have any fiber, you don't have any micronutrients, but you're not going to crave broccoli. Yeah. Right. So that's what's happening in our
00:22:31
society is we're using porn as a substitute for relationships and that's
00:22:36
creating these really strong societal pressures and being driven by. So what
00:22:42
have you seen happening between men and women right now? H um women I think
00:22:49
don't need men as much as they used to and I think this is in part because of this whole sexual revolution and the
00:22:55
pill and the feminism and all these things which is has you know tremendous upsides. I think that women and men are
00:23:03
having less sex, they're getting married less. Men's attitude towards women has become
00:23:10
a little bit more resentful in certain pockets of the internet. They perceive relationships with the
00:23:17
other sex to be disposable more than ever before. Men's spe view women
00:23:24
I would say both. And I think in part that's because of dating apps. Just the perception of choice. The feeling that if you don't work out there's another
00:23:30
thousand people on my phone that I could give a shot to. I think the equation of
00:23:35
a relationship when we think about the investment it takes for it to work and
00:23:41
what you get from it, people now perceive the equation not to be worth it. Okay. I think there's a lot of great
00:23:47
stuff there. So, so you're like a fully formed adult man, right? I think so. I hope so.
00:23:52
Yeah. Like you're you're like you're like a man. You're not like a kid. You're not like a like a dude in early stages of
00:23:58
development. You've like you've got a career. You've got a relationship. You're buying a house. Like you were an adult.
00:24:04
Yeah. So if I was an 18year-old. Yeah. And I came to you and let's say I'm your nephew or something like that and I'm
00:24:10
like Stephen, fully formed adult, handsome man in relationship. I'm
00:24:15
struggling to date. Yeah. What should I do? You want me to give you advice? [ __ ]
00:24:22
Um I think you should work on yourself. Okay. Especially as an 18-year-old man because I think you need to, especially at that
00:24:28
age, create some advantages. is. And so working on yourself could be learning, reading, going to the gym, building up
00:24:34
the ability to provide for someone else and to protect somebody else. That's kind of really where I'd start. And again, that's biased because that's what
00:24:40
I did at 18 years old. I actually didn't date. I think I've been on five dates my entire life. Okay. So, let's say I do that.
00:24:46
Yeah. And it doesn't work. Yeah. Okay. So, I'm like, "Hey, I'm on this growth journey." And I'm sure you've
00:24:53
encountered this and there are going to be people in the audience who are like, "The reason they're watching this podcast is because they're trying to do
00:24:58
that. They're still not getting dates, right? It's still hard to find a girlfriend. Then what do you have to say to them?
00:25:04
I would assume that the reason it's not working is because they're not in this
00:25:10
frame of mind to find love. And when someone says when a dude says,
00:25:17
I I'm trying to do everything right, what is the most common response that they get? Right. So like
00:25:22
try harder or like Yeah. Right. If you kind of like look at Twitter, what you'll find is people will
00:25:28
be like, "It's impossible to find a good woman." And then like men will be and let's say a dude says that or a woman
00:25:34
says that doesn't. It's on both sides. It's impossible to find a good man. And then people won't be like, "Yeah, it's
00:25:40
impossible to find a good man." Maybe some people will be supportive. So you'll have a woman who says it's impossible to find a good man. You know,
00:25:45
they'll there are a lot of people who are like, "Yeah, like like men are trash." Fine. And then a lot of people will be like, "You're not trying hard
00:25:51
enough. You're not going to the right places." is that's that gets we as men get that a lot more because there's a
00:25:56
societal bias that men don't need help. Right? So if if if you look at like the the comparison of scholarships, male
00:26:03
only scholarships versus female only scholarships, there's about $4.9 billion worth of scholarships given out in the
00:26:09
United States from private sources. Uh female scholarships outside of athletics are way higher than ma male
00:26:15
scholarships. So if you look at athletics, the number is way higher for men. But the really weird thing is that
00:26:20
like 60% of people who graduate from college or in college somewhere in there are women. So the the people who need
00:26:26
more gender-based support are men, but we don't really do that. We're usually like if a man has a problem, this is a
00:26:33
man's problem to solve. And when a man goes out and says, "I'm having trouble dating." But what people will say is men
00:26:40
will say, "Work harder, try harder." You know, people will like like and people
00:26:45
will really be nasty about it. They're like, "Do you not know how to talk to women? stop being a creep, things like that. And then the other thing that
00:26:51
we're sort sort of starting to not starting, we're really seeing is that there is like this very very like deep
00:26:56
anger, entitlement. There's like this incel movement. Um, you know, there's this like alpha male, beta male kind of
00:27:02
thing. And I don't know if you kind of get this, but there's like a deep sense of like anger, right? There's like a in
00:27:07
men, and I think women feel it too. This is why women are so terrified. This whole thing about would you rather be in
00:27:13
a forest with a bear or a man? You did you hear about this? So like people would ask this question on Twitter to
00:27:19
women. It's like would you be rather be in a forest with like a bear or a man? And like women feel safer with a wild
00:27:24
bear than they do with a man. So I think people are picking up on this like existential and I don't know if that
00:27:31
makes sense to you, but there's like an existential like cry coming from men
00:27:36
which can manifest as anger. I think we're also seeing reflections of this like in South Korea with like dropping
00:27:42
birth rates, right? Where like men are getting really really angry. They feel really entitled. And I think this is
00:27:47
where it's important to understand a biological difference. And we'll get to what I think is going on.
00:27:52
So a woman does not need a man in order to pass her genes along, right? So I mean like literally, I know it sounds
00:27:58
weird, but like if you're a woman, you can just go to a sperm bank and you can get pregnant. Yeah. You can just have a child without you
00:28:05
can also argue that it's easier for women to find a man who is willing to impregnate them than it is for a man to
00:28:11
find a woman willing to carry their child. But I mean literally we live in a society where women can just procreate
00:28:16
if they feel like it and men cannot. So there's a fundamental power balance there. I'm not saying it's right or
00:28:22
wrong. I'm just saying it is what it is. So I think what we're starting to see is actually like a mass extinction event.
00:28:29
We are seeing natural selection for a group of men who have no options. Many
00:28:36
years ago, I was a loser. And the the world that we lived in
00:28:42
necessitated my entry into third spaces. I had trouble talking to girls, but I
00:28:48
was forced into college. When I got my first job, it was serving ice cream. I was forced to interact with girls. I was
00:28:54
active in a s summer camp where I met girls, was forced to talk to girls. So, I sucked at talking to girls, but the
00:29:01
world that I lived in was structured so that I still had to talk to girls. I had
00:29:06
no option to retreat from interaction and painful interaction with the opposite sex. I think literally what
00:29:13
we're seeing because all this stuff started to get really bad during CO. So, what happened in CO was actually like a
00:29:19
natural selection event, but it wasn't a natural selection event about life and
00:29:25
death. That's what people think natural selection is. What happened during CO? Sure, a lot of people died and that's bad. But the postcoid world, some people
00:29:33
were able to adapt to it and some people are not. We're seeing a spike in social anxiety. Now I can work from home. Now I
00:29:41
have pornography. Now I have all this stuff going on to where I'm not forced to learn how to interact with women.
00:29:48
Does that kind of make sense? Yeah. So now you can live your whole life at home. And I think what's starting to
00:29:53
happen is literally natural selection. And the way that natural selection works is people think it's like, oh, if I'm
00:29:59
natural, natural selection means I'm weak and someone is strong. That's not technically correct. Natural selection
00:30:04
is you were made a certain way, someone else is made a different way and then
00:30:10
the environment changes. Which one of these two is suited to?
00:30:15
It's not even adaptation because all the adaptations have been made. And I think the best example of this is like literally Darwin's finches. So, you've
00:30:22
got like, you know, one finch that has like a hard beak that can crack a nut. You've got another finch that has a very
00:30:27
sharp beak that can get like a a a bug out of like a cactus like that has these
00:30:33
very like tight tight flowers. And so, if something happens and all the cacti die out, the birds that rely on the
00:30:39
cacti bugs will start to die out too. They don't know how to procreate in this world anymore. And I think what we're
00:30:45
seeing with like all these alphas, betas, incelss, what we're seeing in South Korea is there is a whole
00:30:50
generation of men that is like we are literally watching them die out in real
00:30:57
time because we've got 32 year olds, 35year-olds who do not have children, do not know how they're going to ever have
00:31:03
children. And this is where like I know this sounds bizarre, but so that's actually happening. That's not bizarre.
00:31:08
That's birth rate in South Korea is like 7. So there's a bunch of men who will never pass on their genes in the alpha
00:31:15
male, beta male, whatever. Like, you know, in that kind of language, they talk a lot about like procreation and
00:31:21
legacy and stuff like that. But I I almost wonder is there a mechanism in a
00:31:28
human being that if your genes know they're dying out, what would they
00:31:34
trigger in your mind? Right? And I think what they would trigger is exactly what we're seeing.
00:31:39
This like existential panic, angst, even aggression, entitlement, because if
00:31:46
these men do not behave in this way, they are literally going to die out. So what we see in this postcoid world is
00:31:52
that people like maybe you or me who were like losers and didn't know how to talk to chicks in high school, we were
00:31:58
forced into social interaction where we basically like that's where we developed uh in in order so that we could talk to
00:32:05
girls. But in this postcoid world, all those spaces are gone. There's no forcable interaction. So then there are
00:32:12
some people for whom it's natural to talk to girls. And that's why like we see this dichotomy where it's almost
00:32:19
like you know some people like just put yourself out there, just work out, work on yourself and things will work out.
00:32:24
And then there are a lot of other people who are like that's not working. And I imagine if you went back like 200 years,
00:32:31
went back to the Gapagos Islands and you took Darwin's finches and you put them on Twitter, you would see that what
00:32:38
exactly what we're seeing. Some people are like, "Oh, like you have trouble getting bugs, just crack a nut. Like
00:32:44
just get better at cracking nuts." But they have something in their makeup, something in their attachment style,
00:32:51
something in in their their tendency for social anxiety, something in their neuroticism, something in their
00:32:57
circumstances, something in their support structure that allows them to put forth effort and succeed. And then
00:33:05
there are these other people over here who will go to therapy, who will work on themselves professionally,
00:33:12
who will show up on dating apps and because of the shape of their face which
00:33:18
cannot be fundamentally altered or some other thing which they're not even aware of, they grew up with a certain
00:33:24
attachment style that they're not aware of. they grew up with on the spectrum
00:33:30
and their capacity to make eye contact and emotional connections is very difficult. So there's this whole crop of
00:33:37
people who I think are trying really hard. I don't think they're losers. I don't think they're like pathetic or
00:33:42
anything like that. I think there's something about the architecture of how these people are built so that standard
00:33:49
advice does not apply to them. And what I feel when I sit with these people is like someone who is dying out. Like
00:33:56
that's what it feels like to sit with this this person's life. They're not living a life. They're in a slow
00:34:03
protracted process of dying. And when you are in a slow protracted process of dying, pornography shows up. And then
00:34:11
you've got this weird thing that goes on where you get this spurt of dopamine, this existential dread of like I am not
00:34:19
getting to participate in life. There are all these people out there that are participating. They tell me, "Oh, you
00:34:24
should do this, but it doesn't work." And it's just imagine how terrifying it is if someone gives you advice
00:34:32
that's supposed to work and it doesn't work for you. How [ __ ] are you? Right? Because that's the answer. It's like
00:34:38
some people have cancer, we give them cancer treatment, they get better. But if some people have cancer and
00:34:44
everyone's like, "Hey, do this chemotherapy." And it doesn't work, then how screwed are you? You're very
00:34:50
screwed. So this is, I think, what we're seeing. This deep existential loss, this
00:34:56
desire for connection is somehow like intersecting with pornography. Because I
00:35:02
think pornography addiction has a spiritual component, too. And if you talk to people who are addicted to
00:35:07
pornography, they can feel it. They feel like spiritually like empty. They're like, I'm not doing anything in with my
00:35:14
life. So, one of the two variables that correlates with pornography addiction, the two strongest variables that
00:35:20
correlate with pornography addiction, one of them is a sense of meaninglessness in life. And there's a
00:35:26
weird spiritual angle that I talked about, but the other really simple thing is, you know, if you want to stop
00:35:31
watching porn, you need to have a reason to stop watching porn. And the problem with porn is that you can be kind of like living your life and then in the in
00:35:39
between hours when you're like back from work and before you go on a date or maybe you're swiping on Tinder and no
00:35:45
one's really answering or whatever, like you just have these hours in the day where there's nothing going on. You're not living for anything. So, you might
00:35:51
as well jerk off. I mean, there's there's a lot that I'm thinking about. The first is if we go back up to your point about this being a
00:35:57
bit bit of an extinction event, it poses a question about like what do you do about that? M
00:36:03
um you said also people are trying to implement the advice but it's not working.
00:36:08
Now does that mean that that's a question of like motivation, discipline? Is it um is it bad advice? What do we do
00:36:17
there? And um the third I guess question that comes to mind is does society have
00:36:23
a responsibility to intervene in some way to correct this?
00:36:28
So I I think does society have a responsibility? I don't think that is a real thing. So I have never seen society
00:36:37
take a responsibility. I don't think society can take a responsibility. Right? So if like like how do I get
00:36:43
society like who do I talk to? But but if you think about other people that are in marginalized groups, society
00:36:51
intervenes to make the world the governments and the way that we make our laws and the way that we give out
00:36:56
money and grants and the way that we shape our communities. Yeah. So I I understand the question but
00:37:01
I I think like this and this is just the way that I think. So if I ask you what is society you say the government and
00:37:07
then who is the government? What is the government? It's people. Yeah. So I think this comes down to forget
00:37:12
about societal responsibility and I think this is one of the problems. Not to say that it is the problem but this
00:37:18
is just the way that I think. There was a case, I don't remember her name, of a woman who was being sexually assaulted
00:37:23
in public like on a street at nighttime and there were a bunch of neighbors who
00:37:29
were like aware that the sexual assault was happening and no one called for help. And the reason no one called for help is
00:37:35
because everyone assumed that somebody else would call for help. You know whose problem is it? Oh, society should fix
00:37:42
this. And the moment that we say society should fix this, we stop taking
00:37:47
individual responsibility. And the moment that we stop taking individual responsibility, like unless someone
00:37:53
shows up and runs for office and says, "My goal is to do this," which by the
00:37:58
way is happening in like South Korea. So like conservatives that are very like there's this huge tension in South Korea
00:38:04
right now between men and women and this 4B movement where women are like we're not going to have kids anymore. And then
00:38:09
there's like this conservative kind of like pro-masculine kind of movement that is moving into government and says like
00:38:15
this needs to change. we see governments responding to this mating crisis. Um, right. So, I think like China is now
00:38:21
paying people to have children. So, there's all kinds of like moves that are happening. So, is it society's
00:38:27
responsibility? Like, I don't know. So, I think if society doesn't do anything, what's going to happen will be really
00:38:33
simple. And that's what I mean by we're we're witnessing a mass extinction event. We have a group of young men who
00:38:38
are somewhere between 15 to 50 who will just never procreate and then they will
00:38:44
literally die out, right? their genes will not be passed on and for the people who do procreate they will have been
00:38:51
adapted to the postcoid world. Yeah. Right. So they know how to form they they succeed on Tinder. Whereas like if
00:38:58
you go and you look at like if you go to like um some kind of senior event and
00:39:04
you look at all the people who have grandkids, half the men there would not have succeeded on Tinder.
00:39:10
Yeah. Right. And this is something that really like shocks people when I kind of tell them this, but if you want to see like
00:39:15
who's succeeding, it's not the the dudes on Tinder who are getting laid 15 times. Like go to like a I mean, this is
00:39:21
sometimes a little creepy, but like if you go to a playground, you're going to see like a lot of like averagel looking
00:39:26
men with like average looking dad bods, which with average median incomes who
00:39:31
are like having kids, and that's what's really happening. But even those men are
00:39:37
adapted in some way, right? because they're not exceptionally attractive. They're not exceptionally rich, but they
00:39:42
have something going on in their psychological makeup which allows them to form bonds and procreate.
00:39:49
You just said that a huge amount of men between the age of 15 and 50 will not pass on their genes. They will
00:39:54
effectively die out of the gene mating pool. So, people will hear that and many
00:40:00
people will go, "Well, that's evolution." Yeah. And but I want to understand if there's a counterpoint to that. it should should
00:40:07
society intervene should why is you know in the short term we're going to have a lot of men who are disillusioned that
00:40:13
become incel find themselves in pockets of the internet are resentful all those kinds of things but should society
00:40:19
intervene to course correct that should we put systems in place to make sure that those men meet partners I
00:40:24
I'm going to I'm going to answer that question with a question okay if let's say a huge swath of people are
00:40:31
dying out from cancer yeah should we intervene with that yes if a huge swath of people are dying out
00:40:37
from like a virus should we intervene 100% yes if a huge swath of people are dying out
00:40:42
from genocide should we inter intervene with that yes so I think there are two important things one
00:40:48
it's slightly different though isn't it because it's just it's whether you so one is about death right so one is like if if a human being
00:40:55
is dying we should step in but natural selection isn't necessarily about death this is
00:41:01
what's really tricky about it this is why I think it gets hard natural selection is about passing on your genes Yeah,
00:41:06
right. It's about creating viable offspring. And this is where if someone,
00:41:11
you know, and I think we also say yes, like if there's, you know, a couple that wants to have a child and that child has
00:41:17
cystic fibrosis, should we help that couple? Should we help a couple procreate? We also say yes.
00:41:22
Yeah. So that's why we have IVF and things like that. So I think the the tricky thing about the reason that this is different is because that's a couple. If
00:41:29
if a woman is unable to have kids, even if we say if a man is unable to have kids, should we medically intervene so
00:41:35
that it they're capable of having kids? Yes. Right. So, if we're talking about a couple, if we're talking about a human
00:41:42
being and there's a medical problem or if we're talking about protecting people from death, the answer is yes. This is a
00:41:48
new question which is do people have the right and I
00:41:53
don't know if right is and maybe that's the right word to reproduce and this is
00:41:58
what's so challenging about it is like the answer is basically no because for men that requires the consent of someone
00:42:05
else and my right to reproduce never trumps someone's right to not want to
00:42:11
reproduce with me. I think we sort of accept that right that that's correct. Now, this is where the fundamental
00:42:17
biological difference comes in because a woman doesn't need a man to reproduce. I can go to a sperm bank.
00:42:24
And once again, you can argue that you can get laid if you want to, but I that hasn't been my experience. I think women struggle with loneliness and finding
00:42:30
sexual partners and stuff quite a bit as well. There's some really bad perceptions on the internet. So, I think this is like a new problem for society,
00:42:37
which is why it hasn't been solved. Now, that's why the the the track that I take, I don't know what the societal
00:42:43
answer is. I'm not a sociologist. So what I have found thankfully we don't need to sol I don't think we need to
00:42:50
solve that problem. Does it need to be solved? Sure. Should someone solve it? I think so. But I think what what what I
00:42:55
found works really well is that usually the problem that these men are failing
00:43:00
to adapt to I is can be fixed. But the problem is that the solutions that work
00:43:07
for the people who are successful will not work for the people who are unsuccessful. These are apples and
00:43:13
oranges right? So like and this is the big mistake is that when when I say okay I am happily married with two kids but
00:43:22
the thing that I did won't work for these people that's been my clinical experience my advice does not work for
00:43:29
them your advice won't work for them what we need is a different system that
00:43:35
addresses their fundamental problems right cuz I had what it takes internally
00:43:41
I was loved as a child like f like this is how deep it runs. So, I knew how to
00:43:48
give love and receive love. A third of the men that I meet do not know how to
00:43:53
give love and do not know how to receive love. Has nothing to do with their Tinder profiles, that's why they're [ __ ] And when people can say, "Go to
00:44:00
the gym, make more money." But if you do not know how to fundamentally give or receive love, then like that's a huge
00:44:05
problem. Is that where you start when you're trying to solve this on an individual basis? Uh, yeah. So I mean I start giving and
00:44:12
receiving love is not where I start because that's like so foreign to them that they don't know how to do that. Okay?
00:44:17
Right? So I think there are a couple of things. Uh the first place that I start with most men is in understanding their
00:44:24
emotions. So we have all kinds of patterns that we engage in that are driven by different
00:44:31
parts of us that we have no insight into. And usually this is like where the money is. So I I was I had had a great
00:44:37
conversation yesterday with a buddy of mine and you know he he gave me this fantastic example which I've seen so many times. So you know there's a a lot
00:44:44
of women will talk about men who are afraid of commitment. Yeah. You know so it's like oh like I'm dating
00:44:50
this person he's great but he's afraid of commitment. He's afraid of commitment. And then and then then it kind of becomes like oh like the dude is
00:44:55
like he like needs to step up and he needs to like be a man and needs to like learn how to commit. So we sort of put put the onus on the man. You're afraid
00:45:02
of commitment. You need to fix that. It's a really funny thing is if you look at like women that I've worked with,
00:45:08
they sort of fall into this pattern where they date men who are afraid of commitment and that's why they're looking for commitment because they
00:45:14
haven't found it yet, right? And so the really funny thing is sometimes women will select for a man who is afraid of
00:45:21
commitment because deep down they are afraid of commitment. So true. So I I'm going to find someone
00:45:28
who I know is afraid of commitment and therefore I can blame them for never committing. And this is how I know this
00:45:35
because sometimes the dude will come into my office and he will work on his fear of commitment and he will conquer
00:45:41
it. And the moment that he conquers his fear on commitment, the woman will retreat. They'll get terrified. They'll
00:45:47
start to find all kinds of problems. And it's not just like men and it's not just women are guilty of this. So there are all kinds of patterns that people will
00:45:55
engage in that they have no insight into. First of all, understand your emotions. Then you will understand your behaviors. Oh, like why do I keep on pe
00:46:03
selecting people who are afraid of commitment? Because I'm afraid of commitment. And if I can find somebody
00:46:08
else who's afraid of commitment, I can blame them from it. And I never have to deal with my lattering up my fear of
00:46:14
commitment. So there's a lot of stuff that comes with emotions. So awareness of emotions, awareness of your your patterns, the ability to regulate them,
00:46:21
and I'd say that kind of ties it up. So step one is understanding one's emotions, and then step two is sort of
00:46:27
giving them a way to deal with those emotions that isn't the pornography or the addictive behavior or the short-term desire that might be destructive for
00:46:33
their long-term their long-term goals. I think so. And and what is that? How do I deal with
00:46:38
the emotions? So if I'm if I'm if I have a craving to to engage in some kind of
00:46:43
addictive behavior like pornography, what should I do instead? So, so if we're getting super practical,
00:46:49
I can give you kind of like my paradigm for treating pornography addiction. So, the first thing is that I know this
00:46:54
sounds kind of weird, but the first thing that I recommend people do is schedule their pornography usage. So,
00:47:00
pick one hour of the day where they watch pornography. So, if we look at like one of the problems with
00:47:06
pornography, it's that it invades all the cracks in your life. And then over time, what it does is it widens those
00:47:12
cracks. So, the first thing that you've got to do is like move it to like one part of the day. I know a lot of people
00:47:18
are fans of like cold turkey and like like you know sobriety and things like that. I think for the digital addictions
00:47:24
that's harder. So, log out of all of your devices. Restrict it to one hour of the day. Next thing that you need to do
00:47:31
is anticipate what are going to be the hard parts of your day. So, what are the
00:47:36
parts where you're going to feel really bad about something and what's your plan? What's your alternative in those
00:47:43
moments? So the other really tricky thing about the brain is that when we are suffering, we cannot create new
00:47:50
solutions. So usually when we get attacked by something, our survival instincts kick
00:47:56
in. Our reflexes kick in. Reflexes and innovation are at two opposite ends of the spectrum.
00:48:02
So you have to innovate before you need to use it. Right? We need to have a fire hydrant in our house before the fire
00:48:09
starts. You can't go finding a fire hydrant. That's a big mistake that a lot of people make. So, your emotional
00:48:14
regulation techniques, you need to be practiced, whether that's meditation. Um, I really like something called urge
00:48:20
surfing. So, urge surfing is something that's confuses a lot of people. So, if you have a desire, Stephen, like, do you
00:48:27
want anything right now? That house I've put an offer in. Okay, great. Or I'm I'm getting a little bit hungry. So, maybe some
00:48:33
In either case, if you don't get those things, the desire will disappear over time, right? So if you don't get the
00:48:40
house 40 years from now, there may be a seed of desire left, but you're not
00:48:45
going to like want that house 40 like you know that's what's really confusing for people is people don't realize that
00:48:51
if you do not give into your desire it'll disappear on its own and people sort of know this if you've been hungry
00:48:56
and you'll notice that you feel hungry but if you don't feed yourself the hunger goes away. It'll come back
00:49:02
because your s it'll be get recreated stronger by certain signals in your body. But the desire disappears if you
00:49:09
don't give into it. So urge surfing is recognizing that you don't need to
00:49:14
conquer your addiction. You need to wait it out. So if you have a desire for pornography,
00:49:22
the desire will start, it'll increase, it'll peak, and then it'll disappear on
00:49:27
its own. any addictive substance, you just need to play the waiting game. So, it can help to have an emotional
00:49:33
regulation technique. So, the the technique that I recommend for most of my patients is alternate nostril breathing. So, there's something about
00:49:40
our nose that when we change the way that we breathe, it alters our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous
00:49:47
system and causes us to calm down. Anytime we have an urge for something, we feel unsatisfied. When we feel
00:49:54
unsatisfied, it creates stress. Stress causes a spike in cortisol. Cortisol
00:50:00
will then activate our nervous system. So when you want something, it's like I I want it. So you need to just calm
00:50:06
yourself down. So alternate nostril breathing is a great way to do that. We start that by taking your hand, do this.
00:50:12
Okay? And then thumb is out. Great. Then what we're going to do is take your thumb,
00:50:18
block the right nostril, breathe in. Now with a full breath of air, switch.
00:50:25
There you go. Breathe out. Breathe in through the same nostril.
00:50:34
Switch. Breathe out.
00:50:41
In. Switch. Out.
00:50:51
In. Switch.
00:50:56
out. We'll do one more. So, breathe in through the same nostril.
00:51:04
Switch and out.
00:51:10
So, if you do that practice, you'll notice a couple things. One is that one of your nostrils is more closed
00:51:15
than the other. That's completely normal. It'll alternate about every 90 minutes if you're healthy. Okay?
00:51:22
So this practice if we sort of think about it, what were we talking about again?
00:51:28
Can't remember. Exactly. Right. So this practice is interesting
00:51:34
because it forces our attention. If I just tell you to take deep breaths, that doesn't work well because the mind can
00:51:39
continue to be engaged. Right? The mind can think about whatever it wants to. We can talk about marriage. We can talk
00:51:45
about your house. We can talk about what you want to eat. And if I'm just sitting there meditating, observing my breath,
00:51:50
it doesn't anchor the mind. So alternate nostril breathing is really good for a couple of reasons. The first is that it
00:51:56
requires you to pay attention. And if you're concentrating, because we're doing all this weird stuff, right? You're kind of screwing up. That's the
00:52:02
point because then you're not thinking about something else. So then something really cool happens. I feel like watching
00:52:08
pornography. I do this for a while. Which which bre which one? Which one again? And then you do it for a little
00:52:14
while. Calms down the physiology. You'll feel a little bit calmer. And now the urge has disappeared. It'll come back.
00:52:20
It'll come back stronger. But your brain has learned an alternative. The whole
00:52:25
reason we get trapped in a cycle of addiction is because we have one solution to one problem. The moment that
00:52:32
we create a second solution, a lot of things change. Now, we have to train that a little bit ahead of time. It's
00:52:38
hard to do that for the first time when you have a craving. So, you need to practice it for like maybe 5 to 15
00:52:43
minutes every single day. as you get good at it. If you have a craving pornog for pornography, you can use that
00:52:49
practice. And can you use that practice for other types of cravings? 100%. You can use it for anything.
00:52:54
Is there a longer term piece of work I would need to do to get over that craving though? Because, you know, yes and no. So, so start by logging out
00:53:01
of all your devices that you watch pornography on. Use only one device and
00:53:06
schedule one amount of time for the day. Practice urge surfing. Urge surfing is
00:53:12
just the awareness that urges will disappear. I would encourage you to like pay attention to other things. So, if you sit down to eat a meal and you want
00:53:19
a soda, you've got your food in front of you. It's really weird. Just don't eat and don't do anything for a little bit
00:53:24
and just watch the desire for the soda. You'll see it peak and then as you observe it, you will see it disappear.
00:53:31
So, this is what's really weird. Okay, I'm going to say this. I don't know if this is going to make sense.
00:53:37
When you relapse, you know you're going to relapse and then you stop thinking about it. Like
00:53:44
you have this internal struggle like should I do it? Should I not do it? Should I do it? Should I not do it? And then something happens and you're like,
00:53:50
oh, like I'm going to do it. And then you like let the fight happen for a
00:53:55
little while and then it kind of disappears from your mind. You know what I mean? So what a lot of people don't realize is that internal conflict is willpower.
00:54:04
They think willpower means winning the internal conflict. That's technically not the case. If we look at the part of
00:54:10
our brain that exerts willpower, it is the same part of our brain that monitors internal conflict. If you are internally
00:54:19
conflicted, that is your willpower acting. That's you fighting. That's the willpower itself. So, as long as you are
00:54:26
monitoring your internal conflict, the only way an addiction can win is when you leave the ring. Literally. Are you
00:54:33
saying keep the conflict going? Keep the conflict going and you will win 100% of the time. And if people have
00:54:40
struggled with addiction, they're going to know. In the back of your mind, you make a decision and then you pretend to
00:54:45
fight for a little while. You've already decided and then you feel really good. You're like, "Oh yeah, we're going to just do it." Some justification happens.
00:54:52
And then you stop the fight. And then you don't even do it right away. You don't do it like right away. You're like, "Wait." And then it just happens
00:54:58
on its own. But if you really pay attention to your internal process, you'll see that going on. Okay. So, urge
00:55:04
surfing, alternate nostril breathing practiced ideally ahead of time so that
00:55:09
when you are doing it, you know, it's like if I want to learn, if I want to defend myself with a sword, I don't want to
00:55:16
pick it up for the first time when barbarians are attacking me, right? I need to practice. Same is true of cognitive skills. So, we want to do
00:55:23
those cognitive skills and then when we have those urges, we want to deal with them. The other thing that we need to do
00:55:29
is anticipate the hard emotional parts of our day. So, am I going to have this
00:55:34
conversation? Is this going to be hard? And then prepare yourself for that emotion. Then when the allotted hour
00:55:40
comes in, you can use pornography. So, the first thing that we want to do is we want to like not have it invade every
00:55:46
part of your life. Just just localize it to a particular thing. And this may not work for substances, but I think it
00:55:52
works for digital addictions way better. And then over time, you can reduce it. you can start skipping a day. And is
00:55:58
there internal deeper work? Absolutely. So finding a sense of purpose. So people
00:56:03
have conquered pornography addiction when they have no time for it anymore. So there's like deeper work about
00:56:09
finding your purpose in life. That will help you a lot. Overcoming an addiction requires a why. So everyone's like, "Oh,
00:56:16
like I got to do it. Why? It's because it's bad for me." That's not that's not going to motivate you. You need like a
00:56:22
real reason to do it. This is also why a lot of men will relapse with pornography when their
00:56:28
partner has a problem with it. Because keeping my partner from getting mad at
00:56:34
me is not a sufficient reason to conquer the addiction. Usually what'll happen is
00:56:39
the addiction will then use deception. So if if if I if I'm trying to give up
00:56:46
pornography to keep my partner happy, my addict's brain will be like if she doesn't know, I can check that box and I
00:56:53
can use. Does that kind of make sense? Yeah. So you need an internal reason why you need to give it up.
00:56:59
And that enters the realm of maybe psychotherapy, maybe a lot of introspection, hiking, meditation, and
00:57:05
then there's a spiritual component, too. The reason we're seeing an increase in addictions is because we as a society
00:57:13
need to grow spiritually. And anyone, you'll notice this, people
00:57:20
who are like spiritually powerful, not necessarily monks, but like a lot of like the regular people have overcome an
00:57:27
addiction. And anytime I have a patient with an addiction, once they're on the other side, they are
00:57:34
like absolute beasts on the spiritual level. They can handle all kinds of adversity because they have mastered
00:57:40
themselves. So I think there's some weird thing going on in the universe right now where like everyone is meditating. We all need
00:57:48
growth. Our systems are falling apart and like we need this new skill set. And I think addiction is on the path to
00:57:54
meditation and spiritual growth. It's what really gets people started. So
00:58:00
even then, it's not karmically like bad. I've built companies from scratch and backed many more. And there's a blind
00:58:06
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00:58:18
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00:59:05
head to justworks.com now. That's just.com. I've interviewed a lot of people who are
00:59:11
deeply spiritual and pretty much all of their stories seem to start with an addiction. Yeah. I'm really trying to understand what
00:59:17
what the the domino effect I guess is there. Yeah. So I think what's so there are different ways to think about it. One is
00:59:23
that if you randomly have an addiction and you conquer it, that requires an internal work like an internal like
00:59:30
strengthening of your anterior singulate cortex which is what monitors your internal conflict gives you willpower.
00:59:36
You have to master yourself in some way. So I think that but does it stop before the addiction because yes I I think so. So so I I think an
00:59:43
addiction is like a karmic it's like signing yourself up for a boot
00:59:49
camp when you're getting born. So you like come into this earth prone to addiction and then if you conquer that
00:59:57
addiction you will be a different person. And so I I see a huge karmic kind of thing where like we are given
01:00:03
these addictions to spiritually grow right. So when I lift a weight it's not easy but it makes me stronger. So I
01:00:10
think we sometimes forget that the mind doesn't wear out. Can you challenge what I'm about to say
01:00:15
then? Okay. So the way that I would think about it is that you would something might happen in your life. Now
01:00:22
you might think this would happen in a in a past life or in some other form some kind of early trauma I guess
01:00:27
your dad screams in your face that you're a piece of [ __ ] when you're 3 years old and because of that
01:00:34
I don't know you develop some sort of addictive behaviors to deal with the stress and the dopamine the cortisol that's running through your body.
01:00:40
So that becomes domino number two. Great. And then you struggle and battle the addiction. It ruins your life.
01:00:46
One domino. Okay. Okay. Yeah. It ruins your life. Um your partner says she's going to leave you because of this
01:00:52
addiction that you have. So you decide that the pain of making a change is
01:00:58
greater than the pain of staying the same. So you you go to rehab and you go on the journey. You overcome it. And
01:01:08
maybe there is still a hole or a gap. there is you will not
01:01:16
overcome it. The scenario you described that person will relapse. Okay. So,
01:01:21
okay. So, so the scenario that you said okay was you realize that the pain of
01:01:28
not giving up the addiction hurts more than the pain of giving it up. That's
01:01:34
not going to work. So, the moment that if you say okay the consequences of the addiction are so high that I have to
01:01:42
give it up. The reason that doesn't work is because you're being forced. Mhm. Right. So if the goal of this is to give
01:01:50
into myself and reduce my total amount of pain. If it's a calculation to reduce
01:01:56
my pain, I'm still giving into the part of myself that wants to lessen pain. You
01:02:02
with me? Yeah. If I'm giving into the part of myself that wants to lessen pain, the addiction will continue. Not 100%. But that's like
01:02:11
honestly my clinical experience. The way to beat it is saying, "Fuck it. There's
01:02:16
going to be pain. I'm going to embrace that pain. I don't need to run away from pain anymore. I don't need to choose the
01:02:22
lesser evil. I'm going to choose the greater evil because it's the right thing to do." Surrender. Surrender and challenge. Right? So,
01:02:30
that's what's kind of confusing for people. Surrender. Surrender in this case means allowing yourself to walk the
01:02:36
hard path. Not being trapped by I have to lessen the pain in my life. The
01:02:42
domino that I would add at the beginning would be why were you born in that family?
01:02:48
Right? So that presumes a layer of reality that we do not
01:02:54
generally speaking scientifically accept. Why why do you believe in that layer of
01:02:59
reality and what is that layer of reality? Two reasons. One is because I think that
01:03:05
I think that there is order in the universe. I think we have abundant evidence that there are laws that govern
01:03:12
existence. Okay. And the laws that we have so far are generally speaking in my
01:03:18
opinion insufficient to answer the question why someone is born in a
01:03:25
particular place. We have a piece of that. We have a piece of why you're born the way you are
01:03:32
because of things like genetics. Right? So, we know that like your tendency for baldness is like determined before
01:03:38
you're even born, right? That's what the theory of karma kind of says. It's like there's a lot of stuff about your life
01:03:43
that is determined before you even show up. So, that's one reason. So, I I think we
01:03:49
need a system that is sufficiently explanatory. And for me, there are other arguments
01:03:55
like biological reductionism and like you can say there's no broader purpose to anything or whatever. I think that's fair to say. But I I do think that
01:04:03
there's order to things. And I think if we have a reason why if I have three dominoes,
01:04:11
right? And and I knock them over. This is the
01:04:17
cause. But this the finger is the cause. And then what is the cause of the finger moving? It's the shoulder. It's the
01:04:23
head. It's that I am here in this room trying to explain a principle. So the causes keep on going back and back and
01:04:29
back and back and back until you reach a until you reach a singularity, right?
01:04:36
Which is what big bang theory says is that cause and effect basically kind of
01:04:41
got created. I don't know maybe maybe physicists understand this better than I do but what's really fascinating is if
01:04:47
you look at some of these old eastern texts they say that the universe is born
01:04:52
out of a point called bindu visaraa which is literally described as a point of infinite
01:04:58
energy matter and consciousness which then explodes into the universe.
01:05:04
Do you believe in a god? Uh sure. So I I think that what we call
01:05:12
a god. So if you look at like a person, a person has like layers, right? So if I ask like who is Steven? Steven has a
01:05:19
body. So there's a certain level of Steven that is a physical form. There's a certain level of Steven that is a bank
01:05:24
account. There's a certain level of Steven that is a brand. Which one of those is really Steven?
01:05:29
They're all really Steven. So I think there is something at the resolution that people would call a god that does
01:05:35
exist. So you think there's a higher power that is somewhat intentional? Yes. Obviously the question becomes what
01:05:42
created that? Um so this is what's really interesting. In the west we think of time as linear.
01:05:49
So if you ask a yogi he'll say time is circular. So what's the first season?
01:05:56
Spring. I'm I'm confused. But doesn't winter come before spring? So is winter the
01:06:01
first season? I see I see what you mean. Right. So we have this conception that time moves linearly.
01:06:08
But there are a lot of conceptions of time that are quite circular. What comes first, the chicken or the egg? So I I think that there's a
01:06:15
circularity to time which there's a very like simple argument against which is that we cannot move backward in time,
01:06:21
right? Like so time seem like the sand in the hourglass only goes one way. Yeah.
01:06:27
So this is where I'm not an expert in physics. So I wouldn't make an argument of this based on physics.
01:06:33
But I just want to know what your intuition tells you. It's not so experience, right? So I I think when you experience
01:06:39
certain states of meditation, you have experiences of things outside of the
01:06:44
normative reality. Now, you can also make a biological reductionist argument
01:06:49
that those are just illusions, hallucinations created by neurons. I don't think that that's true.
01:06:54
What specifically you referring to that you've experienced? I don't talk about it.
01:07:01
uh you can ask me a more specific question and then maybe I can say something but what is the right question to ask you
01:07:07
so I'll try to explain so this is going to get weird okay so I realized recently
01:07:14
that I used to value credibility over truth
01:07:20
you understand credibility and truth are two fundamentally different things so credibility
01:07:26
is saying something that is believable Right. Mhm. So believability
01:07:33
depends on you, not on me. Yeah. So what I realized recently is that credibility is about changing your
01:07:40
language to the to fit the ignorance of the audience. Like literally. So I was thinking about this recently in in my
01:07:46
own midlife crisis. And I was like, what am I here to do? Am I here to be famous and successful? If so, then I should be
01:07:53
credible. But if I want to speak the truth, then I need to allow my brand or
01:07:58
whatever the [ __ ] it is to like fall apart and be like not credible for people to think that I'm an idiot. And I
01:08:04
think that is more important, right? Because that's ego. Like people can think I'm dumb. I would rather speak the
01:08:09
truth than be credible in this moment and in some limited ways. That's number
01:08:16
one. So I acknowledge that what I'm about to say doesn't make sense. And I think if you want to understand this,
01:08:21
you have to experience it. And we'll explain why in a second. So if you look at your existence in the world, you have
01:08:28
a body, you have a mind, but then you have this other thing which I think science sort of like acknowledge, we
01:08:34
sort of acknowledge, we don't really know what it is, but the capacity for experience. We have this subjective part of you, right? So I can see objectively
01:08:40
what you are, but you have an element of subjectivity. Does that make sense? Yeah.
01:08:46
Do you think? Yeah. How do I know? You don't. Do I think? I don't know. I assume so. Exactly
01:08:52
right. It's kind of weird. So even when we're like scientists and we say anxiety comes from the amygdala, it's kind of
01:08:58
we're doing something really really sneaky. We don't know that anxiety comes from the amydala. We can measure blood
01:09:03
flow in the amydala. We can measure electrical activity using an EEG. How do we know that anxiety is comes from the
01:09:09
amydala? Because we ask a human being, hey, when there's blood flow going over here in this fMRI, what are you feeling?
01:09:17
I'm feeling anxious. So there is a level of human existence that is subjective.
01:09:24
You with me? Yeah. So what science has done is we developed telescopes and microscopes to take our
01:09:31
physical eyes and extend them. So my physical eyes with the baseline
01:09:38
sensory organs I can perceive certain things and I cannot perceive other things. But if I develop an instrument
01:09:45
I can see a star. If I develop an instrument, I can see a bacteria. So, I'm taking my natural physical ability
01:09:52
and I am enhancing it with technology with me. Meditation is doing that for your
01:09:59
subjectivity. So, if I take like the material realm, which is observable, objective, and I use a telescope and I
01:10:06
use a microscope, I can go further than where I started. Does that make sense? Yeah. So, now the question is for the
01:10:11
subjective realm, can you go further in the opposite direction? And when you do that through meditation, you will
01:10:19
discover things that are not available to the basic subjective experience. So
01:10:26
like with the naked eye, you can't see a bacteria, but if you use this instrument, you can see it. There's there's basically an a spiritual
01:10:32
equivalent, a subjective equivalent of a microscope and a telescope that allow you to perceive things using your
01:10:38
baseline subjective experience that are not perceivable by normal means. That doesn't mean that they're supernatural.
01:10:45
We call them supernatural, but I think this is all reducible to science. We just haven't figured it out yet. I think
01:10:51
that I have seen enough stuff through personal experiences, through the clinical value of working on these
01:10:58
things where I think like some of this stuff is real. When earlier when I asked you about your experience, you said I don't talk about
01:11:04
it. Yes. Which is extremely rare for you to say because you talk about everything it seems like pretty much most things. I
01:11:10
mean there's not a question I've ever asked you where you said I don't talk about it. So I'm curious as to why you
01:11:15
don't talk about it. Two or three reasons. One is that it depletes shi immensely.
01:11:21
It depletes energy. So as you as you accumulate spiritual energy, there are certain practices that you can do
01:11:27
including helping people that will deplete your energy. Second thing is anytime I talk about it, I think it it
01:11:34
it induces a subtle form of ego, right? So it's like, oh, I have been to the other side even like talking about not
01:11:40
talking about it. So that's why like I won't show up on a podcast and be like, "Oh, like I've had all these experiences
01:11:46
that I'm not going to tell you about. It's real, but by the way, so so I think there's a subtle form of ego that I
01:11:51
really wrestle with and I've just learned." So there are one or two times in my life where I've shared these experiences and it wipes away like my
01:11:58
meditative progress for like 5 years. So it'll it'll take me years of practice to get back to having those experiences.
01:12:06
And I I I think I've also been told by my teachers and now I'm understanding. I didn't understand back when they told me
01:12:11
but I I think there it's not and there's other reasons too. So it creates expectations it creates an imagination
01:12:18
the moment that there's an expectation in the mind the mind will reproduce that experience.
01:12:24
Obviously the viewer is thinking listen Dr. K I trust you and you're s you're suggesting you've been to the other side
01:12:31
and seen something and I haven't been there but that knowledge that you have might help me make more informed choices
01:12:37
of my life. So tell tell me what you see experience.
01:12:42
Yes and no. So so let's understand. Okay. So any help that I can give I'm going to
01:12:49
give. So like my understanding of this mass extinction event that is happening
01:12:55
right now is like a spiritual sense and I think some people may resonate with that and some people may not. So that's
01:13:02
the first thing. Second thing is if I can help you I will. I don't think
01:13:07
this is going to help you. I think all it's going to do is gonna it's going to create ego. It's going to create an aura
01:13:13
around me. I don't want that. It's going to create people hunting for this which will inhibit it. The more I say, the
01:13:22
harder it will be for it to help you. So, the best thing to do is if you're interested in this stuff, I mean, like
01:13:27
literally like what are we talking about here? Let's just stop and think about this. This is crazy. This guy is saying there's stuff after death. There's like
01:13:33
these beings out there, right? Right? Like this is wild. This is dumb. This is
01:13:39
unbelievable. Exactly. So if you really want to know, and this is what I love about this work, this is the reason I I
01:13:45
say it. One of the great tragedies of the world today is that it's it's explored. We
01:13:53
know what's behind every nook and cranny. We've mapped the earth. There's no exploration. Maybe deep sea is what's left. Space is what's left. It's so
01:13:59
exciting to explore. But most human beings on the planet do not have the opportunity to explore the frontiers of
01:14:06
the universe. Right? The known universe. The cool thing is that I don't know if this is going to make sense. In the
01:14:12
realm of subjectivity, no one can explore for you.
01:14:18
You have to do the exploration yourself. And if you are hungry to be in Mellin's
01:14:24
shoes, if you're hungry to be an astronaut and explore something that no one has ever seen before, then you
01:14:30
should meditate. And I'm a crazy person. Like sure, am I
01:14:35
a am I a Harvard medical school trained psychiatrist? Yes. But like I could be a
01:14:41
crazy person. I had some experiences. I maybe joined a cult and like that. Like you can't trust me. Exactly. So don't
01:14:48
trust me. You go see for yourself, right? Go and meditate. Take take a
01:14:55
moment to sit, not a moment, take a year, take a decade to sit and look at that subjective experience of self and
01:15:02
see how far you can take it. Try to get rid of all of the anchors of
01:15:08
the material realm. If you're got an itch, you need to not focus on that. Just focus your attention fully inward.
01:15:13
It's not a process of evolution. It's a process of involution. Put all of your attention, all of your sensory input. So
01:15:20
if I close my eyes, what I hear is louder, right? If I smell and close my eyes, I smell something more intensely.
01:15:27
Remove all of your sensory perceptions and all you're left with is attention and put it inward.
01:15:34
If you do that, you'll discover things if you practice consistently enough. And this is why it's so hard. This is why
01:15:40
it's so unbelievable for people. I mean, the order, the time scale that we're talking about is years, if not decades.
01:15:46
So if you do like solid esoteric spiritual practice for years and
01:15:52
decades, hopefully it'll happen to you. Maybe it won't. I haven't figured that out.
01:15:58
What What about if I do some magic mushrooms or some kettle instead? Uh so then you'll get some experiences,
01:16:04
right? But you won't control what those experiences are. What are those experiences? Are they real? Are they not real? Like we're not sure.
01:16:10
Do you think more people should try especially people that are suffering from treatment resistant depression or
01:16:16
other things or struggling in their lives should try things like psilocybin which is the active compound in magic mushrooms?
01:16:22
Uh generally speaking no and there's a really important reason for that. So all
01:16:27
these things so the number of people who have been that I've seen in my office who have been messed up by psychedelics
01:16:34
far outweighs the number of people who have been helped. Really? Yes. So LSD, you like we know this,
01:16:40
right? There's bad trips with LSD. It lives in your spine. You have like LSD flashbacks. Uh I've seen PTSD from
01:16:48
trips. I've seen uh new anxiety disorders, panic disorders from
01:16:53
psychedelic uh substances induced. So these are people that'll come to me like, I'm 32 years old. I was fine for
01:16:59
my whole life. Six months ago, I used psychedelics and now like I'm having panic attacks. Here's the key thing to
01:17:07
understand. Psychedelics, what we know scientifically, forget about all the whether the beings exist or not,
01:17:13
whatever, Dr. K's crazy. What we know is that they induce neuroplasticity.
01:17:18
Now, here's the problem. Neuroplasticity means my brain is in edit mode. Okay?
01:17:27
Which means that if you edit it in the wrong way, you'll mess up your brain.
01:17:32
So, what we know is that this is what's really interesting. If we look at the therapeutic effects of psychedelics, set
01:17:38
and setting matter a lot. You need to have like people with you who can like
01:17:44
shepherd you through the journey because if you just do it on your own, you'll potentially get worse. All of those
01:17:49
negative whatever emotions or whatever with the psychedelic experience and neuroplasticity, you you'll sometimes
01:17:54
get you know people will call it I forget it's called um the heroic dose,
01:17:59
right? So there was some guy who kind of coined that term. So, a super high dose which will activate your nervous system
01:18:05
in a potentially traumatic way. So, if you look at the history of psychedelics, the way that they've been used, you're
01:18:11
you're helped by like a shaman. Yeah. Right. So, there's someone who knows how to like do it in a way that is positive.
01:18:18
And unfortunately, what I've seen is I've had plenty of patients who will like experiment with it when they're feeling really bad because they hear it
01:18:25
as healing, but it just messes them up even more because now they're just going in, they're editing, they have a
01:18:30
traumatic experience, some demon is there, it's hounding them, they can't escape, they like wake up from the trip
01:18:36
and that like the demon is like there when they close their eyes and like all kinds of weird stuff. So I think you it has to be done in the right way which
01:18:42
the studies also support that psychedelic it's not you just take psilocybin and you're healed. What
01:18:48
happens is you'll have a trial that has 13 weeks of therapy with two doses of psychedelics in the middle. And one
01:18:55
really important part is after the psychedelic the therapist will talk to you about integrating what you learned
01:19:00
into your life. Now that you've had this experience of a vastness of self and you feel connected with other people, what
01:19:07
are you going to do about this divorce that you're going through? So I think
01:19:12
there's elements that make it clinically useful. There are elements that can heal, but you need shephering. I think
01:19:19
there's a lot of data to support that. So you're pro- psychedelics, but in the context where it's guided with a a
01:19:26
trained professional and the certain setting is controlled. I I I would say that I am optimi cautiously optimistic
01:19:32
about psychedelics and if we want to talk about their benefits, we need to pay attention to the way in which the
01:19:38
trials are conducted and the traditions in which they're conducted. I want to go back up to the top of the
01:19:44
uh the top of the river here to where we were we were before we took this um this
01:19:49
turn and we were talking about the importance of cultivating a why so that you can overcome an addictive
01:19:56
behavior. And I actually think this is super important because our wise seem to run our life. They seem to really be
01:20:02
actually what we refer to as discipline. I think it's people think of like I am disciplined. I'm not disciplined. But actually it's for me in my life anyway.
01:20:08
It's when I have a really really strong why then I make the decision in
01:20:14
hindsight I wanted to make. So like going to the gym is a easy example. Going to the gym requires time. It's not
01:20:21
always super comfortable. I don't love the running machine. But there's this overarching why that gets me there and
01:20:26
gets me to do it. So I wanted to a pause and reflect is like is that accurate? But also how does one go about
01:20:33
cultivating a why if it really is that important? I think yes is the short answer. Why is
01:20:38
incredibly important? Um and I lean on eastern systems of cultivation because
01:20:45
if you look at the difference between a yogi and a therapist, a therapist does something to you. Our system of
01:20:51
psychology is designed with like a patient that I therapize, right? They
01:20:56
have to do some work on their own. But like Freud was doing the analysis in the
01:21:01
same way that a surgeon is doing the surgery. So in the west we have this idea that like I'm trained. I'm going to
01:21:07
do something. I'm going to therapize you. So if you want to DIY it, do it
01:21:12
yourself. That's where the Eastern traditions come in because no one was ever meditating for the Buddha, right?
01:21:18
The Buddha was like, "I'm going to teach you something. You're going to do it yourself." So, I think the cultivation of if you were want to do stuff on your
01:21:25
own, the spiritual traditions and I think that's why they're so powerful because like it's a DIY system. No one
01:21:31
was a yogi was working by themselves. They weren't working with anybody else. So, they get taught things and then you
01:21:37
do it yourself. So, I would use the word dharma. So, dharma is the Sanskrit word for duty. And cultivating dharma in your
01:21:46
life is what I would correlate with a why. And the reason is is exactly kind
01:21:51
of what you described is that there are some things in life that are painful but we choose to do them. And we have to be
01:21:58
a little bit careful because if we're delaying gratification, then we're still giving into desire,
01:22:05
right? It's just like like my desire for $10 instead of $1 means that I'm going to work two days and then I'm going to
01:22:11
get 10 bucks. But it's still greed that's driving us. So the thing about dharma or duty is it allows us to choose
01:22:18
hard things. So the analogy that I use if someone is like pointing a gun at me, I'm going to
01:22:23
run away from it. Gun means death. It means disability. It means all kinds of stuff. Someone points a gun at my kid, I'm stepping into that path. No
01:22:30
question, no doubt. And it makes sense to everybody, right? Gun bad. But when doing dharma, gun is
01:22:37
easy. Like I'll take that gun every single if a bullet leaves that gun. I want it to hit me.
01:22:43
And it's that simple that once you discover what your dharma is,
01:22:49
then all of the difficult things in life become easy. The things that if you're
01:22:56
chasing fundamentally greed, I want something. I want money, but I don't want to work. Why is that such a
01:23:02
problem, right? Because I'm always chasing my own betterment. So, I want money because I want this, but then when
01:23:09
I start to work, it feels bad. So, I want to go home. So, I'm always being pulled by my wants, being pulled by my
01:23:15
wants. But if you ask me, do I want the gun? Do I want to step into the path of the gun? No, absolutely not. I want to
01:23:21
run away from the gun. But dharma allows me to do the things that I don't want to do. It activates a different circuit
01:23:29
that allows me to embrace difficulty. So that's what the why is. Now, go
01:23:35
ahead. You know what I'm going to say, which is like, how do I cultivate dharma? Excellent. The reason dharma is hard to
01:23:41
cultivate is because we don't know what we want. Instead,
01:23:47
we know what the world tells us to want. It's like if you think about the things that you want,
01:23:54
how did you learn that you want those things? Because you saw somebody else doing it. Like an advert. I saw the the waffle or
01:24:00
the Oreos in an advert. And absolutely right. That's why advertising is an industry because we've figured out
01:24:07
as human beings that I can control your wants. So when I work with like young
01:24:12
men, used to be young women, it's slightly different, but this is a bigger issue for I think women maybe 10 years
01:24:18
ago some somehow it's gotten better, but for young men right now if I ask them what they want, they want what they see.
01:24:25
Also true of women. It's balancing some. But like I I want to be I want to be like I'm going to start a podcast. I'mma
01:24:32
be like Steven. I'mma get ripped. I'mma buy a house. I'm gonna get a girlfriend. I want this. I want one want. None of
01:24:40
those voices are coming from you. They're not dharma. So, the first thing that you have to do is evacuate
01:24:46
anything that you want that came from outside of you. Sometimes it's hard to tell where it came from. No, cuz it almost feels on
01:24:53
the surface like cuz when you just said then I want a house, I'm like [ __ ] do I actually want that house or is the
01:24:58
reason I want that house? Yeah. So this is the problem is that when we want something from the outside we internalize it right so this is like
01:25:05
if you say you should do something right oh everyone in the world is struggling
01:25:11
with what they should do that's not what you want otherwise you would use the word want so should is externalized
01:25:18
expectations that we then internalize even a lot of our desires are of those kinds of qualities so it didn't come
01:25:24
from you weren't sitting there still on a mountaintop and be like ah I want that
01:25:29
house and then the question so first thing you have to do is if you like saw someone getting it and you wanted it
01:25:36
that's not really what you want but what you will find is that that triggered something deeper within you so
01:25:44
that what you saw someone else when I don't know if this kind of makes sense but like the things that we gravitate
01:25:51
towards connect to what we really want but it's a version of it so when I see like you know a sexy dude with a sexy
01:25:58
girl and I say, "I want that. That's not that's what I think I want." And this is
01:26:03
the whole problem is I've worked with tons of people who've gotten what they wanted, chased these things, and were
01:26:09
still unhappy. You get the first girl, and then you need the second, and then you need the third, and it's like, "What are you even chasing here?" That's where
01:26:15
you get to the the psychological root of like, "Okay, what I want is to feel loved. I want to feel secure." And this
01:26:21
is where people get into a lot of trouble because if I want to feel loved and I craft myself
01:26:27
into something that cannot be denied, I'm rich, I am famous, I am handsome, and then someone chooses to love me,
01:26:34
then I'm [ __ ] because who do they love? Do they love
01:26:40
this crafted version of me or do they love the loser me? I don't know. And
01:26:45
then their marriage has all kinds of problems. So the external desires that you have will will if you follow them
01:26:53
within yourself, you really ask yourself what what about this do I want? Why do I
01:26:58
want this? What is the thing that is hungry within me? Because often times even when you get the girl, you're resentful towards her. You're like, you
01:27:06
rejected me when I was a loser, but now you want to date. Okay, let's go. Let's have a transactional relationship where
01:27:12
I'm going to get laid and I'm going to ghost you. I did that. Yeah, a lot. I did that. this girl this girl I met
01:27:18
when I was 18 when I was a broke I was a loser and um she was she was not
01:27:24
interested in me and then a couple years later she's interested in me when things are going well in my life and it was
01:27:30
exactly what you described it was like there was a part of me that knew that this was I guess I was resentful towards
01:27:36
it absolutely right and and so even getting what you wanted back then doesn't
01:27:41
satisfy you so your dharma is what I would say is like that's one thing so look at the things that you want, what do they track
01:27:48
back to within you? And then the last thing that works really, really, really well is to be silent to try to find as
01:27:55
much quiet as you can to remove all the external influences and just see what comes up because the things that the
01:28:03
wise always come from within. They can never people can try and go people my
01:28:09
parents tried to convince me to become a doctor, right? They tried so hard. They said why? And I was like why? And they're like because this and this and
01:28:16
this and this and this and so and people like people are going to be telling them why they should do this. It's this
01:28:21
reason, this reason, this reason, why I should get married. The why you should get married, right? And it's never going to work. So the why
01:28:28
literally comes from within. And this is why it's so hard to find the why because we live in a world where we are
01:28:34
sensorally bombarded. We are under assault 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
01:28:40
In my case, it was like efficiency. So podcast when I'm walking to the train, read a book on the train, podcast when
01:28:47
I'm leaving the train, sitting down in class, lectures in the ear when I'm
01:28:52
working out, constantly sensorally bonded bombarded. And so you never get to spend time with yourself,
01:29:00
right? So once you get rid of all of that, something will float up. And if you talk to people who are artists and
01:29:06
inspiration, right? You look at something else and I feel inspired.
01:29:12
I'm inspired by that. But even if you listen to the language, the inspiration arises in here. It is
01:29:19
triggered by the outside thing. Does that kind of make sense? So you have to look really look within. And the best
01:29:25
way to do that is just be silent. So I I talk a lot about my spiritual
01:29:30
journey in India and things like that. But what I don't talk a lot about is like I climb mountains like climbed to
01:29:35
Kilamanjaro, climbed all these mountains in like Colorado and stuff like that. And like climbing is great. Like you're
01:29:41
just with yourself for 14 hours a day and at the top of Kilamanjar, not the top, eight hours from the top. You have
01:29:46
no breath to talk. It requires all of your energy, all of your concentration.
01:29:51
You're huffing and puffing. You are just with yourself in a very deep way. You can't pay attention to what anyone else
01:29:58
is saying or doing because each leg, my leg feels like it's made of lead.
01:30:04
I'm just with myself so so so deeply. And when you're with yourself deeply in
01:30:11
that way, the why will come. Why is it we
01:30:17
don't like being with ourselves? Because no one taught us how to in the right way.
01:30:25
That study comes to mind where they put college kids in a room and asked them if they would rather sit alone or
01:30:31
electrocute themselves. And the college students, many of them decided they'd rather electrocute themselves than sit
01:30:37
alone with their thoughts and wait. Yeah. Why is that?
01:30:42
For the same reason that people engage in self-injurious behavior. So people cut, right? Burn. So when people are
01:30:49
very mentally unhealthy, they will engage in these behaviors because pain
01:30:54
wipes me free from all the thoughts in my head. I don't have to be with myself. Most people their experience of
01:30:59
themselves is negative. Because if like, you know, I experienced this a lot where I would play video games all day and
01:31:05
then if I went to bed without falling asleep immediately, this torrent of
01:31:11
negative negativity would come up, anxiety, regret, guilt, shame, whatever,
01:31:16
right? And and so if you sort of think about it like being with us is normally a ne a very negative place and the
01:31:21
reason it becomes a negative place is because we suppress all this negativity. So my mind becomes an unhealthy place to
01:31:27
be. I don't want to be there. It sucks being me. That's why we get addicted to pornography because in the in between
01:31:33
spaces of my life, if I have to sit with myself, it's [ __ ] I'm worried. I'm guilty. I'm pathetic.
01:31:40
There's this existential crisis. AI is going to take take my job. And it's not just negativity. It's also positivity. I
01:31:46
should be using AI. I should start an AI startup. I'm not doing this. I really should be doing this. Right? But if you
01:31:52
just like sit with yourself, you'll notice there's all kinds of like trash desires and wants and ambitions and want
01:32:01
to teach people a lesson and oh my god, the world is such a terrible place. It's like just not a good place. So no one
01:32:07
ever teaches us how to sit with ourselves. I have this habit where I get in bed, my partner, she uh falls asleep very very
01:32:14
quickly. She doesn't need any kind of stimulation. And I sit there and I like listen to this sounds crazy, but I
01:32:20
listen to like serial killer stuff or I listen to the news. I just need to I'm conscious of saying the word need. I
01:32:25
choose to listen to things to kind of preoccupy my mind. And I think what I'm scared of, if I'm being honest, is the
01:32:31
thought of going to the to bed and laying there and doing nothing
01:32:37
is just like it's just makes me feel that there would just I wouldn't be able to sleep. I don't know if that's true,
01:32:43
but I just feel like they I'd start thinking so much and then the thoughts might make me,
01:32:48
I don't know, get out of bed and start writing a PowerPoint presentation or something. Yeah. So, in your case, I just continue
01:32:55
listening to your fun thriller podcast before you go to bed. You don't need to change that. Okay? You just keep doing
01:33:01
that. So, don't worry. I'm gonna give you But be kind. Like, cut yourself a break, bro. You're doing so much. Like, if you
01:33:07
just want to help you get what I'm saying and I'll help you with the issue. Yeah. But so this is really important on the
01:33:16
road of self-development. You don't have to like if you're going to flagagillate yourself, you don't have
01:33:21
to flagagillate yourself in the nuts. What does flagagulate mean? It's like when you whip yourself, you know this like old like you know like I
01:33:28
you don't have to do it the hardest way. You are allowed to do it in safer, easier ways. And I think bedtime is like
01:33:35
if that's what you like to do like you work plenty hard, Stephen. And if you want to listen to something for just do that.
01:33:41
All right. Now, your issue of if I feel like it was empty or if I didn't have a podcast or
01:33:47
something like all this stuff would come up. So, I think you should do that work. You just don't have to do it before bed.
01:33:53
And we've talked about this before that, you know, like I think sitting on a beach is hard for you doing nothing, right? Yeah. So, like I think like there are
01:33:59
other places where you can sit and kind of do nothing. The other thing that I would a couple of
01:34:04
things that I would tell you is one is whatever comes up needs to come up. Okay. So, just let whatever is coming up
01:34:11
coming up. It's kind of like your mind is so full of stuff. There's another kind of mistake that you're making is
01:34:16
that you assume that when a thought comes up, you will
01:34:21
get up and work on it. So, the reason that your mind is a dangerous place for
01:34:27
you is because of the way that you respond to your thoughts. If I have this thought, then I have to act. You notice
01:34:33
that like I have to get up. You said that the moment that you don't have to get up
01:34:39
is the moment that you'll be free in your mind, right? So, let let it come up. Okay. It's a thought. It's okay to
01:34:45
get up. Sometimes I do, too. I get up. I'll I'll write things down. That's how we get to, you know, book three is ready
01:34:51
at the same time that book two is ready. Like like because I you there's a good part of that. But I I think it's it you know, learning how to sit with yourself
01:34:57
is very important. And this is also where I I'd recommend a practice called
01:35:03
thratika to you if you want to meditate. It's fixed point gazing on a candle flame. And the key thing about that
01:35:09
practice is when you close your eyes, you'll see so you stare at a candle flame for like 60 to 300 seconds without
01:35:15
blinking. Whatever feels safe and comfortable to you. It'll feel a little bit uncomfortable. And then when you close your eyes, you'll see an after
01:35:21
image of the candle. And then you just concentrate on that. So the first step is like being able to do a meditative
01:35:28
practice and like not feel bad. Like it's cool. Like I I I I do this practice
01:35:34
with my kids because it gives them a sensory experience that is like gripping. So it kind of concentrates
01:35:41
your your awareness in the present. But I think you don't need to worry so much about like the bedtime.
01:35:48
Yeah. Yeah, I was going to say I think it's more so that I think I've associated that behavior with some kind
01:35:54
of avoidance. So I think and especially cuz I look over at my partner and she's like a yogi so she's doing everything
01:36:00
um differently. I was going to say well but again that's passing judgment on that. She's just doing everything
01:36:06
differently. She she can fall asleep like this. She doesn't need to listen to some someone getting murdered or
01:36:11
something. She she wakes up. She does her meditation. And do I think that she
01:36:16
has a more peaceful mind than me? I probably I think she most certainly does. Yeah. So, here's what I would say. This
01:36:21
is going to get hard. Okay. So, it's avoidance. What's wrong with that? So, here you
01:36:28
are. You're saying, "Oh, like I'm avoiding my thoughts." And then you come to me and you're like, "Dr. K, teach me
01:36:35
how to avoid avoiding my thoughts." [Laughter]
01:36:41
It's the same thing. Yeah. Oh, now you're going to avoid the avoidance of your thoughts. No. never
01:36:47
going to work. You'll do it a million. You can go back as far as you want. You see what I'm saying? Now you're like, "Oh, teach me how to like not avoid. I
01:36:54
want to avoid avoidance." Doesn't work. That's why I'm saying like with this what I you just do this. Just go to bed
01:37:00
and just look at yourself today. Are you going to listen to a podcast or not? Just just ask yourself
01:37:06
that. I know it's like really unsatisfying, but that's really So the problem is like there's this paradox of like if I'm avoiding avoidance, that's
01:37:13
just falling into the same pattern. So you need to like crack it.
01:37:18
Like this is why the Zen tradition is really beautiful because they have all these paradoxes and there's this like weird like transcendent transcendental
01:37:25
understanding where it'll click for you and then you'll realize you don't need to listen to the podcast anymore.
01:37:30
But it's not going to come through the resisting. Exactly. So just when you go to bed
01:37:35
today, am I going to give in to this part of myself or do I need to be better? And what you'll discover, what I
01:37:41
found is that there's a lot of laughter there, right? is like the absurdity of it's like, "All right, I'm going to lose
01:37:48
today. I'm going to win today. Oh man, winning feels way worse than losing." There's a certain like humor to it that
01:37:54
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01:39:55
There's this quote that I found in one of your videos from Sunsu.
01:40:01
The video is titled how quitting porn can be dangerous. What is that Sunu quote and can you
01:40:07
explain it to me? So Sunzu has a great quote. He will win who knows when to fight and when not to
01:40:13
fight. And a big part of like overcoming addiction is choosing your battles and
01:40:19
making sure doing everything that you can to make sure that you're going to win when you fight.
01:40:26
So this is something that really confuses people about pornography addiction. So, one of the things that I I'll tell
01:40:32
people is that resisting pornography is one of the worst things you can do. So, I'll
01:40:39
explain this to you. So, this I learned when I was dealing with people with o who had opioid addiction.
01:40:44
So, let's say I'm addicted to opiates and so I feel like using opiates. Okay.
01:40:50
Now, I don't know how much you know, but we'll just find out. If I resist my opioid addiction, what will I
01:40:56
experience? Stress. Absolutely. And then what will I what do opioids do?
01:41:02
Do you know why we give them? No. We give them for pain relief. Okay. So like you have a dental surgery. So then
01:41:09
you I feel stressed and then I want it more and then if I don't give my body opioids, what do you think happens?
01:41:16
What for what period of time? Like in the next hour, two hours, three hours. Brilliant question. You get cravings?
01:41:22
Absolutely. I get cravings. And if I don't give into them, what happens? For what period of time? four hours, five hours, six hours, basically what
01:41:30
happens is the cravings intensify and then opioid addicts especially start to feel pain. So they start to feel this
01:41:36
like whole body pain. You start to go into withdrawal and so the craving intensify. Does does that make sense? I
01:41:42
start to feel worse and then if I use opioids then it all gets better. You with me?
01:41:47
Yeah. So then if you follow that cycle of resisting, resisting, resisting and then
01:41:53
caving. Okay, your body learns a very, very bad
01:41:59
lesson. It says, "Making him hurt 10%, I don't get what I want." Making him hurt
01:42:05
20%, I don't get what I want. Making him him hurt 40%, I don't get what I want.
01:42:10
Making him hurt 80%, then he gives me what I want. The second time around, you'll jump
01:42:17
straight to 80%. So, you will start to suffer more.
01:42:23
So your body literally learns what signals do I need to send this
01:42:29
dumbass to give me what I need. And so the more that you resist addiction,
01:42:37
the stronger the addiction will like the the stronger the withdrawal will become. Now here's what I mean by resist. If you
01:42:45
cave, then it'll intensify. But it so so if you're going to give in,
01:42:53
you like need to give in early. Otherwise, it'll get harder and harder and harder and the cravings will intensify, intensify, intensify as you
01:42:59
try to give it up, which is why it's really important to pick your battles. So once you make a decision or you
01:43:06
create a structured environment where you go into rehab so that like you can't give in and then if you can make it all
01:43:14
the way on the other side of the craving and the craving disappears and then you're like you finish the withdrawal process then you'll be really strong.
01:43:20
But literally I've seen this principle time and time and time again where if you resist something and end up losing
01:43:26
the craving will only intensify over time and it'll be you'll lose one battle and you'll start losing the war.
01:43:33
So instead, what you really need to do is pick and choose when you are going to fight that battle, when you're going to
01:43:39
give in. And and if you decide that you're going to not use pornography, then it needs to be like you're dying on
01:43:45
that hill no matter what. Otherwise, the cravings will intensify and it'll become harder.
01:43:50
What about artificial intelligence? Does that change the picture at all in your view? No. I think artificial intelligence is
01:43:57
like just building on a lot of these trends. So what we're seeing with things
01:44:02
like pornography is that there is a fundamental need that is not being met. I'm looking at this graph here. Okay.
01:44:07
And it's the search volume for people searching for an AI girlfriend. Yep. Which is going up and to the right.
01:44:14
I don't know if I did this on your podcast, but I made this prediction a few years ago that we're going to get
01:44:20
some this is going to get worse before it gets better, I think. So here's the next prediction is the first version of
01:44:26
AI girlfriends will be everything that you want. Then someone is going to
01:44:32
figure out that it is more addicting to have an AI girlfriend who gets pissed at you once a month. So every now and then
01:44:39
like the AI girlfriend is not going to want to talk to you and that's the one that people are going to stick with. That's my next prediction.
01:44:44
That maps in terms of addiction psychology, doesn't it? If there's what's it called? Unpredictable reward.
01:44:51
Yeah. Random reinforcement schedule. So, it's going to be like an AI girlfriend. That's a loot box.
01:44:57
That's what my girlfriend's like. Exactly. Why? It's going to be addictive, right? Because if she was
01:45:02
nice to you all the time, like, you'd go crazy. I'm thinking of the um the pigeon study
01:45:08
that I learned about when I was 16 in psychology classes of, you know, the study where they give the p pigeon the
01:45:13
reward at random intervals. And the pigeon that's most addicted to performing the behavior per se is the
01:45:19
pigeon who gets given the treat randomly, not in a predictable scheduled way. So random rewards seem to reinforce
01:45:27
engagement with behavior. Absolutely 100%. So our AI girlfriends and boyfriends are going to be volatile. Yeah, I think
01:45:36
they're going to learn to be volatile because what's going to happen is someone is going to give you an AI that it gives you the answers that you want
01:45:42
all the time and then someone's going to give you an AI that gives you the answers that you want some of the time. And I think what we're seeing with AI
01:45:47
girlfriends is in the same way as pornography, we are craving these things and it's so much easier to talk to an
01:45:54
AI, but I think that over time it's going to mess us up. I I don't think that it will be able to create the
01:46:00
neurochemical and physiological connection that real humans do that will
01:46:06
really satisfy us. I mean, you've probably heard of the study from MIT which showed that essentially using
01:46:12
chatbt is making our brains atrophy. For context, they had roughly 54
01:46:18
participants, I think it was, over four months. And they allowed some of them to use just their brain, some of them to
01:46:23
use Google search, and some of them to use chatbt. And they found a bunch of different interesting findings. One of
01:46:28
them was that roughly 80% of people that use chatbt to write an essay could not remember a single sentence from what
01:46:34
they just produced. um versus the brain group and the Google group who could remember pretty much everything that
01:46:40
they had written. The other finding was that the the communication was soulless described as soulless by objective
01:46:47
observers. And the last thing is just the impact it had on the brain. They found that the connections in the brain I think were roughly 50% weaker um
01:46:55
because they hadn't been using their brain. And you think about this atrophy. So like we talk about go to the gym, you
01:47:01
use it. If you don't use it, you lose it. but also um as it relates to the
01:47:06
brain and maybe our skills to form relationships, maybe there's going to be an atrophy there. Oh, there absolutely
01:47:12
is. So, I I think it's really simple to understand. The the human body is
01:47:18
efficient more than anything else. It is an energyconserving mechanism beyond
01:47:23
anything else. So, anything that it doesn't need, it's going to get rid of.
01:47:28
So, this is why we forget languages that we don't use. skills atrophy over time.
01:47:34
That is not a problem. That's the way we're designed. Our brain is like, if you don't need it, get rid of it. So, if
01:47:40
Stephen, everyone was were to be riding around in electric wheelchairs
01:47:46
for hours and hours a day instead of walking, what would happen? We'd lose our legs.
01:47:51
Absolutely. Right. So, and and our brain is like, "Hey, we don't need these muscle." Our body is like, "We don't need these muscles." And so, what we're
01:47:57
seeing is an atrophy of critical thinking skills. Absolutely. with AI usage. And the reason is because we
01:48:04
don't need them anymore. The real question and this gets this is what because the AI does it for us, right?
01:48:09
Why do I need to learn how to write an essay if an AI can if I can click I can just put a prompt in and then it gives
01:48:15
me an answer. They actually found that in the study. I was reading about it last night. They found that people who then tried to
01:48:21
write an essay without chatt was significantly worse at that than those
01:48:26
who had never used it. Absolutely. So, but that and also they started thinking and speaking like the the AI.
01:48:33
So, it said that they internalized the way that the AI was speaking when they wrote their own essays. It makes a lot of sense. So, I think
01:48:39
there's there's a couple of even scarier things going on. The first is that when we use an AI
01:48:47
uh so I I did a really fun experiment with a couple of friends of mine. We like streamed this thing where we basically gave the AI clinical cases.
01:48:55
So, it was me and and two psychologist friends of mine and we basically like I I wrote up like a clinical history,
01:49:01
pulled some things from my notes and I put it into AI. So, when I asked my friends, you know, what here's the
01:49:07
clinical history word for word. I read it aloud. I got their thoughts on it and then I put it into the AI and and some
01:49:13
some situations they were pretty close. But there are a couple of really great cases of of uh patients who are
01:49:19
incredibly narcissistic who will like come in will say, "My daughter doesn't want to talk to me anymore. She does
01:49:25
this and she does this. I try my best. I make sacrifices. I do this. I'm like basically she's like incredibly
01:49:31
narcissistic. Talks about how our daughter is the problem." So immediately the two therapists pick it up and they're like, "This person sounds a
01:49:37
little bit I I think this person is missing something. We're missing some part of the equation here." Whereas the AI is like, "Oh yeah, like sometimes
01:49:44
this is hard. you've got emptiness nest syndrome. Sometimes kids aren't grateful to you. You're like you're not doing
01:49:50
anything wrong. It can be useful to like share with them how you feel, right? So the AI reflects back what you give it.
01:49:59
So the AI, if you have a really strong cognitive bias, the AI will just reflect that back
01:50:05
to you, which is why it feels so right. If I take the most narcissistic person on the planet and I tell them, "Oh my
01:50:12
god, you are beautiful. You're intelligent. you're brilliant, you're the best. That person will look at me and say, "Oh my god, this guy is
01:50:18
brilliant." So, this is the real problem with with AI is that it's going to just give you
01:50:25
whatever you're looking for. It won't give you the truth. And the problem is if you have a strong cognitive bias,
01:50:32
what you want to hear is what you think the truth is. The really scary thing is the AI can
01:50:38
give you the right answer, but you have to know how to ask it. Yeah. So, what I'm what I'm seeing is that
01:50:45
prompt engineering. So, if we play around with what I ask the AI with that case, it starts to get closer and closer
01:50:52
to narcissism. But here's the real problem is that you don't know how do you know what to ask
01:51:00
the AI. The real skill of AI usage is in asking the right questions because that
01:51:05
will I think get you the closest to the truth. But we don't know if it's the right question. So, you can ask it one question. Is that the right question or
01:51:12
could you ask it better? Are you moving in the right direction with your prompt engineering or the wrong direction with your prompt engineering? So, I think
01:51:18
this is what's really scary about it is it it can just let you feed into your
01:51:24
existing cognitive biases, make you think you're learning a lot, give you a lot of sense of validation, and it's
01:51:30
incredibly validating by the way. And do you think it's going to atrophy our ability to form relationships?
01:51:35
Because one of them is just we're like forgetting how to communicate and think for ourselves. Absolutely. critical thinking's key to having a good good
01:51:41
relationship with the opposite sex. It it will absolutely atrophy our so it'll give us right now it's at a phase
01:51:46
where it can teach us a couple of really important things. So I think it's really good at disseminating some good
01:51:52
information but it will never give us skills and atrophy is on the level of
01:51:57
skill not knowledge like knowledge doesn't atrophy atrophy really applies to a loss of function. So, it'll get
01:52:05
worse and worse. And then what'll absolutely happen is some uh dating app will will collaborate with an AI to have
01:52:12
you text. It'll like modify your texts to be really really responsive. And then what'll happen, we're already seeing
01:52:18
this in the employment space. So employers used to use like tools like AI
01:52:24
to filter through applications, right? We can have a bunch of applications. I can scan it. I can filter based on this.
01:52:30
Now that we have access to AIS like chat GPT, it's just some weird dead internet
01:52:35
kind of thing where the employer has a bot and now I'm submitting a bot with a res like I have a resume writing a bot.
01:52:42
So it's just bots talking to bots and employers are like we're getting all these AI generated resumes whereas
01:52:49
they've been using like computing to get rid of résumés and filter things out for a long time.
01:52:55
So what's the advice then? Is it to not use AI, not use large language models or No, I mean I So I think this is what's
01:53:01
really tricky is you have to use AI now because you're going to be out competed by the people who don't. So I I would
01:53:07
kind of think about it like, you know, caffeine where it's like a certain amount is probably good for you, but if
01:53:13
you get really addicted to energy drinks and things like that, you're doing yourself a disservice. So what I tend to what I would recommend for people is
01:53:20
that you don't let it do your thinking for you but you you can let it do so I let it do some refining for me but every
01:53:27
refining that I let it do it weakens my ability to refine.
01:53:34
So the way actually maybe the best analogy is think of chat GPT like taking the elevator.
01:53:39
So for this trip, it will make things easy for you, but it will make every
01:53:45
single trip that you take after it harder because there's some atrophy. Absolutely.
01:53:50
By not taking the stairs, right? And I sometimes take the elevator and I sometimes take the stairs.
01:53:59
Dr. K, thank you. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving
01:54:05
it for. And a question that's been left for you is What is the most powerful love in your
01:54:13
life and why? The most I mean I I would have to say
01:54:18
it's my the love for my nuclear family like hands down and without a doubt. Um and I think it's kind of interesting
01:54:25
because it's not localized on one person. So, I have two daughters and I I have a wife and we started playing
01:54:31
Dungeons and Dragons recently. And we also I create we created a new holiday called Mother's Day Eve, which
01:54:38
is like Christmas Eve, but for Mother's Day. And I love this holiday. So, it's basically like a chance like we we
01:54:43
prepare and we get all the stuff that my wife loves like ready for her. And instead of like Mother's Day being like,
01:54:48
oh, like here's breakfast in bed, like we we like party basically doing all of her favorite things. So, I'd say the mo
01:54:54
the biggest love in my life, I don't remember exactly what the question is, but I think it's encapsulated with Mother's Day Eve. And I think if y'all
01:55:00
are listening to this and you want a really fun holiday that has not been overly commercialized, Father's Day Eve
01:55:06
and Mother's Day Eve are are the two. Just like make a celebration of all the things that this person does. Do it at
01:55:12
night the night before, not the morning. And it's great. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. I really appreciate this these
01:55:18
conversations. I mean, I don't have to tell you, but um every single time it it's kind of like a reset in my life
01:55:24
speaking to you for so many reasons because it helps me brings me back from whatever [ __ ] has consumed me since
01:55:30
we last spoke. Yeah. I I And uh it's really it's almost like a baptism. That's the way I would describe
01:55:37
it. But I know it is for my listeners, too, cuz they come up to me in the streets. I was I was saying to you before we started recording, they come up to you all over the world. I remember
01:55:43
a lady in New York a couple of weeks ago came over to me midworkout and told me um what she was like I'm listening to
01:55:49
Dr. K right now and showed me her phone and was like can you get her back on the podcast? Um, and it's it's it's
01:55:55
incredible and I actually aspire to be like you in so many ways because I think there's a spiritual component to me that I'm yet to explore. And I think spending
01:56:01
time with you as someone I trust so much in so many areas really is a handheld
01:56:09
into a new realm which I'm a little bit sort of hesitant to investigate. Do I get to respond?
01:56:15
No, I'm joking. Of course, you do. No, I mean sometimes we get into this last word game where it's like meeting
01:56:20
of the mutual appreciation club. So Stephen, I what I love about you and I I really do love coming here. They say,
01:56:27
"Oh, you should have me back on the podcast." What we create here is a diad.
01:56:33
There is a component that you bring. I could not do this without you, right? Right. So, like there's something that
01:56:39
you and I meet and then we make something that is unique and I think
01:56:44
you're really good at making it with a lot of people and you and I are going to make our own kind of baby, you know,
01:56:50
and so it's it's honestly it's a blast. Thank you. [Music]
01:57:15
[Music]
