Asmongold, are you proud of yourself? | Dr. K Interviews

zach this may sound kind of weird but like i'm kind of hearing that you're not really afraid of i know it sounds weird yeah yeah go on you're not really afraid of death i i think what what bothers you it sounds to me is actually your inability to deal with death awesome okay yeah things have been uh they've been a little bit up and down but uh it's been i guess all right i mean the new games are getting released that i'm excited to play so that's at least one positive right yeah what what are you looking forward to playing uh burning crusade uh unfortunately it's getting released a bit earlier than i would have hoped for and a few other games ashes of creation new world other mmos basically yeah new world is um amazon games as mmo yeah yeah it is coming out uh i actually don't know i think it's august okay is there like a beta or yeah there was we played it for a while and um the game was fun for like three days and it sucked and so i'm hoping that when the game actually comes out it'll be fun for at least five pretty much yeah it's it's gaming in 2021 what can i say what is gaming in 2021 uh whenever they try to milk you out of all the money possible while simultaneously putting in the littlest amount of effort possible yeah i was pretty excited about magic legends i don't know if you tried i i didn't play it but i played match with the gathering a lot whenever i was younger so uh i heard about it um what did you hear uh i i just heard it was an arpg and i didn't hear any good or bad things about it i just heard people said it came out and then i never heard about it again so you can kind of put two and two together there and uh yeah yeah i thought it was super cool like the the yeah the conceptual design behind the game i was super excited about like the idea is that you've got like a deck right so it's sort of like a deck builder but it's like an arpg format so you can have like four skills at any given time but once you use a card you like lose the spell and it goes back into your and then you have to like reshuffle and stuff so there's like a lot of deck building and stuff seems like a super cool arpg um i was uh i was always hoping that like i mean i paid a lot of attention to magic like for many years whenever i played it i was in like high school and in the college so like any time that something cool like that happens i'll kind of be interested in it but i just kind of expected to hear more about it later and i just never did so you know that's usually the way it goes yeah i heard that um you know i think what may have happened is there was like a there's like there were four classes and there's a fifth class that you can unlock um but the the class is only unlockable through microtransactions and then on top of that the micro transactions are rng so the class is a drop from a loot box so people were people were spending like 500 and still like not getting the class see that's uh like i remember apex legend said something like that and it was just like you you got a little dagger for one of the characters but like this is a whole class and it's 500 that's exactly the [ __ ] that i'm talking about man like i i said that uh i said a game should make you want to waste your time and not just waste your time and i feel like all the games now they don't just waste your time they waste your time and your money it's just it's sad yeah man yeah i feel like the uh i don't know like maybe maybe it's like i'm getting older or something but like the the allure to it and the smoke and mirrors behind the ways that they keep you playing the game are pretty much just mirrors now you can just see right it's just right there yeah yeah um so you said you're you're excited about burning crusade yeah yeah wow classic burn include crusade right right yeah yeah that's right and then you you've been playing a lot of shadow lands recently or yeah yeah how do you feel about shadowlands not good uh i feel like uh you know i've played a game for 15 years and uh the people that are running the game are ruining it and i feel like i'm wasting my time playing it for the first time in like 15 years it's sad how are they ruining it uh by just not knowing i i don't think they're doing what i what i would do i think they're just not really putting in the effort that they need to i think they're just trying to kind of compel people to play the game longer rather than enjoy the game if that makes sense yeah i love your way with language like compel versus enjoy yes yes and then you said also that a game should make you want to waste your time not yet yeah it shouldn't just waste your yeah yeah you want to spend all day playing the game not you have to yeah and that's the way it used to be and like i always wonder right it's like is this because i'm older is it because the game is worse and it's like you can never really dissect the two because you can't you know experience them in like some sort of controlled environment but it does feel a lot different than it does that it did you can't experience them in a controlled environment can you say a little bit more about that well yeah yeah so like for example if i go and i i play a game that i used to play whenever i was a kid i i can't really go back and experience that for the first time it's like the you can never step in the same river twice right and it's kind of the same paradigm where if i go back and i play super mario world for the 800th time it's not gonna be the same experience as i had whenever i was five years old playing it and getting upset and mad because i couldn't beat the game so it's like is it because is the attachment to the games and the drive to play them diminishing because of the quality of the games or is it diminishing because of a different point in my life you see what i mean yeah i'm wondering if you're turning into a boomer me too right me too yeah right back in the day back in my day we didn't have any micro transactions it was just the good times you bought the game from blockbuster and you took it home and you played it for three days that's that's how it was for me too let me tell you what what happened is you'd go to a game and you'd purchase it imagine that the game was yours you didn't need none internet no to play it it was it was great it really was yeah i didn't need to be a single-player game didn't need to be connected to their multiplayer server i could just play it by myself when my cow stepped on my ethernet cable i could just keep playing what the hell's a battle pass i never heard of that yeah i know i know all too damn well it's sad i don't know where it's gonna go yeah man but yeah might be it might just be being a boomer i i don't know i think that's a that's a big part of it at least yeah so i i i kind of feel that way too like i wonder if it's the boomer within me but i i do feel like um what's happening kind of like what you i think you captured it well that a lot of game designers are trying to make a game that's com like you know that you're compelled to play as opposed to enjoyable um can i just share like a bizarre experience i had like about a year ago absolutely so i was at um like uh so i i used to be in boston and and sometimes i would go to like business networking events ooh and and so sometimes like at these business networking events like um you know you'd meet people who are like you know in different industries and so like i met like this mba who was interested in the gaming industry he was like yeah like i'm you know i'm i'm like i i work in the gaming industry and i was like awesome what games do you like and he was like oh i don't like games i don't play them i was like what interests you and you think he was like oh like you know i think that the monetization opportunities are like really fantastic i was like no yeah yeah he works at activision now i i i know who that is yeah i was like i was like this is they actually exist like people are and you know what it reminds me of actually is is can i tell you another random story i guess i'm the one telling stories today so when i was uh training to become a psychiatrist i i had this eye-opening lecture from this absolutely um brilliant guy and his name is dr freuden reich and so we were we were talking about you know medicine and the practice of medicine within like medicine and healthcare so you know i'm a doctor i practice medicine but in my job it's like healthcare there's like a hospital there's insurance there's billing there's administration you know all this kind of stuff and he's like you know if you don't like your job and you don't like healthcare the problem is that you know 20 years ago a hospital system had something called the forms committee can you imagine what the forms committee does uh they probably process forms yes absolutely that's literally it yeah so they process forms and and the committee actually makes the forms so there's a group of people who decides what are the forms that people need to fill out and when when the forms committee was launched they asked doctors to be a part of it and can you imagine what the doctors said no please no absolutely we hate we hate paperwork we hate it i don't want to i didn't go to medical school and train for seven years to become a neurosurgeon and devote over a decade of my life so i could figure out what forms need to be filled out i did it to do neurosurgery on people with brain cancer and so there were no doctors on the forms committee and then then what happened is all these people decided which forms the neurosurgeon has to fill out and then we lost the battle and this is what's happening in the gaming industry now is that like you know we're you know we've got people who aren't gamers who are designing video games that's just about right uh it's p and and they just necessitate a need for themselves because like if they they'll always come out with new forms or new things that you have to do because they don't want to you know show how useless they are i think that happens a lot too it's like they're kind of creating is creating a problem and then presenting themselves as a solution for it and i think that happens with a lot of games too can you share a little bit more about that how do you how do you know that uh i mean like it's a lot of things i think that really like one example of this is like in the game i play a lot world of warcraft like they will release like some sort of you know like let's say it's a way to get really good armor or to like make your legendary weapons or something like that and you will have to repeat a process over and over and over in a way that is transparently just a method of extending your play time rather than making you enjoy the content so you do this over and over and over and then later on like maybe a year later they will make it easier in the way that people initially wanted it to be one year ago and it's just it's just crazy like it and and like it it as i said it kind of lifts the it it pulls the curtain away and you can just see all the machinery in the back it's like that the wizard of oz right you just see him in the in the little room broadcasting and it's no longer this like experience that you have the willing suspension of disbelief is removed and you're just stuck there like a rat in a maze it sucks it sounds terrifying i mean you know i i feel like i gotta share this i'm hopeful though so i i think like at the end of the day like did you play hades i played it for maybe 20 minutes i had fun for those 20 minutes though so i i think hades is a great example like i absolutely love the game and i think it's like an example what i'm terrified of is um the aaa clones of hades oh yeah because they're coming oh no doubt i mean absolutely and like the game it's not like i stopped playing it because i didn't want to i just stopped playing because i had to go back to streaming and that that's why and i haven't really had time to play it but yeah it was a really fun game i enjoyed it it was it was very clean it was very well designed and there's some things that are just kind of missing did you play valheim i kind of got the same experience with that i love valenheim yeah yeah and that's something made by five people right and yeah it just feels like uh you know these big game companies i told people that they're uh instead of too big to fail it's too big to to succeed that's really the way i feel it's like they're it takes them forever to do anything it's like over produced and they have like this fixation on you know the lighting on a character's nose rather than the gameplay that everybody goes with yeah i remember hearing about dragon age origins three yeah so i don't know if you played the original dragon age but the uh uh original dragon age oh we just got a thousand dollar donation holy [ __ ] and it seems like um as someone who struggles with mental health what you're doing is invaluable thank you i don't know so the funny thing now is like i i don't know if that person is talking about what we're talking about now yeah it's just like a general statement yeah it so now i'm genuinely confused whether you know talking about how depressing and predatory the video game landscape now is is is like with the public good that we're doing or is it when we talk about like depression and anxiety and and learning to love yourself it's probably just it's like somebody is saying it besides them and it's like okay you know there's a guy that graduated from harvard who thinks the same damn thing that i did i'm not crazy you know i think that's really what it is i i remember every time that i hear somebody else saying what you're saying it always is a little bit validating for me too yeah okay well thank you very much for the support folks um so you know just a couple other things like i i think that like you know i hear what you're saying in terms of activision being predatory and whatnot but like part of the thing though uh asman is i i still think that like these these triple a game companies like actually make really amazing games like i loved warcraft 3 loved starcraft sc2 was like okay yeah and like you know wow was amazing i think overwatch is like genuinely like a very good game um you know people may disagree but like i think a lot of the you know the big evil people actually do make really amazing games i i agree but i think that it's a very sad state of affairs that most of the examples that you gave were over 10 years ago but we'll say that i'm sure we'll say that about diablo immortal right won't we add that to the list um i i think that diablo yeah that's a that's a tough one isn't it that's a very tough one and like that's one of the things i just wish they made a a pc port for it i'd play it if it was on the pc just see what it's like but um they don't even do that for some reason i have no idea why yeah yeah so are we just talking about are we like reminiscing well it's a metaphor right because the games are like it's what i spend my time doing and it's like i've played games all my life and i enjoy them and i don't really enjoy them as much now and it's like why is that is it because i'm older is it because the games are worse it's and that's what i'm in it's like hard to decide it's like kind of like i'm 30 now and i i tell my i say that all the time because i still can't even come to terms with it it's scary and i'm i've done this for like basically i've streamed and sat in my room all day every day and played video games for pretty much my whole adult life and i've loved it the whole time it's it's been absolutely amazing but it feels like it's coming to an end it feels like it's it's like ending in a way i don't know how i can really describe it it's sad can i just sit with that for a second you know when you say that what comes to mind have you played dark souls many times so you know like the story behind dark souls which is that the flame is going out yeah that's sort of like the image that i get uh yeah i mean i hope i don't end up like king gwen but yeah i could see that uh absolutely yeah it's uh and i think it's just also like i've kind of done and i look like quinn look if i get a lot if my hair is getting longer and i've gotten a few gray hairs yeah man it's getting there yeah that's right i oh my god that's scary to think and i did actually choose that ending too oh no so yeah i mean it's it's definitely scary because like i feel like i've done pretty much everything that i wanted to do and i've accomplished a lot of things i've wanted to do and it's like kind of i'm aimless in a way because i don't have the same motivation to really do anything like i i do you know i go through the same motions and i do the same stuff but it's not with the same level of enthusiastic uh deterministic it's like determinism that i used to have it's just kind of i'm doing it because it's what i like doing and it's what i do it's not even really what i like doing it's what i do and it's weird for me to think back and think that it's been 10 years that i've been doing this and i don't i i don't ever want it to end but it is it's like i can't stop getting older i can't stop uh that this happening and i feel like also like i'm i'll be honest i'm sure you probably have had the same feeling like you ever play a game that you were really good at whenever you were a kid and now you suck at it yes yeah so i've also done the opposite where there were games that i used to think were really hard and i go back and play them now and i was like i don't understand how i ever you know had difficulty with this game i i understand that a lot yeah there's a little bit of those too especially some super nintendo games yeah i was a dumb ass kid i had ny deal and and uh yeah it's interesting i think the game that comes to mind the most is um dota so i've been playing dota for over a decade and like i was bad at dota and then for a while i was like pretty good at dota like i was probably like you know somewhere in the top 10 or 20 of the player base yeah and then you know like respectable like nowhere near pro but like respectable and now i'm in like the bottom 50 percent and and that yeah and i've been one of these guys that like no matter what game like you know how they're like some people are just good at games right and like you can play you pick up any game and within you know month of playing it you'll be like in the top twenty percent of the player base yeah and yeah there were always the noobs that you would prey on the game after game after game absolutely you play the player those people for six months they're gonna just they're never gonna get better yep and i feel like i'm transitioning into that noob stage yeah that's that's what i see it's happening yeah it's uh yeah good no go go for it um well that's kind of the way that i feel right is that it's like i feel like i'm losing that thing that i was i was good at and i'm not good at it really that much anymore and it's just kind of like for a lot of people it's not like it wouldn't really matter you know what i mean because it's just it's just a video game but i think what really hits me hard with it is like thinking that it's like something as like a greater thing like if i'm just not good at the game anymore it's whatever but if i'm not good at the game anymore because i'm getting older that's scary what's scary about that because whenever you get older you die is that what you feel like you're doing well i mean everybody is you're doing it all the time i mean like of course to an extent yeah it just feels like uh uh it feels like i like there aren't really as many good things to look forward to anymore if that makes sense how long have you felt that way i don't know maybe three years two years and so it sounds to me like you're kind of living your life on autopilot i mean in a way yeah or it's like kind of you're waiting for the next thing to go wrong that's that caught me off guard that's not what i was expecting you to say what do you mean you're waiting has a lot gone wrong yeah i mean well it's not it's not something that just happens overnight uh it's just something that kind of it's either like a slow deterioration or it could be something that just kind of happens right of course and it's one of those things where it's kind of hard to pinpoint when it happens but if you go back and you look two years like before like in in the past you'd see that things are clearly better and there was no real day where things changed but it was just like a slow decay yeah that sounds bleak how are things for you how how were things for you three years ago uh probably uh a little bit better right i mean i had a classic wild look forward to uh that was cool and um then uh i mean it's like a lot of little things right because back then i was like really excited about uh doing my stream and and being very successful with my stream and i still care about that a lot but like at that time i didn't i never had the success that i have now so it wasn't like i still had that to work towards if that makes sense mm-hmm so yeah you had a goal yeah i had to go i have no goals um like i have like i guess i mean to an extent i do but the goals that i used to always have like this might sound insane okay but i used to honestly wake up in the morning and feel completely like fulfilled and satisfied with the idea that i'm going to play world of warcraft today and i'm going to farm for some item that i want and i'm going to feel great about it and i'm going to go to bed that night and i'm going to feel like a winner and i used to really feel that way it was great and now it's just not the same how do you feel now like i wasted my damn time like that's that's the way i feel it's always my i feel like i don't know what to what to do i i don't know if i like what what it is and i've tried to find like other things i made an org company with people friends of mine and that's going really well it's gone actually surprisingly well and uh that's been great but there needs to be something for me personally that i have to work towards can you tell me about the org yeah uh basically i i made an organization called uh otk one true king with uh myself uh s fan you know s fend ms kiff uh tips out and my other friend wrench we brought on nick pollam nmp as well and uh we have people that we obviously hire and we put on different events and we just kind of make content together oh interesting it stands for one tree king one king yeah i just i thought it was one turn kill um so we actually uh the funny thing about that is uh we actually found out it also stands for over the knee which is a sexual fetish we didn't know that until after we announced the org okay little fun uh fun little what is it rule 42 i think anything can be 32 32 anything can be a sexual fetish right um yeah we actually thought about as a joke selling paddles [Laughter] so we'll see but yeah it's uh i i think that was like that's kind of like a next step thing for me too right is to kind of have that thing that you can kind of work on beyond just playing video games and beyond that something that's kind of bigger than yourself and uh that that has been it's been very stressful for me to have to do that and um especially as somebody who is uh pretty much a hermit i like being alone all the time and now i have to talk to people all the time for those different things and it's it's good but it's also exhausting for a person who likes to be alone you want me to call you asman gold asman or or what we just do zach it's fine okay zach can i have a second to think yeah sure um do you mind if i ask you us i'm just debating this because there's something that my mind is curious about um but i'm wondering if maybe like asking this question is embarrassing uh i was debating maybe asking it to you in private but it's something that you had publicly spoken about on stream before and i find myself kind of wondering yeah did you ever go see that dentist and get your teeth taken care of yeah uh i did i still need to get more of them taken care of absolutely uh it takes me uh like my teeth are [ __ ] up right and so there's a lot of work that i need to have done and uh with covet and everything i have been a little bit slower on doing it but yes i've had a number of my teeth uh fixed and taken care of now i have to do i think probably two or three more visits i don't like you about that uh well there's a funny thing about that so whenever i was younger i used to always eat my food really fast and then it would make me sick to my stomach because i ate my food so fast and then all my teeth fell out and i couldn't do it anymore and i stopped getting sick after eating my food and now that i got my teeth back i'm eating my food again and i'm getting sick again so uh yeah that's basically where we're at and uh i i there's i don't know there i don't know if there's really a moral to that story or anything like that but it's basically uh it's basically what it is and it's not like i it's not like an eating disorder i just eat food very fast right i just want to eat the food like eating food is like a it's like a daily quest in a video game where like i just want to get it out of the way as fast as i can so i can move on to actually playing daily quests in video games that's basically yeah yeah get my get my rl daily quests out of the way so that you can do my virtual dailies yeah a min max and uh you know sometimes it it doesn't turn out very well but yeah i mean i uh i i do i i do i'm glad that i've i've gotten them fixed more and uh it's kind of it was really bad like there were a few times where i stopped streaming because one of my teeth broke or fell out or something like that uh and you could tell whenever i was streaming and it just kind of there are a lot of things that i have no problem with people looking at me and seeing but that was one of them that was just a little bit too much okay so i'm gonna just kind of think out loud for a second because i'm noticing you know potentially a direction of this conversation that's a little bit aligned with what we usually do so i know we started talking about about like you know gaming and and being you know boomers and back in the day like you know you had back in the day like you didn't have a server that gave you matchmaking you had to go out and find your match yourself but you had to make it you had to make friends yeah and it was great it was you had to create a custom lobby and you never knew who would show up and whether they would be a hacker and there was no there's no reporting system for hackers xbox live didn't give a [ __ ] yeah yeah i remember all too well so we kind of started out there and i'm noticing that you're someone who's quite driven and that you used to look forward to the day like you'd wake up and you'd play wow and you'd really enjoy it and it was like it was an exciting and fulfilling life you were also somewhat you know skilled or lucky and became like you know successful through that um yeah and and then like and then just like in in the world of dark souls like you know there's only a limited amount of fuel yeah and the flame starts to dim and then like now what i'm kind of hearing from you is like you don't have goals like you don't have that zest that used to drive you well there's yeah i was gonna say there's nothing really to look forward to in the same way that they used to be so um great point i'll i'll kind of get to that in a second um so so and then like you even tried stuff right like you've heard from the others that oh if you're like tired of getting gaming like make an org like do something else like set like come up with a new goal for yourself and you're like cool let's do this and then the interesting thing is that what i'm hearing you say is that it actually checked a lot of the boxes yeah it gave you something to work towards working towards success it sounds like it's actually fun but there's still something like missing it's sort of like you know it's it's kind of like a puff pastry that's kind of good but like empty on the inside yeah it's like it's like an eclair and there's no cream in the middle yeah right and and so and so this is where i think like maybe what we need to uh oh we're getting donations sorry um i think what we want to talk about today is like goals and the nature of fulfillment yeah and and i'm also curious are you afraid of dying yes yes very much so very very much so it's uh it's the same as like the uh the the gray hairs or you know i go get gray hairs it's like the memento mori of it and it i i have to i pull them out of my beard i cut them out of my beard because it just freaks me out it totally freaks me out and like i i'm so scared of it okay absolutely so i i think we can we can this is something i can work with yeah uh so zack i'm i'm i'm actually like i feel pretty good that that this is something that you can overcome like i know i know the best way that i've i've been able to overcome it is by reminding myself that i'm just a very intelligent monkey and i have no idea how the world and the [ __ ] the inner workings of the universe really exist right like i have no idea what i'm talking about just sit back shut up and enjoy the ride like that's been the best way that i've learned to cope with it yeah so what that sounds like a good coping mechanism but it sounds like a coping mechanism not a fix okay so there's a part of me that says like why not just learn how the universe works because you i i don't think you can pierce the veil i don't i don't think people can i i don't think it's possible it's the same as like i don't think a uh you know how like an ant couldn't learn physics i don't think people can do it and i think that's a completely reasonable experience i mean a completely reasonable view and i think that you know you're not going to understand that people can pierce the veil until you pierce the veil yeah um i mean i guess that's a good way to say it i mean people didn't know there was fire until they made fire they didn't know there was electricity until that happened yeah and so this is where i i think the interesting thing is historically so i think the problem is that where you are yeah many people have been historically and this is where my confidence comes from is because i think that like you know you have a lot of the features that i'm gonna out outline in a second that i think are you know you're really falling into a pattern here can i just keep talking yes so the first is that a lot of times excitement and motivation come from goals especially for young people right like so i i like i i set a goal for myself i want to be something i want to accomplish something and so you climb to the top of the mountain and it's it's the image of the view at the top of the mountain which motivates you to climb yeah and so this is the most natural form of like motivation and like goal setting and excitement like you were building something you were growing you were playing games you were loving it yeah and then you reached to the the top of the mountain and even then the view at the top of the mountain is glorious but now what right and so this is where yeah it's like you're slowly sliding down the side of the mountain and every once in a while you stop sliding and you sh you you trick yourself and tell yourself that it's a win but the fact is is that you're just losing slower yeah man so like i don't know how to say this to you but as long as that image and that experience is there i think it's going to be very hard to find excitement yeah i i would say so right so here's what i'm hearing i think sliding down the mountain is a good you seem like you wanted to say something go for it well i i think that it's more that it's not just a metaphor for gaming it's like i think whenever you're younger right you look forward to um you look forward to maybe getting your first girlfriend uh you know getting a car learning how to drive going to college you know like moving out or you know a bunch of these different firsts and i feel like all the fun firsts that i've that i have are pretty much over with and i'm just kind of uh i i'm i'm waiting for the bad first to happen and it's like i really only have bad things to look forward to for the rest of my life in a way i it sounds really bleak but that's really how i feel yeah i'm glad you're sharing that because i think it's bleak and also it's reasonable and here's the reason it's reasonable because so far fulfillment from you has come from cresting the mountain right and so like here's what i'm hearing is like there's an uphill part and once we get to the top it doesn't matter whether you're facing north south east or west there's only one way to go it sure is yeah right and and so what i'm hearing from you is this sort of like the fire is going out a fear of of mortality if you actually study like psychoanalysis what you'll find is that dreams around dental problems are associated with the fear of death i don't blame them i don't blame them at all i think it's more about like it's not about it's how to transcend the mountain entirely because like i don't yeah you can't the thing is i know that you can't live your life it's like you have to you can't be uh i guess like goal like outcome uh driven right you have to just be able to do something because you enjoy doing it yeah that's all yeah so so that's where when you say transcend them out the reason that i'm actually optimistic is i think there are a couple of different things going on one is that i see this a lot because i work with some very successful people and success drives them to the top but then they shrug their they're like now what right and what they usually end up doing is much like yourself they're like oh it's climbing to the top of a mountain which gives me a sense of fulfillment so let me go find another mountain and then they climb that one and they get like a diminishing return from it it checks some of the boxes and they're like oh i've accomplished stuff i can i feel pride but i still feel unfulfilled it's not the same and so they'll find mountain after mountain after mountain and they'll feel unfulfilled despite being successful successful successful yep and so the reason that i'm optimistic though is because like the best known case of someone solving this problem is buddha so okay yeah like if you and i talked about them no no i i know a bit but not can you share with us what you know about buddha uh basically i think that he was some sort of a like some sort of workman and then he kind of just sat under a tree and pretty much all of the a lot of the revelation that he had i i believe was just kind of internal and i think that the i remember there was i think some sort of a a phrase where the true enlightenment is not you know understanding the complexities of the universe it's understanding the nothingness of the universe or something like that i think it's like a one of the things about that now i could be getting this completely wrong and this is like 10 years ago or 15 years ago but it's that's what i remember yeah that's actually it you hit all the important parts but a couple of details i think we're gonna have to reshift so like i think uh the key thing is that what buddha did was as you put it pierce the veil yeah okay so right so like i think that's what his discovery was is that like you can climb mountains until the end of time but that external fulfillment is gonna come with diminishing returns and you can keep on chasing new things you can like okay i'm gonna start a company i'm gonna become a streamer i'm gonna have kids you can you can find all these mountains to climb but that if we kind of think about it fundamentally like if you're unsatisfied at the top of a mountain like that's a temporary satisfaction and climbing mountains is will always lead to temporary satisfactions and so what would the discovered is like through a lot of internal work which is exactly correct i mean i think you hit a lot of the key points which is that you can climb mountains until you're out of breath but never will that bring you peace that peace is piercing the veil is not about looking at a telescope it's about looking at a mirror yeah and so i think the journey that you have to walk is is this one and we can kind of talk so i think that's like the fundamental of where you are and then i think there's also kind of a psychological component fear of death thing like that that needs to be processed but there are a couple of um different uh key points that i want to share the first is that buddha wasn't a workman he was focused and so what happened is materialistically he climbed to the top of the highest mountain so people told him like hey like as a you know as a prince like these are the things that you should accomplish and he went and he did those and then like you know he got married he had a healthy son he was revered he was wealthy he was powerful he was respected he was loved he had a bright future and one day he woke up and even though he was the envy of the world he was unhappy and so then he was like actually screwed because there's a there's a subtle thing uh zach which makes things both beautiful you're you're blessed and cursed because when someone who is not successful wakes up and feels unhappy what do they think will lead them to happiness well they think the success will uh yeah absolutely yeah they know what the problem is and they have a thing that they can displace their uh unhappiness onto but whenever you have what you want and then you still don't feel the way you want it's harder to deal with that absolutely so at some point you reach the end of the road right the worse my life is the further i can go like repairing things repairing things repairing things you know like playing games fixing your teeth launching an organization you kind of tried your hand at a couple things you're taking care of business you're continuing to be successful and yet once we get to kind of the top then we begin to realize we're like faced with this problem which is like where does happiness come from and this is the really really crazy thing if you look at the the hindu and buddhist traditions i don't know if you're familiar with this i'm going to go into a little bit of history lesson is that okay oh yeah i mean actually there's a story that i i remember i i heard and it was a a guy that kind of ascended to some degree of uh you know pseudo heaven and he was assigned an architect and this is i think part of hindu mythology and the architect uh you know he kept wanting to bake bigger and builder like bigger and bigger castles and finally like the architect was so tired of it that he went and he asked i think it was brahma or vishnu i forgot which one and he's like how can i get this guy to stop wanting bigger and bigger castles and then the the god told him he's like i'll this is no problem i'll solve it and then the guy had the castle built and then a bunch of ants marched in to the castle and each one of the different ants was a former version of himself and it put in perspective how actually meaningless and and how how little it really mattered and i forgot i forgot what his name was yeah yeah that's not a particular story i'm i'm that familiar with so i i don't remember his name but um i think there's kind of an interesting principle which is like if you look at all the people so you're i don't know if you're familiar with this because it sounds like you've studied you know hindu mythology or something or you're just well read maybe or a bit i it's just well it's a story that i think it it made an impact on me and because it just it kind of puts into perspective that like it's the whole idea of you know ozymandias or anything like that where any accomplishment that you have is always fleeting absolutely so so here's an interesting um thing so you know like in india there were four castes there was a caste system yes and the highest caste were the brahmins the priests these were the teachers of meditation the closest to god et cetera et cetera you know they were like they were like they were the you know they taught meditation below them were the chatrias or the nobility these were kings lords etc below them were the vaisnavas uh who were avaishas sorry who were the merchant class and below them were the shudras or the laborer cast and so let me ask you a question which cast do you think produces the most enlightened people um [Music] probably it's kind of hard to say i mean it depends on like what you mean by enlightenment i mean obviously you would have the brahmins and they're the ones that spend all of their time uh working towards enlightenment so that's what would would make a lot of sense but is that really what's what's true because usually i mean isn't that just kind of hereditary what cast you end up in sure but they're also trained formally in the in the skills of meditation right they're the ones that are the teachers and the experts i don't know so it turns out that it's the chatrias okay so consistently like if you think about the incarnations of vishnu which if you want to think about it like not from a religious standpoint but a historical or anthropological standpoint yeah i think what you can safely assume is that sometimes there have been historical human beings that have been like different to the point where like they leave a legacy that people assign divinity to like rasputin like i mean that's a that's a borderline one isn't it yeah yeah yeah so so i i think it's it's a good it's a funny example but possibly yeah so what i'm thinking about is like if you look at all the enlightened beings from the indian subcontinent they're all kind of yeah things like that and and the question is like why is that if you have the experts in meditation you have the teachers in meditation and they what the the brahman does is goes to the king's palace every day teaches the king how to meditate and then goes home why is it that the king gets enlightened before the brahman does inconsistently so and the really interesting answer is because like you know i think it comes back to climbing to the top of the hill because at the end of the day what the brahmin is taught is that like don't climb to the top of the mountain because that's not your job the top of the mountain will never give you fulfillment so the brahmin never climbs to the top but at the end of the day they travel to the king's palace every single day and they see a bigger house and you know the king has a prettier wife and you know like the you know there's all these like like the king eats finer food and has finer clothing and the king is the one who actually winds up at the top of the mountain the king is the one who wakes up one day and finds like this desperation of unhappiness because remember like we talked about when your life is not perfect you chase an external goal so for the brahmins there's the seed of desire that is never fulfilled and as long as that seed of desire is never fulfilled they can never truly seek enlightenment because the search the road for enlightenment people people make it sound like it's like a positive thing that's like if you look at instagram accounts about like people who are deeply spiritual it's all like you know like being in touch with the universe and like oh my god i'm so like in love like learn to love man i love myself in a new way those guys don't get it the road to enlightenment starts with what you feel every single day is that like a no matter what you do like things are decaying and no matter like what you accomplish like it that excitement can never be reproduced yeah that that's kind of what's so it's very bittersweet in a way because like you can appreciate it and you can also resent it or dislike it or be afraid of it and you kind of have the the duality that happens all the time yeah so that's actually that understanding is one of the key things to transcend duality you have to sit within duality constantly to ultimately recognize that things are neither bitter nor sweet right so when you kind of talked about you said something about like nothingness when you were talking about your understanding of buddha's enlightenment and i think one of the key discoveries is that like there is no such thing as growth and there is no such thing as decay and once you recognize that once you realize that you'll be free from your sense of decay i feel like uh like yeah it's like the most enlightened version of it is what it is i i i get it i understand it but i i how is that real if people die like a tree a tree dies it burns up trees gone how's that not decay yeah so so i could give you a logical answer that yeah it isn't decay um i i i i could i could do that but i think that will be a discussion of logic and that's not actually going to like let you transcend the mountain so i you know the the answer that i would give you is is all kinds of things one is like you know that matter energy and consciousness they're just transformed right so like like it is is a st is a chunk of limestone better or worse than like a brick in a house i think it's like the uh the impact that it has on you right so like of course obviously it's all the same in the grand scheme of things right in the grand order of the of the universe but you know to a person and to like what your experiences are there are of course things that have more importance to you than other things it's like a you know family member is more important than a rock even now we get to the crux of it right so well said the impact on you so this is what the yogis discovered is that like you said it's internal so like the battle that you need to fight has nothing to do with climbing mountains it has everything to do with understanding how to essentially control or be free of things impacting you to be able to join a micro transaction cesspit the same amount is your first like enjoyment of wow to understand that like living in life is like it's all about impact in the sunscript word for de-impaction essentially training yourself to be free from the impact of things is vairagya to be free of like its detachment is the the best kind of uh definition of it um and so like this is a process that like you can undergo to where you know like you can like literally learn how to transcend the mountain that the going up the mountain and going down the mountain is not actually like any different i know yeah i don't know it it feels a lot different i'll say that yep it feels a whole lot different so but but that's the key thing right is like like the difference arises of feeling it arises to your attachment or your valuing of the climb over the descent yeah but how how could you possibly equate the two that's what i i don't understand is like it it's like i i try to rationalize it in my own mind a lot where it's like you just go on it's like first like for streaming for example right you go on you have a great stream you go on you have another stream and it's not good like how can you make both of those feel as good to you personally and like i think the answer that i always tell myself is that well you have to enjoy them both and you have to just kind of get the same thing out of them but it feels like that doesn't really happen for me okay so i'm gonna give you one last logical answer and then we're gonna get into it okay yeah all right so here's the thing so so i think you learn this in medicine so like sometimes you work with a patient and they live and sometimes you work with a patient and they die right so like clearly one is better than the other there's like no objective argument that can be made and yet do you imagine that it's possible for a doctor to go to work every day and actually like be just as satisfied with their life whether the patient lives or dies uh i don't think so i think that there are a lot of doctors that probably if they have a patient die they'll feel terrible about it i would expect so yeah yeah so so here's where what my experience has been is that ultimately i can't control whether a patient lives or dies and it's been really bizarre i'm thinking of one particular patient in residency that had like younger guy um you know maybe in his like or early to mid 50s um had liver cancer but like one of the sort of genetic or other variants like it's not like he was drinking alcohol and did something that was responsible for the cancer uh you know so so he was a he was a um a chinese gentleman and and so i was kind of assigned to him because i speak a little bit of mandarin and like we didn't have mandarin translators and so like i was assigned to him because like i could at least ask him like if he had pain that day and so you know working with his family was really interesting he had like a 17 year old son and um you know it was really like eye-opening because like it's clear that the dude is gonna die and and yet like like it's so hard to describe i think this is where you have to really experience it but sort of like coming to terms with the fact that as a human being like i can't i can't cure him of his cancer like i can't do that as a doctor you can't actually save someone's life all you can do is like try right yeah and there comes a point where like you can a patient can survive and you can have done a shitty job as a doctor and a patient can have died and you could have done an amazing job as a doctor and that ultimately like what where my piece comes from is like is devoting myself to like the action that i take as opposed to like what happens to the patient because there's no question that you know life is better than death at least in a medical setting right it's just it's sort of like you know what i where i find my peace and i know this may sound strange to you zach and we'll we'll get you there you know because i think i have the benefit of some of these experiences where you like grapple with like people dying of cancer and you figure out how can i go on how can i you know can i be proud of what i did and there are times where like when i think about that that patient and my work with that patient that is i think like the height of what i've been capable of yeah being attached to an outcome and being detached being detached from yeah yeah that that's you know that's yeah being attached is the problem and being detached is the goal yeah and and so like like can you see how objectively like there's no question that life is better than death but even like to this day the family is incredibly grateful that i was this person's doctor i'm incredibly grateful for having the experience even though the dude died and it was sad that there's an axis of suffering and contentment that is actually independent of happiness and sadness okay okay i can see that yeah right and i think you may understand that part pretty well because i think that there are a lot of reasons that you there's a lot of joy enjoyment and potential happiness in your day to day there's accomplishment there's hopefully laughter you know there's working with your one true king folks and there's something that's like missing on the inside despite everything going so well yeah exactly so that axis is like the path that you have to walk through spirituality because you've figured out how to like become successful that's the first axis and what happens the reason we get stuck is because we think that the axis of success and the axis of contentment are linked because early on in life as we climb that mountain we think that these two things are linked because they grow together and then you you kind of like you're going up together and then what happens you get to the top of the mountain and then some people realize that the axes are truly perpendicular and when you understand that a hundred percent is when you attain enlightenment yeah i've tried so hard and like i i've just i i in a way like it's something that you can clearly know but knowing it isn't the same as living it i with you 100 yeah yeah it's like i you you want to do that and you want to transcend being outcome like like outcome driven or outcome determined or whatever right but you just can't get out of it like i it's like i'll play a game and i'll be like oh even if i don't beat the boss you're gonna don't assume it's fine and then i play it and i don't beat the boss i'm i'm maulding yep so so now so enough of theory yes i think there's something holding you back okay yeah and so this is where i think that like there's that general principle but i think there's one big thing getting in the way which is your fear of death so this i think think is actually like psychological in nature it's of the mind okay and and so as long as you we have to get to and probably process or dissolve this sense of decay that like plagues you right so that like what i'm sort of getting the sense of is like you have this shadow that goes like that accompanies you through all of your things and the shadow is like this feeling that like we're on the decline that there's a sense of decay that joy like the only firsts that i have left are bad ones yeah you know exactly and and so that comes from somewhere that has nothing to do with the axis of contentment or suffering what that has to do with is like a psychological like because and this is where we can lean on neuroscience a little bit just think about this for a second zach like you literally have neurons that have been wired to produce those thoughts yeah right so then the question becomes how did those neurons get wired that way and how can we change your neuronal wiring so this is now taking a step we'll leave spirituality behind forget about spirituality forget about enlightenment forget about the top of the mountain and what we really have to do for you is do some psychological work and rewire some of your neurons because once that happens then you can walk that other axis of contentment and suffering so let me ask you this does that make sense yeah no it definitely makes sense it's basically it's programmed in the wrong way like you're programmed to think one thing and and it's a bad thing to think yeah i totally understand sort of so the tricky thing is that it's programmed it was programmed in the right way and now it's maladaptive yeah so it's not a mistake it's actually and so let me ask you this how long have you been afraid of death since i found out about it can you tell me about that how you found out about death oh i don't really remember honestly uh i was i think the earliest memory i have is i was like i'm like four or five or six right i got uh you know i was raised roman catholic and so i had a lot of experience just kind of talking about the whole idea of afterlife and everything like that and even whenever i was like five years old i i read some of the stories i heard some of the stories in the bible i was like man i never heard of anybody that lived in a fish i don't even know if this is true and it made me wonder it's like what is the uh what's really going on and what's really gonna happen because like yeah i understand people die and i was scared of it i remember uh you know it's like you can run from it hide from it uh destiny comes all the same and um it it's scary it is and i remember thinking that when i was a little kid and there have been times where i've been able to kind of forget about that and i think that's really kind of always been my goal is to just not think about it and i think that sometimes whenever i i don't this sounds like really stupid because i i think it in a way i feel stupid for thinking this way and um like i will i will do badly in a game sometimes and it will remind me that i'm getting older and i'm gonna die because i'm not as good as i feel like i used to be and it's like this weird like kind of domino effect where like playing a game like that will make him feel this way and it's just so like to me i i i find it embarrassing it's it's weird because i i think it's a um it's like a illogical conclusion in a way but in another way it's not yeah so well said so so i think when you say it's an illogical conclusion here's what i'm i'm gonna rephrase that a little bit or transform it okay what i'm what i'm gonna the way i'm gonna interpret that is that if you look at the variables that lead you to playing a crappy game of whatever there are tons of them right yeah if you're a moba player the number one variable is that your team sucks absolutely it's always their fault yep and and so like if we think about it there are a thousand reasons why you know you're you have poor performance in the game yeah but what your mind jumps to is ah see this is a sign of the decay we knew it was there we know it's coming as you said you can't escape it it's destiny here it is and so this is this is the very nature of a cognitive bias is that like it's a filter through which an independent experience become like transforms into something else yeah it's like uh if the only tool you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail absolutely you find it yeah i get it so so so now we go back to i mean you say you don't have many memories about it but like like i think that we have to figure out how to deconstruct the filter and that that starts with like understanding how the filter was built and so when you were four years old and you were like raised roman catholic and when you say can you tell us more about that well i went to church every sunday got communion i never liked going to church couldn't play game boy in church and i didn't really ever believe in a lot of this stuff i thought it was kind of i i in a way there's like the parallel realities of is it more like i think i even said this last time i was on here is it more terrifying to know that you are created just for this endless cycle of servitude towards some deity that you don't really fully comprehend or is it more terrifying that you're just a hyper-intelligent ape with no purpose in life who's going to die and cease to exist in a period of time that's nothing in the grand scheme of things it's like which one of these realities is more terrifying and you know i think they're both pretty bad yeah so that sounds like philosophy to me yeah yeah i mean a lot of the religion in a lot of ways is philosophy and so what yep so i'm gonna steer away from that go ahead so why did you have to go to church well my mom wanted me to it was sunday and can you help me understand what did you did you ever try to tell your mom that you didn't want to go to church yes i i made her aware of the way that i felt about it yes many times can you tell us about that i was like mom i don't want to go she's like it's too bad you're going to go and i was like well i don't want to go and then finally sometimes i would uh try to make myself feel better and think like maybe she'll take me to burger king after church that was that honestly sometimes that helped but um overall like yeah like she would always make me want to go or make me go and i didn't really like nowadays the weird thing about it is nowadays i i you know i offer every time that it's like a holiday like right now you know kovitz so like i'm not doing it but like any other time besides and i always tell her like listen mom if you want if you want me to take you to church i will not even stream like i will make sure that you get to go to church right because i knew how much it meant to her back then but whenever i was a kid i didn't have that same perspective right and so back then i just uh you know i didn't want to go i hated going and it was just it's like i could be at home playing with my friends i could be playing video games i could be doing something i want to do and instead i'm doing this thing that i don't want to do that i don't even think is real okay and what would she say when you told her that you didn't want to go uh i mean i think there's a lot of different things she'd say but um like i i don't the thing is it's it's odd because i don't even really remember like the only thing i really remember is that it didn't matter yep yeah i could rationalize it all i wanted but uh i was still still driving to church yep so inevitable it's inevitable nothing you can do to escape it well i could like fake sick sometimes to fix it there's a few times i did that but uh other than that yeah it's pretty much inevitable now we talking about going to church or dying definitely church i feel like the i i definitely feel like it's two kind of different things because church like i was like i knew that at some point i wouldn't have to always do this and like i could get away from it to an extent because it's like okay well i'm clearly not going to be nine years old forever so eventually i won't have to deal with this but um with dying you can't really get away from it in the same way so it's not yet ask you a question okay so yeah i understand that you don't remember exactly what the conversations were but you remember the feeling right of being dragged to church yeah so like like there's a certain sense of like powerlessness and inevitability to the story that you're telling no i mean i think every kid has like many stories like that where you just have to do something it's like going to school it's the center we're not okay if it's the same thing for you but let's not worry about what what many kids have okay so here's my question i know it's gonna sound kind of weird yeah when you have those thoughts of decay is the quality flavor or color of emotion that you experience at all similar to how you felt when you got dragged to church not really i mean i think the church thing was just a more or less a you know a one and a half hour inconvenience whereas dying is like a very much it's a much longer inconvenience and so can you tell me a little bit about when you started to fear death yeah like i was a kid i mean as i said as soon as i figured out that it was going to happen like how did you figure out that it was going to happen well that's the thing is like i must have been like four or five years old so i can't really remember i it's hard for me to like to really get it to really remember what it was or how it felt because it was just so long ago and so i'm hearing you've carried this feeling with you for a long time yeah can you do you remember like times that maybe you were a little bit older that you were like worried about it like do you have any memories of being slightly older where yeah i remember um uh well it's like not just for me right i worry obviously about my parents dying that's scary and uh there's one time my mom she uh i don't know we don't know really what it was i took her to the doctor a while afterwards but she like kind of had some sort of like a it wasn't really like a heart attack but it was some sort of like a thing it was like a couple of steps below that and i remember like i woke up and i thought that and i was like oh my god that was a pretty bad point in my life because she didn't want me to call that the ambulance right because we were really poor we couldn't afford it and like having to deal with that and like the helplessness not only of you know of the the greater existential situation but also just like the day-to-day like you know we don't have money we can't take care of ourselves and that was brutal what was brutal about it well i mean like having to like feeling like you're gonna lose one of your parents and then thinking to yourself like this is all i've ever known and i like to know that it's not gonna last and like that that's what was scary and to to be helpless even inside of the context of society right because you don't have the money to take care of it and uh the funny thing about that is that i actually um like yeah i had i remember because i woke up and she was like like it's just like screaming or like crying and so like i had to wake up like i used to have like ptsd and i guess it's ptsd i don't know i just kind of read about it later on i would wake up and i would hear it in my head and i would have to get up and check on her and this would happen like once every like two hours or something like that and uh this went on for maybe uh like six months a year something like that and and then you know i kind of got i i that stopped happening i wouldn't say i got over it but it stopped happening and um then a funny thing about that is that's actually what drove me to uh to make my youtube channel and to start making videos that's kind of the reason can you help me understand that how does that relate to a youtube channel well because i didn't have the uh i couldn't really have a job at that point because i felt like i had to be around to take care of her and i wanted to be able to work from home and do something like that and so i didn't want to spend all day at work in case she had something happen that she needed me there for and that's why i started doing youtube videos because i thought that well maybe i can do this and you know see where it goes that's interesting yeah so are you saying that if your mom had never had something like a heart attack you wouldn't you wouldn't have had a career in streaming uh you know i uh i've always felt that yeah i mean that's why i say i never have any regrets in my life in a way and um it's like uh you know uh you need a hot fire to forge a sword and that's kind of the way that i i've looked at it yeah it's true but it sucks so zach this may sound kind of weird but like i'm kind of hearing that you're not really afraid of i know it sounds weird yeah yeah go on you're not really afraid of death i think what what bothers you it sounds to me is actually your inability to deal with death well control over it yeah yeah i mean it'd be nice if i could control it that'd be great i i know it sounds weird and and yeah this may seem like a a useless distinction but to me it actually feels pretty significant because what i'm what i'm hearing themes of is is not actually death it's like it's like you being like and and i'm i'm stretching here okay so i'm trying to draw connections but um and so you know we feel free to bat them down if they don't sit with you it's hypothesis testing um you know what i'm really hearing is that like you've been on the receiving end of being powerless before and like what i'm hearing is that death is like the guaranteed powerlessness it's the one thing that you know that no matter how hard you try you can fix everything else you can have money you can have medical care you can have friends you can have love and you can gain power over every dimension in your life but the one thing that you can never gain power over is death yeah the interesting thing though is that i'm not because it's it's bizarre because most people who fear death are concerned about regret they're concerned about lost opportunities they're concerned about all the things that they didn't get to do i'm not hearing really much of that at all from you if i could sit in my room and play video games eating cheetos and drinking soda for another thousand years i would do it so so it's interesting because i know it sounds weird but for a lot of people the fear of death is about missed things i'm not hearing that from you what i'm really hearing from you is that death is about the inevitability of powerlessness yeah like that is like entropy is like a force that no matter how hard you fight against you can never overcome yeah you can't do anything about it yeah it's it's the ozymandias analogy again yeah exactly and so this is where like i think if you want to be free of that the work that we need to do is about experiences of powerlessness in your life right because that's yeah i've thought about doing that for myself too it's like i remember um uh there's like sometimes whenever i will take risks in a way and this sounds really bad i'll take risks in a way that could really hurt me and i don't care about them because it's like kind of an exercise in letting go of worrying about your your well-being no it's not it's an exercise in exerting power how do you feel how do you feel like that because like like you're taking the risk right so like you're you're manning up against it like like what so this is exactly what i'm saying for most people risk to their well-being is is enough of a deterrent but for you you have like a you have a far more important flame within you which is like irrespective of the the like the impact to my well-being like i'm going to choose i'm going to be in control i'm going to jump into the lake of fire because i'm the one that's doing it and while a thousand people will say to you you're a dumb ass for jumping into a lake of fire they don't understand that like what you need from that what you're getting out of that is that you're the one who's doing the jumping for me like what i try to get out of it is that i can let go and just let it happen if it is wrong we're saying the same thing yeah right because what you're trying to do is train yourself to be powerless powerless exactly yeah which in a weird way is actually taking control uh i i i guess yeah i mean if you well how could well yeah but it's like it's how do you how can you it's like a paradox right because how do you take control of not having control how do you not take control that's why it doesn't work okay because you've tried it right yeah and you still fear death and you still fear powerlessness and you've like like do you see like i think we're saying the same thing like i think now i feel like we're on to something because it's like you do this thing to train yourself to endure yourself to build build some damage like you want some fear of death resistance so what you're gonna do is jump into a lake of fire and a thousand other people are gonna say like don't do that that's dumb and you're like you guys don't understand for me it's like i have to learn how to like let go or whatever like i have to learn how to face these things and like do something that's high risk because it's like you trying to grapple with this thing yeah well it's also just like small things i remember i uh i i was walking up the street this was like a years ago right or quite a while and a few years ago it was quite a while ago and um i had like a weird i don't know if this was like a panic attack or something like that where i was walking down to the street and i or to the store i was walking down the street to the store and i had like a weird thing happen with like my chest and i don't know if it was a panic attack if it was some sort of like you know weird thing with my heart i don't know what it was this happened a few years ago and i it was the first time that i ever really felt i think that almost many people have this experience right where they they have the the first feeling of mortality and that was that for me right and i remember a year or so later i had not that same feeling but something that reminded me of it like walking up the street and i thought to myself if that's the case and if i die right now there couldn't be a better time for it to go i'm walking down the street i'm happy i'm with my friends i'm in my neighborhood and everything is as good as it's ever going to be and that's been the closest that i've been to i don't know like like think about that for a second like so so you're afraid of death right yeah in that second time when you were walking don't read twitch at okay all right so when you're when you're walking up the street and you start to feel that sensation did you think you were dying uh there's a two percent chance one percent chance yeah it made me aware it made me aware sure and so as like so can we just sort of i'm gonna put some i'm gonna interpret okay so you're welcome to push back against interpretation so in that moment you were actually like some of the that's the closest to death that you've actually ever been closest to death that i've been without i mean like there have been some other times where i've been pretty close to it aware aware of your proximity to death let's put it that way uh i remember there was one time i was driving that my friend was driving down the street he was drunk and high and i was in the passenger seat and the seat belt didn't work and i thought to myself man i'm never going to have to worry about that test that i have to do next week how did you feel when you were close to death uh in the first case uh the the one in the car i felt uh it's like it there's like the it's it's it's terrifying but at the same time it's also grounding and when you're walking up the street and you think to yourself maybe there's a two percent chance this is a heart attack how do you feel oh that died just i felt good feel fine so like this makes no sense because here you are afraid of death on a daily basis and when it comes knocking on your door the words that you describe are not abject terror sure there's terror but there's also grounding and there's also a sense of like peace and acceptance yeah yeah uh it's it's a weird it's like kind of you have moments of uh moments of peace and moments of being able to deal with things and then also moments where you can't no it's like it's not an even i'm gonna disagree okay because i think actually i know it sounds weird what you say is logically makes a ton of sense but here's here's what i'd like to put out to you is that when actually faced with death you're okay with it it's the feeling of decay the feeling of inevitability the feeling of powerlessness about that future thing that you can never prevent that's where you're terrified yeah do you see the difference like because when you actually face death you're like so be it and anticipation is the uh is the stressful thing and you know going back to the the thing with the dentist right i mean sitting in the waiting room is way more stressful than actually having the teeth uh you know fixed or whatever so now we get to like i think the problem is that you've misdiagnosed yourself and not that we diagnose you here on stream i'm not gonna diagnose just use that term loosely okay because you you call it the fear of death but i don't think it's the fear of death i think it's the fear of powerlessness because when you actually face death you're kind of like if i go so be it that's vairagya yeah i mean it's it's scary in a way yeah i think the the the more i have to think about it it's like kind of it it's like i try not to think about it let me just say that yeah so we'll get to your whole coping structure in a second but like and i think this is where you know i i sort of barked up the tree of like roman catholicism fear of death and things like that and that tree didn't there's nothing in the tree right i asked you that stuff and it kind of felt like it wasn't you're kind of like yeah that's not the same feeling you basically told me so and i think that makes sense because i think what the feeling really is it really has to do with like we've got to talk about times in your life where you felt powerless like this whole thing with your mom i think is like a far better like i know it sounds kind of weird but like you know when you think about your decay when you do poorly in a video game okay yeah this is gonna sound like a bizarre question feel free to swat this down too if it doesn't feel right okay when you do poorly in a video game is the color flavor and texture of how you feel in that moment forget about your thoughts forget about your rationalizations similar to how you felt when your mom told you don't call the ambulance uh yeah i mean to an extent yeah uh sure and i i think that's basically it it's like feeling yeah feeling like you don't have the control over it and like you just can't you know what you know what needs to happen and you can't do it yeah so that's so the the interesting thing as zach is that i think if you want to be happy okay yeah there's a two-step process and and we can dig into this a little bit more if you want to today but like here's what i'm seeing the first thing that you've got to do because you said this beautifully you said i didn't get over it but it stopped happening with your with your i think that's a lot of ptsd and things like that right i mean you have like the initial shock it's the same as like a wound right i mean you the wound eventually heals but you still remember it being there in a way yeah so here's what i'm gonna say is that it just changed the shape in which it manifests and that it's the same thing this is the hypothesis the the fear of decay that you have is what it turned into when did your mom have this event 2012. okay i think it's just somewhere around them i'm meant 2013 i think it was november 2012 if i remember right and how long did it did you have the the ptsd waking up things like that until about uh i don't know like 2014 2000 middle of 2014 somewhere around there okay i mean like obviously these are very rough like guesses but yeah and and how long have you felt not excited how long have you been worried about the decay of your career and that you're getting older uh probably last two years uh two or three years that probably saved you three three issues so it looks like there's like so let's say like there's a pretty significant gap between 2014 and 2018 and and i think that there's like to to me though i feel like i've got a pretty good sense that if you want to be free of this thing you've actually go to gotta go back and explore like times in your life where you felt powerless like the sense of inevitability and like powerlessness and we can kind of talk about that more i mean i know we've been at it for you know a while now um and so i'll kind of leave it up to you whether you want to talk a little bit about like coping like your your uh you know your tendency to like cope and well what do you mean by exploring it like that's i'm curious like how do you explore a moment of powerlessness when it yeah great question so like i i think i know it sounds weird but when when i asked you about your mom what did you feel in that moment as you were retelling the story what sucked i mean like the thing is if i i've told the story before on my stream so like kind of the visceral like emotional feeling is not really there as much because i'm used to telling it but um it's it it sucks i mean i think yeah it just it feels bad i think that's what i what in what way does it feel bad i don't know i mean like it it feels bad that it happened it feels bad that i i i guess yeah it just feels bad that it happened i i'm not really sure exactly how to describe it so let me ask you this do you experience an echo of what you experienced back then when you tell the story no that's why i can tell it okay so that's what we have to change so here's how it works okay so from like and this is a slightly more yogic perspective but if we look at principles of psychotherapy i think we're kind of let's all so i'll kind of explain to you what happens so when we have negative experiences there's a certain emotional energy that we experience in that moment and yeah that that energy can do one of two things it can either be digested or buried generally speaking as we get older we get better at digesting negative experiences so if we think about like you know um so for example you know being emotionally abused by your boss at the age of 27 for six months is far less damaging than being emotionally abused by a teacher for six months at the age of five yes right so like if we think about why is that it's because our pr our our brain's capacity to process and digest at older ages is improved yeah you have more context around it absolutely more con yeah so it what you say is context is your brain's ability to attach context around it yeah right so the five-year-old doesn't understand how to do that you're precisely right but i'm just sort of reshaping it as like a faculty of the mind so if we look at like psychotherapy and like psychiatry like why do we dig into the past it's because like most of the dormant emotional energy forms in the past because we tend to do pretty good like you can have a traumatic breakup you can lose a parent things like that but like losing a parent at the age of seven has and i've seen this lifelong impacts losing a parent at the age of 42 has also affects you for the rest of your life but it doesn't like damage you for the rest of your life yeah it doesn't change the course yeah i see so here's what happens i know it sounds kind of weird but that energy lies dormant and then resurfaces so the example that i'm going to use is like the the standard one i use on stream is let's say i'm walking down the street with my kid and my kid sees a dog kid goes to pet the dog kid dog kind of nips at my kid the kid gets terrified starts crying yells terrified pick me up daddy feels a ton of fear and emotion ten minutes later i get her an ice cream she's licking the ice cream we don't have to go to the emergency room or anything the dog was actually just sniffing her didn't even bite her but for her it was traumatic and ten minutes later she's like a kid she's resilient so she's like licking her ice cream telling me about you know what she's what she's doing in school everything's fine until the next day when she sees another dog and she freaks out daddy picked me up oh my god so like where did that you know she's like across the street it's like what's happening so what's happened is her neurons have wired to recognize this dog as a dangerous stimulus yeah people like the human brain is good at uh recognizing patterns and making patterns absolutely right so that dormant emotional energy so that's the neuroscientific perspective let's think about it from like an emotional energy perspective a ton of emotion disappears in 10 minutes it doesn't actually disappear right it goes dormant yeah yeah and then reactivates so what i'm hearing from you is that like this emotional energy reactivates as signs of decay oh you see the decay there you see the decay there it's inevitable i'm powerless there's nothing i can do and so then the question becomes like okay if that emotional energy is like manifesting because this is where we kind of get to coping you i mean you say it beautifully zack you're kind of like i didn't really get over it but it sort of went away and what it's doing is it's like seeping in through the cracks now it shapes the way that your mind looks at things it shapes the way that you look at life because there's this like part of your brain that is telling you zach that no matter what you do you are powerless and so what is your brain then what happens is your brain takes that feeling and it actually tries to construct a logic around it so this sounds kind of weird but this is how like kind of psychosis works we're like paranoia where the person has the paranoia it's actually an emotion that's at the root of it and then their their mind constructs an explanation to corroborate the emotion why do people feel like they're being followed by the fbi as opposed to someone else it's because they have a feeling of being followed feeling feeling observed and then the mind constructs and asks itself in a logical way what organizations have the resources to constantly follow me which is why you see these recurrent themes of like fbi mob whatever yeah i can see that so they're just looking for a outlet to rationalize their feelings absolutely but at the root of it is a feeling and in your case i think what your mind has done is like latched on to this fear of death because i don't think it's actually a fear of death i know it sounds weird i know you're afraid of death but i think what you're really afraid of is powerlessness at the time of death because if we really look at it scientifically when you face death you're not like freaking the [ __ ] out you're actually like if i have to go now so be it which is not what you would expect from someone who's facing death no it's not and so i know it sounds kind of weird but so now when we get to when you say like exploring it what does that mean what this means is that actually all of that dormant emotion as we talk about it and as we bring the emotion up you will feel it in the moment and you will feel powerless in the moment but the cool thing is that each time you feel powerless let's say like in a therapy session it actually reduces the dormant emotional energy and as the dormant emotional energy starts to wane your fear of decay will go with it so i actually have an interesting way that i actually i i agree with you and i think that's kind of one of the reasons why i talked about it on my stream too is because the exact same thing happened with a lot of other problems that i had whenever i was younger so if you ever go back and watch one of my highlight videos of 2016 or something like that i was very afraid to even show my arms because i'm i'm extremely skinny i'm very very very skinny and i was even more so then and on top of that i i would always cover my mouth whenever i would smile because i didn't want people to see that i had things wrong with my teeth i would wear a beanie sometimes if i felt a little bit more bald than usual that day and uh i had a lot of insecurities and um having to eventually deal with those insecurities on camera and i remember recently i took a shower on stream where i took my shirt off on stream and imagine doing that uh four years ago for me is just completely like i just could never imagine doing that at all and i think that the reason that i was able to do that is kind of just consistently dealing with those problems and being faced with that constantly and then slowly just kind of learning to accept that this is who i am rather than this is uh you know something i have to be afraid of or ashamed of that i i can't let anybody know about me and i think that was that was helpful for me because it helped me become more of more accepting of myself yeah so so perfect example i'm going to reinterpret it using a different kind of language so i think the problem when we hear your story is people if people are struggling with the same thing they're like i'm insecure about my appearance there and you say i learned to accept it everyone listening at home is like how do i learn to accept it right because acceptance comes at the end whereas like i'm gonna try to reinterpret this using the model that i shared with you is i don't think i think the learning to accept it is sort of like happens towards the end the interesting thing is that if you think about each of those moments okay so you have the the dormant energy of insecurity and every time you put on the beanie that energy is not being digested but every time you take off the beanie i know this sounds kind of weird but that insecure emotion comes up and is present alive and on in your mind yeah and if it's not i'll read read it and somebody will make a comment about it again and so then it brings it up and it brings it up and it brings it up so all of the dormant energy of the insecurity activates in the present and if we think about even something like exposure therapy from a phobia or we think about my kid how do i get her to trust dogs again how do i get her to like dogs i have to bring up that emotion right it's like oh we're gonna see oh that dog's across the street we're not gonna touch it okay daddy's gonna go over and touch it and that raises her anxiety a little bit yeah and it's like you know do you want to touch it now and she's like no and then it's like okay and then we're gonna try again tomorrow we're gonna try again tomorrow so it's the activation of that dormant energy in the present that when done with awareness and this is a key part which i think you are like grappling with yourself in those moments right and so that's like the awareness component i'm sure i mean in a way at the beginning and i think also like to a certain extent it's like i tried to be somebody that i wasn't i tried to pretend like i was this different person and i think that in a way it's kind of like a negative emotion telling people that you're actually a degenerate with their teeth falling out like that's that's a negative emotion but it's still you it's still better to be you than pretend to be somebody else but it is it's definitely not like i i don't have like a better self-image because of it i if anything i have a worse self-image but it it is what it is it's not a it's a facade that is precisely so now now we're going to kind of things full circle because that statement that you just made is moving in on that other axis that i'm talking about because oddly enough like if we think about okay my self-image is poor let me fix my teeth that's the axis of like climbing mountains doing something external becoming something that you're not and what you're what i'm hearing you say is that like i actually accept that i kind of look like a degenerate and that actually brings me peace well that's what's bad about it though is because i'm okay with with just living like an animal like i'm i've said before no mere mortal can live with asthma gold like i i live like an absolute animal and i don't care yeah so now we get to subtle things yeah there's another one so this idea that you were an animal that's a whole other complex that also has its origins which like when you were growing up poor just hypothesizing for a second right we could do this all day but when you were growing up poor like tell me about what it was like to go to school oh it would suck right i mean like uh sometimes it would especially if everybody else had x or y thing and i didn't have it uh luckily and you know my mom did you know it's not like we were we weren't like the we we didn't live in the projects right but we were one of the poorer families in a working-class neighborhood i would say somewhere around there like lower working class neighborhood and so um you know there would be many times whenever i wouldn't have something that it felt like everybody else would have or i wouldn't be able to do something that everybody else could do or i couldn't look forward to something that everybody else could look forward to and it did feel bad to be like that one person that didn't have it or that one person that couldn't do it or whatever and i still think about that sometimes it does it's disappointing but i guess like to me now i just i always have like the uh the perspective that as i said i don't really have any regrets and i like in a way i would there be like small things i would go back and i would want to change in my life but i wouldn't really want to do a whole lot of that because every moment in my life has brought me to the point to where i'm at now and i think that i'm at a relatively good spot now it's just that internally i'm not does that make sense yeah it makes a lot of sense yeah so this is where you know i could hypothesize further i'm getting what you're saying but but i i think this sentiment of no mere mortal can live with asthma and gold is i think a sentiment that was born but i'm just taught you know just in the interest of time i'm going to just toss stuff out it's like that sentiment was born when you thought about inviting kids over to your house after you went with their house actually was born after i had a girlfriend live with me okay but uh yeah um well the thing is like a lot of my friends like and the thing is that back then uh we were complete animals like we all were but the the thing is that they got older and they stopped being animals but i'm just the [ __ ] same and like i still feel like i'm 16. the only time i don't feel like i'm 16 or 13 anymore is if i talk to a 16 year old then i realize oh [ __ ] okay actually never mind i'm 30. but outside of that i feel the same pretty much and i feel good it's just that every the whole world around me changed i didn't i think there's a lot there yeah like it's a really interesting combination of acceptance and coping yeah it's weird isn't it yeah i think it's tough because i think what you've managed to do is like survive and so a lot of what i'm hearing is like you've accepted yourself for who you are because rejecting yourself is too painful but in in accepting yourself for who you are you're also propagating things that i think you know aren't good for you which you're also working on no yeah that that's what the problem is right is like i should not be okay with a number of things like i know that like internally you know my my head's [ __ ] up in that way yeah so to explain how you overcome that you actually it's kind of weird you have to go back to bringing up that negative emotion because as long as you say to yourself no mere mortal can live with asthma and gold you're kind of laughing off the shamefulness of your situation but i don't feel any shame exactly that's the problem and until you feel that shame right so so so like since you don't feel that shame you're propagating the life because this is the way that you ignore the shame yeah but it's like i just never had it it never bothered me at all and yeah i i it's just it's so weird to me because like other people they will latch on and care so much about having this thing or having uh you know x or y uh like object or something like that and for me i just don't care about any of it it doesn't matter to me like it doesn't matter if i have a nice car it doesn't matter to me if i have a nice house i don't need nice clothes i wear the same clothes i wore in high school um and that none of these things matter to me at all yeah i just i don't care about the same things other people care about i'm not sure how much of this is it acceptance and attachment and how much of it is a coping mechanism blown out of proportion if i want it i just don't care i i understand that so so so you know there are many reasons that people cannot care about something yeah right they can learn to not care about it or they can be detached from it well so here it's kind of well i think that there's a there's another experience that kind of might shed some insight onto this uh whenever i was young i uh i did care about these things a lot these they were very very meaningful to me like what i was saying before about having everything like you know i wanted to have like nice clothes and they ran clothes things like that and you know many times my mom and i would go to a thrift store and you know i wouldn't be able to have like those same kinds of brand new clothes that uh my other my other friends would have now many times i did also have nice clothes as well but it just wasn't really to the same degree especially with other things that cost more money and i went to a school in high school initially where it was much more of like an upscale school many more people had you know that kind of stuff and i i kind of i didn't really fit in there and i realized that the people that were in that in that society that cared about those things were not like me and uh that kind of got me to not care about those things as much as i did then because i saw people that you know kind of attached themselves to those things and cared about those things a lot and i looked at myself and i'm like this is not who i am that sounds to me like acceptance and growth uh i would say so i mean i would hope so at least yeah so so i'm not i'm not detecting that this is some weird coping mechanism in terms of like being not materialistic ironically if we look at your karmic temperament it's interesting because i think being born so so what you just described asthma gold so is actually would be interpreted by some of my teachers as a sign of past spiritual work so that there's a certain so it's interesting because like in in the hindu gaming system or buddhist uh the lesser of the buddhists but more more in the hindu um that essentially like you don't carry over your gear you don't carry over your stats but you carry over your xp between incarnations and what you're describing to me is is a generally non-materialistic sentiment which would be interpreted by some of my teachers as a sign of past spiritual work which oddly enough is oftentimes coupled with a lot of material success and is sort of the formula this is why like buddha was sort of the same way too and he was born as a prince so his karma was like spawn like picking a spawn point where you can continue to grow spiritually and you carry some of your xp with you so this is something that i've just seen time and again i don't know if this is like a bias on my part where i'm looking for it so therefore i find it but i oftentimes find that people who are not very materialistic and are quite materialistically successful and unhappy despite their materialistic success wind up in conversations with me yeah i mean i think so i mean i think that's the reason why yeah i i of course that makes sense now just to kind of i'm going to try to close the loop and maybe wrap things up and give you a direction to go does that sound okay to you or would you like to kind of okay um so i think going forward zach if i had to make one recommendation for you it would be to really explore this theme of powerlessness in your life and so like have there been times or moments where you felt that inevitability of decay and i i recognize that it manifests in gaming in your life but i i really think about these moments like when you couldn't call an ambulance like that's perfect that's exactly what we're talking about right there's a sense of like there is no matter how hard you try and what you do they're like you know there's nothing no amount of your effort will succeed and as you track back and discover those moments in your life i know you've tried to jump in for twice now um as you track back and try to find those moments in your life and as you actually if you can evoke that feeling of powerlessness in the present my hypothesis is that your fear of decay will go with it so how do how do i evoke a moment of powerlessness without having control over the powerlessness making the paradox making me mean mean it's irrelevant because like if you yeah that that's what's confusing to me like how do you memory yeah so so so the way you evoke the feeling is because the the dorm the emotion is going to be dormant so the problem is that like like you bro have you ever worked with a therapist by the way never so i think if you wanted to see a therapist i think this is what you could work on with someone so like you're gonna go in week after week after week and you're gonna talk about these experiences and if you find a decent therapist they're going to find ways to ask you questions that are going to evoke emotion because i don't know if you can tell but over the course of this entire conversation we keep on moving away from emotion by talking intellectually and philosophically well how do you talk in terms of emotion because like for me i i just the emotions are there yeah i mean it made me feel bad i don't really know exactly how much more i can describe about it i'm not yeah you think about whether so i can't tell you the answer to that question i have to show you okay because telling you the answer to the question is operating on an intellectual level and moving in the opposite direction that we need to yeah it's like even yeah talking about it makes it irrelevant in a way yeah so i think it's like it's like slow conversations where you know sometimes when i interview people like emotions come out i think you have a interesting natural damage resistance from being on the road to enlightenment and then you have an additional coping mechanism which sort of like suppresses and buries some of those emotions the third thing that could be going on is that these circuits of your brain are suppressed by playing video games yeah i mean there's there's part of that i mean i i think that it's also like i i don't want to let go of things that i i had i think that's definitely what it is i'm very attached to things that i had and you know i remember i saw a friend of mine i'd never seen this guy i haven't seen this guy since like high school and it was the day before i came back to streaming like last year i think and i remember i talked to him and this is going to sound absolutely degenerate and that's because it is but i always tell the story of a friend of mine who drew a female dragon masturbating on a chalkboard on the first day of school and he was the guy that did that and i mentioned it to him and he remembered it and that meant so much to me because nobody else in the whole world thought that [ __ ] was thought that [ __ ] was true nobody else thought that was true and i remember seeing him and like i drove home and i cried in the car because i got a chance to to remember that it was real you know this sounds weird zach but like i don't know exactly where that story comes from but what i'm hearing from you is the way to do what i'm telling you to do and it wasn't just like that moment that moment was just like one thing right but it was like everything about that you know the life that we lived uh just everything it was great i i give anything to go back there i would what are you feeling now i was half my life ago i feel like it wasn't like it feels like it was the the i mean obviously this feels a while ago now unfortunately but um it felt uh it just sucks man you can never go back so i i could see emotion coming up yeah and you got to watch out for for twitch chat because they're going to bury it right so oh yeah so so like like something came up there you shared a story yeah and then you felt emotion yeah i do buried it's gone now you see that yeah i mean i've never really been a particularly emotional person i feel like any time that i show my emotions it's not good they're mostly bad mostly bad emotions yeah so i think we've gotta teach you how to let that stuff out and i i when i said i i wasn't optimistic but i think you just did it yeah right and it's weird but like as you told that story like we were just talking about something you tell the story about you know a friend of yours who drew a picture of i i want to really emphasize because it sounds [ __ ] weird that it was not really about the moment itself it's what the moment represented and all the justifications in the world are going to move away from the emotion yeah you don't have to justify anything this is just like i don't know why but you just did it when you asked me how do i do it i don't know you just did and this is what i it's weird it's just you have to go back to the memory and like something about sharing that with him in that moment for things that you had started to doubt and push away and buried came up and it's painful but it's cathartic yeah yeah it is i never thought i'd see him again yeah i never thought it would happen so there are all kinds of interpretations we can make there like so for example the power of that moment is something that you thought was inevitable became not inevitable exactly you would never get closure and so we can see how that's powerful for you because like what's your problem it's that the inevitable is inevitable and here's a here's a chance here's a moment where that doesn't have to be the case and it's it's like painful but it's also hopeful okay i can see that i i don't know i mean that's an interpretation but that also is like me going intellectually i don't know if that's actually [ __ ] true or not the point though is i don't know what you just did but you need to do more of it yeah maybe i mean i don't know it just sucks like it it's sad because like i used to i used to be like really happy about that kind of [ __ ] and now i don't really have that same experience anymore and i don't know like and i feel like i can never have that back because it was uh the context of my life you know it's like my parents were healthy i didn't have to worry about a job i didn't have to worry about a bunch of other weird [ __ ] it was just me and the boys hanging out all the time drawing dragons on a chalkboard and you know riding the bus home together singing along to rap songs and that was good it really was good how are your parents zach could be better could be worse they're all right it doesn't sound like they're all right uh well the thing is there's a degree of all right it's kind of like uh so you're getting away you're going down the wrong side of the mountain well let me let me explain what i'm saying right it's like uh i was saying before about how like things get worse so slowly that you don't realize that they're happening and then you slowly just accept how bad that they are yeah there's a day that my mom started using a cane to walk around that was really painful for me to see and it really hurt me a lot but because it's happened for like now for a while i don't feel the same level of in like visceral reaction whenever i see her doing it now because i like to see your mom walk with a cane for the first time i it is terrible it's horrible what was terrible about it uh it's like it's one step down down that mountain you know are a number of steps and it wasn't like it wasn't like a really emotional feeling i guess it was just like kind of uh [ __ ] i got it it was just i don't know i can't really even describe it so i i think zach this is going to take some work right so i think um but i i do still feel optimistic that like there are too many things here that seem quite familiar to me that i've seen end in a good place well that's good that that's that's a relief right so so i think part of the issue here is that as you as you say i can't describe it so like yeah like yeah that's the problem is like it's it's not about thinking about it like i don't know because it because thinking about it isn't the right thing i'm gonna go back to the you know the the dragon on the chalkboard as an example yeah there are certain ways they're like shortcuts level skips and like something about that story was like the secret tunnel at the end of the mario brothers level that warps you to work world four and it's not a logical chain and you can logically chain it out as much as you want to and that's not going to be that effective the real thing is digging around for those level skips and when you had that level skip the emotion came right up like it was like i mean i think everyone saw it like you're at the verge of tears and yeah because i got you you can just for a moment go back you can just for a moment go back and realize how good it used to be so i'm also hearing themes of not just power and uh powerlessness and inevitability but of loss right yeah yeah i would say so and and so that's also worth digging into i think you know zach of all the people that we've talked to on stream i i would strongly recommend that you really think about finding someone to do this kind of work yeah maybe i mean i i try to uh i try not to think about it as much as i can and maybe maybe i should try to think about it more yeah so maybe thinking about it isn't the right move working on it but by all means think about it i think it's it's your you know i don't know if you play d but you've got an 18 on int thanks but this is where this is where like i don't know what your wisdom is right like there's some other dimension of your being which i think you over rationalize intellectualize and philosophize to get away from your kind of like emotional stuff but i you know if you want to think about it by all means go for it well yeah like it's like you spend time with yourself processing it it's like you'll lay in bed like a lot of times i'll lay in bed without even no music not on my phone and i'll just kind of experience myself you know it's like a form of i guess like uh uh uncultured medita meditation yeah uncultured yeah i think it's it's um it's interesting to see yeah um how unrefined do you think you are uh yeah i mean it's i mean there are a lot of techniques and things like that you can deal with but it's hard to it's sorry i was just thinking i was thinking of something um i uh there are a lot of techniques that you can use and it's hard to really know what works and what doesn't of course yep and that's why i would encourage you to seek guidance from someone who's maybe a little bit more experienced and who can show you what the right technique is yeah maybe i mean i've thought about like i i try to like a lot of times i would try to like watch videos about video games and stuff like that and this is kind of not really the same thing but it's kind of the same type of idea of like bettering yourself and nowadays i will always try to watch videos and do things and and uh read about things that kind of matter i guess to an extent like history and you know mathematics and stuff like that and i've tried to learn more and and be a better version of myself just so i can i can process things better and and think and have the ability to have that that knowledge uh like for me i i i'm lucky in a way that i have a very good memory but i waste that memory on remembering video games yeah i'm getting all kinds of weird signals from you i know um i i don't mean that to be judgmental but it's just it feels like we're opening up new and new avenues of conversation because now i have questions like are you proud of yourself or other people proud of you other people are are you proud of yourself i've done some good things it's all right could be better it always can be better so that's a no um i i think that it's like i'd say it's like it's let me tell you what that is that's a no cloaked and coping and positivity well it's like i mean no it it's a no it's inter it's an intellectualized note because like i've i've succeeded in a number of things on a very uh on a very real level right like i i've i've done this i've done that i've succeeded at this i've succeeded at that like all these things are things that i'm proud of but at the same time i feel like i could do more or i i'm not living up to what potential that i have in my own mind the question isn't whether you've done things that you can be proud of the question is are you proud of yourself um i don't know it's an interesting question i i don't know like i i would obviously like the first thing that i would say is is no end yes because i've been very happy you know in a lot of ways like hanging out with my friends like doing what i want to do et cetera but is that something to be proud of do you do you have to be proud of yourself to be fulfilled yeah so because like a lot of the sense of pride it's like pride in general like oh in this case to some degree is like a construct that exists in context of society so like do i am i proud of you know these accomplishments that i've had in real life well yes to an extent but these accomplishments that i have in real life are these are constructs that exist in society these are not things that are internal these are not uh it doesn't really matter yeah so when i ask you a question about whether you have pride in yourself yeah how do you answer well that the answer is is very simple i don't know and like i'm proud of some things i'm not of others i think that's probably and it's a [ __ ] answer 100 it's a [ __ ] answer but like there it is yeah so i i think we're i'm sort of feeling like i don't know that we're gonna get to somewhere very productive from this conversation i think that these are all important conversations i'm sort of taxed at this point um i feel like i'm oom yeah i'm probably go way down afterwards uh and so what i would say to you zach is that like when i ask you a question about your feelings your answer appears to be philosophical or intellectual in nature you start talking about constructs in society where is what i'm at like pride is an emotion uh i mean aren't they the same thing what i think so like i mean in a way right because you have like shame and like so if you're ashamed of um not having a nice car or something like that that's completely a society construct that's some that's not something that really means a whole lot in the grand scheme of things doesn't really mean a lot as a person doesn't make you grow as a person this just exists as a thing that you do to make society want to to care about you no okay so shame is a subjective experience can shame be caused by certain societal things absolutely but shame is within right so like for example depending on the societal construct i can be ashamed of my skin color or my grades or the clothes that i wear completely agree but the experience of shame for those five people depending on the societal constructs is still subjective it's an experience of emotion is it triggered by societal constructs do societal constructs have something to do with it absolutely but at the end of the day like anger or emotion is not a societal construct emotion can be triggered by a societal construct sure do are certain people's neurons wired to elicit particular emotions based on certain societal constructs absolutely yeah but fundamentally i think what i'm hearing from you is that when we go towards emotion your mind interprets intellectualizes rationalizes and if we think about the story of the chalkboard there's no interpretation there it's just raw emotion yeah i mean i i think there's a lot of context behind it of course i mean like yeah yeah i mean there's a lot of like actual things that happened yeah but like like concepts in the mind are of fundamentally different stuff than emotions in the mind it's like woodworking and like you know alchemy like it's different stuff different mats yeah and what i find is that you tend to always go towards the intellectualization the philosophization which i think is absolutely one of your strengths one of your coping mechanisms and one of the ways that your neurons is wired and that i think that you're going to gain a lot like i don't think you're going to be able to logic your way out of the fear of decay which is really what i'd call it it's not death it's like the powerlessness and inevitability or maybe you can actually you can but i think that you're going to get far better results by learning like picking up a different secondary skill on your wow character because you know you can try to you can chug potions to increase all your stats but at some point it's just more efficient to craft yourself some armor and put that [ __ ] on and what i'm hearing is that you're a grandmaster potion maker who's trying to make potions instead of wearing armor yeah i mean i i could see that sure i i i i think for me like there have been emotions like shame and things like that that i've had to overcome and like you know i said about going to that school and then feeling ashamed of myself and so i've gotten through some of those things for sure but uh some other ones not as much yeah so i think it's just a new skill that you can learn yeah and um you know i think if you have questions or more you know if you want more detailed information about that like i i feel kind of spent at the moment so i don't know but but i'd say that you know feel free to like sleep on it or i need to sleep on it and if you're kind of curious about that or want to learn more just you know ping us i think generally speaking when people come on stream i think we'll send you like a packet of information about potentially like put options for follow-up and how to find a therapist and things like that if you're curious about that but um overall i i think you know i i really can i feel like i understand a lot of what you're going through and i don't think it is quite as inevitable and i think it's i i think it's solvable i think you're walking a difficult road but it's a road that many people have walked before and you seem to have a lot of the karmic signs that other people who have walked to this road have walked okay our tendency for not being materialistic a lot of worldly success early in life in a sense of dissatisfaction that's the spiritual road and laying on top of that that i think you're going to have to process is more of like a neuronal psychological like fear of decay and inevitability and and being powerless in the face of certain things which if we really think about it sounds like the fear of death but the more that we tunnel into it we actually discover that when faced with death you're a chad you know and and and so like as terrifying as that is like you actually know how to accept you know how to accept parts of yourself you know how to face death actually um with some degree of terror and grounding yeah there were a number of times when i was younger i would do things that would get me pretty close to it or pretty close to at least a lot of material harm yeah that yeah is another thing that i find myself being curious about but don't think i have the mana for the encounter oh don't worry if you did i wouldn't cast a spell um zach are you okay with our conversation today yeah i'm great i really appreciate you bringing me on and talking about it i i hope that you know i talk about these things and the reason why i come on is i think that the idea of this is that i i think it's important to have people put themselves out there and and show that this kind of stuff like mental health and just to a greater extent being able to talk about your problems and i think people will watch what i say and then they will relate to it and that will help them so even if it might make me look weird or look bad the greater good for it is worth it does that make sense yeah of course yeah um do you think you look bad i think so i think any time that a person reveals their emotions at all uh there are a lot of people that um that resent that do you think you look bad no okay i don't think you look bad at all thank you i think you're quite handsome well at least that's one of us right [Laughter] all right zach thank you very much um you know i hope you have fun playing burning crusade me too i i hope you get more enjoyment out of new world in three days i'm certainly looking forward to it really was anyway yeah and then yeah go ahead maybe once you find inner peace you can start developing games for the rest of us yeah i've never been i like the idea of making games sometimes but i took a coding class and it didn't go too well so i think i'd have to be the idea idea guy there the vision person sure let's go we'll see all right thanks a lot man i appreciate it thanks for having me on and uh i'll talk to you later see ya all right see ya peace um let's okay chat that was that was fun that was great you know i think zack is fantastic man such a good dude

Channel: HealthyGamerGG

Views: 562,077

Keywords: mental health, drk, dr kanojia, healthygamergg, healthy gamer gg, twitch, psychiatrist, asmongold reacts, world of warcraft, asmongold wow

Id: -3qs1YKMKNg

Length: 133min 53sec (8033 seconds)

Published: Mon May 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/frenziedbadger]

I'm over halfway through this and I want to yell at the screen "you're afraid of change, not death".

[u/DrSquirtle00]

Zach I don't know if you will ever read this or not but currently my mom has a brain tumor and for the past few years ive lived and taken care of her slowly watching her degrade in health. Thinking about her inevitable death and how her loss would effect me, its been a hard process cause i've always been close to her. I'm not trying to garner pity or anything because id rather those emotions be better spent toward her in some way. I guess all I'm trying to say is I can only assume we might be in a similar situation and I'm really thinking about you and your mom right now, cause its hard. Sorry for the rambling, maybe I just needed to verbalize this somehow to anyone listening. Youve personally given me a lot of good times and I watch you whenever you're live. Much love Zach.

[u/hhgomp]

I hope he gets more help. I mean that in the kindest way possible. He is a good person and deserves a good life.

[u/Zanderia79]

I dont know maybe it's just me but I think Dr.K is kinda therapist that I'm not gonna be there on the second appointment.

[u/Haiokha-Amadahy]

Idk that guy interrupts him a lot and seems … weird? Like my therapist doesn’t talk to me like I know nothing. At the end he basically says I can’t deal with you anymore lmao

[u/[deleted]]

Stop being overbearing psychoanalyzing andies who don't know how to give someone their emotional space