Discussion w/ Dr. K (Dr. Alok Kanojia) - Is Video Game Addiction a Cause for Alarm?

yeah man how are you i'm doing great how are you doing you're looking well today i'm sorry i had to bounce when we um last encountered each other on the scuffed podcast no yeah that's fine it was pretty late um let me get my camera working hold on one sec [Music] sounds so chill oh i gotta find this paper [Music] hold on hey man how are you pretty good how are you doing it's pretty early but [Music] what time is it where you are 10 a.m the crack of dawn basically for gamers okay yeah what time do you usually wake up i usually don't wake up till 11. so i gotta bed full like two hours early for this cool well thank you very much i feel i'm just your friend huh you're fine don't worry i'm just messing with you yeah so um you'd ask me i don't know exactly what we're talking about today [Music] oh wait you reached second edition wait is that a second edition player's handbook in your background yes of advanced dungeons and dragons dude 2e is the best edition do you play 2e well yeah why do you think two is the best though i play dude because my dm forces me to play tui okay um tui is the best because it has the most flavor yeah it is the most it is like one of like you know it's like the flawed child that you have that's like the black sheep and doesn't succeed in all of the ways but is has so much flavor and uniqueness it's the most broken rule system because there's no cohesiveness to it it has the most variability in terms of rules like at some point like with 3e right it's they turned all the classes into pick your class and call it a spell whatever you want to it's d6 damage times your level and all of the classes do the same if you have priests that are throwing fireballs there's no uniqueness and then in second edition you have the ghoul lord which is from the alcademe setting which uses hit points to cast spells but is also not restricted by or can only use necromancy spells which means you can have 11 level one ghoul lord with an 18 con and have a race that's like gives you plus two con and you can wind up as with ten hit points at level one is a ghoul lord and you can use powered kill which is a knife level spell okay well hold on one second yeah sure hello huh hello oh sorry no no problem i just realized i need to change my layout thanks zack all right okay yeah i was just kind of curious i was thrown off by um your second edition yeah normally um i'm only exposed to fifth edition but my dm also prefers second edition although he has like a lot of kind of home brew rolls that go along with it um yeah it seems like second edition um has a lot more variability in it there's just more rules that a player has to be familiar with but yeah yeah it requires a lot more home brewing because it's really not a cohesive system sure yeah like he throws out the entire the to hit armor class zero the thaco stuff is like all gone and everything yeah well it's just replaced by the regular i think i think he uses kind of like the like he still has like there's different ac's for like backside front um and everything and then like your expertise and everything to give you ac but um yeah yeah he doesn't use the thago system there's a couple other changes as well but yeah the faco system is really confusing uh yeah i think most people in chat don't understand um which very few people who even play d and d will understand what i'm talking about because it is an obscure rule from an obscure handbook in second edition yeah well here hold on if you're gonna have a samosa i'm gonna go grab a gatorade is that okay so i can feel it yeah of course man this morning one sec replenished is good do you guys play d d um i always wanted to play pathfinder yeah i know it's criminal no sauce so how you been man um i've been doing okay still right yeah um and you wanted to you'd ask me a question on the scuffed podcast which i i don't know if i answered coherently oh yeah it's an interesting question of um you said you had lots of questions um yeah [ __ ] you guys were talking about wait am i am i allowed to say [ __ ] you i guess so i don't know okay well i'm just because it's your stream i don't know you've been doing this longer than i have yeah sure but i don't know if you have different rules for your stream right i don't know what the rules of my stream are well i imagine you have some rules for your stream right i say [ __ ] okay gotcha all right we're good to say [ __ ] um it's always been a really interesting question to me the um the difference between like respecting a person's autonomy um versus uh superseding their autonomy for what you perceive to be their benefit um that question is yeah is a really hard one i feel um so in the case where if you have somebody that you know is suicidal um and has the means and the desire to you know commit suicide um what kind of state of mind do they have to be in for you to respect their decision is basically the a question that i've kind of wrestled with a lot so when you say you do you mean me or do you mean a person when i say you for a person who is suicidal or person who is considering stopping somebody from committing suicide yeah so if the person is considering stopping someone who is the you like a general person or me uh well i mean i guess it i mean at one point in my life it was me um it could be anybody um i imagine for you it's probably a bit different um if you're working in the capacity of a therapist you have an obligation yeah to contact somebody yeah obviously so um yeah it's more just kind of like a question of philosophy in general not necessarily an occupational question yeah so i think the the main thing that i look at is what whether they have so if we think about consent and choice yeah so you know when does a doctor so we're going to talk about doctors for a second we can expand when does a doctor have the right to overcome someone's choice and generally speaking we have the right when that person when we d deem their consciousness or their decision making capacity to be impaired yeah and and so you know what i do in terms of like you know if someone's depressed like they'll make statements that really suggest that they're impaired so if someone says the world would be better off without me and you know generally speaking i mean i imagine that that can be true in some cases but generally speaking most people will you know their family members don't actually want to see them die or their friends and so that suggests to me that their their cognitive process is impaired at some point so you know if they have the capacity to make good decisions and that can be impaired by mental illness um so that's one piece thoughts um so there's an interesting catch-22 that's kind of brought up here where um some people look at things like um medically assisted suicide and some people will say hey you know we ought to have the ability to end our lives should we choose to um now for some people this is just a question of like end of life stuff so for instance if you're dying of terminal disease should you be able to but for other people you know they say well if you're in your 20s or 30s if you're suffering or combating mental illness you should have the ability to you know end your life if you choose to um some people would say that the criteria for determining whether or not you're of sound mind will always preclude somebody from committing suicide though so for instance yeah so how do you is is so the question is like well if somebody feels suicidal i think for a person of healthy mind you would say well there must be some sort of like cognitive impairment there which would then make it so that nobody could essentially ever commit suicide not that i'm advocating for it it sounds like i am i'm sorry but yeah so how do you deal with that um catch 22 is there ever a spot where somebody could be of sound mind or they're not suffering from a terminal disease and they want to commit suicide i guess so i'm going to say something once again which i think we have to be careful i'm not yeah of course yeah yeah sorry this conversation is really weird to have publicly sorry yeah yeah yeah no no it's a good conversation i think it's an important conversation so i'll say something that i think may be a little bit shocking i'd say half of the people that i've worked with that are suicidal are not suicidal due to a mental illness mental illness you said not due to mental illness okay gotcha so this is this is a really interesting assumption that has started to happen in our society so suicidality is a symptom right of a mental illness so it's a sign like if you're bipolar or you have trauma or you're depressed you can be suicidal but you can also have none of those things and be suicidal sure so the first thing to understand is that suicidality is not exclusive to mental illness so if you look at like for example japanese culture or you know even like suicide bombers like i mean you can make an argument about whether they're mentally ill or not but there there's you know there's evidence culturally that people have motives for suicide that are not due to mental illness and the most shocking thing that i've encountered is actually working with people who are suicidal and they're not actually like cognitively impaired so they may sound like they're depressed but they genuinely like look at a life where they don't see a way forward and so they just want to tap out and if you really like assess them in terms of of depression you know they don't meet the dsm criteria oh maybe i maybe i just i see a lot of people move to sub mode but maybe i said something that was not really good but um you know that there are people who uh i've talked to and it's scary so like they're my patients but i wouldn't diagnose them with like clinical depression so there are certain criteria of clinical depression which they don't meet i still think that they shouldn't kill themselves um and i i work with them to work on their suicidal so that they're no longer suicidal and i tend to be generally successful at that but i do think that it's possible to be suicidal and not have mental illness and then coming to your catch-22 so i think the issue there is do you assume that suicidality comes from mental illness because if you don't assume that then the catch-22 goes away right um yeah argument go ahead the argument that i'm hearing is that suicidality is evidence of mental illness therefore it's a catch-22 and um can i reveal themselves yeah i'm sorry i'm trying to be very careful my words i wouldn't say i necessarily meant um i wouldn't necessarily say evidence of mental illness i would say evidence of well people would say evidence of mental impairment so for instance when you say somebody could not be mentally ill but still could be suicidal like i'm curious because i could read that in two ways one i could read is that if you're not mentally ill and you're suicidal then on either one hand then you are perfectly within your rights to feel suicidal like it seems like you're not mentally impaired so you have all the tools available to you to make that decision but then on the second hand i could say like well you're not mentally ill and you're still suicidal that seems incredibly irrational um like there's no reason for this at all um which way do you lean then on that are you leaning more towards the former than the latter or i'm sorry can you say that again so like if somebody doesn't have a mental illness and they're suicidal would you assume then that that decision is very reasonable because they don't have a mental illness and they're able to think through it or would you assume that it's very unreasonable because you're not even mentally ill yet you still feel suicidal i don't like the word reasonable so i i'd say that i i can i'd say it's understandable right so i don't think that people should kill themselves yeah of course yes starting off with the presumption that you the reason you want to kill yourself is because you're impaired is an incredibly invalidating approach sure right it discounts their entire perspective if we say oh you're suicidal because your brain is busted there's something wrong with you that just completely invalidates any actual concerns they have about the world so i don't think that that's actually healthy so i think it's in a sense it's reasonable and that's how you get it to change right like you meet them kind of where they're at if someone says i'm 35 years old i've never been on a date with a girl that i'm gonna be alone for the rest of my life i want to kill myself like it's reasonable i think for them to feel that way and also i don't think they should do that and that's what you have to work on because the cool thing is as you talk to someone about their reasons for suicidality you then begin to see the path of how to make them not suicidal because if this person if what they want is like companionship in life like that's what you should work on yeah i agree with you there the the only worry then is that um how reflective can you be without like um without i don't say without pushing them towards it but like say a person it feels somewhat suicidal they express those concerns to you and they give the reasons why um you're understanding and reflective of the language they use and then they feel like they've gotten affirmation in that and then they commit suicide because they feel like their feelings have been validated is that a worry ever or uh so the data actually suggests that talking to people and validating their super feelings of suicide does not increase suicidal behavior okay so that's a big concern that people have right is that you don't talk about it if you talk about it you validate them they're more likely to do it whereas in my experience it's been the exact opposite so what happens when you validate their experience is then like at least one person understands them and then if i understand them and then i say hey like maybe you shouldn't do this yet like can we work on this for a little while the response that i get overwhelming is like yeah okay fine so i actually find that you know in validating someone's suicidal feelings and understanding the depth of their despair is the first step in like helping them change their life because if you say like yeah your complaints are dumb then like how are you gonna change your life gotcha okay interesting does that resolve your catch 22 or no um well so my original catch 22 was that it felt it feels like um being suicidal in and of itself um can be evidence of some sort of impairment your response is that that's not necessarily true that you can still approach a person who is suicidal you can be reflected with your language you can have a conversation with them what do you do so i guess chasing that down a little bit more what do you do if you are reflective you do have those conversations but they're still pretty set on on committing suicide in in a non-professional role what do you think you have an extra legal obligation there or extra moral obligation there to intervene or what yeah i think you do have a moral obligation to intervene because i don't know that the average person is able to assess for capacity right so we're professionally trained in assessing someone's capacity to make decisions and when someone's thinking is impaired and when someone's thinking is not impaired i don't know that the average person knows how to do that so like i think because you're not professionally trained it's something that if someone is about to kill themselves i think you're morally obligated to try to intervene and at least get them evaluated by someone who is who knows how to evaluate suicide gotcha okay right and the other way to think about it is like this may be it may be incorrect at times but like let me put it to you this way if you're walking down the street and you see someone drowning in a lake do you think you should try to help them um in that case yeah for sure right but what if they are drowning as part of a suicide attempt um i mean i'm assuming you don't have access to that information right but exactly so since you don't have access to the information of their impairment of mind you err on the side of saving the life and if you do have like a more intimate relationship with the person what then do you still err on the side of they need to be they need to at least get one consultation with a professional for a story absolutely right so like the fact that you're intimate with them may in turn impair your judgment objectively and so to have have them get an evaluation by a professional i think is absolutely a good idea gotcha okay what do you think um [Music] yeah maybe yeah i'll think about it you for usually for big topics like this i usually sleep on it a few days and then i have like a better opinion of it but yeah that's stuff to think about yeah what's up it sounded like you had a lot of questions is that um oh well i mean not well not like hours were the questions actually i'm just really curious what you're when you're thinking what's down this path um well how are you feeling in general good well that's good yeah um yeah i spoke to you uh some number of months ago do you feel like your perspective at all has changed um being a little bit more in this world maybe not perspective on mental health but like on like streamers in general or this world in journals or anything that's like surprised you or shocked you um or is everything panned out about as you thought it would or so nothing is panned out how i thought it would um i i'd say that i have learned immense things i think the biggest revelation that i've had is i think that our understanding of mental illness and mental pressure is woefully outdated what do you mean by that i'm curious what you mean by that specifically mental illness and mental pressure yeah so like the first thing is that the stresses that people go under are changing that's why i call it mental pressure because i don't think it necessarily qualifies as illness sure so um and i think that like there's a big mistake that's being made in the academic community well certainly a mistake is actually a little bit unfair um there are some assumptions which are being made so for example if you look at the criteria for proposed criteria for video game addiction yeah they're essentially the same as alcohol addiction with the world word alcohol replaced with video games yeah i think i saw similar with like gambling addiction too basically yeah yeah and so what they do is they say that all and that basically has the presumption that all addictions are sort of the same and it's been my experience that that is really not true having i mean so i'm an addiction psychiatrist generally in my day job and like you know working with a heroin addict and working with like a video game addict there's some overlap to be sure but they feel like really discreet diseases with different kinds of solutions so that's one one thing so i think that in general the kinds of pressures that people face like when i talk to streamers and stuff is like very very different in some ways so i think uh yeah go ahead do you um so i'm kind of curious on that road um do you ever feel like when you bring up even the concept of being addicted to video games do you ever feel like the pushback that you might get from somebody in the gaming community might be similar to an alcoholic like the denial that it could ever even be a problem i noticed that sometimes i remember when i i don't know if it was a proposed day of something or at the whoever initially came out with the video game addiction thing i remember when i first read it the language seemed a little bit vague but it's like yeah i could totally see people being addicted to video games but it seemed like gaming communities in general were incredibly hostile towards the even the notion that video games could like lead to an unhealthy addiction do you ever do you ever see that push back or sure yeah i mean i think some people push back against the idea of the diagnosis like that's an interesting question right like what happens so this is a discussion that i haven't had much recently but in its early days um when healthy gamer was like a group of like 50 strong and we would meet once a week and talk about video game addiction we would talk about what does it mean to be labeled as an addict what are the pros and what are the cons because there are advantages and there are disadvantages so i think it's understandable that a lot of the community so i think our community is misunderstood by society as a whole when you say our community you mean gaming or yeah okay yeah okay gotcha twitch and i think what happens is that like what we see is so let's say like you're i'm a 16 year old kid and i have conflict with my mom and when when i see something about video game addiction it gives her license to continue to it gives her ammo in our arguments because she can just say i'm a [ __ ] addict yeah it's a disease the world health organization is concerned about it so it actually gives people like an avenue to invalidate like gamers experiences sure okay so diagnosis is supposed to help us get help for something basically if you're gonna identify a problem well now we can treat it but some people just use it to like attack people basically yeah and i think the bigger problem that that happens is not so much that they attack people but there's an assumption of understanding right so like your mom then thinks she knows what's wrong with you and by doing so it's not so much that she's attacking you although she can it's also that they don't like actually listen to gamers perspectives so the big thing that is absent in all of the discussions on video game addiction are so speaking of suicidality you know i'll get messages from people that are like you know i can't stop playing video games i don't know what to do with my life i'm stuck i'm 27 i live at home and i want to kill myself i also get messages that are you know i'll be browsing reddit i mean i don't get and i'll see these stories of like you know if it wasn't for you guys i would have killed myself years ago so i think video games in the gaming community can be an amazing source of support and growth and it can be something that is like toxic and harmful and generally speaking you know you don't really think about i mean you can't actually but um generally speaking we don't think about like that the community of heroin users as like a place that can like support and bolster each other when in reality they do like that's why n a and a are powerful organizations sure um but you know gaming i think is a little bit different there's no there's no like there's esports but there's no like professional heroine tournaments so i think that the two are just different sure and one last kind of nuance i'll toss out which is like a good example of why i think that old patterns don't apply is if there's a kid who spends you know all day every day practicing basketball and he's 16. then do you call him addicted because he wants to make it in the nba and when you've got a 16 year old who's in the top .001 percent of a particular sport and wants to go pro and is failing out of his classes do you call him addicted so it's tricky yeah for sure i think it's really interesting um a lot of there's like two different types of like movies that show success in like sports or the arts or whatever um you have the like the the the very happy upbeat sports movies that like everybody's like super happy and super awesome the entire time and then they win the championship and it's awesome and then you have the others that show basically like the level of self-destruction that some people engage in to reach that top 0.0001 percent where the difference between it being pathologized or not is whether or not they make it basically yeah exactly right yeah so like i have some clients who let's say in investment banking been divorced three times have very high net worths devote themselves body mind and soul to their profession and how is that different from an esports professional or someone who wants to make it in esports no so i think that our perceptions of health wellness and illness like need to be re-examined that's another big thing i've learned is you know yeah um sorry okay well it's if we're expanding the conversation i have a lot of just interesting general questions for your perspective on what you just said um so when it comes to things like uh autism spectrum disorder or um adhd and the different subtypes whatever how do you um let's say that there's like a healthy section of human mind that exists on a spectrum of zero to one hundred but let's say like in the society that we live in today it seems like only like 20 to 80 work right and zero to 20 is left out 80 to 100 is left out is there ever a worry that we just pathologize those because they don't work with current society um rather than like having a more honest look at whether or not these are like unhealthy states of mind so i'm thinking of something like specific to like adhd or or autism spectrum disorder usually the ones i hear people bring up the most where these people aren't like mentally ill or they don't have a disease it's just that with the way that we've organized society today their minds specifically have a hard time adapting do you think is that ever a big worry do you think in psychology with how we approach yeah that's half of what i preach about ayurveda so let me tell you the crux of the problem uh destiny is that we think about it as a bell curve with one dimension so like the whole thing about ayurveda and this is i think a fundamental problem with our understanding of psychology yeah medicine in general wait can you repeat that again the whole problem with what what is that word you're using i forget it's the bell curve yeah oh yeah i'm sorry i thought i thought it was dimensional yeah okay right we think about human mind as like a function on one dimension but that's not how the mind works the mind is multi-dimensional that's the first problem yeah oh ayurveda is the word you used oh yeah ayurveda what is that so so ayurveda is traditional indian medicine okay and ayurveda posits that not so this i know this is going to sound kind of weird but in western medicine we posit that all minds are basically the same okay right so like you go to psychology like you major in psychology and you learn like principles of the mind like if you become a doctor you learn like cardiac physiology right so which is like all hearts basically function in the same way and even when we're taught about the mind we sort of learn that all minds basically function the same way we have a subconscious we have a conscious we have an ego we have an id we have a superego these are all commonalities of all minds and we sort of treat them all the same ayurveda starts with the idea that not all minds are the same and not all people are the same okay that people are unique and they actually have three axes of like mind right and you can have scores on each of those axes and depending on what your scores are on each of these three axes you get sort of a unique mind okay and i'll give you just an example so what we call adhd is people who have high vata so i'm someone who has a high vata okay so vata is the sanskrit word which sort of means wind and ether so my mind is like the wind an ayurvedic doctor once explained this to me so actually i'll tell you the story can i go off on a tangent this is what i want yeah go for it we go we go off on tangents okay so when i thought using your diagnosis as an excuse for a responsible behavior but i'm just messing with you guys no no go for it absolutely so i use it i use it as an excuse for my irresponsible behavior and i also use it as a key reason for why i believe i'm successful it's both okay hit me up with this story um so i was so i finished call uh high school went to college started failing out got super excited so i like ran for student government i joined a bunch of clubs i went to a bunch of parties i studied three languages in my first year in college because i got really excited about a bunch of [ __ ] i was pre-med i took philosophy courses like i was all over the place uh tried to join a fraternity and you know fail like got less like got mostly d's and f's maybe a c or a b here there and then second year um what happened is like i tried to cut down so like i cut down in my second semester cut down in first semester of sophomore year cut down cut down cut down and then even like i was taking like three classes which is half a normal load and then was not doing any extracurriculars was doing nothing just taking i was like a half-time student and nothing else and i still did bad and i went to india and um one of my one of my teachers there i was kind of telling him i was like i don't know why i'm like why i suck at life like at first i was doing too many things and i understood that and my dad was like you gotta focus you gotta focus you gotta focus so i started doing fewer things and i started doing fewer things and i started doing fewer things and despite like doing less stuff i still continue to fail at basically the same rate and i was just [ __ ] confused and he was like yeah that sounds like a terrible idea and i was like what do you mean it's a terrible idea he's like your mind is so dynamic that if you're gonna get bored easily and what you need to do is juggle as many balls as you can at the same time without dropping a single one and that your mind is designed to like do something really really passionately for a brief period of time and then switch to something else and actually your best productivity is not going to come from one thing it's going to come from like rotating your attention between like three or four different things so when i get bored of one thing i move to another and i get bored of that i move to that this is the key thing that i didn't understand is that i used to just keep on shifting a to z and the one change that i made is i just circled between a and d and then i circled back to a and that's when i started becoming like successful but my mind is is different it's avata mind and different kinds of minds need different sorts of strategies and adhd is a good example of like what i call you know there another dichotomy is like there are hunters and there are farmers like if you look at human psychology some people excel at waking up the same time every day and doing the same thing every day and they find a lot of pleasure enjoyment satisfaction and ease and like putting all their energy into one thing those are farmers and there are hunters who are there our brains are actually designed to like to pull in a lot of disparate stimuli and like piece things together we have to be dynamic it's absolutely adaptive and add i think is a good example of some kinds of minds that are not ideally designed which i think is what your question was for things like sitting in a classroom for eight hours that's not what we're made for and so we get diagnosed with something because you know it's like our mind is not designed to function that way sure was that too much no it's interesting it's something that uh my son is really really really bad adhd um and that's kind of uh because i did like so much reading on it i think i might even actually after doing so much research on it um but yeah it's one of the things that i kind of wonder is like um we're quick to pathologize behaviors that just don't fit into society um yep yeah it's it's it's very hard um when i talk publicly about anything related to like psychology or mental illness um you have to walk a very careful line between saying like yeah these are some concerns versus invalidating the whole field and like discouraging people from like seeking treatment or talking to professionals is a really hard conversation i have sometimes because some people will take like if you say like oh yeah we pathologize too much some people are liable to take that and go ah yeah i knew it like it's all quack science it's all [ __ ] like i'm not gonna go talk to anybody like i don't need a pill or whatever and then i just you know walk away from everything which is really um which is really bad i think yeah yeah i mean i think there's some interesting data to support so i think adhd is a real thing for sure and also i think it's probably like way over diagnosed sure so there's data that suggests that uh student-to-teacher ratio has a core a pretty tight correlation with diagnosis of adhd that's not surprising what would be your guess as to what i mean student is the number of students per teacher goes up what happens to adhd diagnosis diagnosis would probably increase absolutely and that's what you find why do you think that is you have less time to spend per child so your band of acceptable attention uh decreases and decreases the more children you have the more narrow their focus needs to be because the less time you can commit to them so the higher likelihood that their behavior is pathologized and diagnosed adhd probably that's exactly what the data shows um okay something else you brought up um if you ever want to go off on any of these two just cause now i'm just asking questions sure um a lot of streamers have a problem where you get a message well i say a problem that's a really rude way to say it you get a lot of messages sometimes people say like hey like i'm suicidal um i don't really know what to do i don't expect you to respond but i just want to let you know my thoughts um what do you think is a responsible course of action for i i guess like streamers there in that yeah yeah what is the responsible course of action for any streamer that gets a message like that i mean so i i think you should urge him to get help right so like like i i mean it's cool so i you know many things i've learned destiny since i started streaming on twitch one is like how awesome of a community this is in general and how tight the bonds are between a streamer and the audience which is really cool i mean i think it's actually i was talking about this i think maybe on that podcast that i think it's kind of neat because you know we're facing a lot of societal pressures in terms of mental health and i think that that you know the very things that on the one hand are toxic or also the things that i hope to be our salvation and like social media i think is a good example of something that can be very harmful and also be like incredibly helpful in terms of what to do for a person who reaches out like i think that you know it's hard because what do you have the bandwidth for and what do you have the competence for and so i i think it's important you know if if as if someone you know reached out to you and said hey um i have blood in my stool for the last two months like what do you think your responsibility is as a streamer um we tell them to see a doctor yeah so i think it's the same right so i i think that like i was saying earlier so i think we treat physical and mental illnesses still differently and i think that that person deserves the possibility of treatment if they do have an illness and if not even if they don't have an illness and they're like half the people that i see that are not suicidal i think those people can be helped and uh you know i think you just have to decide in terms of your own personal bandwidth and what you feel comfortable with how much of a conversation to engage with them sure i think the tricky thing there is that sometimes you know if you really don't have i think it can be unfair to people yeah i mean i i think you have to be careful about because we think about this a lot on stream like when someone comes on stream like what's our ongoing responsibility to them so i think it can be you know you should do what you can and then also if you can't do the second step give people direction as to how to do it right like if you're a taxi driver and you take someone to a railway station or something and you drop them off and then you're like oh yeah so like your terminal is this way like at least point them in the right direction sure okay do you ever think um how do you respond to those requests uh oh i mean yeah i usually because i get enough of it to where basically my response is um listen i understand you're going through some things um unfortunately i don't have enough information to help you and i don't think i would even have the time to give you the proper attention you need i highly recommend talking to either school resources or psychology or something basically something like that yeah how does that feel to do uh i i'm sorry i mean personally it's not i don't i don't think about it much but i know that a lot of other streamers have like really big problems with that sorry that sounds really cool to say but i don't think i have like obligations to strangers that email me or whatever um i don't mean that to sign that called but yeah i i don't personally think about it much but i know that a lot of streamers have a lot of big problems where when they get messages like that they feel like they all of a sudden have like an obligation to a stranger to ensure that they have a positive outcome with their issues and yeah yeah do you ever worry about um well you just you use that phrase what is our responsibility do you ever worry about people that you bring on seeing this as a sort of replacement for therapy um i know they're yeah yeah i mean i think that's why we try to you know be clear with people before they come on um and i don't i don't mean just from like a medical legal perspective like we genuinely try to you know make it clear to people um we try to equip people with further resources if they're interested like if they want to explore things i'll oftentimes tell them that you know i think you should continue working on this with a therapist and generally speaking you know sometimes people have misunderstood and and so we have clarifying conversations and we try to behave sort of in the best and most ethical manner possible i tend to be kind of a stickler for like boundaries and ethics and stuff i think it's a really fascinating field especially in mental health so we try to really do well as an organization to like really help them and yeah it's just sort of a case-by-case basis though i mean we have sort of a set of resources and stuff that we provide to people but sure okay cool uh when it comes to looking at mental health in the west it feels like we talk a lot about body health but it seems like we spend basically no time at least through all of schooling talking about um talking about not not just not being mentally ill but being mentally like very healthy it seems like we don't value the pursuit of happiness very much in the western world i know a lot of people and i'm sure you've met a lot of people in the streaming world or in the work world who their lives kind of revolve around the acquisition of bigger houses higher paying jobs um maybe different items or possessions how what kind of conversation do you have with somebody to start to get them down the track of thinking that they should prioritize for things that give them like more sustained or longer-term happiness than just kind of like getting stuck in like the race of trying to get more and more stuff or like a higher wage does that question make sense yeah so i think so i mean how do you deviate people from being materialistically oriented yeah i guess this is like i feel this is being like one of the biggest problems that i think that most people that i talk to face is that we have like no concept of like when we think of like progress of society or lives nobody ever thinks like man you know when i was 20 i could have like three close friends now that i'm 35 i can have like 15 close friends like nobody it seems like nobody would ever say something like that and view it as progress but rather when i was 20 i was making 45 a year now that i'm 35 i'm making 120 like that's the progress of people thinking what how do you talk to somebody or how do you begin to set somebody on the path of not viewing life like that it's a really hard one sorry no i think it's i mean that's a lot of my day job so let me start by saying you know you had us some context at the beginning so let me start with that context sure so i don't i would disagree that we don't think about happiness it's just the way we think about happiness in the way that we're taught to think about happiness is materialist so these are cultural values right so like when you like when you meet like a kid who's like 14 the first question that people ask is what do you want to be when you grow up yeah so right right then and there a whole society is teaching an individual that your identity is based on your profession so why would that individual not orient towards a profession first and foremost what are the things that we celebrate oh like getting into harvard like getting a promotion getting a raise these are the things as a society that we celebrate we don't advertise hey i met a friend today you know it's like okay like the [ __ ] is wrong with you where you have to like advertise making a friend yeah so our value system is i mean we just think that something leads to happiness and you know that too i don't think is entirely unfair because you know i'm a second generation indian where you know my parents like happiness like sort of spiritual fulfillment was like really not a thing that anyone had the luxury for because you know my dad grew up in a house that had like eight people living in a 10 by 10 space so it's really about you know like making ends meet like my grandfather was like heavily in debt my parents like borrowed money for a plane ticket and suitcases when they came to this country and so i think a lot of that is kind of you know it's i don't really blame the society for what it is but i think your question is a good one which actually kind of comes back to uh you know how do you reorient people so i do reorient people because most of my at least until about you know i started doing healthy gamer more you know most of my patients or clients would be successful like professionally successful people who are unhappy that was sort of what i was good at and what i tell them is that you know this is actually the same problem that would have so and this is kind of subtle but so you know buddha had everything so he was a prince and he was loved and had wealth and power and respect and then one day he woke up and he was unhappy and then he was like i don't understand like why i'm unhappy and something very subtle happens so this is another thing that happens we tend to do a lot of gatekeeping around suffering yeah so we don't let people who are successful suffer we blame them for suffering and we say that you shouldn't suffer because you have money or success or whatever yeah that's a big thing yeah i bring this up a lot around streamers is that like if you're a streamer you can't ever really complain about anything related to your job publicly because you sound so unbelievably entitled like oh boohoo you're getting hate because you're famous wow oh my god it's so like people generally in the public perceive it that way yeah yeah so i mean i think the basic question is what do you think is the source of suffering and does money by happiness and money does correlate with happiness to a certain degree right it certainly provides security i think but there's so many yeah so the really fascinating thing though is if you look at buddha so like here here's what happens like so i think basically you know how you talk to them is they need spirituality and i'll talk about what what i mean by that so if you think about it let's say i make 30k a year and i don't i've never dated anyone in my life and i'm unhappy so when i look at my life i think okay in order to be happy i need a girlfriend so let's say i get a girlfriend and my happiness increases some then i'm like okay now i want more money and so you make more money and then happiness increases some because it does right you get to travel and like oh i got to go to hawaii because now i'm making 50k instead of 30k and i can afford to make a vacation sure and so what happened with buddha is like he checked all those boxes and as long as you have a box unchecked you think that checking those boxes is going to lead to happiness which is not an unreasonable way to think but what happened with wood does he gets to the end of the road and he's checked all the boxes and then he wakes up and he's happy and then he's screwed because then what does he do and so this is where like when you know when i work with people who are materialistic or materialistically successful and unhappy i basically tell them now you're on with this path and there's a saying sort of in the meditation community that you can't meditate on an empty stomach you can also see this uh you know shades of this and maslow's hierarchy of needs where he says self-actualization is at the top yeah wealth creates the conditions to pursue happiness not happiness itself yeah yeah and i think from uh from a more psychological or spiritual aspect there is this idea because we're you know our brains tell us that external stuff will lead to satisfaction and once you satisfy yourself externally that's really when you have the desperation that is really required for true spirituality sure like people talk about spirituality like it's a good thing but in my experience spiritual true spirituality is born of like abject desperation and terror okay it's when nothing else in the world will work for you you only have one option left and that's really what it takes gotcha i don't know how common it is among immigrant families in the united states but in my personal experience um sometimes the new immigrants to the us are some of the most like ultra liberal very patriotic very individualized people and i noticed that for my my family on my mom's side is all cuban and they are obsessed my like my mom and her siblings are obsessed with acquisition of material wealth so like they have huge houses but like they all work multiple jobs they're like even with their full retirements and pensions where they're trying to like keep up their payments or whatever um and it just seems pretty miserable and then i think back to um i have older cuban family that live down in miami in a place called hialeah very trashy cockroaches everywhere water is like flooding the apartment every single time it rains horrible place but when i would spend the summer there almost every other day there were like these huge cookouts where like everybody was going everybody's laughing everybody's having a good time and even though they were completely missing that material level of well it seemed like they were all like super friendly really happy like really chill with everybody um and then watching the that dichotomy between like the ultra wealthy super liberal individualistic american um that you know has the big house and the dream cars or whatever versus like the very poor people it seems strange to think that like that my older family just seemed to be more happy in general i guess when they weren't like running that yeah but it's been impossible to talk or what how do you understand that um how do i understand it and like why do i think what drives each person to do i mean how do you understand that phenomenon um i i um brought broader there's a broader philosophical i guess understanding it feels like it feels like in the western world in general it feels like we very much fixate on possession and money um so a lot of parents when they talk about um i want to have i want my child to have a better life than me most of the time what that translates to is i want my child to have a better job and make more money than me and i feel like my my mom's parents were very much like we came from cuba to the united states to give our children better lives and they all you know my mom joined the air force my aunt was in the nypd like people got jobs and they got money but they never maybe they just assumed that like those values of like friends and family would filter down automatically but they didn't actually deliberately instill them so my parents got the whole like yeah like you guys can do better than us you can be successful you can have good jobs and make a lot of money but they didn't actually stress those i guess like friendship values of the relationships you could form with other people and those didn't filter down as much that would be like my assumption i guess why don't you think they filter down as much um why don't they filter down um i think maybe there are some things that filter down unconsciously and other things require some deliberate level of filtering down so for instance like if you're abusive to your children that type of modeling might filter down automatically but if you have some value of i guess in this case of like forming friendships with other people um if that's not as visible to your children maybe they take it for granted or it doesn't filter down as much maybe there's some things that filter automatically into some things that don't i'm not sure yeah that would be my guess yeah i mean i i think that you know for a lot of it so so i mean i agree with you in terms of some stuff is explicitly filtered down but i think that you know generally speaking i almost think about it like darwin's finches so there's a particular mindset that is adaptive for a particular circumstance and you know i know at least in my parents circumstance like friendships were not as important as like paying off their crushing debt yeah of your family and so they oriented towards like materialistic success which is i mean i consider myself to be quite lucky because i think they also instilled in me they weren't materialistic they were very successful but i remember you know being 16 years old and then like you know my parents asked me they're like do you you know what kind of car do you want because i had a car and i was like i don't need one and because i had friends i was younger i started school early or skipped a grade or whatever and so my friends drove so like a year before you know i would always get rides and like i didn't i didn't even get a driver's license until i was 18. which on the one hand is like super entitled and privileged and on the other hand is also like quite unmaterialistic it's kind of weird right it's sort of like both sure depending well it depends on where you live but i understand what you mean yeah yeah it's kind of like my my friends were really shocked that i had the option of having a car and i chose not to take it which is like the depth of materialistic you know but it was also like my parents also instilled in the values that stuff doesn't bring happiness that's really good yeah i'm lucky that way um the thing you brought up early about jobs is really interesting when you act like there's a weird transition that happens at some point i think maybe in high school where when you ask a kid when he's a child what do you want to be when you grow up it's actually it seems like a really positive experience looking forward to because i want to be like an astronaut or a firefighter like these are like what are your passions and then by the time they hit like maybe it's like 14 15 when they get to high school now it's like what kind of job do you want to have when you graduate college it's a much much different question that it's like you're reframing something earlier in a more negative light at the same time yeah so i mean i the reason that i was pre-med in college is because when i told my parents friends when i was 17 years old at a christmas party that i want to be a doctor one day they like thought i was the hottest hottest [ __ ] in the world they were like wow and then i was like i felt really good right i was like i'm gonna be a doctor one day and so i you know you start to develop this professional based ego and it's like the absolute worst reason to become a doctor that's why half of the indian kids that i know become doctors and it's but i mean i don't blame people for doing that i think it's like you know we we pass on to our kids the formula for success that we think is important so in your in our case you know we may emphasize friendships and happiness to the detriment of professional success which i think is okay but i guess it would depend on the person you talked to i think most people would think it's okay if they'd experience both ends of it but yeah yeah right so our parents also thought it was okay to sacrifice friendships for the sake of professional security right that's why they did it have you ever seen on the internet um the the kind of hyper obsession with stem and the kind of relentless [ __ ] on like the arts and humanities and stuff exactly yeah i mean i work i don't know if you're familiar with some of these prep schools but i have i've had patients or clients at these prep schools and it's like one of the biggest crises of confidence for a 15 or 16 year old girl at a place like phillips exeter is discovering that they don't want to do stem it's so hard because they've been taught oh like there need to be more women in medicine and women in engineering and they want to be like astrophysicists and there's almost this like bizarre pressure that's placed upon them that because it's a male-dominated field they should seek to like even that out whereas like really they just sometimes they just don't want to do that and i absolutely see that pressure i think some of it's fair in terms of like discrimination and stuff like that but can't swing too far in the other direction you know yeah i think those fields are overvalued in general so like those are the this is the feeling like if you're a you know second generation immigrant when i was growing up yeah i had a couple of options my dad said to us once one of y'all is going to be a doctor and one of y'all's going to be a lawyer i have an elder brother and what i used to say in my med school interviews when they were like why do you want to become a doctor i said well when i was growing up my dad said one of y'all's going to be a doctor and one of y'all was going to be a lawyer my brother was older yeah and he chose law school so that's why i'm here what do you think um do you think you just got lucky then or do you think that you learned to like accept your profession or why do you think you ended up enjoying what you i assume you do you seem like you do i love what i do uh so i mean i i think so my story is kind of interesting so i started out pre-med but i really wasn't really interested in being a doctor i actually became interested in being a doctor about four years a couple years after truly became interested in being a doctor about two or three years after i finished college and what i realized it was actually part of more my spiritual path more than anything else and then now i think a lot about karma and things like that and i think i'm supposed to be a doctor but um you know for me the decision really changed when my so i tried to become a monk so i tried to like give up my material life and my teachers said you're welcome to do that but you have to get a doctoral degree and you you have to make that choice when you're 30. which is really smart of them because at the age of 21 i wasn't really giving up anything i had nothing worth giving up if you really want to become a monk you have to give [ __ ] up and that means building [ __ ] and then walking away right and this is what i see a lot in like also sort of these like pseudo spiritual people who are like like myself 21 anti-establishment believe that the capitalist world is terrible and they don't want to participate in it and that they're going to devote themselves to spirituality and they're not like really giving up anything they're just saying no to the system because they don't want to play that game yeah and so my teachers are like you know go complete your education and one of my teachers was a neuroscientist a phd in neuroscience another one had a phd in quantum physics and and these were like the two monks basically that i learned a lot from or i've had a couple of other people but um and they said you know go finish your education and then if you're interested in your 30 will take you one of my other teachers said if you can't actually like succeed in the material world you're not going to succeed in the spiritual world because materialistic success is easier than spiritual success sure and so then i was like okay i'm gonna just pick something arbitrary i might as well become a doctor um at the least i'll understand about like the physical body which i think will will help me when i become a monk so i decided okay i just said it almost arbitrarily i was like i'm just going to become a doctor because that's what i'm going to do after i finish medical school and stuff like that i'm going to walk away and i'm going to go be a monk and that's really when i decided to become a doctor and gave it my all gotcha do you have a question yeah no yeah i think it makes sense um it seems like you you had you um i think this sometimes it seems like sometimes we get really really lucky that we stumble into certain people in our lives rather than somebody that could have um i guess put you down another path i i don't know too much about people um in this world of spirituality but it seems like it's possible that you could have wound up with somebody that would have just encouraged you wholeheartedly to drop school and just to pursue the giving up everything lifestyle and that would have turned out not as good for you it seems yeah so i mean there were people who encouraged me for that there were people who encouraged me so i applied to medical school for three years because it's hard to get into med school with a 2.5 gpa sure and i i got like what i think at the end of two years i had gotten 90 rejections and you know even people who are really close to me advise from the other paths they're like hey man you maybe want to think about doing something else and that's why i say like that's when i really decided to become a doctor because it it was a bad idea to continue like objectively it was bad um and i had other options like i could have gone to the caribbean and places like that but i was like unless i can succeed at this i'm not going to succeed at being a monk so i'm going to keep going okay to hell with the odds when you do your or go ahead yeah go ahead all right it was going to be you brought up this point about like you know you're kind of lucky that there's some people in your life and i completely agree and i think a lot about karma or karma which is something that i've really come to appreciate and respect more and more so i don't really think about it as luck well okay do you um oh oof okay hold on because i have a i have a i have one question in terms of like um i wanted to toss that out just for you yeah good yeah because i want to hook on to that um yeah i have a question about like um how how do you decide what level of spirituality to incorporate in your conversations with people such that you feel like it won't turn them off from the conversation and you feel like it's a that's like a that's a that's a secondary question but now you brought up the karma thing um so personally for me i try to avoid any idea of like um of like deserved circumstances um because i worry that it leads people down this road of thinking so for instance if you bring up a concept of karma and you had a few awesome mentors um and you you know well that's the universe you know working as it's intended to um what do you say then to like people that are that never found those figures in life like you ever worry that they might take them it's like oh man i guess i either messed up hard in a previous life or i just did something bad in my youth to not earn i guess that mentor like karma didn't pay off for me because i you know i'm a failure how do you balance that out or yeah how do you address that yeah that's a great question and it's hard so this is a long conversation if you'll permit me yeah of course it's your time yeah when i was when i was studying in india you know i was learning about all the stuff and karma was something that i sort of had a like i didn't believe in like destiny or fate or any of that stuff i'm very scientific like i'm very skeptical sure so people would sort of talk about it i was like ah it just seems like randomness to me and that that the that sentiment was even reinforced by like people that i would talk to right so i somewhat skeptical so i'd go to like different monks and different people who were studying and i'd talk to them and be like you know what do you think about karma and the most telling thing that made me feel like karma's complete [ __ ] is one person i talked to was like don't tell anyone this but and this was a monk who was like i don't believe in karma i think it's [ __ ] and i was like why do you say that he says i have trouble accepting any system in which if someone gets raped it's their fault yeah or starving children or cancer when you're 25 or any number of horrible things and i was like that's a damn good point so like i was like okay karma's out the window and it was for like a decade because i never saw i could never resolve that like why do bad things happen to good people and people use karma as an explanation and that i think is dumb i think it's absolutely dumb and then i don't know when this happened but at some point like something clicked probably through meditation so i think this also gets into like where knowledge comes from so i'd say that a lot of my understanding of karma doesn't come from logic because i think that that stance logically is indefensible and i don't accept it like i'm not willing to believe in any system that says that if something bad happens to you it's your fault um which there's problems with that too but so i think that from a very good i mean you make a really strong point that people sort of say that i'm screwed because of my karma which is what a lot of people in india do and like indians and hindus and i find that to be [ __ ] i think it's like it's a very easy way to absolve yourself of all responsibility because it's sort of karma gets equated as destiny or fate right but that's really not what karma is and if you really stop and think about it like here's my understanding of karma it's nothing but newton's third law second law every action has an equal and opposite reaction it's not a principle of destiny or fate it's a principle of science so the people who develop the theory of karma notice that all actions have reactions right like if i drop a ball it falls yeah and so then they started asking themselves a really interesting question which is like where does that principle stop working right so for earlier today we were talking about why the values that we got instilled and why there are different groups of people and we came up with explanatory causes for the effects that we see materialistic family fun loving family and we said that this has a cause does that make sense yeah of course yeah i understand where we're going huh right so like physics is like a very clear cause and then we get to these things like psychology which is like ah and then we get to [ __ ] like behavioral economics which is like is there a cause and effect there and generally speaking i think the answer is yes of course yeah there has to be right everything is causal if we believe ah but hold on a second so that's a very bold claim right because if you say that everything is causal do you really mean everything is costly i do i'm a heart determinist yeah i do believe everything is does that mean that you were born to your particular parents is that the effect of a cause yep what's the cause um the the cause is them having sex right okay right yeah so do you so that that's that explains the actual biological birth what do you think about like your sense of identity or personality is that also just purely based on the biology of your brain yeah your conscious mind is an emergent property of the underlying neurochemistry or whatever of the brain yeah so that's where i disagree right so i i think that like in my experience so this is the way that i think about people's lives so like i think about let's say let's say i have a fence and i'm standing on one side of the fence and i see a ball come over the fence and all i have is is its downward trajectory all that is observable and scientifically verifiable is the downward trajectory can i know where that ball came from um it depends on how deep you're asking this question i mean the ball could have come from a whole other dimension yeah i mean we don't know we just come over the fence yeah i mean the assumption would be it came from the next the neighbor's yard right and where in the neighbor's yard could i calculate its point of origin i mean assuming you had perfect data about the way that the ball was following the arc of the angle and everything yes you could yeah even though i have no scientifically verifiable or empirical observation about its origin i'm hesitant to concede that i mean i would argue that if you have the trajectory and yeah but that's all we have right all we have is the effect we don't have the cause well but if if we understand the universe because of them we would know that that one effect could only be preceded by one particular thing it would necessitate an origin right it must have been launched at a particular speed and angle right yep right so i think this is where now the question becomes in terms of your experience as a conscious being is so like that's an effect we both agree there the question is what is the cause is it simply neurons in consciousness and so then the question is like do you think that your parents meeting was also like was it random that they met or was there what was their relationship the effect of a prior cause um everything was the effect of a prior cause basically that's what i would say right right so so then we could assume therefore that your consciousness and personality is the downstream effect of causes that happened before you were even born correct the beginning of the universe yeah right so the big difference between karma and science is karma presupposes that some of the things about your life today were determined by things that you were that happened before you were born and science so far generally says no right that sciences wait science says no that things that are happening in your life today aren't due to things that happened before you were born not generally right so if you look at like psychology or behavioral economics people don't think about causal factors before you were born in the application of our scientific understanding of an individual human being is that really true though so like for instance like for psychology um would if we look at things like or genetics right if you like things like heredity we can talk about the heritability of even political beliefs right which would be wonderful yeah right so now this is interesting so like let's look at what traditionally karma has said and what science says now because i think genetics is the first scientific evidence of the theory of karma okay because you think about this we generally say that your life is like you know determined by like stuff now and is not influenced by things from the past that's how we look at our life and genetics is the first scientific so think put yourself 200 years ago okay right we can't think about ourselves now and what if i told you that like who you are today is determined by things before you were born i mean i would fully agree with that i feel like i feel like the scientific evidence though tends to take that point of view that who you are today is usually an amalgamation of stuff that happened prior to your birth so for instance are you born to a single parent household what what is the socioeconomic status of your family in the united states like i would view those factors as being like majorly important in the formation of this person yeah yeah yeah so so we are today but what i'm saying is like put yourself 200 years ago before we had the discovery of genetics because like generally speaking science says like here is the now and the past tends to be filled with randomness and may not be like associated with the now i mean i don't agree with that obviously but i mean i i don't i mean the true sense science doesn't say that right because we have big bang theory and we have gravity and all this kind of stuff but if you look at the application of science and the theory of caramel all of the fear of karma says is that there's stuff in prior to this birth that affects you in this birth and that's the idea of reincarnation that you carry karma from your past life and stuff like that all it's saying is that there's stuff that's happened in the past which sounds radical if i were to tell you that destiny things from your past life affect for example the fact that nathan is your son what would you say um well now i guess it's getting into what do we consider past life i guess or what do you mean by that what prior causes are we talking about exactly right so this is this is where the border so karma used to be like super crazy and the more that we learn in science so this is the way that i kind of think about it there's like order in the universe and there's chaos and like a thousand or two thousand years ago most of the universe was chaos and very little of it was order the reason that lightning happened was because of zeus there's a whimsical god in the sky who sometimes gets pissed off and throws lightning bolts at the ground okay as our scientific increasing is understanding has grown we've demystified a lot of stuff and we added order into our universe so at some point the question is this kind of comes back to i'm lucky that there were certain influences in my life is there order to me meeting the people that i met is there an explanatory reason that we can deduce for why those people are in my life and other people don't have those people that was your original question what do you think yes of course right so that's karma okay so my so the original contention the original problem that i have is that my problem with karma is that usually now maybe maybe it's possible you don't view it this way which is good if you don't but the problem that i have with this is that karma often carries with it this idea of moral weight um what absolutely yeah yeah i understand that but i'm saying that to 99 of people without your explanation karma to them will have a moral weight so for instance like a wealthy person will see a poor person and think well that's karma you know they earned their place in life and i earned my place in life rather than viewing karma as like a billion antecedent clauses that eventually led down to a chain of whatever they are today i i think i think i must right i must subscribe to your idea of karma given the way you've explained it it just feels like a lot of people view karma a lot differently than what your explanation would have been yeah so i mean i tend to be somewhat arrogant but i think those people are wrong sure right so i i think that karma is not and this is what i've like learned through meditation so i think my understanding of karma doesn't come from like logic or reading it comes from meditation and it comes from the realization that karma in its essence is no different from i keep on forgetting which of newton's laws it is but that that you know every action has an equal and opposite reaction and that it's just the fundamental principle of cause and effect that's what karma is it's nothing more nothing less the only thing the only reason it sounds wild is because it presumes that some of the effects in this life come from things that are not observable by this person in his current state of conscience gotcha okay okay but it has no moral so this is the other confusing thing so karma doesn't truly have morality we are the ones who so what karma says is this is also is not a great way of putting it but let's just concede it for a second what goes around comes around and so the reason that something bad happened to you is because you did something bad yeah we're the ones that place the value judgment right if i if i like hit myself in the face with a tennis racket i'm the one who says that that's a bad thing because i place the value judgment all karma says is that if you do a then b will happen it's just cause and effect we're the ones who place the morality on top of the theory of karma has nothing to do with morality sure it just as you reap what you suck yeah i understand that as people though humans moralize everything so it's yeah this can be kind of hard to address a concept like that i guess like in a moral vacuum or whatever because it seems like people are very quick to moralize everything literally it's a frustration that i have i guess uh yeah so i'm quick to moralize as well and that's dharma okay dharma right so dharma and karma are linked but karma isn't has nothing to do with morality dharma absolutely does gotcha okay um i don't know how much time you have so just tell me if you need to what do you need to take off okay um how do you decide to uh how do you decide what level of spirituality to incorporate in your discussions with people or i imagine there must have been some point in your life um when you were either in school or when you first started practicing when you were like i'm going to be this spiritual or i'm not going to bring this up at all or what like what was that thought process like yeah so it's evolved over time so it starts with when i was applying to medical school and having someone who was writing me a letter of recommendation strategize with me about how much to talk about complementing alternative medicine so like we don't know how much we want you to talk about yoga because like if you talk about yoga and ayurveda like they may not like that because they look they're going to think you're like hokey sure and so i talked about it less and then after you know my third year that i applied i was like you know what this is just who i am it's a big part of who i am so i'm going to talk about it and if they like it that's great i don't want to wind up at a medical school where i have to like hide part of who i am so that was like kind of the first step and then at that point i think complementing alternative medicine was becoming like more evidence-based so this was back in 2008 2009-ish and and so by then like you know people like there were yoga studios cropping up people were really starting to do research um and uh so that was kind of the first because i think complementary alternative medicine and spirituality in some ways go hand in hand um and then during residency so then you know when i was applying after medical school i focused on evidence-based complementary and alternative medicine because i still tend to be like pretty scientific and evidence-based i'm not like a hokey you know yoga hippie kind of dude like i do yoga in a more rigorous scientific and calculated way sure um and then then in residency it was interesting because i sort of basically didn't do much of it and there were i had a couple of experiences where i was like sort of testing the waters so i was being taught therapy and one of my so i started to like spread my wings a little bit and incorporate some eastern philosophy meditation some of these concepts like karma not karma because that's like really unscientific sure but i started to spread my wings a little bit and then actually found that um you know got some negative pushback from some people so one of my therapy supervisors so when you're training to become a psychiatrist you have supervisors who like supervise you in therapy so i go and i do therapy with my patients and then you go and you talk to your therapy supervisor and sometimes they sit in and they watch you do therapy so one of my therapy supervisors said i don't know if i can supervise you because i don't know what you're doing but it's not therapy and i was kind of taken aback and i was like i'm not sure what you mean and then she was saying like yeah like you're doing something but it's not therapy like you're it seems helpful so i'm not saying it's bad it's just not therapy and so i talked to my program and stuff about that and they were like thankfully they were pretty supportive and they're like yeah so this is i think the first time that i've ever heard of this happening where sometimes you know residents will complain about their supervisors that happens all the time because we tend to be like a fickle and [ __ ] little bunch sure um but it's rare that like you know it's it's common that you'll have students complain to a teacher i mean complain about teachers it's very rare to have a teacher well maybe not that rare but you know it's less common for a a teacher to say i can't have this student in my class anymore right especially when you're like a resident so it's not like you know kids with behavioral problems when they're eight yeah but we tend to be like well functioning human beings and so thankfully my program found me sort of a different supervisor who was more comfortable with me kind of doing my own thing and then over time i sort of dabbled into the waters and what i tended to find which is weird um is that the more i included spirituality like the better my patients got and that too is i don't necessarily think it's because i'm that much better of a psychiatrist but i think people would come to me with these issues like i lack happiness in my life and that's not the same as having major depressive disorder sure so over time i've included more and more spirituality in general like on twitch i was never planning on talking about search i thought i would be eaten alive by twitch i had when i started streaming on twitch i had an army of scientific articles to back up why i think meditation and yoga is good like all kinds of stuff like even chanting why chanting because it's such a strange meditation technique the scientific evidence behind why i recommend chanting so for all the practices that i do i had like all this science and what i was stunned is that what people seem to be what people ask me about is not neuroscience people ask me about is autonomous how do i find my dharma yeah how do i find purpose how do i find meaning people identify with like stories and narratives way more than 52 percent of 72 percent of whatever scientific article generally is what i find i think that's actually an unfair characterization because i don't think that story or narrative is what i talk about in terms of so i i think i don't think that that one is just a story and the other isn't sure i'm sorry that sounds really yeah i don't mean to sound dismissive when i say story or narrative what i mean is it like some something that you can tell somebody that they can like emotionally hook into um and like personally identify or empathize with is going to stick with somebody's mind way more than being read like some numbers off of a study is kind of the way that i view it yeah but when i read numbers off of a study it's emotionally it sinks into you okay i find i find that that experience seems to not be the case as much that um let's say for instance um your go ahead yeah i mean i agree with you that that's not the case as much but when i cite studies i do so in the same way that i cite spirituality which is in theme with my general narrative sure okay so it's like right so i agree that studies are drier but like that's why like when you cite a study you have to do it at the right time yeah and it gives you oomph to the story i just thought that i would be citing way more studies than scriptures gotcha when i was adding oomph to my points and what twitch seems to be more interested in actually is like spirituality which doesn't mean that they're not interested in the science but anyway i didn't mean to cut you off i just oh yeah something promised which i didn't feel was fair sure okay do you um for one one of the big complaints that i hear about people that are pursuing like mental health related stuff is that there's a very brutal game of trying to find the right therapist um so either somebody that you feel like understands you or doesn't judge you or is empathizing with you in a way that like i guess like rings or resonates with you more um how do you suggest two questions on this um how do you suggest somebody it sounds bad but like shops for a therapist like what's the best way to find a therapist and then how can you tell when you have a therapist that is challenging you appropriately versus somebody that you just like don't click with at all um yeah great question so first question is how do you shop for a therapist so what i recommend that people do so there's resource concerns about this right so that has to be taken into account yeah but what i recommend that people do is is make appointments with three different therapists and you pick the one that like whose web page you like the most what is going on are you okay i'm confused oh your chat just got turned off with sub mode so everybody's free again okay i'm gonna just minimize that because okay um but so yeah it's like oh freedom yeah and i thought we were talking about how to find therapists and i was like really confused um but so i'd say like make three appointments and pick your you know your top choice first because therapy is about fit and then you know i'd space them out by like two weeks and um you know when you find someone that like at the end of the session if you feel like you can talk to them and they kind of get you if it feels good to you then cancel the others um and then or c3 and then pick the one that you fit the best with now how do you know if you're being appropriately challenged so i think the main thing that people need to understand about therapy is that if you have a problem in therapy unlike pretty much any other place it's the one place where you can go and you can just tell your therapist that you have a problem with them you can walk in and you can say i feel like this is a [ __ ] waste of my time and i feel like you're just taking my [ __ ] money and as a therapist when people do that i'm like awesome good and let give your therapist the benefit of understanding your difficulty and letting them work on it like if you have a problem with a therapist tell them so i think i think you're you know i'm a man and you're a woman and i don't think you can ever understand what my experience as a man is like in this world i don't think that seeing you is going to mean anything like i'm not going to get anything out of us just go to your purpose and tell them that because i think the big thing that people don't understand is they think that a therapist like has a good fit i mean so i tell you to find a fit but i think the main thing that you need to understand about therapy is that like in order for therapy to work the two of you have to work together at solving your problem and if your first problem is that you don't fit that's the thing that you guys need to solve how can you guys make it so that the two of you fit and the the the patients that i tend to find the most frustrating are the ones that don't tell me what's wrong they're hiding thoughts because they think you won't understand or they just don't trust i guess your turn and like one you know anyway yeah so i've had some experiences where then they'll because they like like me so that you don't want to criticize someone and they're like i didn't want to say like you know this hurt my feelings like you got to tell me man well if you have a friend that is struggling with mental illness um in terms of how you view the normal population what is like what are a couple ways that you can be supportive to that person that you feel like a lot of people miss i caught you talking about using reflective language for instance instead of invalidating somebody's feelings it seemed like a really helpful tip um do you have any other like things like that where it's like when somebody hears this from a mentally ill person most people do this but you should actually do that are there any things like that um that you know of offhand yeah so i think the first is don't underestimate your impact so this is a very very common mistake that humans make so like let's say you invite a friend to a party and they say no i don't no thank you and then you invite them again and they say no thank you again and you invite them a third time and they say no thank you you assume that they don't want to be invited right but the truth is that your invitation in and of itself can mean a lot like they can have social anxiety or they can be busy and they can feel like oh it's like really nice that he keeps inviting me even though i can't go and for for friends who are struggling with mental illness you know you can even like kind of asking them like hey is there some way that i can support you and they say no i'm fine and then you ask again is there some way i can support you and they say no i'm fine the fact that you're asking even though you don't see it helping doesn't mean that it isn't incredibly helpful so i think the biggest mistake that people tend to make is they undervalue their own contribution to a relationship because they don't see a change in the relationship because of their efforts but especially with mental illness if you're doing something and they don't seem to be changing at all you could actually be what's keeping them afloat because generally speaking mental illness has a downward trend so even if you're like hey man do you want to talk every now and then and they seem to be doing like the same level of depression you're there's i mean generally speaking you're probably grossly underestimating how helpful you actually are to that person okay so i'd say just you know do what you think is right as a friend and don't get biased by the perception that it's not working gotcha which is bizarre right by the perception that it isn't working because it seems like it's not working so why would you continue doing it but it has immense value gotcha because there's some internal improvement that's happening there's an intervention there that feels good even if you don't see like an external change of behavior basically exactly even though they never come to your party you make them feel wanted and cared for which is hard to see and it's also hard for them to express and this is also where you can just kind of check in with them hey i keep on asking if you want to come to the parties or not i'm not sure if you're busy or what like do you want me to keep inviting you just ask gotcha yeah like please let me know when you have a party okay um how do you determine um one of the most frustrating parts about mental stuff is that you can't force people obviously to do things they have to make the choices on their own um how what level of um intervention i guess um all right let's say that you have a friend oh use an example you have a friend with like really big social anxiety right um and you know that they've been like they are trying to like see more people like in larger groups of friends or whatever um how do like is it is is should you make some positive effort to like kind of push them like more or do you leave that entirely in their court and you just don't ever push at all or or like say you have a friend with depression or whatever i know like for instance like reckful would stay in bed sometimes for months because he was so depressed he would never get out like do you ever like show up at that person's house it's like get up we're going outside like come on like do you think that those types of interventions are responsible or do you think that you're depriving the other person of their own choices too much or how do you view stuff like that like when can you make a determination as we're not professionals um for when like you like should intervene a little bit more to help somebody that's kind of struggling with that kind of stuff what do you think what's your compass um i i guess the way that i view it is that if i feel like if i feel like somebody is engaging in a behavior that seems to me to just be incredibly destructive and or self-destructive i guess and it doesn't seem like there is any benefit for them to continue to pursue that behavior and if i have evidence in the past that intervening seems to have positive impacts so for instance i know that sometimes people will be depressed they don't want to come out like but every time you get them out they seem to have a really good experience and they'll even admit as much that like usually those are the types of interventions i would try to push for because i know that if i can at least get them to move a little bit that they'll start to feel better before having moved yeah sounds like a great answer to me okay okay so i i think that this is where um this also leads to a lot of confusion i i think that sometimes we forget that mental health is more than treatment in fact it's so much more than treatment and friendship is one of the best things that you can do for someone's mental health right like you can look at studies that show i mean so you know you can look at studies with like pets and like pets improve cardiovascular health they improve mental health it's not a treatment it's not medicine but it can still help immensely and so i think you should think about what your dharma or duty as a friend is and that dharma is going to be different from the dharma of a mental health professional because it is grossly inappropriate for me to show up at my patient's door right it's like what if they just like are they depressed or do they think i'm a [ __ ] [ __ ] and just stopped taking my calls responding emails so i think you should do your duty as a friend and if that means showing up and crossing certain boundaries that maybe a mental health professional can't cross because then that's okay i mean i think that that's that's what friends are for right okay and and i think the main thing to think about there is you know just to really be very careful about examining your own feelings and also to check in with them about you know like i think friends need to learn like just in general is as a society we need to learn to have like more conversations about you know the the meta level of our relationship yeah i notice that we rely a lot on context clues or on body language sometimes when like people um because of all the sexual assault allegations we went over a lot of this and um the answer that i always give for 99 of like confusion and i'm sure everybody's talking about relationship the same thing is like just have a conversation like just talk about this like have like why would you try to guess like don't try to figure out like how they're feeling or like just talk about it like have a conversation it's the easiest way to elucidate you know like the issues and it seems like so many people don't do that have any of those meta-level conversations about any of their relationships sexual they're not sexual or friendships anything yeah yeah we just don't talk about it what's our relationship um you and me mm-hmm uh quasi-friendly quasi professional i guess we'd talk on stream yeah i enjoy talking to you yeah yeah same okay and so i think of us as colleagues on the road to becoming friends okay you play dota though not league right yeah so significant roadbump but can't have everything yeah um let's see i'm trying to think of have you played dota um i are you um do you know the sunken cost rule yeah yeah some people call it a fallacy it's not a fallacy okay i've sunk too much time into league to ever learn another game i can't switch now even if even if switching at this point in my life would produce better outcomes for me just can't okay i'm dug into league i'm sorry you won't catch me saying this anywhere else dusty but it's not it seems to me like they're both great games really yeah oh man i have such a my view of humanity worsens every time i get into a new a new lobby but okay i admire your new lobby and wall yes a new game i don't agree with i i think the fact that you're your view of humanity but that has nothing to do with the game that has to do with the the players oh i mean the game itself is okay the game itself was pretty good but unfortunately you have to do it nine other people god willing alongside you uh going after hopefully the same goals but well i mean hopefully five of them are not going after the same goal as you yeah oh yeah sure yeah but um what is your what is your end goal with your you talk a lot about the organization that you kind of have with all the people that you're training up to be counselors or like what what capacity coaches okay coaches um what capacity do you want the organization to serve in the future like what's your end goal with that like realistic end goal and then like dream end goal i guess so it's interesting so the the short answer is i don't have an end goal because this thing was never conceived to go to a particular place right so the first question you asked me is like what did you expect from twitch and have you been surprised and the answer is i expected i don't i don't even remember what i expected but the short answer was not much and i've been very surprised so it's weird like because because i mean every step of the way has been in trying to figure out like what is the next step i need to take it's really not about an end goal and the reason we started the coaching program is because i got thousands of requests per month for people like hey can i talk to dr k like i'll pay you any amount of money for just one hour of your time and as lucrative as that may be you know i didn't think i could actually help people so then the question becomes so one of my friends i was talking to one of my colleagues is also a psychiatrist and she was saying like jokingly like either you need to you know duplicate yourself or like maybe come up with some kind of courses or something like that like write a book and what she was saying is that you should write a book and i was like i wonder if i can duplicate myself yeah and this goes to the idea that i'm something special which people think i'm special but i don't think i'm that special and so the the more special i am the harder it is to duplicate myself but the real question is because i i did feel like so the reason we started the coaching program is because i started on stream and what i really wanted to show people so the reason we started streaming was because i was having individual conversations with gamers for like four years and it was like the same 35 like problem points yeah like 35 problems that pretty much all gamers like any given gamer is going to fall into like 99 of them are going to fall into these like 35 issues so my thought was like i'm having the same [ __ ] conversation with like a dozen people what if i just stream that conversation could people watching benefit turns out that the answer is like sort of yes then the question is like but we want one-on-one and i'm like can i really transform someone's life by streaming some people will actually say yes i still tend to be pretty skeptical and i find that it's it's like hard to substitute one-on-one support with like youtube videos just remember don't ever don't ever underestimate the impact you can have on somebody but yeah absolutely right so i've learned that yeah but then my thought was like okay so what's missing from healthy gamer sure i can go on stream and i can have these conversations and i can teach about stuff but what's missing is one on one and that's why we started coaching sure now the interesting thing that's there are deficiencies that have come out of coaching which is that like people want so like they they want more in depth than what we can offer on stream and the coaches have a skill set but they don't have my knowledge base so the next thing that we're working on on the healthy gamer is like so so what i basically noticed is that like people are asking for more in-depth stuff about meditation or more in-depth stuff about ayurveda or like more in-depth stuff about like alexa thymia and getting in touch with your emotions so and the coaches are actually really helpful and they they're good outcomes from our coaching program um but they don't have the depth of knowledge which actually people are sort of ask us to stream about stuff where now the problem that we're running into is i don't think streaming is the best way to disseminate is the best way to disseminate like comprehensive knowledge does that make sense um sure because you can't be responsive to like individual like questions or because you have to break things down on an individual level for somebody to understand because my understanding is that streaming people jump in and out oh okay okay let's do this so we're gonna go can you see the word doc yeah so like so this is so the next thing for healthy gamer is this so this is like uh like essentially the outline of a book about meditation and um so this is like what's come out from our coaching program is that people want more let me try to find just one example oh yeah so let's do like the anxiety primer so like this is just like my understanding of anxiety and all the different kinds of anxiety that people can can experience and this is what our community needs next so first it was streaming then it was like okay people need one-on-one and then people like our coaches can help them with ego but they don't have quite the depth of knowledge about how to like the the know-how of how to remove ego they can actually help they're actually pretty good with ego okay um and so like this is what's next and you know where does it end up i'm i'm not quite sure to be honest okay because i just don't i just don't know i mean i'm going to try to help so the other thing when it comes to dharma or duty is like it occurs to me that i have a so you know when you think about karma and dharma to kind of tie things up so i think i was given a very unique set of circumstances in life and i think that with ability comes responsibility and it was weird i was talking to like this guy named uh bobby scar and he was kind of saying like i predicted someone like you would show up on twitch one day he was like i called it okay and i think that there's a group so what healthy gamer is about is it's about healthy gamers so it's not actually about like treating video game addiction it's about like building a healthy life this is what we've been talking about there's a difference between mental illness and like building happiness and fulfillment and that's really what our goals are as an organization yeah it's like the difference between going to a hospital and being sent out when you're no longer dying versus actually like working out exercising having like a healthy body yeah exactly and so i think the thing that's been really confusing from an organization standpoint or a stream standpoint is people because i talk about emotions they assume that that's therapy but like i think that's the [ __ ] problem with our society is that we don't we don't have these conversations about relationships we don't have conversations about emotions you were kind of saying we weren't taught how to be happy absolutely that's what i'm trying to fix is we weren't taught how to like gain meaning and purpose in life we weren't taught how we as human beings work we have classes about science and mathematics and economics but nothing about why you can't stop drinking soda and so what our mission is is just to help people put their lives together and to become healthy gamers right now i don't want like i'm not really for abstinence for from video games i think it's necessary for some people and certainly for some period of time but like we want to build healthy gamers and when there are enough healthy gamers i guess at some point i'm going to burn out or quit you'll probably be working but generally feel wild but yeah i yeah i mean you know so i'm just going to try to help people so i think it's i kind of view our organization and where it's going in the same way that i think about because it's the only way you can do it mentally and stay sane when i'm working in the emergency room it's like what's my end goal i have no [ __ ] clue it depends on what walks in the door sure okay and as long as people are walking in the door and asking us to do stuff we're gonna do our best to do it okay um i don't know how many questions i've asked you've gone over on stream a million times so i'm sorry if i'm hitting a lot of like common talking points um i guess just like a final question then do we draw to an end here um for because a lot of people in my audience might be listening that haven't heard these things before um uh in terms of if you have like new people listening what do you think is like the most positive thing an individual can do to make like great strides towards becoming mentally healthier that you think most people don't already do like what's like one thing that you think is missing from a lot of uh twitch audiences life that they could be doing that would help them greatly i mean i have a generic answer and then i have a specific answer because i feel like the generic answer is like not actionable which frustrates me so the generic answer is i think you should understand yourself in the same way that you try to understand external things sure your audience in particular so destiny i think you've cultivated a good audience or attitude or culture of like critical thinking the problem is that we don't critically think about ourselves yeah practically what i would say is that a lot of people i suspect in your audience think they think critically about themselves every yeah right but the truth is that they don't so here's what i'd say a classic example of this is like the gamer who feels like they're in control of their emotions because they don't cry during a sad movie or can watch horror films or things like that right like they don't have emotional responses the way that other people do and they pride themselves on this yeah that's not in control of your emotions that's just numbing your emotions so practically what i would if i had to give someone a practical tip it's look at your behavior and try to figure out what are the different variables that influence your behavior and unless you can do something arbitrary for no reason you're not in control of yourself [Applause] so if people think that you're in control of yourself and you can't pick you know the last thing that you ate that was unhealthy unless you can knock that out of your diet for 60 days you're not in control and then tunnel down into what is it that makes that contributes to behavior because behavior is really really complicated yeah a lot of it and understand your behavior and understand yourself and for people who want to be successful i don't think they understand like everyone looks for success outside of themselves they're like you've got to do this or like i remember there was some guy on youtube that was spamming maybe due to my search history or cookies or whatever yeah about how he like reads a thousand books and i'm like i don't think i don't think reading like we all think that reading a thousand books makes you successful like sure reading is important i've read a [ __ ] up books but doing i don't believe that success comes from doing some specific formula externally i think you just got to understand like how you work as a person and that's and i think that's what people need to like take away is like understand how you work because we're playing this game of life without understanding the buttons on the controller yeah do you is there um do you have a good um i 100 agree with what you're saying um do you have good like tricks to check if you're lying to yourself yeah perfect yeah absolutely so the biggest thing to understand about lying to yourself so here's here's how the mind works okay i'm going to do an abbreviated version you guys can check this out and the webinars and stuff because i've explained this with whiteboard and all that good stuff so i also think that eastern psychology in a lot of ways is superior to western psychology because of the way in which it was developed that's maybe a conversation for a different day sure but our mind has an emotional component this is called the monus and the manas is the emotional mind and also reacts to things so if you think about do you like sushi no okay when you ate your first piece of sushi how quickly did you know that you didn't like it um i don't know i usually like i eat something i think about it i'd swallow it i can tell usually in a i don't know 10 15 seconds it doesn't take me that long to figure it out i would say even less sure yeah i'd be surprised if it took you longer than a second sure i i don't like seafood so the first time i really tried sushi it was like a year ago but i went to a really nice restaurant with some friends because i wanted to like give it a good try before writing it off so i really did think about it but yeah but generally yeah for like a food piece of food i don't like usually know pretty quickly yeah sometimes even just smelling it so there's this one part of your mind that reacts to things and so the yogis thought that emotions and reactions like stamping something with like or dislike oh like i like that song or i don't like that song oh that's a cool shirt there isn't a cool shirt the reactionary mind is the same as the emotional mind so we also tend to experience emotions very rapidly right if you walk in and then your ex walks into the same restaurant you have an emotional reaction that takes less than a second so your emotional mind acts that's monus that's the emotional line the second piece of the mind is the buddhi or the analytical mind the logical mind and we all know that like emotions and logic are not the same part right like you can't overcome emotions with logic or you can or that's difficult we can get that the whole process cbt whatever yeah so the thing that people don't understand is that between the emotions and the logic is this thing called the ahamka or the ego okay and what the ahamkar does is it activates to protect you from negative emotions so when you feel bad the ego activates and then what the ego does is it bullies your intellectual mind into coming up with justifications and you can argue logically against justifications and what happens if you like argue with someone about why they do something and they present justifications um it feels like they'll bounce back and forth between whatever they'll either invent or fabricate some or they'll generally exactly because you're post talk rationalizing you're doing it after the fact you don't care what the justification as you're just trying to find questions like how do you know whether your intellectual mind is justifying things or objectively analyzing how do you know and the short answer is whether your ego is present or not right so even when you have a political argument if you can calm down and have a discussion with them where their ego is absent then they can change their mind so basically your intellect functions well if your ego is inactive and when does ego become active it becomes active when you experience negative emotion generally okay and so it really starts with it's not about whether you're in control it's about the presence of or the absence of emotion and if you can't detect emotion and you can't detect and notice your ego then your rational mind is not thinking properly yeah yeah that just seems scary because i guess when i think of like these these tours these sorts of like like almost cognitive distortions like nobody feels like they ever have them so it seems really like everybody feels like they're honest with themselves everybody yeah so that's the beauty of what the yogis figured out is they're like okay how do i know when my intellect is working properly it has to do with the presence of emotion and ego gotcha and until you can see and label those things within yourself then your emotional i mean then your analytical mind will function well okay so then the first step then to figuring out if you're lying if we draw it back then to figure out if you're lying to yourself the first step of that process is can i identify when i'm being emotional yeah and then if you can do that then you can bring these topics in in a place where you're not being emotional and then analyze them but if you feel like you're becoming emotional you have to be able to recognize that in order to the tricky thing is that most people aren't going to even be able to recognize their emotions for sure yeah right so the the first so i would start by assuming that if you don't uh detect emotion that some emotion is there you start by assuming that you're not actually logical because chances are you aren't and until your like eq gets well developed and you can detect your emotions and then also detect your ego right and this like you can kind of see this where like the example that i use is let's say you ask out a girl and then she says no and then you say ah she wasn't that attractive anyway and then you tell your friends she was like yeah i wasn't that into yeah of course yeah yeah you were a [ __ ] anyway i didn't even i never liked her at all like that's clearly illogical but you can't explain it to that person yeah and why she says no in your emotional mind you feel rejection and then your ego's like oh [ __ ] let's tank that and then that pumps you up and then puts other people down for sure so now there are a couple i'll leave you with one last point because they're not going to be able to detect their emotions anytime you're making a comparison that's ego if you're comparing your logic is incorrect gotcha period okay one of the um as a quick aside one of the easy i consider myself to be pretty emotionally aware i'd like to think i am but then there are times when even i realize um way too late oftentimes something as stupid as like man i think i just need to [ __ ] eat because i'm in a really bad mood right now i don't even think i realize that and then you eat and then afterwards once you're out of it you're like wow holy [ __ ] i was really hungry i can't believe i was just like a huge [ __ ] for two hours when i just needed some food something as stupid as that um that's arguably less impactful than like having a fight with somebody or having a negative experience with somebody else so yeah for sure i understand what you mean 100 yeah okay so yeah cool man okay cool um i appreciate the conversation i really like talking to you yeah um if i have a specific topic i'll bring it up in the future what would you say yeah i was just gonna say because i i remember etiquette from before so like i i assume that everyone knows who you are because i just assume everyone knows who you are but do you want to tell people if they don't like i was just assuming but it just occurred to me that maybe people don't know who you are oh sure um i'm destiny i stream at twitch.tv slash destiny we talk about politics and philosophy a lot and then we play video games too depending on what's going on for current events and yeah cool well thanks a lot destiny i really appreciate the conversation i enjoy talking to you yeah i appreciate it as well also etiquette do you want to introduce yourself in case some people watching on my stream might i know who you are uh yeah but i mean i had a chance to talk to about myself a lot sure so i think people should have figured it i mean i imagine okay healthy gamer underscored gg you are trying to raise money for something though right what do you collect no you're not oh you guys raised all the money you needed yeah i mean the community gave us a ton of money oh so we're fine yeah so wow you're making well the first big business mistake you're making is you have to keep increasing those goals you got to get more and more and more money right that's not what we do seriously i know it's bizarre i mean we've had people trying to still give us five-figure donations and stuff and we're like nope huh i think we nope okay well that's awesome cool well good luck with what you guys are doing um you're genuinely really cool there's very very very few people that i talk to that i actually respect and look up to and you're like one of those very few there's like two people actually there's you that i really enjoy talking to and then another guy called sean carroll yeah you two are really awesome people so yeah everyone else you've talked to um most people know that i have very [ __ ] negative views of everybody and i mean like in terms of like if you say something i'm more likely to believe it without feeling like i have to go and like check it and i'm instantly like incredibly hostile or combative towards a thought like if you say something that challenges like a preconceived notion that i have i'm more likely to like default assume i might be incorrect on something and then really ponder what you're saying and try to like incorporate that into what i'm thinking like yeah can i ask you i appreciate that man i i really respect you as well i and you know we don't do much on twitch that isn't like our stuff because we don't have a whole lot of time to stream and i think there are a lot of people to help and i but i really love do love talking to you um look can i toss out one last thing i'll try to send you the paper sure but i had a wild thought recently and i just love to get your thoughts on it yeah so there was recently a study i think on um because we've talked a little bit about psychedelics before i think yeah or you've talked about it or whatever yeah i don't know if you and i have talked about it so a lot of people ask me questions about psychedelics so i saw an interesting study and it just really i clicked in some way and i don't know if this is completely idiotic there was a study i think with mdma or psilocybin i forget okay where something like 68 of people who use mdma or psilocybin felt a connection with like some kind of being and and the being was like positive okay like cared about them and i was just really surprised by the high percentage of a common experience because my assumption would have been that if you use psychedelics like i know that there are some substances that you know like mdma for example makes you feel like more connected to people oh yeah but i was surprised by the the uniformity of their experience of like presence of this other being or being and then i was kind of thinking like oh that's actually like scientifically that's very interesting that they have a consistent experience across all kinds of random people because i would have expected all kinds of random things really okay um well i mean within certain bounds right so like we know that mba mdama like increases your like like empathy and stuff like that but to detect a being is a strange scientific result sure and it got me wondering whether like actually mdma and psilocybin are um maybe like the next version of the telescope and maybe that you know in we have a general reality that we can perceive and then as human beings we develop instruments and then anyone who looks through the telescope sees a relatively common thing even though like normal people can't see it but when you have enough human beings who share a common sensory experience at what point does that become reality as opposed to just something that you're hallucinating for sure um obviously very responsible make sure that everything is safe consult a doctor if you're taking a drug like ssris will interact with um i wouldn't recommend taking psychedelics oh okay you don't okay good uh sorry i should have been clear i was just wondering what you think about the principle of sorry what what you think about the principle of like whether it's possible that psychedelics could actually give us frontiers into reality that we're otherwise not able to perceive much like a telescope it's a theory oh that's um that's a really good question i'm actually going to have a conversation with tomorrow um i'm going to butcher his last name um will suey see you will sue sue yeah yeah yeah about that yeah because i had a really yeah huge mushroom trip that i still have trouble making sense of i think that the perspectives that you gain on stuff like mushrooms or lsd um are invaluable um it's hard i don't want to have this kind of i'm not trying to recommend drugs to your audience i'm trying to be responsible for that but like there's definitely um there are worlds that exist under psychedelic drugs that are inaccessible in my opinion to most people that that's fine so also i'm not recommending so i've also just you guys know from a safety perspective i've had several people reach out to me when we've talked about psychedelics actually saying they have ptsd or bad anxiety from psychedelics yeah so psychedelic usage actually be like very harmful for sure um so so and i think if you guys want more information will is a great person to talk to uh so the question that i have for you though is do you think that those experiences are ensconced to you or do you think they could be reflective of actually an objective reality outside of your mind um man sorry i'm trying to think of like abbreviated forms of this the problem oh sure oh i wanted to get your thoughts on like yeah but the big problem that i had was that i had a very very large mushroom trip and it actually like that term that you use objective reality is one that i don't use anymore because that big mushroom trip really um undermined my opinion of how well i can be in tune with any sort of objective reality when you've done a certain maybe similar to what schizophrenics feel when you've done enough of a certain substance that can induce hallucinations or make your senses otherwise lie to you or cause you to have a conscious experience that feels very otherworldly or unrelated to your normal one i think it really undermines your sense of how well you can truly understand any part of the world because yeah for most people you've never experienced having a sensory organ lie to you like you don't know what it's like for your eye or your ear to report something that absolutely doesn't exist and once you've experienced that in like in a highly drug state i think it it feels a little bit weird to um it feels a little bit weird to think that like you can have this like super big key into like an objective reality um this kind of like goes away from your question though but your original question is like could we use these to gain further insights into objective reality i'm guessing because you're saying that we all have shared experiences it seems to be on these drugs it's possible that because we all have like similar backgrounds um and because we all have like similar like shared biology that doing like a certain type of drug is more likely to bring a certain experience up to the surface so maybe for instance western people would report a different experience on a psychedelic drug than like um maybe indians or japanese people or some form of eastern um yeah um yeah i don't know when you said yeah it's not surprising to me that people would report similar experiences just because we all have like so much shared culture and biology but i think it's worth exploring and i think that the type of shared experiences that you have that in and of itself might be insightful um so for instance for i'm this is conjecture maybe true maybe not but a lot of atheists might say like oh gods aren't important people don't need those and then let's say that all of the human population tries mushrooms and 95 percent of people report um i had an experience where i felt incredibly close to a divine being and it made me feel so incredibly at peace well maybe coming out of that experience maybe like well okay maybe it's a little bit foolish to completely throw out the idea of any type of like god-like figure it seems like it's pretty integral to like you know the human psyche like so yeah i do think that there could be something worth investigating there sorry that was a really roundabout way of answering that question yeah that's that's what these conversations are about man sure yeah also for mdma i truly i would stake money on this not that i was just going to do it but i do not believe that two people in the same room no matter how much they hate each other i do not think it's possible that two people could do mdma and come out of that room still hating each other it is an incredibly empathetic drug like um yeah it's yeah the connections you fill in that are unbelievable jesus but maybe that's because i'm normally like an emotionally disconnected person maybe i'm getting closer to um what what how people normally experience emotions but yeah wow that's what i would say yeah so i mean seriously yesterday i would be careful dude of course yeah we're watching and stuff too so so just so you guys know and you can ask will more about this but you know will was was telling me that psychedelic assisted psychotherapy is uh is you know normally done like you'll you'll do like maybe four or five months of therapy with three uses of psychedelics in between with appropriate time to process and like controlled amounts i mean i've really heard people should really be careful because like you know part of the problem is you don't know what you're getting yeah for sure i would consider myself like i think i have a very very strong and well put together mind and i completely underestimated um psilocybin mushrooms and i deal with things like anxiety and stuff now i can't smoke not that i would recommend it but i can't smoke weed for instance without having panic attacks which i'd never experienced prior to doing uh psychedelic mushrooms so it's definitely something that you should be incredibly respectful of and very careful of yeah i mean i would really just steer clear i mean i know that a lot of people are into it but like it's i mean there can i mean it can be harmful but talk to will i think he'll he knows more than i do about that so yeah it'll be a fun conversation yeah okay all right man well thank you so much for talking man i appreciate it yep i appreciate the conversation it's been fun i'll poke you if i ever have questions in the future yeah have a good one yeah it's called the us flag you stupid [ __ ] this is the only flag that the united states federally has and recognizes why the [ __ ] are you acting like the different

Channel: Destiny

Views: 156,987

Keywords: steven bonnell, destiny, destiny streamer, destiny debates, destiny twitch, destiny vods, destiny rajj

Id: ZP5FkEy2mkM

Length: 121min 11sec (7271 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020