Dr. K: "They're lying to you about the fix to anxiety, depression & loneliness" | @HealthyGamerGG

We're seeing wh scale destruction of our mental environment so this is an end stage lack of human connection that can be incredibly profound and damaging a lot of people will look at that and they'll say Okay social media is the problem but this is where I would say well hold on a second the normality of eating let's say whatever Chinese takeout there is a period around four or 5 days where your gut bacteria can't Survive anymore and then it becomes really hard to stick with your dietary change this is the problem that a lot of

people don't understand how are you supposed to find purpose when you don't feel anything habit change is a part of the solution but it's not the whole solution what people need to really do is just understand the fundamental of how a human being is put together like once you open the hood and you understand how the engine is put Together then you can fix whatever problem you [Music] want well show fans have been telling me to interview you for years and so here we are finally it took me a minute to get off the block

some of your insights into depression motivation escapism they they really resonate with me maybe maybe with past versions of me if that kind of makes sense uh I was never addicted to video games or anything like that but I Think a lot of us definitely myself included can obviously relate to lack of purpose lack of Drive general feeling of not having our proverbial [ __ ] together so maybe that's a good place to start sure uh so where where in that would you like to start or how should we start yeah yeah I appreciate the

clarification there because it's such a big topic that it's hard to even this is part of the problem right like guys are sitting around going okay I should probably Exercise you know I should probably study something for my career get certified I don't know whatever like Microsoft certified and something something you know I'm watching this on YouTube but for the past three hours all I did is watch like crappy stupid gaming things on YouTube that didn't further my career or actually teach me anything other than how to farm for gems and Warcraft or something like

I need to get my [ __ ] together but also I had a pretty Good time watching 3 hours of YouTube eating Cheetos by the pallet you know like what do I do where do I start chipping away at this massive problem yeah so I I think there's a there's a beautiful there's one little piece of yarn that is extending out of the ball which is the word should so I think if we want to really understand the cruxs of what a lot of people are struggling with today what men are struggling with especially I

Think it comes down to this word should So when you say I should be exercising where does that come from if I'm putting myself in the shoes of a guy who wasn't exercising which is like 3 years ago I was just eating Chinese takeout and I was like I'm too busy I have kids it's a pandemic you know I was just like huh I don't really want to yeah you know I don't want to do it my friend started a personal training company largest chain Of gyms in Canada and he's like oh my God pandemic

we got to close I'm going to go out of business I'm going to go bankrupt and so we came up with the idea that he should have them all work online training people so he gave me free personal training for for like for life kind of and I was like no thanks he's like what are you talking about people pay thousands of dollars a month for this you're taking I'm making you do it you're obviously you need this you like You got to lose like 60 lbs so the only thing that actually got me off

my butt was him forcing me to do personal training with a really good trainer and not pay and I'm like not everybody has this level of privilege where like some trainers actually going to whip them into shape right yeah so I mean like that that that's well said Jordan and I think it really gets to the Crux of the problem which is hold on a second so you talk about privilege sure but someone Had to offer you tons of stuff for free and also insistent that's what it takes that's the amount that they need to

balance the equation for you to do something that you need you should do so I think one of the biggest problems we talk about lack of life purpose lack of motivation so one of the biggest mistakes that I think people make is that they view themselves as having a lack of motivation so if I'm like playing video games for 10 hours a Day I say to myself I lack motivation you don't lack motivation you have an intense amount of motivation to play video games you have an intense amount of motivation to stay stuck and if

you don't believe that all you have to do is try to do something else and what you will find is that you have very powerful motivational drivers to keep you where you are can can I ask though what are the motivational drivers because it's not fun being a chubbo who Eats Chinese takeout 5 days a week knows not that good-looking and could be better and used to be and has a kid like my I'll tell maybe this is a better way to phrase it I had a two-year-old boy at the time I mean now he's

he's five Jaden and he's like he I could I would play with him on the floor and I would try to get up and I'd be like oh hang on gr and I'm like I'm 40 and I'm 44 but I was like I'm 42 it's a little early for the groaning and it's not just me being dram Like my wife was like oh dramatic much and I was like no everything hurts I don't even know if I can like my hips hurt how do I roll over and get up off this hardwood floor like now

I'm on my knees on hardwood and I really needed this competing motivation if I don't know what the original motivation was right to be a a schlub but the competing motivation was man this sucks and I'm probably going to die early because I'm in this condition and that's that's Pathetic yeah so so there there's I mean you could say that's pathetic I think it's a reality for most of us so so I I think there are a couple of different things to look at here so the first is that when you say like oh it's

not fun being and then you talked about eating Chinese take out doing this doing this you know having a body that is older than your years but if you sort of stop and think about that that's like I don't know if this makes sense but that's an Abstraction right that's a constellation of factors where I say to myself okay now I'm out of shape now I'm eating too much now my body hurts but if you think about the actual moment of eating Chinese takeout none of those things are true in that moment right no it's

awesome cuz I'm diving into orange chicken which is probably not even real Chinese food it tastes amazing yeah right so so now here's the problem is that when it comes to your brain your Brain is like oh there's all these weird like hypothetical problems like dying early what experience does your brain have of dying early dying yes none what experience does it have of eating Chinese food yeah way too much way too much so this is this is the problem that a lot of people don't understand is that your brain can't outweigh an actual experience

with a hypothetical gain so this is something that we deal with a lot especially in addiction Psychiatry So when I when I when we sort of think about when anytime I have a goal as I move when I think about the goal it's all positive like I'm going to get into shape one day I'm going to have this sexy Beach bod I'm going to show up on Tinder and everyone's going to swipe right we can think about all of these things so in that moment when your brain is making a calculation it thinks about all

the benefit but it hasn't paid any of the cost then what happens is there's This idea of a lot of gain with no real understanding of the cost and then as we start moving towards our goal we see none of the gain and all of the cost so before I get my sexy Beach pod I have to like be a sweaty nerd at the gym for a month and I don't even see any change it's just all that happens is I suffer less each time I go so then our brain is sitting there and thinking

hold on a second wait wait wait wait a second I thought we did this to improve our life This is not improving my life my life is getting worse so this is literally how the brain makes calculations is it kind of weighs like pros and cons but it can't weigh some abstract benefit compared to the very real cost that you have to pay In This Moment by not eating something that you want to eat right that's like a straight cost you don't gain any life expectancy from one Chinese Meal and then if you go to

the gym it just it's just suffering so this is how we get into this problem of we're not really understanding that like our brain is making these calculations we're not aware of how it makes calculations and then that gets layered on top so that's one system but layered on top of that is this idea of shs so then we start thinking all these things that we should be doing should be doing should be doing and should is like in my opinion one of The worst words you can use because by definition should is something that

you haven't done if you should do it that means it's not being done and should is a very poor motivator it's something that gets us to start doing something but really can't withstand the pain of following through so if you live a life of shs your life is going to be like a life of false starts and a lack of follow through the sh just can't sustain you when things get tough you have to Have like a really good internal reson to do something that makes sense it's it's also probably why we evolved stuff like

endorphins you know like how people run and they're like this is amazing and I'm like you are on Mile 49 and you're in the desert your your whole body hurts or like these marathoners and they're just like this is great it's like no this is horrific but your brain has been they're probably their brain is just bathing and endorphins right or Something there's something else going on where their brain is actually focused on this channel and not all the other channels that say you're killing yourself yeah so I think endorphins is a is a really

interesting example because I think it's an example of something that is very rare right so it's like endorphins are like releasing something at extreme levels of exercise at such high levels that then makes you feel good I think what what the other really Interesting thing is that we do value so the cool thing is that human brains will value something that is denied to them so as human beings if we do something that is hard and we succeed at the end we actually feel like really good about it which is also like another really interesting

challenge that a lot of people face right now because the world is trying to make everything easy for us paradoxically it becomes harder but now it's like online dating like you don't Have to go to a bar you don't have to get dressed up you can just you can take pictures once and then for the next 90 days you can be slovenly in your bed and swipe and someone has sold us this idea that as we make things convenient for you that things will start to work out right we have grocery delivery now we have

like Amazon Prime we've got online entertainment we work from home we we've created a culture where like we're incredibly complacent and everything is To be brought to us and the the really tragic thing about that is the easier we make things on ourselves the less our brain gets activated to like overcome difficulty yeah this is interesting I've heard you mention games and apps are like an invasive species right they're kind of they're in the ecosystem but we don't really know how to handle them they're running unchecked and I mean we as in like government doesn't

know how to regulate them our brains are not Evolved to deal with them our habits are not we don't have healthy habits around this like I know not to start smoking right but I don't my friends if I told them I downloaded some dating app they would well I'm married but it like let's say I wasn't and I download a dating app they'd be like oh cool good luck out there but if I start smoking my friends are going to be like what are you doing absolutely man what are you doing right now and nobody

says that about you know Door Dash yeah so I I think we don't you're you're spot-on so I think what started to happen is you have these app developers and I I don't think for the record I don't think that like all of them are nefarious and evil no I I I think that you know think about it from like a product design perspective their job is just to actually enhance your experience that's the way that they see it so when people make a video game they're like how can we make this video Game more

fun and I I'll never really blame a developer for having that goal right the problem is that they don't even realize what they're doing so as they start to compete with each other as someone figures out okay we can add microtransactions as someone figures out okay this is what we need to do like if it's if it's if we have to charge someone for it no one's going to pay so we're going to make it free and then what we're going to do is that's not Financially sustainable so now we need to make a premium

version now we need to start gatekeeping certain features and so there's this weird like almost evolution of features that ends up screwing the user at the end of the day right we end up in these situations where we're doom scrolling and the reason we Doom scroll is because one platform is like unless this person if this person gets bored they're going to switch to a different app so we want to Prevent them from being bored and we provide entertainment so then they make things more and more entertaining which means that we're stuck on it easier

and easier and easier which then ends up hurting us and no one is aware like we were sort of figuring things out now but this has happened for like 15 years without really anyone paying attention can't remember exactly where I was this is years ago and I remember there we were like on a a tour of this swampy Marshy area and I I saw a pig and I was like what the hell is a pig doing here it's a boore and I said I I can't believe you have wild pigs here and they were like

actually yeah we do they're a huge problem a hundred years ago the Dutch brought them over and then like couple of them probably got out or a boat sank with some pigs on it and they ran onto an island and now they destroy everything because they dig and that's like erosions like the enemy in this Swampy marshy area and there's nothing we can do it's like you we've killed tens of thousands of these things and they're just they're hiding in like the jungle and no one's going to go in there and get them because it's

dangerous right there's other things in there that'll kill humans but it's been going for so long that they've just given up on eradicating the pigs it's not possible yeah so I I think that that's it's a great ology because that's what's Happening right so we're seeing whole scale destruction of our mental environment so we're seeing rises in suicide rates we're seeing difficulties forming relationships we're seeing increased anxiety increased depression body dysmorphia um there there's a terrible level of equality that's actually forming right now whereas if you look at historically mental illness it was like divided

between men and women for particular diagnoses women Were more likely to have body dysmorphy and anxiety men were more likely to have things like sociopathy and addictions and now what we're seeing is a great Equalization where body dysmorphia for men is on the rise at an astronomic level and addictions are on the rise for women at an astronomic level so we're starting to see kind of whole scale effects of all of this technology use that is sort of like Rippling throughout our brains and society as a Whole yeah that's not the equality we were kind

of going for is it nope no it's it's strange cuz like we we need to evolve as humans you know to to to deal with this stuff and that's a slow process but it's almost like we've with these apps have made it so you don't even need humans I guess in many ways right you delivery food online gaming uh online dating that doesn't go anywhere AI girlfriends I'm going to ask you about that in a little bit but then it's Also like well actually our brains still need relationships to stay healthy and if you're only

getting AI relationships or online relationships it's kind of like diet soda right like your brain still thinks it's sweet but it's not really doing the thing for you that the sugar does not the Sugar's good for you but you know relationships it's like you I feel like I have friends cuz I talk with these people on Reddit all day it's like well yeah but they're not there for You if something bad happens they don't know you yeah so I I I think I think it's well said so I I think that's what we sort of

are seeing with technology is that technology so I see this a lot I don't know if you're familiar with like this concept of brain rot which has been growing a lot recently but if you look at like um like YouTube videos around brain rot I was watching like some videos for kids recently and if you really look at these there's something Really weird going on where like there's this huge landscape of people just trying to test what works for your brain so what what we're starting to see is like a lot of like YouTube videos

and stuff that are just colors and sounds and like all these weird stimuli that create a shadow of the real thing and that's kind of exactly what you're saying with the diet soda is people have figured out okay if I make a video game and you have you know a a Virtual City in the video game that will scratch some part of your Social circuitry in your brain and over time what's happening is people are figuring out how to scratch more and more of your circuitry and so that's that's where these things like AI girlfriends

and stuff come in where people are trying to create approximations of reality and what's the measuring stick that they use does it activate the brain in some way and then the problem though is that so I Think that you can have real friends online I've certainly had real friends who will be there for you when things go go wrong but your point is still spoton that you can have a real friend who you can confite confi in over the internet but that friend can never physically hug you and when you get a physical hug you

get a release of oxytocin oxytocin has very beneficial effects for building empathy improving social skills reducing anxiety so what's starting to happen is We are getting this diet virtual lifestyle that fulfills Us in some ways but doesn't go the whole way and then the problem is since we're getting this diet soda it disincentivizes us to drink the real thing and since we're getting enough of our needs met since I can get groceries delivered since I have friends online since I can entertain myself at home since I can work from home now I have no no

reason to leave and then we're creating these problems like touch Starvation like it's a crazy term right for the history of humanity that's a thing huh oh absolutely touch starvation right so this is an end stage lack of human connection that can be incredibly profound and damaging I feel like I've heard about this in the context of Romanian communist orphanages where the nurses just never had the time to even change the kids cuz there were so many and it was like run by you know three three nuns had like 60,000 orphans you know to take

care of and there's all these like they don't have any money so it's just like the kids are like soiled for the whole day and that they're not picked up cuddled nothing and they they ended up with much higher levels of mental illness and and and damage than other kids yeah the Romanian orphanages I mean that's quite severe and not just mental illness I mean a lot of these kids were basically like Nonfunctional so the the neglect was so severe that they were not not able to do things like form friendships like we're talking really

really severe levels of neglect very early thankfully with tech stuff I don't think we're seeing quite that level I would hope not right so I think most people still have parents of some kind most people still go to school in some way and form relationships but but we are seeing things escalate very rapidly what I what I find interesting About this is well it's super insightful but also there's this current trend of everything is just habit change right so and and I you know guys like James Clear friend of mine love that guy really good

content and topics and game changers for a lot of people however I think for a lot of this stuff habit change is kind of a red herring because me doing let's say I'm playing video games for 18 hours a day I live in my parents basement I have gone I dropped out of school I went Nowhere in my career I'm not moving forward it's not like oh I have bad habits that I need to break like this is beyond it's beyond that this is not just like I need to quit video games there's something there's

other things going on here yeah so I I mean I would sort of agree with that so I think that habit change is a very useful tool and I think people like James Clear did an amazing job of this is a thing that this is a bite-sized thing that you can control That will have a significant impact on your life but I would completely agree with you that I think there's a lot more fundamental stuff and habit change is a part of the solution but it's not the whole solution I I don't want to put

words in James's mouth he's not selling habit change like by the way everything that's wrong with your life is because you have bad habits he's not doing that but I think a lot of people are kind of like I bought Atomic habits and now I'm Going to get out of this basement and like not be depressed anymore it's like whoa yeah I don't know yeah so I I I I I think thank you for the clarification I didn't mean to imply that as well I I think what what clear did is make habit change accessible

to a lot of people which I think has a huge benefit and you're spot on that often times what happens on the Internet is that everyone's looking for a silver bullet right so so whether it's James clear or This other thing or this other thing what tends to happen is everyone thinks like oh this is the big thing right now and this will transform my life and all of those things can be useful but I I tend to think like so I come from a different background I spent several years studying to become a monk

and so like for me like that's the root of things like let's understand the basics of where motivation comes from what are the different components that operate Inside you and this is the reason honestly that I I wanted to become a doctors because I wanted to just understand everything about how a human being Works let's understand not just habits but literally your gut bacteria if you start to diet and you eat a a diet high in processed foods your gut bacteria that survive off of processed foods will start to die when they start to die

they send chemical signals to your brain that will induce Cravings so Even when we're thinking about changing our dietary habits what a lot of people don't realize is that for the first day or two it's actually not too bad but there is a period around four or 5 days in where your gut bacteria can't survive anymore and then it becomes really hard to stick with your dietary change right red alert we need some Cheetos St absolutely them down they're dying and they're like no we need this food like you need to help us so so

I so good Though but or is that just my gut bacteria talking that's just my gut bacteria talking it could be your gut bacteria plus your brain right because your brain has learned that these Cheetos are delicious and also they've been manufactured to be like artificially delicious it really is like it it really is like drugs in some ways right right so so it works by that artificial activation the artificial hyperactivation of certain receptors Which is exactly what all this technology does too so if we look at these things like Tik Tok or YouTube shorts

or whatever like these are hyperactivating certain parts of us one thing I I heard you say that I thought was particularly insightful was your bra to your brain the normality of eating let's say whatever Chinese takeout playing video games watching Netflix all day that is like your brain is skipping to the end of the movie I Don't want to butcher this too hard you know where I'm going with this like your brain is like hey you could work hard and have a career and you could sacrifice and then you could build a life and then

you could retire and watch movies eat Cheetos and Chinese and and and play video games all day and your brain's like I have an idea how about screw the career stuff and all that other hard work just stay where you are right now in drink diet soda and watch Netflix and and play video games all day you could just do that I think you did a great characterization of it so if we stop and sort of think about it right so I I've worked with some very successful people and the weird thing is like we

talk about like you know all these people like want to yeah I I don't know if you're familiar with like fire right Financial Independence retire early right so like there's this idea that okay I'm gonna grind for some amount of Time I'm going to set up passive income I'm going to do all these things so that I can be free in life then I'm done right I'm done with the I'm done with the rat race I'm done with the hum drum I'm done with the grind like I'm going to grind a lot now so that

I can be free later and then I'll ask these people free for what what do you going to do with your freed I'm going to do what I want so there's something really dangerous that happens I've worked with A lot of very successful people very rich people who are really struggling and even if you look at like social media and stuff I think a lot of people have pieced together that some people who are very financially successful are not fundamentally happy they just don't behave like happy people and what you tend to find what I

tend to find that's really shocking is that once you get all this Financial Freedom people are like oh I'm going to Have sex with a bunch of women or I'm going to drive a really nice car I'm going to eat what I want to and so what they're basically doing is trying to create ultimate material Freedom so that they can create ultimate mental bondage then I will be a victim to all of my desires if I have a desire I'm going to fulfill it if I want to fly first class I'm going to do that

if I want an expensive bottle of champagne then my desires will run wild and there will be No check to my desires if I want to have sex with someone because I have a billion dollars I'll be able to find someone very sexy to have sex with and then if I want to do something else if I want to stay at a palace I can stay at a palace and so if you really look at it what they're really looking for is external freedom for internal bondage they will become a slave to their desires and

that's why this is what we see so I've worked with people who are Trust fund babies and and just really bad addictions and the reason is because they have no internal control of who they are and so what happens in our brain is our brain is sort of like we can kind of shortcut that you don't need a bunch of money to be able to fulfill your desires anymore because you can get a straight stream of dopamine and eat Cheetos so what's the point of working really hard it's so that you can do what you

want well what are you going to do With your free time well I'm going to do something fun what is something fun play video games but then you'll say no I'm going to like sail around the Mediterranean yeah right and then what's going to happen but your brain is like why go through all that trouble when we can get the dopamine right here yes exactly like that sounds fun dream about it talk about it yeah log into Starcraft so what am I going to do with a free day because all our brain has experience of

You can have this fantasy of sailing around the Mediterranean but what does your brain know about pleasure it's like oh we're going to just play video yeah yeah it's like sailing there's a black box around that and it sounds hard but you know what there's a bag of dopamine in your pantry right now absolutely right so like why would I go through why would I walk 10 miles through the desert to get a glass of water from an oasis when I have a sink at home there's no Point that's the way that our brain sees

it and these fundamentals people don't understand and therefore they get stuck in these like traps of like motivation and should and now I need to form habits and now I need to do this what people need to really do is just understand the fundamental of how a human being is put together and once you understand like once you open the hood and you understand how the engine is put together then you can fix whatever you Want do you think a lot of these people who are stuck in that trap you said they're a slave to

their sort of external desires do those come through advertising friends social media is that kind of what you're talking about cuz I know like it it can be very hard to turn off what other people want from you maybe even your own parents right and your friends and I know in in well for example the community in which I assume you grew up in there's a lot of External like you need to be a doctor a lawyer or an engineer or you're somehow a failure I I didn't even have the option for an engineer it

was doctor or a lawyer like literally when I was 9 years old we're not those Indians no Engineers no Engineers right so my my Dad pulled me and my brother aside and he said one of y'all is going to be a doctor and one of y'all is going to be a lawyer I was nine I was goingon to say what you like 10 years old yeah oh my gosh turning it on early so you're spot on that external conditioning has a lot to do with it and this is the big problem right so if we

like look at things like social media let's take like the example of body dysmorphia in men so there's a lot of these like videos of these dudes who are super ripped right steroid use uh anabolic steroid use is an all-time high that's like it's actually like a a under the radar Public Health crisis that I Think is going to blow up in our faces really soon so so it's not just and this is where I I think it's like this is where my Approach is maybe a little bit different because a lot of people will

look at that and they'll say Okay social media is the problem but this is where I would say well hold on a second so you can have an external input but then the system that it is entering ultimately determines the impact of that Input yeah that makes sense when I see somebody on in on Instagram on a travel vacation I don't get depressed I don't even care I can do that but I I know a lot of my friends are like they they see that and they sigh and then they like lament about how that's

never going to be something they can do cuz they're just out of college or whatever so so when you lack confidence in yourself when you lack Direction in your life then whatever sensory input you get will Make you think you need to go in that direction see if I have no idea where I'm going in life and I watch some video of some guy like sailing in the Medan you're like that's the direction I want to go and then the next day I see someone who's working out and super ripped and I say that's the

direction that I want to go and the next day I see someone who's dating a very attractive person I say that's the direction I want to go I want to do this I want to do This I want to do this I want to do this and then we never get anywhere because all of that motivation is coming out from outside of us and if the signal from the outside changes then our motivation will change with it so what the real antidote is that we have to start to develop our motivation internally it's not about

what you should do it's about what you care about doing what do I actually want from my life once once you start to discover Those kinds of things your motivation will be far more sustainable and very easy because it's what you want to do it'll be just as easy as sitting at home and playing video games and eating Cheetos all day these panels behind me being crooked is driving me nuts speaking of needing therapy that is driving me insane and I hope nobody else can see it can you see the panels behind me I can

now that you mentioned it they look C in it's annoying and I don't know How to fix it like clearly the camera's like a little off I'm I'm tempted to also leave it just to watch a thousand people up vote the one comment that's like what's up with the Crooked panels in the background it's definitely the camera cuz the whole thing well I I think actually Jordan This is perfect because you're getting a sensory input and what is it doing to you yeah it's making me self-conscious right now so a little dizzy there's an external

signal And internally you were Disturbed right and so I'm noticing a already to say the least right so your mind is thinking about this thing this thing needs to be shifted but this is another problem that a lot of people fall into now your internal piece is determined by whether you can straighten the panels I'm literally sweating right now it's not because it's hot in here and all it is is tilted panels yep it's not the panels it's not even the panels The camera like moved a slight bit off center it's just absolutely annoy you

can't concentrate on lost my lost my mind bleep the and and so this is the problem is we have all the sensory input but we don't know how to receive the sensory input we don't know how to modulate the sensory input and then we fall into another trap which is that the way that we want to fix things is by tilting the camera which is fair Enough I'm with you I'm I'm now it's bothering me too yeah yeah great but we need to keep in mind that this is where a lot of people like lose

control of their life because if you need the panels to be straight in order for you to be at peace your peace is now determined by the external world does that kind of make sense it does and that for that reason I'm going to leave these crooked for the rest of the show and the other reason is because I have no idea How to straighten the camera without taking a a bunch of time and wasting your time which I'm not going to do um yes that was great and I I appreciate that I was going

to edit that out but now it's like we got to leave that in top comment what's up with the Crooked panels so so just pay attention to when the external world makes you feel a certain way a lot of us default to changing the external world oh my parents are mad at me because I didn't Choose the right Topic in college to study I didn't pick the right major and so now what I'm going to do to make myself feel better is I'm going to Cave to the people around me so that they are happy

and if they are happy then I'm happy this is something that especially a lot of men do because we're kind of socialized in this way women are socialized in a very similar way slightly different but we have to live up to the expectations of Other people this is where the shs come from yes and then the problem is that if I have to live up to the expectations of other people for myself to be happy that means someone manipulative in my life will figure out that if I can make if I can be unhappy towards

this person I can control their behavior huge open door for man bosses parents girlfriends boyfriends friends right I can express unhappiness towards you that makes you feel bad and the way That you make yourself feel better is by making me feel better now I control your happiness with puppet strings yeah oh my goodness that is so dangerous incredibly dangerous that that is incredibly dangerous I'd love to discuss the the sense of purposelessness that I think a lot of people are feeling I I know we're kind of already edging into that but I've read statistics at

porn add is on the rise no surprise with the availability of porn having gone through The roof in the last you know 10 or 15 years suicide is on the rise uh you mentioned that especially among men um I think also especially among asian-americans this is horrifying because that means if you're like 18 to 24 the most dangerous thing in your life isn't even your car anymore it's yourself yeah so that's for that's for Asians right so so Asians are raised to be very risk averse so they're less likely to have accidents As a cause

of death which then then so that their accident rate is lower and they're they're more dangerous to themselves so it is I think that maybe the leading cause of death in asian-americans aged 18 to 24 there are a couple of other things that go into that including the inability to get help so there's a culture that really doesn't focus on mental illness uh doesn't really focus on they they really are like externally motivated so like if You're getting straight A's you should be happy and so the the one of the biggest mistake one of the

most damaging things you can do to someone is tell someone that they should be happy because of a particular circumstance right now it's their fault that they are unhappy so this becomes their burden once again you should be happy whereas if the right move is to really ask yourself if you have every Reason to be happy and you're still not happy the question is why right if you really want to be find become happy it's not people bludgeoning you and telling you hey you should be happy someone told me 10 10,000 times that I should

be happy doesn't make me happy the question is to ask myself why am I not happy yeah makes me feel worse actually cuz it's like well I'm supposed to feel happy I if if you told me I was supposed to feel crappy like I like going in law school First year is horrible and everyone's like it's supposed to be miserable then it ends and you're like okay so when it's miserable you go everyone's miserable it's supposed to be miserable it's much better than somebody being like wait you're not having the best time of your life

everyone else is having a great time yeah you're the only one that's miserable something's wrong with you man so so I I think we we see that very clearly right now where a lot Of people believe they should be happy and that's once again because they're we're fed this sensory diet of oh if I like have this particular shirt or have this particular bag ha I'm so happy right if you look at like beer commercials it's people who are incredibly in shape socializing at the beach that's not if you go to a grocery store and

you watch who's buying beer it's not models at the beach right no generally not and and yeah so this is a Huge problem and you kind of mentioned purpose so like let's talk about that for a second so I think what happens when we get bombarded with this sensory information is we literally we externalize our attention we don't pay attention to our internal signals and then what happens is it's a war for or senses so whoever can convince us that their product will bring us the most happiness that's what we end up chasing so we

have these very Sophisticated marketing tactics advertising tactics where everyone says oh by the way you're unhappy buy this thing and it'll make you happy but it doesn't matter who wins you as the user will lose because you're not paying attention to yourself so we're seeing a whol scale externalization of our attention and the more we disconnect from ourselves the harder it is to find purpose because the world can't tell you What your purpose is you have to figure out what your purpose is and that happens primarily through introspection I guess if getting purpose externally worked

then tiger parents whatever the Indian version of that or the white person version of that that would work really well but it doesn't um but it doesn't yeah right so we don't we don't know what we want there's also like another really interesting neuroscientific angle here which is that If you look at technology usage the other thing that technology usage tends to do is numb our emotions not just our bad emotions our good emotions as well and once we start numbing our emotions we don't know what we feel and so when I lose my internal

Compass because I become numb internally how are you supposed to find purpose when you don't feel anything right then the cycle repeats because now I don't know what to do now I'm not motivated let me go watch This motivational Guru and then the motivational Guru will give me the answers I I I feel like I might be talking about something separate here so stop me if I am but my a friend of mine who who I grew up with who I saw recently reminded me of this he's like you're doing exactly what you wanted to

do as a kid I'm like what are you talking about and he's like you're uh you're talking on I mean it's not the radio it's it's it's the modern Equivalent I was like oh yeah and he reminded me of how we used to build FM transmitters in in the basement and Tred like got plans and went to Radio Shack which doesn't exist anymore and soldered the thing together and put in a legal antenna on it that we fish out of someone's garbage and then it was like decades went by or a decade at least went

by decade and a half and I became an attorney of all things right and my friend was like I never saw that coming And I'm like I'm thinking I never wanted to do that what happened and and when I started doing this the podcast I was like this is awesome and then I you know reminded me that I always wanted to do this kind of thing but the signals had been so drowned out by you can't make money doing that that's not a real job that's something one in a million people get the chance to

do that y yada I I forgot about it I and not not I put it aside I literally forgot about it forgot It even existed yeah I I I think it's a very common experience I I I like the phrase drowned out I think it's it's a a beautiful way to describe what is happening to a generation of people our own internal signals are getting drowned out by everyone including the boomer generation telling us hey like you should be doing this you should be doing this right so what's going on right now like at least

in the United States and parts of Europe as well is we were all Sold in the US on this dream that okay if you go to college if you go to college you'll get a good job if you get a good job you'll be able to afford a house you'll be able to get married right and these were this was the dream that we were sold but something happened along the way where now people who go to college are saddled with a bunch of debt you know are that the wage has relatively speaking decreased compared

to things like home prices so you have a Generation of people I think 50% of people under the age of 30 are now living with their parents who are adults that's terrifying man I that that's the the the the pressure the pressure is real I I'll never forget I wrote a letter of recommendation to Michigan law for this Korean kid who I knew who said his mom literally told him I'm going to kill myself if you don't get into this school imagine the pressure this insanely unreasonable pressure and then He didn't get in and you

know I'm pretty sure she didn't actually kill herself as a result but like I would I too would live in my parents basement if I thought I was an abject failure because I didn't get into like Harvard Medical School and that was their dream for me since I was a little kid even though that is patently unfair yeah absolutely right and that's what happens is is we get drowned out by this external pressure it's not just parents so sometimes you Have parents that are supportive sometimes you don't but we have a pretty uniform pressure from

social media to be a particular way to be rich to be successful to be you know six figures six feet and at least a 6 inch deck if you're a dude there's the female equivalent of like no thigh gap I mean sorry thigh gap man and having no thigh gap is like the worst thing on the planet and and so women are taught this kind of stuff too and so we're all being Taught like hey you should be this way and at the same time all of these Tech all these Technologies are numbing our internal

signals and then we get confused why there's a lack of purpose right the lack of purpose comes from an inability to connect with yourself and being drowned out and so the the really interesting thing is even if you look at some of these things like pornography addiction so one of the top variables that Correlates with pornography addiction is a sense of meaninglessness in life it's crazy like people who have no direction in life basically like don't have anything else to do except for jerk off and so they just watch pornography that's crazy what by the

way I'm sorry I'm hung up on this six feet six figures six inches I or six feet 6 inches six figures but I'm sorry I don't know why I'm hooked on I'm short by two inches and I'll let everybody guess what I mean by that so uh yeah right I should just stop talking um I so the interesting thing is if you want to talk science there for a second so sence the majority the majority of nerve endings for um the vagina is actually in the first like 2 or 3 in so so if you

really look at it technically width is probably more important past two or three inches than length I I yeah that thank you I was I was trying to make a joke that didn't work out so well but hey the Science is important the science is important so there there's a lot of stuff I think especially around sexuality where a lot of like people feel like they're underperforming or whatever A lot of people don't realize do you know how long the average sex act is uh in this house single digit minutes what do you think it

is average Society oh God it's literally going to be like five minutes or something it's going to be shorter yeah so the average sex act LS lasts between three and s minutes so here's the crazy thing right so we have all these like ideas from pornography that you're supposed to have sex for like two hours so if you actually ask women there's a fascinating study that pulled women and 50% of women say say that if sex lasts longer than 10 to 15 minutes it's too long now there's a lot of people who will make jokes

that means that they're not having sex with like good people and that means they're not Doing it right and some of that could be true but I think that this is where we have to be super careful because like do are we using our preconceived notions to interpret the data or are we using the data to interpret to change the way that we view the world and so there's a lot of stuff around sex and sexuality that like people just don't understand it's not you don't have to some stud porn star with a gigantic dick

to have a healthy sexual relationship whether You're heterosexual homosexual asexual I would love to see the age curve cuz it's like college 10 to 15 minutes I mean warmup maybe and then it's like fast forward to 44 and you're like 5 to seven minutes is it more like five or is it more like seven and that's the average right so there's a lot of people under that bar and like I don't even want to ask what it's going to be like when I'm 60 it's going to be like sex I've heard of that um yeah

so I Think the age curve is actually the other way around is it is it really yeah so like generally speaking you know if you look at like uh arousal and ejaculation the older you get the longer it takes that's interesting that's part of the reason why probably people drink so much in college because it slows things down that yeah you that actually that absolutely makes some sense uh that definitely could be the issue uh you Know I I want to I want to be conscious of time here I want to talk about emotion especially

emotion among men because we really don't allow men to have that many emotions in society it it's I I I'm tempted to say we don't allow men to suffer but I is that something I've heard from you because I feel like that's so so I I'll give you all kind of like a a a really classic example that I've started to use that a lot of people Don't like so we we tend to have this view in society that all emotions are okay right so sadness is okay it's okay to feel sadness it's okay to

fear feel fear it's okay to feel anger and it's not just that men aren't allowed to feel emotions is that generally speaking we have different kinds of biases for men and women in the amount of emotions they're allowed to feel so if a woman for example gets angry she's called a [ __ ] like she's Like so so if you look at like the way that people will judge a woman who expresses anger in the workplace it's very very very negative so women are allowed to cry that's like socially acceptable but they're not allowed to

feel angry often times they're not allowed to feel shame they're not allowed to be anything but happy buoyant and supportive so it's not just a problem for men it's just the problem manifests in different ways but for men Absolutely there are huge emotional problems so the first of the is that we say that men are not allowed to feel emotions then people will counter this and they'll say okay but like men are allowed to cry like it's okay to cry I let men cry and I'm very supportive around that okay hold on a second but

what about anger is it okay for a man to get angry is it okay for a man to yell well now suddenly this is an emotion right and we're allowed to feel our Emotions except for anger because the moment that you become an angry man if you start yelling as a man you're a threat you're a danger so now suddenly men are not Al allowed to feel anger the big irony is that this is the only emotion that we are conditioned to feel so yeah I was going to say anger is one of the most

common emotions that like my dad basically has two emotions happy and angry and it's it's like he gets frustrated or sad it just turns Into anger like he doesn't even have the other channels right they're just all blended into the anger channel so so anger and frustration become umbrella emotions for men where we're not allow like we're not like socialized to cry or feel shame right so if men are told like hey I'm ashamed of myself or I'm scared of something what we'll do is offer something called instrumental support So if you're afraid of something

as as a Boy what people around you men and women will do is they'll tell you to go conquer your fear so you're not allowed to feel fear the goal is to get rid of fear and then in some ways we're we're conditioned to feel anger like you said your dad was angry all the time so you as a boy were like okay this is okay to do but you didn't see your dad cry so that's not okay and then also like as dudes like we get pissed right that's socially acceptable To get pissed so

something subtle happens where we're conditioned to feel basically only anger and all the other emotions are suppressed and then once we become adults especially in the current day and age which I I don't think it's bad like I don't think like a lot of what's Happening Here is bad I think we just need to understand what the changes are and adapt it's not that something is good or something is bad that's kind of My Philosophy so now we have a really Interesting scenario because sometimes I I'll see see this scenario where let's say that there

are two people in a relationship and they are having some kind of disagreement one of the people is sad and the other one is angry in this situation do we treat both of these people as the same do we say that you're allowed to feel anger and you're allowed to feel sadness or if you see a man yelling and a woman crying do we place a value judgment on that and we say one Person is bad and one person is good interesting now anyone who's listening to that like 90 plus percent of people will say

if one person is is yelling and the other person is crying one person is the aggressor and the other person is the victim yeah but as a psychiatrist I've seen situations where one partner is Unfaithful is Ser serially Unfaithful gets caught out the other partner is understandably angry and then the person who's Unfaithful starts Crying and in that scenario is it okay to be angry and okay to cry so this is where there's like when we really when the rubber hits the road on a lot of these like emotional situations men really struggle women struggle

too I'm not saying that they struggle more than women or less than I don't think those comparative statements are useful the the challenges that women face are different because for a lot of women the Reason that they're afraid of angry men and they view angry men as aggressors is because their experience of men is angry aggression that anger correlates with aggression that anger correlates with abuse I think something like one out of three women is like sexually assaulted jeez right so so this the numbers are staggering that is horrifying and and a lot of people

a lot of dudes just don't understand this because we're not sexually assaulted quite as frequently But there's a whole other problem of when we are sexually assaulted it's okay to sexually assault a dude right right um but so there's all kinds of challenges and so what happens with men is as we not allowed to feel these emotions this is what's really important to understand just because you don't feel an emotion doesn't mean that the emotion isn't existing and isn't acting you're just numb to it there's a big difference between you Know having the lights off

and having your house flooded and the lights on and having your house flooded house is flooded either way it's just whether you see it or not so then what happens is we have a lot of emotional suppression and then these emotions then do things like impact our motivation this is why it's hard for me to stop eating Cheetos and leave the house because I have so much subsurface emotion that is keeping me Here and if you talk to these people and you ask them why don't you leave the house they will say what's the point

I tried leaving the house it didn't work I I talked to someone today who applied for 300 jobs and got like one interview oh God that's right super demoralizing people who will like be on Tinder for 2 years years and get like four matches and they'll go through thousands of people a year and and so if you kind of look at That someone will say okay this is logical this is why I don't leave the house but if you really pay attention to that there's emotion underneath that's driving that logic they feel hopeless and this

can become a self-fulfilling prophecy because every once in a while if I muster up the courage to leave the house but I'm not optimistic if I'm not optimistic about my ability to enter into to a healthy relationship and that I can be a loving partner it's going to Sabotage my dating for sure and at the root of this is all this subsurface emotion that is sabotaging people's lives and they don't even realize it you must have seen I mean you must see some pretty heartbreaking things as a therapist applying to 300 jobs and getting one

interview is bad but I can imagine that's just like the tip of the iceberg do you talk with a lot of incel type guys or like the toxically Masculine guys who front all the time yeah absolutely so I love does that always start with trauma uh I don't always is a tricky term when it comes to science but I'd say most of the time yes so if you look at a lot of like it's not just trauma so so yeah but I think if fair to say so I would say that you know 80 to

90% of people who are on the red pill incel spectrum that I have worked with and I love working With these people by the way it's like incredibly gratifying work and I think one of the biggest mistakes that we make in society is that we like see when depending on what your demographic is if you are a criminal in some way sometimes Society will judge you and will punish you for it sometimes we'll say like oh this person needs help right so when someone like steals a lot we thankfully a large portion of society has

realized that this person needs help More than punishment the interesting thing is that the incels are so good at being [ __ ] that no one wants to help them yeah but what they need more than anything else is help they are this way because they've been rejected Time and Time and Time Again they're absolutely responsible because they're lots of decisions that they've made but the world hasn't been very kind to them and it usually does start with trauma so it starts with something like you know Getting made fun of being attracted to a girl

having a bad breakup having someone make fun of you and then once that seed of trauma starts then there's a real problem because there's this vicious cycle where they amplify all kinds of like benign or neutral things to feel really negative like but anyway there's weird kinds of cognitive biases but I'd say yeah like a lot of times it starts with trauma and then what happens is just Like the physical body when I get traumatized by something I form a callus I don't want to be hurt that way again so then what happens is they

start to do all this dehum ing of other people they start to restrict themselves from emotionally connecting with other people um and and then it like becomes a vicious cycle I'm I've I wouldn't say well maybe I will the incel thing for a while was sort of an obsession of mine right Because I remember the Genesis of this community online and seeing the most hateful stuff that I'd ever seen in my life being posted on the incel message boards this is maybe like 10 uh 15 years ago now and there was a guy on one

of the boards named Elliot Roger who ended up killing a bunch of people and murdering men and women with I think like a machete it was really just horrifying and I remember just the very beginning of that because I was doing this dating coach thing back in the day and these guys would all would all sort of gravitate towards that like these guys can help us meet women and then it like they realized a lot of the people in the dating coach industry are just like Shameless grifters or information marketers that were like not able

to do anything or like you get a normal guy like yeah I can teach you how to talk to girls but what's that the pickup artist Community yes and then you But then you you get a normal guy and you can teach them how to talk to women but then you get a guy who's like really really far behind and you go oh gosh I can't really do anything for this person they need therapy not like a bnch not like practice at bars because they're shy and they grew up a certain way right it's like

a whole different animal so they there's a lot of anger that that came out of this and it's started to get aimed at women and that was really Disturbing to see it was really it's it still is yeah so I mean I I I think that there's a lot of bad stuff in the incel world for sure and I think what we're starting to see is like this phenomenon there's a lot of literature on this on online radicalization so if you look at the way that content algorithms work so remember that the goal of the

platform is to keep you on the platform they don't want you switching off to something else and so what if we look at The human brain the human brain has this very simple principle of tolerance so if I you know if I see one cute cat video in order for me to get the same dopaminergic uh release I need to see a cuter cat so over time I need like more intense stimuli to get to the same dopam energic impulse so we see this tolerance even with something like alcohol right so two beers is enough

to get me drunk while I'm a lightweight and then over Time I need six beers to get drunk I need eight beers to get drunk the brain works the same way it's all the same receptors gab receptors in the brain for alcohol and so actually it's different receptors but same basic biological principle and so what happens with with incels is that they start to join these communities and there's a there's a really scary thing that happens because as they start voicing some of these things they get banned so then what Happens is you take all

of the worst players and you and them all from the relatively normal communities where they get differing perspectives and then they start coalescing in like corners of the internet this is where online radicalization happens and furthermore this is driven by some of the platforms too I don't think that they like intentionally do this but this is just their their platform is like we want to do whatever keeps people engaged so then What happens is if you watch one like incel video your feed will show you more incel videos and in order to stay on the

platform you're going to watch more and more and more extreme things to get that emotional activation and so this results in online radicalization and then like the online radicalization in a very few number of cases so the problem with incel violence is that you literally have like a dozen cases that are highly highly publicized whereas the vast Majority of incels are like non-violent like like 99% yeah yeah I'm doing I'm doing a show about this because it it is almost like oh my God this person's going to not only are they weird they're going to

murder me and it's like no they're that's not likely to happen you're more likely to get by but do you want to take that chance right of course not so you compare that with women who have you know 30% of women who get sexually Assaulted and they see someone who's an incel and they're like what are the odds that this person I mean onethird is like that's pretty bad odds yeah that's terrible right and then this feeds the cycle because now what happens is the incels they never get a chance this is one of their

big complaints and then they attribute it to their jawline or or whatever but there there's very real dynamics on both sides um and and I think it's like it's A tragedy what happens within cells but I I think we've actually been pretty successful at like helping these people often times it shocks me how little help in compassion they need to get on the right course I agree with you I've seen this with my own eyes and what what was kind of a surprise for me was finding out that some of the most vitriolic incels they

don't actually hate women they're just more they actually just hate themselves or parts of themselves I I I think that's absolutely projection right so so what what happens is you start to I there's so much stuff that's like wrong about the red pill or incel kind of ideology I mean scientifically wrong um and one simple example is that they assume that all women are the same like they use like women are dot dot dot there's no account for the variability right and and working as a psychiatrist you can look at tons of research on attachment

style sexuality motivation Like human beings are highly individual and so you can't judge one you can't judge a race of women based on the actions of one woman like that's just not fair so there are some fundamentals there that are really like off um and then there's another challenge which is that they don't have any experience and if they have no experience they have nothing to counteract right this like online vitriol that's a that's a really good Point right because one of the questions is how come who have bad breakups don't all turn into incels

and the reason is there's the reasons Are Legion however one of the main ones in my opinion is let's say I have a really bad breakup and I'm 20 well what if I had three other relationships with really great girls before that that we're super nice we're still friends it wasn't a big deal one I just moved away the other one was college and we ended up getting job you Know and then we had then I date some crazy horrible person in my early 20s it's like wow well that I might have a little trauma

associated with it but I'm not immediately going to throw everybody into one bucket but if you've only had trauma or only had being bullied or negative experiences with women and then rejection you you're right you just don't have anything on the other end of the scale yeah and we see that a lot where where often times with a lot of The you know incels that we'll work with red pillars that we work with there'll usually be one really bad relationship um and and this is even the crazy thing is that it's not even that like

the woman they were dating was necessarily very toxic or anything it's just something it's one really cuz you know sometimes you can have a bad breakup with like two good people like that can happen yep and and then what happens is that they they go through This period of online radicalization um by the way having four Relationships by your early 20s nowadays is Rarity sure so so now we're seeing also like this like social skills atrophy where like people just like dudes don't know how to talk to girls anymore like it's just not something where

because where everything is like texting now and even then saw this with my own eyes yeah so so there there's a social skills atrophy that prevents people from kind of like Getting back into it and you're spot on that there's a lot of self-hatred and shame and then we project that out into the world so often times what we find is incredibly successful when I work with a lot of like red pillars or incels first of all working on that internal shame processing some of that trauma but also teaching them how to talk to girls

right so part of the reason that we have a coaching program instead of like a Therapy Program is we realized at some Point that therapy is insufficient like nowhere in my therapy training was I taught how to talk to a girl but if you really look at what a lot of dudes need right now it is the ability to flirt like people don't know how to flirt anymore so there's a lot of like social skills that we've taken for granted even parenting skills like that's why we wrote a parenting book first parenting skills that we

take for granted or don't apply anymore the world is changing and We need to adapt our skills to change with it I've got a good friend who's a a dating coach a really good one for men and I thought oh that's still going on and he's like are you kidding me it's it's because I got out of that business you know when I met my wife and you know I I really sort of exited there's way more demand for that stuff now um not the pickup stuff but actual like dating help from mature people who

are functional not like dudes in bars Picking up chicks uh it it is it is quite shock how th those skills used to kind of naturally for many of us just follow right you go to high school maybe you're not great but then you go to college and you got a buddy who's like dude just talk to her like what do I say and they just tell you to do something stupid and it kind of works and you're like there's alcohol involved you're like yeah this isn't so bad you know that's kind of Gone for

a lot of guys absolutely is right so so like we we are also seeing I think some of the effects that we're seeing are actually due to co so for 2 years you know everything was virtual and so we we missed out on some very major Social Development time and now we're kind of like behind and once you're behind it's hard to catch up unless someone is intentionally trying to write things so it it it's super challenging it tell Tell me that before we run out of time we got to talk about the AI girlfriends

that are trying to fill the void a little bit and i' I've seen a lot of criticism like oh the AI girlfriends they're they're going to they're going to destroy men's ability to have relationships and I remember thinking to myself men's ability to create relationships what are you talking about that doesn't exist anymore like this isn't filling this is not creating a Void this is filling a void that's been there for literally like 15 plus years and it's only getting worse by the day yeah so I think it's a very astute observation that often times

what happens with things like AI girlfriends is we use this as creating the problem whereas the problem was there a long time ago like every like thankfully now people are talking about you know male mental health and suicide and things like that like that's getting traction And we're taking some of these issues seriously but suicide rates for men have been four times as high as women for like a 100 plus years like this has been going on for a long time a lot of these problems pre-exist and I think the AI girlfriends is a great

example of there's a group of like lonely men who don't know how to socialize who society's not interested in helping by the way right so no one's out there like fundraising for the Rehabilitation of incels like it's crazy we'll do like fundraising for like it's crazy how much more when I tell people like oh I worked in in a jail for three months everyone's like oh my God you're such a great person right these are people who are like I don't think they understand like these are I'm helping convicted rapists yeah like yeah pedophiles like

that's who's in jail but somehow helping criminals is a good thing which I think it is I think we Should have compassion for all human being but then you tell someone like oh yeah I'm trying to help incels and it's like e like oh my God those guys are such losers so there's there's this moral judgment that we place on these people and they're struggling a lot and I think the AI girlfriends same thing is going to happen they're going to get more sophisticated uh just like all other technology and and right now you've got

These AI girlfriends and then at some point someone's going to combine it with VR and then at some point someone's going to combine it with ar and then at some point someone will figure out that an AI girlfriend who throws a temper tantrum is going to be more addictive than a an AI girlfriend who always does what you want oh my God that mimics the human brain right so real relationships have you know things like we had a fight and then we had Makeup sex and I was gonna say imagine your AI girlfriend gives you

the silent treatment throws a huge tantrum breaks some of your virtual stuff and then has like Furious online virtual sex with you and guys are like oh I'm into that and it's like you have like a normal relationship human beings are into that right so anytime we have conflict and then when we rejoin that's how bonds form and so so I hadn't even thought about breaking your things online but They start deleting things from your deleting your loot boxes and you're like damn you and and then some some company is going to realize that you

you have an AI girlfriend that's going to integrate with por pornography but to unlock the most intense pornography you have to go through the sequence of them having some kind of problem right like it's going to be crazy and what's going to happen is we're going to approximate human relationships more and more and More and as we figure out how all those things happen things will get more addictive and things will get worse and this be yeah go can you even imagine like guys guys are getting into this right cuz they're like oh women I

can't talk to them they're too complicated there's too much drama and then it's like in 5 10 years it's going to be like I just can't with AI women man they're too annoying they there's too much drama they're deleting my loot crates I I'm All for flesh flesh and Bones women from now on man I'm swearing off the AI chicks too much drama maybe I I think the really scary thing is that the AI develop the the the companies who make this stuff will tie trate it right so they'll keep it at the level that

keeps people engaged yeah it's going to be addicting they'll figure out what's too much and what's too little and they'll find that right threshold and like this may sound very Bleak but I think like The only reason that this invasive species is a problem is because we as human beings have not like trained ourselves to resist it right we let this pig into the swamp and we let it run wild we didn't even try to do anything against it the good news that we've seen is that it doesn't take a whole lot actually like it

takes like maybe 3 or four months of work um you know there's some evidence that even watching our YouTube channel like improves like some Mental health outcomes by about 10% we're trying to put together a study to really look into that so we found a signal but it's not like a research finding because we didn't do a formal study yet but the good news is that as you start to learn some of these things like reducing your alyia which means increasing your emotional awareness um as you stop numbing yourself as you stop start introspecting as

you start to cut back some on your Technological input as you work on your social skills as you work on your confidence um we have this awesome thing that that we used to do way more called Social Sandbox which was like 120 to 200 people would show up and we would practice social skills for like an hour and and really fantastic outcomes like people learned a lot they're like oh I want to break up with this person I don't know what to say we're going to go through it three or four times hey it Went

great so the good news is that the only reason I think we're losing this war and everything seems so dire is because we actually haven't been fighting back right there's very little regulation there is very little personal training if we think about you know drug use and alcohol we have parents who will regularly discuss this with their kids they'll say hey I know you're 15 now people are going to want to start drinking people are going to want to Start smoking here's what's going on you could doctors are trained to talk about it parents know

how to talk about it but no one knows how to talk about technology people are at a loss so I I I'm pretty optimist mytic like I think you know we've seen some real turnarounds with some really hardcore incels um I think a lot of stuff from Red Pill frankly is pretty good so a lot of it is like you know they'll now Advocate that you go see a therapist They Advocate that you become independent they Advocate that you develop confidence part of the reason that these these people are so successful is that they're the

only ones that offer Solutions yeah you by these people you mean like the Andrew Tate Bugatti man influencers are who are resonating so hard I think a lot of people don't like to hear this and they don't really think about it but why is Andrew Tate why do You think Andrew Tate is so successful yeah well they're resonating super hard with a certain demographic and it's really easy to trash these guys there's plenty to trash these guys for don't get me wrong but we need to be listening and paying attention to why these guys are

so insanely popular because that's where the information is absolutely and and frankly they're the only guys out there validating men's concerns right some men's concerns right now completely Agree that's my read on it too so so right now if you're man and you're struggling people will tell you you're privileged you shouldn't be struggling that's the most common answer that men receive okay and so there's only one group of people who say yeah your life is [ __ ] here's how to fix it and those tend to be these like toxic misogynistic influencers right we don't

have healthy men saying hey I know your life is hard here let me help you and by The way you don't have to become an [ __ ] and my misogynistic in order to develop confidence these two things don't have to go hand in hand it's tough and and it's almost like you almost have to go through that phase which hopefully it's a phase to get through the other side I look I would love also if it didn't involve being super gross and aggro for no reason but if you think about it it's almost like

just dudes hitting puberty the the Emotional part of puberty really late in the game like if a 13-year-old is like yeah [ __ ] and that you're just like roll your eyes and you're like oh hormones you check your watch you're like it's another two years but when someone's 25 and is doing that you're like uh I don't want to be around this person but it's not necessarily it's yeah it's almost like they're just going through that phase late and it's cringy and it's horrible But it's horrible for everybody especially them yeah absolutely and I

I think another thing that we're kind of seeing is a lack of male leadership so if you look at like there's a really famous study on elephants where if you look at like adolescent elephants who are delinquents the number one thing that leads to adolescent elephants being delinquents and like doing things like even sexual assault and all this kind of stuff is the absence of uh a dominant Male elephant in the tribe so generally speaking even when I was 13 and and you know I was flexing my misogynistic wings and what put me in check

was like other dudes right like I I joined a fraternity in college and they're like hey bro like that's not cool and it's funny cuz I I work with some orts professionals and I see this a lot too where it's like when there's an older wiser normal Esports like old hand at Esports who's like 24 and there's some 16-year-old like hot Stuff kid right like it's the 24y old who kind of calms them down and I think what we're starting to see in our society is a lack of that older male kind of like guidance

because we're so online because there's online radicalization you know because you're joining these communities where the people who are happily married with kids don't you don't hang out in Insel forms and I don't either so there's a segregation of Society where we're seeing more radicalization because like men are not helping men and I know it's it's Vogue to blame women but I think like we're just as much to blame no of course I 100% agree I remember when I played football in middle school there was just like thuggish kid who was from a poor uh

area and he had transferred into our school and his brother showed up and he was also like this kind of gangster dude and I remember a lot of us were trying To impress him by being like yeah dumb girls they don't know anything and I remember he was like guys guys guys don't even start that talk I know you don't really mean it I know you're just trying to front but we don't you you think you're hard hard guys don't talk like that hard guys respect their ladies and I remember being like what am I

seeing right now I've never heard this before from anyone especially a cool tough guy and we immediately cut that [ __ ] out like nobody had another word of that crap for the rest of our Middle School career it was over yeah I think that's what's absent right now right so and I think there there are some of you know some of these people who are will study like male Dynamics will sort of point out this some people attribute this to things like higher divorce rates and stuff like that and I'm sure that that has

something to do with it but um you know I I think it's really Challenging because these people don't have somewhere else to turn they're full of resentment they get rejected by societ people don't really give them a chance actually that's not entirely true sometimes they get Second Chances third chances and fourth chances and they screw them up over and over and over again and then there's someone there who's got their arms open waiting to accept you and saying yeah your life is hard here's how I I'm going to teach you To fix it and then

the other really scary thing that I think people have difficulty admitting is that a lot of that stuff does work like that's the other thing that we need to really like understand is that when you start devaluing other human beings yeah it makes it easier for you to relate to them with a lack of confidence it does right so if I don't care about you then I'm not going to be anxious about what you think of me so it's a very very Toxic solution but it is a solution it it is the the problem that

I found from again from like doing the dating coach thing back in the day is you also screen out the high confidence high quality women that are going would otherwise have been in your life because if you start going I'm going to devalue people let okay you just lost the top 20% of confident well- adjusted healthy women cuz they're not they're not going to sit around and deal with that so that now You've got this other pool of sort of equally damaged people that might pair with youc based on your your antics and that's not

good for either of you and it's this reinforcing cycle this negative cycle and Jordan that that that's like it's such a huge selection bias which I don't think people in that Community quite understand right so sometimes you know men will view or women will view relationships as transactional they're like oh women are Just in it for the money or whatever they'll say these kinds of things and then if you act like that and you talk like that the partners who are not in it just for the money who are interested in building a life with

you won't date you right they'll they'll receive your signals and they're like this is not a good match whereas the women who are interested in transactional relationships will date you because you're saying hey this is transactional Right I'm going to do this this is what you expect and then there's a group of people who are okay with that like there's always in the history of humanity there have been transactional heteronormative uh as well as homosexual relationships I'm sure and so then what happens you end up selecting for the partners that confirm your preconceived notions and

then this becomes evidence or data and then the cycle you see this you see this at the incels right they'll Go women will always leave you for a guy with more money or better muscles or whatever and when you no amount of convincing that you have is going to con is going to work because the guy who says that his wife left him for a dude with more money and because he was like running himself into the ground not taking care of himself or whatever the reason so he's going I have two women that left

me for those reasons and you're telling me no it's not true like What do you know Jordan you Schmo you don't know anything it's it's so psychologically dangerous because what happens in those cases and I've worked with people and not all those cases but in the cases that I've seen it's super it's there there's some psychological gymnastics here that is brilliant but scary so what people will do is like let's say that my wife divorces me because I am emotionally unavailable okay so there are some things that I am Responsible for and I can change

which could be part of the reason why my wife divorces me but the moment that I say she left me for someone who makes more money it removes my responsibility from the equation that's always what women do oh this is an act of nature this is the way the world is this is like gravity and so I am not to blame I am not responsible this is the way that women are she met someone who makes more money than I do Right that's why she left so I zero in on all of the things that

are outside of my control therefore absolving myself of responsibility and doing the work to change it it's the problem is if you don't know you're doing that you are stuck yeah that's what happens right that's why there's two divorces that that that's literally what happens and that's why these people need help and that's that's very true not Just of this these kinds of people I mean 80% of my patients are doing something psychologically that they're not aware of and it's our job as a society e either as medical professionals or through education or through books

or podcasts or whatever to help people their eyes and improve their lives you can't expect someone to do it on their own Dr K there's so much more we could discuss I think I got through like half my notes I am absolutely I Want to have you back sometime we didn't even I mean we got thankfully we covered AI girlfriends in part but I we didn't talk about screen time and as a parent of young kids I'm like oh my God they're going to all be they're going to be brain rot from cocoa melon or

whatever and there's there's all it's talk therapy there's a backlash against that I'd love to get your thoughts on that so that's all for next time but man thank you so much for doing the show we'll Link to your book how to raise a healthy gamer in the show notes as well we didn't even touch on a lot of the notes I had on that uh but that's that's a good sign man you know when we could have talked for four hours instead of 90 minutes that's always chef's kiss thank you so much Jordan it

was an absolute pleasure being here and you know for uh people in your audience who are young parents we instill a lot of this philosophy around understanding and Fostering Independence and how to raise a healthy gamer and if yall want some of these like social skills so like I I think some of my you know people like a lot of the interviews that I do and what we've really done is translate my communication techniques into that book now it's framed for parents but we've gotten a lot of really positive feedback from people who just want

to learn how to be better at relationships and communicating that a lot of the stuff in There is incredibly helpful so check it out if yall are interested in raising your kids to be healthy Gamers or learning how to be a better Communicator thank you Dr k thank you so much Jordan thank you for checking out this entire episode on YouTube if you want to follow up on this topic check out our podcast feed or visit us on our website at Jordan Harbinger tocom where you can learn more about our guest and dive even Deeper

into what we discussed today and remember YouTube only has about a quarter of the episodes that we release here on the Jordan Harbinger show audio feed any podcast app should have us check out the links in the description where you'll find access to all of our shows that don't appear on YouTube such as skeptical Sunday where we debunk topics like healing GMOs conspiracy theories Homeopathy tipping and even Lawns to find out if they're backed by Science and or logic also our feedback Friday episodes where we help people escape from Cults get raises at work and

take all manner of questions from you the audience and some of that stuff is dicey every episode of the Jordan Harbinger show has something useful that you can take away and apply in your own life and help you navigate what I know can often seem like the overwhelming and paralyzing challenges of modern life thank you for watching and remember to Like comment and subscribe cribe