SNEAKO - August 20, 2025
SNEAKO Gets Emotional Reflecting On His Life During Therapy
Episode Stats
Length
2 hours and 59 minutes
Words per minute
180.7954
Harmful content
Misogyny
5
sentences flagged
Toxicity
117
sentences flagged
Hate speech
30
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode, I catch up with my long time friend and Twitch streamer, Dr.K. We talk about his life growing up in Haiti, his struggles with depression and anxiety, and how he deals with it. We also talk about the importance of therapy and how important it is to seek it.
Transcript
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I talked to somebody, two kids in Gaza recently, 16, 14 years old, and seeing the mental strength
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they had. Going through, you know, no school, been at war for two years, constantly evacuating
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their homes, and they're still this mentally strong and not losing their minds. It's like,
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I think that more people should not give into, and they say this term, validate their feelings
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so much. Hopefully this isn't glazing too much. I think you have some serious profit energy. Like,
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you really do. I've talked to someone recently who went to therapy, and their problems were
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just so minuscule. You were really gonna kill yourself, and your parents are still around?
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Like, what's wrong with you? Would you say that when people judged you in this way that it hurt?
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How are you? Uh, not too bad. Not too bad. It's been, what has it been, like two years since I spoke to
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you? Has it been two years? It's been a while, yeah. I think it's been something like that,
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at least a year and a half, a year and some change. Okay. Um, give me one second. Let me see
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if I can... There we go. Chad, is everything good? Everything sound good? Yeah, my, well,
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not my apologies, but unfortunately you can't be on Twitch because of me, but that happens.
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Yeah, I think it's all good. Like I said, I'm more interested in the conversation and just
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catching up than the views, bro. I love to hear that, man. I'm sick of the,
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I'm sick of the views, too. I'm getting sick of the social media world. I mean, I'm gonna be here
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for a while, but it's just, you know, getting sick of it. What about you? What's new with you, Dr. K?
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Uh, not much, man. Um, I, I, uh, was on vacation for a little bit. Just got back.
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Okay. All right. Super cool. Do you speak French? Uh,
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je parle français un peu. No, no, I do not speak French.
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Rien français. Do you speak French? Oui, je parle français parce que mon père
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vient d'Haïti. I speak French because my dad's from Haiti, so. Oh, interesting. Cool.
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Yeah. Yeah, I didn't, I didn't realize you were half Haitian.
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Yeah, yeah. What'd you think I was? I, I don't know. Did you have, did you have a guess?
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Mm-mm. I mean, you're, you're American? Yeah, I was born in New York City. I'm an American,
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no matter what, uh, you know, some, some of the, the far right people are saying I should
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be deported and stuff, but I, I'm an American. So I, I noticed we're both smiling a lot.
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I, I know it's just, I, I'm, I'm, I'm happy to talk to you again. It's been a long time.
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I, I know. I'm happy to talk to you too. Oh, hold on a second. Oh, I don't know who that is.
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I wonder if I should answer. I think I'm not going to answer. Um, I got a phone call, but.
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Was that Mossad? Yes. How you been? I'm good. You know, I'm, I'm fantastic.
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I have been craving a vacation. It seems like, uh, was that refreshing? Was it good? I still haven't
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taken a vacation. Yeah. When was the last time you took a vacation?
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Well, so it's hard to tell. I mean, I've taken a lot of trips in the past several years, but
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strictly like, I'm just going to relax vacation. I can't remember.
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Yeah. So how long have you been making content?
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2000. I mean, technically 2011, but I would say I started my, my personal YouTube channel 2013.
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So, okay. So you've been making content for a long time. And have you not had a vacation in that
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amount of time? No, I mean, no, no, no, no. Since then, since then. Yeah. But I mean,
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like, since I really started, so I started streaming three years ago, I was making videos
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before that. Okay. And just so we're crystal clear, like, so I know that you're not a huge
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believer in psychiatry. I'm a psychiatrist. This is not therapy, right? We're on the same page
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there. I'm on the same page about it. I still don't believe in therapy. And I know that this is
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not licensed clinical practice. This is a stream where I'm speaking with a therapist. So legally,
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you're all good. I'm not going to sue you if I do. Thank you so much, man. Weight off my chest.
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I'm not going to. Yeah. So, so what do you, what do you want to, are we, we're just catching up,
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right? Sounds good. I mean, you told me some things. Should I bring that up? You said something
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to me in this way. So you said you're going through a midlife crisis and I told you, so am I,
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you know, I'm 26. I'm getting up there. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I, I think I said, I sort of went
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through one. I think I'm on the other side. Um, but yeah, I, I think I, I mentioned a little bit
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before, but yeah. So do you want to tell me, can you just catch me up a little bit? We can
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absolutely talk about that. Um, I'd love to talk about it. Um, can you catch me up a little bit
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though? So we spoke a couple of years ago. Has it been two years? I think, I think it was either
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early 24 or late 23. Okay. And, and so can you just catch me up what you've been up to since then?
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It's been, uh, there's a lot, there's a lot to say. I fought a UFC champion and I got like,
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like in the ring. Yeah. I got, that was a big one. And then I think, you know, it's funny. Last
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time I spoke to you, I think I spoke about the importance of fighting and I didn't speak about
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stuff like that. So that happened. I think it was a couple months later and yeah, well,
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it was funny because, I mean, it was fine. It was good. And after the, after the fight,
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you know, it was UFC champion, very, you know, a lot heavier than me, obviously more experienced
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than me. And he said, he, he tried to knock me out, could have knocked me out. And then,
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you know, people intervened and then the fight was over. So I think I got respect for that,
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for not, you know, for, for staying in there and not wimping out. But then the guy ended
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up, the guy's a little bit cuckoo. So, um, he was stuck, you know, he's still talking shit.
1.00
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This besides the point, I think most people understand my perspective and, you know, but
0.98
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your perspective was that, you know, well, he, so people keep saying, people keep saying
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like, okay, you asked him, you asked to spar him like, Oh, these influencers, they talk so much
1.00
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shit. I never talked shit about the guy. I went up to him. I said, Hey, nice to meet you.
1.00
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Congratulations on being the champ. And then he asked me to, he said, let's spar. And then,
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okay, sure. And the next day we sparred, tried to knock me out. He said he couldn't shook hands
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left and then continued to talk crap online, which is ironic because that's the whole reason
1.00
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you want to fight an influencer because they talk shit online. So kind of flipped the script.
1.00
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Then afterwards, I would say the most, the secondary major thing was started streaming on party.
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And then I worked with yay, um, Kanye West for five weeks in Spain. I was living with him in Spain for
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over a month and working closely with him. And that was a dream come true. And, you know,
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working with my favorite artists of all time and having like a close relationship. That was
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pretty, that was a big experience. And then now I'm here.
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And where's here? If that's not doxing you back in New York city, I moved back to New York at the
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end of last year. It's been almost a year back in New York. This is where I was born.
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And I moved to Miami for two years after the last time I spoke to you, I was in Miami.
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I moved to Miami, like at the end of 2022, when I thought my, when I was getting more famous and
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my safety was at risk and needed to get a gun, wanted to pay less taxes, get away from, you know,
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COVID New York X or post COVID New York. And then I came back back here and I still go back to Miami.
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So I got my place there, but back in New York, making my vlogs again, you know, doing what I
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originally started doing these videos. Yeah. What do you vlog about? Everything. Is it okay
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if I ask you these questions? Yeah, sure. Like you can ask me. I want to figure out about your
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midlife crisis. Once I get you up to speed with my life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can absolutely
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talk about my midlife crisis. Um, yeah. What do you vlog about? My vlogs are, I think the centered
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mainly around New York city, interacting with people, things that I'm thinking about current events,
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politics, funny things, talking to strangers, doing interviews, you know, sometimes they're
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motivational. Sometimes they're focused on God. Sometimes they're debate oriented and a lot of
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it's really personal. So, and I would say heavily edited. Sometimes it's drawing. It's just, you
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know, it's a expression of everything that I think and like.
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Cool. That sounds great. And so I think last time we talked, you had mentioned that, I don't
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know if you have always been, you're, you're talking, when you talk about God, you're Muslim.
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Yes. And, and have you had, I don't know if you had been to Hajj for the first time or
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are you Muslim like that? Are you? No, I'm, I'm basically Hindu. Okay. And yeah, I haven't
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been to the enemies. No, it's fine. It's fine. They might make some jokes, but, um, my, my editor's
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can do. Anyway, I, I've been to Mecca three, three, four times, but not Hajj yet. Okay. Wow.
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Okay. And how long have you been Muslim? Two and a half years. Okay. Oh, so you've been to Mecca
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three times in two and a half years? Yeah. I think three or four times. Wow. That's a lot. Yeah.
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Quite a bit. Yeah. What I, and I remember you saying that it was like a, a really, um,
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meaningful experience for you. Yeah. Have you been to the Taj Mahal? I have. Is that
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like the Mecca for, for Hindus, for Hinduism? No, man. So the, the, the Taj Mahal was, was
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built by Muslims. I knew that. So it was, I knew, I knew that. Oh my God. As soon as he
1.00
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said, yes, the architecture is built. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's all good. So, so it was, it was
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built by, um, India has a history of getting colonized by various people. So there were,
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um, there were basically around 1200 CE people from the Northwest started attacking India.
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Yeah. And then, uh, the Mughals, I think around 1500 to 1600, I'm a bit rusty on, on the, I think
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closer to 1600, they kind of invaded. And I don't remember, I think it was Aurangzeb's
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dad. I forget his name who built the Taj Mahal. So where's the, is there a pilgrimage for, for
00:10:07.000
Hindus? There are tons of pilgrimages, but we don't have, uh, Hinduism in that way is a
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pretty like decentralized religion. There's a lot of different paths. Um, there isn't like
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one site of pilgrimage. Oh, I know Vancouver, Toronto, maybe there's a bunch, a bunch, a
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bunch of Indian people in Canada. And there, there's some, uh, there's some pretty, like,
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uh, there's some growing anti-Indian sentiment in Canada. I've seen that. I've seen that.
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Yeah. So what do you, what, what have you been up to? What are your major life events
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since the last time we spoke? Yeah. So it's funny. Yeah. You know, we were talking about midlife
00:10:47.040
crisis for a second. So I think I sort of probably hit it around that time and maybe
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my conversation with you triggered my, no. So, um, yeah, so I, I think, you know, if
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we spoke at the end of, let's say 2023, early 2024, you know, so, so my thing was like, I
00:11:03.740
was working in Boston, um, was sort of like had an academic career. So that means I was
00:11:09.560
faculty and was teaching a lot and then, you know, had a job, had a private practice. And
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then I started kind of healthy gamer on the side and it was never supposed to be a thing.
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And so I started streaming on Twitch and then it grew a lot during the pandemic. And then,
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so I think for a couple of years, my life was sort of like responding to the immediacy of
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my circumstances. So once we started growing a lot, it's like, okay, we hired our first employee
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in April of 2020. Um, and, and so then like, you know, so we needed the one person then,
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and we needed another person and then we needed another person. And, and so we kind of grew and
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we started developing, like, I was kind of noticing that streaming and educating people
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on the internet only goes so far. So I developed a coaching program that I thought would like
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help people with the problems that I was seeing and addressed a lot of the shortcomings that
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I think exist in therapy. So built that one second. Yeah.
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They're, they're usually, um, pretty good about, uh, they, I don't usually work at this
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hour. So they're, you know, I think it's fair game. Um, so, and so then for a couple of years,
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it was just sort of like responding to round, maybe around 2023, I found myself like in a
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position that I never expected to be in and was also trying to think a little bit about
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like what I wanted. So suddenly like was, you know, had the burden of, of running a company,
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um, you know, grew a lot in terms of like brand and, and, and fame and all that started getting
00:13:08.040
If I could somewhere, did you stop being academic and you became a content creator?
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so I, I left my academic position maybe in 2021. Um, so was teaching as
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an adjunct for a little while and then healthy gamer just basically picked up quite a bit.
00:13:25.520
So became a full-time job. I still have a small clinical practice because I just don't
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want to let go of that. I really enjoy doing clinical work. Um, and then, but then it was
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sort of like, or wrote a book that went well, but then I was like, hold on a second. This
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was not, I never intended to be here. So then started thinking a little bit about what am
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I doing? What do I want to accomplish? Um, you know, thought a lot about financial stuff
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too. And in terms of like walked away from a pretty lucrative career and then was trying
00:14:00.800
to think about, you know, what do I, what do I want to do there? So I was just trying
00:14:07.220
Yeah. So I was kind of thinking like, what do I want the remainder of my life to be?
00:14:10.760
Um, because I was, I was actually quite unhappy, um, with a lot of just the way that like things
00:14:18.960
grow, right? So they like mutate and expand and you have all these like opportunities and
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stuff. And I, it's not that I'm not grateful. I think it's amazing stuff. Um, but I sort of
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found myself being pulled in a lot of different directions without having a whole lot of, on
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the one hand, I have a ton of autonomy, but on the other hand, it's like, okay, there's this
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opportunity. So then we're doing this and then this opportunity, and then we're doing
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this. Um, and so just like thinking through all that stuff and it's like, hold on a second.
00:14:43.960
What, what did we really show up here to do? What do I want to do? What's my dharma? That's
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the Sanskrit word for duty. So what's my dharma? Um, and then I think for a long time, I was
00:14:54.600
also spiritually coasting. So I did a lot of intense spiritual practice between the ages
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of about 21 to 28. And then when I started medical school, then for a period of about 10
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years, um, basically devoted a lot of energy to understanding medicine and understanding
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psychology, understanding neuroscience. And in that, in that time, so I haven't been to India in
00:15:20.840
like over 10 years, but I used to go every year. And so sort of, uh, sort of, so, I mean, I, I hope
00:15:28.760
to go back soon, but I, I think I, I sort of was like, I had sort of done my own spiritual
00:15:34.000
development, but it wasn't the priority over the last 10 years. It was like, okay, I
00:15:38.580
have the opportunity to train at a really great institution. I have lots of great teachers.
00:15:42.980
So I'm going to like learn this as well as I can. And then there was a lot of, um, you
00:15:49.880
know, exploration and growth and development in terms of entrepreneurship. I've worked a
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lot with entrepreneurs, founders that started around 2017. Um, and so worked a lot as like
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a psychiatrist and a coach to help people who are like co-founders and, and entrepreneurs
00:16:07.360
and things like that, CEOs, C-suite executives. But then to be in the, in the role myself was,
00:16:12.340
uh, eyeopening and, and educating experience. Um, and so then it's sort of like, okay, what
00:16:19.200
do I want to do with the rest of my life? And so decided on a couple of things, spent a lot
00:16:24.620
of time by myself, which I think really helps me a lot, spent a lot of time, uh, re-engaging
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and spiritual practice. And now I feel pretty good. So there's no midlife crisis. You're
00:16:35.240
fine. No, there was a midlife crisis, but a midlife crisis, I think is a developmentally
00:16:41.440
up. I think we don't appreciate how common they are and how they're also developmentally
00:16:48.120
appropriate. I think a midlife crisis is when you trade in your Toyota for a mid sports
00:16:54.400
car and you get divorced and then you start dating a girl who's like 10 years younger
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I think that that's, and then you end up on, on the, the, the big screen.
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You have an affair and then you get fired that that midlife crisis is cheating on your spouse
00:17:15.260
and getting a new, in a new hobby and hanging out at younger bars.
00:17:21.380
I think that, you know, the, the, I, I would, I think that that is certainly an identity crisis
00:17:26.760
of some sort. I think we sort of characterize that as a midlife crisis. I think many, many,
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many people, it's hard for me to say men versus women, but I think most of the midlife crises
00:17:38.060
that I've gone, uh, that I've helped people through happen to, uh, like that I've, I've
00:17:44.620
assisted people with. I think that just the numbers have been mostly men. Right. So, and
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I think that, you know, the, the textbook midlife crisis that you, you cited was also a dude,
00:17:55.760
right? Yeah. Um, and so I think it's for women. That's just menopause. Um, I don't think
00:18:03.900
so. So I, I think there's a false equivalency there. So I absolutely believe that menopause,
00:18:08.040
is a very serious time to take stock and maybe women go through something else helps a ton
1.00
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of women through menopause. But I think that the psychological load is different. I wouldn't
00:18:21.080
say that they're one-to-one, but I, I think a lot of men go through midlife crises that
00:18:26.460
don't manifest the way that you described, right? That's sort of the classic one. And that's
00:18:32.080
a midlife crisis. That's the other thing. I think that's a midlife crisis gone wrong. So
00:18:36.240
when you don't navigate a midlife crisis, I think the roots are very similar. So you kind of like
00:18:41.200
wake up one day and you're in this life that you maybe didn't want, didn't intend. You realize that
00:18:47.060
you've made a lot of sacrifices. You realize that there's a lot of stuff that you maybe have,
00:18:51.840
uh, you sacrificed a lot of what you wanted for the sake of other things. And then you kind of
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wake up and you're like, hold on a second. My life is, you know, time is passing me by.
00:19:02.660
I'm missing out on stuff. And then, you know, I mean, half of what you said, you started with
00:19:08.440
divorce there, right? In your example. That's part of it. Yeah. That's part of it. So I think
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a lot of that can be just a reaction to the divorce and that can have completely different
00:19:19.280
roots. It's not, you know, it's unnecessary, but I'm just, you know, I'm kind of joking around
00:19:23.920
about some of the components. Yeah. Yeah. No, but I, I, I mean, I, I totally get that you're joking
00:19:28.640
about it, but I think there's also a lot of truth to it, right? I mean, that does happen
00:19:32.220
and it's a trope that people are really familiar with. Yeah. Is that sufficiently? I'm 42.
00:19:41.680
Yeah. So that's around the age. So then what, what, what's, uh, and how does that make you
00:19:45.740
feel? How does what make me feel? Being 42. Fine. Oh, so you, see, where's the crisis? You're
00:19:55.640
good. Yeah, I'm good now. I navigated it. It's over. Oh, good job. Yeah. Yeah. I kind
00:20:03.400
of recent, you know, like I'll, I'll give you like an example, right? So this is going
00:20:08.940
to sound kind of funny and maybe we'll get a lot of flack for this and things like that.
00:20:12.460
But so, you know, when we started healthy gamer, it was really to help people. And so one
00:20:17.940
of the things that kind of shocked me was we never like designed it to be profit driven.
00:20:24.020
So I'm, I'm doing this company stuff for like five years. It's not designed to be profit
00:20:29.160
driven. We, we really try to price things to be like really accessible. There are people
00:20:33.160
struggling in like the Philippines and India. So we, we really try to price things to be
00:20:37.660
very reasonable. And, um, and then after five years of doing it, I was like, you know, this
00:20:46.340
is arguably a successful company that I'm running and I'm not fabulously wealthy. And then I was
00:20:53.520
like, Oh yeah, that's because we never designed it to make a bunch of money. Um, and so that
00:20:59.740
was one thing that I, that was just one example of something that I had to navigate because
00:21:03.840
I had certain expectations of once you start a company and it becomes arguably quite successful,
00:21:09.920
you're supposed to be rich. But then I remembered, Oh yeah, we never started it to make money,
00:21:14.220
which is why we price things, which is why I'm not rich, which is like totally fine.
00:21:17.580
It sounds like it bothers you a little bit. Huh? It absolutely bothered me a lot for a little
00:21:26.820
while. And then I thought about, okay, what do I really want to do? Do I want to make money or do
00:21:31.660
I want to help people? Like what's at the top of the priority list? And, uh, what's at the top of
00:21:38.720
the priority list? It's a priority. Yeah. Right. So you, you can, you can do both and you know,
00:21:43.980
I do okay. I'm not, I'm totally fine. And I have a responsibility to my children and things like
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that. So I, I make sufficient money there. Um, but it's like, what's at the top? So that, that,
00:21:54.900
that was sort of the thing is I was doing both sort of right. So I would make one decision that was,
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um, really thinking about money. And then I would make another decision that was about helping people.
00:22:04.260
And then as you keep on making those kinds of decisions in two different ways,
00:22:07.620
it can create a lot of different confusion. There were also other things that other stupid lessons
0.99
00:22:12.660
that I didn't realize, which make perfect sense in retrospect. One is that if you do something for
0.97
00:22:17.640
free, the more people you do it for, the more expensive it gets, which is like such common
00:22:25.340
sense now, but you can think about it this way. You can help more people. If you make money from it,
00:22:29.600
it doesn't, they don't need, it doesn't need to be a pyramid. It doesn't, they can coexist. Like
00:22:33.940
you're able to help people if you're more excess, if you're, your time is more available and you have
00:22:38.500
more freedom. Yeah. So, so that's, that's a line of logical thinking that a lot of people will use.
00:22:44.680
I think the problem with that, it is absolutely true and it can be used to justify all kinds of
00:22:50.720
stuff. So every time that an investor approaches us, which happens quite often, like every time
00:22:57.820
they're like, well, if we give you this pile of money, imagine how many more people you could help.
00:23:01.660
That's like, they're what's usually out the gate. The first thing that they'll say, but not you,
00:23:08.620
not me. What you don't, you don't think that way.
00:23:13.480
No, I mean, I think that what you said is true. I think it's just, there's, there's more context to
00:23:17.680
it. I don't think it's as simple as that. I think it's absolutely true that if I had more resources,
00:23:21.740
like if I had 20 to $50 million, I have a very clear idea of what I would do. Um, but I don't have
00:23:28.980
that. So I won't do that. And you're absolutely correct that if you have more resources, you can
00:23:35.740
help more people. Right. I think that's absolutely true. So what do you think was the biggest thing
00:23:41.000
that got you out of the crisis? Um, let me think the biggest thing you said centralizing
00:23:57.780
So I, I think for like, I, I, biggest thing, meaning what did I learn or what did I do or what?
00:24:05.580
So thing is kind of a, what did you do? So I think the biggest thing that I did is got
00:24:12.360
quite hardcore about spiritual practice. And I think that was huge. So if I, if I had to put it on one
00:24:18.600
thing, it was that I started doing very intense spiritual practice for like the first time in
00:24:25.080
uh, 12 years. So it wasn't therapy. It was, it was getting closer to God.
00:24:32.940
Um, I don't know if I would call it getting closer to God, but it certainly wasn't therapy. No.
00:24:38.220
So am I vindicated in a way from our last conversation about what? About how God transcends
00:24:46.540
therapy and psychotherapy. When you say God transcends psychotherapy, what does that mean?
00:24:53.480
Well, okay. So if your biggest problem in, uh, in recent time where your crisis stemmed from,
00:24:58.680
uh, if, if your crisis was solved by something spiritual and God, rather than, you know, what
00:25:06.480
you do, which is therapy, does that not, my argument last time we spoke was that God is
00:25:12.840
transcends therapy and people should seek that rather than run to a therapist.
00:25:20.500
I think that, so what's your understanding of what therapy is for?
00:25:26.820
Therapy is to, I mean, there's a lot of reasons people go.
00:25:31.840
There are a lot of reasons people go. That's not the question that I asked. What is it for?
00:25:45.680
Okay. So let's, let's let me answer your question. Are you vindicated? I guess, I don't know.
00:25:51.020
But, but I, I think this is a really wonderful question and this is why I love talking. So
00:25:55.400
Sneeko, I mentioned this last time. I think people grossly underestimate how deep of a thinker you are.
00:26:00.380
Um, and I, I think, you know, last time you were like trying to cause shit with me and stuff. I
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00:26:05.300
don't know if you remember. I sort of love that. And if you want to go back down there.
00:26:08.180
I knew that that would be good content. Like I put on my wife, Peter. I leaned in, I leaned
00:26:16.000
Absolutely. There was, there was a certain, I felt like I was playing a game of mental
00:26:20.760
tennis and I was like hitting balls across the net and you were hitting a back. Um, and
00:26:25.680
I think that's why we were smiling a lot and why it's fun to talk. So I think that, uh,
00:26:30.700
it's really important to remember that psychotherapy, I mean, it started out a particular way, but
00:26:35.160
the way that it's really evolved is to help with pathology, right? So psychotherapy is,
00:26:41.020
I mean, this is debatable and, but I'm going to sort of simplify my answer for a moment.
00:26:48.340
So if we look at medicine, the practice of medicine is to heal, right? So pathology means
00:26:55.060
something that is ill. So the, the most common form of psychotherapy in today's world is to
00:27:03.100
treat an illness. So I think a spiritual crisis in a medical illness are two different things.
00:27:10.320
So if someone has, has a diagnosis of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or an addiction,
00:27:17.220
there is absolutely an evidence-based psychotherapeutic approach that can help those
00:27:23.680
people. Now, I think one thing that we understand very well, I would say, I would argue that 95%
00:27:30.880
of psychotherapists or more would agree with what I'm about to say that psychotherapy, there's a
00:27:36.100
spiritual dimension that helps people and that psychotherapy, depending on the therapist will
00:27:42.100
lean into that dimension or not lean into that dimension. But I think very few psychotherapists
00:27:47.220
psychotherapists believe that they're a substitute for a spiritual thing, right? So we sort of
00:27:55.280
understand that a lot. And so doing a lot of addiction psychiatry, you know, I would frequently
00:28:00.140
refer my patients to Alcoholics Anonymous, which is also like a spiritual sort of inspired program to
00:28:07.600
help with alcohol addiction. And I think the two complement each other. I don't, I think this sort of
00:28:12.580
idea that like, one is better than the other. I mean, maybe we can talk more about that. Maybe one
00:28:17.740
is better than the other. But I think that the key thing about the problem with spiritual practice
00:28:24.460
to solve problems is that it's quite unreliable. So if, if a thousand people start going to, let's say,
00:28:33.220
church, let's just assume Christianity for a moment, or even going to meditation or start going to
00:28:37.700
their mosque or whatever, right? So if a thousand people are in a particular state in their life,
00:28:44.600
and they start engaging in spiritual practice, in 12 weeks, what percentage of them will be better
00:28:51.280
by how much? And that's a question that I've never heard a good answer to.
00:28:59.040
I don't think you can answer that statistically, because spiritual practice relies so much on yourself.
00:29:05.180
There's too many personal factors. How seriously are you taking it? Are you really opening your heart?
00:29:09.940
Are you really, like you can't measure, belief is almost impossible to measure.
00:29:17.320
I'm not sure if that's true, but so that therein, I think lies the weak, the fundamental weakness of
00:29:22.740
spiritual practice or religious practice, right? So the advantage of medicine is that it is more
00:29:30.640
impervious to individual factors. So if I take a hundred people who are addicted to alcohol and I
00:29:37.420
send them to church and I send them to a therapist, the whole point of psychotherapy is an evidence-based
00:29:42.280
practice is that it reliably gets a certain kind of result. That's how it's designed. That's how it
00:29:48.060
gets improved. Now, can psychotherapy go as far as spiritual practice can? My guess is probably not,
00:29:59.120
but I think the whole advantage of evidence-based medicine is that it's reliable. It's reliably
00:30:04.700
effective. Okay. Well, if we peel back a layer, you said psychotherapy or therapy solves illness,
00:30:11.580
correct? That's what it tries to do. Yeah. My, my issue, my main issue with it is that when everybody
00:30:21.080
thinks they're ill, then everybody requires psychotherapy. And I think nowadays more people
00:30:28.140
think that they're ill, think they're ill than ever because it's so profitable. It's such a profitable
00:30:32.440
industry. I've talked to someone recently who went to therapy and their problems were just so minuscule
00:30:37.740
and they're, they're ranting to me on the phone and explaining it. Like I compare myself to other
00:30:42.480
people on Instagram and TikTok. And it's like, you know, some of like it went into like suicidal
00:30:49.000
ideation. I'm like, just like, and then during the conversation, the parents came in the room and
00:30:53.560
started talking to who was there on the phone. It's like, you were really going to kill yourself
00:30:57.800
and your, your parents are still around. Like, what's wrong with you? And to put it further
0.85
00:31:02.620
perspective, I talked to somebody, two kids in Gaza recently, like maybe a week,
00:31:07.640
two weeks ago, 16, 14 years old and seeing the mental strength they had going through,
00:31:12.640
you know, no school, been at war for two years, constantly evacuating their homes. And they're
00:31:16.240
still this mentally strong and not losing their minds. It's like, I think that more people
00:31:22.340
should not give into, and they say this term validate their feelings so much, you know,
00:31:28.640
and I started like pushing back on this person on the phone. They're like, oh, you're invalidating
00:31:31.960
my feelings. I'm like, why are you validating suicidal ideation? Well, you shouldn't validate
00:31:36.380
these thoughts. You should try to be a little more mentally tough. So if everybody thinks
00:31:41.120
they're depressed, thinks they're anxious, have ADHD, thinks they have some sort of mental
00:31:45.340
deficiency, then they're all capable of looking for the cure. And maybe people aren't even sick
00:31:51.620
to begin with. Maybe, maybe there's too many ill people. And maybe it's not because of their,
00:31:56.720
they caught something. Maybe it's because they believe it.
00:32:05.240
Well, yeah, I mean, I, I, okay, this is gonna be great. Are you, you want to talk about this?
00:32:10.120
You want to talk about your, your crisis? Talk about anything. I'll talk about anything.
00:32:13.980
Okay. Okay. Let's talk about this for a little bit. This is great. I love this. Okay.
00:32:19.340
So the first question that I have is, so when someone thinks they're ill,
00:32:26.420
what do you think is going on? How do you understand that?
00:32:30.940
Well, it varies. So I'll specify a little bit. I think a lot of people, the people that I'm
00:32:37.140
talking about, believe they're ill because they see memes on Tik TOK saying I'm so autistic. I'm so
00:32:41.720
autistic that I'm depressed and stupid. And I just can't do, they like to fall back on mentally ill
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00:32:49.020
jokes and depressed jokes because they want to take away their own personal responsibility.
00:32:53.520
All right. If they, if they have a mental deficiency that they read about online, they're not
00:32:57.800
responsible for their unhappiness and their failures in life. So rather than try to sort
00:33:03.640
it out themselves, themselves, Oh, I caught something. I'm sad and depressed. I'm anxious.
00:33:09.940
So it's not my fault anymore. Now I need therapy. It's just, it's like the easy answer. I see it
00:33:15.320
almost equivalent to doing heroin or people who say that they self-medicate like, Oh, I'm so, I need
00:33:21.060
medicine. It's such a stressful day. I need to, I'm self-medicating like, no, you're just like
00:33:25.200
getting high. And you just came up with a word to describe, you came up with a reason to justify
00:33:29.560
it. Obviously there's, there's a lot of reasons people can believe they're ill, but I think the
00:33:33.400
main reason right now is because it's so popular. And you know, a lot of people have a lack of
00:33:38.280
personality. They're not that interesting. They don't really have anything going on. And everybody
00:33:42.220
has a, not everybody I'm generalizing again, but many people have a main character syndrome now
00:33:47.100
where they need to, the self-importance, right? So social media has made us more self-reflective
00:33:52.040
and made us more aware of our own existence than ever before. We're constantly looking
00:33:55.200
in the mirror, looking at ourselves, comparing ourselves more than we ever have to other
00:33:58.100
people. So if you want to become more interesting, you want to be at the top, the top echelon
00:34:02.440
of people like the ones that we see on the top of the algorithm, you need to create something.
00:34:06.260
You need to be the main character. If a lot of people are not interesting at all, mental
00:34:15.820
so it sounds like, uh, when you're talking about, so what's your impression of what percentage
00:34:28.280
of people like have a diagnosis? Like, what do you think?
00:34:33.660
Or describe what you said. I don't know. Like, like what, how common is the phenomenon
00:34:41.460
Again, it's going to be hard to measure statistically, but I think a lot of people
00:34:45.080
in Gen Z millennials, even if they're not fully diagnosed or self-diagnosed, they've definitely
00:34:57.060
Considering it, that's, that's a route to a bad thing. And yeah, I do think considering it,
00:35:02.700
I think considering it as real can be, uh, can be bad. When it's not bad is when you consider it,
00:35:09.540
like, am I depressed? And you're like, actually, no, I have a great life. I'm not, you know,
00:35:13.660
I'm not handicapped. I'm not mentally ill. I'm not stupid. I'm not, I don't have any major
00:35:17.960
disabilities. There's electricity, there's food. I'm alive. I'm not in a war. I'm good. If you
00:35:24.120
consider it, you should, you should consider it. See your circumstances, see where you're at
00:35:27.920
and then be appreciative again and go back to being a normal human.
00:35:32.700
Okay. So this is great. Um, so I'm curious, let's, so let's say someone has every reason
00:35:39.860
to be happy. Yeah. Right. And they're not happy.
00:35:44.200
get over it. What isn't, but doesn't that imply that there's something wrong with them because
00:35:53.820
they should be happy, right? I don't think people should view existence based on that scale. Like,
00:36:01.160
am I happy? Am I not happy? They should just survive and live because they, they, they're given a life.
00:36:06.640
It's not, it's not about, it's not, but you should, I'm, I'm, I'm taking your premise.
00:36:12.560
Okay. Right. Your premise was like, this person has a life. They've got this, they've got this,
00:36:17.040
they've got this, they're breathing and they're not happy. Right. Like they're not in Gaza.
00:36:23.380
So, and if they're unhappy, what do you think is the reason for that?
00:36:29.740
That is the circumstances that they have, like, what are they doing? What are they
00:36:34.380
and putting it into their mind? But they can fall back on believing that they have a chemical
00:36:40.060
imbalance or that they have a, you know, anxiety or something, or they, they need therapy,
00:36:44.000
or maybe there's a, there's a bigger reason. Forget about, forget about what they believe.
00:36:48.240
What do you think is the reason that someone who has every reason to be happy? If that person was
00:36:56.880
suicidal, how do you understand that? I think it's too much introspection.
00:37:00.820
Too much introspection. Too much introspection. Something like therapy can make people
00:37:06.420
unhappy because they're always thinking about how they should be happy.
00:37:10.300
Hold on. This person isn't in therapy, right? Or are they in therapy? Is it right? I'm trying to
00:37:14.960
start with your example that you laid out. Okay. So like this person has every reason to be happy,
00:37:21.540
but they're not happy. How do you understand what's wrong with them?
00:37:25.280
I think they are too introspective if they're thinking that way. And so they should live more
00:37:32.280
in the present and be appreciative of things like water, like sun, like family, like life. Instead,
00:37:39.720
the solution is more oftentimes action rather than inaction is being outward, living in the exterior,
00:37:47.080
living in the world rather than in their heads.
00:37:48.820
What do you think determines someone's capability of being introspective or action-oriented?
00:37:56.960
So there's a variance in the population, right? Some people are action-oriented. Some people are
00:38:01.260
introspective. How does one end up in either camp?
00:38:06.160
It depends. I mean, it could be personality type. It could be, you know, environment. But you can be
00:38:11.700
introspective and be happy. But if you're saying I'm unhappy and there's no reason why I shouldn't be
00:38:16.280
happy and you're an introspective person, that's probably the reason why.
00:38:21.640
But if you're saying that personality and environment determine your level of introspectiveness,
00:38:28.680
So if my personality and my environment, let's say I'm like, like how, let's just say you're
00:38:33.660
introspective at 25 out of 100. I'm just assigning you a random ass number. Let's say I'm introspective
00:38:39.880
at 90 out of 100. Okay. So, and the reason I'm introspective at 90 out of 100 is because of my
00:38:45.940
personality and my environment. I have a perfectly good life, but I happen to be suicidal.
00:38:52.740
So at that point, like, I am introspective, right?
00:38:58.560
Okay. So what am I supposed to do? Like, that's not, it's not my choice. This is the way that my
00:39:04.420
brain works. Well, I'm saying it's a combination of environment and something that's innate.
00:39:10.400
But it's also something you can change. Like, thinking is an action. You know, you're choosing,
00:39:15.000
it does burn calories. Thinking is, in a way, an action. Yeah.
00:39:18.500
So act more with your hands in externally than acting so internally.
00:39:23.940
Absolutely. Right. But that is a, that is a predisposition that you have because you're
00:39:32.360
No, I am. No, I am an introspective person. You know, and I, I actually changed. I'm a very,
00:39:37.860
I started off like being somebody very innately introspective and I worked it out. And now as I
00:39:44.860
grow older, I become more, you know, more extroverted, they say, or more.
00:39:49.620
Can you tell me a little bit about that journey?
00:39:51.500
Okay. So I, I guess, yeah, when I was younger, I was, I was less social. I was more introverted.
00:39:59.520
I, I didn't really communicate the way that I communicate now with other people.
00:40:06.660
Yeah. So how did you feel about yourself back then?
00:40:09.480
I had more feelings of inferiority, more insecurity, uh, less, I was less decisive. I was more worried
00:40:17.160
about what other people thought about me. I remember there's a specific example. I used to walk around
00:40:20.860
Manhattan and there'd be, you could see your reflection when you walk by buildings, right?
00:40:24.260
In the, in the windows. And I would constantly look at myself and wonder what other people were
00:40:28.860
thinking about me. And I walked by them and like, what do they, who do they think I am? And instead
00:40:35.020
I got rid of those thoughts by paying less attention to them and instead doing more, right? I realized that
00:40:40.920
it doesn't matter what other people think. It doesn't, why am I existing for, for other people
00:40:46.320
instead of for myself. So it was a, it was a decision to change.
00:40:50.900
So you said you had a realization followed by a decision, right?
00:40:55.740
And what would have happened if you didn't have that realization?
00:41:00.580
I would have been in a worse spot. I would not have enjoyed my life as much as I do now.
00:41:05.900
Right. So, so you, you acted, but the realization came first and it sounds like the realization
00:41:13.640
preceded introspection or did it not precede introspection?
00:41:19.780
No, the realization came afterwards. So I understand you're going like, okay, people who
00:41:24.360
don't have that realization therapy could help them help lead them to that realization.
00:41:29.460
That's absolutely a slice of what I'm going to say, but I have a lot to say about what you've
00:41:33.240
said so far. I'm happy to lay out my, my thoughts about what you've said, but I would love to
00:41:37.300
you can do that. Okay. So I, I think you're, um, correct about a ton of stuff. I think that
00:41:44.400
you're just missing a couple of things in my opinion. Yes. So, uh, the first is that I, when
00:41:50.720
I think about a clinical depression, I think about someone who has every reason to be happy
00:41:56.820
and is, and isn't, that is what shows me that something is broken in their head.
00:42:01.000
Yeah. Right. So if you're, if you're depressed because you're 28 years old, you are physically
00:42:08.800
unhealthy. You have no social life. You watch pornography and play video games all day.
00:42:13.700
I don't think there's anything mentally wrong with you from a mental illness standpoint. I
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00:42:18.140
don't think that's pathological. I think that's congruent with your life. If your life is shit,
00:42:23.000
you're going to feel bad. That's normal. That's not illness. What I think is illness is if
1.00
00:42:29.340
you're 46 years old, you make $600,000 or $800,000 a year, you're married, you have two kids,
00:42:37.780
you have a wife who's loving, faithful. Um, you are tall, you're handsome, you're successful,
00:42:44.620
and you want to kill yourself every single day. Do you see that there's a major thing you left out
00:42:49.640
of that equation of that life? Sure. It's spiritual purpose. It's, it's a greater purpose. Like
00:42:55.440
you're not living for your, you're not in your career to get validation from your boss or to get
00:43:01.840
a raise. Your purpose isn't specifically to have a good home and to be a successful guy with a mowed
00:43:07.080
lawn. Your purpose is greater than that. It's serving God. And I think that person, if they, if they want
00:43:12.960
to, if they're, if they have those circumstances, like, like, like you just laid out and you did leave
00:43:16.400
out a greater spiritual purpose, it's because that they, they can't find, they don't know what
00:43:21.520
it is. And spirituality solves that. Unreliably. Right. So make this person goes to church and
00:43:31.220
has a relationship with God. Right. So people in church will, I haven't met that guy. I don't,
00:43:37.240
I don't, I don't know this person. I know that, that, that example you're bringing up, obviously,
00:43:41.640
this is anecdotal evidence, but I've never seen that happen. You know, the people that end up,
00:43:45.860
like if you bring up, you know, perfect example, be like Anthony Bourdain or Robin Williams. Some
00:43:50.220
people say Robin Williams had Alzheimer's. He had some, some condition, but let's say he didn't
00:43:54.260
or Anthony Bourdain. Perfect example. You watched the like first episode of his TV show and he goes
00:43:59.180
to, I think Oscar Wilde's hotel room in Paris where Oscar Wilde killed himself. I can't, I'm not sure
00:44:04.280
if that's the right author or artist, whatever, but he goes there and he's like saying, whoa, all these
00:44:09.420
Parisian artists killed themselves and overdose here. He's kind of like, you know, he likes the allure
00:44:13.780
of the artists who ended up, you know, with that grieving, sad life. Anthony Bourdain ended up
00:44:19.780
killing himself in his early sixties and he had a daughter, he had a wife, he had a good life,
00:44:24.160
successful career, all this thing, but he'd never had a connection to God. That was the major thing
00:44:27.860
lacking. And that's why I think he did something so selfish as to take off himself while having a
00:44:32.380
daughter and having a wife. And I see some of his fans, they say Anthony Bourdain, oh, what a
00:44:37.500
tormented soul. When I see that guy, I think what a selfish asshole. What, what, what a narcissistic
1.00
00:44:44.000
self-involved piece of shit to do that while he has a daughter, while he has a wife around
1.00
00:44:49.260
without even leaving a note, hanging himself in a hotel room for people to find his body
1.00
00:44:53.240
because he wants to be remembered as a tormented, depressed artist. I think he was obsessed with that
00:44:58.800
idea. And if he had a greater purpose rather than living for himself and for his legacy,
00:45:03.900
he, he would have never done that. I mean, I think that's a completely valid opinion,
00:45:11.900
right? So, so what, what this, I mean, I'm detecting a couple of things. I'll go back to my original
00:45:17.240
answer, but I think that, um, so when this is interesting, give me a second.
00:45:26.820
Go ahead. Mods on Bama guy. How's it going so far, chat? What else should, what else should
00:45:39.040
I say? How, how's this going? Okay. So let's go back to what, well, I'm going to try to address
00:45:47.700
your, like, kind of earlier, a lot of what you said. So I think that generally speaking, you
00:45:54.800
know, when someone has a shitty life and they come in and they say they're depressed,
0.80
00:45:57.600
I think that there's ample evidence that shows that if you have a shitty life, your mood is likely
0.99
00:46:04.800
to be crap. Okay. And that oftentimes this is, I mean, the whole reason that I started streaming
1.00
00:46:11.700
on Twitch and the whole reason I started a coaching program is because I had so many patients come into
00:46:16.540
my office where I thought that talking to me about your feelings for an hour is not going to be nearly
00:46:23.920
as effective at improving your life as finding a romantic relationship, getting a job or a career
00:46:31.200
that you can be proud of. Um, actually getting your ass to the gym, like doing things like you talk
00:46:38.320
about wanting to write a science fiction fantasy novel that's dystopian. Let's fucking write it.
1.00
00:46:45.760
Right. So the whole reason that I started this is, is because I, I think that there's,
0.97
00:46:52.160
and there's ample evidence. And I think most psychiatrists and psychotherapists understand
00:46:55.840
this, that, that, you know, if we look at the mental health crisis that we're seeing today in
00:47:00.420
the world, a lot of it is an economic crisis. Like a lot of it is a crisis of loneliness at its root,
00:47:08.380
that a lot of the, a lot of the structures that supported people's socialization are like
00:47:16.680
disintegrating around us. So when, when a human being does not get the right kind of inputs,
00:47:24.220
they can manifest something like a mental illness. Now let's talk about a couple of other things. So
00:47:30.240
you mentioned that people have main character syndrome. I think there's also an overwhelming
00:47:34.840
amount of evidence. No, well, maybe not overwhelming. That's just how strongly I feel
00:47:38.460
about it. There's plenty of evidence that shows that increased technology usage and increased,
00:47:43.560
uh, social media usage, being on our phones all the time increases our narcissist, the narcissistic
00:47:50.720
dimension of our personality, right? The more that you judge a human being, the more narcissistic
00:47:55.920
they become. So when you're judged a lot, you're going to become narcissistic. That's just sort of how it
00:48:01.440
works. It doesn't always happen that way, but the default response is to be, become more
00:48:07.620
narcissistic. But before you get to interject real quick, just one observation before I don't want
00:48:11.900
to interrupt your train of thought, but I noticed that the tone has shifted like therapy and psychotherapy
00:48:16.580
a couple of years ago used to be chemical imbalance, used to be mental health crisis based off of,
00:48:22.820
you know, random that you, something you could catch. Now the language I'm hearing before you
00:48:28.560
continue, it sounds like it's self-inflicted. You're lonely because you're addicted to porn.
0.99
00:48:33.360
You're depressed because you're poor and you're not fulfilling. How do you get self-inflicted from
0.99
00:48:37.900
what I said? Are you talking about language that I didn't use? Well, you're saying that the majority
00:48:44.540
of the mental health crisis is due to socioeconomic factors, which sounds like it's, you know, these are
00:48:50.740
circumstances that are more controllable rather than uncontrollable. A few years back when I was in
00:48:55.100
college and everybody was on SSRIs and everyone was on ADHD pills, they were all thinking that it
00:49:01.060
was something that they just caught. It was a chemical imbalance. Now the language is, okay,
00:49:04.400
maybe you're depressed because you're a lonely loser who's addicted to porn. That's what I just
1.00
00:49:09.300
noticed from your response. I'm super confused because when we say that there's an economic crisis,
00:49:15.560
that's circumstances, not self-inflicted. Okay. That's less self-inflicted. My point is that
00:49:22.260
the chemical imbalance language has, has, has hindered quite a bit, right? Rather than it just
00:49:27.360
being something you catch, it's like, obviously the socioeconomic crisis that it's not everybody's
00:49:32.960
fault, but it is something that's controllable rather than uncontrollable. It's a situation that
00:49:37.320
they can get themselves out of rather than something that they caught in their brain.
00:49:39.940
Why would you, there's also, I think there's a weird, there's all kinds of like associations
00:49:47.000
that you form that I don't, if something is a chemical imbalance, what makes you think that
00:49:50.860
it's not modifiable by you? But my point is the language 10 years ago when this was blowing up and
00:49:58.900
everybody was, was that it was just something wrong, that it wasn't at all circumstantial, but just
00:50:04.440
something that happened to people like catching COVID. That's the point. That's, that's my point.
00:50:10.640
So, so I think there's a couple of reasons for that. Okay. The first is, um, I think things have
00:50:17.060
changed. And so the cool thing about medicine, science, and psychotherapy is that we tend to do
00:50:23.780
a pretty good job of evolving with the times and studying what happens. So I think that like,
00:50:29.880
you know, if we look at the last 10 years, the world is very different. And the reasons that
00:50:36.040
people are suffering mentally, I think are fundamental, there, there's a couple of fundamental
00:50:41.160
big changes which have happened, which means that the etiology, which means the cause, the cause of
00:50:46.800
the illness is changing, right? So the factors that people, the people, the world that people are
00:50:51.900
growing up in is shaping them in a way that it didn't shape them 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 25 years ago.
00:50:59.500
Okay. Does that make sense? So I think you're right that the language is changing. There's a couple
00:51:04.380
of other things. So there's a great paper that came out, I think in molecular size, uh, psychiatry
00:51:09.620
that basically made the claim, which I think has a lot of, um, merit. I'm not saying that they're
00:51:18.600
right, that the serotonin deficiency hypothesis of depression is not supported by evidence.
00:51:25.060
Okay. Did you believe that back then? Were you repeating that?
00:51:31.220
No. Oh, okay. I've never, I don't know. I wouldn't call myself a good one. I could be wrong.
00:51:42.140
No, but I, I, I want more psychotherapists who push that
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00:51:48.500
serotonin depletion because of a chemical imbalance. I want them to take more responsibility
00:51:52.900
for that because I've been pushing on against that, pushing back against that for 10 years.
00:51:57.400
And people said that I was, you know, not sympathetic. They said I was demonizing depressed
00:52:01.900
people. They said that I was, that I should believe victims, right? I faced a lot of backlash
00:52:07.020
for that. And it seems like I've been vindicated that it's not, you know, serotonin depletion
00:52:11.240
is more often due to circumstances that are controllable rather than uncontrollable.
00:52:17.380
So it sounds like you, it really, what was it like when people basically attacked you for
00:52:23.520
doubting what people were saying about a serotonin? Oh, they said you're like, Oh, my friend killed
00:52:28.800
himself and you are insensitive. You piece of shit. Uh, they would get really upset. And I'm like,
1.00
00:52:35.400
I'm right. And you're mad. And that's just one, one of those factors of one of those situations
00:52:41.360
where I said something before it was deemed socially acceptable. And as soon as it becomes
00:52:47.120
socially acceptable, people don't admit that they were wrong. Right. And they, they move on
00:52:51.260
quickly without, you know, properly addressing their mistakes. And those are, those are very
00:52:57.840
dangerous mistakes. I think people who push that chemical imbalance lie and made all of my peers,
00:53:02.180
all of my, everybody in my dorm, I would say at least 80% were taking SSRIs because they thought
00:53:08.760
that they just caught depression and we move on. We act like that didn't happen, but this was very,
00:53:13.200
very normal. I mean, I went to a whole high school. I went to a boarding school in New Hampshire where
00:53:17.040
everyone, all the parents were sending them there because they thought that their kids were just
00:53:20.420
depressed for no reason. And there was a mental health problem that they, they didn't know how to fix
00:53:24.480
without therapy, without medication, without, you know, all of these practices.
00:53:30.440
What was that like for you to, to, to believe something and get like, tell everyone, tell you
1.00
00:53:34.880
like, oh, you're such an asshole basically. Right. You're a dick for believing this. And like,
1.00
00:53:39.080
everyone's fucking drinking the Kool-Aid and you're like, I don't want to drink the Kool-Aid.
0.99
00:53:48.580
And so what's it like to be vindicated, which seems so important to you.
00:53:52.760
I'm catching that you caught onto the frustration, which I think I know you caught that. That's a
00:53:59.140
repeated theme since I last spoke to you is I am vindicated about a lot of things that I was
00:54:05.320
demonized for saying too early for the public to understand. And it's frustrating that, and that's
00:54:11.920
something I'm working on. Like it, it, it has increased some bitterness where I'm like these
00:54:16.100
fucking, like I saw this movie Eddington, right? It's a movie by Ari Aster and it's about 2020 COVID.
0.95
00:54:21.240
And it's about the George Floyd riots at the height of COVID paranoia and everything.
00:54:24.760
And I remember at that time I did not get the COVID vaccine. I was speaking out against it.
00:54:29.180
I was calling the George Floyd looting and all the riots. I was saying that this is stupid.
1.00
00:54:32.760
They said that you are against the black lives matter movement. You're propagating racism and you
1.00
00:54:37.940
should not be able to see your grandmother because you're going to get everybody sick.
0.80
00:54:40.920
And you're a super spreader. People moved on. Now they watch the movie and laugh. And I sat in that
00:54:45.640
movie theater. I'm like watching, it was in New York city. I'm watching everyone laugh at this.
00:54:48.460
And I'm like, you didn't let me go into a restaurant without, I had to show my fake vaccine
00:54:53.040
card everywhere. I traveled with this, right? I was deep. You said that I'm a bad person for
00:54:57.460
not posting a black square on Instagram, but then everyone laughs now and act like they're
0.99
00:55:01.760
acting like they didn't, you know, push that craziness, that propaganda. Everybody. I remember
00:55:06.560
back then, all these people in college that were taking SSRIs because they had a chemical imbalance
00:55:10.580
because that's what they read online. Now that they moved on, they don't tell, they don't say
00:55:15.140
like, Oh, actually, you know what? I'm sorry for demonizing you. And ironically, when you push
00:55:21.840
somebody, when you call them crazy, that's one of the quickest routes to make them mentally ill
0.99
00:55:25.720
and to give them mental health problems. When you isolate somebody, call them crazy and say that
0.99
00:55:30.020
they're a bad person when they're really trying to be healthy. Oh, for years, for years, they still do.
00:55:37.720
So, but I mean, the more time passes, the more I'm being vindicated, but they say I'm crazy less now.
00:55:52.800
Tell me about it, right? Oh man, that's such a good word. Definitely introspective.
00:55:57.260
That's, that's a good word. You know, annoying because
00:56:02.540
yeah, I totally get you. What's annoying about it? You want me to answer or you want to answer?
00:56:11.860
I think, I think I kind of, I kind of did answer already.
00:56:18.000
Well, what I just said, it's annoying that people move on. Like they didn't push the propaganda
00:56:24.440
that they fell for, right? They don't admit the wrongdoing. And it's annoying because it seems
00:56:30.780
like it's so repeatable. If they don't say like, man, I wasn't so stupid for believing that I
0.99
00:56:38.400
couldn't sit next to somebody without a mask on, but then I lowered it and then ate the food while
00:56:43.780
they were eating, who were both breathing all over our plates on the plane and then put it back on.
00:56:47.880
And like all the dirty stares I got, cause I wasn't wearing a mask. The fact that they don't
00:56:51.880
self-reflect and protect those any introspection on, on that aspect, it seems like this is going
00:56:56.900
to happen again. And it will, and more people will fall for these very easily debunked lies.
00:57:08.100
Would you say that when people judged you in this way that it hurt?
00:57:30.220
No, I don't think it hurt because I knew I was right. And I think it made me mentally stronger.
00:57:38.100
So no, I wouldn't say I was, no, I don't think so.
00:57:43.240
Okay. I would be surprised if you use that word too, but I think it did hurt.
00:57:51.960
Right. I think it hurts just because you're mentally strong. Doesn't, I mean,
00:57:55.180
so you mentioned mental strength and usually you need strength.
00:57:58.240
Right. When you go to the gym, you break down your muscles and then they repair.
00:58:01.640
So I would, I would probably admit that it hurt if I fell victim to it, but I did it. You know,
00:58:07.400
I just, I was able to rise out of the ashes like a Phoenix.
00:58:13.280
Right. But then you're in the ashes. Like you got burned, bro. You see what I'm saying? Like,
00:58:18.060
I think there's an association here. I think that there's the, the, the word bothers you a lot,
00:58:23.100
but I think that's what happened. Does that sort of make sense? Like, I understand. I understand.
00:58:27.000
Yeah. Like, okay. Well, by the analogy is like, when you go to the gym and you have a great workout,
00:58:30.920
you're not like, fuck that hurt. You're like, woo. It's like, it's like a, in a masochistic way,
0.99
00:58:36.280
the pain is good because you know that it's going to make you better. You understand? Like what,
00:58:39.260
if you do a really big set of the bench, you're not like, oh my God, it's pain. You're not like,
00:58:43.180
it's painful. It's a good pain. So it's, it's different. It's different than hurt.
00:58:48.580
Yeah. I'm, I'm with you. Right. So I would say that it hurt. Right. And then it's just a good hurt.
00:58:54.800
Not all hurt is bad and not all hurt happens to weak people. And a lot of strength comes from hurt.
00:59:01.120
Like, I think that, you know, if we look at the people in Gaza, there, there's a lot of hurt there,
00:59:06.380
but I don't think those people are weak. I think those people are strong. Yeah. And I think that hurt
00:59:11.500
is a great way to grow. And I think that there's a lot of, there's a lot of associations with hurt and
00:59:19.920
weakness that if you're strong, you don't get hurt. There's this idea that invulnerability and
00:59:26.140
strength are correlated. I don't think they are. I think strength, like, you know, it's sort of like
00:59:31.520
courage or fearlessness. Like, I think I respect courage way more than fearlessness. Fearlessness,
00:59:37.760
I think is ignorance. Courage is overcoming your fear. But if you ask a courageous person,
00:59:42.540
are you scared? I think it's kind of like that. So I think that it's very clear to me that this was
00:59:49.360
painful to you. Yeah. As you say this, I understand your point. But I'm realizing my
00:59:55.920
thought process is that I don't like to think with any victim, if I can remove any victim words from
01:00:02.860
my vocabulary, my thought process, I end up, I end up better. So rather than say, like, this was
01:00:07.740
painful, it's that signals to the world and signals to people that, you know, like that you need
01:00:14.020
shelter or that you need comfort. And I'd rather that that all come internally. So I refuse, I try
01:00:21.120
to limit as much of that language as possible, because it helps with the recovery process in a
01:00:28.020
better way. So it's, it's selective thinking. And that's actually a good example of self-accountability
01:00:34.040
responsibility, right? If I use words like hurt more, then I'm going to be, I'm going to think in a
01:00:39.540
weaker state rather than overcome it immediately. So I recommend people think that way as well. The less
01:00:46.680
strength you give away, and the less, you know, the less weakness you signal to the world, the less
01:00:55.860
Um, I really respect that response. So I think like, like I said, this is the second time I'm
01:01:04.900
going to say this, I think you're a really strong thinker. So I think very few people can do what
01:01:11.640
you just did. So I think most people stick to their guns, they don't modify what they're saying
01:01:16.840
at all. And here's what I think is going to be even more dangerous. And I think we should have
01:01:22.960
this conversation, but I still want to get back to the other thing. Maybe that one is left forever,
01:01:26.880
but I think that your way of thinking is really good to move you from one place to another place,
01:01:35.000
but I think it's going to keep you stuck. And there is another evolution of your thinking,
01:01:40.760
which is that, so right now what you're doing is you're creating like a mental filter, right? So
01:01:45.200
thinking this way does not help me. That is whether something is functionally useful
01:01:51.780
is different from whether it is true. So you're, you've engaged in a cognitive reshaping.
01:02:01.120
And I know this is going to sound kind of challenging. I think it's absolutely adaptive.
01:02:05.780
And I think that at some point, if not already, it is going to be maladaptive. I think it's a really,
01:02:13.940
really useful strategy, but at its core, it is dishonest.
01:02:19.040
But that's also the difference between having, so I'm going to interrupt you. Okay, go ahead, go ahead.
01:02:22.320
And I think that many people who are not mentally capable require some degree of dishonesty. And you
01:02:33.560
have to work yourself up to being able to handle an honest perspective on your life. And I can offer
01:02:41.200
examples. So I think what you're doing makes a lot of sense. And I think it's going to fuck you down
01:02:46.580
the road. Okay, but there's a difference between having this conversation publicly and privately.
1.00
01:02:50.760
Part of the reason I answered that was because so much of what I do and say is in the public eye
01:02:55.700
for years that, and especially, I mean, this is a public conversation right now. I am thinking
01:03:01.120
differently and speaking differently because thousands, maybe millions of people are listening
01:03:05.060
to these words right now. So I know that it's a, it's a responsibility and it's powerful. So I don't
01:03:12.080
signal, like if we're having this conversation properly, it'd be completely different.
1.00
01:03:15.040
I would have been like, mine, that fucking suck. Yeah. Yeah. But I have people that are like,
1.00
01:03:20.260
you know, I want to inspire people. I want to make the world a better place. And I've seen the
01:03:24.620
impact that I've had culturally. And I've changed, I've noticed myself change the zeitgeist. I've seen
01:03:32.400
language, I've seen the shift that I think people in my space on the internet and me directly that I've
01:03:38.040
had on the culture. So that's the difference between people who think privately and are always
01:03:45.320
in the public eye and always being scrutinized and always being in the free marketplace of ideas.
01:03:54.520
What do you think would happen if you said, yeah, that sucked in a public way?
01:03:58.720
That gives more weakness and it signals to more people that they can be vulnerable. And yes,
01:04:12.880
that's true that it's good to be vulnerable, but oftentimes for men, it's better to not be
01:04:17.340
vulnerable publicly. So if I want to help out people and I want to make the world a better place,
01:04:23.040
I would like to limit the amount of vulnerability that people give away randomly. Right? I mean,
01:04:28.900
I trust you. I've had conversation with you and I trust that you're an open person. If I were
01:04:32.560
speaking to you privately, I'd be more vulnerable with that. But I don't, there's so many, I have
01:04:37.000
enemies. I have people that want to destroy everything I do. So the less amount of vulnerability
01:04:53.040
Like you sound like you're, I mean, that sounds like you're carrying a lot and, and I don't mean
01:04:58.720
that I, I, I appreciate the nobility of it. Like I'm not asking for things to be different. I think
01:05:06.820
on balance, it's a good thing what you're carrying around. I can see how it helps people and I can see
01:05:12.920
how you're okay carrying it because it does help people that you take this responsibility incredibly
01:05:20.860
seriously. And it makes me sad to hear that that still costs you. Right? So like, just because
01:05:29.160
carrying it is worth it and is the right thing to do and maybe align with your spiritual goals in
01:05:33.980
life or whatever, doesn't change the fact that it still is hard to carry sometimes.
01:05:38.940
And to hear you have to be so paranoid and pardon me if that word is too strong or so careful,
01:05:47.340
so thoughtful to have such a, it sounds exhausting. It sounds trapping. Like you can't be free.
01:05:55.040
And cause you used to, right? And you, boy, did you get fucking punished for it, bro?
0.98
01:05:58.980
You, you, you shared your opinions. You didn't drink the Kool-Aid and people were like, fuck you,
1.00
01:06:05.180
bro. You're being insensitive. You're not standing up for black people. I lost everything.
1.00
01:06:12.720
You lost everything. You can't stream. You can't stream this conversation because,
01:06:16.900
because of that. I, I, I get it. Right. So you, you've been punished so hard and that makes me sad.
01:06:22.360
It is what it is. It is what I mean, but there, there we go. It's like, okay, it's what is worth
01:06:29.660
being sad about? Hold on. It is the, it is what it is. Yeah. What it is. What is that? What is that
01:06:39.760
phrase, Sneeko? This is the, this is reality. No, it's not. That's the fucking exact opposite.
01:06:47.960
Yes. This, this literally, no, actually this is reality. No, it's not. It is what it is,
0.98
01:06:53.600
is you doing your cognitive transformation towards strength and not allowing your weakness.
01:07:01.200
Say that one more time. When you say the phrase, it is what it is,
01:07:06.100
that's your cognitive transformation. That's your movement from weakness to strength.
01:07:11.080
But how does that not reality? Because it's a transformation. It's something that you're
01:07:16.420
intentionally doing to change your perspective. This is where you start. And then when you say
01:07:22.920
it is what it is, it's a really sneaky version of it, right? Because you're saying it is what it is.
01:07:27.560
But if that is what it is, there is so much anger, frustration, disappointment, all these fucking
1.00
01:07:34.840
people said all this shit about you. And now that you've been vindicated, does anyone apologize? Does
0.99
01:07:40.640
anyone say, welcome back to the platform, bro? No, of course not. There is such a mountain
01:07:45.720
of frustration and pain and whatever. And the only way, let's say, to deal with that, right? Because
01:07:53.240
what are you going to do? You say it is what it is. This is the world that we live in. So I'm going
01:07:58.580
to reframe away from that shit to this. It is what it is. You soldier on.
0.99
01:08:07.080
Well, I mean, that statement still is true. It literally is what it is. Regardless, it's 100. It is
01:08:17.840
true. The statement is true. Okay. Hold on. And it's not that it's false. It's that it's a cognitive
01:08:25.260
shift, right? So when you do that, you're shifting away from something else. Does that kind of make
01:08:32.860
sense? What I'm shifting? I understand completely what I'm shifting away from when you say that
01:08:36.980
makes me sad. I start thinking, fuck, like, maybe I should feel sorry and sad for myself. And then I'm
0.99
01:08:42.740
like, I literally I remember where I am. I have a nice exactly. And then you do the cognitive shift.
01:08:49.160
But why? Why would it? What's wrong with shifting to a more positive?
01:08:53.360
Nothing's wrong with shifting right now. Okay. So the so what's the what's your point?
01:08:56.460
My point is, first of all, that we should have awareness. Here's what I think is good. This is
01:09:02.400
what I'm moving towards. We should have awareness of what happens inside of us. That's the North
01:09:07.080
Star. Nothing we should be blind. I'm completely aware of that. Because when you when you when you
01:09:12.220
say that makes me sad, I was like, fuck, yeah, that sucks. Yeah. And I'm like, damn, I started thinking
1.00
01:09:17.240
about the stuff I lost and stuff. And you know, how my reputation was hit and the attacks I get that I
0.97
01:09:21.560
still get to this day and all this blah, blah, blah. So I'm thinking negatively. And I'm reminded
01:09:25.380
that thinking negatively does not solve anything. And that solutions come through positive and
01:09:30.200
forward thinking through maintaining real frame. Then I'm reminded about what is happening across
01:09:35.060
the world. Like is feeling sorry for myself while children are starving in Gaza, as we speak
01:09:40.880
that I know it's it's selfish thinking to be thinking. So all me, oh, what was me and returning
01:09:48.480
to this frame when it's like people have way worse circumstances right now that, you know,
01:09:54.400
if they're able to soldier on, then I should too. And this the world keeps spinning.
01:09:59.800
The girls keep being girls. Everyone keeps everyone moves. Everyone is still living and
0.95
01:10:04.680
we're all older than we were a second ago. So it is what it is. Let's keep on going. What's
01:10:09.380
next? That's the only solution. There is no solution to be found through that negative
01:10:14.940
I disagree. Okay. So I think this is a great solution when you're 26. It's a bad solution
01:10:26.220
when you're 42. So I think that that I'm with you all the way. I think there's a couple of
01:10:34.300
associations that you're making, which I think are completely logical to make or completely
01:10:40.160
correct to make. Admitting weakness or admitting hurt, you're attaching to a downward spiral.
01:10:47.980
Yeah. And I think in when you were probably like a teenager and you had some crush on some girl in
01:10:54.920
high school and she didn't give you the time of day, you were like, fuck that. I ain't ever going
0.98
01:10:59.740
to be that guy again. So when you look at yourself, when you see yourself in the reflection of walking
01:11:03.980
down the street in Manhattan, you didn't like what you saw. And then you decided you vowed to yourself,
01:11:09.020
you're never going to be that. And look at this beautiful suit you're wearing now.
01:11:12.480
Looking great. Look at where you are now. How can you ever say that this form of adaptation
01:11:17.820
is a problem? And I'm with you. I think it's the right thing for you to do up until this point.
01:11:30.360
In 15 years, you will have such a pile of negativity inside you because you've reframed,
01:11:38.140
reframed, reframed, reframed. You'll be functional. You'll be, I don't know about you will. That's not
01:11:43.360
right. So there is a chance that if you continue employing this strategy, the resentment that you
01:11:51.880
have that is pretty potent, right? Like you've used the word vindication several times. So you're,
01:12:05.940
I'm trying to find a less demeaning word than butt hurt, but I can't. So like, I'm, I'm, I feel like
01:12:14.340
I'm walking very dangerous ground because if I say a single thing that demeans you, I think it's
01:12:20.460
going to be hard, but I'm using the word butt hurt because I'm leaning into this, like, I respect you
01:12:25.520
and I really do. And I care about you. Like I do. Thank you. And, and you're so butt hurt about this
01:12:30.800
that you're like seeking vindication so much. And the problem is that you can seek vindication over
01:12:36.720
and over and over again. But if the butt hurt keeps piling up that you can't really, you can not let the
01:12:42.720
butt hurt hurt you through adaptive thinking, which is absolutely correct. I think if you're someone who's
01:12:49.120
like super depressed, I think doing what you're doing is really good. I really do. It's, it's cognitively
01:12:56.200
flexible. It's, it's cognitive adaptations. The shit that you're doing in your mind right now is 50% of what
01:13:04.120
we teach in therapy. We teach people to think like you. Okay. Okay. And I think that there comes a point
1.00
01:13:12.100
where accepting every dimension of your being gets you closer to transcendence. And, and I think you're
01:13:20.480
going to understand this too, because when you're with God, you don't do any of this. That's the whole
01:13:26.700
value. Right. And so all I'm saying is like that, which you do when you, when you lay yourself bare and
01:13:34.800
you tell God about how butt hurt you are, it's not weak, right? You, you let go of it. You're like,
01:13:39.280
kind of like, okay, this has happened like whatever, right? Like I'm going to put my faith
01:13:42.840
in you. I don't know exactly what you do or whatever, but there's a certain amount of like
01:13:46.280
brutal honesty about your weakness, which I totally get is complicated because you're in a public space.
0.98
01:13:52.960
People dislike you, people try to take you down all this kind of shit. Right. So I'm, I'm not
0.99
01:13:57.440
blamed. Please understand. I'm not, I'm not blaming you for anything that you do. I think you're
01:14:01.700
remarkably resilient. Thank you. And I think that there's like, I don't know if this kind of
01:14:08.800
makes sense. You know, so oftentimes in my experience, people are like at one end of the
01:14:16.960
pendulum and then they swing to the other end and that's progress. But I think that there's a step
01:14:23.060
above that, which is to not be on either end of the pendulum and kind of come towards the middle
01:14:27.920
where you can be vulnerable. You can be hurt. You can say that this hurt you. You can say that this
01:14:33.700
bothers you, but there is a methodology to not let that turn into a spiral.
01:14:42.240
And I think that when you do that, there is a level. So I don't know if this makes sense.
01:14:46.700
Every time you do that, I don't know if this is going to make sense. There's internal friction.
01:14:50.940
I'm not saying you're weak. I'm not saying it's going to hurt you. I'm saying that there's like,
01:14:54.240
there's some like, right. And it comes out with your use of the word vindication.
01:15:00.740
And what I'm talking about is peace. Not right, not successful. And if you continue along this
01:15:11.020
track, you may be peace because you've got spirituality on your side. And I think spirituality
01:15:16.340
helps you find that space between these things. I think it's a really good thing. So I'm not trying
01:15:21.940
to like predict doom and gloom for you. But I think that especially like, I do think it's it's
01:15:28.060
better to continue to level up. And because I see a lot of people get stuck with like this way of
01:15:35.060
thinking, which is this sort of like reliance on adaptation reliance on like, I don't think this is
01:15:43.760
you. But in some people, it's like toxic positivity, where they can't ever like say that they're hurt or
01:15:50.140
sad or whatever, right? Like it's it's just I don't think that that label fits you. I think it's I think
01:15:57.000
the better thing to fit you're resilient. And you've got, you know, adaptations based on
01:16:02.840
I'm trying to find a better word than trauma. But like, you've had negative experiences that you've
01:16:12.020
adapted to. And one of the things that we know, is that negative experiences are healthy adaptations
01:16:19.600
in those circumstances. But if you carry those adaptations into different circumstances,
01:16:29.320
Right? So like, I think that a good example of where I see this a lot with men,
01:16:34.660
I'm a loser, I'm going to become a winner. And then the kinds of relationships that you're capable
01:16:42.860
of, can be different from what you truly crave. Right? So like, you can never show weakness
01:16:51.020
in front of your partner, your romantic partner, if it's a woman. But really, what you crave is like
01:16:57.520
true partnership, you want one person in this world that you don't have to put on a mask with that
01:17:02.420
will stand by you all the time. But if you keep on doing this shit reflexively, you will never
0.99
01:17:07.760
show her that weakness. And you will never give her an opportunity to accept you in your flawed
1.00
01:17:14.260
state. And if you never give her the chance to accept you in your flawed state, there will always
01:17:19.440
be a doubt on my in your mind, is she going to leave me if XYZ happens? That kind of security is
01:17:27.280
like, fucking amazing. Right? And I think you have some sense of this, because usually we can
0.99
01:17:32.340
get some version of this through a spiritual experience or God or whatever, because we can
01:17:37.320
be honest with God, hopefully, fingers crossed. I don't know. So what do you think is so you sound
01:17:45.400
like you're coming from a perspective, you're older, you've you've been through more than I have,
01:17:49.720
most likely. I don't know if that's true. Okay, well, I mean, you're I'm older, you're a father,
01:17:55.520
and you have you have children, you have you've had experiences that I have yet to have any idea about
01:18:00.200
personally yet. So you're saying that by age 42, I am going to doing the the practice of the
0.65
01:18:08.500
shifting, you know, cope that it doesn't work the same anymore, because eventually it's going to
01:18:12.700
catch up to you. And you might have like a nervous breakdown or something like that. So you're saying
01:18:16.140
be more more even keel. And as you as you explain this, I am realizing that a lot of that I can't
01:18:23.020
really afford to be more in the middle about this, because of what I do. You know, this,
01:18:29.680
that's why I'm sad. But yeah, and I understand. But I can't really like if I was more nuanced with
01:18:38.020
and I was and I was more, you know, sitting in that not only does it not accomplish anything, but
01:18:43.340
it everything else sacrifices, then my my content sacrifices, and my content loses, then I lose more.
01:18:50.720
And then it's like, it's a, you know, it's exponential loss. So because then I'm producing
01:18:56.720
less money, then I'm going to be less active, then I'm going to be, you know, not enjoying the
01:18:59.980
content as more. It's just, you know, it's a domino effect to a worse life. So it's just this frame of
01:19:06.040
thinking is the most effective for what I do. I can totally understand. So it's not my place to tell
01:19:12.420
you. And by not my place, I mean, it would be the height of arrogance for me to tell you, if you do
01:19:19.440
this, your content will be fine, right? You know, your content way better than I do. You know what
01:19:23.680
works and what doesn't work. What I would encourage you to do is
01:19:28.120
this is something I feel pretty confident about. So here at Healthy Gamer, we've worked with over 500
01:19:37.400
content creators and ranging from super, super small to like huge. And like way bigger than me or you.
01:19:47.560
And, and, and I'm making assumptions about what your content size is, which I'm pretty sure I'm
01:19:52.880
right. But I mean, I don't know what it is, but I think it's in the ballpark of where I am. Right.
01:19:56.540
So, and, and I think that one of the most consistent things is that, you know, people learn a particular
01:20:02.840
strategy of something working, but when you work with them, when you really start to question things,
01:20:07.700
when you start to try things, what a lot of people, what a lot of content creators feel,
01:20:11.920
this is really ironic, but a lot of people think that the more, the bigger you are as a content
01:20:15.860
creator, the more power you have, the more freedom you have, but really it's the opposite.
01:20:20.500
So when you're like a no name, anybody, nobody, you can make whatever kind of content you want.
01:20:24.840
And it doesn't really matter as content creators become more and more successful. One of the most
01:20:30.320
common experiences they have is they feel more and more restricted. They can't try different things
01:20:35.640
because there's this domino effect. They have to make the same kind of content. They can't speak
01:20:40.260
out about this. They can't, you know, speak out about that. Like they can't, they're going to get
01:20:44.400
punished for any kind of innovation, except for the acceptable innovation. Right. So if you have
01:20:50.100
a certain kind of content and you talk to people on the street, you can go to Amsterdam instead of
01:20:54.260
New York. That's like an innovation that your audience will like. Right. It's been my experience
01:20:59.180
that with, with the right amount of thought and energy for about 40% of people, that's not true.
01:21:05.420
I wish I could say everybody, if they thought hard enough, they can, they're not nearly as trapped
01:21:11.600
as you are, but I'd say I'd ballpark it at about 40%. And I totally get that. This is a, this is a huge
01:21:19.000
challenge for you and that you're shaped by having this public persona. And the reason that I stopped
01:21:25.680
it, I have more experience than you. I think you've lived a lot more at 26. I mean, when I was like,
01:21:32.040
than I had at your age. So I, I, I think like, I mean, you said you started making content in 2013.
01:21:38.700
So I, I, I, just because I'm older than you, sure. I have some experiences that you don't have,
01:21:44.140
and I have more experiences theoretically, but I also know that for a large part of my life,
0.97
01:21:49.180
I had the same fucking experience day after day, after day, after day, after day, after day,
0.98
01:21:52.560
after day, after day. I mean, I used to play video games for like 16 to 20 hours a day for like years
0.99
01:21:57.240
of my life. So there, I mean, I don't think that, you know, it's the same fucking thing and maybe the
0.89
01:22:02.540
depths of, of the depression or whatever you want to call it got worse. But like, generally speaking,
0.93
01:22:07.440
I, I, I think you've had quite, I mean, you mentioned that you, you know, you spent five
01:22:13.080
weeks in Spain with Kanye West. Like that's a big experience, right? You've made a lot of different
01:22:17.560
content. You've talked to a lot of different people. So on balance, I'd say I, I probably have more
01:22:22.960
experiences in life than you do, but I, I wouldn't jump to that conclusion as easily as you would.
01:22:28.920
Yes. I'm also partially being humble so that I don't come off too, you know, braggadocious to,
01:22:36.040
you know, the people watching this, but then that is true. And also, it's also why I joke around about
01:22:40.260
going through a midlife crisis because the life that I've lived so far, I feel much older. And I,
01:22:47.200
like most of my friends are in their mid late thirties. Most of my close, my close friends are much older
01:22:52.740
than me because a lot of people, my age, they haven't, you know, they haven't seen too, too
01:22:58.180
much and they haven't been through as much as I've been through. So it's, it's harder, harder to relate
01:23:03.600
a hundred percent. So where do you think we should go from here?
01:23:09.760
In life or this conversation? This conversation?
01:23:15.280
I, um, I can go back to my perspective of mental health. I can talk to you. I can ask you questions
01:23:21.740
about what you've been going through recently. Um,
01:23:27.180
whatever, whatever you think, whatever you think.
01:23:32.900
Okay. Let me finish like my perspective on mental health. Cause you, you said a lot of stuff there
01:23:37.100
and then I'll ask you about, you know, what's what you're going through recently.
01:23:40.800
Yes. And then I want to, I do want to ask you about fatherhood after, after those two things.
01:23:44.980
Sure. So, um, I, I, I think, you know, Sneeko, I think your, your observations are, are like
01:23:52.900
pretty spot on in a lot of ways. I think some of the conclusions that you draw. So I noticed that
01:23:58.880
you, you make a lot of associations. So you'll like make this observation and then you'll tie
01:24:03.720
something to it. Right. So for example, the expression of weakness means like maybe a downward
01:24:08.200
spiral or whatever. And it's not that that's, that's wrong. Right. So that's clearly observable
01:24:14.040
in our own lives. If I like wallow in my weakness, then like it can lead to a downward spiral. We see
01:24:21.600
a lot of people who express weakness. Like if someone expresses weakness, the likelihood that they
01:24:28.080
wallow in it is like pretty high. Does that kind of make sense? Absolutely. So I think you, you make a lot
01:24:33.220
of associations and what I really respect you for is that when I point out the associations,
01:24:39.020
you're, you're quite flexible around them. So like your, your capacity to self-reflect and recognize
01:24:46.420
what you're doing internally is like quite exceptional. Let's go. So there was, there,
01:24:51.700
there was a video, um, that a buddy of mine made, I don't know if he made it or whatever on his channel
01:24:56.760
that has your face and my face and talks about how I owned you. I saw it. I don't know if you've seen
01:25:01.100
it. I've seen that. And, and so I was a little bit frustrated when I saw that, but I realized that
01:25:05.160
it is what it is. This is what the world is and whatever. The thing that I, I really bothered me,
01:25:10.120
I've never watched the video, but the thing that I think really bothered me about that video
01:25:13.680
is that we, it talks about me owning you. But I think the real thing there is
01:25:19.460
you should be given a ton of credit because in order for me to quote unquote own you,
01:25:26.900
you have to be open-minded. And what I think our conversation was really a testament to me about
01:25:33.020
was your open-mindedness, right? That like, I can't convince you unless of shit, unless you're
0.99
01:25:39.020
willing to be convinced, unless you're actually able to look at the critical nature or you're able
0.99
01:25:44.440
to look at your thought process in a critical way. So that, that was one thing I never watched
01:25:48.620
the video, but whatever. And, and, and so I think this is something that like, I just hope that
01:25:53.360
because who knows, right? This isn't a public, maybe someone will make this again or whatever. But
01:25:57.400
I think like, it's really important for people to understand that,
01:26:01.840
you know, if you start this conversation in one place and you end up in another place,
01:26:07.600
that requires effort on both of our parts, right? I can offer something, but then you have to be
01:26:14.820
willing to receive it. And if you're close-minded about it, I'm not going to be able, I can't like,
01:26:20.180
because I don't argue, I mean, we're not arguing, we're talking. And so that's something that I just
01:26:25.480
really appreciate about you. Anyway, so I think that's one thing that I think is, you make these
01:26:30.320
tight associations, which I just don't make. So half of what you say, I agree with 100%. The
01:26:36.080
conclusions that you come to, I don't agree with. So a couple of these things, are people having more
01:26:41.440
main character syndrome? Absolutely. Are people becoming more narcissistic? Absolutely.
01:26:46.700
Are, is the validation of feelings and is everyone over-identifying in a negative way
01:26:56.160
with mental illness? There's data to support that. The science actually supports that. There's one
0.97
01:27:01.660
study that found that something like 90 to 95% of information about autism or ADHD on TikTok,
01:27:09.140
it's rusty on the study, it's about 18 months old, I think at this point, is wrong. So everyone is like,
01:27:15.160
if you do this, you've got ADHD. If you do this, you've got autism. 90 to 95% of it is incorrect.
01:27:22.620
And these are like huge content creators that basically have the slice of life stuff. And then
01:27:26.340
people is like, oh, I forget my keys. That means I have ADHD. So there is an over-identification with
01:27:32.520
a lot of mental illness stuff. I totally see that. I think it's really, really challenging. I think
01:27:36.720
it's not healthy. Second thing, I think there's a lot of bullshit around the validation of feelings.
0.99
01:27:44.360
So I think that there's, there's actually a really cool paper, I can show it later or send you a
0.91
01:27:50.180
reference or whatever, about how reassurance seeking is mentally unhealthy. So a lot of people
01:27:59.040
who post things about struggles are seeking reassurance. So this is a form of unhealthy coping
01:28:07.000
and coping in general is not healthy. So coping is, I mean, like roughly let's understand, right? So
01:28:15.880
coping is not problem solving. Coping is accepting a particular negative state and then doing something
01:28:23.160
to be able to tolerate the state. But the problem with coping is that you tend to propagate the
01:28:29.000
negative state. The healthy way to cope is right now I'm overwhelmed. Right now I'm feeling bad. Let
01:28:34.980
me cope so I feel better. But there's a really important second step. Now that I'm better, now that
01:28:41.520
I'm feeling better, what am I going to do to change my circumstances so that I don't feel that way
01:28:47.480
again. I see a very, very disturbing trend, which I do think is somewhat responsible for the increase
01:28:55.640
in mental illness and mental suffering that we see that people are like sort of defaulting to some of
01:29:01.720
these like maladaptive mechanisms. The other thing that I think is really healthy, unhealthy is that
01:29:07.020
people are increasingly, this is really challenging, but we basically have, we sort of have a epidemic
01:29:20.700
of something in the ballpark of factitious disorder and malingering. So let me explain. So there's a
01:29:27.360
handful of illnesses. Okay. So pseudo seizures, non-epileptiform seizures, factitious disorder,
01:29:33.460
malingering, malingering, that are illnesses that people create the sick role, either intentionally or
01:29:42.200
psychologically. They claim being sick. And the reason that they claim being sick is because it
01:29:48.600
benefits them in some way. So in society, if you are ill, we give you certain latitude. If you're ill,
01:29:57.580
you don't have to come to work. If you're ill, you don't have to go to school. If you're ill,
01:30:02.000
you don't have to take out the trash, right? This is something that we as a society do.
01:30:06.600
So what some people learn how to do, either consciously or subconsciously, is claim illness.
01:30:13.400
And this is a diagnosable thing when it happens really bad. So malingering is like when someone
01:30:18.860
comes in, when a homeless person comes into the emergency room and says, I'm really suicidal,
01:30:24.220
I'm going to kill myself. And it's negative 10 degrees outside and I'm working in downtown Boston
01:30:29.120
and they have nowhere to stay. That's malingering, right? Maybe. So we have to assess them
01:30:34.380
diagnostically to see if it's malingering or not. So what I'm seeing is happening a lot is that people
01:30:41.000
are using illness as an excuse. And my kind of stance on this as a psychiatrist is kind of hard
01:30:48.000
for a lot of people to hear, but this is, I think, what is acceptable. So, you know, I once had a patient
01:30:53.100
who had bipolar disorder and they would become manic and then they would do lots of really
01:30:58.300
inappropriate things. They would gamble. They would start to give their possessions away to
01:31:02.680
homeless people. They would invite homeless people to come to their house, to stay in their house
01:31:07.880
because they wanted to be like, you know, so caring and stuff like that. They're manic.
01:31:11.660
And so this person's partner comes home with their young child. And when they come home with their
01:31:18.420
one young child, there's like three homeless people like in their home and the partner is like,
01:31:25.800
what the hell is going on? So later on, this person said, you know, it's not my fault. I'm manic.
01:31:30.880
And generally speaking, that's true, right? So we as a society acknowledge that if someone is acutely
01:31:37.020
manic, they're behaving in ways that they really can't control. Like it's not controllable. There's a lot
01:31:43.160
of evidence of that. So the problem though, is that just because you don't, you can't control
01:31:50.420
your behavior when you are manic doesn't mean that this isn't your fault. There's a subtlety and a
01:31:55.320
nuance here that's really important. How did you get manic in the first place? Did you stop taking
01:32:00.480
your medication? Did you stop going to therapy? Did you start staying up super late? Did you start
01:32:05.520
using substances? So one of the most challenging things as a psychiatrist is navigating this sort of like,
01:32:12.580
okay, you're not responsible for what you do when you're fucking high out of your mind on K2.
0.54
01:32:19.080
But are you responsible for using K2 in the first place? Absolutely. Right? So I think what's happening
0.51
01:32:25.020
right now is, is since we give so many people a pass for being mentally ill, which I think we should
1.00
01:32:30.380
continue to do, I think we should like, when some people absolutely, I know, I know, I know, I know. Like I said,
01:32:36.560
I agree with 50% of what you said. I think when people are acutely ill, and when they're really
01:32:42.940
struggling, I think that their capability to do certain things is severely impaired.
01:32:48.880
I think we should give people a pass for that. But what I don't think we should do is let that
01:32:54.160
be an excuse. So when someone says, you know, oh, I'm depressed, it's not my fault. My question to
01:32:59.380
them is like, what's your plan to deal with the depression? Fine. In this moment, on this day,
01:33:03.820
it's not your fault. What are you going to do tomorrow? What are you going to do the next week?
01:33:07.500
What are you going to do the next month? Are you being responsible in tackling your depression?
01:33:13.920
And what I tend to find is that like a lot of people, thankfully, most of the people that I've
01:33:19.140
had the privilege of working with, and that's why I like working with them. That's why I have
01:33:23.540
compassion for them. That's why I have latitude for them, because they put in the effort where it
01:33:26.940
counts. They're not weak, right? They like try. And if despite the fact that they're doing everything
01:33:32.680
that they're supposed to be doing, sometimes the nature of the brain is such that they flip
01:33:37.520
into these mood episodes, these manic episodes, things like that. So I think that sometimes people
01:33:42.960
do use mental illness as an excuse. It's happening more and more and more, unfortunately. And I think
01:33:49.040
that now what's happening with that's even more dangerous is like, if you try to hold someone
01:33:54.440
accountable, once they play the mental illness card, oh, yeah, I had an affair. I'm sorry,
01:33:59.280
I have this. I was manic, or I was hypomanic, or I was depressed, and I needed this. And it's not
01:34:04.120
my fault. I think that like people should still be held accountable for their actions, right? Or
01:34:08.340
like groping a woman because you have anxiety. Sure. Right. So I think that that an illness is
01:34:15.460
something that we should give some latitude for. I think these people deserve compassion. I think
01:34:19.720
they deserve help. And someone should still be held. Someone should be held appropriately
01:34:24.740
responsible for their actions. There's more coping mechanisms than ever. The biggest one that I've
01:34:29.520
noticed recently, and I don't know if you have patience to do this, but I like that you pointed
01:34:35.340
out that people search to cope rather than to improve. The biggest one that didn't exist a couple
01:34:41.280
years ago was ChatGBT. And I would say, I think 50 to 70% of women my age, girls in Gen Z, especially
01:34:49.400
in New York City, liberal cities, when they have problems in their life and in their relationship,
01:34:54.440
they go to ChatGBT because ChatGBT will validate them immediately. They'll phrase the question in a
01:35:00.060
way to where they're never responsible for what's wrong. And they'll say to ChatGBT,
01:35:08.600
this happened, it's this person's fault. And then ChatGBT will give them a list of reasons
01:35:13.460
to cope. And now that they can go to AI to validate their feelings of weakness, I think
01:35:22.680
we're going down a dangerous path to where people can avoid bearing responsibility for their own
01:35:30.400
actions even more and through a computer instantly. Yeah. So I think, so I did a super cool stream with
01:35:40.800
two of my colleagues and we basically gave it like psychiatric scenarios. And, you know, like,
01:35:47.840
so, so like we, we like took scenarios from like standardized tests or cases or whatever.
01:35:53.100
Like, so like, you know, when we were studying psychiatry, you'll have like this case or history
01:35:56.700
or whatever. And, um, it is ChatGBT was really good at pointing out a lot of problems and people's
01:36:03.700
thinking. I was quite shocked. And it was also really bad at pointing out particular things.
01:36:08.560
I think the takeaway that I have here is the utility of ChatGBT depends on the prompt engineering.
01:36:14.640
So if you ask ChatGBT, you know, if you just, so ChatGBT is very validating. That's what it does
01:36:22.720
better than everything else. And that's why people, I think, find it incredibly useful. I have found
01:36:27.400
though, that a lot of people do find it incredibly useful. And I do, I think that this is another one
01:36:32.260
of the things that I think I take issue with, with a lot of what you say. And let me know if this
01:36:35.880
rubs you the wrong way, but I think you tend to be pretty like black or white in your thinking.
0.66
01:36:40.440
So, so you'll say, I mean, you said a lot of women and I think that ChatGBT, there's even,
0.56
01:36:45.800
there's a really interesting, um, there's probably going to be studies about this now
01:36:49.120
about ChatGBT induced psychosis. So this is like a phenomenon that we're seeing where like
01:36:55.440
people will talk to ChatGBT and it keeps on reflecting back, like whatever they say,
01:37:02.140
and they're sort of really becoming delusional. Now there's a, this is where you got to be
01:37:07.220
careful, right? So this is where I think you're, you're a lot of statements that you have, I would
01:37:11.000
say, I would argue are missing some nuance. And I think you're missing stuff. I would say not that
01:37:16.860
I'm you're wrong, but just based on my experience, which is that the question is if you have someone
01:37:21.600
who is in prodromal psychosis, which means the early stages, the incubation period of psychosis,
01:37:27.700
and you give him ChatGBT, I think there's a very good chance that these people are like on the path
01:37:33.740
to psychosis and it accelerates it as opposed to creates it. We're not sure. That's why data is
01:37:39.880
important, which brings me to another point that I think is important to understand, which is that I
01:37:45.760
think, you know, you said you've never seen it. And I think that like generally speaking, when it
01:37:50.600
comes to influencers and especially polarizing influencers. Now, I don't know what your social life
01:37:56.520
is like and things like that. I think there's going to be a huge selection bias with like who you
01:38:02.880
encounter, right? And that's why I like data as opposed to anecdotes. So even one of the advantages
01:38:09.120
of being a physician is when I work in the Massachusetts General Hospital emergency room, all kinds of
01:38:14.180
random people are showing up, right? So in my private practice, I have people who are like founders
01:38:19.960
from MIT incubators coming in for whatever. I have degenerate gamers, I have a particular slice of the
01:38:25.780
world that is coming to see me. But when I work in an emergency room, I'm seeing all kinds of people
01:38:31.080
who have all kinds of experiences. And I think a lot of your perspectives on mental illness, Lynn,
01:38:36.120
like the way that you sort of describe depression, I think that there's this is one point that I wanted
01:38:40.780
to bring up. I think it would be very enlightening for you if you could take someone who is healthy now
01:38:48.600
and talk to them and really listen about their experience of depression.
01:38:54.060
So I think a lot of the statements that you make about depression,
01:38:57.520
my interpretation of it is that your phenomenological experience of your struggles
01:39:08.080
So when you talk about the adaptive thinking and things like that, and like you used to be depressed,
01:39:14.220
you used to be sad, you kind of brought yourself out of it.
01:39:16.860
I kind of agree, like I'm not disagreeing. I think a lot of people who are depressed
01:39:20.580
are in similar situations as yours. I don't think it's monolithic.
01:39:24.240
I didn't say I was depressed. I said I was introspective and
01:39:29.780
So you had whatever your mental state was and you used a particular strategy to overcome that mental
01:39:38.180
state, right? And the way that you talk about that mental state and the way that you describe
01:39:43.960
people who have that mental state, I think there's a variety of people who claim they're depressed.
01:39:49.960
Many of them may have something in the ballpark of what you had, probably also in the ballpark of
01:39:55.260
what I had when I was in my low points. And I think there are some people who have a very,
01:40:01.560
very different experience. Like the, the, the, what it's like to be inside their head
01:40:07.180
is way more like intractable. Like so, so very severe depression can cross over into things like
01:40:16.460
psychosis and delusions. And so I think some people are just so depressed and it's hard to like
01:40:22.120
imagine. I don't think most human beings would understand what this feels like until you've
01:40:28.700
sat with these people and you recognize this person isn't weak. This person isn't stupid.
0.96
01:40:33.120
This person is trying to cope. But like when you cope in a particular way, your mind listens to you.
0.80
01:40:40.780
So there are some people whose minds don't listen to them. So when you try the techniques that you're
01:40:48.120
doing, they like, it just doesn't work. It kind of bounces. So they have no, so if your minds,
01:40:54.760
if their minds don't listen to them, then how are they alive? Like that's the only thing that we
01:41:00.220
have complete control over. If we're certain of anything, if we're sort of anything is that we
01:41:05.200
can control our thoughts and our minds. And if we're not even, you can't control your thoughts.
01:41:12.120
I just showed you an example. You said like, that makes me sad. And I said, it is what it is.
01:41:16.260
That was an example of controlling the state of mind and what you think. If you, yeah,
01:41:20.140
you can't, you see, you don't think that you, my mistake, my mistake, my mistake. I was,
01:41:26.020
I was taking an issue with a more of the absolutist. I was interpreting that as an absolute statement,
01:41:31.820
which is a mistake of my interpretation. So for example, there are modifications and attempts
01:41:37.200
to control your mind. You can send signals to your mind and the mind at times will be more
01:41:43.580
responsive and at times will be less responsive, right? There's a spectrum. And, and ideally the
01:41:49.700
healthier you are, the more pliable your mind is. But there, there's, there's plenty of evidence
01:41:54.780
that shows that some people's minds are more intractable. Their, their patterns of their habitual
01:42:00.840
forms of thinking are a lot more concrete and a lot less modifiable. So a really good example of
01:42:08.800
this is like body dysmorphia, where if you take people with like really, really, really severe
01:42:13.680
body dysmorphia, really severe eating disorders, their mind is like, it's like made of stone.
01:42:19.620
Like you can try to modify it as much as you want, but like, it just doesn't shift. Like,
01:42:24.080
and you have to do all kinds of weird, but it doesn't start that way. It doesn't, it goes,
01:42:29.000
it's a path. It's a slow dissolution. I, I, I think so. I think so. So I, I think that there's,
01:42:35.840
I hope so. But, but there's, there's some, like you kind of said, there's environment. And I think
01:42:41.180
a big part of the environment is the way that you, you treat your mind. Um, uh, yes, I, I think that
01:42:47.840
it, it kind of evolves in that. I think it gets more concrete over time. And I think if you intervene
01:42:52.700
with those people early in a different way, then hopefully it would not evolve in that way. But we
01:43:00.260
also do know that there's like genetic predispositions for like rigidity of thinking.
01:43:07.340
So I think you're quite cognitively flexible, which is something, like I said, I've said a couple of
01:43:11.360
times, I really respect about you, but I think that your, your cognitive flexibility is part of
01:43:15.820
the reason why your methodologies work really well, right? So you're, you have, you've been dealt a
01:43:20.360
certain hand of cards in your brain. I also, you keep saying that you think you disagree with 50%
01:43:26.900
of what I say. I don't know if you necessarily disagree. I just think that you don't see the
01:43:31.780
nuance of what I'm saying because I'm saying very blanket statements. And I do generalize a lot when I
01:43:37.680
speak and I speak for, yeah, which is, I don't know if there's disagreement. It's just, uh,
01:43:44.780
maybe it's a total difference or, but yeah, so I, I, I, I think that I would completely agree that
01:43:51.260
as we add more and more nuance to the conversation, I think we get closer and closer together.
01:44:01.940
Um, last, a couple, a couple of other points. So just about the, the serotonin deficiency hypothesis.
01:44:08.460
So I think just to clarify, psychotherapists may not be in favor of that hypothesis. It's usually
01:44:16.480
psychiatrists that are. So psychotherapists of anything, you know, if there's a group of people
01:44:21.760
on the planet who doesn't believe in the serotonin hypothesis, there's a really good chance that
01:44:28.240
there's a psychotherapist because they're like, some of them are trained in like union analysis
01:44:32.580
and Freudian analysis, and they think all kinds of different things. They don't think it can be,
01:44:36.140
I mean, I'm lumping them all together, but many of them don't believe in that or don't attribute
01:44:40.860
that much to it. Now, I think that there, there very well may be a serotonin imbalance in the brain
01:44:46.100
when it comes to something like a mood disorder. But I also think, I don't know if this makes sense,
01:44:52.360
that if you do cognitive things like what you're doing, I think that will affect, that will alter that
01:44:58.640
not, I must be damn near 100% correct. If you do the things that you're doing, that will alter the
01:45:05.960
serotonin transmission in your brain. I feel incredibly confident in that statement. So I think there's
01:45:11.000
what happened with the whole serotonin thing. That was something, and you're, you're, you're kind of
01:45:16.040
right about this. I think what really happened there is we were looking for a way to de-stigmatize
01:45:21.760
mental illness. So we were looking for a way because everyone used to blame themselves for
01:45:26.700
mental illness. They thought that things like mood disorders or stuff like that were weakness.
01:45:31.660
And so we, as a medical community, once we figured out, oh, there's a mechanism here,
01:45:37.820
there's treatments here, we wanted people to stop stigmatizing it as weakness. So we offered this
01:45:43.340
explanation of there's a chemical imbalance in your brain. And when we say there's a chemical
01:45:48.000
imbalance in your brain, it's sort of like, it's not your fault, which is sort of what we were trying
01:45:52.400
to do, right? Because we didn't want to blame themselves because something is going on. It's
01:45:55.820
really not your fault. But then what happened is we made a big mistake, which is that we told people
01:46:00.600
it's not your fault. And then everyone started really internalizing. It's not my fault. So not my
01:46:06.400
fault, whatever. So the pendulum is swinging back the other way. Yeah. So I, I, I would, you know,
01:46:12.520
I would say that most people, like, I remember I was in an interview at UCLA for my psychiatry
01:46:21.820
residency. The person that I was interviewing, I mentioned the serotonin deficiency. And he was
01:46:28.020
like, hold on a second. Why do you think that people with depression are deficient in serotonin?
01:46:33.680
And I was like, well, isn't that what we think? And he's like, actually, there's very little
01:46:36.980
evidence for it. We had, it was a wonderful interview. He's a wonderful person. So I think that
01:46:41.580
generally speaking, the more knowledgeable you are, I think we sort of know that that's
01:46:45.500
like just a piece of the puzzle. It's not that it's right or wrong. It's that it's like
01:46:49.800
woefully incomplete to describe a complex human being. But I think it's something that we did
01:47:00.600
sort of like parrot the party line. Now, if you're, I'm also not quite on, on your level,
01:47:07.480
and maybe there's a lot of nuance there that there's a lot of like, you know, money to be
01:47:10.760
made. And there absolutely is. And pharma does shady things. Very possible that when pharma was
01:47:16.140
talking about fluoxetine and whatever, they were kind of pushing this and saying that this will fix
01:47:20.700
it. I think aftermarket studies on SSRIs have shown that it's not nearly as effective as what
01:47:26.440
we thought it was. In my clinical experience, SSRIs are incredibly helpful and arguably life-changing
01:47:33.000
for about a third of people who get diagnosed with depression. A third of people, it doesn't really
01:47:38.420
help at all. Or is it even harmful? And a third of people is kind of like, we're not quite sure.
01:47:48.200
What about fatherhood? How much serotonin do you get?
01:47:53.740
If you do it right, a ton. So serotonin, this is kind of my take. So I've sort of noticed there's
01:48:05.340
an inverse relationship between serotonin and dopamine. So the more dopaminergic activities that
01:48:11.920
you do, the more your serotonin will decrease. It doesn't actually happen that way. So I'm sort of
01:48:17.580
talking about it in a functional model style way. So no one is measuring, you know, intracellular
01:48:24.640
serotonin concentration or synaptic serotonin concentration when I say these things. But
01:48:30.080
what I sort of observe is when you do a lot of stuff that gives you dopamine, whether that's play
01:48:33.580
video games, watch pornography, do drugs, whatever.
01:48:36.360
So short-term gratification versus long-term gratification.
01:48:40.140
Yeah. So short-term gratification is what, the more dopamine you have, then over time,
01:48:47.200
you're not going to feel good about your life. So serotonin gives you a sense of peace and
01:48:51.840
contentment, also an oversimplification. Dopamine gives you a sense of pleasure, right? Those are
01:48:57.300
two different qualitative things. And the more dopaminergic you are, generally speaking,
01:49:02.380
the less serotonin you'll have. Whereas if you look at like what gives people serotonin,
01:49:09.100
it's like if you work hard over the course of a day, you feel good about it at the end of the day.
01:49:17.500
That doesn't mean that you had fun. It's not fun. It's feeling content. You're like, oh man,
01:49:22.260
like when you hit, when you hit the sack and you're tired because you fucking grind it a lot and you have
0.97
01:49:26.960
work that you can be proud of. When you have autonomy and the ability to self-direct, when you
0.88
01:49:32.620
do things that are meaningful to you, you get serotonin. Now there's complications there because
01:49:38.800
you know, when you're a father, frequently you're not sleeping very much, like especially in the early
01:49:43.400
years. And so if you're not sleeping well, you know, your serotonin levels may be altered or things
01:49:48.320
like that. But I think generally speaking, I would say that if you do it in a healthy way and if you're
01:49:54.140
lucky enough to have a kid who's like relatively like easy to handle and not even easy to handle
01:50:01.400
is just not really hard to handle, then I think fatherhood has profound positive effects on your
01:50:06.920
serotonin and your sense of contentment and peace in life. But if you're not careful and you just sort
01:50:13.200
of go through the motions of fatherhood and make sacrifice little chunks of yourself to being a
01:50:18.900
parent over an extended period of time, you may wind up in a midlife crisis, going through a
01:50:25.100
divorce, dating someone 15 years younger, getting a hair transplant, getting a lease on a fancy sports
01:50:32.200
car. At a Coldplay concert. That's why I had this tweet blow up two days ago. I said, I want to read,
01:50:39.000
I want to see it because I think it was worded really well. And it does relate to what you do
01:50:44.100
and content creators. So I tweeted, I said, PewDiePie ripped a hard R then escaped this gay
1.00
01:50:51.520
world to start a family. A decade later, all of his peers stare soullessly into the camera to make
01:50:56.380
AdSense from drama slop to fund their ozempic addiction and legal battles with former friends.
01:51:01.440
Shout out to PewDiePie. And this blew up. And I think it obviously I'm joking around like he ripped
01:51:07.900
a hard R. That's not like something commendable. But it's an example of saying something you're not
01:51:12.720
supposed to say, going against the grain. And then he left, he moved to Japan, started a family,
01:51:17.460
and it seems like he's living a much more fulfilling life away from the internet. While
01:51:20.840
all of his peers, they are on SSRIs, they're on ozempic, they're getting the hair transplant,
01:51:26.800
and they're still turning it on. Hey, you two, what's up? Today, I'm going to sue somebody who
01:51:33.060
used to be my best friend and spend three hours reading Reddit comments and regurgitating drama
01:51:38.520
slop for parasocials who are also in the same predicament. And yes, they have money, but they're
0.96
01:51:42.700
also still in this world and they don't have an escape route. And I commend someone like PewDiePie,
01:51:49.440
his life trajectory is like, that sounds so nice to be able to have an exit route. Because people
01:51:57.080
who don't rip a hard R or get banned the way I do, they're just kind of trapped. And I think a good
01:52:03.400
example of somebody like that is someone like iDubbs, for example, who used to be an edgy YouTuber who
01:52:10.220
would go against the grain and was saying things and, you know, speaking to the youth in a way that
01:52:15.840
that was outside, like people came to content creators to get non-traditional forms of entertainment
01:52:21.620
and media. And then he became like, he just became the machine. He came, he became mainstream news.
01:52:28.000
And now he just completely did a 180. He's clearly like very upset with his life. He's probably on
01:52:33.280
antidepressants. And in a way to go full circle with this, the blessing in all this is that the
01:52:40.180
fact that I'm banned is that I have an exit strategy that other people don't have. If they're still in
01:52:45.320
this world forever, then they have to play the PR route. And I, in a way I like being the canceled
01:52:49.900
guy because I don't have to jump through the same hula hoops that the other creators do. Being an
01:52:54.460
outsider, I can be truthful. I could be honest. I don't have to play the public relations game and
01:52:59.740
not say this and I'd not be deemed as this phobic or that phobic or a conspiracy theorist. I can be
01:53:05.200
myself and express myself in a more authentic way. And eventually when I do want to get the
01:53:10.900
serotonin from having a family and from exiting, it's going to be much easier and it's going to be
01:53:16.860
an easier out. Cause I don't want to be like, I see those older YouTubers in their thirties and
01:53:23.680
forties who are still turning on the camera to do absolute slap content. And I think that that's
01:53:28.540
one of the worst existence as possible, not just because they're clearly unhappy, but they're not
01:53:33.080
making anybody better than themselves. Their whole audience is full of depressed people who
01:53:36.880
are too invested in the lives of people that they're never going to meet or should be investing
01:53:42.000
into at all. These are just shit people overall. So I do think that's, that is a blessing. And also
1.00
01:53:49.080
partly saying it is what it is. Maybe that these challenges that I face are, I can be grateful for
01:53:55.000
because it's giving me obstacles that other people haven't faced and, and an exit strategy
01:54:01.720
so that eventually, you know, I, I can't have that, that, that family and escape this gay world.
1.00
01:54:19.820
What are you looking for from me in terms of response and how, how it goes, it goes back
01:54:28.480
to when you're like, uh, you said you, um, that makes me sad. And it's like, maybe like,
01:54:33.480
obviously you, you could see that there's a point of reflection there and stuff like this,
01:54:37.760
but I'm my point, I say to say like, maybe this, these challenges are, are a blessing as
01:54:42.960
well. I think like in Islam, we say, alhamdulillah for everything, the good and the bad, because
01:54:47.960
there's, there's always a, there's a, there's positives in the negatives and maybe the negatives
01:54:53.280
aren't really negatives, but they are positives. And I'm glad to, I'm saying it to say like,
01:55:00.160
I'm glad to not be those people that believe everything that we're told to believe because
01:55:04.340
they get trapped in this, in this cycle of long-term negativity. And they just, I hate
01:55:11.780
seeing that person turn on the camera and just do this soulless, those epic stare, you
01:55:16.420
know, and although they have the platforms that I don't have, I think they have less
01:55:25.740
Why do you think your mind goes to analyze these people in this way?
01:55:32.820
Because I see them as someone who started on the same path that I was on. Maybe they started
01:55:37.860
YouTube a little earlier than me around the same time. And it's an easy comparison to make.
01:55:42.140
Obviously comparison is a thief of joy, but I see that as like, this is the route that
01:55:46.620
I could have taken. And am I happier with the route that I'm in or, or do I want what
01:55:53.900
they have? And I look what they have and I don't want it. I'm very happy where I am.
01:55:58.380
So, so since you, since you don't want it and you're very happy with what, where you are,
01:56:02.940
what would happen if you weren't happy with where you are?
01:56:11.100
I would reevaluate. And I, I, I see, I see that in a lot of them. I think that they're
01:56:18.980
extremely unhappy, but because of the coping mechanisms that have been provided to us by
01:56:22.960
Big Pharma and ChatGPT, they don't reevaluate, they don't progress and they just cope more.
01:56:31.120
So Sneeko, one thing you've got to be careful about is devaluing things that you lost.
01:56:39.480
So one, one very, very interesting mechanism of the mind, right? So maybe this is something
01:56:45.200
you can empathize with. So, you know, when my friends and I liked a girl, we would sometimes
01:56:53.340
get up the balls to ask her out. And then if she said no, right, we're, we're butthurt.
0.97
01:56:59.700
That fat lesbian, she's fat and stupid anyway. Fuck that bitch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's coping.
1.00
01:57:07.540
So, so, and like, I, I think that there's a parallel between that and what you're doing
01:57:14.080
with a couple of really important differences. But I, I think that like, so what, what I find
01:57:20.480
interesting is the direction that you go. Like, why do you choose to compare yourself to these people?
01:57:25.780
And you say, this thing is negative. So there's a lot of good adaptation in there. I think you're
01:57:29.940
correct that a lot of these people feel trapped. A lot of them feel unhappy, but I think you've got
01:57:35.200
to be super careful because what you're basically like, I don't know, this is so weird, right? So,
01:57:42.420
so for me, what I pay attention to is what people say that is completely unprompted.
01:57:47.080
I didn't ask you about this. And not that I'm, I'm happy you shared it. I really am. And I'm glad
01:57:53.280
we're having this conversation, but I think it's like, you made this tweet. This is what your mind
01:57:58.260
generated, right? Your mind is looking at these comparisons. Your mind, and I think this is what's
01:58:04.120
kind of scary and good and healthy. And I think it's wonderful that we're talking about this
01:58:07.940
because like, here you are comparing yourself to all of the YouTubers who didn't get banned,
01:58:13.660
who have the luxury of being soulless Ozempic bots and still having tons of content creators and
01:58:20.180
being able to stream on YouTube and being able to stream on Twitch, all the things that you've
01:58:24.100
been denied. And it can be really hard. So, so they have something you don't have. And so you've
01:58:33.600
got to be careful when you devalue them. Right. But I'm not completely devaluing it. Okay.
01:58:38.480
But I, I, I, please, please one second. Okay. Go ahead. Go ahead. Okay. No, no, go ahead.
01:58:44.980
I'm seeing the nuance, but I'm taking a page out of your book in a way. I'm seeing the nuance of it.
01:58:49.740
Yes. I want those platforms, but also there's a blessing in disguise. I'm not completely,
01:58:53.260
obviously it would be better. I would prefer having it, but in a way, maybe I was prevent,
01:58:57.600
this was a trap that I was able to overstep. I, this trap was prevented for me.
01:59:02.460
I think, I, I, I think that there's a lot of, it could be both.
01:59:07.660
It absolutely can be both. So here's the hard question. Do you want a hard question?
01:59:18.960
If you were jealous of them, would you let yourself be jealous of them?
01:59:24.000
No. Could you handle, could you admit to yourself or the rest of the world if you were
01:59:38.560
As in you wouldn't let yourself, I wouldn't let myself show jealousy. No.
01:59:43.300
Right. So like you wouldn't even let yourself feel it internally.
01:59:49.300
No, I could feel it internally, but I wouldn't express that publicly.
01:59:53.900
Okay. Cause I, I, I think, I, I think what I get from you is resentment.
02:00:00.180
And, and I, I get, and I, I don't think you're wrong, right? So this is what's so sneaky about the
02:00:05.260
mind when it's, when it's like well-developed is that it's not going to tell you false things.
02:00:10.520
It's just going to tell you incomplete things. So are a lot of people trapped in content creation
02:00:16.200
that they hate? Absolutely. I have worked with a ton of them.
02:00:19.960
So here are a couple of things that I think are happening, thankfully.
02:00:26.100
So content creation just blew up and no one knew how to do it right. People are learning
02:00:31.900
very, very, very quickly how to do it right, how to do it in a healthy way.
02:00:36.680
So you have a lot of YouTubers who are soulless, on SSRIs, Ozempic, whatever, but then you
0.99
02:00:44.220
have a ton of YouTubers who are not those things, who are not suing their best friends. And I don't,
02:00:49.260
I mean, that's a weird example. I've not really heard of that very much, but like you make it
02:00:53.460
sound like it's a common thing. Does that happen a lot?
02:00:55.440
Yeah. It's becoming increasingly common now for the, the main core of OG YouTubers.
02:01:02.480
Right. So, so, but like, I mean, like I, I spend a lot of time, you know, working with
02:01:07.800
YouTubers, collabing with YouTubers, whatever. And like a lot of them are like learning how
02:01:12.020
to live their best lives. Like a, a buddy of mine, you know, is a YouTuber grew up in
02:01:17.200
a particular country, is married, has a kid. He's a digital nomad. They, he, him, his wife
02:01:23.060
and his kid just moved to a random ass country that they want to live. Haven't, I mean, he makes
0.52
02:01:27.880
plenty of money, but like, you know, has a incredibly nice standard of living is saving a ton
02:01:32.200
of money. And then he like, I'm sure he'll move when he feels like it. Right. So, so like
02:01:36.380
what's, what's like PewDiePie maybe was one of the early ones, but I would say a ton of
02:01:41.520
YouTubers are learning how to do that. They're learning how to do it in a healthy way. The
02:01:47.800
OG YouTubers and especially the OG Twitch streamers, all of us are like a little bit
02:01:52.960
degenerate, but what's starting to happen is there's a ton of professionalism coming into,
02:01:57.620
into content creation. You know, VidCon got acquired by the people who own CAN, the film
02:02:04.240
festival. So a lot of traditional media is coming in. A lot of like structure is coming in. A lot of
02:02:09.160
professionalism is coming in. There's, you know, we get sometimes approached about, you know, doing
02:02:14.120
like, like a, you know, people approach us, right? Like people like YouTube and meta. So we, we built
02:02:21.460
something for meta for their content creators so that they could be like, get some, some basic
02:02:26.840
understanding of like mental health and whatever. So I, I think that like, this is true that there's
02:02:31.600
a lot of degenerate YouTubers or Twitch streamers or whatever who are struggling and, or have the
02:02:36.100
soulless Ozempic stare or whatever. But then there's actually like, I would say that the tide is
02:02:40.160
shifting pretty rapidly. And the thing is, if we were talking about incredibly, incredibly successful
02:02:45.760
YouTubers, I think that they're, in order to cut it for this long and not fall apart, you have to
0.99
02:02:52.740
learn how to be resilient. That's what I'm seeing more and more is that you have to learn,
02:02:56.700
some kind of work-life balance in order to make it work and continue to produce high quality content.
02:03:03.020
But I've, I've worked with plenty who are struggling and plenty who are not. And the most
02:03:08.540
gratifying thing is that many of the people that I work with who are struggling after some degree of
02:03:13.240
work, they don't struggle anymore. Like they, they learn and they adapt and they grow. And I think it's
02:03:18.400
really challenging because a lot of these people start when they're very young. So one of the things
02:03:23.440
that I'm really grateful for, and really like honestly lucky, is that I was like a relatively
02:03:28.820
formed human being before I ever started streaming on Twitch. I started streaming on Twitch when I was
02:03:35.080
36. And like, at that point, I was faculty at Harvard Medical School and married and had two kids.
02:03:43.480
Right. So like I had, I had my difficult years and I was confident in who I was and had plenty of like
02:03:51.240
ego strength and things like that in a good way. Whereas it's, it's really like not dangerous or sad,
02:03:57.460
but it's, it's like, it's kind of scary that a lot of these people start yourself included.
02:04:01.700
Right. So you say you're 26 and you started on YouTube when you were 13, you're 13.
02:04:06.480
I mean, technically I started when I was 11, but I started my channel, uh, the channel that I used
02:04:11.360
for years when I was four, I would say 14, I really took it to started taking. So, so the way
02:04:15.020
you've developed, before I was in, uh, you know, before I hit puberty, like my early voices, my balls
02:04:19.880
didn't drop. Absolutely. Right. So, so, so your developmental years were shaped to a certain degree by
02:04:28.260
content creation. Absolutely. And what we know from a lot of child celebrities is when you're in the
02:04:33.760
public spotlight, the human brain is not designed to be famous when you're 14. So, and when you're
02:04:40.160
famous at 14, there are certain psychological impacts, which once again, I don't think are
02:04:44.960
like weakness or anything like that. Like this just shapes you, like your circumstances shape you.
02:04:49.780
And it's really sad to see, like, you know, sometimes I'll see these like clips and stuff
02:04:53.580
on Reddit of like some of these child stars that are like in puberty and stuff. And there's a lot of
02:04:59.180
really successful musicians who started out like when they were teenagers and boy, did they get
02:05:04.420
like sexualized and judged in a way that like, is just really, really scary. Like, and these people
02:05:10.280
are struggle so much. And I don't want to like, I mean, I, I see all kinds of problems that, you know,
02:05:16.140
when I, when I look at a celebrity and they're doing particular things or saying certain things,
02:05:19.900
I feel like I have some insight. I'm pretty sure my colleagues have similar insights. I've talked
02:05:24.960
about it with some people, but like, you know, we can see how, and it's not this person's fault
02:05:29.480
that they're narcissistic. They just grew up in the spotlight and that's what the spotlight does to
02:05:33.340
you. And that's why so many celebrities and musicians are, are screwed up because they're
0.94
02:05:39.580
just like the human mind is we, we, our brain evolved to exist in communities of like 300 people
0.97
02:05:46.280
being judged by millions of people. And here's the really damning thing.
02:05:50.360
So if a million, the brain doesn't think in terms of percentages. So if a million people like you
02:05:56.740
and a hundred people absolutely loathe you, the, the hurt from the hundred people is not outweighed
02:06:05.540
naturally by the nine, 900,000, nine, 999,000 people that like, very good point. And there's a really,
02:06:14.940
I mean, I'm sure you understand this because it's crazy. You talk to anyone who live streams,
02:06:19.880
if you read your, your chat, you're not reading every message, but if there's a dangerous message,
02:06:25.960
your brain will flag it immediately. You know what I mean? You know what I mean? Right. Right.
02:06:30.580
So it's a scrolling by faster than you can read, but they say the one thing you're worried about
02:06:35.360
and your brain is like, I see, I see. Right. So, so our brain has this kind of danger detecting
02:06:42.100
filter built in, which means that if a hundred people hate you, all it really takes is like one
02:06:48.500
person to stalk you, troll you, whatever. And like one person can screw up your life.
02:06:54.380
And the really damaging thing about being a content creator is if you get big,
02:06:58.040
you will absolutely attract the minimum number of people to screw up your life.
02:07:08.020
I mean, you asked me about fatherhood. I went and ended up here because you mentioned the PewDiePie
02:07:13.640
So, okay. A more specific question is, Dr. K., do you think I'm coping?
02:07:31.440
I think, I think there's some coping. I think it's adaptive coping.
02:07:38.940
Okay. But is it, is it more, is it, is it more coping than what is, is it borderline unhealthy
02:07:49.860
I think it's incredibly healthy. I think that being able to look at your negative circumstances
02:07:54.600
and start to see this as part of your path in life that God put you on and that there
02:07:59.880
are some advantages that you have that other people don't have, I think is very healthy.
02:08:03.400
To look at your situation and instead of being butthurt and depressed about it, saying like,
02:08:09.240
okay, I've got some advantages that other people don't have, even though my life is hard
02:08:12.880
and I'm going to play to my strengths because now I have been banned from most of the major
02:08:17.620
platforms out there. Like, I think that's the right strategy.
02:08:21.420
That's what I do. That's what I just explained.
02:08:24.560
So how is that cope? If that's dealing with it?
02:08:31.620
Oh, okay. Fine, fine. Fine, fine. But coping has a negative connotation.
02:08:34.540
My mistake. My mistake. Let me, let me explain.
02:08:37.700
So, so I think that there is cope. You're doing both. So you're coping, right? So I think that
02:08:41.980
you're devaluing, you're making, your, your, your mind is very sensitive and is devaluing of many
02:08:50.200
people that I think that you are a little bit frustrated with a little bit. You're more than a
02:08:55.860
little bit. You're very frustrated. There's some, there's some negative valence of emotion towards
02:09:02.340
I think jealousy is the most common thing, but I don't think you experience it as jealousy. I think
02:09:07.360
it's more like, you're not like jealous of those people. You don't want their fucking lives. But I
1.00
02:09:12.060
think there's a part of you that grates on the inside because they get, they're allowed to do this
0.99
02:09:17.540
crap and you're not. I think there's more resentment than jealousy. And I think you have the right kind of
0.93
02:09:25.200
adaptation for moving forward. So I think there's that cope and there's some copium energy in that
02:09:32.380
tweet. Okay. But I think that the, the, remember coping is only unhealthy if you don't do the second
02:09:38.400
part. I think you're doing the second part, which is like, okay, now that I'm in this situation,
02:09:43.520
how do I make the most of it? So I think there's adaptive coping here, but I think there's coping.
02:09:50.080
And I think if you're really honest with yourself, when maybe you are, and maybe you're not in public or
02:09:54.820
whatever, I think you, you feel like you've gotten a raw deal, but also I, and some of these, I do,
0.97
02:10:02.240
I do think that, but I'm also, some of these fuckers who are making not, they're doing a lot
0.98
02:10:10.340
of stupid stuff, but they're not making mistakes nearly. They're making way stupider mistakes than
1.00
02:10:15.240
you are. They're making way bigger mistakes in some dimension than you are. And they still get to do
0.99
02:10:20.040
this stuff. And you don't, I think that's somewhere within you. Fair. But again, I'll reiterate,
02:10:27.680
I'm also appreciative of this position because it allows me to travel down a road that other people
02:10:33.760
haven't. Absolutely. It opens new doors and it's mentally simulating. And one of the biggest fears
02:10:39.660
I have obviously after God is boredom. I don't want a life where I appreciate the obstacles because it
02:10:48.440
makes life interesting and worth living. And I never wanted to have a mediocre, you know, redundant,
02:10:56.600
repetitive life. So I appreciate it. And I asked that question because cope has a negative connotation.
02:11:03.360
And I think the way I was asking it was, am I, I think because most people use chat to cope with,
02:11:10.140
they want to live with their negativity in a way where other people can adjust to it.
02:11:16.160
I, but I think we've differentiated the difference between healthy coping or adaptive coping and just
02:11:22.000
bullshitting yourself and being delusional. You think that my coping is leading. Well,
02:11:26.260
I think that the adaptive coping is helping me progress and become better. Many people can cope
02:11:34.560
and just become delusional. Absolutely. So I think you have a lot of adaptive coping, right? So I think
02:11:40.880
you've, you've rolled with the punches and, and, and you're leaning into things. I think your situation
02:11:47.920
is, I think you're quite restricted. I think your options are limited and, and you're fighting an uphill
02:11:54.420
battle as a content creator. Um, and, and I think that's challenging. And I think you're able to
02:12:01.980
not get, um, how can I say this? And I think this is what you mean by coping, but, uh, you know,
02:12:08.460
so I, I think you have, you've been hurt, but you're far from defeated. I think you're actually
02:12:13.880
discovering a new kind of strength, which will move you hopefully forward in the right direction.
02:12:18.500
And I think you've just got to be careful about, cause I, I think what's going to happen
02:12:24.060
is, and this could be happening, right? So, so when you do, when, not you, but when people do this
02:12:30.840
kind of coping, they start to, there's like some amount of weird psychological things that can happen
02:12:37.740
like projection. So one thing that can happen is the weakness that you don't allow yourself to feel.
02:12:44.280
You start to loathe when you see it in other people. So like this kind of stuff, and this is
02:12:50.680
what, why I think that overall, like integrating who you are completely is the healthy thing to do.
02:12:58.560
I think integration is the goal. Don't sever a part of yourself because if you, that, that part of
02:13:04.260
yourself will live in your subconscious and will shape what comes out of your mind without your
02:13:10.320
knowledge. So for example, you made this tweet. I think there's a lot that's true in this tweet,
02:13:16.040
but why did you choose these particular people and these particular aspects of them, as opposed to
02:13:23.360
the million combinations of things that you could take issue with, right? So some part of your brain
02:13:29.800
is selecting this. Now, how does the brain decide whether you're talking about fat people or men or
02:13:36.900
women or this ethnicity or that ethnicity? And this is something that you can see clear as day,
0.96
02:13:42.620
right? And, and there's a, there's really interesting, I mean, like, so there's another
02:13:47.820
psychological defense mechanism called reaction formation, which is when we, when there's a part
02:13:52.200
of ourselves that we don't like, that we know is a part of us, we learn to hate that outside of us
02:14:02.180
because that's way easier than hating that inside of us. So the classic example of a reaction formation
02:14:09.640
is the homophobic homosexual. So like, I've got gay thoughts. That's really hard for me to manage.
0.98
02:14:18.160
And if I can hate gay people outside of me, then I'm certainly not gay.
0.79
02:14:22.220
That's why I have this argument with my community all the time. Cause I say, I love everyone.
02:14:26.300
And they're saying, no, we hate gay and trans people. I'm like, are you gay? Like,
0.99
02:14:29.420
why would you invest that much emotional, you know, attachment to people that don't care about
02:14:35.920
you or you don't care about? I say, I say love these people and learn to, that they're going to
02:14:40.320
exist. And like, I fucking hate them. I'm like, what does that do? It doesn't do anything. It's,
1.00
02:14:44.580
it's so stupid to, to hate something that you can't control or, you know, why as men, you should
0.99
02:14:51.120
not invest emotional energy into something that does not have a change or there's no solution to it.
0.99
02:14:59.420
Sneeko defender of the LGBTQ community was not on my 2025 bingo card.
0.99
02:15:05.540
That's going to be, I mean, that that's what I'm saying. I don't think that it's worth it. There's
02:15:09.860
no point. There's no point in hating them. And so many people in my community, like I've been arguing
02:15:14.580
with them for years about this. They're like, we, we hate them. I'm like, are you, are you gay,
1.00
02:15:20.900
I, I, I gotta say, Sneeko, I, I, I, I think you, you gotta let yourself be better publicly.
02:15:28.640
Like, I, I think you have a lot of good stuff to offer. And I, I, I know, I know you're a
02:15:34.340
contrarian. I know you're spicy. I'm not saying give that up. I think it's beautiful. I love it.
02:15:39.320
But also like, you don't need to, and I know this is going to sound kind of condescending or
02:15:43.400
whatever, but like, I know you're concerned about, I was about to say afraid because that's really what I
02:15:47.320
think you are. Like, you're afraid to be, there's this different kind of courage, which is like
02:15:52.220
being more open, being more honest, like things like that. And, and I think your fear is not,
02:15:58.240
it's such a, you carry such a negative connotation, which is why I don't want to use the word. I think
02:16:02.620
you'd agree with the word wary, right? You're wary, you're careful. And a piece of wary or careful
02:16:08.400
is an acknowledgement that bad things could happen. And that sort of roots back in fear in some way.
02:16:13.240
Mm-hmm. And I'm not saying you're a scaredy cat or a pussy or anything like that. That's where
0.99
02:16:17.620
these associations become really important. But I, I, I think people misjudge you drastically.
02:16:23.620
Well, I mean, but here, here we go. Dr. K, this is part of the resentment and frustration is that
02:16:27.980
because I'm banned everywhere, the narrative about me is shaped in a way that I can't control.
02:16:33.100
So when people all the time, I have liberals come up to me or, you know, Zionists and they say,
0.90
02:16:38.500
you hate everyone. You hate this. I'm like, what did I say? They don't know,
02:16:41.780
but they believe it, but they don't have any reasons why, because they see more negative
02:16:46.460
things come from me from people that are dictating the narrative. So I don't, I don't have a fair
02:16:52.280
place on the social, in the social media world to explain my point of view or to present myself
02:16:58.000
in the way that can be presented when it's dominated by people that hate me and want to
02:17:01.620
make me look bad. The narrative around me is shaped as like, even early, we started off this
02:17:05.320
conversation. Like, you don't, you don't know what I've been up to for the past couple of years,
02:17:08.840
but you know, that my reputation is not the best and you know, I'm controversial. You know,
02:17:13.860
I'm a, I'm a contrarian. And you know that like, you were surprised to hear that I wasn't,
02:17:18.260
that I don't hate gay people because people, I'm not surprised. Fair, but you, you know,
02:17:26.920
you know about me from people that speak about me rather than from me. And that's because of my
02:17:32.060
position in this space. And that's, that's the frustrating part. You know, that's part of the
02:17:36.960
thing. Like, man, I I've been, I've been saying this stuff for years, but people don't choose to
02:17:40.640
listen. They choose to listen to, to what's negative and that does build resentment. And
02:17:45.580
you know, not, not that resentment does anything, but that's like, that's an honest, uh, that's just
02:17:51.720
honest. So, yeah. So, so, you know, people may read cope into those statements, but I think out of
02:17:59.340
everything that you've said, this is the thing that I have the least disagreement or least nuance.
02:18:04.020
I think we both exist in a world where it's a race to the bottom, where what, what gets views is not
02:18:11.100
the nuanced view. Like, so I was stunned. I saw a post recently on, on our subreddit about my view
02:18:18.820
about a particular thing. Okay. And I was shocked because I don't, I don't believe that at all.
02:18:24.520
Right. So, so it, and, and I think we just live in a world where like people make judgments based on
02:18:30.740
slices of who we are. And the, it, we really live in a world as content creators where nuance is not
02:18:37.600
what spreads. So there's a great quote from, from Terry Pratchett where he's, he's like a fiction
02:18:44.880
writer, but he says, you know, the, um, a lie can make its way around the world before the, the truth
02:18:50.920
gets its shoes tied. And, and so I, I think that we, we absolutely do live in a world. And I think this
02:18:56.600
is why you've, you've become so careful, right? You've had to become careful because whatever you
02:19:01.720
say is going to get clipped and shipped. And the thing though, is I'm going to tell you one
02:19:06.540
observation that I made. So you've got a, you've got an interesting opportunity. So people love to
02:19:13.640
tear me down. They're going to love to build you up. So what, what the internet responds to more than
02:19:19.640
anything else is a Delta. So the moment that you're a bad person and you continue doing bad
02:19:25.520
things, everyone's going to get bored of you. The moment that I do anything, even slightly bad,
02:19:30.580
like the more good that I do, the more people are going to enjoy tearing me down. Right. So I think
02:19:34.740
like good examples of this is if you, if you look at streamers who are like, have very good reputations,
1.00
02:19:39.320
people are going to love saying, Oh, this person is an asshole. This person actually secretly does this,
0.99
02:19:45.700
this kind of stuff. Kai Sinat is getting the, like, do you see the hate train on Kai Sinat?
02:19:50.640
No. Oh, it is brutal. Like they just do. It's so fun to hate on Kai Sinat because he has a perfect
02:19:57.940
brand image for the most part. Like as it comes to contributors, he's very well known. He just got a
02:20:02.140
Fortnite skin. And then everyone's like, you didn't donate here. You didn't do this. You're a
02:20:06.460
homophobic. Like they just, they want to, because he's on such a positive internet loves being able to
0.98
02:20:12.080
change the narrative about that. Absolutely. Absolutely. So the internet also loves
02:20:15.420
the redemption. Yeah. They do they? Yes. Can you give me an example?
02:20:34.060
What's a redemption arc speed. Maybe the speed. Maybe. I mean, I just don't follow too many
02:20:42.820
streamers, but like, I, I'm pretty sure that, um, let me just think about there have to be like
02:20:52.920
artists. I'm just not following like pop culture. And I wonder actually, like, so I'm glad you asked
02:20:58.620
me for an example because now I'm questioning whether this is actually true. Right. So if I
02:21:03.520
have a single person, um, so I, I mean, I think generally speaking, so like maybe some musicians
02:21:12.440
and stuff, right. So who like used to use a lot of drugs, used to party a lot. And then when they
02:21:17.360
like the, when they kind of get like decent later on in life, they can kind of become, Oh, a redemption
02:21:22.740
arc, like Snoop Dogg. Um, arguably like Martha Stewart. Like, I think those are good examples. Like,
02:21:31.000
so Snoop Dogg, like, I think, I don't think a lot of people now he's like, he sells like candles or
02:21:35.160
whatever. Right. And I'm not trying to disrespect him or anything like that. I, I also try not to
02:21:39.020
talk about people. I try to talk to people, so I don't like to mention people, but I think Snoop
02:21:42.940
Dogg is a really good example. I don't think most people know who Snoop Dogg really was like in the
02:21:49.080
eighties and nineties. Now he's this like fluffy, he beat a murder charge. And, uh, didn't he get
02:21:55.120
convicted? I think he literally is a convicted murderer. I'm not going to comment any, any, but you asked
02:21:59.400
for an example, that's one that I would offer. Okay. That's right. So like, and I'm not commenting
02:22:06.080
whether he's a good person or whether it was fair or whether he's good now, I'm not, I'm not making
02:22:10.040
any kind of alley judgment, but you want an example. I think that's like a good one. Um, yeah. And I, I
02:22:19.400
think there are other like musicians and stuff like who sort of fall into that. Um, and then I think, I think
02:22:27.140
there, there must be like streamers who kind of like shape up, right. They used to be kind of
02:22:32.320
degenerate, but then they kind of go mainstream and there's something of a redemption arc there,
0.81
02:22:36.140
but it's a good point. And I think they definitely, people love tearing people down more than a
02:22:42.740
redemption arc. But I think from an archetypal standpoint and a tropal standpoint, we love
02:22:47.260
redemption arcs because if it, cause I think human beings see it and they think like, if you can do it,
02:22:55.280
then maybe I can do it. So they, they love to see that the triumph of the human spirit and good to
02:22:59.860
win in the end. I think that's why it's in all the movies, but it is scary. I guess your fellow
02:23:04.280
Indian Neon is on a redemption arc. You know, you're saying people love to hate him a couple of years
02:23:10.120
back and now he's doing a lot of positive things and he's on a, on a very good redemption arc right
02:23:14.820
now. Yeah. I can think of a couple of other streamers, but I'm not going to mention names.
02:23:19.760
I think redemption arcs absolutely do happen. So we've been at this for a couple of hours.
02:23:28.100
I'm debating whether I want to ask you about the crisis that you're going through or whether
02:23:34.220
we should wrap up around now. What do you think? I, up to you. Unfortunately, we only, we said this
02:23:41.980
last time and then we didn't speak for a couple of years. So if you want to, if you want to ask me
02:23:45.280
something or if you want to leave it, I'll put the volume forward. Yeah. That's, that's a great
02:23:49.280
point. So since we do this once every two years, which maybe will change, um, why don't you tell
02:23:54.700
me a little bit about what, what's been going on with you recently? It's, uh, my editor texts me
02:24:03.000
Logan Paul. That's a good example for damage. What's been going on is, um, I've been, I've been
02:24:07.460
working, I've been working a lot and, um, I like talking to you because I'm, I realized when I say
02:24:14.640
things like the, so what I was going to say, and then I'll tell you the thought that I had,
02:24:19.400
I was going to say, I've been working really hard. And the person I've been working with,
02:24:22.520
CZ Kana, he's been working the summer. He recently commented on my work ethic and he's like,
02:24:27.300
it's insane how much you work. And then I immediately thought about my fans or the community,
02:24:31.800
uh, people love, she's like, you're, they, they insist that I'm lazy all the time. They just like,
02:24:36.440
do this, do that. It's very, you know, they see the predicament that I'm in being banned.
02:24:40.620
They get really upset if I'm not live, you know, for six hours every single day.
02:24:45.520
There's a lot of things that I do. You know, I make these videos. I edit a lot. I'm filming a
02:24:49.140
lot. I'm traveling a lot. I, uh, collaborate a lot. It's, it's a lot of work. And, uh, as I was
02:24:56.280
saying that I was like, wow, I clearly listened too much to what people say online and there's no
02:25:02.100
point in investing energy in that. If it ends up frustrating me that people don't understand what
02:25:06.360
I do or trying to communicate that to them. So it's, it's just, it's been, it's been busy.
02:25:11.920
It's a, it's, it's nonstop and I enjoy it, but I do crave a vacation. That's why I'm a little bit
02:25:18.360
envious that you went to France and Switzerland. I would love to have four or five days off and
02:25:23.000
barely look at my phone and unplug and just be somewhere where I can relax and not think about
02:25:30.180
the stuff and not read anything online. But the pressures of maintaining, you know, social media or
02:25:35.560
whatever. And also my career position is like, you pretty much have to be, you got to be dialed in.
02:25:40.180
You got to be, you got to be locked in. And it's that fear of, you know, disintegrating and losing
02:25:44.860
everything you built. Um, so what, what's the, so I mentioned to you that I, I went through a crisis
02:26:05.500
you said same or something of the effect. Is that what this is? Is that, is that what you were
02:26:10.960
referring to? It's not a crisis, but it's, it's, um, I would love to start a, well, okay. Actually
02:26:21.140
you want to speak to Myron, right? I, I, I need to connect as soon as I'll, I'll put you in a group
02:26:25.500
chat and I'm sure you could have a good conversation. But recently he went very public that he, he's
02:26:28.800
been, he's been what? I've been wanting to go on his podcast for a long time. I think that'd be
02:26:34.640
great. And I think he's someone else that I think he's someone else that, um, I think people misjudge
02:26:42.020
quite a bit. Yeah, I, I agree. He's one of my best friends and I got to see him in Miami a couple
02:26:48.440
of days ago. I think, I don't know if you like Aiden Ross, but I love talking to Aiden too.
02:26:52.840
Aiden is another one of my best friends. Yeah. And speaking of dopamine, I remember like last
02:26:59.460
year we were in Canada and I saw him win a million dollars gambling online, something I refuse to do
02:27:04.800
to take the money from. Uh, and I saw him win a million dollars and then immediately he got depressed
02:27:11.000
30 seconds later. I'm like, what the fuck? He just won a million dollars. And he's sitting there like,
1.00
02:27:15.600
fuck. I'm like, what? It's like the dopamine wore off. He got high from winning a million.
1.00
02:27:22.840
And then it wore off. He's like, Oh, okay. I already have like 80 million. And then now he's
02:27:28.940
just, you know, coming down and I'm like, this is evil. Look what this just, how do you get sad
02:27:34.400
after winning a million dollars? It's, it's an endless loop, but yeah, he's, um, yeah, I remember
02:27:39.980
you guys spoke. I saw that stream. Myron, I would love to see you guys do that. And Myron went really
02:27:43.900
public. He said he broke up with his girlfriend. He doesn't want to start a family with her because he
02:27:48.040
doesn't want to start a family with her. This is what he said online publicly. I'm not saying anything
02:27:51.520
that he didn't say. He said that he's not ready. You know, he's 35 and he has more work to do and
02:27:59.000
he's not, he's not. And I'm like, that made me self-reflect a lot because I want a family and I
02:28:05.140
don't want that to restrict, you know, I don't want that to be in a competition with what I do.
02:28:10.700
And it made me think like, when am I going to get out of this? Am I going to still be streaming at 35?
02:28:14.420
Am I still going to be at this routine at that, at this work level, no breaks. Um, am I destined to
02:28:21.240
do this forever? Or can I start a family or can I be able to combine the two of them? So yeah,
02:28:27.960
that's what I've been thinking about a lot. And it also did inspire that PewDiePie tweet.
02:28:33.320
A little bit, but I do. I love what I do. I love what I do.
02:28:41.280
I know. So, so, so I, I, I think like this is challenging because like, I'm going to, I use
02:28:46.040
negative valence emotions and I ask you if you feel that way. And I think that there's an
02:28:52.160
association of like being trapped as weak or whatever, but like, I, I, I, I, I don't get
02:28:57.700
that. Like, right. So I don't, I don't know if this makes sense, but like, so, so I, what I'm
02:29:02.340
getting the sense of is that you feel incredibly like restricted, like you can't afford to stop.
02:29:10.020
Right. So, so, so if you, and, and, and this is what I'm kind of curious about.
02:29:13.960
You said the phrase scary fear of disintegrating. What does that mean?
02:29:22.300
Of losing everything, basically like letting them win, you know, they try to letting who win
02:29:27.920
the people that took away my platforms that ruin my reputation that, you know, say that
02:29:35.240
preyed on my downfall, those people like by, you know, by losing this, it's like that vindicates
02:29:42.760
them. So it's like a, it's like a nonstop battle.
02:29:45.640
So them, you winning means never taking a vacation and never having a family.
02:29:58.220
Me winning is finding an exit point like PewDiePie where you leave on your own terms and nobody
02:30:03.360
could say that you, you know, that, that you lost everything or that nobody could tarnish
02:30:12.660
your, your reputation of what you've done. So he left it on his own terms and I respect
02:30:21.620
Maybe I'm fatigued, but I'm, I'm gonna be a little straight with you.
02:30:25.360
So, so, and, and you have to, you got, we got to reserve the right. If this is not,
02:30:34.560
if this doesn't end up right, I get a redo. Is that fair?
02:30:41.880
So, like I'm hearing some things that I think make a lot of sense and are kind of like
02:30:48.880
losing sight of the forest for the trees kind of thing. So first of all, if your goal is
02:30:57.860
to have an impeachable reputation, that is a terrible goal. So you're dictating the way
02:31:05.160
that you live your life based on the opinions of others. So people want to say like, who
02:31:11.960
the fuck cares if they say that you pussed out or whatever, if you're out there living
0.99
02:31:17.660
your life and you're happy and you're hanging out with your family and you're on the beach
0.99
02:31:21.480
or you're writing a book or whatever it is that you do, you're holding workshops for whatever,
02:31:27.320
right? Like if you're living your life, like, like this is a very dangerous goal to have.
02:31:34.340
A reputational goal is very, I would argue that it is not within your control.
02:31:40.700
That's not the, that's not the complete goal. I think that's a secondary goal. Obviously
02:31:46.320
the goal is to do the right thing and is to, I'd say the ultimate goal is to bring people
02:31:50.800
closer to God, entertain, do the right thing. That's the, that's the top of the pyramid as
02:31:56.640
we specified earlier. Secondary, secondary goals is I do want, ever since they, they took
02:32:03.900
everything and they smeared my reputation. The secondary goal is, is proving those people
02:32:08.980
wrong and not letting them be correct in their assessment of me.
02:32:15.520
So, so that too, I mean, this, this sounds dangerous to me, like in a way that's going
02:32:22.580
to hurt you because now it's like your, your mission. So I don't, I don't think God is the
02:32:27.860
primary goal actually, because if God was the primary goal, you'd take four to five days off.
02:32:33.900
Right? Like, so I, I think what's actually happening is that in one part, and this is,
02:32:41.220
this is exactly the shadow that I was talking about. When you start lopping off parts of
02:32:45.580
yourself, this is what happens because you say something is the primary goal, but if God
02:32:49.640
is really the primary goal, you can take four to five days off. This is where there's some
02:32:53.600
kind of weird fuel. And I don't know if you've noticed, but over the course of this
02:32:57.520
conversation, you've expressed a theme of frustration with other people's impression of
02:33:05.100
you. Right? That's the thing. And, and, and I don't think that that's like bad or anything. I'm
02:33:14.960
not trying to say it's a weakness or anything like that. Like people misjudge you sort of,
02:33:20.320
right? Because they judge, it's not that they misjudge you. It's that they incompletely judge
02:33:24.300
you. They judge a slice of you. They form an opinion based on the first six words out of your
02:33:28.780
mouth. They don't even pay attention to the other 25. And now here you are fighting a reputational
02:33:36.980
war against some phantom. How do you know when you win?
02:33:40.120
But it's also, it's bigger than just reputational, right? It's also an ideological war. It's a
02:33:45.620
culture war. It's the war for about the truth. And also there's conflicting ideas about even taking
02:33:55.000
a break because as I expressed earlier, one of my biggest fears on this earth besides God
02:33:59.760
is a life of boredom and stagnation and repetition. And I know I'm the type of person like I idealize
02:34:08.240
like, you know, escaping and having a family or even taking a vacation, but it's like I can
02:34:12.120
visualize myself there and I see myself like getting bored in a day or two. I'm like, fuck,
0.99
02:34:16.620
I want to go back to work. You know, it sounds nice, but it's not truly. So do you remember
0.99
02:34:23.600
early in the conversation where I said, this is adaptive, but it's going to be maladaptive
02:34:27.900
when you're 40? Yeah. This is what I'm talking about. Right? So like here you are wanting
02:34:35.640
something and you've got to be really careful, man, because if you're not careful and you end up
0.97
02:34:42.760
dating someone who is who you're supposed to date and some of this shit comes up, you're going to screw
0.92
02:34:47.800
it up. Like you're going to get bored. Like it's, I don't know if this makes sense. You're, you're out
0.99
02:34:53.360
of control in an in control way. You can't stop. You won't let yourself stop. And it's not like
02:35:02.700
you're stopping forever. Like you won't even let yourself take a break because your fear of
02:35:06.240
disintegration, you don't want to let them win. Right. And there are these other things that are
0.98
02:35:10.780
not congruent with your actions and you want to part on your own terms. Fine. Like, great. Awesome.
02:35:20.160
You know, I support basically most of what you're like, I think it's good, but do you see how they're
02:35:24.580
like this just doesn't plug in? So there's like, there's an independent driver here, which
02:35:32.100
is driving you. And even though you're not able, like you want to take a vacation, it sounds nice.
02:35:39.200
There's a lot of stuff that you want that sounds nice, but the act of actually doing it doesn't feel
02:35:44.840
good. Right. So this is where, where, so now if you, if you're really careful and I'm, I'm being a
02:35:52.700
little bit rough with you here. Okay. So like, it's coming from a place of love.
02:35:57.680
This is a level of lack of self-control where there's a level of self-control, which is like,
02:36:04.220
I'm not going to let my fear of boredom or my inability to be bored control my ability to take
02:36:11.780
a vacation. Right. So you're still being like puppeted by a part of you. And I'm not, I'm not,
02:36:19.980
I'm not trying to devalue any of your goals. I support your goals. Go ahead and establish your
02:36:26.180
views. You know, like the people who thought that you were X, Y, or Z. It's not that you want to
02:36:33.320
prove them wrong. You are not going to be that thing. And if they want to continue to misjudge you,
02:36:38.640
that's on them. Right. But there's, there's something here that, that feels to me like some
02:36:45.660
of these energies. Fundamentally, you want these things, but you're not able, you're not allowing
02:36:51.780
yourself to have what you want. And if you just think about that for a second, what's stopping
02:36:57.100
you? Clearly something inside you, because I don't know. I mean, maybe your chat is like,
02:37:01.640
if you take a four day vacation, like we're never going to see you again. I don't think that's going
02:37:05.820
to happen. And I think you may attract people, almost certainly will, who also flagellate
02:37:14.360
themselves, right? Push themselves. Y'all, y'all make it an honorific to have such a great,
02:37:23.180
I know you've got a great work ethic. Like I, I can tell. Right. But like, there's almost this like
02:37:30.880
zealousness of, of work ethic where you have to, have to, have to, have to, have to.
02:37:39.960
And, and this is where I think some of those associations become important. Cause I think
02:37:43.660
there's like some middle path. Like I think you can take four or five days off. And I think if
02:37:47.740
you're bored, you don't have to commit to four or five days. If you're bored, you're bored. And then
02:37:52.680
you're like, I want to come back to work. So be it. Right. But as long as you have this specter of,
02:37:58.280
I'm not going to let them win like that, they're living rent-free in your head, bro.
02:38:03.540
Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's why I tweeted that about PewDiePie and, and, you know, the people
02:38:08.520
that live opposite to him is because they have a similar mentality that I'm trying to escape from,
02:38:14.120
you know, and that I'm working on and aware of where they're still churning out the drama slop with
02:38:18.420
that Ozempic stare because they don't acknowledge what's wrong or see that they, you know, they should
0.98
02:38:25.080
have an exit point. And I don't want to be that. Like, that's, that's exactly why I said that.
02:38:29.500
I'm sorry. And that's the crisis is like, I really don't want to be that forever. That there's,
02:38:35.260
there's, that's a dangerous thing to be when you're 42. Absolutely.
02:38:39.380
Yeah. And, and so, so once again, I'm, I'm being a little bit rough with you. Okay. So like,
02:38:44.260
but like, I want you to make me cry or something. This is, come on.
02:38:49.760
So they, they are soulless, making drama slop, whatever, SSRIs, Ozempic stare. And like,
0.97
02:38:58.620
so that's why they're stuck in this, right? What's your excuse? How are you different?
02:39:09.360
Right. They're, they're being pushed by something within them. You're being pushed by something
02:39:15.340
within you. You say you want these things. And I think that some of this will calm down,
02:39:20.720
by the way, so hopefully you become like more secure, like from a, I don't know exactly what
02:39:27.320
your financial situation is or anything like, I don't mean like psychologically secure. I mean,
02:39:30.720
like whatever, whatever. And I've, I've talked, you know, I've worked with, with content creators
02:39:36.760
who have been banned from platforms and it's a tenuous existence, right? It's like tenuous.
02:39:42.660
That's what I mean. Like, and so, so if things kind of calm down for you and you know, there's
02:39:48.540
some more steady like income or whatever, I don't, I don't know exactly what your income
02:39:51.780
is or anything like that. Some of this stuff can get better, but I think you've got to be
02:39:54.700
really careful about what's driving you. What, what is that thing? And it's not the logical
02:39:58.980
thought. There's something that is producing a particular bucket of thoughts.
02:40:04.660
It's also that I, I believe that I have a God given talent. I find myself, I don't,
02:40:12.040
maybe you can call it a star system. I think I'm very talented and I think I'm gifted at
02:40:16.420
what I do. And I think that I impact a lot of people and I've seen the impact I've had
02:40:20.180
on people, um, over well over a decade of the stuff that I've put out. And I know that
02:40:25.920
there's, it's almost like a responsibility that I find to do more and to impact more people
02:40:31.420
and to, to help and to, you know, put that out there more. And I, I know that I'm not even
02:40:37.920
close to done yet. And that, that's also, that's a main driver.
02:40:43.460
Yeah. So I, I, I can empathize, right? I would say that I am talented.
02:40:50.740
That I, I affect a lot of people. I help a lot of people. Um, and also I don't think that
02:40:59.060
I have to do it alone. I think that I was put on this earth by God to help people, but
02:41:08.060
like I get to take vacations and, and I have a ridiculous work ethic. I work seven days a
02:41:15.160
week, most weeks. I had my first vacation in five years. Um, and so like, I, I'm, I'm sort
02:41:23.780
of with you there, but I think this is what I've sort of learned is like, you've got to be
02:41:27.540
careful because all of those things can be true, but this, there's a certain, you're
02:41:33.840
like a hundred percent and all the things that you're saying, like, I don't think God
02:41:38.220
is asking you to never take a break. You're 26 years old. You've got 40 to 50 years of content
02:41:45.020
creation left in you. And what makes you think that like taking four days off won't improve
02:41:52.360
the quality of your content? So one of the most shocking things that we discovered, so we
02:41:57.240
have a career coaching program where we, I forget exactly what it is somewhere on, we
02:42:02.600
in about eight to 12 weeks, people's like channel growth increases by somewhere between 30 and
02:42:08.980
80%. I think the number is 80%, but that number sounds ridiculous. Let's just say we improve
02:42:13.040
their channel growth by 50%. The key thing about our program is we do it without increasing the
02:42:18.140
number of hours worth. So working more is not necessarily, is not necessarily going to get you
02:42:27.900
there. Right. So I think this is where like, there's a lot of self-reflection about, you know,
02:42:34.040
like, are you, are you, do you mind if I ask a couple of questions about your personal life?
02:42:44.800
Uh, no. Okay. Are you interested in finding a committed relationship? Absolutely. Yeah.
02:42:53.660
What is making the, when do you want to do that?
02:43:04.660
Pretty soon. If not now, like I am looking for that. Yeah. That's something that I am investing
02:43:09.700
time and energy into. What, what's, what's getting in the way?
02:43:12.760
Nothing really. It's, it's just, um, I think no, nothing's really getting in the way.
02:43:24.900
Okay. So you're like actively pursuing that things are moving because like, there's a part
02:43:28.500
of me that I'm defaulting to this hypothesis that something about your work ethic is going
02:43:33.880
to like, there's a certain rigidity, not rigidity. There's a certain zeal, right? There, there's
02:43:41.420
like, like, you're like all in on this. Like, it's like work seven days a week, no days off,
02:43:48.260
you're editing, you're coming up with ideas, you're collabing and stuff like that. And I get
02:43:52.240
you, dude, like next six months of my life are, are really, really busy. And then I'm working
02:43:58.320
on a bunch of stuff. Like, you know, I, I, I, I really do think I get you and I think you
02:44:02.600
should do all that shit. Yeah. Like, but scaling back by 10% or 20%. I think that's only
1.00
02:44:11.400
an issue if there's an end target with a finite timeline. Does that kind of make sense?
02:44:18.540
Yeah. There, there, there was financial goals that I want to, I want to hit them. I am doing
02:44:23.420
very well. I'm the, the stuff that I'm very blessed to be, but I'm, I'm not quite exactly
02:44:29.580
where I want to be. So where I could comfortably be like, all right, ready to have like pop out
02:44:34.100
four kids like that. You know, I'm not a very materialistic person, but I, I want to be,
02:44:42.400
have complete comfort in that and not have to, cause I grew up, like there was a lot of
02:44:46.300
financial stress and I don't want any of that for my kids. So. Yeah. So I mean, so, so then my next
02:44:53.340
question is like, how much of this is actually a problem? Is what a problem? Because what you're
02:44:57.900
just, so, so like this, so I'm, I'm getting kind of mixed signals here, which is not a bad
02:45:03.040
thing. This is a good thing. So on the one hand you're saying like, okay, I want these
02:45:07.600
things. Right. So like, I, I kind of like the, the way that PewDiePie did it, that's kind
02:45:12.300
of the path that I think jives with what I want. Do your stuff, take an exit. Don't be like
02:45:21.180
trapped in this life forever. Yeah. You know, take a break. Do you want to take a vacation?
02:45:27.380
Yes and no. Yes and no. Because that's what I first started my streaming career. I would do one
02:45:31.960
month off one month on every single day. And then one month off completely where I just would travel
02:45:37.100
Europe and then not stream at all. And people always say, I miss when you streamed every day.
02:45:40.480
It's like, that was never what I did. You know, I saw when I was on YouTube streaming, which is,
02:45:44.880
you know, short lived, it was one month on one month off. And I really liked that routine,
02:45:50.340
but also when I was there for a while, I'd just be sitting around and then I'm in Europe,
02:45:55.020
you know, not sure. What do you do? You end up drinking somewhere or just wasting time or just
02:45:59.100
being a degenerate. Cause like, how do you fill up your time? I'm the type of person where like,
02:46:02.640
I don't like boredom and degeneracy does quickly replace that. So work is also an escape from that,
02:46:11.880
from that familiar routine. So, I mean, it sounds nice, but it's also, I do, I love working. I love it.
02:46:19.100
Yeah. I love this. Yeah. So, so do you, so what appeals to you about a vacation?
02:46:27.660
I guess just silence from constant social media. That that's the, I think that is the big appeal
02:46:33.900
being in a place without, you know, the familiarities of it. But even then I went to
02:46:38.000
Miami recently for a couple of days, had to take care of housekeeping stuff. And, you know,
02:46:42.320
I streamed maybe once in three days and I came back and I was so relieved to be back in New York
02:46:46.120
city because I love the chaos and the busyness and the, you know, the FOMO that I get if I'm not
02:46:50.780
working, like being in, why I love New York so much is that there's an energy here that pulls you
02:46:55.560
into work. Can I think for a second? Absolutely.
02:47:03.960
How's this going? Is there a problem here? Is this something you're unhappy with? Are you okay
02:47:14.600
with this? No, I'm okay. I'm okay. I'm just, I'm kind of just, I'm, I'm venting, you know,
02:47:20.340
it's, uh, but I'm okay. Also again, why it goes full circle? Like it's part of the reason I don't
02:47:26.360
believe in therapy because, um, yeah, my life is good. I really don't have too much to complain
02:47:33.720
about. I, I, I, I'm venting. What are you venting about? You know, frustrations I have,
02:47:44.100
but it's not that big. What are you frustrated with? What are you frustrated with? The stuff
02:47:50.360
that I vocalize, like, uh, being canceled, the reputation and the feedback from the community.
02:47:59.240
A lot of the frustrations do stem from social media, but also love social media. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.
02:48:05.040
I gotcha. Thank you so much for clarifying. Yeah. So I, I, I, I sort of see like, you're kind of
02:48:10.280
like stuck between a rock and a hard place, right? Cause on the one hand, you've been burned
02:48:15.340
by social media. It's a relief to get away from social media, but you like the work,
02:48:22.700
right? You don't need a break from the work. And, and if you take a break from the work,
02:48:29.500
if you take a break from engaging your mind, and that's really what I see here is like,
02:48:34.500
you're engaging your mind every day. You're thinking, you're talking to people, you're collabing,
02:48:39.160
you're like, your ideas are being tested. Your ideas are being clarified through the,
02:48:44.380
when you say them out loud, you're thinking, right? You've got this mission. You don't
02:48:48.460
exactly know how you're supposed to fulfill it. You notice you're having an impact.
02:48:53.940
The world isn't fixed yet. So you've got to keep going and you, and each day you do it,
02:48:58.660
you get better. That's gotta be addictive, right? Not in a bad way. It's like, okay,
02:49:03.560
like we're doing it, right? So you, you, you got, you got kind of KO'd a little bit,
02:49:07.260
but you actually, you didn't get KO'd. You got knocked down. You're at a disadvantage,
02:49:10.860
but you're going to come back. Right? And, and so like, you're going to, you got to kind of make
02:49:15.800
up for lost time. So you're grinding, you're not going to, you're not going to make the same
02:49:19.680
mistake again. You're not going to get fully canceled. You're going to find a way to come
02:49:22.680
back. So I totally get that. You want a break from the socials that taxes you. You're willing to pay
02:49:30.020
the price. It's worth it to pay the price, paying the price. You're happy with where you are now.
02:49:35.460
And you've got a lot of, you're going uphill, but you're still fucking climbing.
0.95
02:49:42.320
So if you take a break on the one hand, you get a break from the negativity.
0.89
02:49:48.360
On the other hand, if you take a break and you're not engaging yourself,
02:49:53.920
then you're going to become a degenerate. You don't want to be, you don't want to just be sitting
02:49:58.580
there drinking, right? Do you want to explore Europe? Yes. But you're going to wind up sort of
02:50:03.580
wasting your time sort of being bored. So you might as well work.
02:50:09.020
So like what I'm sort of getting from you is that this isn't ideal, but you'll take it any day of
02:50:14.980
the week over the alternative. You just rather be working than be on vacation because vacation is a
02:50:19.680
break from social media. Sure. You get this thing, but you don't get these eight other things.
02:50:24.220
Yeah. It goes back to your point earlier where you can get a million positive competent
02:50:27.620
comments and a hundred negative comments. And so it's like, I get a break from the hundred negative
02:50:31.740
comments, but I also get a break from a million positive comments. So yeah, I think that,
02:50:38.020
that compare, that point you made up earlier is a perfect comparison.
02:50:43.460
So here's kind of where, like after I, after I kind of put it back to you like that,
02:50:54.840
Okay, good. So, so, so I, I think that that's, that's actually really good. So I, I don't think
02:51:01.180
we're actually right where we're started. Um, but it's good to, to clarify these ideas and get a
02:51:07.060
perspective on them and, you know, hear them out. But yeah, no, no, this, this, um, it is good,
02:51:16.380
but you know, I, I'm a very, I think a lot, you know, as much as I try not to be too inspected,
02:51:21.400
the stuff that I've been tossing and turning with for years.
02:51:25.360
So I, I, I, so here's, here's what I think you should do. So I think there's a couple of
02:51:32.100
different points here. The first is that I think a lot of your desire to get away from social media
02:51:38.180
isn't today. It's actually a dormant wound from the past, right? So like when you say,
02:51:45.060
I want to get away from social media, it's not the comments today that you need to get away from.
02:51:52.460
It's the aggregate hurt of social media, which you're sort of moving away from. I think that's
02:51:58.480
something you should consider. So, which also means that part of, part of the, it's because
02:52:03.600
you're sort of conflicted, but I think the reason you're conflicted is because on the one hand, like
02:52:07.180
you actually don't want a vacation. So the thing that you're running away from is not actually present
02:52:13.700
in the here and now in a very potent way. The process of getting canceled hurts a lot now.
02:52:22.600
Right. So, so now I don't think it's social media today. I think it's, there's a dormant wound,
02:52:27.500
which you're running away from in some way, not in a bad way, but you want relief from that's a
02:52:32.800
better way to put it. So I think if that, that wound gets resolved and you kind of come to terms
02:52:38.740
with that and you've done a really good job in some way, but I think you've also walled it off.
02:52:43.560
Do you know what an abscess is? You ever heard this term?
02:52:47.980
Sort of. So an abscess is when we have like an infection or something, your, your body forms a
02:52:53.440
wall around the infection. So it forms this like circle and there's active infection on the inside,
02:53:01.000
but it can't spread. So it no longer damages you, but it never gets healed. It's not the same as
02:53:08.820
healing. So we're going to like wall off the contamination. We're not going to get rid of it.
02:53:14.760
We're going to just wall it off. So, so sometimes when, when people go through things like what
02:53:19.100
you've gone through, this is sort of what happens in their mind. They wall off a part of themselves
02:53:23.720
and then they, they want that to go away, but it's, it's kind of weird. And then they wind up in
02:53:28.820
these situations where you are, where you're like, you're really interested in this, but
02:53:32.500
the thing that you are interested in doesn't solve what you're longing for. Does that kind
02:53:38.600
of make sense? Like you want it, but it doesn't do what you want it to do. It's not going to
02:53:44.260
do what you want it to do, but you want it anyway, which is like weird. Cause then why do you want
02:53:48.700
it? So you're, I think that this is something you should consider. Second thing is that I think
02:53:54.760
you need to learn how to be bored. So there's like, right. So I think that there's like,
02:54:01.340
there's a level of like contemplation. There's a level of relaxation and you say it's easy to fall
02:54:07.220
into degenerate habits. And I think a big part of like growth is going to be learning new ways to do
02:54:13.600
things. Now, I don't think that, I mean, I don't think you're ready to take a vacation anytime soon.
02:54:19.240
And I don't think vacation is really the right thing, but I, I, I think that, you know, when your
02:54:24.480
body tells you we need a break, like give it that break and give yourself some time to, you know,
02:54:30.860
be with yourself. I mean, maybe the kind of vacation you need is a little bit different.
02:54:34.460
I'd say like grab a notebook, grab a pen, grab a laptop. I do. I write it every day.
02:54:38.620
Well, yeah. Yeah. Which I do consider to be a vacation, like something like that. So that's what I
02:54:45.720
do visualize is like being alone with my thoughts and in a cabin that, that is like what I'm talking
02:54:50.520
about. Just being like on a beach somewhere, just like where I could write, which is work,
02:54:54.900
you know, which technically it's not really a break. I mean, yes and no. So, so I, I, I think
02:55:03.280
it is a break from social media, which is the break that you really crave and it's not going
02:55:08.420
to be boredom. Right. And I, and I say like, like, you're right. It's technically not a break,
02:55:13.300
but I don't think you're ready for a break yet. Like if you want to go without the laptop,
02:55:18.460
go without the laptop. If you want to go hang out on a beach somewhere, go hang out on a
02:55:22.220
beach somewhere. But if, if you're not ready for that, then, then go take a working vacation.
02:55:27.420
You know, I mean, and that, that, that's something that just because you're, you don't have to
02:55:33.800
be idle and be on vacation. So I think there's some amount of like, you got to really think
02:55:38.060
about how much you've been affected and, and not just in the sense that it's like worn
02:55:43.680
you down or you've lost or, or anything like that. Like you've, you've coped, you've bounced
02:55:48.920
back, you're bounced back. Now it's just what's lingering within you that you're really like
02:55:54.360
sensitive to. And, and I'm, I'm, and you can go back and, and, you know, listen to this
02:55:58.980
conversation again. And I think the primary theme here is like the judgment of others, which
02:56:03.300
is so tricky because like you're striving to be independent and, and it's gotta be frustrating to
02:56:10.000
be like thinking about other people so much, even when you've learned, because I can tell a part of
02:56:15.420
you has grown past that you really have, but it's like a part of you hasn't like, it's like 80%,
0.99
02:56:22.420
90% of you has grown past it, but 10% of it is like, I want to show these fuckers. And then I think
0.99
02:56:28.060
on a, on a, on a given day, you know, if I ask you, you're like, okay, if I'm doing work that I'm
02:56:32.400
aligned with, I'm going to try to help people, I'm going to work in service to God, whatever,
0.97
02:56:35.840
like 90%, but there's some, some fucking 15 year old kid who's looking at himself in the mirror,
0.99
02:56:40.800
doesn't like what he sees. And what bothers him even more is like, he's proud of himself.
0.99
02:56:45.840
And so what he sees when he looks in the mirror is something he's proud of, but everyone else
02:56:50.220
doesn't see that. That's what really bothers you. And that's still there.
02:56:55.740
Right. You've done the growth. People don't see it. And then you probably hate yourself a little
02:57:04.620
bit for wanting them to see it. You're good at what you do. You're good at what you do.
02:57:13.100
No, you are. I got to give you, got to give you credit. You both, both conversations. You
02:57:17.920
surprised me. Oh shit. This guy's kind of spot on. Yeah. Cause one of my first viral videos,
1.00
02:57:23.220
uh, I was, I was 15, 16 when I made it called how people view you. And it was, it was about this
02:57:29.820
exactly. It was about the living for people's validation and living in the perception of other
02:57:34.300
people and how that's becoming increasingly common with social media. And it was like a warning sign.
02:57:40.140
People really loved how, you know, it was articulate and accurate in a way that people didn't describe.
02:57:45.860
And even without social media, uh, people have been doing that, but that is, uh, I, I, that is,
02:57:53.240
you know, one of the common themes about everything, everything in my work.
02:57:58.660
Yeah. I, I, I think, and I'm, I, hopefully this isn't glazing too much. I think, I think you have,
02:58:03.600
you have some serious profit energy. Like you really do. Like, I think you're, you're thoughtful,
02:58:11.320
you're charismatic. Like you, you have a, you have some profit energy kind of going on and I'm,
02:58:18.020
I'm not, I really see that. And I think you have something really important to offer.
02:58:23.440
And I, and I just, I hope, I hope that you don't have to sacrifice your life. Right. So I know your
02:58:33.660
name. I mean, I don't know what your real name is, but you know, you're Sneeko and like, there's a
02:58:38.640
human underneath. And I just hope you're able to find some way that you fulfill whatever that
02:58:44.500
profit energy is going, right. It's some amount of teaching and some amount of speaking and some
02:58:48.720
amount of spreading and disseminating, but there must be a clarity of idea. It must be disseminated
02:58:53.340
in the right way. These tweets do go viral. You do have this charisma. You've got all those pieces,
02:58:58.380
but hopefully the human doesn't have to be sacrificed in the process.
02:59:08.960
you're the goat, Dr. K. All right, man. Hey, I wish all the, all success to you and to you and
0.69
02:59:20.340
your family. Great speaking to you again. I would love to do this again. And feel free to message me
02:59:25.260
anytime. If you want to catch up and talk, it was fun talking to you through the messages the past
02:59:29.360
couple of days. And you know, before then I, yeah, cool, man. I appreciate this. I appreciate
02:59:33.880
this a lot. Thank you so much for talking. Talking's good. That's what we do, huh? Have a good one.
02:59:42.360
Take care, buddy. Bye. Dr. K, man. Dr. K. Fucking hell, that was good.