Slo Mo with Mo Gawdat: TJ Power On How Social Media Is Destroying Brains And How To Become Happier

welcome back uh my guest today is uh multi-layered let's just put it this way uh studied psychology is a tech geek uh he is uh a neuroscientist the modern way you know neuroscientists with with half a million followers on Instagram but so deeply uh thoughtful about about a topic uh that of course I'm very passionate about mental health and well-being in a very very unusual way TJ power is uh what I just said someone who's trying to spread uh well-being through the Dark World of social media as well as uh the use of technology and

gamification uh but more interestingly he teaches it in a way that I think all of us need to learn uh some uh much more um simplified uh though not shallow approach to Neuroscience a conversation that was introduced to me by my dear friend uh Susie Flor who was a guest on this podcast in uh season 1 uh who introduced us and now finally three months later uh we are together to share with you something that I really think you will enjoy uh Neuroscience the modern technological way uh TJ power uh thank you so much for

being here uh wonderful to have you thanks for having me I'm excited to chat I love what you do I really and honestly uh think that um the mix between you know a scientist you should be grumpy and old and you know uh uh not fun but you seem to be uh teaching NEOS science or sharing neuroscience and mental well well-being really really successfully uh to the m is on Instagram mainly half a million people or so uh how did that start why would you do that and why is it working do think yeah it's

an interesting first question I think how did it start for me was I was actually someone that had a a period in my life that was quite tough in my mind to deal with I uh between the ages of like 16 and 21 lost five people in my family in five years and many people in our in our world go through loss and for a young brain I was like wow this is a new thing to try and cope with and during that period of time I went heavily into kind of the partying dopamin addiction

world and during the time I was also studying psychology at the age of about 21 22 I started thinking like wow I'm not feeling that good in my head with this kind of lifestyle and went on kind of like a a three month Retreat I kind of I knew my grandpa who uh lived out in nature and went to stay at his house for three months to try and like kind of sort myself out and and during this three months I basically experimented with all the different behaviors that we'll probably chat through today and got

myself feeling pretty good and then was kind of looking at my friends and family and like wi the people online and thinking wow A lot of people are feeling these things feeling like flat low in Drive worried whatever it might be and I started thinking this worked for me I'm going to start making videos about it and uh started sharing the videos they started to connect for people kind of in that Co time in the end of Co and uh yeah kind of went from there you studied Psy ology but you're very much into technology

you're uh you you founded uh nefi which is about gamification of uh of you know well-being and mental health I want to cover that deeply and your upcoming book uh is the dose effect yeah that's when in August that is in January 2025 January 202 month where people struggle a little bit with how they feel and hopefully it's going to be a good game plan for how to take on that period and and and and basically that's about you know the hormones that affect our bodies and how we can uh you know use that why

you know and when we were chatting before the uh you know starting to film you were saying yeah it's a bit of a complex mind in there all all at age 26 how is it that you that you combine all of these like where does the passion come from yeah I think I I grew up as someone that definitely just loved technology I thought technology was so cool I remember being like I think I was about 10 years old when the iPhone came out and I thought wow that looks cool what something around I was

so old when it came out man and uh I remember getting an iPhone and just like I loved that word I thought social media was really cool like I wasn't averse to any of these things at all and I also got super fascinated by psychology I played pretty high level golf as a kid and I wanted to be a professional golfer that was kind of my original Pursuit and when you do high level golf you get psychological training quite early in life because golf is so stressful when you hit a bad shot and uh I

became interested in Tech then I got really interested in Psychology and then the kind of philosophy on psychology on how I believe humans could get themselves feeling really healthy and good in their minds came later in my life during that period when I was kind of rediscovering what it means to to get healthy first of all on golf just so that we agree I now realize why I hate it so much honestly very stressful there really is and and in a very in an engineer's way to to me you know as an engineer if you

do the same exact action you're supposed to get the same exact result no that not that's not true with golf so yeah I think on the third session I was like this is not um this doesn't follow the scientific method it doesn't maybe if a robot was playing it get the same swing it would work yeah and and I and somehow in my mind I was like there is really no clear path to getting better at this in my mind so I'm you know I'm not going to do that a lot of what you discuss

is that um there are those four hormones those do o e uh that govern all of our well-being do do you want to take us through that very quickly yeah so you got doe which is dopamine Super Famous one then you have oxytocin which connects humans serotonin all about our mood and energy system and then endorphins which is very connected to kind of de-stressing and relaxing the mind and effectively the whole premise of the dose effect is that our brain didn't develop those chemicals in the last 100 years it developed them over the last kind

of 400,000 years as humans were evolving and for 9% of that Evolution the main things we needed to do were be able to hunt and connect with one another find new places to live and survive that really hard experience and those chemicals are designed to thrive in that environment and when you or if you could like transport our ancestors into this world and suddenly they'd go from waking up every morning to bright sunlight and hunting and building and doing a lot of like effortful action if suddenly they started waking up and sitting on phones and

not talking to each other and having a sugary bowl of cereal they wouldn't feel good very quickly their brain would send them a message and say no this doesn't feel good this isn't good for our survival and with this dose Theory I basically am suggesting that our brain is sending us all a very clever message suggesting that this current path we're on as humanity is not going to be good for our survival in the long term if we continue to engage with too much of this unhealthy Behavior so therefore these chemicals are very sophisticated machines

that are saying guys don't do this don't do that and then it reinforces positive stuff do this do that the more you understand these hormones and align to them the better you feel I need to conf clarify what you just said there do you think that this pandemic of stress and and depression and you know sadly suicide and so on are actually Collective signals that say this is you know that says to humanity at large this is the wrong path I never thought of it this way I really do believe that I think at the

core of like the human being or any species survival is the G like that's the reason is here is to survive and procreate itself and continue going forward and when you look at the different behaviors we do some give you this kind of like guilt shameful feeling within like if you spend two hours on your phone or you watch like pornography or you eat really sugary food there's like this feeling that arises in your body of like this doesn't this isn't valuable to me and the opposite occurs if you go for like a 30 minute

walk outside of nature you get this reinforcing feeling and I think our brain is so sophisticated at knowing our future and knowing what's going to be advantageous and like the the perfect comparison there is if you were to watch porn or have sex both achieve a similar outcome for your body but one leaves you not feeling good and one leaves you feeling great and the only difference is one of them is not going to be valuable to human survival if anything it's going to reduce procreation and the other one is a valued survival and I

think on all the different behaviors we engage in I think our brain is very clever at telling us which are of value to the future of our civilization and and so accordingly when we are when when even though we could be getting the same hormone maybe and the same biological response to something uh somehow if it's not pro our survival our bodies Our psyche will not feel good about it with uh something like the variation how this the hormone would actually be stimulated it would be on the speed in which the hormone increases the hormone

are not supposed to increase super quickly like if you took an example of I'm a hunter gatherer I'm out there I need to provide food for the family and I wake up in the morning and that's my goal and I go out for three or four hours in the pursuit of trying to find some kind of food foraging fruit or finding an animal or whatever it might be the rewarding chemical that's driving you to do that is dopamine and dopamine is going to go through this kind of slow curve as you gradually get closer to

that food then you'll experience a rewarding experience and then it'll slowly calm back down if you take something like entering Tik Tok your brain is suddenly experiencing more dopamine than it would get even if it was successfully hunting an animal and it gets it within like 5 seconds and then because the brain is always seeking for homeostasis for balance it's like how the hell did I get up here so quick so then crashes us and our dopamine goes be below its Baseline level and when we're in this kind of apathetic demotivated low mood kind of

head space that is our dopamine level crashing and that's where so many of us are of us are today like we wake up we have sugary food we scroll social media and I think for so much of society we then are in this low State and then we start thinking about our life and our job and our relationships and we think all of our problems are there whereas I really believe a significant proportion is just our brain is chemically imbalanced and it's causing worrisome thoughts that is an incredible way of looking at I have to

admit I've never thought of it this way and it makes so much sense before we we dig deeper can I ask you to explain very quickly the doe so so what what each of them is and how it is supposed to function in the body for our listeners who are not aware of them definitely so dopamine controlling all of your motivation and it will rise when you do anything that's effortful the most simple example of dopamine is we all have the annoying task in our life of having to change and wash our bedding and it's

not particularly fun task but eventually after you've taken that duve off and you've washed it and dried it and put it back on and done all the annoying buttons you get into a clean bed and you suddenly like I'm so happy I did that you never get into your clean bed and regret that effort and that's your brain rewarding effort that's going to be of value to you so anything in your life that's effort it's going to build it oxytocin then connects Humanity together so whether you're in a good conversation making eye contact contributing to

someone physically connecting with someone being grateful to someone all of that is going to stimulate oxytocin serotonin is then interesting a brilliant scientist called Appleton really created this whole framework that 90% of the serotonin is made in the gut which is now really widely known and any time in which you do something that's going to support the health of your body whether that's nutritious food sleep sunlight time in nature even the whole kind of calm breathing practices that we have that's going to stimulate serotonin and raise our mood and our energy levels and then then

endorphins really interestingly is actually just designed to help us cope with physical and psychological stress if you were in a situation where you had to actually fight an animal or run away from an animal we needed a mechanism that in that moment of extreme physical exerion a mechanism that would kind of take all the stressful thoughts out of our brain and take pain out of our body like if right now I said to you run a mile down the road as fast as you can you probably get out the door and I've got a stitch

I can't be bothered but if a bear was chasing you up these stairs you'd probably be able to run and endorphins release into our brain they take all our stress out of our thinking and that's very valuable obviously like we're not getting chased by bears now but if you are stressed it's very good to release the Endorphin and what what would trigger the the the release is the activity itself so if you're if you're being if you're feeling rewarded you get dopamine if you're sub subjected to stress you get endorphins or the other way around

it would be if you've experienced stress from anything relationship work phone whatever it may be endorphins will release if you physically exert yourself so the the base fun is of course exercise but even something like stretching your body even singing songs quite loudly you get an endorphin release why feels quite good to sing if you uh go into a hot environment like a sauna if you laugh like really hard so anything that gets the body like physically active is going to release them your personal story is that you know your release if you want at

a point in time through was was through sort of those addictions like you know porn or or or alcohol and so on and so forth and then somehow you find the path to say no no hold on this is actually not working well for me I can find that through other activities why would you figure that out and others are not I mean there are so many people in the world that are stuck in that you know replacing uh uh human relationship and real sex with porn or replacing you know uh calm and a good

you know connection with alcohol you know why are we stuck in those addictions firstly they are very powerful these substances it's very hard for humans to manage that amount of pleasure like if you put mice or rats in any kind of dopamine Behavior like a rat for example if it has access to cocaine we choose the cocaine over food and water until it's dead it won't even it won't touch the food and water and our brain operates very similarly like it's very powerful these substances so I have no kind of judgment as Society for the

fact we've got oursel into this situation in terms of how I made the shift I love feeling good and I always found that during the exam periods at University I'd have like six weeks where I did a very healthy lifestyle and I'd be working every day extremely hard like 8 to 10 hours a day of revision and writing and all that kind of stuff and although I always perceived those periods as like oh these are going to be stressful and stuff I actually found I felt really good when I was in a much more disciplined

lifestyle I felt my happiness level was more consistent and I started pondering throughout that final kind of exam period at University do I want to feel good for kind of like 10% of my day or do I want to feel good for the majority of my day and that started then setting a framework of like if I keep engaging with all this quick dopamine stuff like I have a short period in the evening where I feel great but for the majority today I feel low and I feel worried in my head and I started testing

it out just like can I engage with more behaviors that lead to me feeling happier for the majority of the time and I just way preferred that experience and I think for much of society we're all so hooked on this dopamine that we just haven't spent enough time away from it to actually know what it feels like to feel really good that's such a good point and I think a lot of people I think mental health is interesting because there is this percentage of society say 5 to 10% that are really in a a state

of clinical anxiety and depression and like we need to do all we can to help alleviate that pain and move people out of it but there is also a potential of society that are all kind of like four to six out of 10 in how happy they feel like they don't feel really bad but they also just are not feeling really good and I think if those sort of individuals experience just like a week of discipline and think like wow this actually feels awesome it then begins to motivate the change but you got to like

touch it to be able to know how good it is I I I think that's really really really core I mean in a very interesting way in in my work I I recognize that a lot of people don't even recognize what it's like to be calm what it's like to be uh you know unstressed or what it's like to have a a pain-free body or what it's like to be actually joyful uh you know we we've replaced those either with addictions like you rightly said or with acceptance which I think is a very um very

scary place to be because we you know and I'm I'm to blame as much as anyone else like you know my physical stress is normally very high most of the time because of the amount of travel and activities and engagements that I go through and my body is aging and my body is not really as you know capable as it used to be when I was 26 and and you know and it is definitely something that I for a long time at sort of hyper normalized I was like yeah it's fine you know it it

is what it is and you know it's just part of trying to make a difference or to be successful in life and so on and I and I find that to be quite uh scary really because it's becoming almost the norm that we're killing ourselves it is and we are becoming kind of too tolerant I think of that feeling and as I said at the start like we're all individually being sent this message this feeling within us that we're engaging with some behaviors that are definitely not of value to our lives and if we justar

to tolerate that feeling we're never going to change how people live and the experience of life people have and we will get this period of time on Earth and it's like be so nice if a vast majority of that time was spent enjoying it and not hating it and especially like when you lose people and you think oh that person didn't get to experience life and I am getting to experience life and then it's like oh I really should try and make the most of this experience and have a good time doing it and it's

not to say like bad times aren't going to come we going to have stress with work and family and kids and all that kind of stuff but there are definitely changes we can make that could shift the percentage of time we spend in kind of a happier SP on absolutely G gamification of mental uh well-being or of of well-being in general I have to admit intrigued me a lot so when I was researching your work uh you know what what you're trying to do with nefi is is I'll let you explain it better but B

basically you're trying to say that uh there are certain habits there are certain uh uh activities or practices that would act AC at the the dose balance if you want the dose effect and and that those don't necessarily have to be kickstarted through your typical approach to life you can gamify the the approach to you can play a game or a challenge go through a challenge and then that will you know create a habit that will you know balance your dopamine for example MH I have to say this is very intriguing uh it's it's all

because I'm a video gamer and too and I can easily say that real Gamers by the way not addictive Gamers real Gamers uh there is so much meditation there is so much uh uh Focus there's so much dopamine of course clearly right uh not all unhealthy though by any me exactly some can be great when you're yeah and and I I really find it almost difficult to explain to people that as a gamer I'm not what you see at all it's not like there are aliens on the screen and we're slicing each other that's not

the experience at all it's a very very um uh um embodied uh very present very flow kind of experience where it really if if they replaced the aliens with ducks it would be the same and if they replaced the you know the the the movements uh of the of of my guns and bullets to uh just a Crosshair on the screen and red dots I'll I'll you know it's the same flow experience so I am a huge believer that you can actually create massive uh uh uh mental States and you know uh uh practices through

gam gamification of things well-being though that's a tricky one so so tell tell me first H you know how would that look like what would the experience look like and why do you think it would work yeah I think on on that gaming topic for example the key difference in gaming just for for context is those games you're describing that you engage with probably require effort to experience Joy so the curve is slow on the dopamine rise whereas if you compare the game maybe you're thinking of in your mind to like Candy Crash where it's

just colors that kind of thing would crash you out so the gaming is very varied in terms of how it impacts the brain in terms of the gamification of it I think to an extent I think the human life experience is a game of like even if you look at let not go there they uh well I mean we even all have like a app on our phone that we log into and it has a number and it's like a point score and that's our bank balance like we are kind of we're kind of playing

a game already and the reason I found the gamification so valuable is we spend we CH train like quite a variety of Ages all the way down to kind of like 10 years old up to kind of adults in their 50s and 60s and stuff like that and when we started doing these sessions I started the approach of between each of the sessions we do four one on each chemical between the sessions setting them really specific challenges to complete in groups between before the next session begins and I found as soon as someone had some

kind of challenge to complete they were more likely to engage with the behavior and it was like a very very specific challenge around cold showers or like a certain amount of minutes in Flow State or whatever it might be a discipline based Challenge and we are living in kind of a addiction world and whilst I think that's creating much of the challenge we have for our brain I think there's also much to learn about like wow how do you get humans to engage with stuff and it's very clear that because of how addictive sugar is

in cereal we'll eat lo of seral or how addictive pornography is or how addictive social media is and that is all coming from the perspective of dopamine hits in the brain and I've kind of had to try and think down the lens of like how do we get people to experience dopamine hits off healthy Behavior not just from engaging with the behavior itself but from the feeling of completion of a challenge and therefore if with this process like we have five key behaviors within each chemical these 20 core behaviors across do that people are trying

to integrate into their life if they feel like they're kind of winning a challenge it then increases the dopamine and I believe the most important thing for society is we get everyone into a naturally High dopamine State because if you're someone that's in a high natural dopamine State you're the opposite of like apathetic you're like really action oriented and in order to survive like a world where there's sugar everywhere and porn everywhere and all this different stuff you need to be someone that is very motivated and very disciplined like I just think that's an integral

skill for all of humanity to develop in the world that we're living in we'll have virtual reality coming we've got AI that we've got to try and manage and being someone that's like good at taking action is key so if not only do we get them to engage with the healthy behaviors that boost all the chemicals but because of the gamification they feel like they're getting this rewarding I'm going to the next level and we have it done in levels as they go through if they feel like they're going through the next level like a

game they're getting dopamine off that and healthy dopamine because it's like an actual effortful challenge to complete the higher the dopamine we get in society naturally the better we're going to all feel but but then in in that case what you're what you're trying to do is to try you're sort of almost replacing the dependence of that person from a negative or a a a you know a harmful addiction uh and replacing it with the addiction of the game in a way is that is that a fair thing to say I think to an extent

like in this world we're in now we're all going to be addicted to something I think I think like let's just let's just accept it and then we might as well just be addicted to the good things yeah I think I think that like that almost is the casee like you're going to you might be addicted to your work you might be addicted to some of the unhealthy stuff whatever it might be but if we can get those addictions like predominantly to be healthy addictions like life is going to be a lot better and like

for me personally like I was someone that was really hooked on partying like I can't quite do it justice when I talk about the on these podcasts about the kind of Lifestyle I lived but it was far from the lifestyle I Live Now and the only way out for me was spending a lot of time there thinking like what else could I get like a big dopamine hit from and the reason that like nefi looks how it looks and dose is making the progress it is is because it is my new Addiction effectively and someone

could find an addiction in the creation of a work idea but you also could get pretty hooked on like a really detailed artistic drawing for example like I had a young girl come up to me recently in a in a school and she was about 13 years old and she was struggling quite severely with ADHD and ADHD for context from a neuroscientist perspective is low dopamine levels and humans have known this for a long time all of the medications that treat ADHD things like adero and rellin they're dopamine based pills are they yeah yeah and

someone with ADHD you could genetically be born with low dopamine levels and therefore have this like predisposition to anything addictive is going to be super tempting because you're going to get bigger spikes off it but it also means that if you engage with a healthy Behavior you also have the capacity to get this bigger Spike and this girl was talking to me I said to her like what do you really like doing what gets you into Flow State cuz I I teach these kids about Flow State and she was saying how much she likes digital

art on her iPad and I said like in in this next seven days before you come back for the next session just make that your 100% focus is like really developing the digital art and because she had that as her Focus she was then doing something that was effortful to build dopamine instead of just scrolling Tik Tok which to a young person they don't see any difference they're like it's an iPad it's the same thing but one of them is creating effort in her brain and she came back the next week in a much more

energetic excited motivated mood because her brain had engaged a load of effort so dopamine had risen I think it's just so important that people begin to see the distinction can I ask you why are we trying to treat ADHD at all why is ADHD a problem that's an interesting question I think part of that is because it doesn't fit particularly well with the school and education experience like being someone that's hyper like kind of excited by things and the reason you're hyper excited by things is because like if something does excite you it really excites

you because you experience these big elevations in doain but what I think is interesting because I've done a lot on ADHD we've built this whole new model on ADHD which we're working on that I've been teaching at schools and if you took a hunter gatherer that had ADHD as we call it this low level of doping in their brain they would grow up and by the age of say like 10 years old they're beginning to have to contribute to that tribe and they would go out there and they might hunt for food forage for food

be good at building the shelter but what would be interesting is the individual with ADHD would experience the greatest levels of increased dopamine when they engag with the behaviors they would feel the best off these behaviors and actually probably become the best at them so I actually reckon back in the day those with ADHD would have been the highest performing individuals and in our modern world I think it's now becoming the opposite because they're trying to fit into being good at lots and lots of things whereas an ADHD individual needs to find one thing and

get really good at that so so exactly my point to be honest I mean in a very interesting way I I think neurodiversity in general uh is being positioned as something that needs to be treated because it is a question of fit within the capitalist Society right if you if if you if if we didn't need to put kids in school uh and instead we allowed them to find out what they're passionate about digital art for example and then and then tell them to go ahead and and just focus on that and make that entire

life they'll be amazing at it amazing right the best of the best and and and and you take any neurodiversity like any kind even you know an autistic child for example will have maybe low social skills but very high Talent you know talents in other areas and so on and so forth and I think the trick here is that we we're trying to mold everyone uh so that somehow we become all uh you know the the probably lowest denominator of all of us it's like you know something that fits all of us it's uniform for

all of us and that's easy to cost through education systems and universities and then you know interviewing uh skills and basically to get get them to take uniform jobs all of them exactly the same and and it sort of gets to me a little because uh we we cause so much Panic to a parent and go like ah your child is you know diagnosed with ADHD and you should be concerned a woman in my team at NFI is experiencing that exact thing at the moment yeah and I think the exact opposite should be the case

it's like you know jump up and down in Joy because your son is diagnosed with an with ADHD just find out what they're really good at what excites them and they'll be amazing at it you know what I mean I do and I think one of my challenges with this is there's this thing called the DSM in Psychology which categorizes all of the different challenges Society experiences and it's like the the Bible of psychological difficulty and when you take something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder my biggest pain with it is the fact we've put this

word disorder on the end of all of these things and I had OCD as a young kid like quite severely OCD and my mom was fantastic at helping me like navigate it and learn to live with it and stuff like that but one of the wayson which she did that is she just didn't let me hear these words that I have a disorder like as a young kid because then I would have kind of through a self-fulfilling prophecy gone down like a wrong path with it and with this model we teach with ADHD we've actually

rename named it to adha where it's attention deficit hyperactivity ability and get kids to actually think of this is like wow I have some kind of superpower rather than some kind of disorder and I think when you look at that hunter gatherer idea and I always come back to this just because that's what humans did for the majority of our time here having a tribe of 70 people where everyone had a really valuable unique skill would create a thriving tribe because someone's really good with the bows and someone's really good and then I think as

Society scaled up and started Living in these massive groups and stuff it became clear from the kind of top of the system to be like right let's make sure everyone is the same it's going to be easier to manage exactly and I think uh so let's Mo put them in the mold if they don't fit in the mold just you know push the mold a little harder give them a pill and effectively yeah this is where I think it's interesting with the technological World we're heading towards because that mold was built so that at Mass

scale everyone would go through school and then go into corporate kind of systems and work within those organizations but and like the kind of peak of that being law and finance and things like this but if a AI has this capacity to kind of really automate a lot of this stuff like I was with some of my brother's Financial friends who are very successful Financial people the other day and I was showing them what they could be doing with AI and how much it could be saving their time in their work and they completely blown

away at how much of their job is done could be done by and these people are kind of the top of society as we currently perceive it but what I do Wonder there is that if a lot of the automated kind of corporate life gets taken by AI does that then mean we might walk into a world where more individual kind of artistic skills may become more required it could could we walk down a path where more individualization is good I definitely think this is where we're going to I I think we're going to get

to end up back in the cave years right interesting not not not in the caves we we would but you know imagine a world of abundance where uh most of the work is done by machines uh you know hopefully where Society realizes don't need to compete on a capitalist gain anymore uh you know at the end of it basically we may just suddenly realized that sitting on your desk all day was never the life purpose of anyone like we were supposed to be out in nature sitting around the campfire chatting and getting to know each

other and doing physical activities and connecting with nature and you know this this actually is the original design of humanity and and and we went through that transition in the Middle where we created money and we created jobs and we created this and that and the other and so you instead of going out hunting in the morning you have to go out and do Accounting in the morning right which is I'd rather do the hunting absolutely which is really not the not not really what we're made for at all and and yes there will be

resistance and pain to go back to that original design but in reality if everything happened in abundance you might as well you know imagine if I had you for the next six hours and we had the most incredible chat about uh understanding neuroscience and everything else and there was no pressure to go through you know all of the transport Network and having to make money and all of that stuff it's possible it's possible but would it happen I don't know I I I think there it even if it ends up being our next reality it

would go through a lot of teething problems and a lot of pain on on the way because we're so used to this now I think uh as we make that kind of more merge with with tech as a species I think probably the most important thing we could possibly do is make sure the human instinctive part of us is very well satisfied effectively 100% because if we just become these like digital humans coming back to the beginning like that message is going to get really loud in our heads of like the body is not going

to enjoy that experience I even heard you say on a podcast the other day that you think uh well-being should basically become society's number one priority and uh I I I think we're going to hit a a you know I mean you you you know more than I that this uncertainty around what's about to happen is a very big reason for a lot of mental health issues right humans we don't like that we like we don't like change we just like our life shitty as it is you know let me keep swiping just just let

me keep I know I know how to do it you know this is this is good for me right and and I and I think the the resistance at a capitalist Society level at a believe it or not at a at a government governance level at a uh at an individual level it's is it's just going to be very fast it's almost like when you say about dopamine hits that are so quick ah okay uh I think we're getting into a stage where there is so much happening and I have to admit openly TJ that

you know you're so much smarter than I am it's it's the truth you know because of because of lots of things but you're made with a processor that is fit for this a lot more than my process processor right interesting and and I you know maybe I still have a a sort of like a a bit of code in the background that you may not have acquired yet you'll acquire over the next few years hope so yeah but but but but the truth is that from an interface to this world even though I spend hours

and hours and hours and hours and hours trying to keep up with what's happening on AI I'm absolutely certain you are you you would crush me if we were to compete on you know using AI to create something right it's so it's so integral to the way that you are but in in a very very interesting way my wish is that this is not this does not become the direction we go to even though I tell everyone you have to learn the tools but believe it or not like you just said I think we should

somehow use this opportunity not to merge with the tools but to merge back with our Humanity oh yeah yeah that would be that that would be the right way to go I mean there is a you know there is a need to merge with the tools now because we think that this is the way to advance in the coming World mhm but it will be so shortlived that we are needed next to the tools very very quickly the tool will not need you at all yeah we almost need to strengthen the uniqueness of Being Human

so then both can like live together as if we try and become a robot we're just not going to be as good at that 100% yeah and and and basically it will almost completely de uh prioritize our differences think about that because you and I as humans are so different even though so similar in in some ways uh because we're not attached to something that's 10x our intelligence agree right so you and I would analyze a problem from two very different aspects if we both add our 10% to the 10x then it becomes Irrelevant in

terms of differentiating us we all become like the machine far too similar yeah it makes us far too similar that's that's the truth interesting and coming back to that conversation of celebrating the uniqueness of each individual we need we need the uniqu we need to go the opposite way would you would you be okay to share a few of those or disorders allegedly disorders mhm and and what would be so if you were to talk to several mothers in school and say your child has OCD it's not a d right your child has ADHD it's

not a d right because you know the the H the ADHD a child first of all is very creative is very impatient is very passionate is very good at one thing you know see those values in your child okay if you take some of those DS that would come to your mind and tell a mother this is actually useful if you apply it in the following way what would you say OCD for example what what is OCD good for I really believe that all of these quotequote disorders are effectively overdone survival mechanisms like I think

within our brain with OCD for example it's of Great Value to be hyper organized and disciplined and like litigious with how you organize your life however it can go too far for sure and you can end up washing your hands 20 times a day which then would become like quite a Challen ing experience I think step one is your kid not believing they have a disorder like I started developing this at a super young age I think I was about five or six years old and I started having that kind of you have obsessions with

things like I had to kind of for example I'd be in my bedroom I'd have a thought in my head that I had to go into the garage which is outside in the middle of the middle of the night and turn a light switch five times otherwise this event would happen parents would die or something that would be like a and I was 5 years old it's such a young brain to even be able to compute this stuff but to my brain obviously like effectively what happens with those CDs you engage with the behavior once

you go and turn the light switch off the outcome that you were seeking to not happen doesn't happen and then it gets reinforced and you're like it worked so then you get into a difficult path with it and wow the first kind of Step my mom took cuz my mom also identified with these things and she took me to what I believe was called brain training and never told me I had this OCD thing and began working with people to understand this but effectively the main thing she did was normalize it so I didn't feel

weird like cuz then she thought if you feel really weird you might start like it might become more and more extreme so first of all just normalize it It's Not Unusual to experience it it's just your brain like doing something extra than what it would normally do and then with this OCD one specifically you have to in a nice calm environment allow the young person to like engage with a thing that they're fearful of like something simple that I think actually many people have is this three drains thing where you think if you're walking down

a sidewalk and there's three drains if you walk over all three unlucky walk under a ladder is unlucky or whatever and those are like light level OCD type Tendencies and the thing you have to do is as soon as the thought comes in of oh this will happen if I do this you have to immediately engage with the thing that you're not supposed to do immediately walk over the three drains and if you're working with your kid like you would do this with them you'd walk over the three drains with them or whatever they're fear

might be in their mind and begin to prove to them that it's not reality and then you begin to break that kind of like conditioned response within their brain so OCD i' say normalize it and then calmly work through engaging with the behavior and help them to realize that it's not reality and also help them see the massive strength in it like I'm so grateful for the OCD that I have within my brain from a kind of meticulous detail point of view like the only reason nefi looks how it looks is because I'm willing to

spend five hours working on one slide because I can get like really into something your slides oh my God man thanks man they really are really good thanks and so I I see value in these things I don't see it as all negative by any means and so that would be kind of the the root for OCD if it was ADHD I'd be going much more down there really realizing it's a superpower like I think ADHD is of so much value to the brain if you can find something that you can get hyperfocused on and

often when I talk to parents about this they very quickly will say to me my kid doesn't have anything they're interested in and this is a really interesting thing for society because a lot of society doesn't have hobbies anymore and doesn't know what they're interested in and their hobby is have a glass of wine and scroll into the ground real effectively that's become the modern Hobby and I then started really talking to kids about this trying to figure out how the hell do we find their Hobbies because the hobby has become the phone and then

I started thinking about it deeper if for example when you were growing up and not to say you're older than current young kids but you didn't have an iPhone when you were growing up if you had like an urge within you to engage with some kind of behavior like you suddenly thought cooking was cool for a second or you thought music was cool or you thought art was cool the only way to satisfy that craving within you was to go and engage with the behavior and I think this this challenge we have in society now

is all of us have an urge to engage with like hobbies and stuff like that but all we're doing is watching other people that are exceptional at the hobby engage with it instead of doing it and we're kind of like vicariously experiencing hob oh man you're talking about me like I'll think like oh cooking meals is really nice they chopping but instead of actually doing it I'll watch someone do it or it might be music I mean if you count the number of nothing else matter videos that I have on my toke keep list and

then you never even go back to because because I don't I my guitar is in there and I really have to tune it and I have to start don't have the time for that but I can actually look at the video it's so interesting and I think like many of us are vicariously experiencing Hobbies effectively and coming back to the brain chemicals the only way to actually stimulate the dopamine is to play the guitar it's not to watch someone playing the guitar it's for your brain to engage with the experience playing the guitar so when

a parent comes to me and they say oh my ADHD child doesn't have any hobbies or no interests I get them to like chat with the kid and get the kid to really observe carefully what videos are standing out to them on their feed like what is the main thing they're enjoying watching and it will be cooking or music or art or gaming or whatever it might be such a good and your your thing is in the thing you like watching most 100% it's in there and like I I used to love watching videos of

people like out in nature be grills and stuff I thought that sort of thing was so cool when I was a kid like I do too yeah and I just watched it for 20 years and then suddenly realized in my head literally only recently about six months ago like I can do that I can go into nature and make videos like that's also an option for me and like now I found so much joy and like really immersing myself in nature more regular and stuff like that and I think it's really important that we all

ask ourselves that question what is the standout video that's grabbing our attention regularly what kind of style is it and then can we personally engage with it oursel or the parents with their kids hold on this is my therapy session now uh yeah I absolutely I'm crazy about nature crazy about the guitar crazy about carpentry crazy about cars aw uh I just recently actually in don't don't judge me don't judge me I'm not very judgmental I I invested in a a garage a workshop cool to go back to fixing cars with my own hands that's

smart for your opening levels is it incredible I mean imagine every Saturday after a very stressful week I just go report to my team like I go like in an overall and say hey guys you know what do you want me to do and they'll just point me at something and say un assemble this and that's it a Saturday of wonderful engagement with reality H that is so the key of it because your thoughts then get a chance to rest and so much of our brain is spent like worrying and anticipating a few future and

past and all this sort of stuff if you really engage in a hobby you enter that flow State idea of deep focus where no thought occurs and that's where the brain always used to be as hunter gatherers we would have always been in no thought we' have been hunting and then building and then like raising a kid and cooking the food and and like now we've got so much time to ruminate in our heads because we sit there we it whereas like when you're in that shop on a Saturday that will be such like good

kind of active rest for your brain where your brain will be like de-stressing itself because it's not Computing oh what happened with the team and what happened with this and what's next to it would just be here's a car and I got to try and fix it and that's so important so but I have all of those can I can I just quit and stop like I love this too I love slow-mo as well and I love all of the other stuff that I do but I'm actually so obsessed and I I'm being very open

here you know it just hit me at a point in time that yes I hopefully will live a long life and will continue to contribute and so on how many more years can I actually carry a heavy log of wood and put it on my you know uh chains or B so or whatever and and and just you know cut it and turn it into something not so many and it's quite interesting it's hitting me very strongly now that I need more time doing my carpentry I need more time playing my guitar I need more

time fixing cars and restoring them I need more time and and it's just suddenly I'm almost Shifting the other way I'm like now sort of wishing my whole life was Hobbies am I going to make it doctor like and what's wrong with me I think uh nature oh my God I totally want to buy a place in nature and build my own home there yeah I mean that would be pretty hun to gatherer as well if you did especially if you build it and uh I think it's interesting I think work is great I think

part of the real value in technology is we can start getting much more efficient with like task completion like things can be executed much faster than I think a lot of the time we make things take them and like with that whole Flow State idea the bra can operate very fast if it gets into Flow State so with the working portion of your life like if you get super disciplined with executing fast and not necessarily and this is something I'm working on so much but like believing you have to work N9 to five I think

is such like a big thing like sometimes do you work 9 to5 seven days a week but uh on a good day 9 to five yeah that's a short day um but I am genuinely like working on this idea of like sometimes like if if the brain wants to engage with a hobby on like a Wednesday at like for an hour and then it's okay to do that and so many people would push back like my work won't allow this and this won't this and all that stuff but then like all I would ask is

that you go and look at your screen time and the amount of hours you spend on social media throughout the day and everyone has the time it's just like where I I call it the Cold Play test anyone tells me I don't have the time I say if Cold Play came to play in town tomorrow somehow the time pops up right yeah we we can impact the time and like we all spend like five hours on our phone a day now so we could probably my God yeah we could get that back do you know

I actually recently saw a young person's screen time I'll come back to that topic of Hobbit but it was 19 hours 54 average a day no way yeah 19 hours yeah and it's about 10 hours of Tik Tok in the night which is like it's so unimaginable what that would do to the the dopamine and the brain and wild can that be fixed yeah we we need like a replacement Behavior something else that's going to like heavily stimulate the dopamine effectively um we can come back to that but with your hobbies I think as you

like make progress in your career I think working smart when you're working but allowing yourself the piece of feeling I imagine you love productivity I imagine you love achieving Stu I love making things like it's fun to achieve stuff and like a huge amount of your dopamine for example maybe from that Source the only thing I mean I I was asked at a point in time you know you know how it is when they fill your head with [ __ ] and you know at a point in my life I thought that my life purpose

was to uh to uh help startups uh create technology that's you know super technology like Google everywhere in the world and I used to publicly say that H how how I came to that I have no idea I really honestly I mean I was just honestly like looking at the world around me and saying there are many things I do well one of them is to guide startups and help you know Mentor Founders and so on then that might be my life's purpose I what pile of crap like that's absolutely I don't even engage in

business anymore I mean I I it's really not my nature at all I'm good at it that's because of the training right but but it's so interesting when you really dig deep around what you what you really stand for and one day I was on stage and someone tell me told me describe yourself in one word and I said maker okay all of my behaviors are around making things whether it's writing a book or you know recording this wonderful conversation or whatever and and that one word flipped my life upside down and I don't know

why it popped out but and I may end up you know in 5 years time saying oh I was you know wrong about that too but it is so true to who I am and what would you say is fulfilling you the most at the moment in from that making side of you what activities um what providing the most rewarding experience it's it's normally the simplest of all of them believe it or not so you know I've I've committed to myself before I got married uh I you know had uh given myself the final permission

around 10 10 12 months ago I said you know what you're single uh you know you're never going to meet someone anyway so uh you know you might as well just literally build the home that you want to live in okay and so I ended up deciding to build uh to turn my living area into a total nature spot so all you see you still you can see a bit of wall because the plants are not fully grown yet yeah but I wanted to build a space where it's fully green cool and and and life

so it was fish tanks uh embedded within Greenery and and I'm really good with my hands and you know I really like to take care of of plants and I really know how to take care of aquariums and so on and I love all of those things so it took a lot of time to build it now all I really need to do is to cut a leaf here or you know take care of the fish there or whatever take takes me takes me 25 minutes maybe 30 minutes a day and that's not much time

and it's not much time but it's pure joy yeah that's a good activity meditation B it's total flow exactly meditation so you're looking at every root and every leaf and every fish and every you know quality of water and so on and so forth and it's complex you have to learn those skills but now to me it's just so such a joy it's my little you know corner of nature within my own living room and I absolutely love it but but in general I think hobbies and you you really you say this so eloquently I

think the one of the biggest challenges of our modern world is that we dropped Hobbies yeah we have we have nothing other than either being productive or being completely passive M like you know either make money or you know raise kids or whatever or be completely passive you know plug your head into a Netflix series and and just do nothing yeah it's interesting as well because when you our brain loves Flow State like it loves that deep state of focus and effectively when we're scrolling the phone in comparison to say the flow state of doing

the uh the Garden Room in your house I'm going to call it the Garden Room Garden Room is a good name yeah I'm going to call it the Garden Room too um we're effectively like creating artificial Flow State in the brain correct the brain is experiencing like these big dopamine Rises so it's like wow we entering Flow State and you'll notice like that idea of not thinking about anything it it does create that you don't think about anything you just take in the information take in the information but then we almost have like a rebound

effect the other side where our brain goes the opposite of that present experience into a really worri some State because it's uh correct yeah seeking to get to get back in control 100% And I think we all must like find something we can engage in and get better at like our brain is so designed to want to get better at things like it's so rewarding when you become better at taking care of that room or better at anything in work whatever it may be but the challenge with a lot of the the work we do

in our lives is like it remains very similar so like you don't necessarily feel like you're advancing significantly in your working life so you need something outside of your working life to feel like you're making progress on and that is how dopamine is completely designed like as you make progress towards something doping Rises and Rises and Rises just so that like if you were hunting down an animal you would get the greatest Spike just before you actually got the animal so that you'd get more more do more and more focused and I think so many

of us are just kind of living lives that are always the same they're not necessarily feeling like they're advancing and like they need to like imag imagine a hunter gatherer life like I I love this there's this show on Disney plus called Primal Survivor and this guy goes and visits all the hunt gatherer tribes that are still in the world today Africa and South America and so on and it's fascinating for so many reasons one of them is they're all so happy which is just so interes they're all like like I tell people about this

idea and they go I wouldn't want to live like that like that' be so horrible and it's like you actually look at the people doing it and they're much happier than we are more motivated and connected and less stressed out and all that kind of stuff even though they're having to survive like anacondas and [ __ ] and uh when you look at them all they all have such a specific skill set like there was even this this lady that's like 85 years old in this South American tribe and it's really important to know these

people lived a long time like we actually think that life expectancy was like 40 back then it was by no means 40 like humans Liv for ages back then it's just we had like higher death morality mortality rate yeah and she had literally spent her whole life 85 years becoming the best at putting poison onto an arrow tip in order to like craft these arrows so they could successfully hunt with them and like the joy you saw in her like building these arrows and she literally was saying how she' like got better and better her

whole life like she still fine-tuning the skill and it's like we all need to fine-tune a skill and it can be in work but it also can be outside of work in like artistic pursuit or whatever it might be but that fine-tuning of your garden room or your new mechanic shop like that is going to be very good for your brain and I think for you as someone that loves to work but loves Hobbies I think it could be a cool goal to try and have an equal number of hobbies to an equal number of

working tasks like that is a great idea if you have podcasts and I'm not too like familiar with exactly what your business is like how you're operating it but the main business kind of two or three things that are operating within the business if you try and match that to your hobbi like the quantity that would be a good balance that is a great idea honestly thank you for that Ian I I I I'm going to text you and see if you do no but I because I was thinking about that I was I'm very

mathematical about everything and you know the reason why I asked you about the D is because my young brain truly was just numbers and and you know and I know it sounds really weird now because now I can understand the rest of the world very much better but at a younger age all I could understand was mathematics and and uh and um you know to to to have come from that uh into world where I now can have so many hobbies and so many engagements and so on so when I was looking at my current

life saying maybe by 60 62 whatever can I reach a 50/50 like 50 days 50% of work and 50% of Retreats and silence and hobbies and so on and it's possible you know it it doesn't mean I will do less I'll probably end up being doing more you'll be so productive when you work if you na the other side of it if the other side was you scrolling on your phone and eating crap maybe not good your productivity but if the other side is healthy Behavior it's going to up your ability exactly so so we

focused a lot on dopamine I want to talk about oxytocin in a world where loneliness is becoming an epidemic uh what's happening here why are we unable to put the phone down and go hug someone dopamine is a really powerful chemical so it's kind of overriding our capacity to desire the oxytocin and again we're getting a very strong message that we're doing the wrong thing like a feeling of loneliness and low level of like love in your life if that emotion isn't really strong like oxytocin is love effectively and and for context oxto oxytocin most

predominantly release in the moment of birth so the mom and the baby have this massive surge amongst their brains in that moment of birth and it pair bonds them then you go through breastfeeding and physical touch and cuddles and then you go into like being an infer and family relationships and friends and then romantic love and all of that just drives this human connection within us and I feel like humans are effectively so addicted to the dopamine that it's overriding our capacity to get hold of the oxytocin but when we get hold of it we

really feel the importance of it like in covid for example eventually like that first lockdown was kind of like novel and everyone was like wow what's going on and everyone's super hooked on the news and like it was actually quite a high dopamine experience of like curiosity within Society I think in the first one by the second and third one it started to get pretty boring and pretty lonely and that loneliness and that like urge Society had to like oh my God we can all go out and see each other and we're allowed to hug

each other and that like strong feeling we all had in those lockdowns to go and see our friends and family that was oxytocin that was pulling us towards each other and we spent much of lockdown for example just engaging in dopamine alcohol sugar phones and so on and like it is powerful oxytocin and it's really important you start like consciously thinking like am I stimulating this chemical like do I have enough Connection in my life and even for example like if you're a married couple and you're sitting on the sofa every evening either end of

the sofa both on your phones with a TV on there's no oxytocin at all there whereas even if you want to have the TV on it's fun to watch TV if you could just sit next to each other and not have your phones like oxytocin is going to connect through your bodies and it's important we get conscious of it if I were asked to you know to prioritize anything honestly I I know for a fact that one thing that could lead to a lot more happiness is to for ourselves into oxytocin into into a human

connection of some form AG uh and and I and I have to say it's becoming it's almost unimaginable for the younger Generations that this thing exists uh and and I think for the older Generations because of the press pressures of life and having to go to work and so on and so forth and the monotonous you know rate of Life uh we're just sort of almost giving up on it you know is there a when you when you talk about gamification are there practices that you believe we can gamify a challenge let's give people a

challenge to 100% yeah that's where yeah I definitely love this side of things so we have these five core behaviors in oxytocin and I can give like a really simple Challenge on each of them first behavior is called contribution and we all have like a warm feeling inside when we support someone else like if you do anything kind of someone else you suddenly get this buzzing feeling within you and that's oxytocin it's rewarding you for contributing to The Wider group effectively and that's so imperative to our hunter gatherer survival that we had this desire to

not only focus on oursel so the first one would just be can today like in the next like 10 hours after listening to this podcast those people that are listening do some kind of random act of kindness for someone else like can you consciously do something there's nothing to do with benefiting you and that could be sitting and listening to someone for a while it could be asking a barista in a coffee shop how's your day going it could be helping someone with something picking someone up taking someone's dog for a walk but something that

consciously supports someone else is actually going to increase ox toen in you and them and that's the goal is both of us so that's one physical touch is massive and when we've uh looked into different bits of research and how valuable can it actually be to physically connect with one another we've seen that if someone can average seven hugs a day that is actually substantial benefits to human health so you could have a conscious desire today to hug more people that one really can't be underestimated like teenage girls in schools is a group that I'm

really trying to help as much they can with this doe stuff they really struggle with confidence and friendships and bullying and all that kind of stuff self-belief image we get them completing this challenge we in the live interactive session they all like hug one another and I suggest to them right everyone has this there's this interactive software they put in their score of how many hugs they're getting a day it's always like an average of one a day and then they all have to hug one another and as I suggest it to them they all

look at me like oh my God why is he suggested that like I don't I feel awkward and I don't want to do that and then they all hug one another uly then after like 2 minutes they're all like buzzing and smiling jumping around they all look back at me and I say like look how valuable that was you're all suddenly so happy even though you thought that wasn't something of value to you and then we get many messages from young girls saying like just coming in school and hugging my friends has made me feel

more accepted by my friendship group and more confident in myself and so on so hugs whether you're young or or older is powerful why is it in society that we've refused that now is it because we're afraid of like what physical touch might lead to why why are we not I mean I am a serious hugger like I I hug anything right uh but it's it's in Western societies it's a little less accepted somehow isn't it I do see that I think Co definitely threw us through a bit of a ring on physical contact and

I think there is like some underlying kind of like awkwardness between Society now CU I just don't think humans are in their natural form I don't I don't think we're operating in our fully natural state and I think for many reasons this conversation and therefore I think physical Touch One those things has become like maybe uncomfortable for some people and I think it's very important that it's something you just like const consciously reintegrate and like if you're raising a young family right now for example like the amount of physical touch you end up Desiring as

a human is very very much based on how much you experience as a young young baby that's correct and if you've got young kids even if you're not someone that loves physical touch if if you can start cuddling them they're going to be become someone that craves it and gives it to more people and shares that like feeling of physical love and as we like go on this like more robotic human Journey like these are basic things that humans just can't give up on like we need it we need to physically interact like that elbowing

each other when we saw each other in covid where we had touch elbows like it felt wrong it felt like we need to just hug one another please and uh like just give it to me I'm fine I'm I'm I'm going to cough that's fine it's fine we'll take it but uh so so you were saying F five experiences five uh you know we said physical touch we said uh what was the first contribution yes third card is called social life this the third Challenge and it's very simply just making sure you engage in some

way socially every day and the main component of that is making sure you consider what's called active listening so that in a conversation rather than kind of while someone's talking to you you are constantly thinking about what you're going to say next you actually consciously like listen and then respond and it's a very different form of conversation when people do that with one another so really active listening with people that are really into their Tech and spending their time on Tech there's also this fascinating study I found when writing the book that had two individuals

texting one another on their phones and measured their oxytocin release and they had zero and as soon as those two people called one another oxytocin began to release so even if you're going to connect via the tech for your social life challenge it's really important to be on FaceTime or calling or at a minimum voice notes cuz the sound of the voice is at really important to the release of the hormone oh so you got your contribution challenge physical touch a social challenge today to engage socially fourth one is gratitude which I'm sure you're very

familiar with it's powerful for the human being I think one of the most imperative components of gratitude in our world today is that we're living so deeply in states of envy and jealousy and comparison to one another and if comparison is constantly thinking about what you don't have grude is basically thinking about what you do and it's a very important to balance to engage otherwise you're going to live in like just a constant state of dissatisfaction which isn't going to feel very nice so some grateful thoughts or we run this often with families in schools

whereby families try and engage in a conversation around the dinner table where each person kind of shares what they're feeling happy about at the moment and grateful for and it becomes a discussion which is powerful the final challenge is oxytocin doesn't just release when you engage love with one another it actually it releases when we engage love with oursel as well well and we all have a relationship with oursel that relationship can be very unloving and very tough and critical and and not very kind and it's really important to be able to just say kind

things to yourself and I found this so much like when I first started trying to get myself healthy I tried to get off my phone in the mornings and we go on these quiet walks in the morning in nature without my phone and I was so bored and I was so critical in my head of myself it was a horrible experience to be honest but I had this feeling of like out here in the quiet there are like answers that need to be listened to effectively like messages that need to be listened to and eventually

after like days and days of doing this I start thinking like I can't just be a bastard to myself every day in my head like it's too it's too upsetting talking to myself like this so I started this process of just like can I at least say one kind of and we call this card achievement can I just celebrate one achievement and it could be anything made my bed got off my phone did something nice for someone and they started this daily process which I've now done every day for like three or four years where

it's just like you do your great thought then you go into like just celebrating one achievement from the previous day and it begins to build a different style of conversation in your head like if you had a parent that was really critical of their kid that would be like one of those like not necessarily that lovely Dynamics between that parent and kid that the kid might not like them and so on and we are like that with oursel in our head like super tough on oursel and critical and then you might not really like yourself

and you want to build a friendship with yourself and therefore saying good job for doing this thing to yourself it begins that conversation of kindness so contribute to someone physical touch a social engagement a grateful thought or celebration of an achievement they would definitely Boom the oxy if you do one of those I I have to say the world is I I'm I'm less concerned about the world when someone like you is in it that's really really cool um can I can I stay on oxytocin for a for a minute you know when it comes

to love and romantic relationships um I find that in today's world there is a tendency to uh to sort of prove oneself right rather than to maximize oxytocin for everyone okay let me try to explain this because I I find you know I'm I'm I'm developing with my wonderful wife Hannah what used to be called finding love my my book about love and romance she looked at it and she said that's wonderful but you're not taking you know psychology into consideration at all and you know a lot of the of the of the mechanics that

I describe she says is triggered from our scripts as children and how we view ourselves and so and and and so part of what we're looking at is that idea of if you if you maximize oxytocin a lot of the conversations will be easier so rather than get into an argument with the objective of proving yourself free you know correct okay and the other accordingly the other person wrong can you go into a conversation where you're trying to make them feel good about your themselves and feel good about this connection right and and and often

you may not even need to get into the argument because you know what it's not even important like I love you so much you're wonderful anyway MH we've lost that in our not only in romantic relationships I I believe in every relationship in especially relationships online where all that we're trying to do is to prove our eles right not be kind to others can can you see where that I mean where is that an a natural tendency that ego of trying to be right rather than trying to connect I think that's yeah that's an interesting

question I think there's kind of two things at play one is we as a society are becoming pretty hooked on being right about things because of the divisiveness of social media so we're beginning to kind of almost get addicted to that experience of being right and that actually really plays out on social media part of the way in which the social media algorithms are designed is they will help you develop a perspective on something and then they'll send you more videos on it because you get greater dopamine hits if your belief system is affirmed so

then you'll be like oh I really believe this and then you'll see a video that's very much on the other side and you'll think those people are stupid and I'm very right and that's like why we are very divided as a society is because we're getting so clearly shown messages that are different from one another so I think there's a like an underlying impact of society and Technology that's made making us seek to be right and then I think when it comes to oxytocin in a situation like there of actually trying to be right I

think it's so important to understand that from purely an oxytocin perspective one of the deepest desires we have as a human is basically to feel seen and as a baby literally that means as logically as our parent is looking at us and making sure that we're not being eaten by something and and like as a baby important yeah it's important it's very important survival mechanism and even like if for example you measure the oxytocin in a baby's brain you'll see that if they can hear their par primary caregivers voice oxytocin releases because of a feeling

of safety that that person is near them and I think often in arguments one of the greatest challenges we can have in a relationship is like not feeling like our perspective is seen and I think it's if you're definitely arguing with someone that's proving themsel trying to prove themselves to be right you're definitely not going to have your perspective seen and I think in conversations like it's super important to just like slow things down a bit and if there's a really complicated thing you're trying to solve I'd definitely advise like getting yourself into a natural

environment to try and solve it cu the body is just going to be much better out there or maybe to your Garden Room everyone can go for sessions In the Garden Room you can chop around the outside and if they if they can help with the work yeah everyone that would probably help calm their relationship but I think the objective really needs to shift to like how much can I try and understand this person's point of view even if you think you are right and maybe you are right in this specific negotiation it's just important

like for that individual to feel like okay my my perspective has been seen and the likelihood of you coming to a good conclusion of that conversation is much higher and I think it's really important to just think about that in general like when you're engaging with another human how much you making that person feel seen like I think sometimes I see this like in friends and conversations like people can be so self-focused now where like it feels that everything is about their experience and I think social media has done that to us because we all

suddenly have these profiles where we constantly see our own name and our own pictures and like we're so focused on oursel whereas prior to the internet you didn't really see yourself so effectively you were just like focused on whatever was in front of you and it was likely the other people in the world we've basically flipped on its head to the main focus in our life is ourself rather than the group and I think whenever you're with people like really making a conscious effort to make sure they're seen and you ask them great questions about

their life and families and work and all that sort of stuff things very important in a negot in an argument but also in general relationships for maximizing the oxy you're a a a child of the internet yeah for sure and you're using it so well and you're you know you're learning from it so well if I asked you if I told you that I have a switch that can make it disappear tomorrow would you prefer that word oh that is so interesting um no my gut feeling is no I think uh and I depends how

far if you could if you could click a Switch and Go back to hun gatherers I think I'd potentially take that seriously yeah I I think society would be happier and healthier if we were in that state and I think like the kind of objective as a humanist to like have a good experience and like contribute to others and I think that would be very fulfilled if we were this is such a profound point to put to put into conversation so all of the progress we've made so far mhm futile well it's not that I

don't think it's incredible like I think I have so much admiration for every bit of progress we've made in medicine and transport and like every education I think it's phenomenal what we've done but I think if you yeah I just I find when I watch these shows of humans living in the original way I think and and I think what we can get caught up on is like when we think back in time people's brains look back on like 100 or 200 years ago when there were like plagues and like was Carnage back then so

comparatively to then yeah this world is extremely good and safe and clean and healthy definitely compared to like a few hundred years ago but if you jump really far back like we didn't really have disease and stuff out in the wild because humans weren't close enough together to form disease and germs and like everything was very clean and stuff so I do think that life would have been a very fulfilling magical experience very like spiritual experience connected to like death and life and I do think it would have been pretty cool I do the question

you asked me would I turn the in off the reason I'm probably suggesting no is I I think there is so much wisdom and education to be like shared through that media yes and what I would probably prefer is we didn't necessarily have social media but we just more had kind of YouTube type platforms I was going to say exactly that I would turn the whole thing off but YouTube yeah like video education and like I like written education like if YouTube had that kind of feature as well I think that that kind of thing

is fantastic podcast all that kind of stuff I think uh the kind of profiles and seeking for like that kind of yeah validation and stuff which obviously I'm in that world of seeking for that kind of thing I think that's quite complicated so yeah yeah maybe keep the videos and and cut the other stuff tell me I'm not going to tell anyone other than the few tens of thousands listening are you also addicted to those uh living off the grid videos on YouTube yeah they're cool oh my God play those all the time I watched

a video of a guy building his like uh cabin in Costa the other day yes sir and it looked so cool he was fully off grid and he like created some clever like system with water and that kind of stuff I I I I literally daydream about which tools I'll take with me I thing is like because you're you're a thriving human in this world and you would have probably just been an exceptionally good H gatherer like when I sit across from people because I spend so much time in this like deep visualization of this

world and cuz I have these different like ocds and stuff like I am so hyper fixated in my brain on this idea I spend basically 12 hours a day thinking through this landens and when I'm with people I almost see people in their Hunter gather a form where I can imagine you you're a good Hunter you you you stay in the cave you say that but like and and as Hunter gather is like the term would then Link at just hunting but there's so many required skills in order for that group to thrive and like

I can imagine you in that kind of construction of the tribe were whereby like all of the huts and stuff and yeah yeah I'd be the mechanic it's like everyone would bring they'd bring back their arrows and their you know their Spears and everything and I go like yeah not balanced I'll balance this one for you 100% not balanced and you would have done that and like that I mean like if you imagine like you were waking up every day and you were doing that with your daytime and then you also had like a family

and a and a partner you were connecting with and you were eating only healthy natural food and you were sleeping and you like you would feel so good would be it and that is my my whole goal is like as we go more and more advanced like how do we just like really build that instinctive part of oursel like how do we satisfy that urge and then I think humans can go into this like next phase feeling good and optimistic about like all the Innovation that's going to come as a result of it and the

abundance the opportunity to work in new ways and stuff but I think this whole body and brain needs to be very happy with how it's being treated and like getting as close to the hunter gatherer lifestyle as possible is the way to do that I could talk to you forever honestly I mean I think we should just let everyone else go and keep going yeah we can I'm happy to do that I mean this is so such a honestly we covered so much ground and also some of those points are so um so deep to

think about that idea of balancing the dose you know I really love what you're coming from on this it's it's the it's it's accepting the fact that situations and circumstances will trigger a hormonal imbalance within you and that and that you know your need for those hormones in your body will drive you to do behaviors that are not always good for you and and that there is a way for you to actually get those hormones in a healthy way MH uh it's a bit of an addictive approach to it I have to say but it's

a very healthy addiction it's almost like being addicted to working out the interesting thing with the phrase addiction is my absolute favorite kind of definition comes from Andrew huberman and yes he describes addiction as the progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure and when you are addicted to stuff whether it's like your phone or social media or porn or alcohol like very quickly that becomes your primary pleasure source and everything else feels kind of crap in in comparison and then they describe a good life as the progressive expansion of the things that bring

you pleasure and that would be the opposite of addiction and although like I framed it in a way whereby people people are trying to complete levels and go through these kind of processes and getting dopamine hits we are really trying to expand all the things that are going to bring someone pleasure in their life so they're getting pleasure from nature and people and food and sleep and cleaning and like all these like core things humans need to be operating well and if you can expand what brings you Joy instead of it just being your phone

and your unhealthy dinner then you're going to feel way happier it's been three months in the making uh I I I I I texted you the very first time uh when when uh when Susie told me told me about you three months ago oh my God it's been worth the wait thank you man this has been such a joyful conversation so mind openening uh yeah I probably will demand that I buy you coffee every now and then and just think what you're doing what you're going through and what you're thinking about you're an amazing amazing

young man i' love I'm I'm so honored that I met you this was a wonderful conversation thank you so much for being here thank you so much for having me man absolutely beautiful and everyone honestly I keep thanking you for giving me the chance to meet so many incredible humans and and I have to say TJ just blew my mind today so many things to think about and uh you know disappointing in a way that I'm so old and yet I have to discover all of that new stuff uh in any case I am very

very grateful that you're here I'm very grateful that you're listening I would definitely urge you to follow TJ uh his contribution on social media is always positive is always a plus for your life so uh this is the part of social media that's good for you otherwise let's all hold hands and pray that all of social media disappears other than YouTube podcasts and ebooks I think we would have a much better life that way uh actually let's have all of podcasts disappear but this one I think this one that would give me a significant Advantage

whatever it is that you're doing today uh please look at your activities and find healthy ways to find um mental health balance uh I can't wait for uh the book uh the dose effect uh which is out uh January uh I'll probably give you a reminder about it when uh it's about to come out uh until then follow uh TJ uh on Instagram and uh do use that uh lethal tool that's called social media to tell people about this podcast uh what do they say like And subscribe like And subscribe and press the little uh

Bell thing like you know just to get notifications so that we annoy you when new episodes of this podcast happen uh uh find a little bit of time this week to slow down it doesn't really matter how busy you are there's always a bit of time to slow down I love you all for listening and I will see you next time [Music]