Joe Rogan Experience #1869 - Dr. Gabor Mate

[Music] pleasure to meet you i've really enjoyed your conversations online i love your perspective and uh it's really a real pleasure to have you in here well i really i'm happy to be here with you thank you my pleasure uh this book the myth of normal this is your book yeah it's called the myth of normal trauma illness and healing in a toxic culture and it kind of sums up everything i've ever learned what exactly is toxic about our culture is that a too big question no it's it's the uh it's the central question yeah

um if you imagine you're a microbiologist in a laboratory growing microorganisms in a petri dish that's called the culture you know you put in a brew and with the right nutrients and the microorganisms thrive and not multiply but if a lot of them start getting sick and let them started dying you'd say this is a toxic culture now if you look at what's happening in north america now there's an article in the new york times 10 days before we speak of a teenager being on 10 different psychiatric medications 10 different psychiatric medications more and more

kids are being diagnosed with adhd with anxiety with depression the rate of childhood suicide is going up and everybody's saying what's going on here why is this going on more and more people getting autoimmune disease mental health issues the overdose crisis in the states over 100 thousand people died of overdoses either we assume that these are all accidents and sort of um blows of misfortune or we get that there's something about this culture that's fomenting so much illness seventy percent of american adults are on at least one medication seventy seventy yeah fifty forty percent are

on about two at least that's the toxic culture there's all kinds of i could talk about what makes it that way but when i talk about toxic culture i'm talking about its impact on the people who inhabit it so this toxic culture are you just talking about uh the the overall way human beings communicate is it the way we're being raised is it the foods weed is it everything it's all done it's all and salient amongst them how we raise our kids what about how we raise our kids well if you look at how human

beings evolved uh over millions really of years and uh hundreds of thousands of years and even our known species has been on the earth for about 150 200 000 years for all that time until the blink of an eye ago we lived out in nature in small band hunter-gatherer groups where kids were raised communally so that it wasn't just an isolated nuclear family or isolated mother or father it was grandparents and uncles and aunts in the whole community it takes a village as the same goes it takes the whole community now children also were picked

up when they cried in fact they were never even put down they slept with the parents they were breastfed for three or four years um in today's society and i can start even before that already we know that stresses on the pregnant women have a negative impact on the infant physiological impact on infants brain development it's not even controversial in our society we don't pay attention to women's emotional needs when they're pregnant and we don't pay attention to the child's emotional needs so the child needs to be held and accepted unconditionally now in our society

we actually tell parents not to pick up the kids when they're crying yeah and that is an insult and a trauma to the child and that has a cha impact on the child's trust in the world sense of safety sense of belonging how they feel about themselves you know in the book i talk about my mom and i talk about my own infancy in budapest hungary as a jewish infant under the nazis so you can imagine how stressed my mom was but forget the nazis for a minute i read her diary and she writes this

is when i'm two weeks of age and we're in the maternity hospital and she says my poor little gobbler my heart is breaking for you because you want to be fed and you're hungry but i promised the doctor i would only feed you every four hours and you've been crying for the last hour and a half what's it like for an infant to lie there next to their mom and not be picked up and fed for an hour and a half now try telling a mother baboon or a mother cat or a mother bear to

ignore the child's distress for an hour and a half so the very advice that you give to a lot of parents these days already damages the child where was that where's that advice coming from like who are the experts that thought it was a good idea to not pick up children when they're crying it's been going on for about a hundred years um it may be even longer dr spock i don't know if you remember the name benjamin spock his book was just the most influential parenting bible for decades through the 50s and the 60s

and 70s and he talked about the tyranny of the baby he wants to be picked up he says well how you deal with that is you walk out and you shut the door and you don't go back in other words you isolate the infant now look at how hunter-gatherers raise their shells they carry their babies everywhere i met a cree woman once who told me in our community kids weren't even allowed to touch the ground for two years they're just held all the time so it's modern life it's the pressure and stresses of modern life

acting on parents that makes it so difficult for them to really be there for their kids now my mother's heart was breaking she went against her own instincts to follow the doctor's advice again you tell a mother rat or mother baboon to ignore the baby's cries and you find out what mother rage is all about and what does this effect of not holding babies and not comforting them when they cry what does this have on the child well let's say you're my friend okay and you come to me for help as an adult and i

ignore you what's the impact on you what are you gonna believe i don't know i mean if if you ignore me i'm gonna i'm gonna take into account what the rest of the world says you might but what would you believe about my attitude towards you i would think you're ambivalent yeah and i don't care exactly that's exactly the impact on the child not consciously but unconsciously the child makes the assumption that there's something wrong with me i'm not lovable the world is an unsafe place because we learn about our worlds through how we interact

with our caregivers that's the template i mean if you ever raise the puppy dog you know that how you treat that little infant animal has a huge impact on what kind of a creature they're going to develop into well human beings are the same in fact even more so because we're more dependent and more helpless than the average animal is so we need that care and that connection even more powerfully so when we're lacking it the infant assumes unconsciously that there's something wrong with them they're not lovable the world is not this trusting place then

we spend our lives acting out from that unconscious belief so the majority or a large portion of our culture develops as a child with this problem in in this world yes in this world very much so then then there is the like if you look at what the what a psychologist friend of mine calls the irreducible needs of children irreducible meaning that if you don't meet these needs there's gonna be negative consequences the first one is unconditional loving acceptance just the sense of belonging attachment it's called connection the infant needs that you know how baby

elephant is born when the mother elephant goes into labor all the mother elephants stand around in the circle when the infant plops on the ground they all reach out their trunks and they stroke the infant that's natural instinct you belong to us you're welcome here now the human infant needs that at least as much as the baby elephant now so the first need is this unconditional loving welcome in the world the second need of the child is that the child shouldn't have to work to be loved to be accepted i shouldn't be pretty smart successful

compliant good nice anything i'm just i shouldn't have to work for what is my birthright which is to be accepted as a person with value and worth and lovable in their own right that's the second you know the third need is the freedom to experience all our emotions okay all our emotions now our brains have emotional circuits um for rage which we need to protect ourselves for lust which we need to reproduce for seeking curiosity to explore and get to know our world one of the one of the and there's other emotional circuits as well

for care so that we can look after each other these are circuits that were nature evolution has wired us with this have been studied now so one of the needs we have is the freedom to experience all our emotions all our emotions our gut feelings and everything else a lot of parenting experts will tell you an angry child should be made to sit by themselves so they come back to normal i'm quoting a very i'm quoting a very famous person here um a psychologist who said this in his book an angry child should be made

to sit by themselves so that they come back to normal now what's the message to the child anger is not normal if you want to belong to us you have to suppress your anger now suppressing the anger is a trauma because anger is given to us by nature as a natural boundary defense if i enter your space in a way that threatens you you better get angry with me get out that's healthy anger if i suppress that if i depress it push it down 30 years later you're diagnosed with this disease called depression it's not

a disease it was your response to the stupid advice of the parenting experts that your mothers and your fathers believed they should follow it's a coping mechanism you pushed on the anger to be accepted by your environment but later on that causes you problems mental health issues and physical health issues so when i'm talking about irreducible needs i'm talking about the real needs and in this society parents are told to keep ignoring their own parenting instincts to make the child behave the way they expect them to behave and the result is a lot of kids

are hurt without parent meaning to hurt them they love their kids they do their best but because of this culture they actually end up hurting the kids so this is standard in america pretty much and you feel like this is the base of this host of psychological problems well i wouldn't want to put everything down to just one dynamic right but certainly what happens to children in the first three years is a huge template for problems later on and once a child develops and becomes an adult and has all these issues that are connected to

the way they were raised what can be done then well that's where the process of healing has to begin and um by the way um but okay yeah let me let me deal with the question um what can be done then well the first thing we have to do is to recognize what's going on that that that what happened to me like if i can talk about my own example okay so medical doctor i'm in my 40s successful physician newspaper columnist respected good income and all that but i'm a workaholic i have to be working

if i'm not working i'm kind of depressed and alienated which is how my family experiences me including my young kids now why am i that way because as a jewish infant under the nazis the message i got is that the world didn't want me now not because the nazis directly affected me as an infant although we lived under a nazi occupation in my first year of life so my mother was our life was under daily threat in the book there's a painting of my mother and i with her run the yellow star when i was

11 months old she handed me the complete stranger in the street to save my life in budapest i stood on that very pavement just a couple of months ago when i visited my birth city so she gives me the total stranger to convey me to some relatives in hiding because she thinks where we're living i'm not going to survive another day so she does this to save my life now what message do i get i don't know that there are nazis i don't know that my mother is passing me on to a stranger to save

my life what sense do i get i'm being abandoned i'm not wanted i'm not lovable well if you're not lovable if you're not wanted one of the things you can do is to go to medical school because now they're going to want you all the time and every and every day you get to prove to yourself how much how important you are and how much they want you and how essential you are to everybody's life what message do my kids get when dad is not around all the time or when he's around he's kind of

in withdrawal from workaholism they get the same message so we pass it on this is what trauma is we pass it on unwittingly for one generation to the next and we don't even know we're doing it i didn't know i was doing it so you know when you say how do we at some point you have to say so damn the successful doctor columnist and so on but i'm depressed at some point i have to start asking and my kids are afraid of me i have to start asking myself what's going on here why is

this tension in my family why are my wife and i breathing together at this point 54 years coming this november but when our kids were small we had a very tense marriage and i have to start asking myself what's going on and that's when you start looking for the answers so the first thing is we have to recognize that the way it is is not working and maybe it doesn't have to be this way so how did you go about shifting the way you think about your life and the world and being a workaholic and

becoming what you feel like do you feel like now you're a healthy person you should ask me that relatively you should ask me that on my deathbed okay because then i'll give you the final answer but uh well right now how do you feel right now i've come a long way i'm much more balanced um i'm not 100 there i'm not you know like what's missing every once in a while when i get triggered i still can behave like i had never learned anything at all you know sometimes when you're triggered your your the circuits

in your brain that can regulate you and guide you ground you go offline i can still go offline sometimes but much less than i ever used to and i come back to groundedness much more rapidly i also have learned how to take care of myself you know so but i've done a lot of work to to to sort out all the traumas that i experienced as a child so it's been it's taken a lot of work and what kind of thing really triggers you when i'm not understood when i don't understand really when i'm not

seen when i'm [Music] and when i perceive as myself as not being respected for who i am and i don't mean respect for what i do i mean respected for because i mean people can disagree with what i do and i don't take that as a sign of disrespect it's just a disagreement but when i'm not respected just for who i am as a as a person as a human being as a human being yeah so if someone insults you or someone dismisses you or treats you like [ __ ] very often i can see

that as their problem they're projecting something on me mm-hmm i'm sure you've had the same sure in fact i know you had because i saw your interview with um lex friedman and and he talked about how you handle the the negative vibes that come your way sometimes so sometimes i can see that as their issue but if i'm particularly vulnerable maybe stressed maybe i didn't take care of myself maybe i haven't swum for a few days so my nervous system is on edge then maybe i can take it personally and then i can get triggered

that seems like one of the best forms of medicine some sort of rigorous exercise you don't want to talk to me if i haven't sworn for a couple of days swimming is your thing that's my thing it's a great one yeah that's a great one because it's physically exhausting exhausts the muscles the cardiovascular system yeah the mind gets in that meditative state of constantly stroking and constantly kicking that's right and you have to breathe don't you it's like a yeah you know and and so i do i do that 50 minutes an hour a day

and and it makes a huge difference for me and when you do that do you do it with the intent of enjoying it or do you do it saying that this is the necessary work i have to do or is it a combination of both for me it's enjoyable i love i look forward to stretching out my body in the pool and just getting that rhythm as you say going getting the breathing going and just notice the thoughts oh next week i'm gonna be on joe rogan you know and and notice that those thoughts come

and go but not not not stay with them just watch the watch the video in my mind as i swim you know yeah um so you recognized at how old were you when you recognized that you really had a problem that you had i would say i was in my early 40s early early to mid 40s i would say so what were the first steps that you did to try to come out of that and just evolve your process yeah i will answer that but i have to tell you as well that this is not

separate from my medical work either because in my medical practice i began to notice that who got sick and who didn't wasn't accidental there were certain traumatic imprints in people who got physically ill and mentally ill who got addicted and so on so what i saw in medical practice kind of melded with what i experienced in my own life so my steps were both to start talking to my patients and to find out about their lives and i began to see the commonalities amongst people including myself and my patients doesn't matter how addicted or how

ill they were there was always something about them that i could recognize in myself and i began to go to for therapy and i began to really research the child developmental and trauma literature and the more i did the more i learned so and then you know eventually like you i got into psychedelic work as well that didn't happen too much later but it was all that and what psychedelic work did you do and how did that help you how did that happen so my book on addiction in the realm of hungry ghosts close encounters

with addiction was published in 2009 in canada and in 2010 in the states in which i point out that addiction is always always always rooted in trauma always obviously what about genetics do they play a factor or is the genetics just related also to trauma well here's the interesting thing about genetics you know what the best letter i received was um for a woman who was 48 and she wrote me from somewhere in the states she sent me an email to thank me for the birth of her over 4 year old child she said we

just celebrated my daughter's four-year birthday thanks to you she said because my husband used to be an alcoholic and he used to believe that his alcoholism was genetically determined so he didn't want to have a child because they didn't want to pass on the addiction the alcoholism gene because he was he had suffered so badly but then he read your book and they realized it wasn't genetics at all it was trauma as a result and i was just at the edge of the child bearing years i was 44. so now we have this four-year-old child

thank you and i thought this is the best praise i've ever got because i've been thanked quite often for saving people's lives but never for causing one long distance so go back to your question about genetics there's no gene for addictions i don't care what they tell you what they are there are some genes that make it more likely that you might become addicted but they don't cause addiction as such in fact the addictions have nothing to do with sorry the genes have nothing to do with addictions at all now you say well how come

you know my father was an alcoholic my grandfather wasn't like i'm an alcoholic it's not the gene that's passed on it's the trauma that's passed on because what's it like to grow up in a home with alcoholism now there are some genes that make some kids more prone to have mental health conditions and addictions and so on but there's no gene that causes any specific illness or sorry any specific mental health illness any specific addiction what there are is a large group of genes but the more them you have the more likely you are to

have any mental health conditions including addictions but you can have those same genes and be a perfectly happy successful joyful creative person depending on the environment acts on those genes which means that the genes are not for disease they're for sensitivity and the more sensitive you are when things go well the happier you are when things go badly the more unhappy you are the more pain you have the more you have to run away from pain and that's where the addiction comes in so the genes are not for addiction as such and most of my

profession gets this completely wrong so yes there's a genetic position predisposition not to addiction as such but to either joy or suffering depending on what the environment does when it acts on you so um i forgot where this conversation began but this is where we are now well we're just talking about addiction and genetics and whether or not you know when when you hear about families that have a history of alcoholism we just assume based on what we're told that that's because this is yeah and it's probably the part of the world your ancestors are

from and whether or not they had a history of abusing alcohol and there's genetic predetermining factors okay there's a great example to refute that right here in the united states so prior to colonization the native people had no problem with addiction at all and they even had some alcohol in the new mexico area really there was yeah apparently so there was all these other plants around by the way there was no addiction then you traumatized that population you subject them to the extermination and the destruction of their ways of life and their culture like in

canada we have a terrible problem when i worked with addictions in vancouver's downtown east side 30 percent of my clients were indigenous people they make a five percent of the population thirty percent of the people and of the men in jail in canada fifty percent of the women in jail in canada are indigenous people they have much more addiction child abuse mental health issues suicide violence maybe he heard about the stabbings up in canada right now yeah it was in an indigenous community why because they're so traumatized by what happened to them and for 100

years their children were abducted from their homes by the state and the church sent to these residential schools where they were sexually physically emotionally abused i had a i met a woman by the way remember where we started talking about tonight you're asking about psychedelic works i'll come back to that i was in a psychedelic ceremony with some indigenous people in canada maybe about eight years ago now i met a woman who was taken from her family by law abducted by the police taken to the nearest school the parents weren't even allowed to visit these

kids they were her first day in school as a four-year-old she spoke her tribal language you know what the punishment was they stuck a pin through her tongue this was in the 1960s in canada 1950s i'm sorry late 1950s for a whole hour this little girl couldn't put her needle couldn't put her tongue back in her mouth for fear of cutting her lips that's before the sexual abuse began by the time she was nine-year-old she was an alcoholic by the time she was 20 years old she was a heroin addict not her grandchildren are heroin

addicts what's being passed on here is the trauma not the addiction now the reason i began to talk about addiction is after that book came out showing the relationship between addiction and and trauma i would travel and i'd be speaking and people would ask me what do you know about ayahuasca and the healing of addiction actually i know nothing next city hey what do you know about addiction anything of trauma nothing i finally got sick of it i said you know i've just written the book i've just spent three years writing a book and you

keep asking about the one thing i don't know anything about but you know what the the universe is the way of knocking at our doors and somebody said to me did you know you could actually do this up here in vancouver i said okay this is the message i gotta do it i did the ayahuasca and in half an hour i got why i've been asked that question i just got it because with the ayahuasca and the chanting i had these tears of love flowing down my cheeks not love for any one particular person just

openheartedness it was amazing and i understood something how close they had been to love all my life even to my spouse and to my children into the world why was my heart so closed because they had been bruised so early and so we closed on our hearts we don't even know what the kind of love is so that with this plant that opened up and i also got the pain of what happens to us when we close our hearts all of us human beings it really hurts and then we have to protect ourselves from that

pain with drugs and behaviors and sex and gambling and work and everything else so i got that if we can both feel the pain that we've been running from all our lives but also maybe experience the love that's underneath all that pain we don't have to keep running no it's not that simple and it's not like overnight i was a changed person believe me i wasn't you know i'll be back but but at least i saw the possibilities and then i decided i'm gonna work with this plant i'm going to help others with this plant

i'm going to help myself with this plant so that's how i got into psychedelic work so this one experience you have this revelation you you feel this love and you understand that you have been closed off to this your whole life yeah do you need subsequent experiences do you do you just internalize and reflect and try to sort things out and then or like how what is the process for you well what you said should have been the process but i didn't know that yet you know i had this thing and then now the buddha

has got this terrifying story that he tells that's one of the metaphors stories that he tells of this too strong man dragging a third man towards an abyss they're going to throw him into the pit and he resists but he's not strong enough to resist the buddha the two strong men equality are habit energies their ingrained habits beliefs subconscious emotions everything that's driving us and if we want to overcome those habit energies we have to do what you just said integrate work on it reflect hang out with it i didn't do that i just plunged

back into my work colors i'm now going to save the world using this plant and i started leading retreats and i did a great job helping others but i didn't go far enough with myself so that's something i had to learn how did you recognize that well i i can tell you a story sure so it's it's in the book um 2019 this is like three years three years ago now in june i flew to peru to lead an ayaska retreat for physicians and the healers and psychiatrists and psychologists counselors from around the world and

by that time i had a worldwide reputation my books had been published in 30 languages and so people healers came from all over the world to work with me in the amazon jungle at this ayahuasca center no i don't need the ceremonies i'm not a shaman so my role is not to pour the po not to to give the brew or to lead the ceremony but to help people formulate their intention and after the experience to help them integrate it to help them understand what happened to them and i i'm adept at doing that so

we do the first ceremony and there are six shamans maestros and maestros three men three women these beautiful short little people stand up to my to my eyebrows and uh there's the first ceremony in the malacca the tent like building in which the ceremony is held and they chant each of them chant there's 24 of us there's 23 participants that came out of the world all from all over the world four continents to work with me in the jungle and there's me when the shamans come to chant to me all six of them in turn

i'm sitting there thinking you can do your best but this brain is too thick you're not going to get to the skull is too thick try and break through this one and not much happens next morning they send a delegation to me and they say we can't have you in ceremony why not because we think that you have such dark dense energy that affects everybody else in the room and it interferes with our capacity to help the others and because of this dark dark energy that you're carrying our echo rose or chance can't penetrate you

what is like what's causing them to have this reaction like what are you doing well it's not what i'm doing it's it's my fixed belief and how do they know about this fixed belief well how's it manifesting because they're shamans they just feel it they sense it they're highly trained people they pick up on energies i don't see anything and they don't know who the heck i am they're not impressed with my reputation and my international standing or the books that i've published then you know they just pick it up that's what shamans do that's

what a good shaman does so they said our our chance can't penetrate it but but worse than that it's it's affecting the others so we want to help the others we can't have you in the room and furthermore they said we think you have worked with so many traumatized people in your life and you've absorbed their traumas and you haven't cleared it out of yourself and furthermore they said and you were very small we think you had a big scare and you haven't got over it yet this is me at age 75. no in the

book i can i'll show you a painting if i may this is from the first chapter this is a painting that my wife did from a photograph the photograph is in the upper left hand corner of the painting of my mother and i at three months of age you notice she's wearing the yellow star that jews had to wear under the nazis what do you see in the expression traumatized baby yeah these people picked that up 75 years later and so what they did is they assigned one shaman to work with me alone and i

had my own ceremonies over 10 days every second night wow and they were and the other five worked with the rest of the group and so they fired me from my own retreat now my ego didn't like that very much but uh you know these people came all over the world to work with me i know you're telling me i can't do this yeah we're telling you you can't do this i said yeah i get it do you recognize that they were correct like do you see why i knew right away they were correct yeah

and i accepted it and so this guy worked with me for five nights and by the fifth night i had the big breakthrough experience yeah so so what i'm saying is that what was the big breakthrough i won't i describe it in some detail in the book i but you've had those experiences and as far as i can tell it's very difficult to describe them in language because they're like beyond yes you know but the download i got was yes my grandparents died in auschwitz when i was five months of age yes my mother was

terrorized and stressed yes i was a very scared little infant yes the world was a terrible place to be born into at that place at that time but that doesn't have to define who i am it doesn't have to define how i trust the world or how i don't it doesn't have to make me defensive and scared anymore um because because there's also love and there's also acceptance and there's also a reality that's so much bigger than the trauma that happened to me so it kind of liberated me from having to drag that experience around

in my soul the way i really had so you feel like up until that point you couldn't accept the fact that there was love in the world there was good things to focus on you were too consumed by your own personal trauma you know everything works in layers so in many ways that did accept it and if you had asked me i would have said yes the world is a can be a beautiful loving accepting place but on some deep emotional level i couldn't allow myself to feel it so you had perhaps developed a pattern

of thinking that was insurmountable and that even though you had had psychedelic experiences and even though you thought you were doing a great thing by bringing people to these ceremonies and exposing them to the mother and all the that comes with it you had not changed the way you really viewed the world well again it's that's true in a very deep sense but it's again it's sort of relative because i'd seen a lot of people heal i had guided them to healing right i've seen miracles but you know that sometimes people do that they concentrate

on others instead of concentrating on themselves because it's kind of easier to fix other people's problems but that's exactly the case yeah that was one of those and and but also because one of the impacts of trauma is that you feel so alone with it so it's everybody thinks that they're uniquely traumatized right so even though i knew intellectually that wasn't the case and i know how to work with people who had terrible experiences i mean much worse than mine um i just couldn't allow that to penetrate me very deeply as deeply as it needed

to and what what these shamans helped me to do was to kind of help remove another skin of the onion let me put it up it's more like the skin of the onion it's not one layer there's different layers and so i've been to many layers very important but what i can tell you is that since that experience people who have seen me before they say there's a more more lightness about me than they used to be you know so people pick up on it i wish i met you before i mean i was really

dark and dour yeah i would like to see what the difference is because i've met people that have uh changed because of psychedelic experiences you know and i certainly have changed yeah so i would have liked to have met me so what how would you summarize your experience with them i don't mean the different experiences but in terms of the transformation that you've experienced i'm much kinder yeah just i grew up in competition and most of my teenage years were spent competing in martial arts competitions well i know i read somewhere about you that you

said that you hated the idea of losing yeah i hated the idea of weakness yeah i didn't even like the fact that i enjoyed sex because sex to me seemed like pleasure and pleasure seemed like a lazy weak way to approach life wow but i was very dedicated to winning you know i was very dedicated to being the best and uh that that mindset is very ruthless and uh it takes a long time to get that out of your system so when you say dedicated to being the best it's two ways we can be the

best we can be the best version of ourselves or we can be better than anybody else which best were you thinking about i was trying to be the measurable best at a specific form of competition yeah where you're just essentially trying to take on take one though yeah yeah yeah so the the problem with that is it's to be the best you have to be insanely dedicated to this one thing and you have to be pretty ruthless yeah i understand you know and uh it took a while for me to realize what that was yeah

it took a while for me to realize that my desire to do that was not a healthy desire and that it was a desire based on trying to acquire uh love and and respect and the appreciation of others and i was trying to do it through accomplishments and are you aware of the trauma that led you to believe those things yeah no my my path is pretty clear i mean my childhood was very [ __ ] up and my father was very physically abusive and my mother left him when i was five years old and

it was there's a lot yeah there's a lot there i get it yeah yeah no i i don't want to by the way uh create the impression that i'm some kind of a psychedelic evangelist i think this i think psychedelics have a role but it's somewhat of a limited role overall in healing and then when it comes to social issues and even individual healing so it's not like i don't just don't cure the immunity it's not the only thing it's not like it's not the only thing and certainly in my experience it's it's a relatively

relatively small small part of what i do but it's it's a very cherished part of what i do well the experiences are so profound and so significant but they are just a day yeah and then you know whatever more you do but yeah there's a lot of days you know and so it's very easy to go back to baseline it's very easy to slip back into your old way of thinking one of the ways that i describe psychedelic experience it's like a real like a dmt experience is that it's like control alt delete for your

brain so your brain reboots and then you're left with an empty desktop but with one folder and that folder is labeled my old [ __ ] and you can either choose to approach life approach live with a completely new perspective because you've had this experience yeah or you can comfortably and easily slip back into that old mild [ __ ] folder okay and most people do that yeah and then i would say that's true for me as well you know and but it you know but the learning continues yeah but overall um there's so many

issues and so many problems in this culture and psychedelics will never be the answer no no it's not the answer but it's one of the answers it's one of the answers and i think it's also the having the option yeah and having people know that there is some sort of a deeply profound transformative option this thing that happens that brings you into this other dimension which is truly feels like another dimension i don't exactly know what's going on but whether it is or isn't a dimension another dimension it has the feel of another dimension i

think it opens up a part of our brain and consciousness that's usually not accessible to us i mean some people get there without psychedelics don't they they have these um holotropic breathing or or just deep meditation for some people right but that's also igniting endogenous i mean if you look at it yeah yeah that's what i'm saying so it's in our brain that capacity yes psychedelics get us there much quicker yeah um but you know it's sometimes it's even very frustrating because the person who drive me drove me this morning to your studio um he's

a vet and he's got friends with severe ptsd and we know specifically there's a plant called the boga bible gain that's been shown by experience first of all it's got this amazing quality that it can get people of heroin overnight yeah you know and i've seen that personally i've done it myself it's not for the faint-hearted by the way what did ibogaine do for you you know what i'm going to forget what i'm saying okay go ahead let me go yeah we'll go back to that so this man who was driving was talking about and

i was saying you know what there's actually a plant called the bogo ibogaine that iboga is the plant that is really good for ptsd and there's people working with the south of the border here but they can't work with it in the u.s because in the u.s it's illegal which is insanity it's insanity you know and he said actually this friend of mine was severe ptsd is actually gone south of the border and and working with one of the universities who was doing a study on it i said oh good and and and he says

the driver he says there's already such profound changes in my friend now what the hell are we doing yeah making that illegal instead of embracing it and researching it yeah it's not harming people that's the the thing about ibogaine is it's not an addictive substance it's you know it's almost impossible to be addicted to it well you wouldn't who would want to do it who'd want to do it anyway well i have never done it so i'm just going on other people's experiences but it doesn't seem like something that you would ever want to do

a lot what was it like for you it was the toughest experience one of the toughest experiences of my life because it's just you sort of you you so lose control you know and uh felt pretty dark and heavy at times afterwards i felt very clear you know um dark and heavy how so sorry dark and heavy how so how did it feel dark and heavy in the body and there's nothing you can do to change it like if you feel uncomfortable in your body and there's nothing you can do to change it yeah it's

it that feels pretty scary you know now even though i know that this experience will end now again i have to say that i'm more resistant to psychedelics than most people i have a pretty thick skull as i told you before and it takes a lot to get through to me um i uh i keep getting worried that we keep talking about psychedelics and there's so much more that i want to know but there's plenty of time don't worry about it okay great so in march of this year i did a mushroom ceremony um with

some indigenous canadians on their land it was some of the deepest experiences of my whole life but the dose that i took was triple or quadruple the dose that most people take just because it takes a lot what was the dose 16 grams whoa yeah that's going deep and it took me deep it was it was beautiful it was great it was a great experience of my life how long did it last i have about seven eight hours something like that and you know it rains and then then i sat outside with one of my

indigenous friends who had never met before but we were blood brothers right away and um this beautiful mountain and bison grazing in the field and the sunset and oh my god the beauty of it all right and and the and the lovingness of it all you know and the um companionship and the camaraderie of it all and these people have really suffered and and their suffering was right there as well they asked me to participate to help them with the trauma part um so it was one of the most poignant but also most beautiful experiences

of my life but it took a lot to get me there yeah the north american indigenous cultures and uh i think you could say the same about australia and some of these other countries that have been occupied yeah it's one of the most devastating things in modern times and it's not discussed no it's we have relegated them to reservations and they're kind of removed from the cultural conversation as far as like people in this country that are troubled you know we think often of slavery which is also horrific we think often of immigrants from other

countries that are disparaged and experience racism but we don't think about the native indigenous people that were here that had everything taken away from them that's the colonial mindset is that the indigenous people in this they don't matter right you know um i read this book about quanah parker do you know that name yeah sure yeah was it the empire the summer moon yeah beautiful book yeah we have a photograph of quanah parker outside was that him out there okay yeah and i quote i quote him in this book and i do talk a lot

a lot about the not just the indigenous experience but also the wisdom they had and they have if only we were willing to learn what they have to teach not that we have to give up our science and our medicine and our technological achievements but my god if we could infuse some of that with the wisdom that they have to offer us but we're so bloody arrogant yeah primitive we have nothing to learn from them you know and yet they have so much to teach they do i mean and they most certainly had an incredible

way of living with nature yeah they were also incredibly ruthless and also to other north american tribes yeah i mean they the way they lived their life was absolutely savage yeah and barbaric it's sort of like the white man though um sort of i mean there's there's certainly parallels to all sorts of conquerors in the way they treat their victims yeah i mean it seems to be a human characteristic of cruelty and i think part of that is based on the fear of being conquered yourself or the fear of you know of being captured and

killed and being have other someone's someone else's will imposed upon you so they impose it upon others i know they were quite capable of terrible cruelties i wouldn't put them any different from anybody else on that level i mean when i think of all the tortures and massacres and cruelties and you know that people human characteristics well it's human characteristic under certain conditions yes yeah for sure well it's unfortunately it's more common like the the human cruelty you know that whether or not it exists in cultures is more common than not at a certain stage

of history that's true i might give you an argument that that it needs to be that way and uh in small band hunter-gatherer groups they don't it doesn't seem to be quite like that until they're invaded until they're invaded or until they go too large and the territory gets [Music] a matter of competition and you know so i do think that and i do discuss this as well i i do think that we're very much creatures of our environment and uh so that what shows up as human nature is very imp is very often human

nature as it is determined or or or influenced by a certain culture a certain set of circumstances yeah it's um but when you think about the way human beings evolved it seems like we have a brain and a body that really is designed for these small groups of humans like 200 people that's right it seems like that's the design yeah that seems like when we're in symbiosis when we're in harmony yeah when when everything is working and it works well yeah that's when it works well exactly when you get to los angeles you know this

indifferent mass of human beings that's impossible to scale when you look at the numbers of like new york city people stacked on top of each other and the indifference they show towards each other yeah and the disdain they have for other people because other people instead of becoming a valuable part of the community they become a detriment to your ability to move around that's all true and then the question is can we somehow learn what we've lost and meld that with modern civilization you know that's the real question now in in this culture where the

general belief is that greed and competition and aggressive interaction no i'm good thank you and um and uh selfishness and and and and aggression are the way to make it it's very difficult for people to get to that place of communal kindness and and and and but when you talk about human nature i mean you talked about the kindness that you think you've retained or found that you've attained through psychedelic work for example i don't know if you can answer this question but i'd be curious which feels more like yourself this kinder state of being

or kind of the aggression aggressive i gotta be the biggest mf on the block which which are they both equally you or no which one feels more like you the kind part yeah the other part is just a means to an end it's trying to accomplish a goal it's trying to fill a hole that can never be filled exactly and that's the workaholic that's you know but that's also the thing that we cherish in the society we cherish the outlier the over performer the one person who can push the boundaries past and above and beyond

all others but sometimes at the expense of others yes many most of the times i believe at the expense of others and certainly at the expense of their own peace exactly you very rarely find a workaholic supremely motivated conqueror type person who's truly happy but that's the whole point and that's what yeah that's why i talk about the myth of normal that what we assume is normal in the society right it's completely unnatural and healthy for human beings it's a myth that it's normal hence the title of your book that's the title of the book

um yeah so that kindness then is actually much closer to who we are as human beings then all that other stuff but certainly when you feel the best yeah you don't feel the best when you're dominating people you feel the best when you're in sync with people because you're happy and you're having friends like yeah my friend my favorite moments in life is laughing with my family or laughing with my friends that's my favorite moments in life just having a good time and who's isn't yeah yeah everybody says that's what we're really supposed to do

yeah but then there's also this sort of inherent desire to achieve success you know and and what is that success problem solving uh accomplishing goals creating things there's this desire that human beings sort of inherently have to do these things that's part of our nature as well that's why we've created only so many amazing things whether in science or technology or art or music or anything else but that doesn't have to be at the expense of everybody else right yeah it should be morally and ethically pursued that's also why we hate fraud right when someone

is stealing money and they have all the success but it turns out that what they've done is like done something illegal yeah like pyramid schemes or something where someone's using this sort of desire to succeed as a justification to victimize others yeah but you just described the corporate world yes narcissism yeah it's necessary corporate narcissism yeah what somebody calls is sociopathy you know and and so you we live in a world where like you talked about sugar for example well there was this book i think a few years ago called salt sugar and fat or

something like that that was the title of it by the american journalist who shows that the food corporations quite deliberately set out to find the what they call the sweet spot just the right combination of sugar salt and fat that's going to make people addictive to their products which is going to kill them yeah so these corporations are quite willing to make people sick and so i was talking to a colleague of mine rob lustig who wrote a book called the hacking of the american mind and so how about the corporations deliberately create products that

make people addicted at the risk of making them sick and and so what kind of minds would deliberately set up to sell products and advertise them and to manipulate the market that will actually kill people and this is respectable corporations with philanthropists at the heads of their boards and so on you know yes that's the world we live in yeah that's very dark and that's also the pharmaceutical companies farm to oil companies yeah i was just watching this very disturbing commercial yeah yesterday with children and it was talking about adhd and it showed a kid

that was not paying attention in class and it showed these kids like playing around and doing things they weren't supposed to be doing yes and then they introduce this medication and then you have the child raising their hand and then you have everyone clapping and you have the child with a big smile on their face and you've medicated your child to be a successful and integrated person in society should i should i spit off about adhd yes please that was my first book on adhd it's the american scattered or scattered minds depending on which edition

you got and that was after i was diagnosed with it myself in my 50s um what does it mean adhd yeah what is it exactly is it real oh it's real but what does it mean well like if someone has adhd it's not like you have herpes right like you could say oh i got you got a disease well uh what is it well they that's the whole point is that the medical profession and a lot of the so-called experts think about it as a disease another one of these inherited diseases in fact they say

it's the most heritable mental illness there is and i say it's neither an illness nor is it heritable so the the hallmark are difficulty paying attention when you're not motivated yeah so kind of tuning out like that kid in the commercial like me okay poor impulse control so that you tend to act out whatever emotion arises and sometimes the hyperactivity difficulty sitting still and then to fidget and all that and that described me to a t and but as soon as i learned about the diagnosis i knew something this is not a disease and it's

not heritable despite the fact that some of my kids were diagnosed with it what is it so tuning out is not a disease so let me ask you a question if i may okay if i were to stress you right now um create stress emotional difficulty or attention for you right now what would be your options of dealing with that of dealing with me what would be your options i could get upset or i could leave exactly you could fight back flight or fight yeah but what if you didn't have those options yeah then you're

stuck and now what does the brain do when you're stuck like that gets distracted it gets tunes out yeah tunes out you want to do other things think about other things in other words it's a coping mechanism yeah it's normal i mean the the idea that your child who is uh you know an eight nine year old ball of energy filled with you know hormones and life and thoughts and things they enjoy and then you make them sit down all day in this unnatural state in a classroom with fluorescent lights and stare at a teacher

that's unmotivated and underpaid and is teaching something in a very boring and non-entertaining way yeah and then if this kid doesn't lock in like a zombie we need to medicate them yeah well the other part of it is that if you look at my infancy and it sounds like yours we spent our first year or two under very difficult circumstances a lot of stress infants can't help but absorb the stress of their parents right they can't help it what does an infant do could i have escaped or fought back could you have all we could

do is tune out yes but when is this tuning out happening when our brain is being developed right and our brain this is the part that nobody taught me in medical school but it turns out that brain science now teaches us that the human brain develops under the impact of the environment so the the most salient feature of the environment that shapes the circuits of the human brain is actually the relationship with the parents and if the parents are present and emotionally attuned and available child brains develop properly but the parents are stressed the child

absorbs the stress what can they do with it they tune out and that tuning out then gets programmed into the brain and then 10 years later or 50 years later we say you got this disease no you don't you've got a coping mechanism that's no longer working for you but it had a function when it first came along so this whole idea and and by the way if a family comes to me with their adhd child i'll say to them what you've got here is a very sensitive child that sensitive child is picking up on

all the vibes energies and stresses in your family want to help this child deal with the whole family look at the parental relationship look at how what stress is there in your life look at how you react to the child look at do you understand the child's behavior or the emotions that the child is having or you're just trying to control the child's behaviors look at all that and very often parents will tell me after they've read that book on adhd they've totally changed their relationship to their child the child changes what a surprise but

you go to the most doctors you got this disease here's the pill and by the way i took those medications and they helped me for a while you know so i'm not when you're in your 50s yeah yeah i'm not anti-immigrant which ones did you take i took ritalin um which uh i can tell you the story sure so you know one of the hallmarks of adhd is poor impulse control right so um [Music] i found out about adhd and even before i was diagnosed i took ritalin and you know why'd you take it before

you were diagnosed because i'm a doctor and i could hey and oh so you diagnosed yourself well they did and and so you at least assumed that you had that yeah i knew i had it and and but not only that also because i had poor impulse control i never practiced medicine that way if you came to me for any problem my first impulse would never be to write your prescription unless it was obvious that you needed it for an infection or something i'd sit down with you and talk to you about what's going on

here but but not me poor impulse regulation so i went to a colleague of mine a medical colleague i said hey bev i think i've got hd can you sum it can you give me some red line so she writes me a prescription and then i took it in the higher than recommended initial dose and uh because i mean if a little bit is good then more must be even better and again it's not how i practice medicine right but i came to myself that's a totally different ballgame so i felt immediately present and calm

and grounded and really yeah and it's a stimulant and i went well it calms the adhd brand and i go home and my wife says you look stoned because you're calm yeah well because i got this glassy-eyed expression and and within a couple of days the ritalin made me very depressed that's one of its potential side effects so i did see a psychiatrist i was formally diagnosed and they gave me dexadrine and i took that for a while that's an amphetamine yeah it's amphetamine it's another stimulant um and it did help me i became a

much more efficient workaholic and i could do even it didn't change any of my emotional issues but it made me more focused and so on it helped me write my first book but i i haven't taken them for decades but because also i know that the brain can change if you treat it right so this reliance on medications that we have is is a real poverty of the spirit the real poverty of imagination a poverty of medical education the average doctor never learns this stuff the average physician never gets a single lecture on brain development

how their brain develops in interaction with their environment so when you're seeing and let alone do they hear about trauma they don't hardly at all right so when they see an adult with adhd or depression or addiction or or or bipolar conditions or or or for that matter autoimmune illness or anything else they don't think of trauma they just think of this disease and they think that the diagnosis explains everything but the diagnosis don't explain anything because think about it let's say gaba or joe goes to a doctor and they diagnosed with adhd well why

is what are the harmonics of adhd well tuning out poor impulse regulation maybe hyperactivity why does gabor have poor impulse control uh hyperactivity and uh tuning out because he's got adhd how do we know he's got adhd because he's got impulse control and tunes out and he's hyperactive why is he hyperactive tunes that have poor impulse control he's got adhd how do we know if he's got adhd because you know it doesn't it's circular it doesn't explain it it doesn't explain anything diagnosis describe things and that there that can be helpful that way but they

don't explain yeah one of the things that people get they get they get treated for and they get diagnosed with is anxiety yeah and that one drives me nuts yeah it drives me nuts because people pretend that anxiety is a disease yeah it's not and i'm like my god the world should make you anxious if you're a sensitive introspective person if you're just looking at the world itself and you you don't put it in perspective like the world's it's filled with anxiety the anxiety is it's future problem solving you're you're thinking about all the things

that can go wrong you're thinking about your life in a you know potentially uh devastating way and that's not a disease that's just the way you look at the world and people getting diagnosed with it well i won't quite agree with you on that one in what way i've felt anxious at times sure the world is the same if i actually the world is the same but the way you look at it is not the same right right yeah that's what i'm saying so the world is giving you anxiety no the world is not giving

me anxiety right you're giving yourself anxiety and looking at the world right and by holly look at the world yeah cause i look into i can look at the same world one day and feel grounded and connected and i may have all kinds of concerns about what's happening in the world but my nervous system won't be on edge my adrenaline yeah i won't be anxious that's my point is that it's not a disease it isn't a disease right so remember i talked about those brain circuits of lust and care and rage and uh and and

and seeking and so on one of the brain circuits that we have as described by a very prominent late neuroscientist yak pancep is for panic and grief panic and grief are the normal responses of the young human being or the young animal when care isn't available so when the parents are stressed distracted economically or politically or because of their own unresolved trauma or whatever is going on their lives and they don't respond to the child's distress they don't pick up the child when they're crying they make the child be alone when their child is upset

the child's panic circuits get activated as they should be because when the child's panic circus get activated they cry for help yeah that's so it's necessary for survival a young animal should feel panic when the adult is unavailable in a rational world in the same world that child would be responded to but when children as in our society are not responded to in their distress the panic becomes built into their nervous system and now you have a lot of anxious people and that's why more and more kids are being diagnosed you're right it's not a

disease it's a response to the environment and the thought process of like leaving a child alone when the child's crying is that to toughen the kid up is the thought process that you don't want to encourage this sort of behavior because then they'll do it all the time and then you'll develop an indulgent child like what is the thought process the thought process is that the child's behavior is the problem and so we have to fix the behavior by controlling it now actually the opposite is true because if you pick up the child when a

child has distress physical or emotional distress you're teaching the child that the world is safe and they don't have to be they don't have to be anxious about it and they can just ask for help and it doesn't entrench kind of crying manipulative behavior how it works dr daniel segal who's a psychiatrist at ucla and a very prolific author and mind researcher he says in his book the developing mind that the child uses the mature circuits of the adult brain to regulate its own immature unregulated circuits so when the adults show up in a calm

loving way that the child downloads that into his own nervous system and then he grows he doesn't it's not going to be an infant forever at some point he's going to be a mature adult who knows how to take care of themselves that's a natural process we don't have to teach kids to be independent independent is nature's agenda because the parents are going to die at some point the mother bear is going to disappear that bear cub has to be able to look after themselves in a mature confident way that's nature's natural agenda what the

mother what the mother bear needs to do is to meet the the needs of that infant bear so the infant bank care matures so if we meet the child's needs they're gonna mature out of that helpless state with a sense of self-regulation and calm confidence in their own capacity when you don't pick kids up what you teach them is that the world is not available that they're alone and that they're helpless talk about a formula for anxiety what about the concept of coddling children and what about the concept of creating you know what was what

someone would call a mama's boy someone who is scared of the outside world and just wants comfort and attention and just wants to be sheltered from stress and anxiety all the time they just want to be alone with their their mother and their parents yeah it happens but why does it happen why does it happen so there's a study that i quote in the book where they looked at a thousand or several hundred women new mothers and how they related to their infants and most of them related very well some were not that available and

some were extra doting and extra coddling you might say with the infants they looked at the adults 35 years later the people that were the most independent and successful and self-actualized were the ones that were super loved by the mothers okay now and then and there and the conclusion of the researchers was you can't love children too much now the case that you describe is not too much loving but loving that comes from a very anxious place so these mothers that cuddle their kids when the kids don't need cuddling they're not doing it because the

child needs it they're doing it because they need it right they need they're doing it because they were not cuddled enough their anxious and they passed that anxiety onto the child you don't create those dependent kids by loving them you create them by by imposing your own agenda on them your own anxieties on them so those are the mama's boys if you want to call them that but the mama's boy is just a very anxious person who downloaded his parents or her parents anxieties that makes sense because the kids that i know that grew up

like that their mothers were terrified of everything yeah yeah and so they boy but how do you get out of that if you're you know you've developed this uh these patterns of thinking that are based on a mother that is incredibly anxious and scared of the world and then you sort of adopted these thoughts and you know they call you a mama's born that you're coddled like how does someone break out of that well there was a greek playwright escolus who wrote about drama about 2500 years ago and in one of his plays the agamemnon

he says that the way zeus said the way the master the god created us was that we have to suffer suffering to truth and with most people i find that at some point like me and perhaps like yourself some suffering happens that says okay you're not going in the right direction yeah so again it's got to begin with this understanding that what i'm going through is creating suffering for myself and people around me and maybe it doesn't have to be this way there's got to be that recognition now once you get that recognition the sky's

the limit because now there's all kinds of therapies and possibilities now you can i mean i think a wonderful i i don't like this phrase mama's boy but it describes maybe a certain kind of personality what if they did martial arts what if they worked out yeah what if they developed some confidence in their own bodies to start with because they don't have confidence in their bodies that's right you know some there's all kinds of things they could do yeah that's a big factor once you get that there's an issue you know let alone you

can go for therapy you can do the trauma work like whatever uh you can do the psychedelics you can do mdr you can do somatic experience you can do any number of you can do the therapy that i teach compassion and inquiry you can do the martial arts you can meditate you can do yoga you can go into nature but you need to do something but you got to do something yeah and that that is the problem and some of these people unfortunately they turn to drugs because because they're so overwhelmed they want a complete

escape from the moment yeah well and and uh they turn to drugs so they turn to eating yeah or they turned to shopping like i did or shopping oh yeah that was your thing i had a significant shopping addiction yeah really oh yeah uh i i shop for i i talk about this in my book on addiction i uh i would show for classical compact discs you laugh but some days i spent thousands of dollars literally thousands of dollars a day did you have the money well i was a doctor hey yeah so you can

afford these compact discs and you know how the addicted mind works it's brilliant it justifies one addiction by another i'd say but i'm working so hard i deserve to pleasure myself right so one addiction justified the other you see but once i tell you i i left a woman in labor to get a a symphony from the downtown store and and i missed the delivery oh my god that's how addicted i was to shopping but did you think that that classical disc was gonna go away like why did you go does the india addict think

wow that's a weird addiction i've never even heard of anybody being addicted to compact discs well there are people addicted to shopping yes and and and the addiction is not to the object that you're buying because if it was the object you would just go and enjoy it right the addiction is to the acquisition now what happens when you're looking for something and you're excited yeah you know what happens the level of dopamine which is one of these brain chemicals elevates in the brain which is just like taking an amphetamine so it's the thrill it's

the thrill and so the gambler the workaholic the shopaholic the sexaholic any addict substance addict they're not after the actual as much as after that thrill that's seeking that dopamine hit the pornographer you know they're after that dopamine hit right no the dopamine which is the seeking chemical in our brain the one that makes life vital and and interesting and and and you know makes us explore novel objects or seek a sexual partner or seek food those dopamine circuits develop or don't develop based on what happens to you very early in life and so that

children that don't get the proper experiences they might be lacking dopamine not they have to seek the thrill of the stimulant drug or the or the exciting activity or the dangerous rock climbing or the so they can feel really present and grounded oh wow or or the or or the shopping or the compact distance it's always about the next thing because you're looking after that dopamine hit um i was just watching this documentary the alpinist have you seen it i've heard about it yeah it's about a young man who was a free solo climber and

did he die who died yeah he died in an avalanche yeah um he was constantly pushing the boundaries of like what what he could get away with and he was free soloing these rock faces and then that wasn't dangerous enough so he moved to ice climbing yes and so he's with no rope and just these axes climbing these picks climbing up glaciers climbing up in and one scene there was this ice that was detached from the face of the cliff yes so it was separated by several feet you could see the gap in between the

ice and the face of the cliff and he's climbing the ice it could break off at any second it's not permanent and he's just digging in his pick and pulling himself up this and then apparently he had gone to the top with this other guy and on the way down they died in an avalanche no i bet if you interviewed him and i've seen interviews with these people yeah uh the three divers and the free climbers what's happening during the experience i'm totally present yes i'm at one with life you know there's no separation i'm

grounded yeah totally focused i'm fully alive why because it triggers the dopamine in their brain so you feel like people like that probably have had something happen when they were younger where their body doesn't develop dopamine properly under normal circumstances i'm convinced of it well that makes sense i've had alex honold on several times and he is uh the guy from um what is the document is it free solo yeah the documentary free solo and he's very famous for climbing like um el capitan and just sticking his hands these cracks of the walls and climbing

up with no ropes and he's a very calm guy it's very interesting he's like sort of calm and mellow and you know when you talk to him about climbing and he's like no it's like you're pretty relaxed it's pretty chilled out and they're clearly addicted to that they're doing it constantly they travel around the world to do it and risk in their lives yeah risking their lives can i read you a quote yeah sure please if i take a minute to do it yeah sure sure so my cell phone here i this is uh i

carry so many quotes on my cell phone because i'm always trying to teach myself stuff so um this is uh free diving let me just look for free diving free diving no not dooving diving this is something that you saved on your phone yeah yeah i i i have a thousand things saved on my phone i have all books that i've dictated to myself done on my book on my phone isn't that amazing because they store that in this whole tiny thing you keep in your pocket it's incredible and i keep trying to teach myself

stuff i think if i just dictate it maybe i'll learn it but guess what next time i read it why wasn't this here before of course it was anyway this is a woman called natalia mocha nova she died at age 53 on august 2015 free diving she is one of the world's leading free diver and here's what she says about the experience free diving is not only a sport it's a way to understand who you are when you go when we go down if we don't think we understand we are whole if we don't think

so that the mind just gets out of the way we understand that we are whole we are one with the world when we think we are separate on the surface it's natural to think and we have many information inside we need to reset some time free diving helps to do that in other words freediving gave her this experience of unity and oneness and the quietness of the mind but the question is why do we have to do such extreme limits with some extreme um lengths yeah to to find that state you know and when i

read that quote to a couple of friends of mine who are fierce meditators in a way that i'm not they said that's what we get when we meditate you know but these people are serious meditators so but that state of oneness that's just the highest state we can experience isn't it yeah but we get that we're not these separate individuals and this society creates this what dan seagal calls the myth of the solo self that we're all just individual separate little creatures yeah struggling to make it against uh competition and and and and in in

a fearful race with everybody else and it's so that we we get separated from ourselves which is the sense of trauma and we get separated from each other and then we have these peak experiences and we keep seeking these big experiences because we don't know how to make it real in our own lives one of the things you find out in competition is that the real competition is with yourself yes you are competing against other people but you're competing with yourself to improve upon your performance against other people you're not really competing with other people

and once you realize that it's a real revelation you realize like oh i'm fighting my own demons the this is these people are just this is a a mechanism for me to to be able to to find that in me yes which also means that there's no real loss is there right i mean if you've done your best well maybe you can do better but there's no failure is what i mean there is but in failure there are lessons it's beneficial even though failure feels bad yeah because you didn't accomplish what you wanted to accomplish

that the motivation that you get from that and the revelations and then the knowledge that you get from that are crucial to your development as a human being and in whatever your chosen pursuit is well let me argue with you again if i may please so i mean you work out and i know you talk out you have this brutal physical workout program and all yeah i don't do weights and you can see in the relative size of our arms as to which ones which which of the two of us does resistance training i just

swim i don't do it now if you and i had a wrestling match right now and uh or even the taekwondo match which i've never studied but i did my best to show up as alert and as powerful as i could and you defeated me would i be a failure well it's not fair okay and competition one of the things that you learned about competition is that you need to scale it that's true you know that's why we have divisions we have weight classes and we also have belt rankings so you would assume that someone

who is a white belt is a relative beginner that's one of the reasons why when we're talking about people who cheat sandbagging yeah is one of the most reprehensible things amongst competitors and what it's sand banging would be is imagine if you had a black belt in judo and you played somebody who was no and then you entered into a jiu jitsu competition you would technically be a white belt in jiu jitsu but you would be very experienced in grappling and submissions and you'd be dominant and you would just tear through the field of people

that were also wipeouts and people would be angry at you justifiably so because you're violating the the rules of this scalable competition and through the scalable competition you're supposed to be met with surmountable challenges things that you can overcome things in lessons you can learn and even if you get dominated by someone what you learn is that that potential is within a human being you know one of my most profound experiences that i talked about many times is when i first started doing jiu jitsu i got dominated by this guy who was uh you know

he's like an intermediate jiu jitsu player but the overwhelming control that he have had over me and the dominance over me was so eye-opening because i didn't know that a person could do that to me and now learning that i knew that that potential was in a human being he wasn't like physically gifted he wasn't much stronger than me or bigger than me he was just much better at this thing that we were both doing right and i realized that on the path he was many miles ahead of me and that i could go down

that path and achieve what he is doing and that was very uh it was very enlightening fair enough when you talk about sandbagging it reminded me of this paul newman movie called the hustler yes you know yeah big john you think this boy is a hustler yeah yeah yeah i've seen that movie a hundred times yeah it's a wonderful film yeah i play pool so that that okay that is a big part of pool playing is people pretending they're not as good as they are yeah but that's a desperation thing and a gambling thing there's

a lot involved in that too but to go back to idea of failure so let me ask you this question usain bolt if you line up at the 100 meter race so the 200 meter race against the same boat right and you come in second are you a failure well you didn't beat him but are you a failure well it depends on where your performance threshold lies but nobody's going to be as good as him that's not true someone will be as good as eventually yes and that's the whole purpose of doing that but the

whole purpose of record is yeah but not you're chasing a very specific thing there though you're chasing extreme excellence yeah yeah and if you choose to be that person that chases extreme excellence in a very narrow and rigid discipline yeah there's a very narrow and rigid discipline it's very comprehensive but it's very narrow and rigid that's running in a straight line as fast as you can um someone has to be the best and if you choose to do that thing and you are not physically gifted then you have a problem because there are some things

that are dependent upon your physiology they're depending upon the size of your limbs the length of your limbs for sure your genetics and some you some people for some people that threshold is insurmountable well and this is where genetics does come into it i mean we have certain capabilities and you know i but all i'm saying is in my mind coming in second to that guy is no failure as long as i've done my best as long as the person in the next lane is doing their best sure they've succeeded they have succeeded in a

way there's a there's a great quote that i remember one my early years of taekwondo where my instructor said that martial arts are a vehicle for developing your human potential and that through overcoming these difficult obstacles and the fear of competition and and learning that with discipline and focus you can get better it can elevate your ability to do everything it isn't so much so that also um i get that and and isn't so much also being completely present and focused yeah and connected to your body and and grounded and responsive to what's happening in

that moment yes you have to be in the moment you can't be thinking too much you you rely on your training and your focus and the ability to maintain this mindset yeah which is so missing from our lives in general yeah well it's also one of the things that's missing from our lives is physically difficult pursuits yeah which i think we have um we've categorized things in into two ways things that are uh intellectually difficult which we praise and things that are physically difficult which we think of as being like base and you know less

consequential to your overall development as a human being but i don't think that's the case because i think that physical difficulties stress the mind in a way that we don't appreciate don't we value our athletes and our athletics and our the people that can do sure we do but we also dismiss them as being intellectually inferior one of the ways that people justify that an athlete is better than them at this thing is by categorizing them as a dumb jock oh gosh i read sometimes the blog of kareem abdul-jabbar he's no intellectual [ __ ]

you know of course i mean whether or not he applies that to the rest of his life as well that's what's that's where it gets interesting yeah because some people don't they only focus on being the greatest at whatever whether it's basketball or golf and they don't think about their life in general as being a project as well they think about this one thing only and you know what i i might say that that certainly could have been said of me at a certain point that of me at a certain point where i would be

really focused on being very good at a certain task or a certain area of endeavor which is say medicine and healing but i wasn't applying the lessons to my own life right and i think i think a lot of us get compounded like comportalize that yes you know yes we don't take our our wisdom um into our own lives but i think a lot of us need mentors and we need people who have already gone down the path a little further than they have to tell them hey this is what's going to come up and

this is how i've dealt with it and this is what you can learn from my mistakes without having to repeat them i think one of the significant losses as the study that we've sustained is the loss of elders i mean traditional cultures would have elders yes we don't talk about elders we talk about the elderly right we define them in terms of their age but but but if you look at traditional cultures the elders have huge status yes and they should and as they ought to their experience it also means they don't get shunted to

the side and get made to feel useless right and develop dementia you know right uh because they're active and involved in the community and we've lost so much with the loss of um the elder and the passing of tradition so yes we were so focused on progress which has brought incredible advances that again was like we sort of cut off from one part of ourselves which is rooted in tradition and rooted in wisdom so what if we could have both what if we could have both wisdom and and and and progress at the same time

i think it's possible it's certainly possible i mean i've always said that about the idea of an ethical moral capitalism yeah is that the competition of capitalism isn't the problem the competition is the end all be all like only win only get ahead greed is good the gordon gecko yeah mantra i think that uh people get lost in the achievement of the goal as being the ultimate thing that's going to bring them happiness and it's it's never the case well now you have the corporations we talked about before and what's the milton friedman this uh

nobel prize winning economist and he said that the only legitimate business of corporation is to make a profit yes and that's how they look at it and that's one of the reasons why they can justify horrific acts yeah and it's also one of the reasons why a person inside of that corporation feels separate from the actual horrific acts says there's a diffusion of responsibility in being attached to a group you know i am just one of these people i am just a manager of this region and that's all i do i mean i have to

abide by my shareholders needs in the book i interview a guy who used to be a vice president for human relations for ikea and uh he found out my work about 10 11 years ago and he said i want to talk to you and he called me at home and i thought he was just a strange guy with an accent you know when you get known a little bit all kinds of people want a piece of you you know and uh i thought here's another but anyway he came out to vancouver from back east and

we had we have sydney with lunch at my house and my wife is there uh and [Music] ray says ray my wife says to him his name is wolf and ray says oh for what is it that you do and will says oh i work with this company maybe you've heard about it called ikea and my and my wife just about jumped off her seat because she's just been to waiki that morning buying some furniture but old says that for decades all he lived for was to be successful within the company and he totally lost

himself he had he had no value he said that it wasn't associated with this success right as an executive and he says it was an empty existence and he says he was driving he was making himself sick so he gave it up you know but he he talked about what it's like inside that world and he's uniquely um he's a gifted photographer so he started doing photography and he's you know he's a very healthy man but he had to really learn after decades that everything had been done had been done for some external and and

in this culture we're so driven to validate our existence by impressing others by uh by trying to make ourselves successful by the standards that are laid down for us by external forces that have nothing to do with our real needs and who we actually are as human beings that it's it's almost impossible not to fall into that trap it's very very difficult not to fall into that trap particularly if you're invested in a career path and you've achieved a certain amount of success and then you have responsibilities and you have bills you know you have

mortgages and not only that you also have the whole world telling you how great you are yeah so so when my wife would walk into a department store or anywhere with a credit card and say you know are you the why are you the wife of oh isn't he wonderful and she was just gritting her teeth because it's the same wonderful guy he was such a success out there is not like that at home in fact it's at the expense of the home that his success is in some ways achieved so that there's that so

not only do we have bills to pay we also even get all this validation for the way that we right abandon ourselves you know yeah and oftentimes you don't concern yourself with the appreciation of your loved ones because you get it no matter what you live with them you get it you expect it and but you you concentrate so hard on this thing that you're pursuing whether it's climbing the corporate ladder or becoming a physician and you know working so hard constantly day in day out and that's the only way you get any measure of

this feeling of value that's right it's it's when you try and get that sense of value from the outside which which if you had been valued just for existing yeah from the moment you were born you wouldn't have to keep doing you wouldn't have to keep doing it but the thing is like so many people from that terrible childhood have developed this ability to pursue excellence and then they have shaped and enhanced and influenced so many other people's lives because of their work whether it's their art or whether it's their sport or whatever something that

they've done some way they've accomplished things has been incredibly influential to other people yet they came from this horrific trauma well that's true and the question is can i balance that with more self-awareness right and then and and and a more expansive experience of life or are they narrowly focused let me tell you a story and let me ask you what you think about it okay if i told you about a four-year-old girl who is bullied by neighborhood kids you've got daughters yes so imagine your four-year-old daughter being bullied by neighborhood kids and one of

them runs into the house to their mom and say for protection and the mom said to her there's no room for cowards in this house no you get out and deal with it yeah how would you see that well it's abusive okay you're setting the kid up to be not protected and that you don't care and and also this is a it's a horrific aspect of human nature that desire to gang up on kids if a group of people gang up on people and bully them so speaking of that you would see that interaction with

the mom is abusive and traumatizing yes okay this story was told on public television in the united states in a photo of a cheering audience millions of people watching on television at the democratic convention in 2016 when hillary clinton was nominated and she told and it was the voice of god morgan freeman who actually uh narrated this docu bio documentary about her and this was presented as a wonderful example of resilience building and so i'm saying drama is so normalized in this culture yeah that even when this horrific incident is being depicted on television in

front of millions of people people think this is wonderful and nobody nobody nobody nobody commented on it now 65 years later or 60 years later the same candidate develops pneumonia during the campaign i don't remember that when she got pneumonia you know what she did what she sucked it up she didn't tell anybody about it so she collapsed in the street with dehydration now the supposed lesson was this taught me strength and resilience and independence and self-reliance so a lot of the success that we sometimes perceive in this society comes at a huge human cost

and we don't even recognize it it's so normal we don't even recognize it i'm not talking about politics now i'm not well i'm talking about politics these are very often are politicians by the way but i'm talking about i'm not talking about policies of whether i support her or somebody else i'm talking about the human experience that's being depicted and totally normalized in this culture yeah and that example is that that is a problem that people do think that that's a way to handle a situation like that where a child is being bullied to tell

the child to go out there and face those bullies yeah a four-year-old yeah and then you look at the end result you have this extremely unlikable woman you know who was god she's built the defense around herself the unlikability that people pick up on the unrelatability is this hard shell that he had to develop to protect herself yes it's a simple trauma response yes you know and uh one when you look at it that way you just see a suffering human being and it's it's even sadder because she's old yeah and she doesn't recognize this

pathway she doesn't recognize where she is and why well her father used to beat the kids and she doesn't see that as trauma yeah no i'm not picking her up but by the way i'm sorry i'm not i know what you're saying you're not picking on her not picking and i'm just giving a public example of what happens the um the child abuse the beating of the kids yeah was standard yeah that's that's what's really crazy it's like if you go back to uh the 1960s and 1950s beating kids for doing something wrong was normal

it was what everybody did yeah well i mean how much of an effect did that have on people well there was a study this week just about that about how traumatizing spanking kids is yeah i had a conversation with someone the other day when they were just like talking about how they spanked their kids and i'm like no dude i didn't know what to do i wasn't sure that i should just put my foot down and say hey you should never do that you know why'd you do that i shouldn't i didn't want to admonish

them you might ask them if they're open to an opinion yeah well it was just one of those things but it's so difficult isn't it because people get so defensive but i'm telling you the studies have been done over and over and over again yes about spanking and it's a fan its effect can be as bad as more severe form of abuse yeah i could i can completely see how that would be the case i just don't think it's ever required you know i just uh i wasn't really spanked i mean maybe a couple of

times when i was really young but it was nothing serious um but you know what i'm saying like it wasn't like i wasn't held down and beaten wait a minute no who's saying that nothing's serious me as an adult me now yeah me as an adult but but think of your kids yes but let's say let's say you did that to one of your children would you ever say to her this is nothing serious no i wouldn't well i would never do that you wouldn't do it i don't do it and i don't even i

would never even consider it i try to have conversations with my kids and i have since they were really young i have conversations with them that i talk to them like i would talk to you yeah and although i'm much more you know expressive and lenient and and kind and and i tell them how much i love them and the only reason why i'm having this conversation with you is because this is just an issue that people have yeah and one of the things that i always bring up with my kids is whatever you've done

i've done it so if you've lied if like one i caught my kid lying to me once one of my daughters and i said i i used to lie to my parents all the time it's totally normal but what i'm telling you is you don't have to lie to me and it's better for you if you don't lie if you just address things that you've done that were wrong or incorrect or you know unwise let's just talk about them i'm not going to judge you on a mistake because you're a human being and you're 12

and human beings make mistakes but what's important to know is that i will praise you for telling me the truth if it's difficult it's very good because i think it's it's it's a very valuable lesson for a kid because otherwise you pretend you think you got away with it and then you live with that lie of course yeah well there's a the the german philosopher nietzsche writes somewhere that people lie their way of reality when they're being hurt by reality and um so there's certain politicians who are known for lying yes well we know about

their childhoods really traumatic really abusive what kind of childhood did biden have there was an article in the new york new yorker magazine about the biden family yeah generations of alcoholism well that makes sense and and other forms of manipulation and so on and and so when you look at hunter biden right and hunter has actually mentioned my work because uh his own addictions he he came to some understanding about the traumatic basis of his addiction problem but that addiction on hunter's part is just the downloading of multiple generations of family suffering so it's not

anybody's fault you're not pointing fingers at anybody but there's trauma in that family and there's no american president in recent memory that didn't have significant trauma in their childhoods and it's affected of course how they conduct politics you know and it shows up i mean uh i don't know if you know the name bessel van der kolk he's a psychiatrist this is in the perennial bestseller in the new york times called the body keeps the score which is about trauma and this is a book about trauma that's uh it's been best selling enough for five

years and every week in the new york times and bessel told me that donald trump is a poster boy for trauma which he is in a certain way because even often many people say that he's lying but by the way there's trump supporters here i'm not arguing politics there i'm just talking about a human being i'm talking about a human being when they say that he's lying i don't even think he's lying consciously much of the time uh his by his the guy who wrote the art of the deal with him a guy called tony

schwartz once said that this man doesn't know the difference between truth and lie because if you want something to be true he'll believe it now what other class of human beings will believe when they want something to be true children yes no he had trump had a terrible childhood and his his uh his niece mary trump was a psychologist whose father drank himself to death was trump's brother and he drank himself to death so traumatized was he in the term family or virgin well one of trump's responses to that well first of all poor attention

just his attention is all over the place that's a typical adhd response i'm not diagnosing him i'm just saying i recognize that there's a response to trauma but the other is that he's got difficulty telling truth from reality sometimes because he wants something to be so true because his dif because his early years were so difficult he couldn't face the truth of it yeah and so what we're seeing in our politics very often are highly traumatized people you know who then have to act out their trauma on the public level i don't care which party

you're talking about right i'm not being partisan here i'm just saying how i see it well it's one of the more difficult aspects of modern politics is that the people that choose to pursue that level of adulation and attention and power yeah are the people that should never have it that's the whole point yeah that's why it's so crazy it's this wild pursuit and every four years we hope for a new leader someone to rise who's going to make sense of it all and fix it all and yeah it just doesn't happen which kind of

which is true and it also points to real dynamic and political life that we're on a on a political level we're much more immature than we might be as individuals so we're like we're looking to the mother figure or the father figure to fix it all for us yeah instead of us asking well what's going on here communally what's going on social level or cultural level how do we all play a role in someone making it better we say oh let's just elect the right daddy or the right mummy and they're going to make it

okay and there's also the also that's right and then four years later we're disappointed yeah so they elect another mummy or and we're also locked into this tribal ideological thinking where you can justify the lies of the person on your side because they're on your team that's right and so you say well better him than them you saw that with uh in in your politics american politics because the kind of sexual adventurism that bill clinton engaged in was never excoriated and and and criticized as harshly as say trump right now trump was more egregious about

it i mean he's talking about grabbing people at a [ __ ] because i can get away with it i mean that's yeah but he was caught on i don't know microphone saying that i guarantee you clinton has had similar conversations that's a good point but the point i'm really making is that i have to say not that i'm defending trump here there's nothing to defend it's to me it's a sign of dysfunction right but he was criticized for it far more severely than clinton ever was for the very same behavior you know so that

and it works both ways that people tend to criticizing the others in the other side that which will completely excuse in their own side yes which makes political debates so toxic well no one's being honest it's uh and we just we decide what team we like and uh that's our tribe and that that's a also a negative consequence of our development how we all evolved in these small tribal groups is that the outsiders are threatening but you are protected by whatever group you align with and you see that with the blue no matter who or

red till dead you see that from either ideological position they would support whoever's on their side you know there's a psychologist at notre dame university she's retired now her name is darshia narvaez and she studied hunter-gatherer groups it might be interesting for you to talk to her once she studied them internationally studying historically and uh i don't want to speak on her behalf but she could give you a very interesting um what's her name again um i'll write it down for you afterwards okay it's darcia narves and now she's written a new book which when

it comes out you really might want to talk to her i wrote she asked me to write the forward for it and the book is called the evolved nest and it'll be published next year by north atlantic books and i'm happy to give you her name okay yeah and she's she's got a huge body of work she's written many wonderful books she could really she could reconduct really she can talk really um maybe i'm talking fast this must be all the caffeine i'm doing you're not talking too fast it's great oh that's good anyway darcia

could really tell you about her studies of hunter gather groups and not only about that but about how her evolution has mirrored and paralleled the evolution of other mammals and how much we have in common with other animals when it comes to rearing the young and interacting with each other and so on a very she's a very fascinating person to talk with well i wouldn't be surprised that our evolution mirrors other mammals yeah it's like we are mammals we are animals no matter what we think of ourselves we're just this weird mammal that happens to

be at least uh amongst the ones walking on earth the most intelligent yes and unfortunately once that intelligence becomes disconnected for more emotional lives it becomes a dangerous weapon which is largely what's happened i'm talking about our really emotional lives um darcy's got this concept called she says she says that we are specie species atypical which means that we're actually the only species that is capable of creating environments that actually hurt us most species will seek out and cultivate and like beavers will create environments that will support the protection and nurturing of the young they

build these dams they build uh they create ponds they make you know we create environments that actually hurt us yes which is where species atypical that's true right i mean we create ghettos and we create horrible toxic air quality because of the way we develop power in our cities and yeah yeah and then we justify it by whatever pursuit we're involved in that you know you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette we're also the i mean look i mean i as a jewish kid growing up in eastern europe um with the

awareness of what had happened you know i had some awareness of what had happened my grandfather was 40 54 and he was a wonderful doctor in a town and he was taken to auschwitz and died that same day you know so i grew up with this huge question in my mind of just how can people do this and human beings are the only ones that will gratuitously and for no practical reason turn on each other and they do this habitually it's it's not even like conquest and war i mean that experience didn't serve anybody's needs

it had no purpose other than the acting out of pure hatred and insanity by one people against another you know but this happens all the time in human life and so my quest as an individual and as a physician and just as an observer is why why do we do this and what do we have to learn about ourselves so that we can break this chain of trauma well i think people need to hear it discussed in a way that they it it makes sense in their mind like they they're like what you're saying here

today i think is going to radically impact a lot of people that are listening to this because you're you're saying things that resonate it works in their mind they're like oh ha oh that makes sense okay now i understand it and then once you've intellectualized that once you've you you have these ideas in your head now when confronted by what would be a typical behavior a pattern that you had fallen into then you can recognize it and say oh this is why i'm doing this and then the process of change is gradual and slow what

i think psychedelics what the one of the ways they help and i agree with you that they're only a small part of this process of change but they allow you to completely detach from the normal patterns of life in a way that is absolutely inescapable like when you're having a dmt experience or a psilocybin experience it's and one of the weird things is that the most profound of these experiences or many of the most profound mimic human neurochemistry it's the whole point yes yeah i mean that's what psilocybin does that's what dimethyltryptamine does it's all

these things and we have even countability receptors in our brains for kids yes yes and you know there's undeniable benefits for some people with these things but it's not a panacea it's not as simple as like take this you'll be fine well let me two things occurred to me when you said that what was the first thing um oh yeah when you're talking about people recognizing i think what's really important here is that when people look at their lives and where they've lied or they've let themselves down or others that they examine their experience compassionately

not with self-judgment of of of of a moral condemnation of themselves but why did they do that yeah what made me do that not as a way of excusing it was a way of understanding it so i don't have to do it again you know so that's the first point um you talked about using natural chemistry so let's look at opiate addiction it's really interesting example so people are addicted to heroin you know and i worked with a lot of heroin addicts in vancouver's downtown eastside which is north america's most consulated area of drug use

i mean if you've never been there it's an eye-opener for it's horrible yeah so as i was physician there for 12 years and i was the doctor at north america's at that time only supervised injection site where people bring their drugs and inject themselves with heroin with clean needles sterile water and if they overdosed they'd be resuscitated so opiate addictions and what you said about natural human chemistry so why do you have people get hooked on opiates well opium works in the human brain because we have receptors for it but why do we have receptors

from a plant that comes from afghanistan well we don't we have as you said receptors i should say or internal opiate system this is our own natural chemical now why do we have opiates well if you understand opiate addiction you have to look at what do our natural opiates which are called endorphins and endorphins are it means endogenous morphine-like substance so why do we have endorphins what do endorphins do but the first thing they do is they're pain relievers and they relieve not only physical pain but emotional pain so people have just natural painkiller which

is good you know if i bang my knee then these endorphins by the way my people cut themselves that's what they're doing they're looking after the endorphin head wow no um the um so the pain relievers physical and emotional pain relievers that's the first thing they do second thing they do is they make possible the experience of pleasure and reward and joy and elation so those are important experiences because life is tough what would our lives be like if we had no joy elation and pleasure so endorphins help with that experience the third thing they

do is the most important thing then possible this little thing called love endorphins promote the loving contact between mother or father and infant so when mother and dad or mother or dad look into the infant's eyes and the infant is smiling up at them both the infant and the parent gets an endorphin hit now without that now if you take infant mice and you knock out the endorphin receptors these little mice will not cry for their mothers and separation what would that mean in the wild death their death that's how important the endorphins are yeah

now if you take human beings who didn't have those early experiences that promoted the proper development of endorphin circuits you got a sitting dog for opiate addiction when they do heroin they feel normal for the first time in their lives as many people have told me russell brown told me about this experience of love that he had when he did endorphin you know and we needed heroin yeah we did heroin yeah sorry yeah and uh when i was working in detox at that facility i told you about this big muscled guy i imagine your body

in a six foot four guy and earring and tattoos and shaved head and just tough looking as anything and he was coming in for a detox from heroin i said what does it do for you and he said doc i don't know how to tell you this but it's like you're sick and you're ill with a fever and your mother wraps you in a warm blanket sits you on her lap and gives you warm chicken soup that's what the heroin feels like love love yeah and one somebody told me this sex trade worker with hiv

i said what's it do for she said when i first did heroin it felt like a warm soft hog in other words mother father love parenting why do people become addicted to heroin because they didn't have those experiences and very often they had really negative and abusive experiences and then we punish these people we ostracize them we cast them out of society it's still a struggle in the united states to establish safe injection sites where people can use clean water so they don't pass each other with hiv and i mean with that backward yeah and

then there's the illegalization of iboga yeah a bogey gain and uh also psilocybin in ayahuasca have been shown to help people cure addiction and to have some sort of a center where you have trained experts that can guide people through these things exactly and then there's the problem with these guide these experts because they become a subject to all of the the human flawed instincts of you know the guru mentality and then they become this revered person because they've introduced this person into this world of psychedelics and and their ego grows and they they feed

off the adulation and attention and then they get lost i've seen psychedelic shamans even abuse sexually abuse their clients not that i've seen it i know of it very directly personally yeah i've heard of it as well i've heard of it as well and some of these retreats where you go to these other countries so you have to really be have some due diligence before you go to a place and this happens of course in the spiritual leadership work all the buddhist masters that have abused their clients or exploited their clients they are the catholic

priests who have it's a power thing right the psychiatrists who have yeah the doctors who have yeah the politicians who have it's it's just once you have power and you don't know yourself right it doesn't matter how good you are and how much you know and how much wisdom you might even have but if you're not integrated you might very fall into the trap of using your power for selfish purposes and that's what these people do yeah it's a that's a weird instinct that human beings have because it never ends well and it's it's mapped

out there's been so many instances of these uh cult-like situations or cult leaders it never ends well no never and yet people still go down that path because in that moment when they're in control of their flock and when they're getting all this adulation and you know they're doing whatever they want to do they feel like they're superior they're invincible they're so significant there's something special yeah yeah anyone sees that all the time you see it in athletics yeah there's so many athletes that i know that were abused by coaches and and and experts and

the very famous case the infamous case of larry nassar the yeah the doctor who abused all these young women in in the acrobatic acrobats you know yeah we got away with it for years and years and years because which is again is part of what the system does is it drops people of their internal power and they surrender it to others and they don't even think to complain right you know yeah they don't think that they have the ability to complain there's just there's so many people that have power over them and that's right they're

they're also holding this position of a spot on the olympic team and you're going to compete represent the united states and gymnastics and so you just deal with it yeah yeah the the power dynamic of human beings having power over other human beings in that way specifically in regards to psychedelics is one of the more disturbing things to me because i've seen this abusive thing happen in people that should know better they should know better they i mean they're supposedly on this journey and yet they're involved in this thing where they're they're clearly they're they're

extracting a enormous amount of adulation out of these people and they're using it in this very transparent way and when you hear them talk it's so obvious and anyone who doesn't know any better or doesn't know them rather and they they watch like what do you think is going on here what is that a cult like immediately like a meat because it's it's got that aspect of it it's like but it can become yeah and the people that's that that's a weird instinct too is because we we're always leaning towards a tribal leader you know

that's part of our our heritage of developing in these tribes darcy and norves could talk to you about that yeah because the tribal leaders weren't all powerful rulers they were servants they may have been good at leading a war party but that didn't give them authority to rule direct lawyer over the others you know so but that's more likely what we can say is that human beings are incredibly complex beings and uh we've got these incredible intellects and uh the more we come you again you talked about the kindness you know that you found in

yourself and that you recognize is closer to you to nature than your previous persona yeah we develop the power or we develop the intellect or any aspects of ourselves but we get cut off from the heart we become very dangerous creatures and neuroscientically speaking we think of the brain as sort of the ruler of everything but actually we have three brains at least three brains we have a brain up here then there's a brain in the heart there's a nervous system in the heart that has got important predictive and and um knowledge so is the

gut ideally the gut and the heart and the the nervous system up here will be all connected and in sync and if we are we're very grounded and present and wise and if we're not if we cut off anyone from the others and that's what trauma does is it cuts us into little parts so we're no longer this whole and when we that means that certain parts of ourselves can then take over and rule the roost to the detriment of ourselves and and to others and that's the essence of trauma this disconnection from our whole

selves so essentially human beings are this incredibly complex almost organic machine that doesn't come with an operating system um doesn't come with uh yeah it doesn't come with the what comes in well not excuse me not an operating system an operating manual that's exactly right it doesn't come with the programming so so it's how that operative system gets programmed by the environment that depend that determines so much of what we behave right like and what what we love what we hate what we accept what we deny you know and and again that's the essence of

trauma and so the subtitle is trauma illness and healing you know toxic cultures how do we get back to that wholeness that's my whole not just mind but it's one of my that's the essential question and so you're trying to with this book provide people with the tools and the understanding to recognize these inherent flaws that human beings have and these traps that they fall into and give them an understanding of how to leave lead their life in a way that's more harmonious that's as good a summation of the book as i could give you

yeah that's a very valuable thing to to do for people because there's so many people that they just don't know what to do and they don't have any outlet other than psychiatrists and psychiatrists oftentimes immediately put them on drugs well so again i talk about that in the book so there's this modern trend of what's called biological psychiatry yeah which is all about let's change the biology of your brain by giving you this pill but they're not trending is to understand is that the biology of the brain is determined by the environment so the brain

develops an interaction with the environment and is in a lifelong interactive relationship with it both the internal environment and the external environment so rather than blaming the bulge of the brain let's look at what shapes the biology so in the book i talk about i don't know if your comedian do you know who darryl hammond was or sure yeah i know daryl yeah so there's in the book oh is he yeah yeah so dale had a documentary about his life called cracked up which is when netflix were is still available on netflix and daryl um

in his 20s developed a mental health condition and over the next two decades or more he was seen by 40 different psychiatrists what kind of mental health condition well they called it psychosis they called it bipolar unless it was given a whole lot of diagnosis typically and all these medications until finally one psychiatrist in new york said to him i don't recall that you have a disease something terrible happened to you the day i was abused severely by his mother throughout his childhood he says there was a hallelujah moment for me but it taken him

decades and three dozen psychiatrists to a phone son he said to him something happened to you and and what you what you're experiencing is a response to what happened to you so i interviewed daryl for the book you know and and he's gone a long way towards having dealt with his trauma but nobody for all those decades is all about take this pill or take that pill yeah this diagnosis that diagnosis it's so typical has daryl had psychedelic experiences first of all even if i knew i couldn't tell you oh cause you're a doctor no

because it's somebody's private life that i don't have the right you know well if he's talked about it publicly but i don't know that he has so i haven't i haven't heard him i haven't heard him talk about psychedelic so i have no knowledge so [Music] if he had talked about publicly and if i'd heard about it i would naturally say yes but i just don't know yeah um it's all based on pain i mean it seems like everything that we're talking about all these problems are coming out of trauma so there's a lot of

physical illness yeah like when you do the research the more adversity you had is a childhood more risky are for addiction for mental health issues for relational issues and also for autoimmune disease and malignancy so for example there was a study out of harvard university uh i think three years ago women with severe ptsd have doubled the risk of ovarian cancer really yeah double double um what about other cancers in my experience and i worked in palliative care for a while as well looking up to two million people and i've done the research a lot

of militancy is related to trauma because what what's the mechanism this is that it affects your immune system because you're severely stressed well let me because you're not well let me give you an example sure so [Music] let's see a child that sexually abuses you know the natural reaction would be rage can they afford to be rageful if they were rageful what would happen to them at the hands of the abuser they'd get punished even further exactly therefore the defense mechanism is to suppress the rage okay that's just a natural defense of the organism okay

now scientifically speaking i'll tell you a secret that most physicians never hear about despite decades of research on thousands of research papers and elegant science the mind and the body are not separable what happens in the mind hampers in the body and vice versa they're one unit in fact one great researcher candy spurt called it body mind it's one unit so our emotional system is part and parcel of the same apparatus as governs our immune system and our nervous system and our um hormonal apparatus it's all one system it's not separate they're different manifestations of

the same system now what is the role of unhealthy anger like we've already talked about is to protect your boundaries what is the role of emotions in general it's to let in what's healthy and nurturing and welcome and to keep out what is not is that clear enough is that okay what is the role of the immune system fight off intruders and to let in what's nurturing and healthy when you take vitamins you don't want your and your supplements you don't want your immune system attacking that right so it's to let in what's nurturing and

healthy keep up what is dangerous and toxic the immune system and the emotional system have the same role because they're one unit when you repress anger you're also suppressing your immune system that's been demonstrated in the laboratory now when you do that your defense against malignancy goes down because the immune system immune system is supposed to recognize the malignant transformation which happens in our bodies all the time by the way it's an accident in nature but a healthy immune system will say that's that's a foreigner that cell i'm going to destroy it right when you

repress healthy anger because you were programmed to do so cause some parenting expert told your parents that an angry child should be banished from your presence or because the child was abused and to survive the abuse they had to repress their healthy self-defense they also suppress then they learn to suppress their anger all their lives that represses the immune system now the immune system turns against you or it can not fight off malignancy the the physiology is straightforward it's elegant it's been worked out most physicians never hear this now there was a study out of

massachusetts i think which i quote in the book um i think two thousand women are followed over ten years followed over ten years those who unhappily married and didn't express the emotions were four times as likely to die as those who were unhappy married but they did talk about their feelings you can't times four times yeah you can't separate your emotional life from your physiological life right so when you look at the question of why do women have eighty point seventy to eighty percent of autoimmune disease they have much more likely to get rheumatoid arthritis

scleroderma lupus chronic fatigue and so on and so forth it's because women in this society are particularly acculturated not to be angry it's also why black people have more illness to society because they don't they can't be angry good for a black person to be angry is to court danger and so if you look at the biological markers they're different not because of race but because of racism and none of that has to do with diet well yes in a certain sense it does but it's not purely the diet it's it's part of a whole

um mix of influences so for example diet is a factor that is absolutely a factor so that's the emotion so as you know for example women who are because i've heard you talk about it people who are obese are more likely to get covered right yes but who gets obese people are abused yeah yeah and why are they eating too much to cover up their feelings exactly yeah so it's all connected yeah so the obesity epidemic in our society is it's an epidemic worldwide by the way as globalized capitalism extends its influence internationally obesity is

a huge blob in china now it didn't used to be really it's a huge problem in mexico it didn't used to be it's happening worldwide it's an epidemic but what's happening is that number one people are more and more isolated more and more stressed now they eat to soothe the stress and then the in the goodness of their hearts the sugar companies will come along and say well have this food it'll make you feel better that's sweet salt fat combination so it's the system works elegantly whoo boy and it's just exploiting these openings but it

creates the problem in the first place and then it explores the openings that it creates you couldn't design a better system if you wanted to uh a stress people and be profit off the stress do you have hope that we can sort this system out and that we can develop a better system do you think that that's i believe in human beings i believe that your experience you've experienced healing you've experienced an opening of kindness in yourself i have i don't claim to be perfect i don't think you do but we would say that we've

come a long way now if we can why can't anybody sorry so i think that human beings i have a lot of belief in the human potential i just think we have to work recognize what the problem is and move towards conditions that will support that potential rather than inhibit it so yeah i believe i believe in the possibilities of human beings that's why i get so excited about these kind of conversations and about your work in general is because it does give people a viable field of study and an option to understand and to

to look into all of the things that bother them and what what is actually happening what are the underlying factors that are leading me to these bad decisions what are the underlying factors that lead me to this general feeling of distress and being upset well i think people need a map to themselves and i think my work and the work of others that i highly respect is to offer people a map to understand themselves so that they can navigate their lives with some information rather than blindly yeah yeah and that's uh that's all we can

do you know all you can do is sort of give people another viable option and and give people an understanding of why the the current options are so unsatisfactory and what caused them and why they're there and how you could avoid these problems yes and how you get better yes should we end it right there we can end right here i think so i couldn't i couldn't think of a better way to end it it's a good way to end it well thank you again thank you for being here and thank you again for all

your work you've really done some amazing amazing stuff and it's like just have someone with your ability to express yourself put that kind of information out there is incredibly valuable to people so thank you well thank you for giving me the opportunity please let's do it again sometime and uh the myth of normal is this how currently is it out right now september the 13th september 13th so it's that's like two days that's right it's five days oh what's today seven i don't know what's going on eighth or the eighth it's just five days yeah

okay so in five days so thank you very much and uh did you do an audio version of this as well there's an audio version which is written which i gotta mention my co-writer is my brilliant son daniel and he also narrates the audio version because he's a very talented uh actor and and and and voice person an award-winning narrator of books so daniel did the audio version which will be available the same date as the book is beautiful shout out to daniel all right thank you appreciate you take care bye everybody [Music] [Applause] you