Speaker A
People of the UK and Ireland, if you're coming to my live shows this October, there is a chance that your story could end up on stage. Worst first dates, problems that you need solved by me. You will not believe that this happens.
Explores addiction and compulsive behaviors in men, focusing on porn, gambling, and video games, with insights on coping and meaning.
Key Takeaways
- Pornography, gambling, and video games are highly addictive and commonly co-occur in young men.
- These behaviors serve as coping strategies to alleviate pain and fill a void of meaning in life.
- Addiction progresses through stages, starting with pleasure and pain relief but leading to tolerance and compulsion.
- Understanding the underlying pain and psychological needs is crucial for effective intervention.
- Technology addiction is a growing issue that reflects broader societal and psychological challenges.
What the video covers
- The video discusses compulsive behaviors among young men, particularly daily use of pornography, gambling, and video games.
- It highlights the addictive nature of these activities and their role as coping mechanisms for pain and lack of meaning in life.
- Addiction is explained as having three stages: initial pleasure and pain relief, followed by tolerance development.
- The video explores the evolutionary function of play and how video games simulate survival skills in an artificial environment.
- It addresses the overlap of these compulsions and their shared underlying ideologies and psychological mechanisms.
- The discussion includes the impact of technology addiction on men's lives and the broader societal implications.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of understanding the pain being avoided through these behaviors to address addiction effectively.
- There is mention of live shows where personal stories related to these issues are shared and discussed.
- The video also touches on the need for skills necessary for survival and how modern compulsions may reflect deeper psychological issues.
- It encourages reflection on life decisions and offers a Q&A format for addressing related existential and practical concerns.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Live Show Announcement
- 08:45Statistics on Porn, Gambling, and Video Game Use
- 17:51Addiction Stages and Psychological Insights
- 27:17Evolutionary Function of Play and Video Games
- 37:15Addiction as Coping and Meaning Deficit
- 46:15Societal Impact and Broader Implications
- 56:09Q&A and Personal Stories
- 65:34Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
stories and much more. I'm going to be reacting to my favorites live, plus doing a Q&A where you can ask me about relationships careers existential crises, or whatever questionable life decision you're currently considering.
Speaker A
Stories and much more. I'm going to be reacting to my favorites live, plus doing a Q&A where you can ask me about relationships, careers, existential crises, or whatever questionable life decision you're currently considering.
Speaker A
Can you look at this chart for me? Sure. One in eight young men watch porn, gamble, and play video games every day or more. Almost one in four gamble daily. More than one in four use porn daily. And only 26% do none of them.
Speaker A
I've spent over a year building brand new stories and ideas, and it is hands down the best thing I've ever put on stage. You can get your tickets now at chriswilliamson.live. That's chriswilliamson.live.
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the lives of them are like. Is this compulsion? Do they wish that they could do it less? Is this something that borders on an addiction or something that's kind of uh guiding their life, taking over their life, or is this just
Speaker A
Can you look at this chart for me? Sure. One in eight young men watch porn, gamble, and play video games every day or more. Almost one in four gamble daily. More than one in four use porn daily. And only 26% do none of them.
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can probably see through the headline a little bit more deeply. Yeah. So I I think the answer is yes.
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What do you make of that? Uh, what do you make of that? What the issue here is about once a day or more often. Okay. Um, I wonder, we don't know what the life of people that are doing this are like. We don't know what
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I I want to kind of point out here is that there are three things right gambling, pornography, video games. So generally speaking, when you see multiple overlapping things, they tend to have a shared ideology, right? So these are
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the lives of them are like. Is this compulsion? Do they wish that they could do it less? Is this something that borders on an addiction or something that's kind of, uh, guiding their life, taking over their life, or is this just
Speaker A
Yes. Um and and to me if you look at sort of uh things from an addictive perspective. So all three of these activities are addictive. Um what are the what's the core feature of addiction? Something that gives you
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a natural response to a world that's maybe been tapped of meaning? And this is a good coping strategy for 74% of men to get through. I don't know. Uh, but you work on this much more than me. So you
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So then the question becomes what is pleasurable pleasurable about these things? And more importantly, what is the pain that's being taken away?
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can probably see through the headline a little bit more deeply. Yeah. So I, I think the answer is yes.
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But if you look at an addiction, addiction has three stages. In the first stage of your addiction, it gives you pleasure and it takes away pain. But then what happens is we develop tolerance to the pleasure. So if you ask
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Brilliant. So I, I think thanks for coming everybody. Yeah. So, so, so you know, is it a compulsion? Yes. Is it a coping strategy? Yes. Are people's lives devoid of meaning? Yes. Is technology getting addictive? Yes. So the first thing that
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So prior to being addicted, you can say, "Oh man, this weekend is coming around.
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I, I want to kind of point out here is that there are three things, right? Gambling, pornography, video games. So generally speaking, when you see multiple overlapping things, they tend to have a shared ideology, right? So these are
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and I'm going to just like jerk off a whole lot I'm going to I'm going to go to Mexico and I'm going to take a a laptop pathologically fat I'm gooning all day it's aon goon all day there are people
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symptoms. Sure, they have their own like diagnostic criteria and things like that, but I think what this is, what I, men are jerking off, gambling, and playing video games. Yes, this is correct.
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depending on what the specifics of your psychology and your neuroscience is, you will end up in one of those quadrants. And the fascinating thing is we're getting to the point in research where we know what the defining features
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Yes. Um, and, and to me if you look at sort of, uh, things from an addictive perspective. So all three of these activities are addictive. Um, what are the, what's the core feature of addiction? Something that gives you
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Video games. So video games, interestingly, is the biggest, okay, of the lot by a distance. So for the people that are just listening, uh, gambling on its own, only 1.8% of men are doing that every day without either
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pleasure and takes away pain. So all of these three things do that. So anytime you're looking at compulsive behavior, this is at the root of it.
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Sure. Okay. So, what do you do? Do you do you play video games? No.
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So then the question becomes what is pleasurable, pleasurable about these things? And more importantly, what is the pain that's being taken away?
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Okay. So, so what why did you used to play video games? What did video games do for you?
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So oftentimes I think there's a, a big kind of misemphasis on addiction. When people talk about addiction, they talk about dopamine predominantly.
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Two. I was living in you like five person house in university. I used to play Borderlands and you could play Borderlands co-op locally which was sick because it's you and another person doing the same thing, talking [ __ ] to
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But if you look at an addiction, addiction has three stages. In the first stage of your addiction, it gives you pleasure and it takes away pain. But then what happens is we develop tolerance to the pleasure. So if you ask
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Also a massive fan of watching people in the house playing a video game that I'm not a part of. So if I watch someone play Fortnite, if I watch someone play FIFA, one of my favorite things to do
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most people who gamble, play video games, or watch pornography, they won't say that like this is a huge source of pleasure.
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I'm enjoying seeing the fallout of that, but I don't have really any desire to play video games. Not now. Not anymore.
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So prior to being addicted, you can say, "Oh man, this weekend is coming around.
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Sure. To me. So I I I think in your answer is everything. So it's beautiful.
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I'm going to play lots of video games. It's going to be great." M, but as you progress into this, people aren't like looking forward to, they're like, man, I can't wait till I have vacation at the end of the month
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what the evolutionary function of play is? Testing capacity in a safe environment. Uh that's a good way to put it. I I would say it's a testing capacity, building capacity even, right? So if you look at like two cats that are playing
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and I'm going to just like jerk off a whole lot. I'm going to, I'm going to go to Mexico and I'm going to take a, a laptop pathologically fat. I'm gooning all day. It's aon goon all day. There are people
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play is because play trains us in the skills that are necessary for survival. This is the first thing to understand.
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who goon, right? And we can get to the psychology of that, which is fascinating. So I, I, I think this is largely a symptom or a manifestation of a deeper problem, um. And I think that we just have
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skills that will be necessary for survival. So if we look at what video games do, they take all the most important like evolutionary aspects for survival and they create an artificial environment in which we can get those satisfied. So this is something that
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depending on what the specifics of your psychology and your neuroscience is, you will end up in one of those quadrants. And the fascinating thing is we're getting to the point in research where we know what the defining features
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understand that this first thing is it's not a game. It's actually a substitute for life. That's why people get addicted. And so even in your answer, why don't you play video games anymore?
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of each of those quadrants are. Oo, tell me, tell me more. So, um, pick one to start.
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Yeah. So the 66% of people who play video games every day are people who are trying to accelerate time in this men who play video games every day.
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Video games. So video games, interestingly, is the biggest, okay, of the lot by a distance. So for the people that are just listening, uh, gambling on its own, only 1.8% of men are doing that every day without either
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Speed running their own life. Not speedrunning. The exact opposite. So speedrunning is accomplishing a lot in a very short amount of time.
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porn and or video games. Okay, that's kind of interesting. So let's start with video games. 35.8% of men doing video games daily and, uh, 66% doing video games with something in total with something else daily. Are you okay if I ask you questions?
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Mhm. Right. So So they're they're accelerating the time to the end. And so video games give us a sense of agency.
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Sure. Okay. So, what do you do? Do you, do you play video games? No.
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So when talking exactly right which is the way that you express approval and respect to to the dudes around you right is like you [ __ ] talk them.
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Okay. What do you know about video games? I played a lot in uni and stuff and then business became my video game.
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There's dopamine. Sure, there is some suppression of their negative emotional circuitry. And like this is what's kind of the scary thing about fast forwarding your life is like as you fast forward your life, your life gets worse because you're not living it. You're not
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Okay. So, so what, why did you used to play video games? What did video games do for you?
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Have you looked at u reported or self-reported retrospective estimations of how much time passed when people have played games? like what what how are you arriving at this conclusion that people who play games are kind of moving through their life more quickly
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Uh, they were a way to pass time when I was bored. They were a way to connect with my housemates because a lot of them did. Yep.
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Yeah. So, so, so they're they're they're not moving through life quickly. Life is passing them by faster. I would say say video games keep you still, right? So, from a developmental perspective, you're not moving forward. So if you spend I
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Two. I was living in, you like five-person house in university. I used to play Borderlands and you could play Borderlands co-op locally, which was sick because it's you and another person doing the same thing, talking [ __ ] to
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look at purpose and direction in life it's inversely correlated with like the amount of time that you spend on a screen largely um especially playing things like video games and if you look at the things that protect the the strongest protective
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each other but like working on a team but complaining about stuff. Borderlands one, two, I'm pretty sure I completed one, two, and maybe even three with my housemates. Yeah. So sick. I love that. That was great.
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Yeah. So this is where you can get into the research of each of these things and you'll find slightly different things.
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Also a massive fan of watching people in the house playing a video game that I'm not a part of. So if I watch someone play Fortnite, if I watch someone play FIFA, one of my favorite things to do
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It's forward momentum. Yes, there's there's progress. You've leveled up. There's a new challenge that you're going to do. You're starting the game again at a higher difficulty setting, whatever. So, you would assume that the purposelessness thing would be more
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because I get to [ __ ] talk them while they're playing and I get to comment on their, like, so I, I enjoy video games. I watch a lot of, uh, like reviews of video games. Obviously GTA's just come out.
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what you'll find is that they have a very high rate of meaninglessness or purposelessness in life.
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I'm enjoying seeing the fallout of that, but I don't have really any desire to play video games. Not now. Not anymore.
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But if you're strum someone who's struggling with technology addiction, it can feel like whack-a-ole, right? where it's like, "Okay, I stop playing video games and my pornography use increases." So that's pornography addiction where if you don't have a reason bluntly to not
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Why do you think that is? I, I think I supplanted the game playing, uh, SATA seeking, go after something with business. Okay. And I, I think content creation and YouTube is basically a video game.
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Video games is interesting because, as you aptly pointed out, what video games do is gives you a substitute for purpose. So pornography is like a numbing effect against a lack of purpose. But what we'll see with video games is that they
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Sure. To me. So I, I, I think in your answer is everything. So it's beautiful.
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There's no like leaderboard for gooning. Watch me. Watch me. I mean, we can arguably there's I guess you could say there's only fans, but not really.
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Thank you. Thank you for coming. So, so here's, here's what we need to understand. So if we look at like why things are fun, right? So human beings and not just human beings, like cats too, have the capacity for play. Do you know
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There's not there's not a comp. Yeah. So, I mean, there are some weird edge cases actually. I mean, if we want to go really down the rabbit hole of a lot of intensive competitiveness amongst only fans subscribers, right, for the attention and affection
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what the evolutionary function of play is? Testing capacity in a safe environment. Uh, that's a good way to put it. I, I would say it's a testing capacity, building capacity even, right? So if you look at like two cats that are playing
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Um, but yeah, I mean, I I think you're spot on. So, so meaninglessness leads to pornography and meaninglessness also leads to the substitute of meaning through video games, right? People try to become pro gamers, which is actually a viable career increasingly becoming
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with each other, they're not like playing chess, right? They're like fighting. And if you look at like people who play, like kids who play tag, right? So what, what the reason we've designed play or the reason evolution is selected for
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YouTube is sort of a video game. There are ways to optimize a video game, there are ways to optimize YouTube. So it kind of scratches that evolutionary psychological itch.
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play is because play trains us in the skills that are necessary for survival. This is the first thing to understand.
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Gambling is like a whole different ballgame. So with just different neuroscientific mechanisms and especially if we're talking about young men, one of the um what's the right way to put this? One of the more unique things about gambling
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And so if you kind of think about it from like, let's say I'm evolution and I'm trying to create, I'm trying to prepare this juvenile organism to be able to succeed. What I need to do is create a reward circuit to encourage the
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So the standards for men have not changed but the the expectations of men for men have not changed. If if any anything they've gotten arguably more difficult and the capabilities of men have decreased. So many women will still want a male
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skills that will be necessary for survival. So if we look at what video games do, they take all the most important, like, evolutionary aspects for survival and they create an artificial environment in which we can get those satisfied. So this is something that
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really rough gap between what society expects of a man and what a man is capable of. And that gap is widening. So one of the simplest ways to solve that gap is to make it big in gambling. So,
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when I, um, the first book that I wrote is how to raise a healthy gamer and I, I taught this to parents because parents who are struggling to teach their kids or parents who are struggling to get their kids off of video games need to
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feel about yourself? What's going on in your life, they all want to make it big and they don't know how. And then gambling enters the picture and now you you have a big problem because the root of gambling is I want to be someone one
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understand that this first thing is it's not a game. It's actually a substitute for life. That's why people get
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cocaine and [ __ ] and and yachts and stuff like that, right? But they they want to be able to buy a house. They want to be able to take their partner out. They want to have freedom and
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security in life, but college is all messed up because of AI and lower metriculation rates and things like that. So, there's a future that many men are grasping for that they don't know how to get. in one really, really,
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really simple way is to win it in gambling. You know what's interesting? I was talking to Patty Galloway. Do you know Patty? YouTube wizard of YouTube. He's employed by Google to help them do their own YouTube channel. He's pretty [ __ ]
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hilarious. He's like kind of the guy at the top of the tree. And um he was telling me cuz he's got access to all of these channels behind the scenes and all of this proprietary data and stuff like that. we were at
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dinner and he was saying uh in 2019 2018 2019 all of the biggest finance niches were uh slow investing dollar cost average S&P 401k uh tax efficiency it was long-termism long-termist thinking and the biggest financial niches in 2026
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are all make cash fast uh prediction markets kshi poly market um crypto and and we know we went through a crypto NFT wave as well kind of in the middle of that we had a wobble but what is being
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talked about online and he he thinks that this is a um wind changing of people wanting to try and make it big quick uh I think maybe concerns about AI uncertainty about the future geopolitical in instability stuff like
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that like ah I just don't know what's going on I don't know the future like I'll just yolo you know like uh what's it called fast life strategy uh it's kind of an equivalent of that but it's pass money strategy in the same way. But
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if you were to think um globally, that's caused everybody to be like, I don't know what's going on. I don't know how to make it. I'll just go harder. That's some of those things are like gambling adjacent and um or g direct gambling
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advice. And that kind of plays into what you're talking about here, too. Yeah. So I I I think it's I mean it we can go as wide or as narrow as you want, but I I think this speaks to like a
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broader problem, which is that so things are like this wasn't what I was planning on talking about today, but this is something that I've been really mulling over. Things are like really reaching a critical point and something fundamental
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is like breaking in our society. I I think we're we're seeing like a midlife crisis of sorts in humanity. Like so I think a lot of what's happening and I think men are sort of feeling the crunch of this in a different way and we can
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talk about how women are feeling it but I I think when we what's going on is like there used to be a path to success right the there used to be this thing and especially if you look at men the
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core psychological problem that men need to solve is conquering themselves. So if you look at like most of the advice out there, most of of what men need to do, they struggle with themsel and it's about getting the most output out of
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yourself. If you know how to bring out the best part of you, you can do fine in life, right? That that's what this is just my experience of sitting with men and things like that. There's some psychoanalytic literature that kind of
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supports this, but it's kind of like arguably I'm competing against other men, but if you sort of think about what is the lever that I pull, it's my own effort, right? How do I beat somebody else at football? I practice harder, I
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train harder, I get better. So, the core issue is effort. And then what's really interesting, this is a little bit of a shift, but then if we look at what triggers a midlife crisis, um, which I went through recently myself, was
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fantastic experience. It it's that the realization that when you're young, the main thing you need to do is generally speaking, work harder, right?
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So there's like a lot of options and if you put forth the effort, you've got I'm 20 years old, I have 60 years on the planet, right? And if I work hard every day, if I can bring a lot of effort
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every day, I can become married. I can get I can have kids if I want. I can develop a career. I need to extract the potential for myself.
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Midlife crisis psychologically happens when that strategy no longer works. M so at some point you wake up and and in my case I'm 43 and then you realize that oh crap working harder is fundamentally not going to solve my problems anymore.
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It solved my problems when I was 21 and addicted to video games and all this all this good stuff. It doesn't solve my problems anymore because there's just not enough time left. I can work as hard as I want to for the next 40 years of my
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life and it it's not going to get done. We're midlife is actually 36 which is like really scary. Okay. So we understand this from the the psychological literature and if you look at what's happening in society hard work doesn't work anymore
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especially in places like America. So we have this in America we have this idea right of like the American dream which is like independence and working hard and and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.
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Meritocracy meritocracy and this is this is the right way. Well, this is really scary, but we've sort of assumed that meritocracy is like kind of the best way to navigate life, but this is not working anymore, right?
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So, so co, you know, college used to be a secure path to uh it used to be a path to financial security. It's not anymore.
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If anything, it's a it's a path to financial ruin. Yeah. Right. And and so so and this is scary. So, and now what's happening is you have lots of young men where like everything is falling apart.
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Yeah. AI is taking your job. There's all kinds of stuff going on with like dating and mating. Um, you know, rates of of sexlessness are at an all-time high. Rates of loneliness are at an all-time high. Friendships are at
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an all-time low. Um, the number of people who have three close people that they can call in a number in a crisis situation has dropped to an all-time low. like society and I'm not trying to be alarmist here like I'm I'm really not
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but I I think something fundamental is like breaking in society. Yep. And the reason I really believe that is because we have the greatest amount of resources that we've ever had and this is also a bold claim to make. But I
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think there's actually sufficient data to back it up. We're also we also have the highest level of suffering that we've ever had, you know, and I I realize that's like oh my god, like how can you say that? Are you No, no, I'm
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not saying this to be alarmist. I'm saying like this is a fact, right? This started during the pandemic where we have a mental health crisis that has been going on. We've known that it's been going on now and we're like six
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years in and things are not getting better. If anything, body body dysmorphia is on the rise, right? And we have the some of these things like ompic and semiglutide and stuff like that.
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Really scary. A lot of people don't realize and I'm going off off. Oh, dude. I I'm [ __ ] loving this.
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You're cooking. Keep going. Just a simple example. You're cooking a chicken coma, though. So we used like everyone has body image issues, right? And so everyone wants to be thin and everyone wants to be beautiful and like social media is a big
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part of that. Yep. So then along comes a medication which is amazing because this medication makes it so that you don't want to eat. So this is what's really scary about society.
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Up until now, human beings have had to obey the laws of physics. That if you want something in life, you have to put something in.
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And what scares me about semiglutide is up until now, if you wanted to be healthy, if you wanted to have if you wanted to lose weight, if you wanted to get fit, it required you to put in a
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certain amount of effort. An honest signal. the body that you had was an honest signal of the effort that you put in.
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There's yes, there are variables that go into that like upbringing and and stuff like that and whether you're in a food desert, but basically yes. Like you you had to work for stuff in life. And I think that that's good. And the reason
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that it's good is because the body doesn't wear out. It rusts. So the more you use your muscles, the stronger they become. The more that you write essays yourself, the more intelligent you become. Human beings have gotten stupider for the first time
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in the history of recorded IQ. Is that the Flynn effect? I don't know. Can you chat GPT? Is the Flynn effect about IQ? I'm pretty sure that the Flynn effect is people got smarter basically throughout all of human history if you
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were to grade them by IQ slowly slowly slowly get smarter. Uh and we gotten dumber for like the last decade.
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Uh probably. Yeah. So, so for the first time in the history of like recorded IQ measurements.
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Yes. Here it is. Scroll up for me. Uh, the Flynn effect is specifically about IQ scores. It refers to the observation first documented by political scientist James Flynn. The average IQ test scores increased substantially throughout the 20th century. In many countries, many
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developed nations. The increase was roughly three IQ points per decade. Uh, and has the Flynn effect stopped in many developed countries. Yes, since the 1990s or early 2000s, researchers have found that IQ gains have plateaued in some countries and reversed slightly in
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others. Sometimes called the negative Flynn effect. Yeah. So, so and this is happening. So, and and what's happening is is especially if we look at IQ reductions, I see this a lot. So, I have friends in academia and stuff and like the more
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that people use AI for stuff, the stupider they get. And there there's lots of good studies that show this. So, the MIT released a study a couple of years ago that showed a decay in critical thinking skills with AI use.
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and and you know AI is basically like taking the elevator instead of taking the stairs for your brain. So what what's happening is something weird is going on where like society is progressing but human beings are getting worse and as we get worse like things
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are really starting to come apart at the seams. I think we sort of feel it. We see evidence of it in in in mental health. Um we were talking about OMPic.
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So basically what happened is up until now you've had to work to get something right and along comes semiglutide and these GLP-1 agonists and suddenly you don't have to work to get something. You take an an injection and then your
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cravings get reduced and then we're starting to see some really scary things around GLP1s.
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So, they're amazing medicines because if you have if you have like if you're overweight and you have like cardiac risk factors, um endocrinology risk factors like type two diabetes and stuff like that, the these medications are amazing at all this kind of stuff. We're
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also seeing some really cool mental health effects. So, we're seeing reductions in cravings on alcohol. Um we're seeing uh improvements in even things like nicotine sessation and stuff like that.
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I think it's so weed the data is mixed, right? Um, pornography appears to get worse.
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Pornography gets worse. Yes. Video games. Uh, I haven't seen any data about that. Yeah.
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So, and and there's a lot of really interesting signaling around GLP that we can get into, but this is exactly kind of what I mean is it's sort of a miracle drug and our society has been filled with miracle innovations that actually
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cause silent damage around the edges. And I think we've been doing this for way too long and like it's hit a critical point. H tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly. You eat reasonably well. You feel fine, but
Speaker A
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the exact same blood panels that I use and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom.
Speaker A
That's functionhealth.com/bottomwisdom. It's a simple example of GLP-1. Fascinating study. If you take someone who has a binge eating disorder and you do cognitive behavioral therapy on them, the more weight that they lose, the more effective the co cognitive behavioral
Speaker A
therapy is, the higher their risk is of developing anorexia. That's correct. It's confusing. If I have a binge eating disorder and I lose 50, if I lose 20 pounds from seeing a therapist around my binge eating disorder, rate of anorexia is low. If I
Speaker A
lose 50 pounds from cognitive behavioral therapy, my rate of anorexia increases. So rapid weight loss is an independent risk factor for developing anorexia. And we see this, right? We see this. We see that if you look at celebrities, if you
Speaker A
just take pictures, like you just take a collage of celebrities from now versus 20 years ago, if you take a collage of like Instagram influencers or whatever, you will see that like eating disorders are shockingly on the rise. We're also
Speaker A
seeing equality with like looks maxing where there's a a a drastic level of body dysmorphia in in men now. And so there something weird is going on where like as we move away from the laws of physics like as we move away from this
Speaker A
fundamental idea that if you want something in life you have to pay something. What do you think is the mechanism for that binge eating to anorexia pipeline?
Speaker A
Um it's a fascinating question. So I think there are two or three different factors.
Speaker A
One is so one is this gets a bit complicated but let me so if you look at what is the what is the psychological makeup of someone who loses 20 pounds versus someone who loses 50 pounds first thing that you can argue is that
Speaker A
someone who's likely to lose 50 lbs is more motivated to begin with is more concerned about their appearance to begin with so I don't think it's a direct effect necessarily of just there's a selection effect going on here
Speaker A
to some degree. Absolutely right. So the the harder that you yourself or are motivated to look good or whatever.
Speaker A
Absolutely. So that probably is part of the reason for it. It's not that the weight loss itself is all causal. It's that the people who lose more weight are more more motivated to begin with. Maybe have more body. I
Speaker A
have I have to assume as well body dysmorphia or or um mirror hatred. Uh but also people that are anorexic, they must have a good amount of willpower.
Speaker A
They have a ton of willpower. I have to imagine that you basically your willpower muscle is like so hypertrophied that you're able to voluntarily starve yourself.
Speaker A
Absolutely. So so that that's exactly what we see. So what we see with people with anorexia is they have so many physiologic signals telling them to eat.
Speaker A
And so the the one of the things I love about being a psychiatrist is like there's a lot of cool neuroscience, but there's a lot of old stuff too that I think is just as relevant. I think psychiatry is the only field of medicine
Speaker A
where stuff that was true 100 years ago is just as true today. Um, and I think some of the stuff about like yian archetypes and things and modern like dating and the manosphere is like it's it's like textbook. Like
Speaker A
literally there's a textbook written from 1920 by someone named Emma Jung who like describes the manosphere and our dating and mating crisis to a tea. It's it's insane.
Speaker A
Um, but going back to this question of of why do people develop anorexia? So the root of anorexia is control. So like if you look at like people who develop anorexia, there are people who are deprived of control in their life. And
Speaker A
so what what tends to happen with human beings is we tend to displace things. So if if if I'm out of control over here, I'm going to balance that out by being extra in control over here. And we see
Speaker A
this in places like, you know, if I have if there's a parent who has a toxic work environment and they can't get angry at their boss, they're going to displace that anger onto their loved ones at home, right? So, this is just how we
Speaker A
manage like psychiatric stuff. So, in anorexia, it's all about control. And and what happens is once you start to get the reward, right? Oh my god, from the cognitive behavioral therapy, I have lost this weight. Look at how much
Speaker A
better I look. I can do this. I am now in control. I'm so much more in control at a 50 lb loss than I am at a 20 pound loss. And so there's something there that that is very almost like addictive
Speaker A
or compulsive or gratifying about taking control of yourself and then you just keep going.
Speaker A
How do you think that continues if somebody isn't using control themselves but is artificially uh supplementing their control by using GLPS? Your suggestion here is that people use CBT. There's an intervention that gives somebody an additional amount of control over their weight and and how
Speaker A
much they eat and some people overshoot that and kind of get a kind of addiction to the control that they have. Are you suggesting that GLPs allow people to shortcut or people who wouldn't have typically that access to willpower that
Speaker A
these people would uh and they they're able to um the mechanism still holds even though the way that they've arrived at the mechanism isn't isn't the same.
Speaker A
The mechanism is the same. What what the difference is so remember I can I can have really strong cravings and I can have really high willpower.
Speaker A
So, the reason I think GLPs are causing lots of problems with body dysmorphia is because now I don't need a high willpower because I'm reducing my cravings. So, so they basically allow people who have less control of themselves to achieve more dysmorphic
Speaker A
goals. Why is that a problem? Um I think for two major reasons. One is physiologically I don't think it's healthy. So so I I think that there is a healthy weight that the human body likes to be at. And GLPs there's
Speaker A
also a lot of evidence that shows that the more unhealthy you are the more beneficial GLPs are. So even people who are more overweight see greater reductions in alcohol use with GLP use compared to people who are normal
Speaker A
weight. So if you have a normal weight and you start a GLP your reduction in alcohol consumption is lower so it helps you less. So so there there's a ton of evidence that and this is true of all of
Speaker A
medicine right? So all of medicine everything has side effects. So whether something is a good medicine or not depends on what the alternative to not taking it is. So, do we want to should we give you Chris Williamson a heart
Speaker A
transplant? Well, that depends. How messed up is your heart? And in the same way, the majority of GLP benefits are for people who are very unhealthy, right? Um, and there's a lot of data that supports that. But then the second
Speaker A
thing that I that this is like my personal thing, this is not like a medical stance. I I think it is supporting a societal shift into having a free lunch. No pun intended. So I I think what's really scary right now is
Speaker A
like people want everything to be free, right? So So we we did an interesting study about why people we have an amazing membership and why people don't join our membership. And the number one reason people don't join our membership
Speaker A
is because the quality of our free content is so good. And so internally we had this meeting where we're like, "Okay, should we make our free content less good?" And I was like, "Hell no." Right? Um, so right now
Speaker A
what's going on is like human beings fundamentally don't want to pay the cost of stuff anymore. This is why we get to things like gambling and stuff like that, right? And everyone is selling like you were saying from this this
Speaker A
YouTube guy, everyone is selling the idea that like you there's a free lunch, passive income, right? Effortless success. You don't have to pay the price. We're becoming, and this is what's really scary, is like, you know, there are so many predatory apps, like I
Speaker A
I saw an ad for a gambling app literally yesterday, $200 of credit with $5. Oh my god. So somewhere along the way, like people don't want to pay the cost anymore.
Speaker A
People don't want to pay the cost to put their lives together. They don't want to pay the cost to have money. They don't want to pay the cost for help, right?
Speaker A
Okay? Because there's so much free help available. And here's the really scary thing. A lot of people are out there telling them, "Yeah, you don't have to pay anything." Right? We'll give you this for free. Right? So, so like
Speaker A
there's so many services out there that promise free, promise instance, promise a lack of risk, here's a money back guarantee, right? There's zero risk, zero effort on your part. We also see this in politics where it's like, yeah,
Speaker A
the we go to our politicians and we say, I want all of these things done and the politician says yes and I'm going to tax that person over there. So people want things to be free and everyone is
Speaker A
selling them saying yes yes everything is free. You don't have to pay anything. You don't have to pay anything.
Speaker A
Everything will be free. You don't have to do effort. You don't have to do anything. And I think what we're seeing is a whole scale infantilization.
Speaker A
a whole scale deconditioning of our society which is why so many things the easier things get. No one wants to study anymore. People are using AI. Oh yeah, you don't have to study. You don't have to write anymore. You can have AI do it
Speaker A
for you. So we we're seeing this whole scale deconditioning and things are really starting to fall apart. Let's get back into gambling. You said that neurologically that's very interesting.
Speaker A
We've explained um sociologically what's going on there. What's happening inside of the brain? So what's happening? So the most danger Why are you laughing about it? Is it because you did the Indian accent? Is that why?
Speaker A
No, no, no. So So I'm just laughing because what's going on in the brain? So the most dangerous thing about gambling now is that it's available 24/7.
Speaker A
Mhm. There used to be, and we know this, right? Casinos are open 24/7. So they figured out a long time ago that if you're a predator and your prey is somebody's bank account, making things available 24/7 is a really good idea.
Speaker A
And there's a really simple neurological reason reason for this. So as we as the day goes on, we get more fatigued. As we get more fatigued, we make worse decisions. So as the frontal loes are as our frontal loes get fatigued, as we get
Speaker A
tired, our ability to play the tape through to the end decreases. our ability to anticipate consequences decreases. Our ability to control our impulse decreases.
Speaker A
So many years ago, I spoke with someone who maybe this is supposed to be secret information, but I'm not under an NDA, who's telling me that there's a there's a day trading app that not only facilitated trades, they built this
Speaker A
algorithm where any trade that is made at like 2 in the morning, they're going to be on the opposite side of.
Speaker A
Mhm. So it's it's not like you're, you know, if I'm buying this share at 2 in the morning, somebody else is selling it.
Speaker A
anyone who wants to buy or sell anything at two in the morning, the app itself is taking the other side of the trade because they realize through their big data set, right? Because they're seeing all this trading volume and stuff like
Speaker A
that that people just make really really really stupid decisions at 2 in the morning. So, a big part of gambling is that the the gap between the impulse to engage in gambling, which we know there's a lot of stuff around random
Speaker A
reinforcement schedule and things like that. There's all these biases like you know human there's a superiority bias so everybody thinks they're better than average everyone thinks that they're going to get lucky everyone's luckier than average right there all these
Speaker A
biases have existed but there used to be a very like physical barrier of going to the racetrack going to the gas station to buy a scratch ticket huh friction friction absolutely right so you had to you had to like do something
Speaker A
waiting until it opens up again waiting until it opens up and then then the impulse will pass so now what's really happening with these gamblings gambling apps is that impulsiveness. We made it really, really, really easy, right? And
Speaker A
everybody's doing this. It's like one click to purchase. You don't even have to go to checkout anymore, bro. Just tap a button and and it's going to be so easy. And so what what's really happening, and this is also kind of
Speaker A
scary, is like the other thing I sort of realized recently, this is kind of like a I don't know if this is really stupid or really smart. I can't tell yet. I realized something recently.
Speaker A
We have no psychological immune system that is prepared for the world that we live in. So we have like an immune system that protects us against attacks, right?
Speaker A
And we even have a psychological immune system that protects us against attacks. These are things like Freudian defense mechanisms like displacement and and yeah, distancing, distraction.
Speaker A
Yeah. So like we have all of these like psychological defense mechanisms that we use to protect our mind but we have no immune system for the world that we're living in today which is why like this is like a new a novel
Speaker A
organism that is attacking our mind and everyone's mind is getting messed up. I had no idea when I when I chose to become a psychiatrist. It was 2013. I went to my family I was like hey I'm thinking about becoming a psychiatrist.
Speaker A
They're like this is a terrible idea because they're like you know like a psychiatry is especially amongst Indian people there's the reputable specialties and there's the disreputable specialties.
Speaker A
How's surgery rank? Reputable enough. Okay. Not not the best because they don't make the most money.
Speaker A
Dentistry uh quite high because they you make really good money for not having to go to an MD program.
Speaker A
Okay. MD's top. Yeah. Right. Prestige, power money, all that good stuff. Interesting. And so I I told him and and then you know there was sort of this sentiment that like okay if you become a psychiatrist like you're not going to be
Speaker A
that important. You're not going to it's not going to be like that big of a deal but like look at where we are today and like mental health is is the number one thing that most people are struggling
Speaker A
with. And so I I think part of it's really scary because we're seeing all of these functions in our mind getting torn apart by social media, pornography, video games, gambling. Um, it's really scary and we we don't have the defense
Speaker A
mechanisms. I mean, I think there are things that we can do, but we don't really have the defenses built in, which is why everyone is getting crushed. A quick aside, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's
Speaker A
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Speaker A
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Speaker A
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Speaker A
That's drinklnt.com/modernism. What do you think happens to someone's brain when they engage in all three of those things daily?
Speaker A
Um, I think the the most synergistic effect is going to be the most fundamental. So your dopamineergic I would I would predict two things. One is anhidonia. So the inability to experience pleasure. So that's going to cause huge problems for trying to put
Speaker A
your life together because the part of your brain that rewards you for doing a good job won't be able to do that anymore. So the feeling of like oh I got an A on a test. Like literally you'll be
Speaker A
like blunted and and not be able to experience that. Um, one thing I started telling my patients that has helped them immensely in in dating or actually in falling in love is to not use their cell phone for
Speaker A
an hour before they go on a date. No screens. So, go for a walk because what what people don't realize is that your your dopamine is like you have a storage of dopamine and if you deplete it with a
Speaker A
screen, there's none left over until you go to sleep. People are comparing the level of stimulus that they had from their screen to the person that they're going on a first date with. It's not even that they're comparing. It's that there is no
Speaker A
dopamine left for them to experience pleasure. And if we look at what love is, love is literally a trickle of dopamine because like the presence of this person is like, "Oh my god, it feels amazing." Like, "I can't wait to be right next to
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you. Oh my god." It's just like being across from this person and your brain is flooded with dopamine. If your dopamine stores are empty, you're not going to feel any of that. And so people aren't falling in love anymore because
Speaker A
technology is draining our dopamine. Are you worried about GLPs impacting dopamine for people falling in love or cravings, I guess?
Speaker A
Yeah. So, they they do blunt cravings. This is where things get like really neuroscientifically like specific.
Speaker A
Um, so so they do blunt cravings, but they don't work directly on the dopamineergic circuitry.
Speaker A
So they they they work I mean everything's kind of tied together. So they're not. But what we do know that GLPS do so is they cap the amount of dopamineergic response that you can get.
Speaker A
That's part of the reason that they're kind of like good. So people with um so if you look at studies of people who use alcohol on GLPs, their desire for the first drink is the same. The number of
Speaker A
days that they drink doesn't go down. What decreases or what improves with alcohol is the number of drinks they have when they drink. So like after a hard day's work, if we're going to go to happy hour, like let's grab a beer. That
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desire is absolutely the same. What's blunted is the joy that I get from my first beer is blunted.
Speaker A
And so that's really what where GLP's work. Okay, so going back to someone doing all three of those things every day.
Speaker A
So anhidonia is number one. So the inability to experience pleasure. If you talk to these people, life will feel boring, which is why they want to pass the time, right? cuz I don't feel like doing anything.
Speaker A
Becomes a vicious cycle of life is boring, therefore I need to do more exciting stuff in order to make it less boring, which means more porn, more video games, more gambling.
Speaker A
Yeah. So, a lot of people don't realize this. So, you know, you know, in our body and brain wants stuff and then there's the physiologic signaling and then there's the subjective experience.
Speaker A
So, when you are when your liver is out of glycogen, I know you're pretty knowledgeable in this stuff and if you need some background, let me know. When your liver is out of glycogen, do you know what the subjective experience of
Speaker A
that is? Hunger. Okay. So, if you're calorically low, I you know, if your calories are low, you're going to feel hungry. Okay. So, if your if your cells have insufficient water, what do you think is the sufficient feeling of that?
Speaker A
This. Okay. Excellent. Um, now we get to the fun ones. What do you what is the subjective feeling of a dopamine craving when your brain wants dopamine?
Speaker A
Do you have any idea what that feels like? Novelty seeking. Yes. Yeah. But that's not what we feel.
Speaker A
It is novelty seeking. Boredom. Exactly. Hey. So what people don't realize is that if you are someone who is is unmotivated in life, if you are someone who finds life to be unpleasurable and you're struggling because life just
Speaker A
isn't fun anymore, boredom is the feeling of re-calibration of your dopamineergic circuitry. Do boredom is a dopamine craving, right? Because boredom induces you to seek novelty, to get that pleasure.
Speaker A
It's like novelty hunger. Exactly. Exactly. It's dopamine hunger, right? Y and the other cool super interesting thing, this is a random aside, but the feeling of neuroplasticity is confusion.
Speaker A
So, everyone wants neuroplasticity. They want to rewire their brain. No one wants to be confused. And so, being confused is very very very good in life. Um, which we can talk about if you want, but so kind of going back to your your your
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earlier question, what does this look like? So, anhidonia is at the top of the list. The second thing is distress intolerance. So these people will not be able to handle negativity in any way and emotional dysregulation. So there's
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going to be emotional numbing. And when the emotional numbing goes away, there's going to be too much emotion. M and the really scary thing about this is what a lot of people don't realize is when you're numb, it's not that you're emotional circuits
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are not working. You're just not aware of them. So a lot of times people who feel numb feel out of control in their life. They're like, I want to do this thing. I want to go to the gym. I should reach out to people.
Speaker A
But they can't bring themselves to do it. And that's actually because there's all kinds of emotions that are going on that are influencing and controlling your behavior.
Speaker A
You won't even feel the fear. Like why can't people apply for something? It's because there's actually this subsurface fear that we kind of dissociate from through things like technology and and people are like, I can't control my life. Yeah, that's because you have a
Speaker A
ton of dormant emotion that you are not aware of that is sending signals to parts of your brain to tell you not to do things. M but what people experience is like I need more discipline. I need more
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willpower. They don't realize that there's all this other input that is preventing them from acting.
Speaker A
What do they need these people? Let's say that someone resonates with that's me. I have the novelty seeking but kind of mundane. I'm doing it through the screen. I have the bit of anhidonia. I have the intolerance for boredom. If
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they don't need more discipline, which is kind of the go-to especially for men, right? like David Gogins montages and 4:30 a.m. ice lunges and stuff like that.
Speaker A
What does recovery from an intolerance to boredom look like? Great question. So, I think it starts with one question. What is the cost you're willing to pay?
Speaker A
Right? So, like if you look at David Gogggins, he'll pay any price. That's what makes him David Gogggins. I mean, I've never met the guy and I I try not to comment on people that I haven't met, but I've listened to enough of his
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stuff. And it's it's really interesting because if you listen to what he talks about, his mind is always thinking about cost and how to pay the cost.
Speaker A
And going back to what I was saying earlier about everything being free, you know, we live in a world where no one wants to pay anything. And this is what's so interesting is is when I work with people like this, it's like they're
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always running away from something bad. So, I'm isolated. And then when I I'm isolated and lonely, I'm tired of feeling that way. I'm going to go go to a party and then I'm socially anxious. So then I go home. So people
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are like people are people aren't stuck in life. They're they're swinging on this back and forth pendulum of being like bodied on one side and bodied on the other side. And what's really interesting about this, this is a a
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condition called ambivalence, which is internal conflict. And the really interesting thing about internal conflict is that anytime you start moving the cost is far away. And the further you move the more real the cost becomes.
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So as long as you were like so for let's say for example I want to get in shape.
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I want to get into shape. Easy to say that when I'm sitting at home once I go to the gym and once I start huffing and puffing now I'm paying the cost. So what motivates us right is the the goal like
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like the the the reward that we wanted at the end. That's what gets us moving and then at the very beginning we're thinking all about the reward and none about the cost. And once we actually do something we think we're experiencing
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the cost and we see zero of the reward. Right? So the first 10 times you go to the gym you're going to have zero improvements in your health that you're that is going to be visible. It's just going to be all suffering. And so this
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is what's really scary is we've we've become such a reward oriented society, right? And if you like look on the internet, right? Everyone's offering you value like do this and you'll get this, you'll get this, you'll get this, you'll
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get this. And so this is how we pull people by offering them rewards. And so what someone really needs to do is is grapple with the cost and kind of accept like and there are ways to do this.
Speaker A
There's all kinds of stuff that can be done. So one is first of all to to ask yourself what are you willing to pay right what's the price you're willing to pay what could an answer to that question
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look like 5 minutes a day right for five minutes a day I'm willing to stare at a blank page and struggle to put words on a p piece of paper right that cost could be I'm willing to travel
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to India and stay there for 3 months and see what happens so a big part of it is is focusing on the cost. Another huge part of it is focusing on uncertainty.
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What is your tolerance of uncertainty? Because we live in a world now where we want guarantees. We want to know, okay, we're going to ask Chat GPT which major will give me the best earning potential, right? And so what we really what people
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really need to do is this is crazy, but you no one can predict the future. And so you got to roll the dice. Like that's the only way to live life, right? You you have to take chances.
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um and and chances come with pain and suffering which is why it's it's kind of cost. So I I think really embracing the the bleakness to it and the good news is that this is very doable. Like people who struggle with things like
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uncertainty, they struggle with things like paying the cost. There are like methodologies that really really help people do that because this is something that is actually natural for us. Human beings have always dealt with uncertainty.
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But we've all been tricked into believing that there's no risk in life, you know, risk-f free, like get free stuff. Um, and then I think the third thing that's probably pretty helpful, two or three other things. One is
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emotional regulation. So, you need some way to manage your emotions when they come up. You can't keep running away from your emotions. And you can't keep preventing emotions or avoiding emotions. So, the problem is that most people will live a life where they try
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to avoid emotions. like how do I go to a party and not be socially anxious? And if you pay attention to people who ask for help on the internet, you'll notice that everything is conditional. How do I do
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this without this? How do I how do I ask this person out without messing things up at work? How that's what is you have to remove the conditional? You have to pay the cost. And then the last thing
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that I think is really, really, really important, amazing study. I think um there was something like 78 I'm rusty on the numbers. I think something like 70% of soldiers in Vietnam were using opioids or other drugs and only 9 to 12%
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continued to use them when they came back to the US with zero treatment. So a lot of people don't realize their their existence and and what they're capable of is largely created by their environment. So in my case, I had to
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travel to India and I stayed in an ashram for like 90 days and and I can teach these yogic techniques and there's there's good stuff that can be taught and people you know you can DIY this stuff from from home but what a lot of
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people don't really appreciate I think is that the this gets a bit philosophical but your mind is actually not you it's part of your environment.
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So I don't know if this makes sense but like you struggle against your mind right like most people do that which means that you are over here and your mind is over here the way to make your mind calm is first of all your mind is
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part of your environment and then the way to make your mind calm is through your through its environment so the food that you give it the the circumstances that you're in even these little things like you were saying you used to play
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Borderlands and you'd hang out with your friends like all that kind of stuff is shaping your mind right so how lonely do you feel. And if your mind feels less lonely, getting it to do things is like way easier.
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Is that one of the big levers? Loneliness. Just wonder why you went to that as opposed to how spacious the [ __ ] vista is that you walk out of on a bedroom morning. I I think I think loneliness is one of the
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things that the human mind does not do well with. So, human mind does really well with solitude. Solitude is amazing.
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Loneliness is terrible. So human beings, the human mind is not designed to be lonely. This is why ostracization is it used to be a death sentence, right? So to be to be kicked out of the group was like exile was like is just as bad as
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death. At the risk of sounding like a prude, is there a safe way to gamble, watch porn, and play video games every day?
Speaker A
Absolutely, 100%. It's just that you the thing should do what it is designed to do. So the moment that gambling, pornography, or video games become a substitute for other things in your life, it's game over.
Speaker A
So I play video games. Um, and I teach my kids to play video games.
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Like I love playing video games. It's great. I used to be addicted. Now I'm not. So the good news is with behavioral addictions, it's not quite like alcoholism where it's like one drink and it's like game over. Even that is
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somewhat mythological. It's only some people who are like that. Um the majority of people who qualify for an alcohol addiction in college will still be drinking but not qualify for an addiction in adulthood. So yeah, I I think as long as you are have a happy
Speaker A
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at checkout. That's limme n.com/modernwisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Of the roughly 75% of men who are doing one of those three things every day or one in eight that are doing all three of them every day, how many of them do you think
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are doing that from a place of valition and are sort of choosing and how much of them do you think are compulsive or addicted?
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I'd say compulsive and addictive is 95%. Wow. Yeah. I mean, I'm tempted to say 99, but that's probably statistically wrong.
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Just what What I think about is you saying, and I agree, the modern world makes people feel really displaced in many ways. And there aren't a whole number of previously more accessible solutions to that. The displacement is salved, unfortunately, by things that
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people judge or that might might have some side effects that wouldn't have done previously. Um so you know on one side you have this kind of increased burden that people are trying to fix with novel solutions but all of the
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novel solutions come with these side effects that are both social and internally shameful and externally judged and then potentially neurologically catastrophic financially ruinous sexually dysfunctional like there's all of these [ __ ] things going on but you have this increased burden with these
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increased novel solutions solutions squaring that circle just seems hard and I think a lot of People will feel like well [ __ ] like I've got so few opportunities in front of me. Can I not get some pleasure? God is there nothing
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that I can do? I can't have any fund at the moment. I can't get any uh lots of people are using it to solve them. It's an artificial solution to an artificial problem which is painful if it's not
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fixed. Yes. So, so my answer to that is there are new problems and as we're saying new solutions don't really fix new problems. M so this is where I go back to if you want to fix new problems you need old
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solutions the old solutions that have worked for thousands of years the old solutions that go to the fundamental of what people are right so if you look at some of these contemplative traditions and there's a reason why like mindfulness and stuff is
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exploding it's because it's what works and it it's always worked and so I mean so many of the problems that we talk about finding purpose like all all this I mean I deal with these people day in and day out I deal with men and women
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who are living in a society where they don't just feel displaced they are displaced there's no there's no pl it's not displaced there's no space for them anymore and so how do you grapple with a world that AI is taking your job inflation is
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an all-time high gender dynamics are at an all-time toxicity the the problem is that no actually no one is living in the real world anymore everyone is living in a construction of social media algorithms.
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And so, how do you fix this? You go back to like the fundamental of who you are. And this gets kind of weird, but like all of that crap enters you at some point. So, inflation, fine.
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At some point, when you go to the store and you try to buy something, you have a $10 bill and you can only get one thing instead of two things. that has an internal psychological impact into you.
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And I think the problem with all of the artificial solutions is because they don't focus on the one thing that you can really control which is yourself.
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That's the only thing you can control. And here we are having a lot of people offering us solutions that semiglutide is a great example. Remove the need to work on yourself.
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All of our solutions have people not working on themselves. which is exactly why we're seeing a whole scale deconditioning of our body, our mind, our critical thinking.
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It's all of the outcomes without any of the inputs. You're able to lose weight without the traditional input.
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Yeah. So, that's a good way to put it. And I would say it's like it's all of the outcomes without the inputs. And really all of the outcomes and some of those outcomes aren't good.
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Yeah. Right. So, it's it's writing a paper. This is what's really fascinating. AI usage improves grades and decreases knowledge.
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Right. So you're right. It's it's all of the outcomes. It is it is a deconditioning of people. Whole scale.
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Well, GLPs, I would guess for people starting under a BMI of 30 would probably decrease body fat and decrease health.
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Uh I don't BMI under 30 are probably still have a positive effect. So, so they largely have positive effects from most people that take them.
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But how many of those people are going to overshoot? How many of those people that are using them already aren't eating a well-balanced uh micronutrient rich diet that is now being chopped in by 2/3 or half. So, a spar nutrient
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sparse diet has now turned into a uh calor caloric deficit nutrient sparse diet, which means that the [ __ ] tiny little bottom filtering of nutrients you were getting has been cut down too. Uh I How many people were using
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foods to cope with their emotional issues and now they don't even have that to do?
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Yeah. So, so this is it's all great questions. So, here's a couple of answers. The first is one of the most important pieces of advice that I give to people, this is family, friends, patients, whatever, when they start a
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GLP. I mean, usually I don't prescribe GLP, so somebody else should be doing this, but if I have a patient who's on it, I try to tell them remember to eat.
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So, so, uh, they just don't feel like eating. And so, so you're right that I think we're starting to see like nutritional problems with with some of these people. Um, and then I I think on balance though, given how bad people's
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diets are, I think there's there's a lot of data that GLPs are like really good, you know, and and I'm not saying that they're not good when you look at those indicators, but there are these hidden costs like maybe we'll see micronutrient
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deficiency. And here's the real answer to all of your questions. We don't know, right? They've hit the market and and we don't have any long-term surveillance data on what this is going to do to people. They're also designed for
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people, originally designed for people. And most of the longerterm studies, which are still relatively novel, were done on people that were morbidly obese because it was built for diabetes, right? Built around diabetes originally.
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I mean, that depends on whether you want me to put my tinfoil hat on or not.
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Oh, yeah. So, here's here's my tinfoil hat. The captain's hat. Okay. So, here's here's my tin foil hat.
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I do have a disguise actually. So, you wanted to put some I I would not be surprised one bit if we discovered many years from now that the same thing that happened with opioids is what's happening with GLPS.
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So, were they designed for morbid obesity or did the companies that developed them understand very clearly that this is a medicine that will make someone not want to eat?
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And so they they move forward and and they weren't designed for obesity. They were designed to help people not eat.
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And there's a subtle difference there. Then what happen and I I don't know if that makes sense, but like like they they know there's a very good chance that they actually there's not a very good chance. We have no idea, but if I
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put my tin foil hat on, they damn well know that this is a medicine that everyone is going to want to take because everyone is want gonna want to lose weight. Everyone wants to be pretty. This is the age of social media.
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We are going to give people a medicine that takes away their cravings. That's what they're designed to do is to take away cravings. Now, here's the subtle important part here.
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They were tested in people with obesity because in order to get a drug through something, you have to show a certain amount of benefit.
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But I think the incredibly rapid adoption of using them off label for people who don't fit the clinical criteria, that's like one hell of an interesting thing. Right. So like cuz they were able to predict who the end
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users of this product be, not the people that were in the original clinical trials.
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Exactly. Right. So there's a very real possibility that we will find that. And if we find that, the reason we would find that is because things really get to be a problem. This is exactly what happened with opioids, right? So people
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damn well knew or actually not opioids. This is what hap well opioids as well, but this is also what happened with benzo. Okay, so benzoazipines like Xanax the Alprazilam or Xanax is one of the first benzo that came out and there is
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like very little doubt in my mind that the drug companies who this is going to get technical, okay? So if you really want to understand conspiracy stuff, you have to understand the science. So, everyone got addicted to Xanax. Why? It's because Xanax has a
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very rapid onset. So, the faster something hits your body Mhm. the more addictive it is. So, now cocaine.
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Yeah. Exactly. Right. So, so what happened is we now have benzoazipines, later bzzoipines that are less addictive and hit your system slower. A good example of this is clinazipam. So you can still get addicted to glinazipam but alprazilam
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which is annex hits your system like that. Glinazipam hits it more slowly and also lasts longer. So the the faster it hits you and the faster it wears off the more addictive it is. This is crack cocaine. Okay. Meth and alpresim
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hits you fast goes away fast. Dasopam which is valium hits you fast but stays for a long time. So now we're moving away from those addictive ones. Here's a really fascinating thing. Everyone talks about GLPs like they're the same thing.
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They're not the same thing. Zepide, semiglutide, they're not the same. They all have different penetrations to the CNS. Okay? So, where all of these GLPs go is actually different. So, if you look at studies on reductions in alcohol cravings and
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alcohol addiction, they're not the same for all GLPs because they have different CNS penetration. So, they enter your brain at different rates.
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Okay? So, like it I'm not sure, but like the the conspiracy theorist in me really wonders whether they know exactly what what's happening, which is that they're going to release this medicine on the market.
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And it's not about obesity. Like, sure, it helps people with obesity a ton, but they damn well know that the majority of prescribing is going to be off label.
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They damn well know that people will pay out of pocket for it because it'll make them thin. We have a medication that makes you thin, which previously we used to have medications that will, you know, I forget what the I'm blanking on the
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the name now, but because no one prescribes it, but there were medications that prevent fat absorption in in the gut, right? So, this was like a weight loss medication, which is great.
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So, here's the problem, Chris. If I present prevent fat absorption in the gut and I eat fat, where does it go?
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Through your digestive tract. Yes. Into the toilet. Yes. Actually, not into the toilet. That's where you're wrong because one of the key um so bad. One of the key side effects of these these fat blockers is anal leakage.
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It's a it's a technical term. Depends. Yeah. Do you know what anal leakage is?
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Isn't this the [ __ ] that like people accuse EPG of causing? I don't know.
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Okay. But like this is what Do I know what anal leakage is? Yeah. A poop that you can't keep in your butt.
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Exactly. And it's a trickle. It's a leak. Okay. Right. So, so, so this was the the last weight loss drug. I mean, not not the last one, but this is like a weight loss drug, right, that people, but it just
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had side effects that were completely unacceptable. Oh. And so, GLP's like there's a there's a very real chance that someone somewhere and and I'm not I don't think like pharma is evil and bad and stuff like that. I think a lot of pharmacologic I
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mean no one's complaining about acetaminophen today, right? So, like drug developers develop a lot of amazing things amazing developments like for CML and and stuff like that. Halol.
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Haloperodol is an amazing medication. SSRIs are amazing medications. I'm not like anti-farma, but I I I really wonder when I see something that has such rapid adoption that does so many things like people who, you know, do they know it's really
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a miracle drug when they release it? I like I sometimes wonder whether they know exactly what they're doing and that we're going to see postmarket surveillance 20 years from now, 30 years from now, in the same way way that we did with benzo in the same
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way that we did with um uh opioids, right? Everyone's like, "Yeah, Oxycontton has a long halflife. People aren't going to get addicted to it." They they knew people were going to get addicted. Well, the the only way that
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your theory isn't true is if the most well-funded pharma research companies in the world didn't foresee what would potentially be the biggest drug market on the planet and they have happily closed their eyes, thrown the dart, and the dots hit the bullseye in the middle
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of the dart board and they were like, "Ah, look at this." Yeah. So, so anorexics just happened to be a trillion dollar drug.
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Yeah. So, so I mean that could be. So, so maybe what they were doing is is I mean I think everyone knows that weight loss is a multi-billion dollar market.
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There's no question about that. I don't think there's anything nefarious in that. And then they came up with a medication that in clinical trials reduces cardiac mortality, reduces heart diabetes, which is an amazing thing, right? So, I don't think they're evil,
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but I still wonder whether they know, you know, or or whether they like deep down deep down do they know.
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You talked about numbing earlier on. I've heard you talk about the need for young men to retrain their penis.
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Yes. What's going on there? The the mother of all nons from from anal leakage to retraining your penis. Let's go. Okay. So, this is okay. How how do I Okay, so first thing, Chris, what is training?
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Uh applying efforts to increase capacity. Okay. Um how do you train my penis? Anything just the concept of training.
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What do we do when you train? Practice in a manner that is akin to a performance that will come in future.
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Okay. So repetitive practice, right? So here's the basic problem. I'm a teenage boy and I discover pornography and I have an erection and at some point I start masturbating and then this is becoming a problem now because my access to pornography is at
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an all-time high. My access to a healthy sexual relationship is an all-time low. So whereas you know so so now what's happening is for maybe 15 years I'm using a certain kind of stimulation for my penis and just to
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give you uh okay so I'm using a certain kind of stimulation for my penis and then the body gets used to that right so in the same way that like if I eat spicy foods starting when I'm 13 like I can
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handle spicy food when I'm 15 so the body gets used caffeine. It gets the whole point of the body is that it adapts to whatever you give it.
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So, we literally we're training our body to tolerate spicy food. We're training our body to run a marathon. We're training our genitals and and our our penis to ejaculate in c certain circumstances.
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So, we see a a shockingly high level of erectile dysfunction. I'd learned from you 40% of men are dealing with erectile dysfunction.
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Yeah. So, I think it's 30% of people under the age of 30, which erectile dysfunction, maybe I said 40%, I don't remember the exact statistic, but erectile dysfunction used to be an old man's disease. It's not anymore. And
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what a lot of people don't realize, do you know what erectile dysfunction is? No.
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Okay. So, this obviously. Okay. Okay. So, too easy. Yeah, that's that's a good one. So erectile dysfunction is defined as the inability to maintain an erection through the completion of the sexual act. Okay.
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Okay. So the interesting thing about the young men, 30% of people under the age of 30 who have erectile dysfunction, it's not that they can't get hard, it's that they can't stay hard enough to finish if they're having intercourse,
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let's say. Okay? And there's a really simple reason for that. the I was going to ask a couple questions, but I doubt you got the answer. So, the the the PSI, the the pounds per square inch of your hand, okay, the amount of
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force that you can exert with your fist, Mhm. is about 130. Now, there's there's some problems with that because you're actually you measure uh hand grip strength not by force, but by Newtons, but sorry, not by PSI, but by Newtons,
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but there's a rough conversion. Okay, there's about 130 the PSI of the vagina is like 30.
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So if you just if you just in this you may not know but you know the vagina exerts a certain amount of pressure and tightness and then the hand exerts a different level of tightness and they're not even in the same vein. So basically
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what happens with a lot of dudes who spend 15 years of their life watching pornography and masturbating, it's not just about gender stuff or the the jiggliness or the angles of porn. And there's all that stuff too. There's a
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very simple physiologic thing where this is what you need to finish. You need a very high level of stuff. And I mean, I I've worked with u men in their 60s who will um not be able to climax
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through oral sex or vaginal intercourse. And so when they have when they engage in in sexual intercourse, either they have to finish using their hand or they have to engage in anal sex. Those are the the two things that work. Um and and
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so this it's just physiology. It's just what you've you've trained your penis to respond to.
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What's the pounds per square inch of an [ __ ] Um I don't know, but I I This is important research.
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I I I I imagine it's probably north of 100. Really? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Especially if you Yeah.
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You know. Yeah. So I It's got to be high. I mean it's it's certainly way higher than I mean the the there's a anyway a couple sphincters in there and but they're they're quite strong but but so so this is what's going on.
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So, so men have basically and there's all kinds of other issues like um cardiovascular issues, sedentary lifestyle. That's a good good question here because I think when people hear erectile dysfunction in men, what they probably go to is like an uninformed
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person or even a well-informed person, they go um well that is low testosterone, that is uh obesity, that is uh mental stimulus desensitization due to extreme uh fisherian runaway acts in porn uh and seeing unrealistic or tail end
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representations of women in porn. Uh that is due to psychological nervousness. Far fewer will go to how much nitric oxide are you consuming from your [ __ ] leafy greens and your beetroots?
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What's the level of cardiac health that you've got? Um, what's the death grip comparison between your right hand and a vagina of the culprits causing erectile dysfunction among men, young men?
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How how would you sort of partition off that pie? So, so this is something that I've been dragged kicking and screaming into becoming an expert in.
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So, let's start with testosterone because specialist subject. Let's [ __ ] go. This is this is the biggest scam that is being perpetrated against men.
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Okay. So around the year 2000 the average testosterone for a man was about 612 to 690 nanogs per deciliter. Okay.
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So 20 years later the average testosterone for a man has dropped to about 400. Okay.
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That's significant in a short space of time. It is significant in a short space of time and it is well within the acceptable limits. Right. So it it there so so has testosterone dropped? Yes. Has it dropped by a third? Yes. Does this
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cause physiologic problems? Almost certainly not. Second thing. So what's the testosterone drop due to? There is an effect from obesity but it is even if you factor out obesity there's still a testosterone drop.
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Next thing I have a theory on that. Can I hear my theory? Do you want to keep going? Sure.
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Okay. So this is my theory. Men's testosterone is mediated by their environment. If we had a bunch of weapons around here now, our testosterone would be higher. If we started picking them up and waving them around, our testosterone would be high.
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Not much, but like a little bit. Another thing that mediates male testosterone is the fertility of the women that they're near. If you're spending a lot of time around women who are giving off the cues, largely pherommones, but also
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visual cues of being fertile, that will increase testosterone, not by an insignificant amount. Um, if you were a man that somehow was stranded on a desert island, some hunter gatherer man, stranded on a desert island with a bunch
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of children, a bunch of grandmothers, your testosterone would be less. Okay. Uh, I think, and I've spoken to Dr. Sha Swan about this, etc., etc. Um, one of the X- factors, my like tinfoil hat X factor thing is the artificial
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suppression of fertility by women increasing their use of hormonal birth control is causing and the solitude of men spending less time around women is a contributor that hasn't been fully factored in to the decrease in testosterone.
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And that's a fascinating especially the birth control. And don't [ __ ] test me, dude, on this tinfoil hat stuff. That's what I'm about. Yes, Dr. [ __ ] me. So, I know we have a lot of important things that
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matter to people to talk about, but one day we have to put our tinfoil hats on and and just go off the rails.
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I have a I have a hat that says make autism great again. Yes. Okay, interesting.
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Cool. Um, so first one was testosterone scam doesn't really seem to is there a level question. Is there a level of testosterone that it gets below where erectile function begins to be impacted?
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Yes, that's where I'm going next. So 5% of erectile dysfunction is due to testosterone deficiency. Specifically we call that hypogonatism. So so basically 95% of erectile dysfunction is not due to testosterone.
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Don't worry about your testosterone. Okay. Um and I I think that the things that you said are certainly factors for lowering testosterone. I think there's also really other simple little things like sedentary lifestyle. We've become more sedentary. I think the largest uh
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don't skip lag day. Right. So, one of the the greatest endogenous signals that stimulate testosterone production is like stress in your quadriceps muscles.
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Big muscles. Yeah. So, the bigger your muscles and quads are about about as big as they get.
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Yep. So, don't skip leg day. Huge. The other thing that you touched on which I think a lot of people for forget, the penis is not like a endocrine organ.
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It's a vascular organ. Right. So, testosterone is a hormone. It travels in very small quantities all throughout your body and does all kinds of things everywhere in your body. The penis is first and foremost a vas vascular organ.
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It's basically a a tube that fills up with blood. So the number one thing that improves actually I don't know if this is true but if one of the things Yeah. So one of the things that is very
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very very important for penile retraining and penis health is cardiovascular health. The stronger your heart is the stronger your cardiovascular system is the the healthier your penis will be. the longer you will be able to maintain an erection. Even the size of your erection
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depends on you know how much blood goes into the corpus cabinosum and the corpus spongiosum which are anatomical parts.
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There's also valves that become really important and this is where you mentioned nitrous oxide. So if we look at selenaphil which is Viagra it's a it's a nitrous oxide increases the levels of nitrous oxide basically it's a phosphodiestraase
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5 inhibitor. So it prevents the breakdown of nitrous oxide and nitrous oxide is what causes the penis to swell.
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So cardiovascular health is huge. And then there are so if we're talking about this penile retraining regimen um there are a couple things that you have to do. The first is it takes about 10 days to 2 weeks for
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things in your body to start shifting. Okay. So first thing is if we look at about 50% of men will have a nocturnal emission after 7 days without any ejaculation.
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50%. Yeah. No way. I think it's ballpark 50%. I'm not 100% sure on I love the term nocturnal emission as well. It's my [ __ ] favorite.
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So what that means is if you don't have intercourse and you don't tug one out, the body starts to recalibrate and we'll say 50% of men is like okay like we got to get rid of some of this stuff. So
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that'll happen. Mhm. So once you hit 2 weeks then you know the the likelihood of nocturnal emission goes up and and this twoe number is like ma magical in the body. So even if you look at the hypertrophy of muscles so if
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you if you stop working out if you don't lift weights after about 10 days is when you really start to see a loss of the the mass of your muscles. So this this twoe period is really important. So, I
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think if you're like retraining your penis, you got to do it. You got to you got to give yourself two weeks. Okay?
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So, um don't skip penis day. So, penis day is leg day. So, you want to work out your legs. You want to improve your cardiovascular health. The more that you work out, like the healthier your penis will become.
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Second thing is you you need to abstain. I think it's probably a good idea to abstain from if you really want to retrain your penis. And usually the the situation in which this becomes acutely important is if you start a sexual
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relationship. We'll get to the anxiety and stuff at the end because that's a whole conversation. But so when when you're you know if you're going to get laid for like 10 days like don't tug one out. We'll get to some other conspiracy
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tin foil hat stuff about, you know, premature ejaculation and stuff like that, but um so so give yourself about 2 weeks and then and then, you know, as dudes know, like if you haven't tugged one out, you're going to nut fast, which
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is like the goal. Okay, so that's what's we don't want to avoid nutting fast.
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We'll get to that in a second. Um but it's okay to not fast. That's actually like a good thing to do. And then if your penis is if you're able to complete a sexual act um then you know
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you're on the right path because the problem with erectile dysfunction is you can't maintain an erection through the completion of the sexual act.
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So next thing that we want to do is loose grip and lots of lube. So we want to mimic the 30 PSI. Okay. So, this is something that is very, very difficult and frustrating for dudes to do, which
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is why I recommend the buddy system, right? So, if you have trouble doing doing a loose grip, you can ask a friend of yours to use some lube and and make sure that the grip stays loose and such a left turn. Such a left turn. Hey,
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dude, sit in sit in a cup chair in the corner and warn me if I get above 30 PSI.
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Yeah. So, so so it's it's hard, right? So it's I mean it's not Oh no, which is the issue. Yeah.
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All right. So penis jokes galore. Let's go. Correct. So um but yeah. So so you have to loosen your group grip, use lots of lube. Y um that'll that'll do pretty well. Then there's the pornography stuff where I
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think the the more you if you're waiting a week, right, and then you are engaging in masturbation, best if you don't use porn and let your thoughts do the work for you. Mhm.
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And that opens up a whole other really interesting thing which is like addressing premature ejaculation or inability to ejaculate is your mind is like an incredibly important organ to control your sex.
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Point and shoot. I don't understand. Oh, point and shoot's the uh parasympathetic sympathetic seesaw.
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That's the way that they get taught at med school in the UK. Yeah. Yeah. So point and shoot. We get taught the same thing.
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Oh. So like so when I have patients who struggle with premature ejaculation, one of the things that I'll tell them to do is like think nonsexual thoughts. So math problems is really well like do like factors like prime factor analysis,
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things like that. Okay? And and because if if you think about like if you're a dude who's had, you know, good sex before, you know, like getting into it is like a big part of it. So, so even when I talk to um you
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know partners or people who are engaged who want to do certain kinds of sexual exploration with things like anal intercourse and stuff like that, the mentality becomes really important for sex. Like so what what is going on in
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your head, right? So you said point and shoot which means parasympathetic and then sympathetic. Parasympathetic is relaxation. So this is why for if if you're trying to engage in in sex, you're trying to engage in the sex, right? So especially I mean this is
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really true for women but is also true for men especially if they have anxiety induced issues. You want to be really really really relaxed, right?
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Um and so if you're relaxed, blood flow increases to your genital organs and then you start to have thoughts and those thoughts will excite you and that excitement in your mind, the dirty thoughts that you have will help you climax. M.
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So then the other thing that that you need to do and this is why this is where it gets tricky is so then you can control like how long you last. Okay.
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So if you have premature ejaculation, you want to do math problems in your head or or think about what you learned on modern wisdom. Just really picture Chris Williamson in your mind.
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Y So you want to think about other things if you have premature ejaculation. And on the flip side, if you have difficulty finishing, you want to think sexual thoughts. M and this is where pornography becomes tricky because pornography outsources
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your sexual thinking cuz it's providing you with all the stimul doesn't have the same sensory input as pornography. So the angles are different. You don't get to see all the same things the things that you may be aroused by. Um, you know, there's the
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feel is different, like I think largely in a good way, but there's also things like smells and there's like quefing and like like little, you know, there's a lot of playfulness and stuff like that.
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So, it's it's just a different experience. So, the more that you can kind of get turned on in your head, the easier it will be to finish. And so, this is like one of the weirdest things.
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Like this is as a psychiatrist this is like not what they teach you in med school and no one talks about but you know part of when I work with people with erectile dysfunction is we will we will work through getting aroused you
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know and not like in the office but like let's think about can you in your mind evoke things that get you turned on and the more that you outsource to porn the harder that that is. So this is
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absolutely trainable which is the really cool thing. So research also shows that all of this high levels of erectile dysfunction uh in young men is largely reversible without even medication.
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So numerous studies show that if you improve your cardiovascular health, you cut back on pornography, addiction, things like that. This is all basically repairable. This is why we get to training, right? So your your your physiology, your neuroscience and your
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psychology have been trained to engage in sexuality ejaculate in a particular way. And through a period of retraining, you can get it to re-calibrate to what is biologically what we're more suited for, which is why it's like actually pretty doable, which
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is why there's a lot of hope for it. Jared, you ever considered you might have a drinking problem?
Speaker A
I don't consider a lot, Chris. Well, you drank an entire case of Athletic Brew and Co. last night, but they're non-alcoholic.
Speaker A
And that's not a problem. Sorry, man. I kept chugging. Wait for the regret to creep in. Never happened.
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Didn't you end up going home with that chick with the lazy eye? I didn't seem lazy to me.
Speaker A
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What about the social anxiety? What about it? I'm in front of someone. Oh my god, what if I'm gonna I'm gonna lose the thing?
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Like too much pressure. Yeah. So I think one of the key things that we don't really have cognizance of as a society is that a sexual relationship is something that you work on. Like the first time that you have sex with a so
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I've been married for 15 years. Okay. And I mean not to go into too much detail but I'm I'm relatively satisfied and I'm pretty sure my wife is too. I mean you'd have to ask her. But like we're better at it now than we were 20
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years ago, right? And you just don't know someone's body the way like the first time, right? It it's not even about the size of your penis. Like this is what pornography teaches all these wrong things that the manlier you are,
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the the better lay the bigger your dick is. Like this is where people don't understand. It's a really big dick. Most women don't prefer really big dicks because the cervix, if you're bumping against the back of the vagina where the
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cervix is, that is incredibly painful. Um, the majority of the nerve endings in the vagina are in the first 3 in. Okay?
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So, when I'm working with my patients, I tell them have sex the opposite way that you park, which is you want to bump into the walls as much as possible. So, so you want to go in at like angles and
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there's a lot of like skill which if what if you want to talk about I mean there's there's so much skill at at sexual satisfaction and and you just like if you're a novice and you suck at it like that's okay.
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Like the first time you get on a horse is anyone expecting you to be an expert and and with sex it's a whole new horse you know if you're have a new partner it's like a whole new person who has
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their own particular things that turn them on things that that attract them. And one of the really I mean so I've been doing this deep study for many years is like I'll because I'll talk to my patients about sex and I'll take like
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copious notes about okay what actually works right in real human relationships in people who are going through couples counseling or on the verge of divorce because somebody is sexually unsatisfied in cases of bad dead bedroom what actually works and there's all kinds of
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stuff that people don't realize I mean simplest of which is I tried to find data for this I really couldn't but I tin foil hat I'm convinced that.
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Okay. I'm convinced that semen in the vagina improves the intensity of orgasm for a woman. I'm convinced. The best data that I've got is there are some studies that show that compounds in the semen can be found in
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the bloodstream of a woman after sex. And some people have investigated whether some of the compounds of semen have anti-depressant prop properties.
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And the short answer is there we don't it doesn't there's not a clear answer to that question. But I think the biggest mistake men make like this is such a simple thing. Oh, I came too fast.
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That's not a problem, bro. The the problem the question is do you finish her when you're done?
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Right? And then something really weird can happen which is if you finish first and then you do a good job afterward.
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There is a Pavlovian response of finishing and then this is the most arousing thing for your partner because as long as you do a good job afterward.
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So this is like one of these things where like we like this is dudes getting worried about this. Like if you premature ejaculation, research shows, first of all, the average sexual act lasts 3 to seven minutes and that 50% of women want it to
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be over at 15 minutes. So you need to last for 15 minutes, which is really doable with math problems and retraining.
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And then you just make sure that you, you know, you don't leave her hanging.
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Have you looked at any data around whether women have got an equivalent problem with vibrators and sex toys that are industrial strength stimulation devices?
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I haven't looked at a whole lot of data, but this is what I the female death grip.
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Yeah. So, so, so that is almost certainly true with a couple of caveats. So, some research shows that 70% of women are unable to climax without clitoral stimulation.
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Mhm. Okay. That's kind of the ballpark number, which means that penetrative intercourse isn't going to do the trick.
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So, enter the vibrator. And and so the vibrator also has a very particular motion which absolutely can get trained towards.
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If if you had to ask me like my clinical opinion, I think that women are much more I I hate to make gender- based comparisons, but there's some truth to this. I think women are much more cerebral with their sexuality.
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No, I don't think you need to make generalizations to that. Look at the romantic genre.
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Ex. Exactly. Right. So, so this is where this is where the I mean does vi does using a vibrator can someone get dependent on a vibrator? Very possibly.
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vibrator dependency and but then the other issue is what is the skill of their partner at clitoral stimulation right and there's all kinds of things that are like so a vibrator provides very very intense consistent stuff that gets people off but having worked with
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with you know a lot of people around sexual gratification in their relationship which includes like people in their 60s um I've had patients who have never had an orgasm until their 60s and then you know we're talking about
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something else and they have cancer and now they're in remission. And I mean, it it's it really is a it's a I I know that people make jokes about sexuality, but like this is something that I really don't I'm not judgmental towards, right?
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And and I want to help people have sexual relationships that are very healthy and fulfilling no matter who you are.
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And and so it provides a very specific kind of stimulation. But I'd say that a vibrator is kind of like tugging one out in that there's nothing else involved.
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So, a couple things that I'd say about that is that, you know, the the kind of stimulation that you can provide is drastically different if you're a human.
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So, the whole labia is very sensitive. Um, and this is where things get really really technical, but like if you look at the anatomy of the clitoris, the anatomy of the clitoris has a fold and then it has a bead of tissue underneath.
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That is what in men um you know under the influence of testosterone is what becomes the glands of our penis. So the the the embryologically the tissue in the clitoris and the tissue of the glands of the penis are the same.
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And then if you think about if you're a dude and you're trying to figure out okay how do I make I'm going to just how do I make a woman come right if she's used a lot of vibrator. You got to think
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about the clitoris the way that you would think about the head of your penis which is not you don't just like apply a lot of pressure just right at the head right you're going to use the whole shaft. I can't remember who it was that
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I had on the show, but he sent me with the book. Every book gifting that he posted out came with a 3D printed model of what the inside or the the the entire structure of the clitoris looked like.
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And I couldn't get over the fact that I was adamant it it looked like a Pokémon.
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It looked a lot like a Pokémon. And I couldn't look at it any longer. I couldn't look at this thing. I've got the book on the left of the screen as I'm talking to him and this thing to the
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to the the other side. And every time that I looked at it, I started grinning.
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So I was like, that's a Pokemon. That is that is a that was all that was all I could think about.
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Yeah, I I can see that for sure. And so I think that like a lot of dudes don't realize like okay, so like don't be intimidated by female genitalia, right?
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Like you you you don't and you don't have to just do straight clitoral stimulation. There's a lot of stuff around there. There's also lots of like different kinds of motions and strokes that a vibrator can't do, which can feel
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really good. You have a competitive advantage over the robots. That's what you're saying. Yeah. You're a human and you you can learn whereas it can't.
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Mhm. Right. And until the AI sex toys come along. A and I and I I think that you know learning about your partner's body in a calm, compassionate, curious, loving way is usually something that your partners are okay with. And what I literally mean
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is if you just want to like, you know, don't like get a speculum and and make it medical, but you know, if you're just touching your partner, just touching different things and try to get a sense of like, okay, what does my partner
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like? Like if I touch in this way, if you just simply cup the area around the vagina with like, you know, your hand like this, like that can feel really good for some people. Um you there's all kinds of like gradients of motion which
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is the biggest mistake that men make I think when they when they have sex with women is they they focus on the orgasm.
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The orgasm is the end right? It it's like no one wants to watch the last five minutes of a movie right even though it's the best part. Like the whole point is the whole thing. And the slower that
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you take it that I think the better off it'll be. And like by all means learn if you premature ejaculate and you have difficulty, you know, getting your partner off because she's dependent on a vibrator, first of all, you can use the
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vibrator. Freees you up to do other things. There's a lot of other erogynous zones that you can put your full attention on, which is not bad at all.
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You can complete your math problems more quickly. Uh yeah. Well, um I'm confused about the reference. I'm having trouble plugging it into my Well, you can outsort. You would do You said you've got to think you do do your
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calculus in your brain. Yeah, I was I was more thinking about so I I need to double task at the same I need to complete my calculus problems and you know the sex thing can just continue. So, so if you're talking about
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penetrative intercourse with the use of a vibrator, yeah, you can absolutely do that and then do your mouth problems at the same time. But I mean there's a lot of other erogynous zones that you can focus on like breast tissue big, you
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know, the butt is also something that you can utilize to your advantage. Um, but also like the nape of the neck, the clavicle, like all of these areas behind the ears, like I know this is we're getting pretty graphic now, but like
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you know these are all areas that you can put a lot of attention to. And if the vibrator's taken care of the [ __ ] then you can move on to other things.
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Wonderful. Speaking of that, yeah, you mentioned earlier on uh some of the loneliness stats that are going out at the moment.
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It's hard to imagine whatever it is like the number of men with six or more close friends has decreased by basically half like 55% to 27%. Uh men with no friends at all has jumped from 3% to 15%. Seems
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like a big deal. It's hard to imagine that these things, male loneliness and compulsive behaviors are unrelated.
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How do you come to think about how AI might sort of factor into this when we've got people with AI partners and AI friends? I don't know whether you've seen any information on the number of people that have got an AI friend or
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partner, but I are you concerned about what this might cause in future for an increase in loneliness and loneliness and compulsive behavior now fed through AI?
Speaker A
Yeah. So, I mean, not even in the future. I think we're already seeing it. So, I I I don't know the current statistics because they're changing so rapidly. Like, if you have numbers on what percentage of people have an AI girlfriend, I I don't
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know. I don't have the stats at my fingertips. see if uh chat GBT can say how many people it's in a relationship with. Please sh Jared.
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So I I think we see the same thing that we tend to see with AI, which is that it improves things in the short term and makes things worse in the long term. So I there's a ton of studies that I've
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read that show that if you ask someone when you use an AI companion, do you feel less lonely? And they'll say yes, I feel less lonely. And then if you ask them what is your isolation over time, that that will go up,
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right? So what AI does is it helps you feel better now. So I can use AI to once again write a paper, but I'm not going to learn the material. So you can use it to assuage your feelings in the moment
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and then over time it'll isolate you even further. And and and one of the scariest examples of this is like sort of this AI induced psychosis which I don't know if you've run across but this is happening like more and more. There's
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a really scary paper that found that basically within nine messages you can AI will like polarize you completely. So I if I if I talk to an AI and I say hey I'm worried that people at work may not like me within nine rounds
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of back and forth you will be convinced that no one at work likes you. So AI has this fundamental sycopancy that it because it agrees with you right so you can even tell like so so like 19% have an AI design so do this now let's
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ask is this is chat GPT say I don't think that's correct I think that you're missing some nuance and that AI relationships are not as important as you think so let's just disagree with it and see what happens I don't think
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you're factoring in nuance from internet discussions or peer-reviewed research. Let's see what happens. I'm sorry. I I I realize that.
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Let's see. I actually did a D. Right. So, so there's studies and and I if you guys have media that y'all can play, remind me and I'll send you.
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Right. So, so this is the best peer-reviewed evidence is much more cautious. Right. The one in five, it's already walking it back.
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So, and this is just one message and and this came out because there was a case of a person who talked to an AI and became convinced I think that their mom and her friends were like part of a
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conspiracy and then he killed her. So there are like a couple of lawsuits about this and now what's really scary is we we have one case report of a woman with no history of psychosis, history of mental illness, no history of psychosis,
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uses talks to AI a lot, becomes uh psychotic, gets hospitalized, gets given antiscychotics, psychosis goes away, leaves the hospital, stops the antiscychotics, still is not psychotic, reuses AI, becomes psychotic again. So, we really have the first case report of
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what really appears to be some hefty strong evidence that AI can literally induce psychosis.
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Are you surprised by that? Are you surprised that a textbased messaging is sufficient to cause a human brain to go into psychosis?
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Yes and no. It's a brilliant question, Chris. So, it scares me because it's so shocking, but I think that what I've come to realize is how much of our mental health is based on things that we take for
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granted. So, a simple example of this is like you are mentally healthy because human beings disagree with you every single day, right? So, if you think about like I'm I'm married. I've been married for 15 years. So, I go home and
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every day I have a disagreement with my wife. And we talk about that like it's a bad thing. But I want you to think about, you know, when you have uh a political leader who is surrounded by sycopants,
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they no longer live in reality. Hitler, good example, presumably. I I I don't know too much.
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Massive. Yeah. Yeah. The inner circle was hugely sickantic, right? So then they I mean I remember hearing about some of this stuff with like Putin in in the Ukraine war and I'm not getting into that. Just a simple
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example of you know I I I remember hearing from people who are more knowledgeable than me that like you know he would ask for military estimates and there were some generals who were like hey actually like people are siphoning
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gas off of the gas tanks and selling it. Our military preparedness is not 100%.
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There are serious problems. And that was not what people wanted to hear. So they got asked. they're like anti- they're not supportive enough, right? And so eventually everyone was like, "Yeah, military preparedness is at all-time high. Morale's great. Our stockpiles are
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awesome. They attack Ukraine. Everyone predicted it was going to be over in 3 weeks and here we are years later." Yep.
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Right. And and so we know that sick of fancy is very very dangerous to people and everyone who's listening to this like knows that like you know that there is someone in your life who someone like kisses their ass and tells them whatever
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they want to hear and that is not like a good thing for anybody. Right. And so what what AI is doing is really accelerate it's removing contradictoriness from people's minds. And then what we're seeing with AI is really an acceleration
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of what social social media algorithms already do which is they create this sense of online drift or echo chambers.
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And then people start believing all kinds of things that are not true. And I saw Lindsay Clansancy was on your thing.
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We can talk about that. It's an amazing example of this happening in real time.
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Really scary way. What are your thoughts on AI therapy? Um, I think that AI therapy can be useful and also likely misses some of the most fundamental mechanisms of therapy.
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So, people who use AI for mental health support, I'm not perfect on this data, but I I think I've seen study So, I've seen studies that show short-term trials that show that AI for mental health support can help people feel better, but
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I'm pretty sure that people who use AI for mental health support are people who use AI regularly have worse mental health outcomes as well, right? So, I think both of these things can simultaneously be true. And I think we're seeing a really simple kind
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of like thing that floats to the surface, which is AI is good shortterm and is bad to use long term.
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That's interesting. I Well, there's a caveat, but keep going. No, so so so the caveat is AI is is fine to use once you're already good at something. So, anything that you want to learn or any capability that you want to
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have and this is what's really scary about AI for mental health. If you you are using AI to manage your mental health, your own ability to manage your mental health will decrease over time.
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How would someone use AI to manage their mental health? The healthiest versions or AI is pretty good at giving people insight. So, I work with a lot of clients and patients who do use AI for their mental health.
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And I don't think it's a bad thing. like AI really remembers a lot of things and this is where the AIs are not all the same. There's some really interesting studies of that rate, their safety and and efficacy, how sickopantic they are.
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Um uh like I think the TLDDR of some of those studies and people everyone's going to get upset with me, but Deep Seek tends to be the worst and Claude tends to be the best. Um and and I'll
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show you guys the actual paper and you can look at the analysis they they did and every new model that comes out completely upends probably a good bit of this that in the space of two years time this would be
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yeah so so the cool thing about this paper is it did look at different versions of of AIS. So so I think they compared something like close to a dozen including multiple versions of some like chacht and stuff like that.
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So they've got some fundamental physics in there. That's interesting. I saw this Wall Street Journal article that said, "Our therapists to blame for the rise of adults cutting off their parents? Many moms and dads believe that their adult
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children are getting bad advice, and a growing number of researchers agree everything becomes trauma." What do you make of that?
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Yeah. What was the quote again? Are therapists to blame for the rise of adults cutting off their parents?
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Yeah, sure. So, so I I think this is, you know, I I think we're setting a lot of boundaries nowadays. So, a lot of a lot of a lot of people are big on setting boundaries.
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So, this gets like complicated. Um, but I think that we're sort of like I don't know if you've heard the term latestage capitalism.
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Yeah. And I have no idea what it means. So that's like if a capitalist society like keeps going in a particular direction, it reaches this like terminal stage where things get really damaging.
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I can't comment on that. I think what we're seeing though in our society is like latestage independence.
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So human beings for the majority of humanity have usually valued or needed a community and the the community is more important than the individual. So we see this in themes like why do people fight in wars? Because I want to serve my
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country. Why do people donate organs? Because I care about people around me. And I I think what we're starting to see now is people are valuing their independence more than their community.
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And I don't think that this is necessarily bad. So I I think if you have, you know, a narcissistic parent, because this is another problem is that the generation above us is not very mental health aware, not very mental
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health capable. Um I have a family member who's a little bit older. Literally every one of their three siblings, all four of them, three out of four have like narcissistic personality disorder. And and in Indian culture, there's this attitude of like making it
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work. And they they prefer hate that stuff. Yeah. So they prefer they value harmony which is very common in eastern cultures like they val value harmony over individual wellness.
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Yep. Understood. Yep. So Yep. A a and so this is something that you know like I saw in in my family in in a in a arguably mild compared to other things but in in real time for us big way. So
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Indian weddings are big. Okay. And the thing about the Indian wedding that I realized pretty quickly is the Indian wedding is not about the two people getting married. It's about everybody else. And so when my mom got married it
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wasn't about her. It was like the the senior ladies in her life and especially her in-laws made a lot of the decisions.
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So then my my mom goes has this like kind of like it's so baked in she's not even consciously aware of it like okay my mother-in-law made the decisions in my wedding my turn will be when I have a
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mother-in-law but my wife was not having that. So what's happening right now with this older generation is they're getting squeezed with having toxic parents above them which they had to support and now independent children below them that are not putting up with their
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[ __ ] anymore. They're actually getting screwed at a at a at a colossal scale. Yeah, that's a really interesting reframe around this that modern especially Gen Z look at the development that they're doing mental health awareness repatenting of old traumas and visiting
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what it is that's happened to them and you're looking at the young and shadow varying levels of success etc. Uh but and and they say um my parents didn't have the skills that I do. Woe be on me
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for this sort of curse of awareness that I didn't have the upbringing that I should have done and I wasn't treated in the way and I wasn't held and my attachment was broken and now did the thing and my kids aren't going to have
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to deal with it but I did. You're like, "That's true, but this is the first time that I'd ever thought about what it must be like for a parent parents generation who didn't even have access to the skills and are now
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in small parts or large parts realizing that there's this thing they could have been aware of but didn't have access to and their kids are now looking at them and saying, "My parents did the best they could and I'm still quietly angry
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about it." Very interesting. Yeah. So I I mean I I think that that there is this this push for independence. And I think you were kind of leaning towards where I think the healthiest place is, which is like,
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yeah, it sucks. Yeah, they're toxic. And they don't know how to be any other way.
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And and even if you say, oh, but they like I'm telling them they need to go to therapy, but they're not going to therapy. But what is their understanding of what therapy is? how how deeply baked into that is them, right? So, you tell
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them like, "Hey, do this thing." But it's like if I if I told them, let's say like someone's like, "Oh, yeah, my parents won't go to therapy." And then I say, "You do the therapy for them." And then they will rebel against that,
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right? So like even even the the child will rebel automatically against something. There's something that they never even consider. So the so if I tell you do therapy for your parents, take the role of therapy for your parents,
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your instinctive reaction, the way that you feel about that is potentially the same way that your parents feel about going to therapy. I'm not saying that they should that children should take the role of therapist. I think that's
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actually an overt mistake. You should not do that. Um but I I I do think that therapists are are absolutely there's a there's a greater mental health awareness.
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Sometimes there are therapists who I think have their own like their own issues with their narcissistic upbringing or or sociopathic upbringing or personal I'm thinking about personality disordered parents really.
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Um and so I I think that often times I think this is quite harmful in therapy but this is not just related to parenting. oftentimes therapies therapists will bring their own value set into the room which is to a certain
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degree unavoidable but is also generally speaking I think not great a great idea. So yeah I think I mean sure therapists are to blame.
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I think that in in my experience though that real healing doesn't come from cutting someone off and is is not even actually necessary for cutting someone off. Um if anything it it I mean sometimes it can help it it can help
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deal with the toxicity in the short term. But generally speaking, I think that you can form healthy relationships with people who are even personality disordered if you want to.
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And I don't blame people for not wanting to. I think the real problem is what is the impact of this happening at scale. So, it's kind of just like AI and stuff like that where it's like, sure, you can you
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are no longer responsible for anybody and you can ghost and cut people out of your life if they're toxic, which is fine, but we're seeing that happen in our society. And lo and behold, we have a loneliness crisis at the same time. I
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had this idea a while ago, the parental attribution error, like the fundamental attribution error, that people love, it's a a right of passage in modern psychology to blame your parents for a lot of things that happened because you've been heavily imprinted by them.
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Like, hey, and I mean, if you take the behavioral genetics red pill, you can blame your parents for at least 50% of everything you are or 90% of your height. Um, but we love to lay at the feet of our parents the things that we
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consider to be shortcomings and weaknesses. But if we're going to do that, we should be prepared to lay at them the feet of us, lay at their feet our strengths as well. Like you say that your uh anxious attachment was due to
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the fact that you were never prioritized at home, but is that not the same reason that you ensure everybody else is well served and you're such a good friend to the people that are around you? You say that high standards caused you to always
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have to excel and never feel like you're enough. But is that not the reason that you push yourself so hard and have achieved a lot in your life when you've arrived in adulthood and so on and so forth? That basically most of the
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strengths that you have are simply the dark side of something that's light. Not true in all things. Caveat caveat. My point being that people are often very keen to sort of throw shade at their parents in a manner that they're not
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prepared to give them bestow on them some of the ways that that has been transmuted or was maybe the beginning of a germination that became something that was good or also hey these are the ways that they actually did show up for me.
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Maybe subjectively they didn't give me what I needed emotionally, but there was no abuse. I was never starving, you know? Look, like I [ __ ] they were there. They took me to all of my sports practices and they showed up and they
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were like, "Good." But they just didn't go to [ __ ] therapy and they didn't understand what I needed emotionally and stuff. And it's complex, right? Because it's easier to call our parents the villains than to reckon with a
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complicated inheritance. Like I got lots of things that were good for me and I got lots of I I didn't get lots of things that would have been good for me too. and the squaring the circle becomes a little bit difficult. The reason that
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I say that is I wonder how many people and and the point of this and a lot of the reaction of that Wall Street Journal article Matt Walsh did one one of his reactions to this was uh basically a
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accusation that people are being too uh quick to cut off their parents to say that this is something which is toxicity. And you know uh your point here is there are lots of people out there that are [ __ ] Many of them
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are parents. Many of them might be your they some of them might be your parents but how many people are choosing to do that because they don't want to engage and what happens when you do that at scale in a
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reactionary way that doesn't actually meet the threshold for what probably would be a healthy way to go about this.
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Well, you actually end up with kind of this generational divide where lots of people aren't talking to their parents because of something that maybe they were convinced of in a therapy room or they've decided to not convince in a
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therapy room, they've arrived at a realization that they have arrived at from time spent in a therapy room, but maybe it's not actually as firm foundation to make quite a big life decision as they might think.
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Yeah. So, I I mean I I think there's a lot there. So just to kind of go through it. So are people quick to cut people off?
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Yeah. I I think though that one of the So I I kind of can take both sides of this argument.
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Um I do think that if we look at what's happening right now, there is an a really distorted perspective on mental health. So one study I I saw found that 95% of Tik Toks about ADHD are like incorrect. So, so even even like
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So, I mean that actually could be good proof about your ADHD. You didn't even have enough attention to be able to research the ADHD correctly, maybe.
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So, so, so I I think people people are very quick to like label right now and they're really quick to say, "Okay, this is toxicity pathology." Yeah.
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Yeah. And and and I think that there is something going on right now where like the generation like the the positive not positive the the side if I if we take the side of people who are cutting people off
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they're just done with it right so so just because so so we we have this saying in in medicine that [ __ ] rolls downhill and there's this cycle of the cycle of toxicity and the cycle of abuse
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continues especially in like medical training. So my attending was an ass to me. I worked he worked I worked 30 hours a week when I was a resident. I had to pick his [ __ ] up and he would come drunk
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and whatever. And so I had to I I went through trial by fire and now it's your turn. So this generation is not having that anymore. They're not they're not taking it laying down. Um ironically there sometimes they're taking it laying
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down. I don't know if you what laying flat is, but this is a movement in China where people are like they're basically exiting the grind and the hustle culture and they're it's called laying flat.
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Is it like the hikimi at all? Not. It's kind of like Hikimorei but but I think notably different. So Hikimi I think it's the same route but Hikimorei was much smaller and men.
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Yeah. So, so but laying flat is like a a rebellion against the structure of grind for 60 years and then you'll get your just desserts.
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So interesting. I think there's a there's a there's a reasonable amount of like we're not like the cycle stops here. Like somewhere the cycle of abuse has to stop, right? Or it doesn't have to stop, but we're going to
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stop it here and and I'm going to insulate I'm I'm not going to deal with you anymore. Which kind of makes sense because I think a lot of times, you know, you can say like, are people too quick to cut off? Sure. But you
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should also talk to the people who are cutting people off, right? So, so because I I think a lot of times what what these the experiences of many of these people are who cut off their parents is that they have tried for like
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30 years, right? It's not a rash decision. It's not a rash. It's a decision that that in fact they sort of tried everything has been many much of their experience.
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That was what interested me at least in part about the reaction to the Wall Street Journal piece which and you know that that title of our therapist to blame for the rise of adults cutting off their parents opens up the door to yeah
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maybe this is part of a uh flippant commercialized weak culture where people are doing things that are more easy rather than going through the hard thing. But I can't imagine I can't I literally can't imagine a person what sort of construction somebody who
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is both emotionally informed enough to have done even a cursory or requisite amount of therapy to be able to get to this sort of a stage to know that it's a thing that you could do or should do or
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whatever and also be so flippant as to do it in a like a a quick way in like a callous manner.
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Yeah. So I I I think that those so I think this is a good example of like there's a lot of different populations that we're lumping together. So as you pointed out, I think often times the people who who do a lot of therapy don't
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flippantly cut people off. So So what happens is the people who are looking for a reason to cut people off will cut people off and then they'll cite whatever kind of trauma abuse. And I I think some of these people like Matt
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Walsh or whoever react to this stuff, they're reacting to that. And this is the basic problem with the internet is anytime you talk about an issue, people are not talking about the same thing.
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It's the reductio adsium in opposite directions. What is reductio absurdium? Uh it is a philosophical technique to explain how if you were to take this thing to its most extreme version, you're like, well, if you had sex with a
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thousand guys in a day, do you think that's the sort of feminism that you're talking about? And it's like, well, that is a kind of Bonnie Blue is kind of the reductive adabsium of the sex positive movement in one way, like the most
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extreme version, the most extreme example. And yeah, Matt is talking about the person who went to two therapy sessions and decided to get rid of their parents and maybe somebody that's super pro therapy might be explaining, well, this person went through, you know,
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three decades of it and and and all of this abuse and then only then did they decide to do it. It's kind of both of the extremes, but going in opposite direction.
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Yeah. So I I think what what worries me about this is is we have to play the tape through to the end. And I think what we're seeing in our loneliness crisis is fundamentally a shift of one human being not being responsible for
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another human being. So one manifestation of that is like my parents are not my problem to fix, but also someone else's loneliness. So we see this a lot in gender dynamics where it's like is it the job of women to teach men
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emotional skills and things like that? Um, whose job is it to help those who are left behind? Whose job is it to support the people who have been ghosted? Whose job is it? So, if you have a someone, you know, someone in
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your life that you you cut out, like, it's not fine. I I I would not play lay that responsibility at any individual's feet.
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And at the same time, whose job is it? Well, you do it on mass across an entire society and you end up with a bunch of atomized individuals who never look out for anybody else, never feel like they
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need to look out for anybody else and also know that given their lack of looking out for other people, nobody's probably looking out for them either.
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Yeah. So, I I think that we would we would like to think there's this thing called the the just world hypothesis where it's like, okay, if I'm not looking out for other people, no one's going to look out for me. I think the
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the really scary thing is that that may not be true. I think what people are really doing right now is they're forming these strong bonds that are nuclear without any of the toxicity people. But it's not necessarily that
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they're lonely. I think it's like people are setting limits with people who are toxic and then they can still they're able to sometimes they can form a lot of healthy bonds. So what's really scary is we're seeing all almost this like
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inequality of connection and and loneliness where some people have a ton of connection, right? really is the uh social parto principle.
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Uh what is parto is perto efficiency 8020? Yeah. Yeah. That that a small number of gains acrew to a large number of gains acrew to a small number of people. A large number of friends probably acrew to a small number of
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people. So so there are people who are cutting out a lot of toxic people and have very fulfilling relationships. Right? There are people who and I see this all the time. I mean I hear about this all the
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time in my social circle. So I'm South Asian and there's a lot of like restrictions and ostracization around marrying someone who's not your religion or not your cast or not Indian or whatever, right? And and so there are people who
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are building there's like a lot of people who are departing these old structures and are are like recoales. I think the really scary thing is we're leaving a ton of people behind which is fine, right? So the people who
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have So it's like the billionaires may not care about the people who are broke, right? They're like, "I got mine." Like it's bootstrap world. You you handle yourself. And we're all like, "Oh, that's bad." But if you have a high
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degree of social capital, if you have strong relationships, like sure, you work to get it, which is exactly what the billionaire will say, right? But what happens to all the people who are left behind?
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Yeah. There is this interesting responsibility. All right, Lindsay Clansancy, what do you think about the case?
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Okay, so let's start with some background for people who don't know who Lindsay Clansancy is. So, Lindsay Clancy is an obstetric nurse, okay?
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um who has is married and has three children, has a history of psychiatric illness. Um and after her third child has a psychiatric decline that is characterized by um outpatient care, partial hospitalization program, going to the emergency room, being
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hospitalized inatient, being discharged. has seven psychiatric providers, uh, psychiatrists and nurse practitioners who prescribe 13 medications over some period of time.
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So, Lindseay Clancy is also like particularly close to home because I trained at MGH where she went to the emergency room. Um, I know the people who took care of her when she was hospitalized at MLAN. So, I'm I'm very
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familiar with like the the this case. Okay. Wow. Um, I used to take she's from Duxbury where I used to take my wife when she was pregnant. There's a beautiful beach over there in Great Oysters. So, and then what happened is is Lindsay
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Clansancy um killed her children and then jumped out of a window and um cut herself first.
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Cut herself and then jumped out of a window and is now, I believe, paralyzed for the sternum down. A few months after this happened, I believe her husband divorced her and I think he's in a new relationship. I'm not 100% sure. And
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then there are two separate legal proceedings. One is the state of Massachusetts is is trying to Lindsey Clancy is on trial in a criminal trial by the state of Massachusetts for murder of her three children. There is a
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separate civil lawsuit uh by Lindsay put forward by Lindseay Clancy and her ex-husband suing various mental health providers for failure to do their duty of care. I didn't know about the second one. That's fascinating. Okay.
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Yeah. So, first thing is most people don't know much about like like you said, have you read the legal proceedings? I I've read some of the legal stuff, but I don't know anything about ethics or legality.
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But I know a lot about medicine and I know a lot about the internet and I know a lot about how people react to it.
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So, there are a couple things that are like, so this is a thing that So, this is the these are the facts. Okay. Then there's the internet's reaction to it, which is people are blown away that she has
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has. So I heard, this is not something I verified myself, that her husband started a GoFundMe that raised $1.7 million that is not being used for her legal defense.
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I don't know if that's true or not or if that's social media conspiracy hat.
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She There is a GoFundMe for about a million dollars now. I think I don't know whether he she started a GoFundMe to which uh uh women have raised a million dollars on her behalf. And then the other really
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interesting thing is that this is tearing apart couples. So not just call off a wedding.
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So yeah, so someone called off a wedding. So I am a psychiatrist who has done some postpartum work and I went to the Massachusetts General Hospital and trained at Harvard Medical School and I am reading 28page civil proceedings on this as well as doing a
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lot of research on postpartum psychosis and my wife who is my boss comes to me one day and she says I'm disappointed in And I said, "For what?" She says, "For how you're handling the Lindsey Clansancy case." I mean, like, "What do
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you mean how I'm handling like I'm I'm reading things. I'm like reading papers. I'm looking at stuff." And and she was like disappointed. I was just blown away. Like, this is like like I took paternity leave. I changed diapers.
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Like, I'm pretty sure I'm a pretty good husband. I'm pretty sure I'm a pretty good dad.
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And I'm pretty sure that I like support women through pregnancy. And I've seen postpartum psychosis. We'll get into that in a second. I've helped women through this. And I was just blown away by like my my wife's reaction. She
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wasn't like super mean about it. She was just like, you know, I'm I'm really disappointed and [ __ ] like what did I do? Like I'm actually like doing like what like I've spent 10 to 15 hours at least like getting into the details
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of what is going on and like I so I I was just struck by that and I was like wait what what is going on? Right?
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because I I know that she doesn't think I'm a bad person or bad psychiatrist or things like that. Like I've helped some of her people in her life who have gone through somewhat similar things. So like I I know I'm not like in the wrong
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a and and so there's just so much energy around this. And then so what people are getting upset about, right? So people are breaking up over this. People are upset at the women for supporting Lindsay and not considering the kids.
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Okay. So, and people are upset at them for supporting the woman. Full stop, which is a separate thing I think to the case. So, so let's understand a couple of things.
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So, I think the basic issue here is that it's really a lack of understanding for a lot of things. The first is I don't think men or even society as a whole understands how hard pregnancy and the postpartum period is. Mhm.
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Like we all say it's hard but we don't understand. So the reason that like my take this is some hot takes and I'm not you know I'm not really an expert actually.
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I think the reason that so many people are rallying to their defense is because whose defense?
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Uh Lindsay Clancy's defense and re reason they're so many women are giving her money is because they have they have looked down from the cliff that she jumped off of. So I think so many women have had such terrible postpartum
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experiences including struggling with thoughts of suicide or even killing their kids or all other things. So I think the experience of of many women in not even the postpartum period this is pre-partum and there's all kinds of stuff but like
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it is like you are fighting against something that is going to kill your kids and you love your kids and you're fighting against it day after day after day after day and you're losing and you don't know what to do and
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it's like everything is falling apart around you and like you don't know what to do and everything is just going to [ __ ] fall apart. I I I know that's hard to understand, but that that's like I think that's why people are supporting
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her because they know what it's like and they know how dangerously close they came to succumbing to this.
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So let's talk about what this is. So this is the other thing is you know I I I you know the the people who are breaking up with their girlfriends andor boyfriends, husbands, whatever a big part of this is she killed her kids. If
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you support her, there's no way I can ma maintain a relationship with you because like I can't how can you support someone who would kill their kid who would kill their kids.
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I cannot be in a relationship with someone for the safety of my own children.
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I think this speaks to a real misunderstanding of what psychosis is. So, interestingly enough, mental health awareness has increased, but mental health ignorance has also skyrocketed.
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So people are aware of mental health but they don't know what mental illness is and people don't know what psychosis is.
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Okay. So let's go through some stats. Two to three women out of 10,000 live births will experience postpartum psychosis.
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But postpartum depression is experiencing depression within 12 months of having a baby. So not all postpartum depression is necessarily due to the pregnancy. The diagnostic criteria for postpartum depression is the same as a regular depressive episode. It's just it
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happens postpartum. Okay. So then there's a a couple of other statistics. So um there are 6,000 live births.
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Oh maybe I'm getting this wrong. 6,000 or 60,000 live births per day in the US. M okay. So I I remember like doing this math and thinking like a handful of people experience postpartum psychosis every day in the US the way that the
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math works out. So the they're going to have a kid and at some point in the next 12 months they're going to go insane.
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Yeah. So so people are experiencing postpartum psychosis like every day like all the time.
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Y okay. So it it's actually like quite common prevalent. Um and so and then the second thing is I don't think people understand what psychosis is. So what psychosis the best way I I'd explain it is like you know like your
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mind tells you to do things and there are some things that it tells you to do that you listen to and some things that it tells you to do that you don't listen to. So let's take something really basic
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like let's say you know like when you take a dump and you wipe and you don't like wipe good enough and you like need a second wipe and it's just so natural to like wipe a second time, right? It's
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like so simple. It's not even something that you would argue against. You never even question it. Imagine the thought is kill your children and you just do it.
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So, so the thing about psychosis is it is like literally like your mind is manufacturing. So, what is psychosis?
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It's a break from reality that is usually involves two or three different things. One is hallucinations. So, your mind is literally creating things that are chasing you that you think are real.
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Lindsy Glansancy said a man's voice told her to kill her children. We'll get to that in a second. So, I had a patient once who jumped out of a third story window was also broke both of his legs. Thank thankfully wasn't paralyzed
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because he was being chased by a demon and like imagine a horror movie but like you're inside it and the demon is real and is like chasing you like you believe it's real. That's what psychosis is.
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Everyone's like mentally ill by reason of mental defect. And this based on the media is like something that sociopaths do. They pretend to be crazy. Oh, it was a dissociative fugue. It was multiple personalities. It wasn't me. No,
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psychosis is a whole different ballgame, right? This is the thing that causes people, including herself, to jump out of window. She's paralyzed for life.
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Okay. It can also include things like delusions. So, this is a different kind of delusional disorder is different from from acute psychosis, but it sounds like she was experiencing cute psychosis.
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Acute psychosis. And there can also be there's like severity of psychosis. So, it's not all the same. So when you get persecutoy hallucinations that is more common and actually less severe. So this is a voice actually talking to you. It's
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not a voice in I mean we talk about it like it's a voice in your head. No it is someone who follows you around and just constantly calls you a piece of [ __ ] Just wherever you go think about the
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most toxic we talked about cutting out toxic parents. Think about the most toxic person you know and just imagine that you had AirPods in your ear and they were just commentating on whatever you do. Interesting that the categorization is persecuto like that
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this is the defining characteristic of this guy. They're not following you around going, "Dude, you look so great today." No, no, no. They're not. Yeah, it's persecuto right?
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It's interesting. So, and then what's even more severe than that is command auditory hallucinations. So, command auditory hallucinations is there's someone in your ear that's giving you commands. So, this isn't thoughts, okay? This is like commands that sometimes people feel
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compelled to obey. And in my experience and I I've worked with a lot of psychosis. Um I trained at MLAN hospital. MLAN is amazing. It's like where she was hospitalized. And so the cool thing about MLAN is most hospitals
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will have a psychiatric floor. MLAN is a psychiatric hospital. All the floors are different kinds of psychiatry. So when we do when I rotate, there's a unit there called AB2. 3 months on AB2 is bipolar disorder and psychosis. So every
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patient that I see every day for 90 days, not to mention all the days that I'm on call and covering the unit, is all psychosis.
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So command auditory hallucinations are more severe. And they like and the the whole point of like like this level of of psychosis is that the reason we can we hospitalize people against their will is because we know from a medical perspective that these
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people, this is what's kind of interesting. It's not even that they can't control it.
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It's that they start to believe it. Right? So like like like like and this is what's really hard for people to understand.
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It's not about control, it's about belief. So psychosis makes you believe something. So when I was an intern at MGH, I was on my first month of inatient and this patient I mean I don't think there's anything identifying here. It's
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chimera. Okay. Patient comes up to me. I she's not my patient. I'm not taking care of her. I pass her in the hall and she says, "How you doing today, son?" Say, "I'm doing well." She's like, "You know you're my son, right?" And I'm
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like, "I'm not your son." And then we we like have this little back and forth in the hallway and then she's like, "Get a DNA test. Then you'll know." She's like 10 years older than I am. I'm like, "All
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right, lady. Whatever." So, I come back the next day and she's like, "How you doing, son?" I'm like, "I'm not your son." She's like, "Did you get the DNA test?" And I was like, "No." She's like, "See, I knew you wouldn't.
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You get the DNA test, then you'll know." And for the rest of the hospitalization, she was sure that I was her son, and I'm not going to get a DNA. Like, I'm not going to go get a DNA test to And then I
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have to get her DNA, which like I I'm not you that's not even possible. It's not ethical, whatever. And she really believes this. She had a delusional disorder where she would just think people were her son. And she really
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believes that. and and you know and then like as I denied that I was her son she like forgave me and she's like you know even if you don't accept it like you know you should really get it and then
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you'll know but like if you don't know like I love you no matter what. Yeah, she sounds like a good mom. Great mom.
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Right. So this is what people don't understand about like psychosis is you take the things that you really believe and then you just change them.
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Yeah. So there is an element of valition in there. You're following something. It's not derangement. It's uh uh it's deranged belief and then downstream from that you are you're not doing crazy things. The things that you do are crazy
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but the beliefs that you have are completely logical to you. Yeah. But and the beliefs are dist or break from reality. Yeah. Right. So so you believe and and and so there there are there all are you there is an
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element of loss of valition as well with command auditory hallucinations for sure. Right. So so then that's kind of intrusive and Yeah.
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Yeah. And then then you feel like you can't resist, right? A and so or you resist for so long and then all it takes is one moment for you to like follow the command and then you feel like you can't
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resist anymore. or you choose to follow because you think it's the right thing to do. We don't know. I wasn't a doctor.
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I wasn't there. Right? This is I'm just talking about psychosis in general. So, everyone's like, "Oh, mental illness." Like, there's some pre this is what people don't get about psychosis.
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There's some preser preservation of agency in every other diagnosis, right? But this is why psychosis is like, you know, by reason not guilty by reason of mental defect. I'm not a forensic psychiatrist.
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But I think that this is the situation for which that exception exists. Yeah. How how unlikely is it that somebody suffering from that kind of psychosis would be able to plan in advance to get their husband out of the house?
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that that I mean I I don't the short this is not my area of expertise but I I think that that holds zero water for me personally so so like I I don't think that so this is why it's important to
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understand the nuances of the belief system right so she's not there are some types of schizophrenia this is a diagnosis it's not psychosis psychosis is a symptom people with schizophrenia sometimes have psychosis but she based on the medical records and stuff and
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that I've looked at she probably has bipolar disorder that can manifest with psychotic features.
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Um, which which you know they will make arguments for. So I'm not trying to diagnose or anything, but that's just what the argument is, which is consistent.
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So and and by the way, the first uh so a very common time for women to be diagnosed with bipolar disorder is postpartum. So they will have a history of depression, unipolar depression, and their first psychotic episode or their first manic
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episode will be postpartum. It's a really common. So literally like in the hospital when I was training, people were like, "Hey, by the way, if you have a patient who's a woman who has unipolar depression and postpartum, they start
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doing some weird stuff. You need to think about bipolar disorder." That's like a part of my training. And the really scary thing, this gets really detailed. I have a whole YouTube video about this which is is blown up, but
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there's this thing called the ease, which is the examination of anomalous self-experience, which is a 50page like questionnaire about different kinds of psychosis. And if you look at I I I go over it in detail, but if you look at
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like her symptoms, like they map onto the ease, but very few people even know that the ease exists. So, this is some really weird like this is some AB2. I I'm learning from people who's have been working on a psychotic disorders unit
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for 10 years and this is what they see day in and day out. But anyway, so it's it's personally I find it fascinating because a lot of psychosis like a lot of the warning signs are not what you would think.
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They're not psychosis and they're not delusions. They're they're feelings of like disconnection like vague feelings of something is going wrong. I don't feel like myself. Something is going bad. This is something that that's pro what we call prodal. So like you know
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before you get the flu you feel sick for a day. So the the prodrome for psychosis is like this weird sense of like something isn't doesn't feel right. I don't feel like myself. My thoughts aren't my own. Like I feel like I'm not
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myself. Like that's what they that's what how it starts. So people don't understand this and I think like people really need to understand this that that even if she killed them, you know, 5% of people with postpartum psychosis
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have homicidal ideiation. 6% of people with postpartum psychosis have suicidal ideiation. And I think the numbers are there's somewhere between two and 20 people every day who will develop postpartum psychosis in the United States. So what that means is out of
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every like five to 10 days like someone's going to get homicidal and someone's going to get suicidal. This happens.
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I think the other really scary thing that's causing people to rally around Lindsey Clancy is that see if someone thinks that this is someone did something wrong here. I I think the main question to ask is what was she supposed
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to do? So, she did. The really scary thing about this for me as a psychiatrist, which I think we don't really understand.
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See, when you get cancer, everyone understands there's a chance you're going to die. What we really don't understand as a society is that 5% of mothers with postpartum psychosis become homicidal. Like, that's a part of the disease. Like, we know that. That's
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an outcome. trying to kill your kids is a very very rare but measurable consistently measurable outcome for this diagnosis or not necessarily killing your kids but having homicidal ideation which Yeah.
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the desire to but you are around your kids a lot. Yeah. Right. So, so that's what's really scary and what's really scary about this is that she kind of did everything right.
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Right. So she was actively in mental health treatment, got into higher levels of care, had multiple providers see her, received care at MLAN and MGH, which are respectively the number one and number two top psychiatric hospitals in the
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country, right? And maybe I mean a couple other every year changes a little bit, but they're definitely top five, right? So and so she's got some of the best care on the planet. She has a husband who according to the civil
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lawsuit, I don't know how much of this to believe or whatever, but is like pretty involved in her care. He's like calling her nurse practitioner, calling her psychiatrist like, "Hey, I don't think the medication is working. Can I
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bring her in?" So supportive husband, doctors from Harvard Medical School, long history of treatment, and this still happens. This is why women are rallying behind her. And this is why women are [ __ ] terrified because she did everything right, but
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this is medicine and we're humans. And the scary thing about medicine is you can do everything right and you can still get [ __ ] Are there any drugs that she was prescribed that would make her more susceptible to listening to the voice to
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do bad things or I I mean I like the I'm not going to get to that level of resolution because I think there's so much The short answer is like kind of yes and no, but like there's so much clinical
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specificity. So if you just take any any one of the medications she's on and you look at the foldout sheet of side effects, right? There's going to be like literally hundreds of side effects to each medication. I'm going to guess I
Speaker A
mean I've heard people who aren't clinicians talk about some of the specifically one of the um drugs that she was on as maybe causing hallucinations. I don't actually hear anything about hallucinations.
Speaker A
The short answer she's on a she got prescribed a lot of medications. Is this like serious serious [ __ ] Is this as serious as you can get from a Well, so so so yeah, but I the reason
Speaker A
I'm hesitant to answer that question is because I think it's very hard to it's very easy to take out of context. It's very easy to misunderstand. Just to give you a simple example.
Speaker A
So she was prescribed an SSRI. So an SSRI is an anti-depressant medication. If you have bipolar disorder, so it's an anti-depressant. So she's depressed. We give her an SSRI. SSRIs can sometimes trigger mania. One of the features of mania can be psychosis.
Speaker A
Okay. So was she prescribed a medicine that can cause psychosis? Absolutely. But this is also ironclad standard of care for postpartum mothers who are experiencing depressive symptoms. That's what's really hard to wrap our heads around in this case is
Speaker A
that you can do everything right and bad stuff happens in medicine. Are there any other elements of the case that you wish more people were paying attention to before we get into the reaction? I I mean, not really. Like, I
Speaker A
I think it's it it's brought up to the surface and I I think a lot of this armchair quarterbacking, like I don't know if she got good care or didn't get good care. Um I I'm not going to comment
Speaker A
like I I we just don't know like you have to be in the room. And what I do feel really strongly about is that, you know, if you look at some of the testimony of like cross-examination of the psychiatrists and stuff like that,
Speaker A
like I I think that the other big thing that this is showing, so for example, she called the suicide hotline twice, but there is no mechanism for the suicide hotline to communicate with her mental health providers.
Speaker A
She went to different mental health medical systems that don't have access to each other's EHRs. There's a lot of things that electronic health record there's a lot of stuff that people will ask like you know her her care providers
Speaker A
on the stand like did you do this did you do this did you do this like and that's just completely unreasonable in any sense of of practical care. So simple example is did you assess her for all of these things?
Speaker A
The appointment lasts 17 minutes because that's what insurance will pay for and so you don't have time to do all the stuff that you're supposed to do.
Speaker A
There's just there's just no way that So, the other thing that I think this is really showing is this is a really good example of like something the flaws of our health care system here in America.
Speaker A
So, so what's really interesting is I was talking to some of my colleagues who are also following the case who are psychiatrists and they're like this is not possible in our country because everyone has the same medical record.
Speaker A
There's one medical record for everybody. So everyone sees what everybody else is prescribing because it's all centralized, but that's not how we do it here.
Speaker A
So I I think that this is also really scary because it's like and the thing that I I want to also help people understand is that this is not like an anomaly. Like everyone's getting caught up about this, but what's really scary
Speaker A
is like this happens every day. And I think that's why so many people are are supportive of her women because they know they're like, "Oh crap, like I did see a doctor and the doctor wasn't helpful or the medication
Speaker A
didn't work and I was like right on the threshold." And I think that there are enough I think something like 5,000 women donated to to give her a million dollars. So, it totally makes sense to me that there are 5,000 women out there
Speaker A
who understand what it's like to be in her shoes and understand that even though they love their children, their mind was so distorted that they were thinking about hurting them. And so, I think that's why a lot of people are
Speaker A
rallying to support. And I think the men who judge the women don't understand what I mean, she jumped out of a window and is paralyzed for the rest of her life, right? That's not like What do you make of the women who judged
Speaker A
the men? Like your wife obviously stepped in and was I I you didn't actually finish the story. I'm going to guess uh disappointed that you seemed to be less supportive of Lindsay than she may have wanted you to be.
Speaker A
So, so this is where we get to like the real like So, so I feel really confident in what I've said so far, okay? That this is what psychosis is. That it's common. I think that a lot of women
Speaker A
experience this that we really don't normalize like how gruelingly difficult pregnancy and the postpartum period is.
Speaker A
I said that I said that before you. Yeah. Yeah. I believe it. And you know like simple things like you know people say like oh like I'm so happy I'm a happy mother and my baby is amazing. And
Speaker A
like some women if you're in postpartum depression you don't feel that. So they feel like they'd missed out on something that they was they should have gotten as well. I I I mean I think miss out is the under an understanding like I
Speaker A
think they feel like terrible human beings. They feel like terrible mothers like because they feel love for their child on a deeper level but they don't feel an emotional love. So they love the child but they don't feel love for the child.
Speaker A
And then what they realize is oh [ __ ] this child that I love more than anything else in the world has a mother that doesn't love them. And that hurts so much.
Speaker A
I'm a bad person. Yeah. What what a monster I must be, right? And and then that can spiral and then you throw in social media and you throw in body changes and you throw in all this kind of crap and it really
Speaker A
spirals out of control real fast. I mean, we know that statistically getting pregnant and having a baby is probably the most dangerous thing that most women will do in their life. What we don't acknowledge is that there's a
Speaker A
mental health component to that that is just as risky and just as severe. presumably not just as risky given that the numbers of the psychosis are what?
Speaker A
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So by just as risky I mean like we know that you know pregnancy is very physic like so the average woman pregnancy and child birth is like the most high risk activity that they will engage in.
Speaker A
What we don't acknowledge is that the postpartum period in pregnancy from a mental health standpoint is also arguably the most right highrisisk thing. Yeah. I mean, maybe probably even more likely than uh severe depression after losing a parent
Speaker A
or something. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So, so I I think interesting. Yeah. No, that that that does make sense. That's that's an interesting angle that I never considered. You have a very the most for most women on average, physically
Speaker A
traumatic period, and the most uh psychologically risky period. Yes. And so, you know, motherhood is celebrated, but for many women it's like going to war.
Speaker A
Yeah. Right. So it's like, oh, yay, like World War II, like go live in the trenches for a year and like, yay, you know? So, so I think I think there's there's a disconnection of people's real understanding because even if a woman
Speaker A
says, "Hey, I don't love my child like 6 months in like other people around her will judge her very harshly." Um, what did you make of the disagreement coming from men to women saying this level of support feels
Speaker A
uh concerning? um uh or your judgment of my judgment doesn't seem to respect the role that most men are supposed to take which is to protect the kids and the family including what's that like line in the I don't know whether it's true but like
Speaker A
we swore an oath to protect our country from enemies both like without and within some [ __ ] like that um you know this would be an interesting question this would be a fascinating question actually to ask um people on both sides
Speaker A
of this debate. Would the women who are supporting Lindsey Clansancy say that it is the job of a father to protect the children if the mother is going through psychosis? Like should you physically restrain the mother? Should you step in to stop that kind of damage
Speaker A
being done? Like if you were there, if you had been there. Yeah. So, so I I I think based on my reading of like the court documents and stuff and like keep in mind the civil lawsuit which is most of what I read
Speaker A
because that's where most of the psychiatry is, um the civil lawsuit is, you know, has a angle, right?
Speaker A
The civil one is the one against the her her doctors. Yes. Okay. So, the the civil lawsuit is painting things in a particular way.
Speaker A
Sorry. Is that one concluded? I don't think so. Far from it. Hang on. So, they've got two Yeah. So [ __ ] lawsuits occurring at the same time.
Speaker A
Yeah, but but one in one they're the plaintiff and in one it's the defense.
Speaker A
But in one they're a team and in the other only one of them is on trial.
Speaker A
Yes. [ __ ] me. Okay. But is that has that like do you do you have to stand go on the stand and do all the rest of this stuff in the civil one? Cuz it's a it's I
Speaker A
don't know enough about that's happened presumably. No, the civil lawsuit is ongoing. Jesus [ __ ] Christ. So, she's sitting there in sometimes in court as the defendant.
Speaker A
Yes. And sometimes in court. Well, I I I I'm sure that the I would be stunned if I mean I think the criminal trial is happening first.
Speaker A
Yes. Right. And then the civil lawsuit will get resolved. Right. But that is [ __ ] crack. I didn't know about the civil lawsuit. I didn't know that that other thing was going on. and like you're like turning
Speaker A
up and you're and I'm aware that this isn't the way that it's being scheduled or whatever but you know like you look at your watch and you're like today which uh I'm on the stand today and then the next day you're like uh oh on the
Speaker A
other side [ __ ] Yeah. Yeah. So so I mean that so I'm I'm a lot of my information is coming from the civil lawsuit which I think is trying to paint her in a severely mentally ill way and is also trying to
Speaker A
paint her providers in as negligent of a way as possible. Um, but I I mean I I think you know you were asking about like why are women reacting to men like this, right? Like so what's going on
Speaker A
there? So I I I think a lot of I think there's a lot of like displaced anger, resentment towards men from women who go through this period.
Speaker A
Mhm. Right. So, so, so and in and things like, you know, like sometimes it does end a divorce. Like sometimes you have postpartum depression, you're not interested in having sex anymore, you let yourself go, you're really not doing
Speaker A
a great job as a mother, and your partner is like, I don't want to be in this relationship anymore. I have to look out for myself. I have to look out for my kids. I'm going to divorce you.
Speaker A
Right. What why do you think it is that men have taken I haven't seen many men on the side of Lindsey Clansancy well well so I I think that the ones that float to the top of social media
Speaker A
are not right uh what do you think is their motivation you know people will say I can't be with someone who supports a woman killing her kids So you can infer whatever motivation you want, but I don't think that the
Speaker A
motivation is like the operative thing there. I think the operative thing there is that killing has no nuance between murder and manslaughter, right? So I think that they're they're I mean what they're motivated motivated by is abhorance. What they're motivated by
Speaker A
is shock. What they're motivated by is fear. What they're motivated by is perspective love. I I think probably their primary emo the primary emotional veilance that I think most men who are reacting to women in this is is
Speaker A
befulement. They're like what the [ __ ] are you guys doing? Like how can you get here? Like what the hell is wrong with you? So So that's why I think I get to ignorance because I think the the
Speaker A
primary emotion is confusion by men. That's that's very interesting. So, so like they're like they're like what are you guys doing?
Speaker A
I don't get it. Like how can you think this way? Which by the way is why I think it's so dec divisive because people on both sides are like how can you possibly think like this?
Speaker A
What do you make of the same Lindsay trend that was going on online? What's that?
Speaker A
It was women on primarily Tik Tok holding their children or recording themselves sometimes with their kids crying and the caption was same Lindsay.
Speaker A
It was the me too for the Lindsey Clansancy case. Yeah. So, so I think this is where we get to like where I'm on the weakest ground, but I also feel really confident about. So, this is like the damaging
Speaker A
parts of the internet. So, a couple of things. So, so one of the things that I was confused about uh cuz my wife was telling me about this is like now there's this theory that the husband did it.
Speaker A
Yep. So, I I got this was my first point when you asked me what do I think about it. Um, women are certain women seem to be incapable of laying agency to do bad things at the feet of another woman that being able to
Speaker A
do evil is only the purview of a man. There's actually a wellstudied psychological phenomenon like that's like the good mother bias or like the loving mother.
Speaker A
The women are wonderful effect is something similar. damma bias is something that's not too not too there is an element of that but I I I really think some of this stuff is like social media brain rotting kind of stuff
Speaker A
because I I think as far as I know there's like there's no dispute like everybody in the room agrees her included that it was manslaughter right she's saying that she killed her kids it's just she wasn't in her right
Speaker A
mind when she did it so so that that got me really like confused because I like I don't like you know okay What do you think is the motivation of the women?
Speaker A
Yeah, getting there. So, so this is where things get really interesting cuz cuz like I was looking at some of the social media and and a lot of the comments are women's intuition.
Speaker A
So, I did a deep dive into women's intuition, the science of women's intuition. So, as a psychiatrist, I've come to really respect women's intuition. But here's what the science shows. The first thing is that women's intuition is not significantly greater
Speaker A
than men's intuition. But it is it is it is more potent than men's intuition but by a very small like maybe like 10% tops. The second thing is that women's intuition is modulated by attention. So man's intuition and women's intuition is the
Speaker A
same depending on how much you're paying attention to something. Okay, does that kind of make sense? So like and this is what I've learned as a psychiatrist.
Speaker A
When a woman comes to me and says, "Hey, like I think something is going on." And I trust her intuition because what it women's intuition really is is being able to detect like disongruence.
Speaker A
So women's intuition kind of how I think about it if I were to simplify it is women's intuition doesn't tell you what happened. It just flags suspicion that things are not the way that they appear to be. So it
Speaker A
doesn't give you like a positive direction. It just tells you something is wrong here. Like, okay, this person is doing something shady, but yeah, they're having an affair. Like, that jump I don't think is evidence based.
Speaker A
It's like having a dashboard on a car that only has one light. Exactly. When something is wrong in the car, but it doesn't tell you which thing is wrong.
Speaker A
Brilliant. That's exactly. So, so that's my take on it. So, I I still take this very seriously clinically. So, like if I have a female patient who's like, "Hey, I like I've got a bad feeling." I'm like, "Tell me what's going on. Like,
Speaker A
let's figure out what is this feeling?" is they're picking up on something and and so but I I think that then this so I I didn't think that women's intuition is sufficient to make him guilty but I think some element of women's intuition
Speaker A
some element of echo chamber of on the internet some element of you know there's a there's a population of women who love true crime which is not bad but then what happens is you and then there's like people who are making like
Speaker A
astrological like takes on this and they're like oh like she's a Gemini he's a Leo or whatever And and the really interesting thing is I I think there's even like some I I've read a couple of papers on astrology
Speaker A
that are actually like quite compelling. But nowhere I think this is basically like a an amalgamation of and there's I 90% of papers I've read on astrology show that there's no merit to it. But I I think basically this is like internet
Speaker A
brain rot, right? So, so it's like some amount of of resentment, some amount of like, you know, being in an internet echo e echo chamber, all men are to blame, some amount of like true crime kind of stuff. And there's there's a lot
Speaker A
of research on, you know, when you're on social media, like encountering things over and over and over again is proof to the human brain, right? So like this is happening because I see it a lot and we see this you know like in in
Speaker A
men's echo chambers on like the incel red pill black pill whatever like this is the dream we know that yeah we we know that that right so it's the same same thing so I I think there's some amount of like really displaced
Speaker A
resentment displaced hatred there's some amount of distrust there's some amount of like this like like you said the kind of the the loving mother kind of hypothesis that she she and I think that even these people don't understand
Speaker A
mental illness because they're saying, "Oh, Lindsay Clancy could never do this. She loved her children. I saw the picture that she had. She loved her children." The whole point of psychosis is you can love your children, be a good
Speaker A
person, and still do something bad. Can I bro a few things that have come up while you've been talking and I've been learning? Um, one is it seems odd to lay everything at the feet of pure agentic murder
Speaker A
if this same person is going to it. People do murder homicides. I murder suicides all the time, right? Like it's not as rare as you might think. but doing the killing and then the cutting and then the throwing herself out of the
Speaker A
window head first. I watched a animation of the way that she fell and it's like she really [ __ ] went for it like just landed on the top of her head kind of.
Speaker A
Um if all you wanted to do was kill your kids, is that the way that you would like round it out? That would be the dessert to the main course of your of your thing. That's the first thing. And
Speaker A
the second thing, and the reason I bring this up is the agency appears to be kind of like a prophylactic against the insanity defense or the mental defection defense from the leaders.
Speaker A
Yeah. So, so now, now this is getting into territory that like I basically won't go into for a couple of reasons, right? So, now we're hypothesizing.
Speaker A
You're asking me to hypothesize about someone who's trying to kill themselves. Would they kill themselves in this way?
Speaker A
That's a whole different conversation. And I can't comment on Lindsay Clancy, but you know I I've in my clinical practice I've seen many many methods of suicide or attempted suicide and they each have a different meaning and they and that meaning is not shared
Speaker A
between people. So a simple example is you know I've had patients that for example have borderline personality disorder. So the the way that I was taught to examine suicide attempts it's a really great framework is what is the
Speaker A
lethality and what is the visibility. Mhm. Okay. So, example of low lethality, low visibility is I took a bottle full of Tylenol.
Speaker A
Bottle had two pills in it. Okay? And then texting someone afterward, right? So, letting someone know is like low visibility, like higher lethality.
Speaker A
I'm not going to go into details, but there are certain things that you can do that can make things more lethal. Most extreme case of suicide that I've ever encountered was tying a noose around the neck. uh tying a 100 foot rope to a
Speaker A
tree, getting into a sports car and jamming the gas. Okay. So, so there's like lethality and visibility.
Speaker A
So, you know, people who are like quote unquote doing it for attention. I don't like that phrase, but you know, they're they're high visibility attempts. And usually high visibility attempts are expressions of distress.
Speaker A
Um but I think suicidality I mean it's a fascinating topic. So one really interesting paper by a guy named Matt no great suicide expert I think this is his paper basically showed that 60% of suicide attempts the decision gets made
Speaker A
within 5 minutes. So often times the experience of suicidality is that you're struggling with it and then you know how like you're like late at night oh I like I don't I shouldn't eat a cookie I shouldn't eat
Speaker A
and they're like I'll just have a cookie. It's it kind of happens like that. like almost impulsivity.
Speaker A
Yeah. Yeah. It really is impulsive. So, so for for more than half of the people, so that this media idea of like setting your affairs in order and things like that, often times what'll happen is the pain will just be too great. Um, and my
Speaker A
take on this, I realized this I I went to an art museum where that that this clicked for me. I've wor been working with suicidal patients for now 12 years, I guess, since I saw my first one, maybe even more. But I I realize
Speaker A
that the the thing about chronic suicidality is that a part of this person has already been dead for a long time.
Speaker A
Like like what I realize now is that when I have patients who are like suicidal for long periods of time, there's a part of life that they just haven't had access to for a very long time. And it can really feel like a a
Speaker A
lot of to them it can feel like you're kind of struggling to stay afloat, but that a piece of you is like already gone. and and that I didn't see until I saw one of Picasso's paintings. And that's a whole conversation for a
Speaker A
different day. But um I was like, "Oh [ __ ] I just realized like my patients have actually like there's a piece of them that's been dead and they're they're struggling to catching up with it." Yeah.
Speaker A
So just to clarify, the point that I was making wasn't to try and uh psychoanalyze a particular mode of of of suicide. It was somebody that is fully in control of all of their faculties.
Speaker A
That to me seems like an extreme. At at the very least we can say that murder suicide is less common than just murder.
Speaker A
That there is more going on, right? There has to be more going on. The reason that what you brought up is the it seems to me the onset of psychosis or psych presumably a psychotic episode if that's the right way to put it um can be
Speaker A
relatively sort of a quick turn. Is it possible therefore for somebody to have sufficient agency to send a husband out of the house in order to get food and I think to get like a prolax or something for one of the kids like a digestive aid
Speaker A
or something like that? uh and then while he's out have the onset of an an episode like can these two incidents be separate or is psychosis the sort of thing that ambiently runs at the same level over much longer periods of time. Do you
Speaker A
understand like what I'm trying to get at here? Because it allows both things to be true. The agency to send the husband out of the house not for the purpose of freeing the house up in order to commit this act.
Speaker A
Yeah. So so I I think that that's a it's a good question. And so I'm going to ask, you know, I'm not going to comment on her, but I I think psychosis is not fixed. This is important to understand,
Speaker A
right? So even if you look at like depression, feelings of depression, even if you're in a major depressive episode, will wax and wayne throughout the day.
Speaker A
So we don't really know what causes psychosis. But you know once her husband leaves the house if there's a command auditory hallucination and then it picks up which might not have happened before he left the house right so I I think that I mean this is
Speaker A
documented so I'm not commenting about whether this is psychosis or agency or anything like that I'm just saying like if you look at what is written in the legal documents one thing is that it the voice was telling her
Speaker A
this is the chance. This is the last chance you're going to get to do this.
Speaker A
She said previously in texts to the mother mother-in-law, I've been thinking about killing the kids anyway. So, it seems like I I don't I I don't I mean, I haven't examined everything in in that much detail, but but I mean, I think if
Speaker A
you're asking me, do I believe that this picture could be consistent with psychosis? Because I'm not going to comment on her. I think the answer is absolutely yes. I mean I I think most I have not talked to a single mental
Speaker A
health provider um who does not believe that she was seriously mentally ill and we literally had like I mean she was hospitalized you know I think weeks or maybe days I I don't know the exact timeline but I mean she has a a well
Speaker A
doumented history of a psychiatric decline. M I don't know what the status is going to be by the time this episode comes out, but uh as of right now, the jury's been deadlocked for 20 hours. Uh can't read a ver reach a verdict, which
Speaker A
apparently if that happens, results in a mistrial. Yeah. Which means that you need to run the [ __ ] thing back.
Speaker A
Yep. Which is crazy. Yeah. And is going to cause all manner of hell to break loose on the internet. I mean, so I think things will the internet has a very short memory during the brief blast radius window.
Speaker A
Yeah. So, so and then the [ __ ] second when you've got to play the the return fixture of it going again.
Speaker A
I mean, I I I I think, you know, the fact that the jury is deadlocked is not surprising to me at all because I think it's like it's a microcosm of what we're seeing on the internet.
Speaker A
What do you think is the likelihood that the jury is deadlocked male to female?
Speaker A
Uh, no comment. I I have no idea. It's just got to be I I have to assume based on what's happening on the internet that on average more women would be I I I I don't know. I mean, I I
Speaker A
understand where you're coming from with that assumption. But my my stance is the people in the jury have we have no idea. Well, I mean, like I haven't watched every day of the trial, which you can watch. So, I think
Speaker A
in order for me to answer that question, I would have to get the information that the jury got, right? Like I I think it's not the the internet. So, this this is the big difference between the internet and the
Speaker A
trial. The internet is a lot of people who are sure and have no idea what's going on. And the trial is a bunch of people who know exactly what's going on and appear to be unsure, right? And and
Speaker A
I don't even know if deadlocked means there's like hard eight yes and hard eight no or whatever. Or if people aren't injuring I think usually 12.
Speaker A
Yeah. So, so like I we don't know what what I mean we have no idea, right? So, so like I'm happy to answer questions about things that I know about.
Speaker A
Mhm. You know, but I I think that you could have at least I'll I'll [ __ ] say it if you're not going to say it. I think that it is more likely that the guilty side would be
Speaker A
disproportionately male occupied and that the not guilty side would be disproportionately female occupied. And I don't know what the gender split. Can you uh chat GBT? What is the gender split of the uh Lindsay Clansancy jury?
Speaker A
Um because if that's not Oh, nine women, three men. Wow. Yeah. So, so here's my take on that, Chris. There are too many things that have made sense to me logically like even as hypothesis that have turned out
Speaker A
to be so wrong for me that have turned out to be so wrong right like the jury dynamics are completely different man there's like whole psycho dynamics of juries and like you know how women like if you look at
Speaker A
like judgment of women judgment of women is more harshly done by women y yeah including female judges so so so like like there's all kinds of like data points here that we don't have access to. So I I really
Speaker A
don't know. The bro science is allowed out. Dr. K, ladies and gentlemen, dude, you [ __ ] roll. Um, thank you so much, man.
Speaker A
I appreciate you. I appreciate everything you're doing. Where should people go? What have you got coming up?
Speaker A
Anything? Yeah. So, you know, if people are interested in the sex stuff, like we just released a guide to love, sex, and relationships. That um is our most successful guide. And it basically goes through I I I thought about
Speaker A
someone who's struggling to meet somebody and all of the information that they'll need and tried to put it all together.
Speaker A
And so, you know, a lot of the stuff that we talked about about penile retraining, all that stuff, it like comes out of the hundreds of hours that I spent doing research on how to have a successful relationship, which includes
Speaker A
things like charisma, attraction, um, how to how to how to engage in a sexual relationship, how to do physical touch. There's so many things that people don't know anymore.
Speaker A
And so, we try to put together the most important info. So, if people are interested in that, otherwise, just check out the YouTube. Where can people get that guide?
Speaker A
Um, that's a great question. Don't tell me that you've spent hundreds of hours researching a document and you have no idea how to send people.
Speaker A
I think just search for Dr. K's guide. I mean, so so I'm sure healthy gamer.gg.
Speaker A
This is This is embarrassing. I'massled. I'm embarrassed by you. So my job is to build things that work.
Speaker A
Okay. And my wife briefly you need to direct people to it. I I agree. I agree that this is important.
Speaker A
This is the duality of a useless academic. Absolutely. The it it absolutely works. If you find it, if you can find it, test of agency and healthy gamer GG on YouTube. Dude, you're the best. You're the best.
Speaker A
Thanks a lot, man. Appreciate you, man. Till next time. All right. Goodbye, my babies, dude. [ __ ] Yes. So good. You are the best.
Speaker A
I waxed philosophical there. I loved it. Congratulations. You made it to the end of a podcast episode without dying. Now, here's another one.
Speaker A
Go on, watch it.
Topics:addictionmen's mental healthpornographygamblingvideo gamescompulsive behaviorcoping strategiestechnology addictionpsychologyexistential crisis
