Decoding the Gurus - Dr. K (Part 1): OPed Ayurvedic Medicine vs. Nerfed 'Western' Allopathy

Episode Date: June 23, 2024

Alok Kanojia, better known as Dr. K, is a charismatic psychiatrist and online streamer who offers a unique blend of psychological, self-help, and spiritual advice to guide individuals through the complexities of modern life, aiming to help them become Healthy Gamers™. Join Matt and Chris as they embark on a multi-part journey through the diverse biomes of Dr. K's content and try to ascertain the meta.In this first episode, Matt and Chris take a critical look at a 2019 video in which Dr. K discusses his views on Ayurvedic medicine, the problems with Western medicine, and the unacknowledged scientific evidence for Ayurvedic claims. We consider whether the evidence provided matches the rhetoric and relive youthful follies as we immerse ourselves in the all too familiar water of complementary and alternative medicine discourse.So join us as we learn about the universal mind and single type of depression proposed by modern medicine, how a tripartite classification is actually incredibly individualistic, how the shape of your nose and kink in your hair predicts the food you should eat and the quality of your bowel movements, and the surprising benefits of drinking elephant milk.In Part 2, we will delve into Dr. K's recent discussion/debate over Ayurvedic medicine with Dr. Mike, another popular YouTube doctor. And finally Part 3 will focus on the dynamics of Dr. K's long-form, somewhat controversial, mental health-themed interviews with influencers.Links Dr. K's Healthy Gamer GG websiteHealthy Gamer GG- Ayurveda Pt. 1: Gunas, Cognitive Fingerprint, PersonalityScience is Dope: Should we adopt Ayurveda | An Indian's response | Dr. Mike vs Dr. KList of Studies mentioned in the episodeSimon Singh's court case that Chris mentionedThe Iced Coffee Hour: Harvard Psychiatrist on How To Get Ahead of 99.9% of People (Starting NOW)Some of Matt's related papers: 1) Thomson, P., Jones, J., Browne, M., & Leslie, S. J. (2014). Why people seek complementary and alternative medicine before conventional medical treatment: a population-based study. Complementary therapies in clinical practice, 20(4), 339-346. & 2) Browne, M., Thomson, P., Rockloff, M. J., & Pennycook, G. (2015). Going against the herd: psychological and cultural factors underlying the ‘vaccination confidence gap’. PLoS one, 10(9), e0132562.

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Matt Brown, with me is Chris Kavanagh. He's sitting there, he's looking pretty enlightened today. You're looking like your chakras are all in balance. Your ki is centered. You are looking at one with the universe there, Chris. That's a lie, actually. You look tired.

Many people say that. Many people say that. So, yes, I'm feeling okay. It's early morning. You know, the birds are out. The sky is bright what's what's there to be sad about matt the world is you know it's not like there's anything bad going on in the world currently is there no no huge conflicts and uh or fine politics afoot none of that no no this is fine this is fine no the wheel is turning uh well i'm

fine i'm making lasagna today i'm making two lasagna the world can go to hell i've got lasagna yeah so that is well no i think dramatically you might be hinting that we are looking at a candidate this week who is associated with mental health, well-being, spiritual development, so on and so forth. Is that the case? You would be correct. We are looking at a fellow called Dr. K. How do you say his actual name? That's his streamer online persona. Yeah, thanks for handing that over.

I love Kanogia. Kanogia. Good job. One of those two. I did try to look up, and I apologize for the mispronunciation if it was there, but more readily known around the internet

as Dr. K. And Dr. K is an interesting fellow. he's part of our streamer and academic season matt so listen to this streamers america deserve 9-11 dude fuck it i'm saying it academics can they make a comment about canceling culture streamers yeah please explain this to me so i can tell you how fucking stupid you are academics and when I'm talking about that anagogic in and out of the imaginal augmentation of our ontological depth perception, that's what I mean by imaginal faithfulness. You'll provide some interesting lessons for us today. This is going to be really interesting. Hey, that got me in the mood.

I'm ready for it now. That's right, streamers. I know what they're about. Yeah, streaming all the time. How do they do it? Maybe not this one, Matt, because Dr. K is an interesting combination of things. He is a streamer,

but he is someone that also gives self-help advice. As we'll see, I think a little bit of an advocate for alternative medicine, or at least specifically Ayurvedic approaches, and somebody that engages in therapeutic, but not therapy, engages in therapeutic but not therapy discussions online to raise awareness about mental health issues in little informational videos and in in-depth interviews with influencers and streamers so that's an interesting confluence of streams. Yeah. So he's a psychiatrist by training, but I think he focuses all his energies on his online business these days. His material is strongly influenced by, I guess, a complementary and alternative health approach, in particular, Ayurvedic approach to therapy.

Would you say that's right? Yeah, I think it depends a little bit in the venue he's in but if you look at his output like if you go to his youtube channel and look the tag for the channel is healthy gamer gg right gg the shorthand for good good game and a lot of what he talks about is relating mental health issues to contemporary issues and environments, including gaming, online communities, and addictions to, you know, online porn, all this kind of thing. So on this channel, you'll have short videos focused on specific mental health issues. Like you have why shit life syndrome is holding you back, the neuroscience behind fixing your sleep schedule, Dr. K's approach to meditation,

why having free will holds you back, right? And then you also have Dr. K chats with Dan TDM, Dr. K chats with Ali Abdel, Dr. K chats with Mizkif, chats with Destiny, so on and so forth, right? So you have mental health focused mini episodes, then you have the long form, often deeply personal interviews with influencers and streamers that to the untrained might resemble public therapy, but he is clear that they do not meet that criteria. We'll look at that later, right?

And then also he established a platform by the same name, Healthy Gamer GG. He describes as an industry-leading mental health platform, a team of experts and a commitment to providing affordable, accessible, and inclusive mental health resources to a new generation. So what this takes the form of is that you can take kind of online courses of his in specific modules, like anxiety module or depression module. They're about 30 bucks each. They're like little online courses that you can take.

Or you can sign up for coaching through coaches who have been trained in his particular system of healthy gamer GG advice. And he is clear that coaching and therapy are not the same. Coaching is focused on building through planning, introspection and awareness. And therapy is more about fixing something for clinical diagnoses, medication and or treatment. So he wants to say they're not doing therapy, they're doing coaching. And it is focused on often people who are having issues that that might be common in

the online environment so in some respect providing services for a community that might not be well understood by traditional psychiatry or psychologists right people that don't understand online environments or gaming or that kind of thing yeah and with respect to his sort of informational educational videos he certainly does create a lot of them i mean the one i watched this morning was what enlightenment does to your brain the neuroscience evidence apparently for uh enlightenment how to get it well i can play just a short clip from the introduction of that to give a taste of that kind of thing so he does have an element to his output focused around what he sometimes refers to as like Eastern concepts and spiritual practices and whatnot, but linking them to science, right? So for example, what enlightenment

does to your brain video has this kind of thing in it. So if you look at these Eastern spiritual traditions, they have this concept of moksha or liberation, enlightenment, this state of basically permanent happiness, which is impervious to all of the vagaries of the world around us. But if we look at the science, we don't really see a whole lot of evidence of that, right? So we have these studies on meditation or mindfulness that will show reductions in anxiety or improvements in quality of life, but no one using a mindfulness app is becoming permanently happy for the rest of their life. So it seems like we don't really have any neuroscience evidence of enlightenment. Or do we? Oh, suspense. So today we're going to understand the neuroscientific mechanisms of enlightenment. How to cultivate particular

things in your life that will lead you to happiness that could be a little bit more permanent, that could be a little bit more impervious to your circumstances. Yeah, so you get a sense of it there. It's, you know, it's speaking to stuff that people, there's obviously a huge market for it. Everyone wants to be healthier, happier, more cool with the world people are interested in spiritual practices and like introspective yeah breaking bad habits but not just breaking bad habits i think more in esoteric sources of knowledge tends to be quite popular so not just from a practical optimizer point of view, I mean that religion is hot right now.

Religion is hot right now, but I think health and wellness is perennially hot with everybody, not just people that are bodybuilders or min-maxing their various vital stats. True. And such people often have an interest in spirituality in various forms. It can be Buddhist versions of introspection, or it might be Ayurvedic practices, or it can be homeopathy.

You have people that are more evidence-based and less evidence-based, but the combination is certainly common. Yeah, not people like you and me. We're dead inside. We don't care about that stuff, but it is popular. Yeah, look, the other thing you heard

with Dr. K's thing there is is that heavy emphasis on science like he's he's he's bringing his scientific background his medical background and explaining the uh scientific and evidence base behind a lot of these uh tips and tricks to improve your well-being yeah and actually and actually, so his promotion for his stuff tends to emphasize that dual nature. So like here's a very short ad for some of his content he promotes. Hey all, if you're interested in applying

some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr. K's guide to mental health. It combines over two decades of my experience of both being a monk and a psychiatrist and distills all of the most important things I've learned into a choose your own adventure format. So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today.

So you've got the Harvard trained psychiatrist component, then you have the insights from time as a monk and meditation insights as well, like kind of combined to provide an alternative pathway. So I think he very much emphasizes those things. But just to say that not all the content is combining those two things. So another recent video was why shit life syndrome is holding you back, right? And there's no mention throughout that video of basically anything related to spiritual practices.

And you hear this kind of, I think useful and accurate summaries of things. So the adaptations that we use to survive are the very things that prevent us from thriving. Now, here's the really tricky thing is it turns out that these adaptations that you make will be deterministically bad for you in the future. OK, so remember that the organism is in homeostasis with the environment.

We're trying to survive. So we're forming certain kinds of adaptations. So if we look at some of these adaptations, what we find is that these adaptations will become problematic in the future. will become problematic in the future. So what we know is that when people have a history of trauma and when they suffer from depression, which by the way can be an appropriate, like almost like an adaptation or maladaptation from your circumstances.

So here's the chain of reasoning, okay? Adverse childhood experiences increase the risk of depression. So if you've had a shit life, you are more likely to have depression. Once you add depression into the mix, that creates perspective problems. So you add depression into the mix, that creates perspective problems. So there are multiple theories behind this, but they're basically

all agree that there's some kind of bias in our mind. So we have memory biases. This is wild. So what we know is that there are memory biases in depression. So a memory bias for negative material. Yeah. I mean, putting aside the specific advice there, like I really endorse the general points that he's making there, which is that, you know, having a better appreciation for our biological evolved tendencies and understanding that they don't always fit very well with the modern world and the kinds of things we have available to us you know it's really helpful i mean really basic stuff like like this is why we don't jog evolution didn't need to kind of encourage us to jog because in a natural environment you

just have to do a lot of physical activity anyway but we're so sedentary we actually need to force ourselves to do something instead of saving calories which is what evolution says we should do so yeah i think those sorts of insights are helpful for people and yeah you can you can hack yourself to some degree i'm jogging you know i'm there yeah yeah so i just play that to say that you're not gonna see in every video like you know discussions of how you can put eastern spiritual practices into your, you know, like to make your gaming play better or that kind of thing. There's kind of different facets. And this is why we've actually chosen in this case to look at a selection of content, right? In particular, we're going to separate out a couple of things. So let me explain the structure. We normally take one or two pieces

of content, and then we focus on those and add in some additional clips to elucidate points or that kind of thing. Now, in this case, we were originally going to look at an episode between Dr. K and Dr. Mike, where they got into a debate about Ayurvedic medicine. But in doing research for that, we came across an older clip from four years ago, where Dr. K is outlining more of his Ayurvedic theory, right, and his views on it. It was called Ayurveda Part One, Gunna's Cognitive Fingerprint and Personality. And there was so much in that piece of content that when we clipped it out, it ended up, you know, being as long as a normal episode would be. And the Dr. K and Dr. Mike thing is then a more recent discussion, which touches on a lot of the same things about, you know, the potential overlap and disjunctions between Ayurvedic approaches and modern medicine

approaches and whatnot. So we're going to look at both of those as a two-part deal, where we'll look at this older content first from four years ago, and then we'll look at the more recent interview with Dr. Mike from just a few months. And then separately, we'll do an episode specifically on the long form interviews with influencers, which whether their therapy or non-therapy is debated, and there's various ethical issues, there's various controversies around that. And there's some controversies around the Healthy Gamer GG organization, right, that is set up.

But we'll get into all those things separately because they are, although connected, they're actually a bit of a different dynamic. And the content that we're going to look at today is really a lot more related to the dynamics of complementary and alternative medicine versus modern medicine, and in a very traditional sense. So it seems like dealing with it all together

would have made like a six-hour episode. So we're gonna we're gonna split it up into parts which is a rare occurrence and kind of a credit to dr k in a way that his content made us feel the need to do this yeah that's right so there's quite a lot of material with dr k uh discussing ayurveda and uh i guess complementary and alternative approaches to therapies. And I guess we'll see the extent to which this informs his understanding of psychology, psychiatry. Yeah, exactly. And just one more little point to mention before we go in to look at the first piece of content that we're going to look at.

So this is from the conversation that we had with Dr. Mike talking about kind of his motivations, right? And it speaks to this combination that we were just flagging up. I just like clinical work. I like sitting with people. The other thing is I do believe I have, it's part of my spiritual path. So I believe I have a dharma or a duty, the way that I conceptualize my life is like, I'm really lucky. So I got to spend seven years studying yoga and meditation, like in all corners of India, South Korea, Japan. So I studied with a ton of different teachers, a ton of different gurus, I learned so much different stuff, really high value stuff, transformed my life from being like 2.5 GPA failure to like literally being faculty at Harvard Medical School. So I found it personally very helpful. And then I also had the chance to train with amazing mentors. And I went to medical school

at Tufts and like had some just brilliant psychiatrists that inspired me to become a psychiatrist trained at these amazing institutions. And so what am I supposed to do with this? Right? So I have this very unique advantage. The world has invested 15 years into me. And what am I supposed to do with this? So I did what most people usually do. So I'm complimenting alternative medicine, a lot of people from famous people and CEOs, and I was in Boston. So HBS and MIT and all these like fancy people who are very wealthy started coming to me. And, and then I realized that there's like, literally millions of people out there that no one is and these people that were coming to me, like they have no shortage of people who want to help them, right? Because they cash practice,

you pay out of pocket, you charge a lot of money, right? And, and so but there's no one helping these other people. So I sort of view it as my dharmic which means duty or karmic goal to try to disseminate this information i was the world has invested like 15 years of understanding the mind from both eastern and western perspectives and am i supposed to use this to enrich myself and and fly first class and go on vacations no right i'm supposed to disseminate this try to help people in the world. And that's what really drives me. So quite altruistic motivations, highlighting the unique combination of background preparedness. You could say, if you're unkind, a rather

traditional presentation for the secular guru archetype or not, not even secular there, but, you know, trained in multiple disciplines, traveled the world, was courted by CEOs and the elites, but chose instead to benefit the people. It is a narrative that, you know, sounds very much like a lot of self-help gurus story, right? Yeah. But I will say that I think he genuinely has a desire to help people. I get the impression from his content that, you know, his channel was started out to provide assistance to people based on his experiences and an area that he felt was underserved and it does seem to be an you know a genuine motivation that he wants to help people now weller dynamics have shifted somewhat and there are you know other creeping influences we'll

we'll get to uh especially in the stuff about the influencer interviews but um yeah so that kind of gives an overview of his presentation of his motivations right it's a dharmic duty and he's had 15 years of input so now you know he needs to give something back to the world yeah he's got dual training he's had the conventional western medical psychiatric training and he's had i think was it seven years of uh traveling and training and studying with gurus and so on in the subcontinent japan in east asia yeah and we heard reference right to tops to harvard medicine you know prestigious institutions so not just the spiritual enlightenment seeker side, more the kind of Huberman side of things. Since we're going to look at the content, one thing just to clarify for

people, if you were around in the 2000s and late 90s, as I was, you might remember various debates about calm and modern medicine, alternative therapies versus reductive Western medical systems, right? And this was kind of like the creationist evolution debates that you've seen online. I myself, for example, was following the British Chiropractic Association, suing the science writer Simon Singh for writing a critical article about them. So it's been a couple of decades that I have been aware and interested in discussions around complementary and alternative medicine and the different kinds of rhetoric that surround that topic. So do you have any familiarity with that topic or is this like you're approaching this cold?

No, I mean, I've got some data, I've published some papers on the psychology behind complementary and alternative medicines. You know, in essence, individual differences in terms of how appealing people find them. The basic framework that me and some other psychologists who studied that kind of thing is that essentially conventional medicine is widely used mainly because it works. It's not particularly appealing. It's not really generally fun to go to the hospital or to see a doctor or have a procedure done. Whereas

complementary alternative medicine tends to be popular because it's attractive rather than because it works. There's a broad spectrum from homeopathy at one end to sort of chiropractic or osteopathy, massage-y type stuff. Yeah, so this is not to say that absolutely nothing a camp practitioner does could possibly be helpful, but the psychology of it is basically that people tend to go to them because of the good vibes that one gets rather than efficacy.

How dare you reductive science man so Matt laying his reductive materialist cards on the table I prefer to keep an open mind you know I don't mind the source of any practice. If it works, it works. Medicine is medicine. So all I care about is the quality of your evidence. But I'm very familiar with the rhetoric in this space. And there certainly is a healthy dose of rhetoric applied in this area. And you will hear in this content, but also in general around this topic, a constant setting up of dichotomies. And on one side, you have complementary, integrative, holistic, alternative therapies contrasted with reductive, materialist, contrasted with reductive, materialist, Western, scientific, allopathic medicine.

So this is the binaries that you will see and we'll come to have a look at them. So the reason I mention all this is I have to say that when I first came across Dr. K's content, I was initially quite impressed because I hadn't seen content like his before. The interviews that he did with creators, which we'll get into, was very interesting because, yes, it did to me resemble therapy, but, you know, it was kind of empathetic listening and questions free as in ways that elicited interesting responses from people. And he seemed to have a very empathetic way about him. And I thought, you know, if this is, you know, if there's going to be influencer types out, that this is not a bad one to add to the mix, right? Somebody who's being empathetic, talking to people about mental health, and just generally not being Andrew Teat or something like that, right? So my initial approach was positive. I would say

the more I've dug in, it's become a little bit more nuanced. And this video that we're talking about here is one of the reasons for that. So Ayurveda part one, Guna's cognitive fingerprints and personality. This is from 2019. So relatively early in when his channel came out. Now, we'll see, Matt. We're not cherry picking because we are going to look at content from this year or from a few months ago later. But let's hear him set up what is the difference he sees in the Western and Ayurvedic approaches. So that's how Western medicine works.

We sort of divide things into groups like cardiology, nephrology, hepatology, infectious disease, psychiatry, endocrinology, pediatrics, OB-GYN, right? So we divide things into lots and lots of categories, and then we become super specialized in one category. Ayurveda is completely different. Ayurveda is not about zooming in. It's about generating patterns from multiple data points. So it's kind of looking at different dimensions of a person and trying to figure out how can we make correlations based on their physical body about what's going on in their mind? Is there some way that we can understand someone's bowel movements and how that will affect their mind? Is there a relationship between how prominent the veins on the back of their hand are?

of their hand are? Yeah, so the contrast there, I guess, is a very familiar one for people that like to contrast alternative medicines with so-called allopathic medicine, which is conventional medicine is very narrow. It wants to divide the world and unweave the rainbow, zero in on a specific ailment and doesn't consider the holistic picture, doesn't understand that different symptoms in, say, diverse parts of the body or connections between behavior and the mind and your physiology could be there. Whereas alternative therapies do take that holistic view and treat the person as an individual, as a whole, and give them a bespoke treatment as opposed to, you know, treating everyone the same. Yeah. And to give it a little bit more about that perspective. So an example of a randomized controlled trial is I take 10,000 people and let's say I'm trying

to figure out depression. Then what I do is I split them into two groups, a control group and an intervention group. And I give 5,000 people an antidepressant and I give 5,000 people a sugar pill. Then what I do, the reason we called it controlled is because we try to make the two groups the same. We try to have them have the same socioeconomic status, the same average age, the same gender breakdown. So we try to remove a lot of the individuality so we can isolate the effect of the disease and the treatment. So we try to remove a lot of the individuality so we can isolate the effect of the disease and the treatment. So we're trying to treat depression, not individuals, and we're trying to use randomization

and controlling for variables to remove any individuality from the equation. So I'm trying to just look at a disease in isolation and a treatment in isolation and see what the impact of the treatment is on the disease. So what this means practically is that Western medicine is not about treating people, it's about treating diseases. And so that sort of like, if you've sort of trained in Western medicine, you may think that that's the best way. But as you learn clinical medicine, you begin to realize that like people are fundamentally different. But as you learn clinical medicine, you begin to realize that like people are fundamentally different. So there you go.

Western medicine doesn't really appreciate that people are different. There are individual differences and really focuses on a disease rather than the person. I mean, that's not quite sure I graphed that distinction. I mean, if someone has depression, say, and they come to you because they are hoping to not be depressed, I'm not quite sure about that distinction between treating the depression and treating the person. It seemed to be one of the same to me. Well, I think he wants to say that, you know, you have like illnesses listed in a textbook and the person comes and you identify the illness and then you apply the treatment from the textbook to the person. And this is the model that is, you know, looking at there's something wrong.

We need to fix it. Not looking about you as a person, not concerned about, you know, your kind of circumstances and individual constitution, but more like, let's get rid of the ailment, which is affecting you. Now, yeah, there is an issue about saying that by treating an illness in an individual, you're not concerned about the individual. Because when someone goes to an Ayurvedic practitioner, they're often going for a particular ailment as well, right? And Ayurvedic medicine is a traditional treatment from India based on a kind of alternative understanding of like what makes up the body and the universe and, you know, theories of how to

treat things. It's actually a little bit like the four humors where there are substances in the body, free in particular, that we'll get to that can be unbalanced, right, or overrepresented. Then you can take various things to balance them up. It can be behavioral things, but more readily like changing your diet or getting particular, you know, Ayurvedic medicines to help balance the energy. So in the same way that qi presents an alternative system for how the body and energy works within the body, that's essentially what Ayurveda is doing as well. But yeah, so trying to treat depression, but not individuals. depression, but not individuals. Well, when you go see like a psychiatrist, for example, and you have therapeutic talk therapy, surely that is highly individualized. Or even in the case of receiving

medication, it's often done with consideration about what other medications you're taking, with consideration about what other medications you're taking, your family history, if you have some genetic issues or allergies. So I don't know that I completely agree, but it is a useful framing mechanism to say that Western medicine doesn't care. Oh, and one thing to say as well is that I will try not to do this, but there's a constant conflation of modern medicine as Western medicine. This is very common in alternative and complementary medicine practitioners. I don't think it's a good thing

because it implies that modern medicine is a property of the West as opposed to a property of science, scientific application to medicine, whatever country you're in. But in the presentation, it kind of puts an air of cultural chauvinism onto it, that if you want to advocate that modern medicine is better, you're implicitly denigrating all these alternative non-Western systems, when in reality,

there are plenty of Western medicinal systems, which are also non-scientific, including things like homeopathy and whatnot developed in the West, but also, you know, the four humors and various other treatments so we'll make that mistake a multiple times in this episode but i i think it's worth flagging that that is something that happens a lot like the contraposition of the west versus the east and versus holistic

therapies yeah it's a convenient framing for people who would like to be a booster of CAM, because most progressive open-minded people accept that there are different cultures and different ways of doing things, and none of us wants to be chauvinistic. But as you said, Europe has a rich and long tradition of traditional medicines and also alternative, what we'd call alternative in the modern world, approaches to health. Ideas about miasma, ideas about the four humors, ideas about people's faces being related to their personalities in some way. So much stuff. And it has been discarded, but only just very recently. And obviously, modern medicine and scientific approaches generally are practiced by people all over the world. So we will try to stick with the modern versus traditional framing. Yeah, well, we'll feel, but we'll try.

And so in any case, more about this issue about, you know, what Western medicine lacks in terms of interest and individuality. I'm a psychiatrist. I prescribe antidepressants from time to time, try to avoid it whenever possible. But one of the things you quickly learn if you prescribe medication is that medication, even though antidepressants will have a moderate improvement in clinical trials for people, an individual may get better or may not get better at all if you give them an antidepressant. There's a lot of like individuality that enters medicine. The funny thing is that our system of medicine doesn't sort of factor that in. We don't really factor in individuality in terms of our clinical trials

and the gold standard of our information. So Ayurveda is fundamentally different because Ayurveda like treats a person. It presumes that all human beings are different and that in order to like help someone, you have to understand like individually how they function. It sounds good, doesn't it, Chris? You know, treating the person, just treating them as an individual, understanding how they in particular function, not just throwing pills at them because you have to have them in your drawer. And not treating them as a dehumanized illness, just a carrier for an illness, approaching them as an actual human. Yeah, again, like I understand on the one hand that modern medicine, often in developed countries as well, especially those with socialized healthcare systems, has a deep personalized feeling to it. Like take the NHS in the UK, there's limited resources. Doctors have to see X amount of patients

and they cannot spend hours going through an individualized discussion with everybody that comes in the door, right, about their life circumstances. They need to diagnose relatively efficiently, give whatever the treatment recommendation is or send them on to the next place and move on to the next patient. And that's certainly unsatisfying

in comparison by, say, could be a private practitioner, but also often alternative health practitioners who do devote extra time, extra consideration to sit down, to devote significant portions of time to discuss the particular concerns of a person and have like an interest in their particular circumstances. So that feels better. And it feels like you are more being treated as a person. But to some expect, being treated as a person. But to some extent, you're paying for that privilege because, as I say, if you pay a lot for privatized healthcare, you can often get very personalized, indulgent treatment as well. So it's a little bit unfair to compare those systems to systems where there is more capacity for at least the appearance of personal investment. But I can understand why people often have very legitimate complaints about their interactions

with a modern medical system and the impact of things like pharmaceutical companies and whatnot in the way that problems can be addressed, where there is overprescription of antidepressants or overprescription of anti-anxiety medication or whatever the case might be. There's the famous case like the opioid crisis in America, right? And the overprescription of PM relief drugs and pharmaceutical companies doing various things that they were penalized for in helping to encourage that. So there are plenty of legitimate complaints about modern scientific, pharmaceutically linked medicine as well. But it is also often the case that when you look into alternative medicine providers,

you know, they are not individuals on corners like brewing up you know home remedies these are also multi-billion dollar industries with large transnational corporations producing supplements and whatnot so yeah that's something to know but but it is true that alternative practitioners often at least in appearance devote more time to people's individual problems right yeah yeah they can they can but yeah the entire experience of going to a camp practitioner i've i've been to camp practitioners as a experiential research i've had color therapy done seen them for a variety of things and i can tell you that it is it is a like a socio-emotional experience and it does feel individualized the the treatments are often rather generic but the

experience of going there is is certainly very very pleasant i mean one of the things i found and others have found too is a is a very strong correlation with large data sets found repeatedly between anti-vax and cam and this is not to say cam practitioners or people that are into cam are necessarily anti-vax many of them aren aren't, but there is a strong correlation there. And there is a good, interesting theoretical reason for it. And it's connected to what we're talking about, which is that part of the resistance, psychological resistance to vaccines is that they are a generic one-size-fits-all production line, medicalized treatment.

production line medicalized treatment and we heard from joe rogan or other influence who's who who really you can tell that they find the idea of getting like a customized cocktail created just for them something bespoke is just much more appealing to them so so there is some common psychological ground there yeah and i'm going to cheat a little bit, Matt. I know I said I'm going to focus on the content from the video that we talked about four years ago, but there is one little exchange in the conversation with Dr. Mike that is relevant that I'll just bring in here, where Dr. K is contrasting the approach between Ayurvedic and Western modern medicine systems, okay, and how they build up bodies of knowledge that I think is important because we'll go on to look at how this is applied in

practice. But this is a discussion about, you know, where they start from. So if you look at our Western system of medicine, the idea is that a disease process is independent of an individual and has a treatment. So the whole point of an RCT is let's remove all of the individuality, all of the specificity from an individual patient, because if we take an individual patient, we treat cholesterol in this individual patient. We have no idea how that's going to apply to the other 9,000 people we treat because this person is an individual. So let's remove individuality from the equation. Let's look at high blood pressure and let's try to isolate this disease process. Then we run into a problem in Western medicine because you can isolate this

disease process in a laboratory, but the moment that you have a real person in front of you, things get complicated. Agreed? 100%. So Ayurvedic medicine just looks at it from the opposite direction. They kind of say, okay, let's start with an individual and let's understand what works for this person. And then they also generalize. They sort of also have, you know, diagnoses, right? Which obviously means that it's not, it's not, there's diagnoses that are shared amongst individuals, but they start from a more individual lens. We are starting at a population level, and we are trying to narrow down to personalized medicine. They start at personalized medicine, and they sort of extrapolate out to a more general

way. Isn't that flawed by design? No. It's only flawed by design if you presume that the population base and the system, the existence of a disease process that is independent of people exists. Yeah. So again, this contrasting, this dichotomy between modern medicine and traditional medicines, in this case Ayurveda. And it sounds good, right? It sounds like a symmetry.

You've got the scientific approach, which starts off, like focuses on populations, focuses on a universal treatment and hopes that it works on an individual. And then you've got the Ayurvedic approach, which is to focus on the individual but then go up to the population but yeah think about that carefully it's unclear what that means isn't it chris yeah well there's significant issues there like one of the things is you know it is true that randomized controlled trials are designed to try and find treatments that, you know, can be found to work reliably in populations. If it only works for one

particular individual with one particular, you know, unique genetic makeup, then it wouldn't be that useful. However, I don't know that the characterization of that isn't entirely fair, because like, let's say, for example, when you're developing vaccines, now developing vaccines, you are developing a kind of one size fits all approach. But in each case, vaccines involve introducing a person's immune system to, you know, novel viral information, which they then build up antibodies to. And the reaction of people's immune systems are going to be different, right? But broadly, we're all humans, so they're acting on similar principles. But you will have people that have more strong immune responses than others, and you will have people that have stronger side effects than others. And it's not like we aren't interested in that. We are. And if

there are rare negative reactions in, you know, subsets, we would be very interested. You know, if there were people with rare genetic disorders that reacted very badly to a particular treatment, that's something you would want to know. Or men and women consuming things differently. And also clinical trials, you know, go through different phases where you have tolerance trials before you get to testing whether things work against placebo. So there's just, there's a lot of sweeping suggestions that the individual is just really unimportant. And it's not completely untruerue but i think it does a disservice to the fact that in developing medications that reliably work modern medicine is still interested in how that applies to an individual when it comes to giving them the treatment like your doctor won't just be

you know it doesn't matter what other medications you're taking it doesn't not matter if this medication works for you we're just going to keep doing it like they adjust you know, it doesn't matter what other medications you're taking. It doesn't matter if this medication works for you. We're just going to keep doing it. Like they adjust, you know, depending on how people respond to things. So, yeah. Yeah. There's obviously a huge amount of scientific investigation into interactions and the effect of things on different subgroups, depending on this, you know, or depending on that. So it is a bit of a straw man to say that there's no interest in the specifics of individuals but as

well as that there is like a big logical problem there with the idea that you you base your knowledge on an individual and then you extrapolate out somehow to a population because first of all if you are coming to a patient with a blank slate not applying knowledge that you've gained from other people because that is where all knowledge whether it's traditional or modern has got to come from your experience with others right so you are generalizing for you to bring knowledge any knowledge at all to treating a patient you you have to be incorporating general knowledge and so i it just doesn't quite logically compute yeah and there's actually i i again i i'm cheating a little bit by you know sticking with the doctor my content but there is a point almost immediately after that where dr k

contradicts what he just said he did talk did talk about moving from the individual to the more general, right? And applying it at a higher level. He kind of hedges a bit there, but listen to this. No, no. Yeah. But so this is a fundamental misunderstanding. The whole point of Ayurveda is you don't generalize one to the broader population. You develop a system that works for each person ideally that's what their approach

is there's no generalization or i mean there's some generalization some necessary generalization but their whole point is that you when someone comes to you and this guy is a bro science and he says this works for you the ayurvedic doctor says this worked for you let me try to figure out the next person comes along and they try to figure out what will work for you specifically what will work for you specifically they don't care for you specifically. They don't care about populations. They care about individuals. Right. Yes. So that's contradictory to what he was saying before, but I think, and he sounds uncertain, of course, he's sort of moving backwards and forwards. And I think that's because on some level, he recognizes the contradiction there. It doesn't quite make sense that you are somehow a practitioner

with knowledge that comes from somewhere, but at the same time, approaching someone as a perfectly unique snowflake, which doesn't share a whole bunch of things in common with other people, because if they did, if they were like an alien, then there was no way you would have expertise that could help them. Yes, we'll see if it is true that Ayurvedic systems approach each person as a completely individual, unique constellation of factors in a moment. But that last point about the possible interest in interactions versus the reductive nature of modern slash Western medicine. We know that these things are clinically correlated, but our system of Western medicine. We know that these things are clinically correlated,

but our system of Western medicine is looking at individual things and tunneling down, doesn't look at patterns and doesn't look at overarching changes. But we sometimes clinically, we know that even though our system isn't designed with this in mind, we still see evidence for this idea. And a good example is something like exercise or meditation, right? Exercise improves everything. Meditation improves everything. Meditation improves depression. It improves anxiety. This is from later in the episode, and I think a bit more sweeping in the things that are stated. But also, Matt, again, that are stated. But also, again, Western medicine doesn't know that exercise is generally beneficial to health across like different... Well, including mood, right? Like it's one of the most well supported treatments, most well evidenced and most well studied effects, which is that exercise

elevates your mood. And it's one of the best things to make you feel good and feel happy so again it's just the the straw manning and the false dichotomies there the the premise is that western modern medicine doesn't account for correlations when of course the vast majority of research is actually focused on on correlations and individual differences um so yeah anyway um let's continue yeah you know that just reminds me of joe rogan who similarly is like doctors will never tell you the exercise they'll never tell you about vitamin b or vitamin d or diet and you're like the consistent if you go to the who right now on twitter they have a specific thing dedicated just

tweeting out about the importance of health and diet and exercise and nobody pays any attention to it this is the problem that they have consistently been saying exercising and good diet is important and not smoking and you you know, these kind of things. But it's just nobody pays attention to them. Before we get too caught up in furiously disagreeing with Dr. K, Chris, I think one thing to recognize here is that he's very eloquent and the rhetoric is extremely effective. Those framings do feel very convincing if you don't stop and dissect them a little bit so i think we have to give credit to his rhetorical strengths yes well that is true and i'll now move a little bit to the ayurvedic like so there was a claim that there's a unique approach to each person as an individual.

So let's see how that applies in practice. So I'll give you guys kind of an example. So Ayurveda divides all people into like these three, you have this thing called a doshik balance. And doshas are sort of the three major patterns that kind of govern what people are like. So Ayurveda says, unlike Western, so Ayurveda says that individuals have like a cognitive fingerprint that is like different and that different people have different kinds of cognitive fingerprints. What do I mean by a cognitive fingerprint?

When we think about Western psychology, we tend to think that all human beings sort of have like the same psychology, right? If you study psychology, you don't study like an individual, know, let's say like hedonics. You study like cognitive behavioral therapy. You study like these general principles about the mind and like cognitive behavioral therapy applies to like everyone, right? You study kind of like one thing and it sort of assumes that it works for everyone because everyone's mind has cognitions, has emotions, and has behaviors, and that those three things are related. Ayurveda starts by saying that everyone's mind is unique and that in order to help people, we have to understand what kind of mind they have because the kind of treatment or intervention that we want to use depends on the kind of mind

that they have. So I started using this phrase cognitive fingerprint. Once again, this strong emphasis on the flattening and universalization of modern... No, Western psychology. Western psychology, yes. Yes, Western psychology. So putting aside the fact, as I said, that the vast majority of psychology research

is focused on detecting correlations and effects in cross-sectional samples, that is, individual differences. Putting that aside, the point that he wants to emphasize is that Ayurvedic approaches are phenomenological. They treat people as complete individuals, but we sort of got a hint there in terms of those different fingerprints or those different types of people. It might be actually that they do also put people into sort of flattening categories. Yeah. So you have the statement of a cognitive fingerprint, which, you know, fingerprints are unique to each person, right? You commit a crime and you could be caught because of your fingerprint, which is not like anyone else's, but it's made up of basically the same lines and whatnot. So we're familiar with this, but

you can equally say the same about genetics, right? We're all made up of the same double helixes and whatnot, but the genes are expressed differently and that leads to the differences. But in his system or the Ayurvedic system, there were three categories, right? He said three major patterns that govern what people are like, doshas. And so contrasting that with like, if you present Western psychology or Western medicine as having a single type, just one type, then that would be an improvement. Three versus one. The Western version just has the universal mind, which applies to everyone. But like you just hit that, Matt, that's absolutely not my understanding of Western psychology, even in the old school version of psychology where you're dealing with

freud because you had people in different levels of the sexual social or what is it like stages of development yeah psychosocial stages of development people with an oedipal complex or not or people who have oral fixation like freud's particular pathologies are well noted but but almost all a even very early psychological systems are talking about these typologies of different categories or tendencies amongst people and actually now a lot of them as it turned out are not well evidence-based. But even Freud, right, again, you had the id, the superego, and the ego. Those are three components of the mind which can be in different degrees of balance. So I'm not really sure.

Like, couldn't you say the same thing? That if you can have different ratios of control, you know, versus superego or being driven by the id, it sounds like you could come up with the same kind of argument. Well, the thing is, is that the modern conception of personality in psychology is not a categorical one. It's very much focused on a dimensional approach. So the most prevalent one is the ocean model. Is it, Matt? Or Dr. K might beg to differ, but I'll get his rejoinder. Oh, no, no.

Let's hear Dr. K's impression of psychology approaches to personality. Yes, let's. But just to mention, Matt was going to reference the ocean model, the big five personality features. We'll talk a bit about that. But let's hear Dr. K's version of it. Remember that Western psychology assumes that the mind is like uniform, right? The body is uniform. The heart functions a particular way. The mind functions a particular way.

That's how it works. And then Myers-Briggs comes along and says, people are fundamentally different, that not everyone is the same way, That there are introverts and extroverts. That there are people who judge and feel, right? Intuitive and perceptive. That fundamentally, they're different kinds of human beings. Where do they get that idea? Why is it so contrary to the rest of Western psychology? Because it's based on Jung.

Because Jung said people are fundamentally different. And then the question becomes, where did Jung learn it? We'll get to where Jung learned it, but you might have been, maybe, you know, Ocean might be a little development of the Bayer's Bridge. So there was a single unitary mind, right? The mind always functions the exact same way in all people it's it's the same then myers-briggs comes along and applies jungian archetypes to you know develop different personality types so and and then we go from there right and maybe ocean comes out of that

is that a fair representation of the history of psychology no no no no there are just layers and layers of wrongness to that explanation chris the myers-briggs type indicator is a relatively a very uninfluential and unimportant particular personality model of which there have been probably dozens or maybe up to 100. Within psychology, it is a very influential model within industry and popular conceptions of psychology, right? It may well be. That's right. And it is popular with industry and just with the general public for the same reason that star signs are popular. There is a little thrill in filling out the MBTI and finding out that your category is,

I'm an INTP, by the way, Chris. I'm an INTP. Oh, I don't know what that is, but yeah, I'm glad to hear. It's basically like a Scorpio. So yeah, the thing is, is that it's extremely poorly evidenced and that was determined very quickly. And that's why it had very little influence within psychology. In other words, the data just doesn't support this model.

But it remained popular, as you said, with corporations and stuff, because it's fun for staff training things. Now, the actual influential models in personality research in psychology, which is obviously focused on individual differences. So this is not conforming with this idea that we just treat people all the same, is things like the ocean model. So openness to experience, extroversion, agreeableness, things like that. And the reason why the MBTI and any categorical model of personality And the reason why the MBTI and any categorical model of personality is not just wrong, but it cannot be right. Because the way personality operates is that it is on a continuum. It is

a dimensional thing. You can be very extroverted, a little bit extroverted, kind of in the middle of the distribution, and you can be in the other direction as well. And same for all of the other characteristics or ways in which we might describe personality. It's fundamentally a misconception to think that there are personality categories. Now, Matt, you as a psychologist, consider me your pupil, right? I'm raising an objection to the teacher. Now, many people, Matt, will know people in their life who they regard as like more dramatic or more prone to anger, you know, angry people. They'll also be aware that you can get clinical diagnoses for in extreme cases like psychopathy or whatever the case might be. So

doesn't that mean like we have lots of cases where people layer conceptual categories over continuous variation and then say this is a type of thing there's always going to be edge cases so what's wrong with with that mr psychologist yeah look it's certainly true that um you can use conceptual categories to describe very complex things like psychopathology, because they are, for one, clinically useful. And while there is an underlying range, there tends to be a stage at which things kind of spiral out of control. And we say that that person kind of has a disorder. So this is very much true for gambling problems, for instance. There are population screens and people make diagnoses of you have

gambling problems right you have an addiction and and that that label that category can be useful but but it is still an abstraction that's foisted on to what is an extremely complex underlying thing so in the physical sciences and to some degree in biology categories make a lot of sense because events happen or they don't happen you're dealing with things that are very sort of microscopic level so like a molecule protons neutrons protons neutrons uh for example an isotope of uranium might decay or not decay the event happens or it doesn't happen so it is a binary event. And so categories make sense there. Well, except though, Matt, you'll know about probabilistic outcomes and quantum indeterminacy.

And you'll also know in biology, we have complex interacting systems, which are not molecules, they're organisms and ecosystems. So take that, productive science man, how do you deal with that? Yeah. I mean, there's obviously a continuum. I was going to get to biology. Like in biology, you tend to have like chromosomes express themselves or they don't. There is a binary categorical aspect to DNA. An organism reproduces or it doesn't reproduce, right? Now, yes, there are shades of gray there because, as you said, you are even at the level of microorganisms.

You're dealing with a very complicated system. But still, often the idea of categories scientifically can make sense. When you start talking about personality, and you were talking about normal human variation, then a property like extraversion is caused by a huge number of different factors. Like there's no one single underlying mechanistic event that makes you an extroverted person or not an extroverted person. Rather, there's probably thousands of different little things contributing to that personality trait. Genetic, environmental, and so on. Yeah, exactly.

Social, cultural, and so on. That's right. We don't even understand most of them. cultural so on that's right we don't even understand most of them now for that reason it's a statistical fact right that that when you average a whole bunch of effects like the the original distribution of the effects could could be binary could be a binomial distribution it could have any kind of distribution but when you lump them all in together into a composite effect then things tend to converge mathematically to a normal distribution so so this is why you know not just empirically like the evidence supports models like the ocean model dimensional

models but also theoretically it almost has to be a dimensional thing not a categorical one where you put people into mbti categories or doshas or anything else. So how about, Matt, may I ask, last objection I'll raise to you, Mr. Psychologist. We have nationalities and we have cultures and we recognize different national cultures, but you can also recognize, you know, Swiss people, German people, there's overlaps, there's language overlaps, there's cultural things and, you know, there's fuzzy boundaries. But the categories themselves remain useful, and there are co-occurrence of various features that make us refer to someone as German as opposed to Swiss. And yes, you could do it by passport, but often people are just going

by a kind of clustering of features. So is there not an argument to be made that you can get that kind of clustering with personality factors and therefore develop, you know, a broad typology where you say could have 16 core types of regularly reoccur? Because I think that would be an intuition that people would have. Yeah, look, it's definitely true that for some, like, I guess, high level or complex sort of constructs, like we deal with with sociology and psychology, there can be a degree of clumpiness, right? That things can sort themselves into categories, you know, so if you go, say, from Germany

to Poland, and you measure culture somehow, and as you move along, you'll find it's like German, German, German german or pretty similar and then it switches to polish now you may find along the border there is a bit of a fuzzy boundary sure where people are culturally a bit german and a bit polish but still your point is true that you can get like useful categories to describe these complex phenomena but with things like that there is always a mechanism and the mechanism there of course are national boundaries national boundaries have this homogenizing effect makes somebody you know 50 kilometers from the border between poland and germany on the german side much more german

and likewise on the polish side so with personality you would have to not only rebut all of the evidence that there's no evidence for categories but you would also be looking to identify the mechanism like where do these personality categories come from i mean there's there's lots of interesting things that you can look at and there's the disputes about the degree to which various personality models apply cross-culturally, right? The measurement, at least, of them, whether they're appropriately culturally specific. But the big five tends to do better than most when it comes to cross-cultural applications.

But we're not here to get so much in the indigenous psychology claims or the role of cultural determinants of personality and so on. But just to say we recognize they exist. So to return, Matt, to the point though, one thing in this whole presentation that struck me is he is presenting it as Myers-Briggs invented differences in psychology, but he references Jung, like he took Jungian categories. But so like Jungian archetypes, that means existed prior to the Myers-Briggs, right? And Jung was working from Freudian systems. So that implies that there actually was different types, right? But in any case, he raised the issue about where did Jung get his archetypes from,

you know, psychoanalytic archetypes? Where do they come from? Let's find out. One other question that I want to get to is someone asked about Myers-Briggs. So I do believe that there's some correlation with Myers-Briggs. And the reason for that is very simple. For those of you guys who don't know, does anybody know what Myers-Briggs is based on? What's the foundation of Myers-Briggs? Anybody know? You can be a chubby vata. Nope, Myers-Briggs is not based on the Big Five.

Yeah, so Esther Q has it right. Based on Carl Jung. You know what? This is fascinating. You know what Carl Jung's theories are based on? Did he come up with them himself? Nope. Not Freud. Incorrect. Nope. Not Nietzsche. Dake Moses has it correct. Carl Jung's theories are actually based on Ayurveda and Hindu philosophy. Right? So Carl Jung studies Ayurveda and then comes up with theories. And then Myers-Briggs

studies Carl Jung and then comes up with Myers-Briggs. And so it correlates to Vata, Pitta, and Kapha. We'll get to Vata, Pitta, and Kapha shortly, but you didn't know, but actually, you know, Western psychology actually got its insights via Myers-Briggs from Carl Jung, who was studying Ayurvedic systems. And no, not a big influence from Freud. Wrong. Incorrect. That guru treat or it's likely a pedagogy tactic that people sometimes do where they want to elicit a specific response and they're like, what's the answer? Nope. Nope. And then, you know, until you give the correct answer, but like what is Carl Jung's main influence? The correct answer is Freud. He was a pupil of Freud. And the claim that he was primarily studying Ayurveda and developed his theory of archetypes out of that literature?

No, not true. Actually, Carl Jung had, yes, he had an interest in world religions, including Hindu systems and myths and legends. But he took concept from all different traditions, various, you know, East Asian religions as well, and Western sources and myths and legends. So there are elements taken from Hinduism there, but it's very much not a primarily Ayurvedic system and and he wants to say that like essentially saying the bit that western medicine got right is because it was like reflecting from ayurvedic insights which yeah so yeah it's challenging to cover this um segment

because he's just wrong in so many different ways simultaneously like he's he's wrong about the mbti being like a well-recognized psychological instrument he's wrong to assume that there's any evidence for it really at all he's wrong about the influences and and he's fundamentally wrong that there is a categorical approach to psychology that modern medicine shares with Ayurveda. Yes, well, so we question the claims about Western psychology that he makes there and welcome arguments to the counter. But it is surprising for somebody with significant training and expertise in this area to have that version of the history.

But in any case, let's spend a bit more time with what the Ayurvedic system has. So he mentioned Vata, Pitta, and Kapha, right? And one other thing that Dr. K will do is make reference to computer games analogies because of the audience. So here's him explaining these a bit more with reference to Pokemon types. So I'll give you an example. Like they think that you should be disciplined. They think that you should be focused. They think that you should wake up at the same time every day. They think that, you know, these are the things that lead to success. Whereas Ayurveda says,

actually, that's not, that's just one route to success. And if your cognitive fingerprint is different, that the way that you can like be successful is to kind of play to your strengths. So I think this is going to be way easier to understand once I actually start explaining specifics. So the first thing is that there are three doshas, vata, pitta, and kapha. So vata is kind of like the wind, pitta is kind of like fire, and kapha is kind of like earth. And Gaffa is kind of like earth. Okay, so this should work great for gamers because these are like the elements of your Pokemon, right?

So like if you have a Vata mind, you're like an air Pokemon. If there's an air Pokemon or like grass or some shit, right? If you're a Pitta Pokemon, you're like a fire Pokemon. If you're a Gaffa Pokemon, you're like an earth or water Pokemon. Now, Matt, I feel like you're not going to be a big pokemon player is that fair to say that that doesn't help you out we've reached the limits

of my expertise there chris um yes so i can provide a bit more there's there's information i can provide about each of those types right right? But let's hear a little bit about the general types, right? And, you know, he highlighted there, there isn't one single path to success or achievement. Like his implication is the Western modern psychiatric approach would be, there is only one way to do things correctly, right? And if you deviate from that, you're kind of doing things wrong. Whereas, at least in the Ayurvedic system, they have three potential factors that might come into play. And yeah, so here's a little bit more about how that might apply in another gaming analogy to help you. But the difference is like,

at the end of the day, like we both ended up training at Harvard Medical School and we're both faculty at Harvard Medical School. And so how is it that both of us wind up at the same degree of like professional success? It's because I understand that I'm a Vata and I created a Vata life and that she's a Kapha and she created a Kapha life. And so you have to figure out what's your dosha and how can you develop a life that is structured to be easy for you, right? If you've got like mage stats, like you want to be casting spells, you don't want to be like melee DPSing someone with a dagger.

But the problem is that our society says that like melee DPS is the way to go. And then you also have your tanks who are like, we suck at melee DPS. And so then they look at themselves and they say like, I suck at life because I suck at Mealy DPS. What I'm trying to tell you guys is like, well, you're a fucking tank. So you're supposed to be doing a different thing. You have a different job. And what I like about Ayurveda is that Western medicine says that Mealy DPS is the only way to go. This is success. Society says that this is the only way to go. This is success. Society says that this is

the only way to go. This is how Western society works, right? We think in terms of polarities. We think in terms of like good or bad. We don't really think in terms of shades of gray. We think like Republican or Democrat. We think like conservative or liberal. We think about like everything is like a polarity. But that's just not how we are there's like like human beings are a spectrum and the more that you understand where you lie on the spectrum the more you can understand how to like structure your life in the right way okay so you got to find out whether or not you're a vata or one of the other ones and live a Vata lifestyle, but also understand that you're incredibly unique, not the same as one third of the population of the world

and it's dimensional. But look, another quick comment from me, Chris, there is that just more of a meta comment is this idea of like differential approaches, like finding your learning style or finding your lifestyle and customizing things to it. It does come out of psychology a few times and gets very popular in other disciplines. So things like learning styles, are you familiar with this? There are

some people that are visual learners, some people that are auditory learners. So it's like, you know, you got to find your modality and then customize your learning or your teaching to each student or to yourself. So as to suit that modality. This is vastly popular and is still taught throughout Australia in education departments. And it's bullshit. But I mentioned it because it's appealing. Like you can understand why this kind of customized sort of thing has has traction and it goes back to what i was saying about the difference between cam and

conventional medicine is that sometimes you have theories or or knowledge that is well accepted because it works not because it's appealing vaccines are the ultimate example right we sort of reluctantly embrace vaccines even though we don't like needles we don't like anything really about the concept of it but because intellectually we have to accept that they work but then you have other types of frameworks like different learning styles or like you're finding out if you're a wind person or a fire person or whatever or or a star sign and these are popular because they're appealing they're just appealing yeah so in some sense as well you know there's these things called

barnum statements right matt you might be familiar with them where they're designed to sound personalized but they are so broad that almost anybody can make them apply to themselves. So you say, you know, like you're somebody that can be confident sometimes, but at other times you feel like, you know, you don't want to be around other people. And everyone's like, yeah, right. And they've done these studies where they give people these statements and ask how much they apply to them. And a lot of people think that they're very accurate to describing them, but they're designed to be generic, right? So now I just, I mentioned this because Dr. K would say, no, no, no, no, that is not what we're doing. And, and also you mentioned the potential issue, you know, the contradiction of saying there are

three types and that everyone is unique, right? And he does attempt to justify this, but let me first just highlight that there definitely is a tripartite classification system there. And he also said, if you are a Vata person, you should live your life as a Vata person, right? If you're a Kapha person, you should go with that which like it implies a very like there is a destiny right like you shouldn't go against your nature you should recognize your limitations and your benefits and and play to them and that can be empowering but it can also be rather restricting if somebody classifies you as a particular type right i mean you know in the indian context obviously the caste system is the extreme form of that i'm not saying that's what's classifies you as a particular type, right? I mean, you know, in the Indian context, obviously,

the caste system is the extreme form of that. I'm not saying that's what's applying here. But I'm just saying, that kind of thing, when you're talking about, you know, karmic destinies and whatnot, it's often nice to the people who they have a future where they can see things going well, but when it applies to, you know, people in worse circumstances who don't achieve much in life or, you know, don't leave their mark on society, does that mean they didn't fulfill their karmic destiny or just that the majority of people in the world cannot be the heads of industry and the leaders of nations and whatnot? But in any case, so Vata, Matt, Vata, what is a Vata like? So Vatas are like the wind. So I'm super Vata. So Vatas have memories and mindsets that are like

the wind. So I get really, really passionate very easily. Like I blow, I'm like a gust of wind. So I get super excited. And I say that I'm going to teach about Ayurveda today. And I get super hyped up about it. And I blow really hard about Ayurveda. And then like a week later, just like the wind, I just randomly die down. So my mind gets super excited about stuff and then like randomly dies down. So I get really, I get excited about stuff, but follow through is very difficult for my mind. Other examples of vatas include like interests that change very quickly. So, you know, like a month ago, I was reading a bunch about Carl Jung, and now I'm like, okay, I'm done with Jung. I'm ready to move on to something else. And so that's another example. So interests like the wind. The other thing about vatas is that their, their mind learns very quickly. So vatas,

much like the wind can blow really hard in one direction. So if you drop me in a random like job within two or three days, I'll be really good at it. So when I was like in medical school, I did a really great job because like it, I learned super fast. The downside to vata is that you forget super fast too. So vata memory kind of like is, is easy to learn and easy to forget. So when I meet people, people think I'm super smart. Like you guys think I'm super smart. And then like, the problem is that like, if you know me for a while, I'm not going to seem nearly as smart as I come across like at the very beginning, because Vata's are super dynamic in their memory. Like we just learn things very quickly, but we forget things very quickly. so that's vatas we've got two more types but one thing is you know there's pros

and cons right i still think vatas sound you know kind of good from that description it sounds like the kind of enigmatic genius you know who's a the forgetful professor right with the the kind of piercing intellect but but can't concentrate on individual things so well so like vata sounds pretty nice to me and uh yeah but he but he does mention you know they're not good at sticking with things and they're you know a bit material this kind of thing right and and also the same matt dr k highlights some some of his failures and it is like relatable i think to his audience so i'm gonna tell you guys this very simply i'm fucking lazy i'm not disciplined i'm fucking lazy i i still love to play video games i

procrastinate i don't like to do work i play video games instead of doing work i'm actually no different from you i don't think my stats are different from like pretty much anyone on stream i think the biggest difference is that i understand i'm vata i get it and i recognize that this is the way that i am and then i structure my life to suit who i am in my mind like like structure to suit my cognitive fingerprint and if you start structuring your life to be like designed for your cognitive fingerprint we'll get to the other doshas in a second then you're going to start to do a lot better yeah that's relatable yeah lazy fuck you know and it's a it's an important um like it's an important point for someone like him to make that is looking to i guess convince his audience

that the system works right embracing the ideas works because i'm super successful i've been to ivy league places and um you know whatever i'm big deal, but it's not because I'm special. It's not because I've got some attributes or whatever. It's rather because I've embraced these ideas. So if you embrace these ideas, you can too. I'm skipping ahead a little bit here, Matt, but thematically just connected. I feel I have to play this clip because it relates to this.

So we'll get back to the Tridoshic system in a minute. But so exactly what you said, that Dr. K is saying the system is what's unique, what gives him the stats boost. And if others follow the system, they'll get the same benefit. I just want to make it clear that he really is making quite strong claims for the degree of benefit that he derives from following this system, not just for him, but for the people he treats. So listen to this. The reason that depression is hard to treat is because people treat it like a monolithic disease. Like, I don't know.

I mean, there are all kinds of reasons why this could be true but i have very good results with the people that i work with with depression like i i shit you guys not like i'm really not trying to toot my own horn but there are people that are in my practice that have been on treatment for like have been in therapy and medication for anxiety for like 15 years and within six months we're taping them off of medication. They feel fantastic. Why? Is it because I'm a brilliant clinician? No, this is what I'm saying. I'm not actually any better. It's just, I use tools that none of my colleagues use. I use Ayurveda. And it's like, it's OP, man. I'm not actually a better clinician. So this is what I want you

guys to understand. I'm not actually saying I'm better than anyone else all i'm saying is that like all of my colleagues who are treating anxiety as a monolithic illness are doing themselves a disservice because anxiety is not a monolithic illness they're different kinds of anxiety and once you understand that once you start incorporating like anti-vata diets people get better okay so the ayurveda is the superpower um the op overpowered in humor analogy right yeah other psychiatrists don't understand that people are different they treat conditions as being exactly the same for each for everyone but ayurveda is the key that allows you to see people as individuals and let you cure people who have been on medication for 15 years matt unable to be helped and you know you come you use the ayurvedic diet treatment and they're better

they're cured that's some pretty big claims like because if that is, you're essentially saying that there is a very, very effective system of medicine. Now, the way that you've got to apply it should be interesting because, you know, as he's just explained earlier, you can't apply any generic principles, right? It has to be each person approached individually. But it is claiming like people get better, right? He said it. People get better. And it's not like people get better, right? He said it, people get better.

And it's not that he's better. It's the system that he's applying. So this just speaks to the level of confidence that he has in Ayurvedic treatments. And he really does see it as a distinguishing feature of what he offers. So we'll see this slightly different in the later content, but I just want to note that that is there. And also just to say as well, that when you look at, for instance,

the modules that are offered on the Healthy Gamer GG thing, like the depression model has as part of it you know understand clinical versus non-clinical distinctions but then also has panchakosha theory discover how this ancient yogic theory can help you free him feelings of depression so you know i i think it's it's still a significant component that distinguishes what he does from other people um Okay, I just, I felt we should continue that, but we need to get back to the different types of people, different type of doshas, right? So you have vatas, you have pittas, maybe we'll get to them later, but let's hear about kaphas.

The third dosha is something called kapha. So kapha is like earth and water. So kaphas, a lot of people that I know, you know, think that they're not smart when actually they're just kaphas. So one of the things to remember about kapha is that they learn slowly, but they also forget slowly. So kaphas take time to like get up to their, they have like slow acceleration, but they can hit very high velocities. Whereas vatas have very high acceleration and then like very like high negative acceleration and like low velocity at the end of

it. So they take their time, kaphas take their time to get started. Kaphas are also what we call big bones. So they tend to be heavyset. It's easy for them to gain weight they have very round features and guffas tend to be very very resilient uh so they can withstand large amounts of like negative situations and sort of handle that pretty well because they they kind of have like high constitutions or high endurance but did you ever play zelda no like there's There's these rock people that are like, you know, they're little circular boulder people that they're very, you know, like kind of friendly but they're a little bit slow

and, you know, like they can help you out, they can absorb a lot of damage. That's why I'm talking about Kappa based on this description. Kappa certainly sounds like the, you know, if you had to pick, if you had to pick It's like, Kappa certainly sounds like the, you know, if you had to pick, if you had to pick between Bato and Kappa, Kappa is a heavy set.

People think they're dumb, but they're not. And they, yeah, they're big boon. They can't actually change that. That's, yeah. I don't want to be a Kappa. But, you know, but but every team every rating team needs a couple of kaffirs to absorb those dp tpm i i wonder is there like cross national you know ratios of different people because obviously there are you know there are genetic differences

between populations right you know the people that might be in extreme circumstances like better adapted to living in uh low oxygen environments because of isolation or whatnot or you know chris i hear what you're saying i hear what you're saying you're saying that like 80 of the population of samoa are kafirs it's it's a shocking revelation i'm not saying that i'm just saying you know like sumo is dominated by mongolians japanese and answer words like to a certain extent but i'm not saying that i'm just saying you know like sumo is dominated by mongolians japanese and answer words like to a certain extent but i'm just wondering what the way that would apply but in in any case we haven't won all our type as well but you know we'll get to them basically they're like the fire type they're kind of passionate imagine elon musk

like kind of driven and they argue a lot but they're very inflexible and this kind of thing. That's the other one, right? Now, alongside this, like how do you determine which one you are, right? Like how would you work this out? You could go to an Ayurvedic practitioner and they could, you know, find out. Let's see some signs that you might be able to detect which one you belong to. So remember that Ayurveda says that like your mind has correlations with your body. So vatas are also what we call people with fast metabolisms. So if we look at like people's physical bodies, we know that there are three groups of people. Like you can sort of just look at people and everyone knows this.

The first is that there are people with fast metabolisms. So I can basically eat whatever I want to and I'm not going to gain a whole lot of weight. Then there are people who have medium builds, and then there are people who are what we call big boned. So medium builds are pittas and big boned people are kaphas. And so kapha people who are like big boned, they can eat salads every day and they're still going to be chunky. That's just their, that's what their Ayurvedic dosha sort of dictates. And Vata people are going to always kind of be thin. The other thing about Vata body types is that like they have angular features. So if you look at my face, like my nose is like very like angular, right? It's like sharp. The features of my, um, like my,

my face is sort of angular. And if you, if you guys saw, like, for example, on, on the last stream, we had, uh, Joro, which by the way, Joro did do his stuff, which we'll talk about in a minute. But, um, we had someone named Joro and Joro is a classic gaffa. Like he has a very round face. Like I can't even like grow a full beard. So Vatas have very like scant facial hair, whereas gaffas have like full facial hair um and vatas also use their hands a lot so like i use my hands a lot when i'm talking so i'm starting to get confused because like i've got a beard right but i use my hands a lot and i'm kind of flighty in attention and so i'm like am i a kappa i don't have a ryan fierce i suppose that's it yeah yeah so yeah it is it is big claims right that uh you can basically tell somebody's

personality um and basically a whole bunch of things about their mind and their proficiencies their cognitive abilities just from looking at them or just from feeling their skin or seeing how much hair they've got or whether they've got a round face i mean these these ideas that you can tell what a person's nature is from the shape of their face or their head or their body have a long history in other places too and they are generally not looked upon very favorably these days yeah phrenology all right one system there are others there are systems about like criminal appearances right facial features that are also discredited so yeah it's physogyny right isn't that the the general term for this this style of

physiognomy physiognomy physiognomy i think i think there's two pronunciations the american one and the everywhere else one so whichever one choose your pick but you everyone knows what it is right and that came out everyone knows there's three types of people right there's there's like athletic people there's normal people and there's fat people that's essentially what he said and i'm like i don't know you know there's like this is a good example where this is a continuum there's a continuum this is this is this is a good example of what i was saying like height and weight you don't even have to go to personality height and weight are multiply determined by a whole bunch of different factors both genetic

environmental lifestyle etc and they all contribute and that's why these things are on a spectrum you look at the distribution of heights and weights and there's a normal curve maybe some heavy tails but a curve a spectrum there are not fat people i know we use these concepts you might point at someone and call them a skinny, big bone. Sorry. We might call them skinny. We might call them tall. That's true. But that doesn't mean that there are categories of heights and weighted people.

I don't know, Matt. You've heard the term skinny fat, right? That's me. I'm skinny fat. Yeah. So people are asking if you're skinny fat. So skinny fat is just you being unhealthy and vata. So instead of getting big bone, vatas can be fat.

It's not like you can't be fat. Skinny fat is a vata that doesn't take care of themselves. But they don't balloon like a gaffa. And they're not going to get fat in the same way that a pitta does. They're going to get skinny fat, right? Just look at that phrase, skinny fat. They're going to get skinny fat, right? Like, just look at that phrase, skinny fat. You don't call yourself fat. Intuitively, we recognize that this is a different kind of fat. We call it skinny fat. It's just a completely different kind of fat.

It's not a big boned fat. It's a skinny fat. So vattas, like, doshas are simple to see in your own life and simple to observe. You can see kind of the proof right in front of you with the term skinny fat. It's not big bone fat. It's skinny fat. They don't balloon like gaffers. There's a term skinny fat, Chris. You're aware of it.

It proves it. It proves what he's saying is right. Yeah, how can you doubt that? You know, it's not just your general overall weird, right? You know, we heard mention of your angular features and whatnot, but there's more, Matt. So I want you guys to look at the top of my eyelid and see how it covers like the top of my iris. That's classically Vata. So there are even things like the more of your iris you can see, that's like pittas.

You can see the entire iris of their eyes. And so there are all kinds of physical... Oh, this is great. Appetite. There are all kinds of physical features. So my diagnostic question for vatas is, are your eyes larger than your stomach? And what I mean by that is that, do you get intensely hungry and then get satisfied with a relatively small amount of food? Like you feel like you can eat like, like, you know,

10 pounds of barbecue, but then you eat like half a plate and you're like, actually, I'm kind of full. So that's, that's a classic vata appetite, where your eyes are bigger than your stomach, and you feel super, super hungry, and you feel hungry erratically. Bittas have sort of an excessive appetite. Gafas have sort of a stable, regular appetite. Vatas tend to be prone to constipation. Bittas can have indigestion and can have like acid reflux and like stomach problems. So eyelid, Matt, eyelid coverage of the iris and the way that you approach eating meals, right? And you heard quite clearly there, fat is prone to constipation,

bitters indigestion, acid reflux and stomach problems. That is saying that there are types of people that are identifiable by physical characteristics and it's associated with proneness to particular illnesses, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Now, look, we're not a debunking program, but a lot of this smells an awful lot like

bullshit. It is not inconceivable that there could be some physical uh indicator maybe a trivial one like something about your eyelids that might possibly be correlated with some surprising aspects of your of your personality or physiology one of the things i think you mentioned to me Chris, that maybe this isn't backed up very well. I'm skeptical myself, but I think that they do investigate the degree tonatal testosterone exposure now i have no idea whether or not that's true there's probably better examples but you know i'm just saying it's possible but your default assumption right when somebody is is claiming that oh we know that from this eyelid shape that you're a vata and you're going to get heartburn. Your first response should be bullshit until

proven otherwise. I'm not convinced about the fingered link ratio and testosterone exposure, even though there's heaps of papers in the literature about it. You really need to be convinced and it doesn't seem like there's any critical evaluation of these claims. Oh, well, Matt, no, we haven't got to the tri-dosha, but we do need to talk about your claim. There's no evidence. So let's first of all talk about how you might classify people. I mean, you could just look at them. You could just say, are they skinny fat?

They're vata. You could look at their irises, but maybe you want to be a bit more systematic for it. So here's some discussion about the content of a questionnaire to help you distinguish the different types. So here's an example of the, the Prakriti questionnaire. Okay. So this includes physical and mental stuff. So I don't know if you guys can read this, but this is weight. So vatas are usually thin, often difficult to put on weight, visible ribs, medium build, good muscle tone is kaphas. i mean is but those gaffas are larger difficult to lose weight heavy bones vata skin is dry cool thin bit the skin is like oily smooth and warm

with a lot of freckles or color in their face so you guys should go look at joro and look at the fucking color in his face he's got a ton of color in his face gaffas have like thick skin cool skin oily so hair tends to be like thin kinky like i don't know if you guys see this but like my hair is like kinky as fuck you guys see this like it it it it kinks like you see this action like it's not straight um so uh bit does have like male pattern baldness oftentimes um and guffa's hair is like thick wavy oily lustrous thank god guffa's got something you can't lose weird they're slow and you know they're repentable but at least they've got luscious locks you know that's something positive but yeah so there's a questionnaire that you can

apply and you can work out your relative, like quite clear here, and we'll get back to it, this issue that he is talking about three distinct categories, but he will go on to argue that he's not doing that, right? Like he's talking about relative proportions and everybody is a little bit of each of them. But you mentioned evidence. And I want to correct you, Matt, that they are not concerned with evidence. So let's hear some about this. You're going to hear some science, Matt. Get ready. Let me send you guys. You guys want to see science is anyone wondering whether any anyone wondering whether there's any science behind this stuff like yes is this is this like just this is just theory right there's no like science behind it this guy's

like he's one of these complementary complementary alternative like homeopath reiki people it's not real come on can't be real right there's no way so you guys want some science there's the science okay so i'll tell you what these two papers show yeah it's some voodoo shit right the first is that what what researchers in india did there's a there's an emerging field called iugenomics so researchers did is they said okay they gave a bunch of people these questionnaires and they said like okay okay, for all of the people who are Vata, let's check their genome. And for all the people who are Pitta, let's check their genome. And for all the people who are Kapha, let's check their genome. And are there statistically significant

correlations between your genes and your dosha? And the answer is absolutely yes. So sorry, Matt. Did you want science? You got it. I think our poor Dr. K may have been infected by hubermanitis, but nonetheless, he's brought the, you know, science to the dinner table. And are you going to eat, Matt? You need to eat your words, right? Okay. So statistically significant associations between your genotype and your doshas. You checked this out, didn't you? I did, Matt. There's a paper. He flashed it up on the screen. The two papers he references. The first one is Prakriti and its associations with metabolism, chronic diseases, and genotypes, possibilities of newborn screening, and the lifetime of personalized prevention.

of newborn screening and the lifetime of personalized prevention. Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine. This is a narrative review by two advocates for Ayurvedic medicine being integrated. And would it surprise you that they survey the evidence and decide that there is promising signs? It is apparent that multiple linkages of Ayurvedic tridosha principle with modern scientific biochemical and genetic markers are being unearthed. As a step further, it can be envisioned that in future newborns can be screened for various Prakriti types, which will open up possibilities of creating lifestyles environments that lead to prevention of diseases that particular Percriti types are prone to. I found what I think is a message from one of the authors on LinkedIn, which mentioned allopathy doesn't have all the answers.

Allopathy or Western medicine, while being quite progressive and diligent, still doesn't have all the answers. In addition, the attitude of Western medicine is sick care and not health care. You just have to look at the health care costs of the U.S. to see that it's not sustainable. Finally, Western medicine is not holistic. It's trying to be, but it's not, since most of the Western medical science is based on the Cartesian paradigm. Please see the book Turning Point from Fritjof Kappler for more. So I'm not sure you should completely take the assessment of people who are advocates for Ayurveda as the final word when it's just their opinion man, as the dude would say. But the other one, the study from 2015,

genome-wide analysis correlates Ayurveda-Prakriti. This is from Nature Scientific Reports, a journal associated with the nature. It's not the real nature. I'm published there, so it often confuses people. And he mentioned, the way he described it is, you know, they look at all the people, they check their genomes, and they find statistically significant correlations. Now that's, that is somewhat true, somewhat true, but this is the hubermanitis at effect. Cause like one thing, Matt, is finding statistically significant correlations in

data sets, not very hard, not very hard. And what you want to be concerned with is, one, well, like statistical significance is not practical significance. But two, have you constrained it such that, you know, these statistical correlations you've identified wouldn't have been expected in another circumstance? Like, we have a model that has five categories or something, right? And this study, 3,416 male subjects from Ayurvedic institutes, ages 20 to 30, right? A rather selected sample there. And from that sample, we're only able to assign, you know, applying these kind of questionnaire things, 970 to a dominant one. So around 30% of the sample could be assigned. So this is a problem if you want to claim that

it works because 70% of the sample wasn't able to be distinguished. Then from that 30%, they selected 262 participants randomly to do the GWAS, right? It's a very small sample size for a genome-wide association analysis, usually tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, right, for that kind of analysis is recommended and then they looked at 405 782 single nucleotide polymorphisms and took their three categories from the questionnaire and looked for correlations right wow yeah almost half a million things to look at and they do indeed find that they can find correlations um using a principal component analysis yeah yeah so let me it's also on top of everything you said if for people who don't know in general these genome-wide association tests are you know they they can be done well i assume but they do tend to be the

kind of thing where people sift the tea leaves and find quite spurious things. They are, although I would say when used appropriately by population geneticists, they often have very robust and interesting results. But they are known for being abused, is what I'm saying. So, look, in a nutshell nutshell we don't need to belabor the point but the the study that he cited is extremely weak methodologically and the the claim that that it's supporting is an extremely strong one and just like with hooberman there is this tendency of these influences to be a little bit like birds spotting shiny studies that they can

pick out and collect and cite because they support something they think is cool and they cite it with a high degree of confidence rather than actually having a critical appraisal of the literature. You simply cannot lean so hard on single studies with such poor methodology that is not how it works yes and so just to highlight you know the the hubermanism that applies here there's an objection from the chat re is a legitimate one about like potential biases right to to people approaching things from this perspective and listen to how he responds to this issue. Yeah. So, and someone else was saying like, doesn't this create a cognitive bias? Like, yeah, it can, but I don't think it's a cognitive bias because people don't know anything about this. They just circle things, right? A cognitive bias requires knowledge ahead of time. The other

thing is I'm confident based on the genetic testing that is statistically significant that this has real scientific merit. Wrong approach, Matt. The replication crisis should have taught people, especially well-informed, scientifically minded people, that simply counting statistical significant results is a bad way to approach science. You have to look at the overall quality because there are plenty of low quality, badly controlled studies that report statistically significant results, which cannot be replicated when people apply good controls. What you would want is pre-registered studies with large sample sizes, with researchers who are not invested in proving the outcome correct, right?

And just to give an illustration that people may or may not know, there was a study conducted in a premier psychology journal that proved that you could do the psychological manipulation, like give the stimulus after taking the outcome measure. So you got people to come in the lab, you took an outcome measure, then you give them the stimulus. The effect from the stimulus traveled back in time and produced different effects depending on what stimulus people were presented to.

And this proved retroactive causality across nine experiments, all of which reached statistical significance. So there we go. Science has proven that effects can travel backwards in time and that psi appears to be a real thing. No, no, it didn't. Darrell Bam did that study in 2011. It was roundly criticized, could not be replicated. And there's an illustration of the issue with using lax methods and allowing researcher degrees of freedom to impact designs right basically if

you if you analyze things if you exercise degrees of freedoms you can arrive at statistically significant results you know exercising enough researcher degrees of freedom but huberman and dr k kind of act that finding statistical significance, that solves the issue, right? Like it's been proven. And he also says there that a cognitive bias requires knowledge in advance. I'm not sure that's true, first of all, like you can have biases

that don't require advanced knowledge. But in this case as well, in the particular study he's citing, this is people from Ayurvedic institutes. Like I suspect people who are completing Ayurvedic questionnaires do have at least big knowledge of the system that they are completing a questionnaire for. So, yeah.

Yeah, that's right. Unfortunately, Dr. K doesn't seem to be aware of any of those issues you mentioned. Very similar to Dr. Huberman. Yeah. Or if they are aware of them, they certainly don't seem to influence what they say, you know, particularly strongly. And just to note that this matters, right? Because listen to this. So that's what's awesome about Ayurveda. Like you can make predictions about your life. And if you sort of understand that, then that's,

that's fantastic because you can start to live accordingly. So the cool thing about Ayurveda is that if you do have an autoimmune disease, if you do Vata lowering treatments, your autoimmune disease should get better. Right? So like if you adjust your Vataata now we get to the next thing which is um someone was asking a little bit about changing your uh dorsic level which you absolutely can do ayurvedic treatments can cure autoimmune diseases that's that's funny because so can you know all meat diets and so can practically everything that people talk about in health and wellness spaces autoimmune treatments all the rage yes yes yeah fecal transplants gut biomes well we'll get we'll get to those we'll get to those matt but you know so this is like ayurveda makes predictions it cures

people right it's oped compared to reductive Western medicine, which isn't interested in correlations or, you know, other factors. And yeah, like, again, just to emphasize this. Just think about this for a second. People who have fast metabolisms, they have to share certain traits. Our metabolism is common. People who are big boned have a metabolism that's fundamentally different from people who have fast metabolism. So that has to be our body types. Any person can look down the street and you can say, oh, there's a thin person. There's a person who's big boned. And there's a person who looks thin, but they clearly take care of themselves. Their thinness is not natural. It's due to effort.

And you can just look at someone on the street and you can tell. There has to be a physiology behind this. And that's just how it works. So Ayurveda has been looking at this. And so, I mean, this second paper that I sent you guys is very interesting. It actually correlates prakriti, which is vata, pitta, and kapha, with different kinds of metabolism and diseases. What they did is they correlated prakriti, like your vata, pitta, and kapha, and how likely you are to have a particular kind of chronic disease. So vatas are prone to autoimmunity. Autoimmune disease is a vata disease. Pittas are prone to other kinds of diseases.

Kaphas are prone to things like type 2 diabetes. Right? So there are correlations now. So now there's a huge area of research emerging in Ayurveda. And the more that we study it, the more that we scientifically analyze it, the more correct it turns out to be. Yep. Does it predict disease proneness? analyze it, the more correct it turns out to be. Yep. It's not surprising deficit-prone type 2 diabetes. I would have guessed that from all the descriptions of them.

But constantly proven correct, Matt. The science is just lining up behind it constantly. And you also hear, like, so like with Huberman, you know, there are times where things are stated responsibly around science and whatnot. And then there are times like this. There's a fascinating study done by the Benson Henry Institute, which looked at something called MGUS, which is a monoclonal gammopathy of unknown significance, which is a precancerous state. And taught those people who have this kind of precancerous state meditation, and then assessed their genetic activity, and actually found that

the procancerous genes are less active after you learn how to meditate. So this may be the first evidence, or there may be other evidence, I'm not really sure because this isn't my area, but this is actually a really interesting data point that suggests that meditation actually prevents the progression of cancer. And it also treats depression. How does that work? It's because there are some overarching principles behind human health and wellness that once we start accessing those principles to things like exercise, meditation, everything about you is going to get better. So there are claims about meditation preventing the progression of cancer. There's a study that

was done and they looked at monoclonal gammopathy of unknown significance a pre-cancerous state and they you know genetic activation and they find that if you're taught meditation this will be less so if we just got all the people that were potentially uh more likely to get cancer if we taught the meditation would not be great everything's going to get better. Well, Calum is skeptical about the benefits of meditation specifically to prevent the development of cancer. Again, a very huge claim. We're not going to comprehensively debunk it,

but I think good advice to take it skeptically, Chris. Well, I'll just say, Matt, if it's a study that I was able to locate, you're talking about a sample of 45 in the response resiliency relaxation program versus a weightless control of N equals 48. And you've got a whole bunch of p-values hovering close to the 0.05 significance threshold. So, of course, not pre-registered. Of course, dealing with, like one thing that people need to know about this,

whenever you have either, really any kind of data, but data that is very dense, like physiological data, for example, heart rate data, there's lots of different ways that you can look at it, right? You can look at the just heart rate,

but you can look at changes over time. You can look at peaks versus troughs and all different ways. And it allows you to analyze the data in a whole host of different ways. And if your goal is just to achieve a significant outcome, it's not that difficult, especially in smaller sample sizes, to get results that are by chance or by random variation just under the significance threshold. So if you get lots of results that are close to the significance threshold, this is a warning sign. And what you would really want is people pre-registering studies, having large, hard designs,

and clearly indicating what their key outcomes are in advance, that's what you don't get. That's what you don't get. Instead, you just get reference, it was a significant outcome, right? And also very little consideration of the magnitude of the difference. So, you know, like if there is a statistically significant difference between groups, it can be like 0.1 or or it can be one group is 100 and one group is 1,000, right? And in these kinds of studies, the differences are often very small, but reaching a significant threshold. So again, it could be true, but if so, this is weak evidence for it. It's a low quality study, and you would want much more before you talk to an audience so confidently

you know or enthusiastically about meditation being a preventative treatment against cancer that's that's correct chris that's right i mean this is i mean look it's useful to talk about because this is scientific literacy and for for the layperson, like a good rule of thumb is just to be skeptical of claims like this. And you can see those red flags there. Is the claim really big? Is it like super duper surprising? You're hearing it for the first time. It's been rattled off super confidently

and a single study is cited. If you do want to dig deeper and actually look at the study and look at the literature, then yes, I mean, pay attention to are the researchers highly motivated to prove this thing is true? at the study and look at the literature, then yes, I mean, pay attention to other researchers highly motivated to prove this thing is true. And the other thing to look at is, as you said, those research degrees of freedom. So when you're dealing with these complicated data sets,

the GWAS is a good example. It's very high dimensional. You use complicated statistics on it. It's a whole bunch of choices in terms of how you analyze it. If you are motivated to prove the thing is true, or maybe you're just a researcher who's motivated to bump up your publication record, you're trying to get it accepted at a good journal and they won't accept null results. With those motivations there, then people can intentionally or unintentionally

basically produce dodgy research, even when other aspects of the methodology, like the sample size and stuff is good, which in this case, it generally isn't. But I mean, look, the takeaway here for me is that Dr. K is very similar to Huberman in his role as an influencer, you know, being a font of wisdom when it comes to, I'm dropping truth bombs on you on how to optimize your life. They reference these studies as window dressing. You really can't rely on them as a source of scientific information. Yeah. And I know you want me to move on from it, but I can sense it. But I'm going to give you one

last example. This is a citation of a study about rats and fecal transplants. Here we go. And you guys got to tell me if you really want references because I feel like it breaks my flow, but I feel like it's important for me to back up what I say. So I saw a fascinating study. They took a bunch of depressed rats. Oh, sorry. They took a bunch of depressed rats,

extracted their stool, transplanted their stool to healthy rats, and the rats became depressed from a stool transplant. That is insane. It's completely insane. There are two kinds of bacteria that have been found in people who have high levels of anxiety. So they ask someone, are you super anxious? People who say yes, they test your gut bacteria. There are two kinds of bacteria that people have high levels of bacteria if they're anxious. If people test low for anxiety, there's a different two bacteria that are very prominent. Fascinating stuff. Here, again, I went to due diligence. I only want to illustrate this to talk about the way that you should approach these things,

because I find what I think is the study he's referencing, fecal microbiota transplantation from chronic unpredictable mild stress mice donors affects anxiety-like and depression-like behavior in recipient mice via the gut microbiota inflammation brain axis. Okay. A paper from 2019 published in Stress. Now, this is what he described. Like there was, you know, fecal transplants and they use various mechanisms to try and control the study, you know, like wiping out the gut fauna and whatnot before they start doing the post-transplant tests and so on and so forth. But even with that, this is a study with each group of mice in the different conditions having eight mice in it and a whole bunch of the

outcomes hovering around about that magical 0.05. There are other studies, a more recent one from 2022, doing a similar thing with different genetic strains. One mice that are more prone to depression that does a similar kind of thing and finds effects again. But again, we're talking about samples with like 10 mice per condition. So, you know know it's a developing literature it might be an interesting finding but i would be highly skeptical until you have stronger quality evidence and the way it's presented in dr k's material is this is just constantly validating you know all ayurvedic insights and anticipations and like the evidence is much weaker

than he implies like it's yeah there's statistical significance that's true but the you know nothing is pre-registered nothing is like large sample sizes or this kind of thing so it's the appropriate response is skepticism yeah and it's not like one can't talk about tentative findings like this but when the results or the conclusions of the literature are so weak you can't be referring to them like hooverman or dr k does as if his science has proved my particular bespoke theory right look look here's study. That's the wrong way to be using it. It's very misleading. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So Matt, there's some other areas that we should talk about, but one thing I should get back to just so people can understand is like,

there is the claim, despite what we've talked about with with the tripartite system, that this is the wrong way to conceive of the doshas. So listen to this. Yeah, so then people are talking about mage tanks, right? Yeah, so you could be a battle mage, right? You could be like, you can wear heavy armor, you can cast

some spells, and then you can also wield a fucking two-handed sword. You can do that. So some people are Baidosik or Tridosik. And the thing to remember about people that are Baidosik or Tridosik is that they're no like better or worse than other people. It's just like, if you're a battle mage, you're not going to be as good of just a straight up spellcaster as a straight mage. You're also going to be like not have, you're not going to have the same weaknesses. So my weaknesses and my strengths are very, very polarized. I'm not like a middle

of the road kind of person. I'm super Vata. And so if you're a battle mage, you're like, you're like a Kaffa Pitta Vata, right? So you do some spellcasting, you do some melee DPS, and you're kind of tanky. You're not going to be as extreme as any people who are Vata, Pitha, or Gaffa, but you're going to be like kind of like well-rounded. So some people are Doshik like that. So in that case, Matt, he's talking about people who are multi-class, right? In between the categories. So you've got the concept that there are, you know, people who are pure like Doshas, and then there are people who are in between, right? It's not an exact classification. But you also have this.

Can people have like multiple amounts? Absolutely. So some people can have like a vata memory and like a kapha, let's say say like let me think about this so like people can be like have kapha friendships and avata memory like generally speaking they kind of lump together but everyone is dry dorsic everyone has some level of each okay so i'm moving away now from the categorical approach to these types, which he sometimes talks like that, but I think now he's falling back to what I think is a more accurate

reflection of what Ayurveda says, which is that people have these different amounts of these three things, pretty much like in traditional European things, they have different levels of the humus, too much blood, too much yellow bile, that kind of of thing and he actually compares it to dnd you know the kind of gamer analogies again so like listen to this so i want you guys to imagine that you have like imagine these are like stats so like instead of like strength intelligence and like constitution imagine that you have a vata score a pitta score and and a Kapha score. So I want you guys to think

about these as stats, right? And everyone has like a certain number on each stat. The other thing is it's not like higher numbers mean better things. So disease or problems in Ayurveda arise when your Vata, when each of your Dosha stats is too high or too low. So I have a dynamic mind. I learn things very quickly. And if my vata stat like goes five points higher, like let's say my vata is like a 75. If it goes like 10 points higher and I hit 85, then I have ADHD. At that point, my mind is so dynamic that it can't focus on one thing and it becomes like problematic for me. Whereas my guffa stat is like super low. So like if my guffa stat drops a little bit more,

then I get like sick. So I physically like get ill very easily. Like I was a sick as a kid. Like it's like kind of like you have a low con stat, right? Like my poison resistance and my disease resistance and all that kind of shit is like really low. You can see why this is appealing, right? Especially I think the people, because it sounds, you know, one, you can kind of intuitively get it, but also now we're talking about people who are, like you said, you know, you can raise and lower your stats and your, you know,

your basic build might be a Vata type, but you can bulk up, right? And maybe you become more bitter for like your diet and your habits and whatnot. But that goes against a lot of the stuff that has been previously talked about, because vatas can't get properly fat. They can get fat, but they're skinny fat. So, you know, there's like a combination, depending on what you want to emphasize, that is either like a typology, which is quite strict, versus a very flexible system where you're a Vata type, but so you say oh you're you know you're a scorpio um you feel like this and um someone's saying well hang on no actually sometimes i don't well yes of course because in some situations you know scorpios will be like this but then you know it's very flexible the way it's applied that's right and the last clip i'll play for this part is just, you might've been curious, he's a Vata type.

What type is his wife, who is the CEO of the Healthy Gamer organization as well? Anytime my kids get sick, I get sick. My wife is Gaffa. So she, like everyone in the house can be sick and she's going to be fine. So like my immunity is weak. So I have like a low constat

high int. Right. So I want you guys to just imagine that everyone has like different levels of these and you could be Thraidosik. You can be like in the middle for each of these. And I hope if you guys take a look at the questionnaire, what you see is that there are different dimensions and that like, you know, you can have like vata and memory and like gaffa and friendships and like pitta and career and that's just the way that you are yeah so there's so many degrees of freedom what happened to the gwas and you know the autoimmune system is for vatas right like so now i know you're like you can be in the middle and all them you're a rich tapestry again that's right and you can be like a vatter in this way it'd be like a kaffir in this way it all depends and it's all very complicated so it can at once be a very simple and intuitively

satisfying thing but also complex and nuanced enough to fit any situation. Yeah. This is a bad theory, Chris, by the way. Just structurally, that's not a good property for a theory. There's a lot similar to the four humors, like when they're out of balance. And you had individuals who were phlegmatic or whatever the case might be. So yeah, yeah. You might say it's a pre-modern pseudoscientific approach to medicine.

One might well say that, Chris. One might, but let me just make you consider the issue of depression. But it's kind of bizarre that in psychiatry, if you look at the DSM-5 criteria for depression, you can have insomnia or hypersomnia. Like, just think about that for a second. They call it sleep disturbance. But like, they say that depression is the same whether you sleep too much or you sleep too little. That just doesn't make sense to me. So another DSM-5 criteria for depression is appetite changes. They call it appetite changes. What that means is that you can eat too much or eat too little. Both of those qualify as depression. It blows my mind as a clinician that a disease where you eat too little is the same as where you eat too much.

Those are two different diseases, my friends. If you sleep too little or you sleep too much, we call both of those things depression. Those are two different diseases. There's a Vata depression and there's a Kapha depression. There's an anxious depression and there's a neurovegetative depression. So this is how stupid the DSM-5 is and the diagnostic criteria for depression. Did you think that was a reasonable critique there chris well if you take it in a generous spirit there are complaints about a lot of psychiatric and psychological

disorders that their diagnostic criteria is a little bit generic or broad so that you know it's possible for a lot of people to be classified within them and there are issues with over prescription. So in that regard, I think that you could have objections, but the particular ones that he raises in regards to like sleep disorder, too much sleep versus too little sleep being fundamentally absolutely different like of course they are different but like each individual person right that can have like different things so if you're somebody that sleeps uh usually nine hours a night and then suddenly you're sleeping four hours a night that would be a change to your sleeping patterns and

if you were someone who was usually sleeping like six or seven hours a night, and then suddenly couldn't get up for 10 hours, that would also be a sleep disturbance. So I do think that he's overstating the degree to which it's silly to regard sleep disturbance as a diagnostic criteria, because surely that's just recognizing there could be individual variation and what that counts for yeah yeah exactly and you know that's just one criteria from all of the diagnostic criteria of which there are many you know the most important one being being depressed most of the day not not taking pleasure in in many different activities significant weight loss but here's another example or or weight gain, right?

So again, disruption, psychomotor agitation, fatigue, feelings of worthlessness, a whole bunch of things. And it's not just, do you sleep too much or too little? It's not the case. His reasoning there is bad. It's not the case that just because one of these indicators, the disruption can be in the positive or the negative direction. It doesn't imply that the underlying disease is an entirely different thing.

There could well be different types of depression, but it's not because of that symptom. There are various different types of depression as we'll get to, but let's hear him talk about this a little bit more. And clinicians understand this. If you talk to someone who prescribes antidepressants, we have two classes of antidepressants. Clinicians understand this. We have activating antidepressants, which give people a pep in their step. And then we have like calming antidepressants. We have some antidepressants that are also anti-anxiety medications.

And we have some antidepressants that are not anti-anxiety medications. So clinicians understand that there are different kinds of depression. But in Western science, like we just haven't figured this out yet. Okay. Is that true? Remind me of the question. What hasn't Western science figured out? Okay. Remind me of the question, what hasn't Western science figured out?

Well, so there are antidepressant drugs that can be activating and there are ones that are calming. You know, the drug profile is doing different things and clinicians will find that people respond differently to different types of drugs, right? Some people might need a calming type antidepressant, and some might need an activated one. So he's saying this speaks to there being an underlying different pathology at play, right? So there are different types of depression. Now, my clinicians recognize it, but Western science does not. Right. Well, that's odd because there are different types of depression,

as you said. I mean, obviously, everyone reacts differently to particular drugs. And the underlying, you know, if it's kind of a physiological basis to the depression, I can well imagine that there are different mechanisms. psychiatrist will see how a patient responds to one, it doesn't work for everyone. And if that one isn't really working, then they might put someone on to another one, right? There might have side effects that are too strong or that the patient doesn't feel comfortable in the way that that applies. But I think what Dr. K wants to say is the reason for all that is because, you know, they haven't fundamentally recognized that there's different types of depression. Okay. Did you want to play another clip or did you want me to read your list? I'll play another clip before you, because I think this might address what you were about to read. So let's play another clip and see where the argument goes.

I know this is maybe not what you guys are interested in. Anger attacks. So this is fascinating paper. Here we go. Maurizio Fava. Okay, you guys have to check out this paper. Fascinating. You guys want to see Bitta Depression? Read this paper. Maurizio Fava is the associate chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. Guy's absolutely brilliant. He's a depression researcher. And he discovered back in 98 that there is another subtype of depression, not just anxious, not just neurovegetative, but what he calls depression with anger attacks. That's bit the depression. The neurotransmitter profile for depression with anger attacks is different from the neurotransmitter profile for depression with anger attacks is different

from the neurotransmitter profile for anxious depression and neurovegetative depression. The neurotransmitters in each of these depressions is different, and that's been studied. So I'm telling you guys, Ayurveda has this spot on. And if you understand that when you're under stress, do you get anxious? Do you get pissed? Or do you get depressed? Where is this thing? Glory.

So, this is an example of Ayurveda. Right? So, the thing there, first of all, the paper that he brings up, anger attacks in depression, it's from 1998. And it is, like you said, a depression researcher talking about a major subtypes of depression in the DSM-5, you get atypical depression, melancholic depression, anxious depression, treatment-resistant depression, psychotic depression, seasonal affective disorder, double depression, subsyndromal depression,

substance medication-induced depressive disorder, disruptive mood dysregulation disorder persistent depressive disorder major depressive disorder so on so forth actually sorry i read the subtypes and then i i read the principal types disorders right yeah major depressive disorder persistent depressive disorder yeah so there that i could go on there's also other specified depressive disorder, unspecified depressive disorder. There's a lot, is the point. It's almost as if modern psychiatry doesn't assume that everyone's depression is exactly the same, Chris. That's the impression I'm getting.

Yeah, there's even like, there's ones which sound like they're characterized by atypical presentations right so uh and and he himself was signing a paper from 1998 which is identifying like arguing for you know uh a subtype of a of a subtype right like so but this seems to contradict his point before that western medicine refuses to recognize these differences and his logic there seems to contradict his point before that western medicine refuses to recognize these differences and his logic there seems to be that because he's read this paper and he thinks he sees like a connection between this subtype and bitter depression then yeah that's a that's a validation

of ayurveda it's ayurveda yeah this is a little bit like a callback to Carl Jung, because he mentioned reading about Carl Jung, but I think he might have been reading sources that were presenting Jung as being, you know, essentially an Ayurvedic practitioner and all but Niamh, but that seems like a little bit of a skewed presentation. So yeah, that I just, like the logic doesn't seem to hang together to me. It's like you're saying nobody in Western medicine is recognizing this. Then you point to examples of people recognizing something which is parallel and is itself building on an existing foundation of different types of depression. So yeah.

Like the DSM-5, it's almost at fault for having too many different subtypes like it's massive there is so much specificity there um it sometimes gets a bit overwhelming but it's also also there's there's many different streams of treating depression like these depressions are not treated the same way either i mean beyond just you know selecting different pharmaceuticals and modifying them depending on how people are responding to them. In terms of the psychology of it, like I'm aware of heaps of different approaches to depression, which might suit the different causes better. Like, you know, cognitive behavioral therapies, for instance,

focus on the links between, you know, thoughts, feelings and actions and try to interrupt unhelpful cognitions, you know, that sort of spiral. So if that's one of the key drivers for you, then that kind of therapy could be most helpful. On the other hand, there are these more humanistic or interpersonal type approaches, which look at maybe some more existential or self-actualizing problems in your life, which might be more of a deeper, I guess, cause for being unhappy and dissatisfied. And you can, you know, you can help the client resolve those. Like there are so many different kinds. Um, ones that focus on family, you know, behavioral activation, which focuses on the physiology, getting people moving around. So it's, it's not like there's just a one size fits all. And I just, so I am reacting a little bit, I suppose,

to what I feel is a straw man version of modern psychology and psychiatry. Maybe some people would argue that in the American context, there's a stronger push towards simply like a kind of carpet bombing with medication, right? And like one size fits all, that might be the argument that he's operating within that system. But even there, like I think, you know, there's still a lot of different talk therapy style things and stuff in the American system. So I don't doubt that there are therapists and clinicians who do a one size fits all approach, but I am absolutely sure that even

all alternative health systems that you're going to have people applying you know despite what he's talking about there are going to be products and treatments which are very commonly applied to vata and bitter people right and yeah and and even then when there is a treatment that is very commonly applied like it's the first kind of go-to it's often because it's very effective like for instance um you know schizophrenia for a long time was totally untreatable really um no amount of talk therapy is going to help you um if you're having those episodes and these drugs came along they're not perfect but you know they resolve it for for for many people so it makes sense to kind of try that first so anyway anyway anti-psychotic

medications and psychotherapy or whatever right and and support so yeah that that makes sense but well so linking it to the approach that ayurvedic might take that would differ from the Western style, there's a little bit of discussion about diet. So people are wondering what food do I eat to cure depression? See, this is the wrong thinking. Remember, we just talked about how there are three kinds of depression. There's anxious depression, there's depression with anger attacks, and there's neurovegetative depression. Depression is not one thing. That's a Western concept. There's one thing called depression. And all depression has the same treatment. That's exactly what I'm trying to say is incorrect. There are different kinds of

depression. What kind of depression do you have? What's your Ayurvedic dosha that's where you're going to find the right treatment you guys get that like that's the whole point behind what i'm saying this is why depression is so fucking hard to cure because it's not one disease again that contradiction at the start he said depression with anger attacks, anxious depression, neurovegetative depression. Surely those are not Ayurvedic terms, right? And then they said that it's a single thing. It's a Western concept, but he just listed three different types. So, yeah, it just it feels like a little bit contradictory. But the strong through line is Western medicine is reductive. It applies a single treatment to a single kind of patient.

And it's only interested in treating a disease like depression. One treatment, it applies to everyone. Yeah. And so I just have to, you can't think that he's unaware of all of the different subcategories of depression. He's a credentialed psychiatrist but he mentioned them he literally mentioned some of them in the sentence before he said that they don't distinguish like and he must also be aware of all of the different kinds of treatments like what about you know this systemic family therapy which looks at depression in the context

of family and the social networks you're embedded in and looks at the dynamics and the way that you're communicating i mean that kind of thing is not going to help you if if the basis of your depression is kind of physiological essentially but it can help you if that's kind of the root thing and so there is a just a huge amount of diversity of approaches as well so again i just i feel like he must be aware of that but i i guess in the context of this conversation maybe that knowledge isn't useful yeah yeah i i think in different contexts he probably would be less dichotomous around this but but here it's strong. This is part of the reason I wanted to do this before we get into the one where he's debating with another doctor and is more presenting

a favorable interpretation to some extent of modern medicine. But that focused Matt about, his audience were asking about diets, right? And he took them off a little bit like there's no single treatment he was like there's three types three types right this is it feels a little bit about being gaslit you know to say there's infinite diversity and then like very often it comes to three three that relate to the doshas right but this focus on diet that is a a somewhat unique aspect because I don't think if you go to most psychiatrists, they're going to give you

a specific dietary regime. I mean, McKayla Peterson might, but... Yeah, that's right. McKayla Peterson would definitely endorse that. But no, I don't think your typical psychiatrist is going to say,

oh, you're feeling very depressed, get more roughage in your diet, that'll fix you up. Well, not just diet. So here's a little bit about the kind of, you know, holistic approach, shall we say, Matt, as it relates to diet and some other bodily activities. So we're going to talk about diet and vata right now. And then we're going to also talk a little bit about different mental health issues and vata, pitta and kapha. And then we're going to talk about diet and vata right now. And then we're going to also talk a little bit about different mental health issues and vata, pitta, and kapha. And then we're going to jump to questions. Simplest thing you can do for vata. You have to get your bowels moving regularly. So if you're constipated, fix the constipation. Number one. Okay. Even bowel movements. Vatas are cold and dry. And so you want to eat foods that are warm and moist.

So anytime you have an option between soup and salad, pick soup. Vatas have weak digestion. So their digestive power is not very high. So you want to cook foods before you eat them. If we think about like if you eat like a cooked carrot versus a raw carrot, they taste very different. Both of them are sweet, but a cooked carrot is way sweeter. So some of the process of digestion has already been done for you. You've broken down some of like the walls of the cellular structure of carrots so that the sweetness is more available to you. So vatas should eat foods that are warm and moist.

So avoid things like toast. If you have an option between toast and oatmeal in the morning, go with oatmeal. For pittas, you want to avoid foods that are warm and wet. So you want to eat things that are cold and dry. So like a sandwich is a great food for a pitta. Salad is a great food for a pitta. Gafas are cold and wet. So you want to eat foods that are warm and dry. So toast is great food for a pitta. I mean, sorry, gafa. Okay. So, you know, again, just the contrast between infinite diversity, everybody has tried to shake the you know you can be a a kafa in your marital relations and the vata and you suddenly cafes are the only ones that are supposed to be eating toast because they're cold and wet you know it's it's it's quite a whiplash between the claims that you're going to be treating everything individually to like very strong generic pronouncements about, you know, whole food types and all vatas shouldn't be eating toast.

Right. Like, so sorry for vatas. Sorry for them. So sorry for vatas. Sorry for them. Presumably he means, he's saying if you're a vata, then you're a vata with respect to your food. So you're cold and wet maybe, just specifically with respect to food. But maybe you're warm and dry with respect to interpersonal relationships.

Like, is that an alternative reading? I don't know. Oh, it could be. Yeah, it could be and the the bowel movement thing so this is also a feature that came up when we were looking you know mckillop peterson and the the kind of various diet gurus right and there actually used to be this doctor called well she wasn't a doctor she was a like nutritionist the version right uh called gillian mckeith who was constantly obsessing over people's bowel movements and you know she

would diagnose all sorts of things and it's not that there's of course there are yes if you choose to if you only choose to look, Chris, there's lots of information there, but you're right. It does tend to be like obsessing over it does tend to be a feature of alternative health. And also I should say of pre-modern European medicine, those, the doctors back then, they, that was the first thing they wanted to do. They wanted to look at your stool. Yeah. And there, there is following that a recommendation for the chat to go out and find out this kind of information. Like, you know, it's easy to find out. So here's what he suggests. So cold and dry is vata, so you want to eat foods that are warm and wet.

Pitta is warm and wet, so you want to eat foods that are cold and dry. And kapha is cold and wet, so you want to eat foods that are cold and dry. And kapha is cold and wet. So you want to eat foods that are warm and dry. So that's the simplest change to make. You guys can also like Google different, like you can just Google Ayurvedic diet, and I'm sure you guys will find stuff and you can sort of test it yourself. Yeah. So, you know, just find an Ayurvedic diet that lists, identify which of the doshas is you, and that determines the foods that you are most suited to consume in three broad categories. Yeah, and I kind of realized while that clip was playing that that alternative interpretation that you could be a different dosha across a multiplicity of different aspects of your life

that seems to be contradictory with the idea that you can tell your dosha by your physical appearance right because you've only got one right so that implies that you are what he's saying you're a you're a you're a bitter or a i keep forgetting a kaffir, like if it's based on your physical appearance, right? If that's a strong diagnostic indicator, then you've got to be just one, right? You can't have a multiplicity of different doshas in different dimensions, at least according to Dr. K's explanations.

This is Ayurveda filtered through Dr. K and we're talking about him rather than that. It's the Barnum nature of it. I think this is the infinite flexibility, right? That it is both quite prescriptive and a clear typology. But when it needs to be, you can inject infinite variation by saying, well, there are also certain aspects

that don't apply to everyone. And yeah, maybe in this specific way. So you actually shoot it that way because this interaction means it responds well to your doshik balance. It does remind me of how our Scorpios are always cold and harsh. But we can be very warm and giving if we're in the right person, the right circumstances. Yeah.

It doesn't make sense because I am sometimes. But it can make big changes, Matt. So like, for example. So gluten is a prime example of like Western thinking. So gluten sensitivity says that gluten, one individual compound, is the problem for everyone. So if you have a pro allergic thing to gluten, like that allergy is vata. But what I would say about gluten sensitivity is if you fix your vata, your ability to tolerate gluten should get better. So remember that some people have celiac disease,

which is a true allergy to gluten, and that some people have gluten insensitivity. But if you improve your vata, if you lower your vata, your ability to tolerate gluten should improve. So one thing to note there, I think he is correctly diagnosing that there is a genuine illness, which makes you react very badly to gluten, which is rare. And then there is a perhaps cultural phenomenon where a lot of people feel that they are very sensitive to gluten ever since it became a cultural phenomenon that this was discussed. And so I can't entirely tell there. Was he saying that you cannot like you can't cure celiac disease with yes this but you

could like yeah deal with the you know milder more more subjective more subjective yeah yeah that's so yeah yeah you could be right it's like inflammation, isn't it? Or feeling tired. But before we give too much credit, let's just be clear that it's not like that's all he says about diets and this kind of thing, though. So he does go a bit further. We have, yeah, so it's autoimmune, but that's exactly what I'm saying, right?

It's like, you guys have to understand that Vata corrects, in general, autoimmunity. So if you have MS, if you have rheumatoid arthritis, if you have lupus, any of the patients that I work with, when they come in with these things, I give them Vata-reducing diets, and they tend to get better. So rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, they are symptoms of imbalance and doshas really and yeah yeah just a little side note there you notice the like the reliance on his clinical experience um which is understandable and and there is a like a legitimate divide i think between between research and researchers and clinicians and because there is experiential knowledge that that you get from hands-on practice whether you're a nurse or a doctor or a psychiatrist or whatever the stuff you can learn

from being experienced at it that you probably can't get from a textbook so much but at the same time we know all about the kinds of biases and things like that that can kind of creep in like there's all kinds of you know treatment effects rebound effects things that there are there are ways in which your personal experience in terms of oh i did this and it seemed to work and whatever this is why we do rcts because your individual experience is yeah very dodgy sometimes there and there's plenty of people with legitimate clinical experience and expertise long careers who promote absolute nonsense anti--vaccine insanity, you know, so on Peter McCulloch for just one example, right? So I think a clinical expertise is relevant, but it cannot be used as a substitute for actual robust evidence because Jordan Peterson,

similarly, often references his clinical experience right to justify his insane culture vortex well that's right if like if you listen to michaela peterson and and jordan like talking about the the magical treatment properties of all meat ruminant diet with vinegar um not just with themselves or with other people you know from their personal experience it it works every time right it's perfect it's the magic bullet and i think that they're they're in good faith they really believe that it just it just illustrates one can be led astray from that yeah well so all of this conversation might sound a little bit familiar to people in regards to the increased attention given to gut biome in various areas of research and the discourse sphere. And Dr. K touches on that here, linking it up to the Ayurvedic concern of diet.

So I think what we're going to have to do, if you guys are curious, we just have to have someone come on and then we'll talk about some, some specifics of Ayurveda. But the first thing to start with is diet, diet, diet. First line treatment for mental health problems in Ayurveda is dietary change. Change your diet, your anxiety, your, your depression, your anger will get better. And now there's an emerging field of the hottest topic in medicine right now is brain gut. It's this idea that if you change your gut bacteria, your mental health will change. And Ayurveda has been saying that for thousands of years.

So now we have scientific evidence that correlates what happens in our gut and what happens in our brain. Right? So this is the coolest study ever. He's going to reference the rat study that we already talked about there. But this is, I genuinely think people should know this because the level of enthusiasm with which some hot new research topic is approached, especially one where people are prone to making significant overextrapolations from limited evidence. So most researchers who are like responsible, right, discussing the gut biome and, you know, the connections to mental health,

then want to be in line with evidence, right? And careful in what they're saying. When they see a field like kind of blow up and become, you know, like a hot new topic, they increase their skepticism about the level of claims being made, right? Because it may turn out that this is a revolution in the way that we understand, you know, how the body works and how the brain connects

with the gut and all these kind of things and there are there are legitimate connections there are there is a very interesting research being done but it's also like quantum physics an area that just attracts people layering in on top pseudoscience and over extrapolations and and that's why almost all health and wellness influencers you will hear that when they reference the gut microbiome that it validates whatever their model is it doesn't have to be ayurvedic it can be any other well do you remember the episode during the episode we did with gwyneth paltrow and the person she was interviewing uh that was a good example um yeah like it's like the magic bullet that fixes everything or you know everything is boiled down to inflammation which was another key topic you know inflammation

is important it is a signifier of of important things but you know it's it's like these tech bubbles that come along from time to time that people have made that graph there's there's the enthusiastic zoom up and then there's the sort of reality crash that comes along too but in health and wellness by the time the crash has come people have already got some new hot thing to focus on yeah and and that approach like you described earlier matt you know he's going to reference a study of mice like a very small sample size with you know the p values have very near significance but presented as you know the coolest study ever it's a yeah huberman does this as well it's everything it proves i was right about such and such years yeah yeah like they knew this five since years ago and it's one very weak small end study in rats

with a p value of 0.05 or something. Yeah. Yeah. It's just not a good approach. It'll just lead you to bounce around from one shiny thing to the next in a constant state of confusion. Yeah. So you mentioned inflammation, just to know. So how does diet improve depression? It's because there are some bacteria that are sending inflammatory signals to your brain that cause depression. Also, a really fascinating study that I just saw recently, people did a brief clinical trial of giving people anti-inflammatories when they're depressed, and their depression got better.

So some bacteria create a lot of inflammation, like bacteria that digest processed foods create a lot of inflammation. And when they create inflammation, it causes depression. Yeah. So the fascinating thing is that people have been believing in Ayurveda. You want to believe in it, fine. The reason that I'm excited behind it and the reason that I'm such a proponent of it is because there's actually science to back it up now. We're not quite at the level of clinical studies, but the basic science really suggests that Ayurveda is good and is correct. And I've seen enough clinical or anecdotal improvement to where i believe it fair enough that's his opinion well that like but but you heard there the reference to processed food creating bacteria generates inflammation yeah that's what's driving

depression bacteria that process processed food specifically and these are the ones that send inflammatory signals to the brain. And that's what causes depression. I mean, I haven't looked into this specific claim, Chris, but on the face of it. Yeah, you're initially skeptical. You're right to be skeptical. And the reference to a study, right? There was a fascinating study where they give people anti-inflammatories under depression. Again, you know, big news if true, because if it were that mostly it's the bacteria

and you can just like simply give anti-inflammatories and depression goes away, then great. That should be easy to demonstrate. Yep. It'll be huge if true. Like everyone would love to know this um this would be great um you're feeling a bit down that like i've got anti-inflammatories you know you don't even need a prescription this would sort a lot of well anti-inflammatories are used all the time so surely like if there was over prescription we would have noticed yeah i mean because this is how a lot of effects get discovered like for instance there was like a drug for you know i think the azempic ch Chris, wasn't that originally

like a quit smoking treatment? I thought it was an anti-diabetic treatment. Oh, right. I could be getting mixed up. I think there was a different one then that was non-smoking. But anyway, they just noticed that the patients who were taking it, you know, it's easy to notice that suddenly they're losing weight or they're not drinking

as much or whatever. So if it was something as common as anti-inflammatories which people take all the time for all kinds of things and people notice that their mood was better man we were really i mean like you wouldn't even know anyway well the fact the fact that you referenced inflammation before knowing that you know there was going to be a clip on it. It just speaks to how well these things go together. There is a correlation for you, but there's also a little bit of an issue, and this will come up a lot in the later parts, the other material that we're

looking at, because in this case, you know, discussing a kind of approach that he likes. This isn't an interview with someone or this kind of thing. But there is still a disclaimer about this not being medical advice. But let's see what happens here. I have one person in my practice. I mean, I have also like I treat people with skin problems and IBS and things like that. And people like, like who haven't had solid shits in a decade. And then we start them on Ayurvedic dietary changes and they have solid shits. And it's like, it's crazy. It's like, it's not, I'm not doing anything. I'm not doing anything like extraordinary. I'm just telling

them to drink yogurt and water mixed together in like a one to two ratio with a pinch of cumin and a pinch of hydrogen sulfide or pink salt or Himalayan salt. And there it gets better. Okay. So once again, I can't, I can't provide medical advice over the internet, but I will tell you. So if you guys have a medical problem like diarrhea or IBS, you should go and see a doctor and at the same time something that you should just try because is is to take yogurt so like take like just plain yogurt not greek yogurt not low-fat yogurt nothing no sugar or anything just plain yogurt two ounces of yogurt six ounces of water two and a half ounces of yogurt, 5.5 ounces of water. Mix it together. Add a pinch of toasted cumin. Add a pinch of pink salt. Drink it every day, assuming you're

not lactose intolerant. If it gives you problems, don't do it. See what happens to your bowel movements. So there was, again, the kind of interest in bowel movements. That's that's that's ayurvedic stuff but uh no i can't give medical advice but here's a specific recipe for at yogurt that if taken will cure like and will make you know your bowel movements regular and healthy but i'm not saying that you should do that just in my clinical practice it works every time yeah yeah yeah i mean just incidentally too i mean this particular treatment uh the little cumin i love cumin by the way but a little little cocktail of yogurt water cumin and himalayan rock salt that's the easiest thing to test in the world, using an RCT. Easiest thing.

Easiest thing. Yeah, he didn't say anything about the dosage, but I think that's a Vata treatment. So you need the first Vata. Did he say it's just for Vatas? Maybe. I can't remember the surrounding, but like Vatas in general, weren't they the ones that were having problem pooping? I can't remember.

I can't remember. Whatever the case, you could easily design a study where you apply that, you know, look at their eyelids and then classify them into vatas, doshas, and then just use the vatas if it was the case that it was a true vata. Oh, even that would be better.

You could then damn you know if you had all of them and they all did it and it only worked on the vata ones then that would be you know like an even better demonstration that would be a good demonstration yeah somebody should do that i think i could have been accidentally taking this treatment for years chris because you know i eat a lot i cook a lot of Indian food. I don't want to know. I was going to ask. You want me to describe how I'm doing? You can fix that. No, I don't.

I will say we'll see. I mean, this is in some way laying the groundwork because these kinds of discussions about your bowel movements and whatnot, this is all going to come up in the interviews with influencers, right? So he does put into practice what he preaches here yeah so i did for me the only important thing really in that clip was the kind of disclaimer alongside what sounds like rather specific advice about a

particular thing but there is still the this now if you have something more serious please go see a doctor right which is good i'm glad that he you know adds that in but but even still chris chris i'm not a financial advisor i can't give you financial advice but you should go all in on gold right now go all in because i'm seeing very good results a lot of people making a lot of money on gold that's not financial advice though so that's you know just keep that in mind yeah and so cannot you know give it medical advice online also not doing diagnosis distance diagnosis not doing that it's a discussion about health and mental wellness and whatnot, but not that. But this and this, this is a little bit of interaction with the chat and specifically talking about one of the chat members. People in chat are commenting about various attributes of vata, pitta and kapha. And so now like what would be fascinating is if you guys like go back and look at the comments that people are making and see if there's a consistency with Vata.

Right. So Gizmo has been saying that that I think that they're pretty Vata. And so they're they're talking about different attributes that are all Vata. So Vata's are reactive. Yes, they tend to be very reactive. So we got we got reference to Gizmo there, right? And Gizmo is identified as likely to be Vata. And the recipe there, Matt, of like going back and looking for consistency and stuff, like this would be the kind of thing you might be concerned about confirmation bias or, or even leading, given that you are doing a stream that is telling people all of these things are V bad characteristics, right?

So, you know, his advice there, you know, just like a fun little exercise, but seems almost by design to produce false positives if people apply it. Yeah, agreed. But not that serious. So anyway, a little bit more about treating the Vata and what happens and also this gizmo character. Yeah, so gizmo. Gizmo is our textbook vata. Lupus gets anxious. That's what I'm telling you guys.

So the cool thing, the really cool thing about Ayurveda is if gizmo balances their vata, their lupus is going to get better. Their anxiety is going to get better. Their sleep is going to get better. Their skin is going to get better. Their sleep is going to get better. Their skin is going to get better. Their bowel movements are going to get better. Because if you lower the vata, everything that is associated with elevated vata is going to get better. And in Western medicine, we understand this concept clinically as well. When I'm working with someone who has depression and addictions, when one thing goes bad, everything goes bad. So in psychiatry, we have a saying that all boats rise together. So if Gizmo were to like, because I think he's putting into the chat

various things that he suffers from that kind of thing and so the reference there is you know wow if he if he balances his vata then you know all of these things are going to get better that not not offering medical advice though and now i'll just talk about ways that you can you know recipes and what that you can balance your doshik thing a bit better or you know look them up for yourself yeah it's a great area isn't it this this medical advice versus just talking about your opinions about health and wellness and so i have one more clip matt that relates to the gizmo character and the non-diagnosis issue. Absolutely. So I want you guys to look back at everything that Gizmo has said. Gizmo is textbook Vata.

Has fucking lupus. Has ADHD mind. Is super Vata. Has eyes that are larger than their stomach. Right? Like has an autoimmune disease. Like I can't diagnose people over the internet. But we kind of diagnosed Gizmo over the internet. Like I can't diagnose people over the internet, but you know,

we kind of diagnosed gizmo over the internet. Like, I don't know anything about gizmo, but I can predict that the likelihood that gizmo has an autoimmune disease is greater than other people who are bitter or guffa. So that's, what's awesome about Ayurveda. Like you can make predictions about your life. And if you, uh, if you sort of understand that, then that's fantastic because you could start to live accordingly. So the cool thing about Ayurveda is that if you do have an autoimmune disease, if you do Vata-lowering treatments, your autoimmune disease should get better. Right? So they are not, right? I it the facade breaks a bit of saying i can't diagnose people over the other time but like we have diagnosed them right he's a you know he's a

vata like it so he he's kind of joking around but that is the the dance right yeah like because it is a diagnostic framework uh you know when you figure out someone's avatar then you can understand the causes of their autoimmune problems illnesses yeah and you can you can advise them on what they ought to do they need to lower their their avatar i mean isn't it also consistent too because the other thing that's coming through is just how enthusiastic he is about ayurveda as a basis for psychiatric practice it's coming through strong but didn't he say elsewhere that it it's not like it doesn't inform his practice or something well he says this now lee your your time you've slipped into the time streams so he's in this one it clearly does so it's later that he talks about it not being a big component of what he does in his output.

Oh, okay. So I'm sort of, I feel like I'm adopting a pro-Ayurvedic stance because of the way you're asking questions. But I don't use Ayurvedic medicine with the majority of my patients. I use evidence-based techniques with the majority of my patients because they are reliable. But yeah, here he is, you know, enthusiastic and saying that it's the OP'd special skill that he has that others lack. Okay, I see.

So one other part that came up, and this is just, this is a little bit of a silly extension of it to put it, but it just struck me a little bit when I heard it. And it does speak to the dynamics of interacting about the chat, you know, how the way the streamers often interact with their chat. So this is him talking a bit about milk. So we're going to play a fun game, Twitch chat.

How many kinds of milk can you come up with? Let's see if you can hit all of them. Whey isn't milk. Whey is a compound within milk. Nope. Nope. None of these are correct. This is not milk.

There we go. There we go. Soy milk is not milk, my dudes. Skim milk is not milk. There we go. There we go. Soy milk is not milk, my dudes. Skim milk is not milk. Goat. Cow. What else? Where else can we get human milk? Absolutely.

Sheep's milk. What else? We've got four. You already's milk. What else? We've got four. You already said milk. Human beings don't drink cat milk. Buffalo milk. Five. Good. So we've got goat, sheep, cow, human, buffalo. What else?

What else do humans drink milk from? Anyone know? Camel milk. Yes. And? Not daddy's milk. That's disgusting. Trees?

No. Bats? No. No. No. We already got goats. One more. A horse, yeah.

And elephant. Elephant is the last milk. It's fascinating. This page, people, humans don't drink cat milk. Humans drink milks from hooved animals. That's what we drink milk from, right? We drink milk from domesticated animals. We have domesticated

elephants in India. So, this exchange, right, Matt, again, just, this is not a Dr. K thing, but just a human thing where people have a specific answer, and they ask people, and they're like, no, no, even though, like, neem milk,

sorry milk, no, that's not milk, sk a milk sorry milk no that's not milk skim milk no that's not a milk i feel these are milks but you know he he wants to be no it's these five specific animals but he also like who was going to guess elephant and when he he follows that up by saying you know elephants elephant is the fifth missing milk that humans drink. And then he said, humans drink milk from hooved animals. And my brain, when I heard that, was like, first of all, I was kind of mind blown that humans are drinking elephant milk. But secondly, I was like, elephants have hooves?

I've always droned them with three big clumpy toes. And I checked it, but elephants are not hooved. I'm quite correct. There you go. And also, I can't find much evidence that there is a significant cultural habit of drinking elephant milk no yeah no i haven't heard of that either i think he was just saying that mainly that people drink milk from domesticated animals they're generally but he said they domesticated yeah he said yeah we domesticated elephants in india like yeah so what's wrong and he's the one that said elephant is the last milk

like the whole point was the categories of of milk well anyway it would be hard to uh extract elephant milk like i i looked into this it's difficult and it's not clear that humans are to uh like that it's a good thing for humans to do. No, I suspect it isn't. Okay. So why is he so interested in elephant milk, Chris? Well, it's because of the Ayurvedic stuff around milk. Right.

So let me just play it. We don't drink milk from carnivores, but we do drink milk from herbivores. We drink milk from hooved mammals. But we do drink milk from herbivores. We drink milk from hooved mammals. And then this text and page of Ayurveda says that the different milks are good for alleviating different doshas. And that different milks are treatments for different things. So if a human being is recovering from malaria, they should have a certain kind of milk.

And if they have active malaria, they should have a different kind of milk. Like this is the specificity that Ayurveda has. It breaks down each and every food that we have and says that an apple is different from an orange, that a lime is different from an orange, that a lemon is different from a lime, that all fruits, five servings of fruits and vegetables, they're not all the same. And we know this, right? That's why. That's why he wanted to know. And I don't know if elephants, I can't remember if they're in the little diagram

that he's talking about or not. But, you know, this is the thing. Goat milk for certain, you know, malaria or whatnot. Caramel milk for recovering from malaria versus malaria fever, all this kind of thing. This is the great thing about Ayurveda. It's so specific.

It has a specific benefit to a particular species of milk that is relevant to a specific disease, even at a particular stage. And I'm sure he's correct about the um baroque complexity of it i mean it's a typical thing of cams um in general to be incredibly detailed and incredibly confident about all of the different things um so yeah um that does make sense of course the key thing is like anyone can write a whole cosmology of treatments um you know like there were thick textbooks that people studied in the middle ages with an inordinate number of folk remedies for every specific thing that you can imagine that doesn't mean that any of them worked right so i think it gives you a false sense of confidence that they're the prescriptions are so detailed

yeah just the fact that there's like an encyclopedic reference to this kind of thing means that you know why would they write down all those specific treatments chris if they didn't work why would they do that yeah why matt why indeed that't, it doesn't make any sense. So, so yeah. So there we have it. We've come to the end, Matt, basically of this particular beginning. It's like Lord of the Rings though. This is not the end, Matt. This is just the beginning. I'm not here to tell you how this ends. I'm here to tell you how it begins. That's a Matrix reference. If you want, yeah, it'll have the end of the Matrix, I think. Unfortunately, the movie's continued.

They've got much worse. But one thing to note, though, Matt. So this is content from four years ago, as we noted. And Dr. K does make a promise at the end, which goes like this. It's clear to me that we're going to have to do a lot more stuff on Ayurveda. So I'm going to have to like write stuff up for you guys, like guides to this stuff from start to finish. I'll do it. I've started already. Right.

So more to come. But in some of the more recent content that we'll look at, he has stepped away. Oh, no, sorry. Stepped away might be putting it too strongly. He has suggested that he is not putting so much of an emphasis on the Ayurvedic approach. But we'll see how much that applies when we look at the more recent content, right, from a few months ago. when we look at the more recent content, right, from a few months ago. And just as a little taster, Matt, this is from a conversation you had mere months ago

with people from a show called Ice Coffee R. Graham is extremely good at grinding, like putting his nose to something. He's GAFA, which is earth and water. So stability, like low acceleration, high top speed. High acceleration, low top speed. That's really fun. Interesting. So we have this joke, I'm the kite, he's the string.

Absolutely. Yeah, that's our joke. He's the rock, you're the kite. Yeah, that makes complete sense. Wow. So the cool thing about Ayurveda is that you're able to make these diagnoses because there's physical correlations

with mental attributes so if you look at like the veins on the backs of your hands are gonna be more visible than the veins on the backs of his hands he has a roundness to his face you have more angularity so what could you tell about that about like facial structure so your face is round right his is more angular your nose is round his is more angular his ears stick out more my ears stick out more by the way what do you think i am is this an angular nose or a round nose uh yeah absolutely right so i have high vata too that's why we're vibing so much and we're like nice let's talk about this this is the other thing to understand about vatas is that

the current society is very bit the favorable. So the way to success, right? So you're talking about like all these people who come on and we'll say, this is the road. So our whole society is biased towards bit this. Okay. So yeah, it does seem like a little bit of Ayurveda was coming through there. I did detect a note.

Yeah. It's just very familiar. So, you know, that is from your months ago. So I know some people will say well this this is you know old content things have changed but i think we will see not change so much as some might suggest but there were definitely echoes a few hints there of things that we heard um in the older content yeah well it's definitely been uh a confusing tour you've taken me on chris on one hand maybe there are three types of people

and you can tell everything about them from that. On the other hand, maybe everyone's a unique journey, a unique story, a phenomenological snowflake. Yeah. Maybe science and scientific medicine just treats everyone the same and thinks that all depressions, for instance, are the same, or maybe it doesn't. It's confusing.

I'm still figuring stuff out. Confusing, perhaps a little inconsistent, maybe, even just a little. But we won't do a wrap-up on the general thing because I think we should leave that until we approach the end of the series or at least cover the other content related to the Ayurvedic topic. Because the next one we'll look at the interview with Dr. Mike. this perhaps tees up the content for next time that um i feel like if this was a traditional western system if it was referencing homeopathic principles and making reference even perhaps to christian concepts as opposed to hindu or you know, concepts which are less seemingly exotic to a Western audience. I feel... You feel like there'd be more pushback. Is that what you're

saying? Well, I feel, yeah, I feel there is something where if somebody was doing this with like astrology or whatever, people would be quicker to respond critically. With skepticism, yeah. Yeah, but when there is a cross-cultural component, people seem to... Unnaturally reluctant because it's not a good look, as they say. But yeah, I think if someone's come to the table with a breathing life back into the four humors, blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm,

being the key components that you need to understand about keeping in balance because they have you know basically influence everything to do with the body and the emotions and you need to treat things in order to bring your blood down or bring it up depending um you know i think people would be skeptical and structurally it's a very, very similar model to the one that he's describing and probably with the same similar degrees of evidence. I mean, I think if it was coming from a Western tradition and we're talking about understanding the nature of a person's character from the shape of their skull or their facial features, then... People would have concerns. People would have concerns. And there's actually a channel I want to mention, Matt. There's a channel called Science is Dope by an Indian doctor.

I'm not sure his name. I don't have it handy. But he did an episode called, Should We Adopt Ayurveda? An Indian's Response, Dr. Mike versus Dr. K, right? So he's commenting on the Dr. Mike and Dr. K video that we looked at. But he spoke as somebody from an Indian background who has taken Ayurvedic treatments and has a lot of experience with people.

So if you want to hear that, like a critical from that background you could check that out on youtube it's a good video yeah well i thought it was a very good video and one of the points he does hammer home is that prescribing alternative treatments generally but ayurveda is one example is not consequence free is not necessarily harmless um no he he spoke to another clinician who basically treats patients all the time who have you know serious liver dysfunction from being dosed arbitrary ayurvedic treatments and of course you know it can in india that's right and of course it can often substitute for conventional modern treatments that would be more likely to work. And admittedly, a lot of the time that happens because people do not have access to modern medical care, and that is the underlying problem, perhaps.

But yeah, it's a really good video. And I thought he makes the points very forcefully, but also very politely. And he responds directly to Dr. K about Ayurveda. Yeah, yeah. responds directly to dr k about ayurveda yeah yeah and one other point he made matt that the last thing i'll just say and it relates to some of the things that we talked about that was that he based on his experience dealing with ayurvedic practitioners was arguing that it wasn't such an individualized process as dr k presents it was much more there is a you know a very checkbox system and his argument was this is actually the way that it is normally practiced in in india so um yeah this differs

a little bit from the theory yeah yeah that's been my experience i've i've had uh you know i've had traditional chinese treatment sexually in japan from time time. And yeah, that was very much like that. Like it was, oh yeah, let me look at the thing. This is, okay, take that. It was pretty, it wasn't that different from going to the conventional doctor, I got to say. Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll get to more of this as we look at all our content, but that's it for now. This was the, we set the foundation and now we'll move on to start building our house and look at more recent content

and then some of the therapy episodes. So this has been a journey, but we are now at the end of our journey, Matt. And at the end of the journey, one thing that we need to do is tip our hats to our fellow travelers, to the people that that support this endeavor that allow us to do a three-part series because it's what the world needs the world urgently needs this um so you guys are heroes

you guys are the real heroes yeah so who we will thank today is uh neil diskin holdaway oj simpson gus alabone salt august owen liz the tomler bill duros stock just the worst ever marlene smith David Hall, Zeno Kujawa, Just Me, Shino, David Noble, Sam Lemming, Siobhan Murphy, Sarah S, Adrian Lee, Tomas Krivelis, Tomas Krivelis, Sagatas Tretjikokas, and Catherine Esperanza. I'll stop there. But I don't know what level those people are at because this is missed shoutouts, long-term missed shoutouts. So I'm going to give them all the Galaxy Brain Guru shoutout. Welcome, welcome. You're all welcome.

We tried to warn people. Yeah. Like what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything. Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense. I have no tribe. I'm in exile. Think again, sunshine.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so consider this two pro-science academics' response to what I would characterize as alternative pseudoscience-heavy material.

I do not think that means that everything Dr. K recommends will fall into that category or that he cannot give any good advice or do useful things but i just say on the basis of this content i would be skeptical of his scientific claims in the same way that i'm skeptical of andrew hooverman even though hooverman also can say many things which are valid and correct you're so quick to rush to judgment chris it's only been a couple of hours i retain i have an open mind i'm giving him the better for the doubt you're too mean i'm a vat that's what we're like we're i want to know i want to know i'm a bitter you're a you're a bitter bitter man and i want to know i want to know what what i am because i've got a carrot shaped head yeah it is triangular with a puffy thing on top clearly a carrot face um i'd have to discuss your bone movements in great depth to work it out and

and look at your irish shape and i i simply can't matt i can't i'm done i'm out of here i'm i'm like the wind i'm gone oh damn it it's so unreliable, you goddamn vatters. Yeah. Yeah, what you need is a good kapha in your life, a good kapha. Well, with that pearl of wisdom, go check your own doshas out, discover your elemental affinity, and balance out those energy levels, whatever way you know crystals antidepressants coffee get those just mix them all but but not for god's sake not elephant milk no dangerous to get unpleasant to drink they're not gonna be happy they're not gonna be happy i

think i looked up that humans can't digest elephant milk. Anyway, just, you know, if you're an elephant milk drinker, let us know. Let us know. We look forward to hearing from you. All right. Goodbye. Ciao. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Thank you. you