Decoding the Gurus - Gabor Maté: Achieving Authenticity, Tackling Trauma, and Minimizing Modern Malaise

Episode Date: August 3, 2024

Join Matt and Chris as they hunker down with the dulcet reassuring tones of Gabor Maté, the Hungarian-Canadian physician renowned for his unconventional perspectives on trauma, stress, and addiction.Inspired by Maté they reflect on early childhood experiences, explore whether unprocessed trauma has steered them towards a life engulfed by modern gurus, and discover how to stay true to their authentic selves & avoid manifesting debilitating illnesses.With an atmospheric background storm setting the scene for the early segments, tune in for 'cheerful' discussions about childhood trauma, emotional repression, the unexpected cause of female cancer, and the toxic horror that is modern life.The episode also considers 'classic' YouTuber motifs and selected long-form insights, courtesy of "Diary of a CEO" host Stephen Bartlett.So get ready to uncover the authentic crystal butterfly within, cast off the myth of normality, and soar unfettered by past trauma.LinksThe Diary of a CEO- Gabor Mate: The Childhood Lie That’s Ruining All Of Our Lives. | E193The Diary of a CEO- Doctor Gabor Mate: The Shocking Link Between Kindness & Illness!The Conversation: Gabor Maté claims trauma contributes to everything: from cancer to ADHD. But what does the evidence say?Business Live: Huel advert on Steven Bartlett’s podcast The Diary Of A CEO bannedHuel -Steve Bartlett joins Huel Board

Intro Music 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, I'm the psychologist from Australia. With me is Chris Kavanagh, he's the cognitive anthropologist from Japan, formerly of Belfast, as he never ceases to remind us. He's the, not the hero we need, no he is the heroases to remind us he's the not the hero we need no he is the hero we need but the hero we don't want is that how it goes i forget you're batman don't worry you'd be happy yeah i feel you're just disparaging the fact that my accent reminds you that i'm from belfast and you have an anti-irish prejudice so you feel like I'm telling you I'm from Belfast, but it's just the way I speak, goddammit, Matt.

Have some tolerance. I've heard people from Northern Ireland express surprise at your accent. You're from Northern Ireland, are you? Those people, they are barely sentient. We don't even need to acknowledge them. They're just troublemakers. They're enough trouble. And speaking of trouble, you know, we don't even need to acknowledge them. They're just troublemakers. They're enough trouble. And speaking of trouble, you know, we don't do intro segments anymore.

I'm just going to say the gurus fear is a flame. It's a flame at the minute. There's too much going on. They're running into each other like headless chickens. The whole events in American politics about the attempted the attempted assassination the dropping out of biden it has led to the great flourishing of hot takes online and we will cover it we will cover it but good god it's amazing chris brett's brain has melted into a small pool of butter elon musk and jordan peterson are tripping the light fantastic together there's

too much gold out there for us to mine but we're going to get to it we are we will but not today because today is a decoding episode and we were on the third part of our dr k series but we fancied a break from dr k you've all been suffering from Dr. K overload. And we thought, OK, so before we get to the Dr. K stuff on therapy, not therapy, streaming and all those issues, we would instead have a look at somebody that's been requested for quite a while. Hungarian-Canadian physician, public intellectual, person who writes books on trauma, stress, addiction, so on, Gabor Mate. Gabor Mate, indeed. He's a somewhat elderly man now. He was born in 1944. And, you know, has worked as a, like a doctor, like a medical doctor, but also written a huge amount of books. You know, I think fair to say with a self-helpy, psychiatric,

self-actualization, maybe even new age vibe to them. And, yeah, he's a public figure. You know, he's guest on podcasts and on videos. He does public speaking. And, yeah, he's advocated for um alternative approaches a range of things yes yeah we'll we'll get to some of them so i think he's 80 or 79 now then in any case he's up there in age and actually looking very good for it i will say in terms of physical appearance and delivery yeah Yeah, yeah, that's right. He's still got all these faculties, that's for sure. Any issues that we might have with him,

I don't think has got anything to do with his age. If he was wrong about something, I feel like it was something he's been wrong about for decades. Yeah, that's probably true. Now, the content that we're going to look at is his interview with the diary of a CEO, Stephen Bartlett. This is somebody, I think we have come across him in some interviews previously. But yeah, we'll get to the dynamic in those interviews. But well, there is one thing I wanted to say, and this applies to the Dr. K material as well. And I think in general, it actually applies to anybody that we cover that offers self-help advice and therapeutic content. So if you are someone that has listened to a public figure, be it Jordan Peterson, be it Gabor Mate, be it Dr. K or whatever, and you

have found this very beneficial and helpful, it's provided you either with, you know, therapeutic benefit or just you feel like you've come to understand something about yourself more from it, that is perfectly fine, right? It doesn't make you a simpleton or an easy mark or somebody like falling for a fraud. A lot of the self-help advice, including from people who are not particularly great, but also including people that are, you know, relatively on the up and up, is helpful to people and in particular circumstances, it might resonate with you. But this really common mistake I see is that if somebody feels that they got genuine benefit from someone, that this then translates to overall their approach must be valid and their claims must be reasonable. As if that is not true, it would mean that the benefit that they gained is somehow tainted

or not true. And I just want to say it is possible and indeed advisable to separate those two things. Did you find something beneficial? Do you take benefit from it? And is the evidence for this person's claims and their overall model of illness or mental health, is it scientifically valid and well supported by evidence? Those are two entirely distinct points. So yeah, that's right, Chris chris i mean i remember us pointing this out that when we started this podcast a few years ago that we had a couple of academics we we look

at things from that academic sciencey point of view so we're looking for stuff like are the arguments well put together are they founded in good evidence evidence? Or is it somewhat rhetorical? Is it stuff that sounds good, but isn't necessarily true? That kind of thing. And that's different from whether or not they're groovy politically, or whether or not they provide content that's helpful to some people. Sometimes those things go together, sometimes they don't. So yeah, that's what we do. That's the lens through which we operate. Yeah. And I'm not going to go into great detail here, but I will also say that I think there is a lot in Gabor Mate's output that would make him particularly appealing to a wide range of people.

A focus on trauma, emphasizing mind-body connection and holistic practices, talking about the toxic modern environment and how it's harming us mentally and politically, psychologically, all sorts of things, spiritually. all sorts of things spiritually and this emphasis on each individual being unique and pathologies being put onto them by society and stuff there's there's just a whole bunch of things that come together to make this very attractive and including references to colonialism and so on yeah that was my impression too now we're going to show not tell so we won't say too much. Yeah, that was my impression too. Now we're going to show, not tell, so we won't say too much about it, but that was what was going through my mind too. It's really quite interesting, actually, the degree, I think, to which people like Gabo Mate

might reflect a cultural zeitgeist and I guess the kinds of values or concerns that sort of affect us culturally and are therefore appealing to us. So yeah, let's explore that as we go through it. Okay. Now the first thing, Matt, we're going to get the gabber quite quickly, but I just want to highlight a little bit the dynamics of this particular podcast setup. Here's the kind of introduction, like the teaser trailer that plays at the start of the podcast, right? And it's a podcast with quite a high level of production. The episode is 193, the childhood lie that's ruining all our lives. So this kind of click-baity title, But here you go. This is just a sample of the kind of diary of a CEO framing. Financial stress on the parents translates into physiological stress in the children.

They didn't inherit anything in terms of a disease. They're just reacting to the environment. People call Dr. Gabor Mate the people whisperer, legendary thinker and bestselling author. He's highly sought after for his expertise on addiction, stress and childhood development. The evidence linking mental illness and childhood adversity is about as strong as the evidence linking smoking and lung cancer. And the average physician doesn't hear a word about that. It's astonishing.

I can give you the example of Donald Trump. I mean, his father was a psychopath. You are the enemy of the people. Go ahead. It sounds like a trailer. Yeah, yeah. It's powerful stuff. Powerful stuff.

Yeah, so that's the vibe. We're going to have to look at this. There's his host, Diary of the CEO. I think maybe just a little short divergence at the very start might be helpful before we get into the meat of the trauma. This is something that you find in a lot of these podcasts, right? You hear this in Trigonometry, you hear this just in general.

This is YouTube culture. But this kind of thing never feels to amaze me. I think this is fascinating. I looked at the back end of our YouTube channel and it says that since this channel started, 69.9% of you that watch it frequently haven't yet hit the subscribe button so I have a favor to ask you if you've ever watched this channel and enjoyed the content if you're enjoying this episode right now please could I

ask a small favor please hit the subscribe button helps this channel more than I can explain and I promise if you do that to return the favor we will make the show better and better and better and better and better. That's the promise I'm willing to make you if you hit the subscribe button. Do we have a deal? That's a promise, Chris. You can take that to the bank. He's going to make it. Yeah.

Is that fascinating? I feel the delivery. You're right. That is. I know. You're right. This is YouTube culture. This is specific to

this bloke but uh yeah like it is just so blatant and um i don't know people don't seem to have any reluctance to to do that kind of hard sell yeah i don't whatever anyway yeah well it's that it's that thing that like it's spoken as if you're having you know an intimate chat with the creator you know i have noticed this thing in the back end that, you know, 69% and I promise to you, right? It's like, it's very used car salesman in a way, but like with more parasocial sincerity into it. And I just, yeah, like, you know, if you break it down, what's been said is I've noticed

that more of you could subscribe to my channel. And if you do, that will help my channel get bigger and you know please please please do that yeah but it's somehow it's intoned with moral weight and like a personal yeah this is this is an agreement between me and you so yeah he's not the only one to do that but it never feels to amaze me that that comes up this is like i've also noticed chris this is i've been going through the metrics on our podcast and of all the people listening only a small percentage actually subscribe and pay us money on patreon only a small percentage and it would really really help us if more of them would i mean i don't even know how many of them subscribe.

I mean, many people on the Reddit would never heard of me. It's really annoying. Less than 100%. It's fascinating. It's, I don't know. So yeah, I mean, that would be self-serving, but like, you know. It would be self-serving. Yeah.

But that's fine. That's fine. Speaking about self-serving things, listen to this. Quick one from our longest standing sponsor here. I can't tell you over the last, I'd say over the over the last really it's been about two and a half years it was really um post pandemic how much my health has become such a huge priority in my life huel has been probably the most important partner in my health journey because i've been in the boardrooms i've been to their offices tens and tens and tens and tens of times,

I've seen how they make their decisions on nutrition. And that's why it's such a wonderful thing to be able to talk to this audience about a brand and a product that is so unbelievably linked to my values and the place I am in my life of valuing the gym, exercise, movement, my mind, my breathing and all of those things.

And most importantly, my nutrition. That is the role Huel plays. And so every time I get to read these ads out i do it with such passion because i really really believe every word i'm saying and i absolutely love the brand so if you haven't already tried here and you've been resistant to my my pestering then give it a go and let me know how you get on again that's a hard sell i realize we live in the real world and this is their job, right? They're running a business, but it would just be nice to acknowledge that and be a bit more upfront about it. Like this is my business. I do interviews. I make YouTube videos. And if you're going to do endorsements or read out advertising, I think just be a little bit

more honest. Like I'm doing this for the sponsorship money because that's how I earn my living. Well, Matt, what would you imagine from the ad read that Mr. Bartlett's involvement with Fuel is? I assume that they're a sponsor of his show, right? That's correct. They are a sponsor of his show. Would you imagine that he is on the board of fuel ah no i didn't did not pick that up is he yeah that didn't come up he didn't mention that but

yes he is on the board of hero so his wholehearted endorsement of this product that he just really believes in that that perhaps is a slight conflict of interest that you might want to mention that this is a company look that's just happenstance chris he just happens to be on the board he might have some shares he might be getting paid money to sponsor it's more it's huell accords with his values where he is right now in his life really valuing health don't you value health i value health come on i yeah i do i guess just i just find that slightly distasteful like that you wouldn't mention you know that this is your company or the a company that you have a direct stake in that you're promoting so yeah anyway that's the influencer world i guess but

well now oh wait yeah well this actually will lead in i was about to move on but there's one last clip i have to play because it's podcast dynamics at play there's a question we often ask each other in flippant conversations which we usually kind of brush away because it's the convenient thing to do yeah that question is the question i wanted to start by asking you which is how are you yeah um so that question is uh for me it brings up you know two dimensions one is how am i at this present moment which is you know how am I at this present moment? Which is, you know, how am I at this moment? You know, which is all there is. I'm well.

I feel rather peaceful inside. I'm very happy to be here with you. If you'd asked me two days ago, I wouldn't have said that. I would have said I was feeling somewhat anxious and kind of troubled, you know? So as an in-the- in the moment answer i'm well and i also know how to keep well as long as i stick with what i know and when i forget what i know then i can be very not well and so the last year since we've met has been in many ways a tough year for me um also one of deep learning.

So if the question is, how have I been? I'd say I've been up and down and I've had real challenges that I've had to learn from. How am I right now? I'm really well, thank you. How are you right now, Chris? Well, you know, if you're talking about how I am in this minute. God, Matt, God, podcasts should never be invented. Like, I know this is not a big thing, but this ability for podcasts to imply hidden depths to this question of how are you?

You know, we ask it every day, Matt, but do we really ask it? And it's all in how seriously you deliver it and how serious the partner takes the response and as long as you both do the you know the very sincere thing it's fine but if any one of you were just like well i'm fine how are you like to to be absolutely clear because i do not come from this pseudo clinical american frankly culture whenever i ask you chris how you're doing i want to hear the word fine that's that's it that's all i want to know and you understand that that's why we get along this is good yeah yeah that's that's it so anyway just that's indulgent podcasting 101. But I thought it's interesting because, like I say,

if you are the solemn tone to the question, it kind of just leads to pseudo-profound answers, even though the thing is quite trite, which is, I'm okay. But if you mean, am I always okay? I'm not always okay. I've been bad sometimes. Like, no shit. Yeah, but this is all part of the, again, like YouTube interview culture,

which is it's not just a normal interview. Like, it's not like a journalistic interview with a politician or even an expert or something like that. It is a meeting of minds. It is a deep emotional connection. Like, You almost feel like after an interview like this, the two people are going to go off and rent a cottage in the country somewhere for the summer. But of course they're not, right? Gav O'Maddo is going to leave and these people are not going to talk for months and months. But that's what they do. They engage with people fully. They're fully present and they see each

other, Chris. They see each other fully. fully yes there is such intimacy implied there although i didn't get the impression that gabamata had has been a big influence on this host well it's hard to say because stephen bartlett is very good at giving the impression of whoever is speaking to he's the biggest fan yeah changed his life they're the most important figure but i think in this case it is a little bit like he's the biggest fan yeah changed his life the most important figure but i think in this case it is a little bit like he's probably read his book and took some influence from it and that kind of thing but you know there's certainly a lot of people that steven bartlett interviews that have significant impact on his life so yeah but but this is the the job of a YouTube self-help, self-actualization, how to be a more successful, more productive, more healthy person. This is the style, isn't it?

I mean, the podcast title is Diary of a CEO. So, yeah, that makes sense. And his first book was called happy sexy millionaire that sounds nice yeah isn't that what you want don't you want to be a happy sexy millionaire too second book matt the diary of a ceo the 33 laws of business and life 33 that's a lot yeah i remember when there was only seven habits of highly successful people yeah or 12 rules for life but um yeah and actually i also see stephen bartlett on british airways he's at that level he's in the safety video telling you how to plug in your um seat belt and seat belt yeah your belt and stuff so yeah okay

okay anyway um so they're setting the stage for what is going to be a very deep and meaningful question where they fully engage with each other as real yeah that was a little bit of a sneaky move by me because that's actually from a different episode but nonetheless it doesn't it doesn't matter right but uh so did not start off too negative matt here it is i mean we did start off negative but we did we did we're gonna we're gonna wind it back yeah i'm going to let gabor outline his background just a little bit and you know why it might be worth listening to him about topics like trauma and care for alerts and this kind of thing and in those 33 years what what was your practice what did you specialize in what did

you focus on so i was a family physician which meant i delivered a lot of babies and i looked after people's problems from beginning to the end of life i also worked in palliative care. I was the director of a unit at the hospital which looked after people with terminal disease. And I did, that was 22 years or so of my practice, 20, 22 years. And then I switched gears altogether and I went to work in the downtown east side of Vancouver, British Columbia, which is North America's most concentrated area of drug use. Yeah long career as a actual practicing clinician in various roles and and look I mean a little aside here too Chris I know maybe you didn't get this impression but my feeling was that despite the disagreements I have or the issues I have with the assertions he's making,

we'll get into all of that. I got the vibe that what we have here is a somewhat wise, dare I say, man who, you know, just in terms of being a human being and just being kind of, I don't know. That's just the vibe I got. I know very little about Gabamate and I don't know that's that's just the vibe i got i know very little about gabba mate and i don't know anything about about him apart from this thing but he just gave me those vibes so don't don't burst my bubble don't don't shatter my illusions all i'll say is i understand because i think his tone of delivery and the atmosphere about him is endearing and authoritative like he comes across as genuine

speaking from the heart and with empathy right i did get that but but i think there's a danger there in that just imagine him with a squeaky voice matt right like a squeaky voice was like i didn't care like it would make a difference the substance but i feel it would make a difference the yeah that i appreciate that point a lot of it is about style and i was just thinking about how my initial impressions of brett weinstein and heather hanging were simply positive purely based on the vibe they gave off from their first video that i saw which my god how embarrassing but um yeah you know i mean even apart from the sound and the vibe i mean you know i'm gonna buttress your point for you there's a little bit more about his experiences in palliative care and whatnot and you know by the

way he talked about working in the east of vancouver i lived in vancouver just for a month when i was traveling around canada east vancouver was no joke in terms of drug use and that kind of thing so yeah you know that's just very limited experience for me in passing through that area no offense to anyone who's from east vancouver i'm sure it's a lovely part of the town yeah yeah maybe it's changed but in in any case a little bit more matt about palliative care and his experiences there that experience working with patients that were in palliative care so that's for anybody that doesn't know that's patients that are approaching the end of their life that have terminal illnesses and that are aware that they're going to to die what did that

experience teach you it took an acceptance of one's lack of lack of omnipotence as a physician because you're going to you want to cure people you want you want people to heal and now it takes the tremendous acceptance to say you know we've reached the limit of our knowledge and that doesn't mean we can't help people but we certainly can't cure them yeah that's the kind of thing that i mean like it's it's just sort of human reflections that are informed from actually having lived life, right? Yeah, yeah. And he also mentions this just a little bit more in that topic. Acceptance, you learn a lot of acceptance. It challenges you to do your best

when you know your best isn't going to be saving anybody's lives, but it's to help people live a life of as little suffering as possible and as much dignity as possible. So it really challenges the best parts of you to show up. Patience, acceptance, intuition, personally taught me a lot to listen to people. Interesting enough, people really want to be heard when they're dying. interesting enough people really want to be heard when they're dying uh they want to make sense of their lives they want to tell their stories then i want their stories to be heard and so um i listened a lot i just sat by the bedside and i listened yeah at various times i've been in palliative care units not not for myself obviously but um, but with other people.

And yeah, like I can imagine that working in that environment would, yeah, you know, it makes you have to grow up a bit. Yeah, you know, and I think those insights that we can't control everything, you know, it's good to listen to people who are coming towards the end of their life and people are inclined to try and make meaning of what's happening to them and stuff. Very empathetic. All good. From my point of view, this is the kind of content where I don't have any issue with what's being said.

And I think it is the kind of experiences that might incline you to be reflective about you know the nature of existence and what is meaningful in life and and so on so yeah this was just a you know pull it back we had a bit of a bit of negativity to start but there was it's not all bad we're not mean nasty cynical bitter people just looking to tear everybody down that's not us chris that's not us and there are a couple of clips we'll probably get to towards the end of the interview where i quite liked what he said but we could save those for later yeah yeah there's more stuff to come but one of the things that i think is helpful to understand gabor's whole approach is the stress that he puts on trauma and experiences in early childhood. This is him talking, I think, about his own childhood trauma. But listen here.

So your mother gives you away for five to six weeks in order to sort of save you from starvation in a ghetto that she was going to, right? That's right. This is after your grandparents were killed in Auschwitz by the Nazis. How do you know in hindsight that that moment of those six weeks created that sense of abandonment in you? I wouldn't say it's just that one moment. Children very much view themselves through their interaction with their parents.

Now, first of all, I had no father because he was gone. I hadn't seen him, except very briefly when I was a month old. But there was no father in the picture. My mother was grief-stricken and terrorized and full of woe and worry about what's going to happen to us and just the task of surviving each day. She's not playful with me. She's not smiling at me very much. She's worried looking. She's stressed looking.

The infant takes everything personally. That's just the nature of the infant. As infants, we're narcissists. We think it's all about us. So when are great hey we're great but my mother is unhappy it's because she doesn't want me or i can't make her happy or i'm inadequate so that separation from my mother certainly set a template for some of my relationship interactions with my spouse decades later but the sense of not being good enough and and and and being responsible um that was inculcated in me throughout that whole first year of life yeah so so mate's family is obviously the victim of

crime and trauma from uh the nazis uh you know that lost his grandparents father endured forced labor aren't disappeared um but yeah so his experience is describing there when he was separated from his mother for over five weeks he was aged between one and two years old yes or i i think he said that whole first year of life so but yeah for five weeks so i don't know if that's zero to one or one to two but it's very early very early and his description is quite vivid of his experiences during that time so that's surprising like it yeah he he describes his his sort of anger or something with with his mother for having abandoned him but um yeah anyway that's it seems um unlikely to me i have to say as a just from what i know of developmental psychology, I don't know if experiences like that at that age is something that one actually remembers as an adult.

No, typically not, Matt. There's a thing called infantile amnesia where most infants don't have the brain complexity necessary to have long term memory storage until around three or four years of life autobiographical recall now not to say you don't have any experiences you can't have you know like uh emotional neurological changes yeah somehow persist but actual episodic memories yeah yeah you can't from everything that i know about this literature the brain just isn't developed like that so you will have people talking about the memories of like being in the womb and whatnot but they may very well believe that they have those memories right because but the nature of memory is not a ticker

tip so you could have a vivid memory that is not actually a memory of an event that they right or is a right a reconstruction of other people's accounts so if he was describing this as this is what he has inferred happened from you know the various accounts that he's pieced together that would be a different thing but that's not what he's saying yeah i mean it's maybe a small point but you know it is very well understood by psychologists the tricky nature of memory you know the pop and and subjective feeling of it is it's like a almost like a video camera recording or something like that but when you study a little bit of psychology you understand what a malleable and what a reconstructed what an unreliable thing

it is so you know it's just maybe illustrative, I guess, of Maté's approach to psychology, perhaps, that he doesn't see. Yeah, it's also illustrative of an earlier approach to psychology, a kind of psychoanalytic approach that absolutely prioritized the very earliest stages of development and attributed a lot. You know, this is kind of the caricature of Freud. we did a lot you know this is kind of the caricature of freud but in any case just in case it sounds like we're being unfair here's some explicitly explaining this in this book the myth of normal i i actually talk about a an experience with the psychedelic mushrooms at the with the therapist this is not that long ago seven years ago maybe um when i'm at least 70 years old and i'm in this therapeutic session with the psilocybin the medicine and the therapist and i know that i'm 78 70 years old and i know this is a therapy session and i know her name and i know who i am in the world but at the same time

i'm experiencing myself as a one-year-old baby, and she's my mother. And I start crying, tears come down on my face, and I say, I'm so sorry I made your life so difficult. Now that was an unconscious memory of my sense of myself as a one-year-old, that I made my mother's life so difficult, because that's the way the baby interprets it. So even if your mother loves you, which mine did infinitely,

not that she always treated me the best way possible, but she did love me. And can you imagine what a great act of love even giving me to a stranger in the street would have been for her? But because of her own unhappiness, I can only conclude that i'm not good enough and it's my fault yeah so this does almost come across as a caricature of freudian psychology that this incredible emphasis on these very very early experiences the idea that there's this sort of psychosexual traumas that are occurring very

early in life which then have these far-reaching implications up to 70 yeah and it is it's it's it's kind of connected with uh i think a broader cultural zeitgeist around that idea of repression and repressed memories and reliving trauma that kind kind of thing. And yeah, I mean, all I can say is that it is not in line with the scientific evidence about how brains work. It may well be popular amongst certain kinds of clinicians in the US, but it is out of step with our understanding of the human brain. Yeah, and the issue I would point out here is like it isn't that mate cannot believe that he has had this insight which has had a transformative experience

of his sense of self that is not in question i i fully believe that he could have that but that it is based on his experience as a one-year-old which he unlocked through a mushroom trip facilitated with a therapist when he was age 70 and it is a correct representation of his emotional trauma that was locked away until that session no no that is it's as far-fetched as past life regression to be honest yeah yeah i'm afraid so but to highlight like how matthew will present this as kind of you know processing it as being very important uh there's a clip matt where he talks about the the kind of subjective nature of being wounded by trauma. How does somebody at 70 years old go about correcting that sort of interpretation you had of that traumatic early event?

Well, by bringing it up to the conscious level. Then when I notice that sense of guilt or responsibility in me, I say, oh, that's what it's about. So it's a meaning. See, trauma as I define it is not about what happens to us. It's about what happens inside of us as a result of what happens to us. And so the wound in trauma means wound. So the wound in this case is my sense of deficiency or not being good enough,

not being worthy enough. Once I realize that oh this has got nothing to do with anything except this interpretation that i made of my own experience all those years ago then when i notice it i can no longer believe it i don't have to any longer be a subject to that interpretation of myself in the world so awareness is one step it's not adequate but it's an essential step towards um letting go so i think he's talking about how it allows him to process the experience but i actually think it reflects on the level of kind of subjectivity involved in um reinterpreting that experience that one um

belief that you weren't good enough yeah how did that rear its ugly head throughout your life it um made me a workaholic physician because i had to keep proving my worth and it doesn't matter no i don't know if you ever had an addiction but the nature of it is that we're trying to get from the outside something that only can arise and fulfill us from the inside so when you're looking at it from the outside it's addictive

because you get it temporarily but then that internal emptiness, that hole never goes away so it has to be filled over and over and over again it can only be done so temporarily so it becomes runaway addictive so then you know work becomes an addiction because i keep trying to prove my worth and it doesn't matter how many times you know i i may show up in a positive way at the beginning of someone's life at the end of

somebody else's life or any time in between it never fills that emptiness that my sense of lack of worthiness creates. So that's one way it shows up. Another way it shows up is if in my relationship I don't feel as satisfied, my wife doesn't please me the way i like her too um then i get angry but why am i getting angry i'm getting angry because it's my sense of not being good enough that's being now revealed big consequences from that first year experience yeah Yeah, yeah. It led to persistent feelings of not being good enough and overwork, constant need to prove yourself, being angry with your wife, et cetera.

I mean, Chris, maybe it's too early to comment about this kind of thing, but I think this kind of talk is interesting because it does represent this sort of clinicalization and medicalization of everything. I think Gabor Mate is speaking to a lot of things that everybody feels, right? A lot of people feel, oh, am I trying too hard to please people? Am I working too hard?

Am I feeling unfulfilled? I feel bad because I wasn't very nice to my partner all of that stuff these are all totally normal human things that are extremely common but i guess the appeal of psychoanalysis and that kind of clinical analysis is the same as almost like a spiritual type frameworks in that it gives it a legitimacy and it gives people a kind of language to analyze themselves. I don't know. What do you think? Well, there's some components there because in one way, there's the part that Matej usually presented as somebody pushing back against over-medicalization in a way, because he's

somewhat critical about pharmaceutical interventions and medications, as we'll see, right? And he has this book, The Myth of Normal, where he wants to argue that a lot of behaviors that are classified as potentially mental illnesses or whatever, or just variation. And actually I can play a clip of him making this point in regards to his diagnosis of ADD that I, I kind of feel aligned with. This is from later in the interview, but just to highlight this first point. So you so you you you were on medication you did the work you're now not on medication yeah um do you still have the symptoms of add to a certain degree but not in a way that anyway blights my life like one thing i can be

sure that when i go on a speaking trip i'm gonna lose something i'm to lose my portable electrical tooth cleaner. In this case, I left my rain jacket in Budapest when I came here. You can take it for granted that my attention will just not notice something that I haven't packed yet. That's okay. I'm going back to Budapest next week, so I get to get my rain jacket back. But sometimes it's the cost of being me. So what? No, not in

every way but that's not the point nobody's life has to be perfect it just has to be a life that i i want to live and i can enjoy living that i have you know so who cares if sometimes i forget something or i lose something or even if i'm listening to a symphony and I can't keep my attention on it, okay, so I can't. So that, you know, I like that because I have perhaps some of the same tendencies. And I have a similar point of view, which is there are variations of personality and stuff, and there is, I think, a tendency towards over medicalization in contemporary

society perhaps perhaps my use of the word over medicalization was not quite the right one because it's a different but it's a different kind of of clinical talk where you develop you know from coming from a psychoanalytic thing or a new age thing talking about various types of trauma in your life and and forming quite complex theoretical explanations for why you had a fight with your partner for instance that's that's a bit different right from the like over prescribing drugs to treat adhd no but i i think there is something to that. So like, in regards to his definition of trauma, right, which in typical definitions, usually refers to like a severe event, right? A severe, usually unpleasant event that people have experienced. He takes a more expansive

definition, shall we say? How do you define trauma i know society has defined it in its own way but how do you define it the word i define it very specifically um it's not something bad that happens to you it's not some it's not that you know i went to this movie last night and i was traumatized no you weren't you were just sad or you were had some emotional pain but you weren't traumatized trauma means a wound that's the literal meaning of the word it's a greek word for wounding so trauma is a psychological wound that you sustain and it behaves like a wound so on the one hand a wound if it's very raw if you touch it it just really hurts so if i have a wound around not being wanted,

or the belief that I'm not, then decades later, if anything reminds me of that, it hurts as much as it did when I originally incurred the wound. So in one sense, trauma is an unhealed wound. That touched, we get triggered. That's what triggering means, by the way. Some old wound gets activated or touched. And the other thing that happens to wounds is that they scar over.

And scar tissue has certain characteristics. It's thick. It has no nerve endings, so there's no feeling in it. So people traumatized, disconnected from their feelings. Scar tissue is rigid. It's not flexible. So we lose kind of response flexibility so when something happens we tend to react in typical stereotypical predictable dysfunctional ways because of the rigidity and scar tissue doesn't grow like healthy flesh you got quite into the

metaphor there but but the actually in this clip uh he was sounding like a more restrictive version of trauma but he he has a concept of big t trauma and little t trauma and that they're both valid forms of trauma and little t trauma is not the you know the kind of big suffering. It's more the kind of thing that maybe other people wouldn't regard as hugely traumatic. But he essentially wants to say, like, even if you had a very nice life and you were living, you know, a relatively comfortable existence, you could have had significant mental trauma because of the relationship you had with your parent or this kind of thing, right? Which is a, it is a kind of psychoanalysis thing where you might've thought that, you

know, things were generally okay, but actually deep down, there were all these dysfunctional relationships, which have caused huge damage and you need to bring them up in order to properly process them so his approach is more expansive than it somewhat sounded there yeah i mean look trauma is obviously real but it is a very strong word isn't it in just natural human language and it can refer to people that are the victims of you know extreme violence refugees people that are like subject to extreme persistent abuse as a child or from a partner or something like that so like there is that sense of the world with word which undoubtedly has persistent

psychological effects but at the same time you have to recognize that it's a very popular word in the modern zeitgeist i mean there's trauma-informed yoga there's trauma-informed mindfulness practices there's trauma-informed massage like it is so it does have the scope where i think there is something very satisfying for people that feel a bit bad to look to some events as being traumatic and to frame themselves as being the victim of traumatic events in the process of healing. You know, part of this involves, and this is a very common refrain whenever we're looking at alternative medicine practitioners or people advancing revolutionary theories, which Gabor Mate absolutely is, is that they have to present that the mainstream medical establishment doesn't in any way grapple with trauma or doesn't really understand it. So what I'm saying is that this way of looking at what we call disease as a process is so much more accurate scientifically, actually, and understanding the mind-body unity. And then, you know, naturally when people are traumatized, that has a huge impact on their physiology. Their psychological trauma has a huge impact on their physiology. It's just science, but it's science that's not taught to medical doctors. It's just for some strange reason. Well, the average physician never hears a single lecture about, say, trauma and its

relationship to illness, and yet there's studies internationally, thousands of them, showing those relationships. So there's this strange gap between science and medical practice but it would it would change medical practice for the better because what would happen if you went to a physician and you presented with your symptom and they'd say okay look we'll give you such and such medication to deal with your symptoms and then let's look at your life in the context that you live it and see how that the stresses that you may be taking on the traumas you may be carrying might be affecting the physiology of your body no they don't have to be all trauma

therapists to do that they just have to raise the question and to start and then to begin the inquiry yeah i mean like historically speaking, there definitely was like a lack of recognition of the persistent psychological effects of traumatic experiences, like shell shock, for instance, right? Yeah, but when was that? 1914 to 18? Yeah, it was a while ago.

It was a while ago. You know, you had soldiers returning from you know vietnam the classic goes the the the helicopters send them off and stuff so you know there's obviously been recognition since then uh very strong recognition of the impact of traumatic events i mean what i am skeptical of, I think a lot of the audience of the books are people that like to think that they are the victim of trauma or still processing trauma or something like that. And I am a little bit concerned that the word can be expanded and broadened to such a degree that it loses its meaning meaning like let me ask you chris what percentage of the population do you think abelate believes is currently suffering from some degree of trauma i think they talk about it at some point and it's very high like it's uh like it's over

over what i think over 50 over 50 okay yeah so if if you've if your definition of the word trauma includes over 50 percent of the population then i think you have diluted the meaning of the word to such a degree that it it doesn't really mean what you think it means anymore well yeah so like listen to this for example there's those obvious traumas or the obvious trauma of being sexually abused. So men who are sexually abused, according to a Canadian study, have triple the rate of heart attacks as adults. And all kinds of physiological reasons. But that should be the case. So there's those self-evident big T traumas that we call big T trauma.

T with a capital T., T with a capital T, trauma with a capital T. There's a certain percentage of the population, much larger than we think, subject to that. If you include all the known factors such as physical, sexual, emotional abuse, spanking, by the way, has not been shown to be as traumatic as harsher forms of physical abuse. Spanking, which is still recommended by so-called experts, who should remain unnamed for the moment. The death of a parent, violence in a family, parental violence against each other. A parent being jailed, a parent being mentally ill. Did I say a parent being addicted, a rancorous divorce.

These are the identified big traumas, big T traumas. Not to mention poverty, not to mention extreme inequality, war and so on. But then, if you remember that trauma is not what happens to you, but what happens inside you, it's the wound. People can be wounded not just by bad things happening to them, but small children can be wounded in loving families where they don't get their needs met. Yeah, so that is making a point about it basically suggests making that point about it basically suggests that maybe everybody is processing trauma to some degree at least the small t trauma and there is certainly validity to the point that like

the subjective experience of your childhood or whatever could lead to, you know, various mental issues, right? And it doesn't mean that you need to have like somebody who was a crack addict as a parent and you were living in poverty in order to develop neuroses or whatever the case might be like, you know, just pathological thinking habits or whatever. That's absolutely true. And a lot of it is down to subjective interpretation but it is that broadening of the definition to be like i think there would be very few people who could attend the counseling session who would be unable to locate family trauma with such a expansive

definition of trauma yeah i mean even his definition of big t trauma was pretty expensive and would have included a pretty large percentage of the population um anybody with a rancorous divorce that experienced then like there's a lot of divorces in america for example yeah yeah a lot of people were spanked right um not that i could donate it's not good but you know it so i mean it's just a conceptual thing really i suppose and if you if your conception of uh human psychology is is one in which we are such fragile beings such that what are normal basically in statistically normal experiences in the modern world which by any definition is one of the safest again statistically speaking environments that humans have ever existed in and and if we are so fragile that that is traumatizing a very large

percentage of us inexorably then i think you don't quite have an accurate model of how humans work yes we will get to his presentation of the modern world and what the status of it is as well but before that matt there was one other part in that clip at the start where he talks about a canadian study and that men that were sexually abused have tripled the rate of heart attacks. You might notice it said men, because I looked up that study and the pattern doesn't exist in women. And the authors of the study make it clear that we need the release, press releases, of course, about this finding. But they also said, of course, we need independent replications of this finding because it was a huge

cross-sectional database. And I'll just state the obvious here, that there are probably hundreds of correlates of... Yeah, but they control for things, Matt. They can control for 10 things. So that means it doesn't... Yeah, so this is... But that way of citing

studies, like one... i looked into that was looking was there any follow-up study no nothing this is not but this is very much the kind of dr k huberman we have citing studies is like remember a factoid and be like okay so a study of you know in canada showed that this relationship is there and like did it or was that a correlational finding and like why would it only be in man if it was that right and why is it only that kind of trauma like sexual abuse and man yeah why not why not other kinds of trauma yeah i mean that's right yeah citing an isolated study that kind of gives inconsistent results, you know, hasn't control for everything, is cross-sectional,

doesn't hold up in other populations like women, where you would expect it to hold up if it was the mechanism and wasn't followed up by any other research to actually establish it. You know, dropping that stuff in, it's really just because it fits with the framework that that he is aligned to in in his framework social psychological experiences early childhood that kind of thing the processing of trauma has massive biological implications for your body and your health so little scientific nuggets like that can be dropped in to support the pre-existing framework that one

has yeah and you mentioned about the leaning towards you know various alternative therapies and body work and these kind of approaches being somewhat attracted to this expansive model of trauma right and like ways to process it and just to highlight the connection there well for you to say how to go about it you already must have some degree of awareness if you didn't you wouldn't even be asking the question so that's the very first step of realizing that there's something here to work on. There's something here to work through. It does not need to be the way it is. That already is the biggest step.

The Buddha said that to recognize the source of your suffering is the first step towards relieving the suffering. And so as soon as you ask how you go about it, you've already taken a huge step. Because a lot of people don't even know that there's an it. They just think this is reality, that this is life. So realizing that this it doesn't have to be the way it is, that's already a huge step now. Beyond that, yoga, meditation, nature, therapy of all kinds, body work of all kinds, like somatic experiencing or craniosacral treatments or even massage therapy. It's incredible what can be revealed just through body work like that.

Then all kinds of forms of therapy, the ones I teach, the ones other people teach, journaling, certain exercises in this book that we recommend, like just ask yourself where you have trouble saying no in life to things you don't really want to do, and working that through on a regular basis. So there's lots of ways once you open the door. It's interesting, isn't it? basis so there's lots of ways once you open the door it's interesting isn't it but the sort of progressive leaning healers uh will often cite buddha and yoga and prayer and whereas jordan

peterson will be citing jesus christ and and prayer yeah you know it's kind of kind of similar that i mean it's similar in the sense that in both cases, there is a strong spiritual component to what is purportedly psychology and purportedly informed by scientific evidence. Yeah, there's that kind of, you know, Dr. K dancing. This is the cutting edge of science that we're getting to. But a lot of it seems to also be ancient wisdom, hearkening to traditional ancient wisdom and alternative modalities

and, you know, just getting more in touch with the actual you, which is very much aligned with the self-help wellness approach of the kind of American self-help industry. So it's funny because Maté is sometimes presented as like a critic of like the indulgent, hyper-individualized commercial approach to self-help and wellness. But I don't see a huge amount of difference, except that he will

reference commercialization and capitalism and stuff, but that's hardly unique. They often will all reel against materialistic societies and the toxic products that are causing us problems. Indeed, indeed. Yeah. Well, if you wanted to draw some more parallels to the more indulgent side of the self-help work, clips like this might help. So we are created in an image of God. I mean, what our religious views are, but that sense that we're created in images of God means that we are creators because the essence of God is creation.

In fact, we call God the creator and we call the result of that creation. If we're created and if we're offshoots of that creative dynamic in the universe, then it means that it's in us to create. And whatever form that takes, I mean, you know, you don't want to see me do art, you know, unless you, I can do a pretty good stick figure, you know, but I'm married to a nurse. So that creativity doesn't have to take the form of formal art, but it does have to take some flow of something that's inside you that needs to come out.

Otherwise, as Celia says, you get hopelessly hemmed in by frustration. And so in that sense, everybody's got that creative urge, and that may take the form of social intercourse. It might take the form of gardening. I don't care. Communing with nature. Athletic expression. I don't care what.

But everybody's got it. And if people don't realize they have it, it's only because life has hemmed them in and they're too busy. And sometimes they are trying to make a living or trying to survive or too disconnected from themselves but it's in all of us and to the extent that we don't give it expression we suffer yeah well um on one hand he reminded me so much of jordan peterson there just in terms of the logical flow or lack of it or in terms of you know where we're made in the image of God I don't mean religiously but I mean metaphorically we

clearly are made in the image of God and God's a creator therefore we're creators as well and we all exist to to create and you can express creativity like doing anything like podcasting I assume is a way of expressing your creativity and if you're not expressing your creativity it's because you've been hemmed in by life and the the whatever repressive individuals or trauma or something i mean it doesn't make really any sense like analytically but i can see that it's extremely like it's appealing right like these are all things uh good vibe things that you would like to feel about yourself we all feel like we're restricted a bit by the situations we're in and

life hasn't quite given us the opportunities to flourish as much as we would like we all would like to feel that we're creative and humans as a pretty intelligent species are i think inherently creative just in the sense that we don't have pre-programmed behavioral responses to things like a lizard. They are pretty good at generating novelty. So I'm not saying there isn't like grains of truth there, but it is mainly nice-sounding fluff. Don't you think?

Yeah, it's a casual disparagement of lizards aside uh it's a very flattering uh it is a flattering message we're all artists in our own unique ways we're all capable of artistic expression and even if you haven't you know if you don't think you've got that in you you do it's just not you're being expressed yeah you you might be shit at painting shit at music shit at writing but you you can garden you can garden we can all podcast that's for sure yeah like you say it's not a it's not a negative message by any extent it's like it's a kind of you know but that's the point it's the kind of message that everybody wants to hear that inside you, there's something, you know, that is a little bit special that hasn't been fully given the chance to flower.

And that's just, that's, it's a nice sentiment though. The reality that artistic talent is not completely evenly distributed across the population. I think deserves to be said. You know, we're all special snowflakes. It's true. We're all very special, Chris. Don't tell me I'm not special. There are people that are more creative than other ones.

So, yeah. Well, but the thing is, you're using a restricted definition of creativity, aren't you? That's right. I mean, what you need to do is use an expansive definition, just like trauma can be everything um creativity can be everything too chris everything i'm an artist on twitter my tweets my tweets are shit hot my insulting tweets

that's a form of art that's a form of art that's how you express yourself right don't i'm not gonna have anybody criticize you it's the way that you express. Okay. Okay. That's the way it is. And you're like, this is a little bit of a low blow, but not really, because I think it highlights it. So when your reference that you reach for, when you want to talk about a topic is this

person, it does put you in the self-help genre. The myth of normal. Yeah. this person it does put you in the self-help genre the myth of normal yeah what four words to to sort of pull people in into in some way summarize a 550 odd page book why why those four words why that phrase can i pause for a moment to find a quote on my cell phone 100 yeah yeah so this is um are you familiar with the work of Eckhart Tolle? Oh, Eckhart Tolle, yes. Okay, yeah. So Tolle lives in Vancouver, like I do. And in one of his books, he says,

the normal state of mind of most human beings contains a strong element of what we might call dysfunction, or even madness, you know. So Eckhart Tolle, you know, if he's the person you're reaching to i feel that's only one step up from deepak chopra what's what's the deal with the cartola i don't really know much oh we'll cover him we'll cover him he's a little bit like a more guru version of anthony de mello uh to be honest but yeah oprah went for a mystic that's the way to understand eckhart tolle but alongside that whenever you're talking about you know this kind of thing one thing that's important is authenticity being true to yourself finding your true person so hard to do freaking love this i swear to god podcasters too but listen to this

this is stephen bartlett primarily it will lead us into the topic that's the first step that you say is uh missing missing from the book which is that sort of awareness the next thing which i've been it's been really front of mind in my life recently because i've been asked this a few times on stage and i've been trying to find the words to really um articulate the importance it is, and this is one of your forays in this book about how to heal is authenticity. Really interesting concept because I've been trying to articulate why the fact that I've just shared all this stuff with you and the fact that I do this every week, I'm getting closer and closer to that sort of authentic self where there's really the mask is kind of dropping on me. Why that's been so healing for me why is authenticity such a good way an important way for us to heal i can tell how

authentic a person his host is by those ad reads he did at the beginning there's a door i was the whole time i was listening i was thinking this is an authentic man he's all about that matt matt your sarcasm showing through there but let me highlight a little bit of what he was referencing there i actually think gabor offers some good advice and response to this but this is the kind of personal anecdote sharing that he's talking about okay and so my early memories of like looking at my mom and dad are this kind of violent verbally not like physically this incredibly stressful screaming, one person screaming at the other.

That's what I remember. But from reading what you've written in this book and from what you've said now, I actually might have learned, sort of learned that I was the problem to some degree. Children interpret it that way. That's just the whole point. That's what I mean about kids being narcissists.

I don't mean that in a negative sense. I just mean, actually, they think it's all about them. So if your mother is unhappy, it's your fault. And you're not good enough. So then you have to go out there and work to prove to the world and to yourself that you're good enough. So that, going back to your first question about how these things show up in our lives that's how they show up all right wasn't there something inside there you know children often taking the blame on themselves for parents you know screaming at each other and internalizing that it's something to do with them when it's not and and steven

sharing that experience so isn't that authentic you know trauma work in action uh by authentic do you mean fine uh yeah yeah yeah i mean the way that that that is what they're talking about right like in the way that he presented there was you know maybe he's making some insights into how that experience affected them through this conversation and through reading his book. And he's sharing these personal experiences that you know, that you normally wouldn't, this would be oversharing in most circumstances, but he's talking about it to an audience of, you know, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. So yeah, is that being more authentic? Well, I have to admit, I'm a little bit triggered by the word

authentic. And I'm using the word triggered advisedly, because that's something that happens from trauma. But I mean, it is absolutely a buzzword in modern Western culture. Even my university and other ones have got this thing of like authentic assessment, you know, living your authentic self, like being here in the moment authentically finding your own inner voice it pops up in consumer culture in in advertising in corporate stuff in this kind of clinical self-help type stuff and it's it's related to all of that self-actualization personal growth kind of thing but what it really is is an expression of our cultural values, right? These Western values, right? We all live in a society.

We all have some need to conform, to turn up to work, to not let the inner voice out every moment. But we also have these cultural values of like rampant individualism and this sense that every one of us needs to leave a mark on the world and be special in some way shape or form if not be like a just like a blinding success in the eyes of everyone and if you don't then you're kind of a failure so so everyone has has imbibed this this cultural value of of authenticity being your true self it's incredibly appealing to us. And I suppose I just want to make the point is that not that it's wrong or right. It's just that it's not actually, it's not a fundamental component of human nature or psychology or anything. It's rather just an expression of our cultural milieu. Yeah. And some cultures might even regard it as rather indulgent. might even regard it as rather indulgent.

Some, you know, cultures that may exist in the contemporary world may regard the focus on self-actualization as a somewhat indulgent fixation of the more North American of our societies. But just to highlight your take there, let's hear Gabor talk a little bit about authenticity it's much more than a way for us to heal it's actually who we are like what you're asking really asking is why it is important for a creature to be true to its own nature because that's what we're meant to do we're meant to be here as ourselves you know and and and when

we're not ourselves because we had to abandon ourselves or betray ourselves, disconnect from ourselves in order to survive, we lost connections with our essence. to be a successful CEO and more than realizing your financial dreams, but to be a workaholic and not to be available to yourself in areas of your life that really matter to you, as opposed to being honest about your stuff, sharing with other people, dropping the veil, dropping the...

I mean, to answer your question, what does it feel like? I mean, can you sense the difference in your body? I feel the lighter. Well, yeah. Expansive. Exactly. Well, that's the answer.

Yeah. That's why it's so important. Millionaires talking about the importance of them feeling more expansive and lighter. Like, I get it. They're all humans, right? We all have our hang-ups and whatnot. But at the same time, I just, I do find this thing where you'll have Elon Musk or Jordan Peterson sit down and reflect on their philosophical worldviews and what like it's it's very indulgent like yeah it is extremely indulgent but the other thing too is it's it's

it's very fluffy like those sorts of phrases like connecting with your inner essence because that's what we're here on earth meant to do yeah your natural self like these are pseudo-religious kind of assertions that don't really mean anything except for as i said before like an expression of our of cultural values you know but they're so abstract and vague like it feels good like the the words all have just like jordan pearson they all have these associations which are good but what does it mean i don't really know well there's stephen bartlett runs a bit farther with this and i i just like what he describes as being inauthentic because it's it's a lot of things right so okay here's here's a bit more like what inauthentic lives are like so many of us so many of us um live inauthentic lives because as you said, it's either because from an early age we were escaping some kind of reality in order to help us to survive.

Or then the other thing that happens a bit later on in life is we develop an identity, which becomes a career, which becomes a social circle, which becomes a prison of our inauthentic selves. We get trapped in there, you know, because I was good at something or because I, you know, I felt accepted in this job as a lawyer. So I am now living inauthentically as this robot in this prison. in this prison um and it's a it's a there's often a real perception of risk and loss and danger of trying to get out of that prison of trying to get close to our authentic selves we feel like we'll lose our friendship circle we'll feel like we'll we'll let our parents down who wanted us to become a lawyer you know all of these things i guess you see that a lot in your in your work so you've you've got adopting a persona or developing a thing to fit in with social circles but also developing a career becoming confident in particular areas falling into social roles all of this is kind of alienating you from this true crystalline pure authentic self-realized

self which exists under that unburdened by society expectations are nothing it is the pure you that society has stolen and hidden away this little perfect gem that you must mine out all those people that are holding you back from getting there, you know, cast them aside, Brad. Cast them aside because they don't know the real diamond that it lays. Like it is very self-indulgent. Another way to characterize that is just that you develop your personality

as you go through life. You inhabit social roles. You get more obligations as you go on and the priority in your life cannot always be yourself and your feeling of self-actualization or whatever the way they present it yeah yeah it's a very individualistic approach it is that's exactly exactly right i blame jean-jacques rousseau for all of this he's he's to blame get back to james lindsey james lindsey the french revolution well i'm not sure who to blame feminist post-modernists but it is definitely you know there's this arc of i guess cultural values which you can see all

of this speaking to and like on one hand there's very trivial natural human things like like feeling i don't want to go to work today i've been writing a bloody 150 page report for the new south wales government and it hasn't made me feel very self-actualized i haven't really been expressing my my true authentic self with that but i kind of got to because it's my job and and maybe then that means i shouldn't to quit my job but i have to make money because i have a family to support and all that stuff is that wrong you know like in a trivial sense that we all do things and and live things that are sort of it might not be the thing that gives us the most satisfaction and so that's a natural human feeling i think there's a natural

positive response to this kind of talk because you think yes i sometimes feel dissatisfied too that's that's me people are bastards to me sometimes that's right like am i trying too hard to please people right i've i wanted to tell my my partner my friend my boss whoever what i really think of them and i bottled it up that's probably causing me trauma right now you know but really what what it is is just an expression of this cultural idea that that we i don't know get to do whatever we want basically you know what i mean that there's something missing and that if i was just completely free of all obligations all social pressures and things like that then i could be the better person that i imagine myself to be uh i don't know yeah well there's a little bit

more on authenticity matt just a bit more and then we'll get to the potential yeah yeah you would be you you husk of a human you're inauthentic self just wrapped up in the canadian shell an australian shell inauthenticity has gotten a bad rap i'm all for it like in japan people are extremely inauthentic and i i love that about them and look at the amount of suicide matt look at the amount of suicide they're all depressed it's maybe they're a little bit too inauthentic look there's swings and roundabouts swings and roundabouts although they're actually yeah the suicide rates are like i'll tell you one thing about authenticity because like i said it's it's a funny it's a funny thing like australians i think are probably more authentic in a trivial sense than japanese people as a result

the service in australia is absolutely terrible people are just rude to you and mean to you all the time because they're expressing what they what they really feel i think i told you matt that my northern irish friend who moved to austral Australia temporarily found the lack of authenticity in Sydney very upsetting. So maybe it's Irish who... Maybe you guys are the peak authentic. Well, I don't know. I think the Americans could give you a run for their money, but... No, they're...

Look, who's the true authentic? We can't adjudicate it here, but we can learn about the benefits of being authentic. Yes, there are some costs, Matt, but there are benefits. No, it's true that if you develop the whole set of relationships based on your inauthentic persona, some people in your life may not like it if you gradually move towards authenticity. They may not like it. It's not what they wanted from you. You're going to find out who your friends are. You're really going to find,

because your real friends will say, oh, I'm so happy for you. We were waiting for this. Other friends will say, it's not what I signed up for. You know, the question is, you still have to decide. As an infant, as a young child, I had no agency in the choice of being authenticity and attachment. No, I do. Which one do I want to go with? What is the cost of being an authentic? I can't make that decision for anybody else. Nobody can make that decision for anybody else.

But most people will find that choosing authenticity has benefits way beyond whatever they might lose. That's what I find. On the positive side of this, Matt, if you want to cast it in a positive light, you can be like, maybe you've gotten in with a group of people who are holding you back. They don't have high expectations about, you know, what you can achieve or whatever. And they make fun of you because you want to do something which is a little bit outside the box or something like that, right? And so that could be the positive view of you have to be willing to not let other people's judgment hold you back, right? That's the positive side of it. The other side is, say you're an evolutionary biologist teaching at a lesser known liberal arts college. And you've gained some fame

through various public controversies and whatnot. But a pandemic strikes, and you suddenly realize you have insights about COVID. Your friends are saying, maybe cool it with the anti-vaccine rhetoric. But you find this other group who are willing to recognize your authentic evolutionary insights. Your old friends, they're calling you a conspiracy theorist, but these new people are recognizing you saying, you know, express your truth. Say it like it is. Don't be hemmed in by society. Welcome Brett Weinstein into your authentic self as a conspiracy maniac.

And there you are, right? You've cast aside those friends that were holding you back. You now hanging out with robert malone and rfk jr how does that not fit with this narrative about realizing that others were preventing you from being your best self yeah i think it does apply just as much as somebody who goes and tries a new career where their friend said they didn't think they were going to be able to make it yeah no that's right i mean look i i don't want to give the impression that we're totally cynical and i don't think that there's any scope for people to have personal growth or become more mature what that expressing yourself and thinking about what it is you want out of life and and accomplishing it not jumping around fulfilling the expectations of others like these are all

good things right but it swings and roundabouts at every point. Like you said, listening to the opinions of your friends who maybe have concern about this new angle you've taken, and then they could have good grounds for that concern, or they could just be expecting unreasonable things from you, right? You can't tell it's neither good nor bad. Like it could be the right thing for me to do to quit my job because what really gives me satisfaction is painting and gardening and that's what i want to do it's going to make life difficult for my wife and children but they need to accept me to live my most authentic life i mean like it's not helpful advice to be more authentic or be less authentic or be more accommodating or less accommodating there's no sweeping guidelines you could portray there yeah

well there is in their approach to things right and you know you were asking matt about I think there's no sweeping guidelines you could portray there. Yeah. Well, there is in their approach to things, right? And, you know, you were asking Matt about, what does it even mean to be authentic? And as it turns out, people haven't been authentic for 15,000 years. It's actually a long-term problem. It's a big problem. We have circuits in our brain dedicated to the attachment relationships and that's so important all through our lives but especially when we're infants and young children

now but we have another need we've already talked about it i just haven't named it the other need is for authenticity we just to be ourselves connected to our bodies and our gut feelings because again without access to our gut feelings, we don't survive out there in nature, where we evolved and where we lived until 15,000 years ago. And so that authenticity is very important, to be connected to yourself, so that you know when you're safe and when you're not.

You know what you want and what you don't want. You know how to say no when you don't want something. You know how to say yes when you're safe and when you're not. You know what you want and what you don't want. You know how to say no when you don't want something. You know how to say yes when you do. That's authenticity, auto the self, being ourselves. I'm sorry to mention this again, but it really does remind me of why I hate the romanticism of that stream of thought that started with Rousseau, with this back to nature.

Society is this sort of constricting corrupting influence and we need to like peel back the onion skin and find you know the true id in there which is our real self and only that way we can flourish it is just oh so it's not a it's not a helpful frame of mind but it sounds so good i know because you know we all naturally do feel irritation frustration we all feel like there are burdens we have to be polite to people we have to satisfy other people's explanations to some degree or another because we're social animals right i just want to make the point like there's also all these books about how we're cultural animals where you know we're ritual creatures

we live in these highly cooperative non-kin based societies that is natural for our species because that's the kind of species we are that's where we track so many social relationships but it's always presented that like contemporary basically civilization is not what we were supposed to do and it's this teleological not even civilization like any anytime people were living in groups like i'm thinking of a hunter-gatherer tribe they would have had huge amounts of expectations huge amounts of roles and things even like even like much more than contemporary australian or american culture right um depends on the society but yes probablyends on the society, but yes. Probably depends on the society, depends on who you were in that society, all those sorts of things.

Exactly. Yeah, that's the one, who you were. I'm just amping up your point, though, that it is entirely natural for humans being social primates who have created culture as well to basically create these, you know know interlocking interwebs of mutual responsibility and obligations and we're not wolves well i'm a bit of a wolf you might be a chattering monkey chris but i'd like to think of myself as a creative wolf i'm uh yeah i'm a social primate that just wants to groom everyone around me and i pick the fleas you could pick fleas off me any any day of the week actually wolves were that was a terrible example wolves are very social they're often used as the lone wolf example so it's fine but just don't highlight it but

but you know maybe my our objection to this is actually because of our colonialist intuitions because we're so for colonialism. You know, me, as an Northern Irish person, very, very in favor of colonial endeavors. So that might be why I have an objection. And if you can't quite see the logic, listen. So authenticity is not just a new age concept. It's actually a central dynamic in staying healthy human beings.

Oh, one more thing. So yesterday I was in Westminster Abbey and I was looking at all these beautifully and articulately worded monuments to all these colonialists, to all the people that oppressed and murdered and robbed and despoiled native people all over the world. They're the heroes of the British Empire.

And I think one of the reasons there's such a strong pushback against the idea of trauma in this society is if you recognize trauma, which exists not only on the personal individual level, but very much on the collective level, the ruling elites in this country would have to come to terms with the fact that their wealth is based on the traumatization of foreign peoples, which incidentally was one of the crimes of Harry, is that he pointed that out. Let's face it, the royalty, the wealth that I was born into, was achieved at the despoilation and oppression of people around the world. So trauma is not just a personal issue.

It's very much a social and collective and historical issue. So I agree with his concerns about the British Empire, but I feel that's a very self-serving pyramid, historical issue so i agree with his concerns about the british empire but however i i feel that's a rather self-serving for me that like if you don't think that my approach to emphasizing that everything is trauma and trauma is the the thing that we should all be focusing on it's possibly because you're pro-colonialism yeah yep yep i look i'm just gonna leave it i didn't leave it there leave it hanging uh well yeah that does that so you know well okay look i'm gonna get to what i consider possibly the worst aspect of this map because it relates to what trauma and feeling to process trauma causes.

But just before I get to that, just to put a little cap on it, the flip side about romanticizing traditional society or romanticized the state of nature, us running around the forests and being at one with our authentic social primate self, is that you must present the modern world as toxic and damaging and not aligned with the true spirit of humanity. So just a few examples of this. So in medical parlance, normal means healthy and natural. So there's a normal range of blood pressure, normal temperature.

It's a range. Outside that range, there's no life, there's no health. Either too high or too low, you're gone. So normal means it's equivalent with, synonymous with healthy and natural. However, we make that same assumption that out in society what we're used to, what we call normal, is also healthy and natural, which is a myth. Because I'm saying that in this society, what we consider to be normal is neither healthy nor natural in fact it's hurtful to us so that using the word normal in a way that doesn't apply in the narrow medical sense it's accurate but in the broader sense that which we're used to in this society we consider

normal it's just not good for us you know and norm is kind of a statistic or it's a kind of a um average so if everybody you have a dog if everybody in london mistreated their dogs and if you didn't then you'd be abnormal you know so it's a myth to say that what is normal is healthy and natural that's what I mean by the myth of normal. So his point there is that, okay, natural and normal to some degree means healthy and good because, yeah, you know, like blood pressure or temperature and stuff like that. Yeah, you will die. Okay, that's good. So his thesis in that book and elsewhere is that that doesn't apply to many things connected with normality in the modern world, because the modern world itself is abnormal, is sick or corrupt in some way. Is that right? Yeah, but he layers on top of it the same thing that Dr. K did, where he also adds in the confusion about the average.

Because he says, you know, like if you lived in a society where kicking dogs was the dominant thing and you were the average person, then you would be kicking a dog. So like, yes, he is highlighting that our norms are pathological and that you know like if you grew up in a nazi society and you were a normal member of nazi society would not make you a monster right but but also this kind of notion that like the average mean is kind of a goal or something but it's that ends up with just like a completion of the word normal or average or yeah typical yeah like the typical person is not i don't know a millionaire but does that mean that we think being a millionaire is not good um like i mean the the thing that i got from it chris is once again i'm sorry, but this is, again, the stupid part of romanticism to a T.

Seeing the modern world as corrupt, idealising some imagined alternative natural situation is the thing we need to... Yeah, authentic. It's the authentic way that people should be living in authentically. And, you know, modern society and the expectations being artificial and constraining and the idealization of this sort of like just being this sort of free-floating

totally expressive i think of some more buzzwords and set them there um and you know this is so popular in modern health and wellness complementary and alternative medicine is sort of it's it's infused into all of it and and melded with some fuzzy notions of eastern spirituality and stuff as well and it's just i don't know i just think it's pretty empty you know it is appealing because we're always dissatisfied with the state of things as they are right that's just kind of human nature if things got twice as good tomorrow within a few days we'd start feeling dissatisfied with the state of things as they are right that's just kind of human nature if things got twice as good tomorrow within a few days we'd start feeling dissatisfied yeah i don't think it's very helpful well maybe he doesn't have that much of a negative view though maybe we're overstating

it do you think society is getting more toxic and if so why what measure shall we use you know if we use the measure of a number of kids being medicated, the number of adults having chronic illness, autoimmune disease, the number of students, university students being depressed, contemplating suicide, the number of children in the United States killing themselves, the number of people on medications of all kinds the degree of safety that people have in society

the rancor or peace that characterizes political discourse in this world the intolerable fact that eight people in the world I think own as much as the bottom half as the bottom 3.5 billion. You know, if I look at all those things, by those measures, if you look at what's happening to the environment, if I look at the fact that the people who are the worst polluters in the environment also happen to be the most successful people,

by a certain measure of success. By any number of parameters, if I look at how racism still affects the lives of so many people, and not just affects it in an emotional sense, but actually physiologically, then yeah's this is a toxic society and those measures are getting worse they're not getting better and inequality is getting worse here in the uk and elsewhere so yeah i think it's getting more toxic things have never been worse chris never been worse i can't think of any other places in the world or times in human history where people have had worse than modern people living in the west today it's the flip side of like douglas murray and jordan peterson's triumphalism of like you know the society is just perfect and getting better like i feel the person

that was accurate about this is kind of hans rosling types the ones which are talking that things are getting better but yes there are you know that that doesn't mean that everything is good it's great yeah yeah yeah the environment is a problem etc i'm yeah we should get we should get him and steven pinker together and get them to touch fingers see what happens i think that exploded a matter antimatter reaction but then you know it is it just highlights that that's the worldview the the modern world is is toxic things are getting worse people are slipping into depression they're all over medicated that's right this is the point i want to make is that these are not statements about reality these are not statements of fact. Whether it's the triumphalism of Charles Murray or whoever, or the complacency, some would argue, of Stephen Pinker, or this kind of, you know, everything.

Malingering. This kind of attitude, which is a very popular one. I mean, what they really are, are an expression of your values, right? It's an expression of your values right it's an expression of your your own personal values and just like it's it's fine to express your values but i just don't i think don't conflate it with statements about reality like it doesn't make sense to talk about the world today being toxic culture being toxic society being toxic if there has never been in any time in human history uh a society that's been like less toxic like you know like if this is the pentacle yeah like like if well if all human societies are toxic like i'm sure if push came to shove

he wouldn't say oh no in whatever stalin's russia things were better or in napoleonic france things were better egyptian egyptian egyptian were better. Or in Napoleonic France, things were better. Egypt. Egyptian. Egyptian were better. That's right. Go back as far as you like. I think it would be hard to back the argument that it was a much more authentic, self-actualizing, personal freedom, flourishing type situation for the majority of people. Were the Mongols living authentic lives when they had the you know running around

the horse waving a saber shooting arrows from yours i mean i feel maybe that was authentic for them i wonder like whenever kublai khan took over you know the mongol empire from his father and actually they ended up you know expanding um and there were various other sons and family members in different parts of the mongol empire but there were concerns that he had become too sinicized because of the influence of chinese culture right so that yes he was mongol but not an authentic mongol so you know kublai khan even he wasn't living uh his authentic step lifestyle not authentic enough yeah so i mean just my point is is not that everything's great now but it's just that if you want to describe the state of affairs whether it's for mongols or egyptians

or contemporary americans it's a relative statement right relative to other situations either cross-culturally in other parts of the world or historically to other times and places. It doesn't make any sense to describe it as toxic or unhealthy or broken with respect to some idealized, imagined nirvana, which hasn't existed or doesn't exist. nirvana which hasn't existed it doesn't exist yes well now matt let me turn to the topic that i've been saving why i think this goes into the realm of pure toxicity in a way this relates to what unprocessed trauma is supposed to be able to manifest and be responsible for, right? So let's get started because there's quite a few clips here to get through. Just to be clear, Chris, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but when we talk about unprocessed trauma, we've already discussed trauma. Trauma can be a lot of things and probably most of us have it. And when we talk about unprocessed trauma, we're talking about trauma that hasn't been treated

either via consultation with a therapist. It's repressed. It hasn't been acknowledged that it exists. You have not processed the experiences that you had as a young person that have left wounds on you. Right. You haven't processed it. You haven't sort of recognized it and brought it into it into full holistic manner in a freudian way right okay all right but i presume

you need to read a book or get some therapy or someone to help you maybe you could do it on your own i believe there is a a system which since you asked it would involve something like this it's one of the seven a's of your of healing as you say the first being the topic a topic we've talked about already which is acceptance yeah um the next being awareness well awareness i wish we had put into this book but we didn't not into this book uh in this book i put four a's and uh i left out awareness and that was an omission on my part really yeah it was i'm sorry but it was so in the book you have authenticity anger acceptance and agency yeah and acceptance yeah so awareness you've said before before this

book that awareness is the starting point yeah i found that to be so true in my life but it's not very easy i feel like awareness is a is a luxury or a privilege that is very hard fought yeah because you're guessing yeah you're guessing based on pattern recognition so there are seven a's of healing perhaps four in this book but these are part of it but but before you respond there are also the five R's that you should consider. It's interesting in your work, throughout your work, you use alliteration a lot as a way to kind of summarize and make ideas really memorable.

It really helps. It's an old trick. It's a trick. It's a writing trick, right? Well, it also works, you know, before A's or... Before R's. I don you know before waves or before i don't i don't want to say you know i'm i'm denigrating my work if i say it's a trick no it's just something just the way things occur to me that's all it is one of the one of the um alliteration devices you use is also relates to limiting beliefs and how we can undo

self-limiting beliefs with the five r's yeah relabel reattribute refocus re re value and recreate yeah re is getting a lot of doing a lot of work is that kind of cheating with the alliteration if you if you make them all or if a prefix or yeah it's that prefix or post-present it's a prefix right yeah so yeah that's that's a very common thing in self-help world right like the the four whatever's of emotional regulation or yeah yeah the four stages of healing the the sevenfold path chris or whatever it was i don't know um yeah like but it is but it is buzzwordy right i think that's that's that's the comment i mean like they're all nice sounding

words but you know this is something academics are just as guilty of yes i will say they like to do this like the five hours of female extremism and so on and and also they like to make acronyms that spell out words yeah like weird western educated industrialized rich democratic yeah i know in fact my colleague did that i forget i even forget what the acronym was but it's spelled drastic or something like that yeah that's it so it does work because you you know, when it hits, it manages to get your thing very memorized, the byte model of cultish control or whatever. Overreading the byte model. Yeah, but this just reminds me, before I get to the thing that I've set up, I'm worried about, there was something which just like caused me my own process trauma. I flashback a few years ago to listening

to jamie wheel and jordan hall i was i was again in front of a computer hearing people sense me at me with extended metaphors and yeah just let's see if it produces the same trauma response in you when you hear this it reminds me of an analogy i've been talking about in the last couple of episodes of this podcast of the distinction between being driven and being dragged. Yeah. It's like, which side of the lorry am I flying down the motorway? Am I tied to the front and am I running and pulling the lorry? Or am I just like my ankles attached to the back of the lorry as it flies down the motorway because I'm being dragged?

But if I may, I would say that neither of those are particularly desirable. But if I may, I would say that neither of those are particularly desirable. But it's the distinction that I made before between being driven and being called. Yeah. Because if you're called, you see, if I call you, say, Stephen, would you come and have dinner with me? You can say yes, you can say no. I just gave you a call and you could say, literally, I'm talking about a call, a telephone call. You know, you can say yes, you can say no. It's a it's a decision though but you're the ones making the decision yeah when you're

dragged or pushed or pulled you're not making the decision i'm a slave to the decision yeah that's right autonomy chris is so important i've often said so autonomy it's it's um yeah just saying that metaphor took a freaking route i felt i was dragged along behind it like they're dragged or they dragged or driven they're on the lorry but there's a call and a call like a telephone call so and that call is a call that you choose the answer not like being driven and you're like oh my god and then like you know it's just people have a lot of fun when they're doing this but i think this is a type of person that really enjoys this kind of yes sounding metaphorical insights it's i know that people enjoy that i just find it excruciating because i'm like

what are you actually you're just saying something very trite in a dressed up metaphor. But like, it's so trite. That's the bit that gets to me. It doesn't need this many words. And you're also just playing on the word call. So like telephone call. Yeah. I mean, like, there's always a version of it that is makes sense.

I mean, like there's always a version of it that makes sense. Like, you know, there's concepts in psychology of, you know, you can be attracted to a behavior can be rewarding because it's a relief from negative affect, right? Or it could be rewarding because it's giving you, you know, a positive pleasure. So you could say that that distinction they're making there between are you being sort of dragged towards something or pulling the thing or called, I forget how the analogy works.

But there's a, you know, if you work hard, you can find a reasonable way to put it. But the way they put it is usually dressing it up and connecting it to a lot of pretty vague and fluffy things. I mean, just be specific and get your terms straight and don't dress it up. That's what I'd prefer. Yes. Well, so analogies.

They have their uses. They also have their limitations. I just feel some people perhaps don't recognize the limitations as much as they should, but that would be, you know, that's a minor complaint, really, Matt. People like analogies. Some people like metaphorical language. Some people are abstract painters. You know, whatever.

Whatever floats your boat. But when it comes to this, I think there's less room for positive interpretations. Again, my view is, as I pointed in this book and in previous works, who gets sick and who doesn't isn't exactly accidental. There are certainly personality patterns based on traumatic experiences in childhood

that make disease more likely. And people very often realize that throughout their lives, they had abandoned who they were. They lived a life that wasn't meaningful for them. Just to say that, again, this is this valorizing of autonomy and control and individualism, right? That you have control over whether or not you get sick. You get sick.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And this is where the sort of touchy-feely progressive, like liberal types, hand in hand with the Joe Rogans of this world. Because the common denominator is this sort of romantic, naturalistic sort of version of health, where you get to control everything, right? By having the strength of character, and by doing the right things, you will have complete control and autonomy and power over sickness. And the dark side of it is that when people are not healthy,

when they do get sick, whether it could be from COVID even, right, it's because they haven't been doing the right alternative health practices yeah so one thing that you have to do when you're going to go down this route is that you have to explain that the medical profession and medical model is unfit for purpose you know we've already saw they don't get any training about trauma they don't recognize the connection there to any illness so yeah so let's just hear a little bit about that as it relates to treatments how do you think that the medical profession and the psychological profession would respond differently if we removed this idea that there is a normal how would how would our approaches change to treating people?

Well, that's... It's a multi-layered answer. First of all, we would recognize that our diagnoses are not explanations for anything. So, you know, I've been diagnosed with ADD, you know, legitimately so. My first book was on it. But it doesn't explain anything.

So I tune out easily, very easily, you know, and sometimes when I don't, often when I don't want to, but, you know, unless I'm highly motivated. So you might say this person has ADD. How do we know? Because he tunes out a lot. Why does he tune a lot? He's got ADD. How do we know he's got ADD? Because he tunes out a lot. So first of all, we have to understand that our understanding of normal and what's outside the normal, that doesn't explain anything. They can describe, if you describe my mental

functioning as that of somebody who's got an automatic tendency to tune out you'd be accurate so the description it's helpful as an explanation as to why this person isn't behaving quote unquote normally it's doesn't explain a thing okay So it's just the medical profession is just about describing things. They're not about the actual cause of things. That's not something that modern medicine is concerned about. They only concern with identifying symptoms and then matching it to a pathology in the textbook. And then that's it. That's all modern medicine as a bike.

But I guess there's a very superficial sense in which it's true, right? Like you might be diagnosed with heart inflammation and that diagnosis is kind of what the doctor at the hospital often cares about because they're looking to treat it. It may or may not give you some guidance about what was the underlying cause of it? Oh, absolutely not. But the corollary there is modern medicine isn't interested in what the risk factors for heart disease are, what the causal linkages are there, whether genetic factors apply,

whether lifestyle factors apply. Is that the case? No, that's not the case. That nobody has been particularly interested in what causes ADD, right? The way that he presents it is no, you know, by just simply identifying that set of symptoms and giving it a name, we don't determine everything about it yes true but there actually is a thing whenever you have identified you know like a kind of categorical illness or cluster that you can then set apart investigating like the ontology or you know the causal relationships and whatnot well let me put it this way like like medical science yeah research in medicine is absolutely very very concerned about what what causes disease right absolutely but it can sometimes be the case

that a a treating physician who is busy and has lots of people to treat and we don't have infinite resources for each patient might go okay i can diagnose this person with a particular kind of schizophrenia. That gives me some guidance as to how I can treat this person, right? Now, there's heaps of research on schizophrenia and the causes of it. But for this particular person, what may matter most is actually the diagnosis and the treatment, not whether it was some combination of genetic or environmental or whatever factors that that kind of thing can often be unknowable for the individual person so it is very much shades of dr k right this oh yeah this straw man version of conventional medicine which doesn't care about

any of the interesting facets that make you you that just wants to put you in a box treat some symptoms and doesn't really care about the underlying causes right and part of that is that you there's often a disparagement about the kind of way that mental illness is approached in the modern medical profession right and there are there's plenty of things that you can critique here but just listen to the way that that's presented here why do you say so-called um well look the disease model is as long as we understand it's a model it's okay when we think it's it describes reality fully it it doesn't. So, for example, we talk about mental illnesses. And we're assuming that there's a kind of definite pathology there, just as in rheumatoid arthritis you can describe the inflammation of the joints

and the blood levels of certain antibodies being abnormal and hormonal levels being disturbed, you know, we're making the same assumption in mental illness. There's no such evidence in mental illness. There's no physiological parameters that you can say somebody's got mental illness. There's just been a study a few months ago of thousands of brain scans of people with mental illness diagnosis. There's nothing diagnostic about the brain scans. It's not like I can take an x-ray of a lung and say that this lung has got what we call consolidation or fluid indicating inflammation.

what we call consolidation or fluid indicating inflammation. There's nothing like that in mental diagnoses. There's no blood test you can do and so on. So illness is a model. I mean, it might, somebody's really depressed, even suicidal perhaps, and they might need pharmacological intervention, which would really save their lives, that may be true. And in that sense, you may say that they're ill, as long as we realize that this is a construct that we're applying here, but that there's no actual measurement of that.

I might disappoint you here, Chris, because I think I agreed with all of that. You do disappoint me, Matt matt because that is fairly standard anti-psychiatry style rhetoric there's plenty of illnesses including physical illnesses which are not defined by a very specific presence of something like those types of migraine headaches right that are expressed differently so this is presenting it as like the only thing which is a real illness is like a genetic defect that you can do a scan and you can show it it's there well i think what we're getting at is you're thinking about where that line of thinking leads and like in in very simple terms not thinking about any of the implications or what someone might do with that, in basic terms,

it's completely true, right? Someone can be diagnosed with having a behavioral addiction to something like gambling, and it is a somewhat arbitrary categorization based on the constellation of behavioral indicators and self-report and all kinds of things like that, right? There isn't like a blood test you do for it. And it is an abstraction, right? It is like to categorize somebody as being mentally ill

by being, say, addicted to gambling. That is a convenient categorical abstraction we apply. But this shouldn't be taken to invalidate the utility or necessity of those sorts of categorizations. What about severe schizophrenia what about it so you said addiction it's a fuzzy category people can be fitted into it and you know so there are issues around oh yeah i look no i totally agree with you it's it's true not just of like the softer if you like um things like a behavioral addiction but it would be true of acute schizophrenia it'd be true of a lot of physical ailments like like you said before

right like medical diagnoses of all kinds uh are not necessarily i don't know grounded in a in a single observable 100 reliable black white sort of. Right. But so this rhetoric is very familiar to me in that what will usually be referenced is things like addiction or ADHD or ones where there is some debates about the relative fluidity of diagnosis and over-diagnosis issues. What it's not typically referred to is when people are talking about severe mental illnesses, which often lack the ability that you cannot do a blood test or do an x-ray and show on the chart where is the severe schizophrenia in this x-ray. You can't show it, but does that mean it is not an illness? But in that recording, in the clip that you just played,

he didn't say that you shouldn't regard something like that as a real illness. Is there some further recording you would like to play in which he goes down that path? Well, let me play some more and see. Maybe people will agree with you or agree with me. But he does extend this just first of all. You might take that as to be being applied to mental illnesses, right?

But not normal illnesses, but not true. But even in physical disease, we make certain assumptions. For example, somebody has rheumatoid arthritis. Now, nothing wrong with that statement on the face of it, but there's an assumption there. The assumption is that there's this thing called rheumatoid arthritis. And there's this person called me. And this person has this thing. Now, you know, the example I often give, here's my cell phone, I'm holding it in my hand. I have a cell phone. It's not part of me. It says nothing about me. It just, it's a discrete object. Its nature doesn't depend on my nature. Nothing. Is that true about rheumatoid arthritis? Or is it more true to say, as I found out, that this is a condition that shows up in people with certain

life experiences and certain ways of functioning in the world and that because of the science documented unity of mind and body and the impossibility of separating the activity or emotional apparatus from serum immune system because it's all one organismic unit therefore the when the immune system turns against the body as it does in rheumatoid arthritis the immune system actually attacks the body is that a thing that's got a life of its own or is there a process that's happening inside that person because of certain aspects of their lives oh that's that is some very obfuscatory warble, I have to say, Chris. I mean, like, it's very hard to figure out what he's implying there. Like, I know that you're reacting against the implication, right? It's the implication. It's the implication. I guess I'm

reacting to the sort of trivial and mundane interpretation, which is like, of course, right? So you could say something like like chronic liver disease right that arose in exactly the same language that he used right as a complex interplay of all your emotions and your behaviors and your lifestyle inside your body it's not like a phone yeah that's right it's not like it's not a phone that's right i mean so so what you know what i mean it's like medical conditions like having a chronic liver disease or any of them are just technically speaking an abstraction, right, a category.

We say, okay, you've got it or you don't. But that's just a convenience and it's just a trivial thing and sort of philosophizing about it is meaningless to me. Perhaps you're missing the implication. So let it be spelled out. Now, if I say it's the thing that happens to you, then that thing has got a life of its own. And that's how most doctors see it. They see some of your rheumatoid arthritis, they say, okay, this is the kind you've got. This is what's going to happen. This is the only thing we can do is to mitigate the symptoms.

I find that's not true. I find that the rheumatoid arthritis, by the way, not just I find it, the science finds it, that the rheumatoid arthritis is very much related to stress and trauma. And the more stress there is, the more likely it is to flare up. And if people deal with that stress, if they know how to prevent it, their illness abates, which means that it's not a thing that's separate. It's a process that happens inside them this is a subtle concept i'm wondering if i'm explaining it clearly no you are and it's

it's really making me question how much we misunderstand the relationship between the mind and the immune system yeah because that's the real that's the important connection to understand if you if you are to accept all the things you've just said, which we don't understand. I don't think typically we understand that my mind and my immune system have such a close relationship. See, there's a segue there, Chris, right? So it starts off with making this straw man version of conventional medicine, right? Which is it doesn't care about the causes or treating the underlying disease all it cares about is kind of making the symptoms go away well

first of all that's not true right if you get diagnosed with a chronic liver disease they will ask you about how much do you drink and if you drink more than whatever they will tell you to stop right that's that's got to do with the ideology of it right the causes right so i'm sure it's true of every other disease out there then they segue to well the alternative way to do it that gabamate does is looking at the fundamental interconnectedness of all things and things being a process and then happening inside you. And it's not a distinct object that is somehow separate from you. And like, this is all meaningless warble, right? Like that is. No, no, it's not.

I think this is the same thing with Dr. K. It's not meaningless warble. It's his alternative system, which is that these diseases so-called diseases are really the kind of natural consequence of the body dealing with stress and trauma that causes it to manifest dealing with you not living your inauthentic life in the inauthentic society that we've created for ourselves. Yeah, yeah. And if you think that is me reaching, okay, allow me to illustrate this rather clearly. Things like rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, inflammatory diseases of the gut, and so on.

Why? So those diseases tend to happen to people, not just according to my own observation, although it's very much my own observation. When I was working in family practice and palliative care, before I did addiction medicine, I noticed that who got sick and who didn't wasn't accidental.

That's the subject of my book, When the Body Says No. And then again, in the myth of normal, people tended to be compulsively concerned with the emotional needs of others rather than their own, identified with duty, role, and responsibility, so their work in the world

rather than their own true selves, they tended to suppress healthy anger. So they tended to be very, very nice and peacemakers. And they tended to believe that they're responsible for how the people feel and that they must never disappoint anybody. Two fatal beliefs. So these are the people that are going to my observation but according to a whole lot of research as well that i didn't even know about

but have since found an elegant research these are the people that tend to develop autoimmune disease now in this society which gender is more acculturated programmed to suppress their healthy anger to be the peacemakers to be the caregivers women there's so much so much to unpack there but first of all i was i was kind of joking but i was right wasn't i it is actually not living your authentic self and uh that is that is responsible no i was agreeing i was genuinely agreeing that is it i'd actually forgotten this little segment when i listened to this. Okay.

There's a trivial sense in which this is true, right? Not specifically what he said, but just that there are heaps of lifestyle, environmental, and social factors that are risk factors for stuff like developing addictions and many other health and psychiatric issues. But the way he spins that is well one emphasizing them to the exclusion of all other causes and two specifically he he sees lack of authenticity in being a people pleaser as being the fundamental driving thing behind a lot of physical ailments so for me the first takeaway chris is that one you you're golden

you're fucking bulletproof because no one's called you a people pleaser now i'll i'll leave you i'll leave you out of it but i I looked into it, I'm sure you did too, about this higher prevalence of autoimmune diseases in women compared to men. Yeah. Because I thought that would be interesting, wouldn't it? First of all, it is surprising that he's right that about 80% of all people with autoimmune diseases are women.

So that's interesting. But as to the causes, well, it turns out the causes are pretty well understood, right? There's a range of genetic factors and hormonal factors and and perhaps some degree of environmental factors like this is probably a very much a tertiary impact in terms of like maybe being more exposed to cosmetic products and things like that but also women tend to have stronger immune responses compared to men so there are a lot of interesting sex differences which have been looked into so but but he doesn't look at any of that no no modern modern medicine isn't

really interested in like what causes oh i forgot yes they're just like we don't care why women get autoimmune they've got the box. They've got some symptoms. How can we make these symptoms go away? That's what we need to do. Yeah. Yeah. Steroids. Steroids is the answer.

But also, Matt, just to highlight how strongly this goes. So we mentioned women. And I think, again, this clicks into that progressive kind of rhetoric where this is about the suffering of women which has gone on the globe so if you're questioning this are you saying that women are not like forced to repress how they feel and i'm saying that harms them yeah exactly i think that's that's worth a note because like you know when he gets rhetorical he does lean into these progressive tropes. And the right wing gurus that we cover do the same thing, right? They make some highly dubious statements, but they link it to the hot button political convictions of their audience. And what happens, of course, is that your brain

switches off. Oh, he mentioned colonialism. He mentioned the plight of women. Well, I'm on board with this, right? So you accept the other claims more uncritically, I think, including the complete nonsense about these causes for autoimmune diseases. And Dr. K did this with Dr. Mike, right? When he brought up the, like, maybe you're being like kind of Western chauvinist towards Indian culture. Right. And that worked. That worked. And just to point out that how far he is going with this. So listen carefully to the claim here, Matt.

And what tends to happen is, is that men, then women at some point get to the, if they're healthy enough, if they're not strong enough to assert themselves, you know what happens? They get sick. And I know this is a mouthful, but a lot of women's cancers and autoimmune diseases are precisely because of this self-repression. And I could talk about that at great length, the physiology of it. But either the body will somehow say no for them. of it, but either the body will somehow say no for them. So women's cancer, women who get cancer are often manifesting cancer because they're unwilling to express their true feelings. And

this is like kind of bubbling up like a toxic physiological symptom of their mental repression. I find that so distasteful because it's presented as empowering. You know, women should be told that they're able to stand up for themselves and say what they think, but it is victim believing. It's saying you got cancer. It's likely that you haven't manifested your authentic self. Otherwise, you know, your body would be dealing with this, it would be processing it. And it's never stated so categorically, but it is like he said there, women's cancers and autoimmune diseases are precisely because of this self repression. And it qualify if you ask them about it, but the message like that's, that is not empowering.

It's the flip side of Gwyneth Paltrow saying the universe only sends what you can grow from as a challenge. And you're like, so the people that are sexually abused as children, that was to help them grow. Yeah. Yeah. The implications are often distasteful. I mean, but of course the most objectionable part objectionable part about it is that it's it's nonsense it's blatantly untrue like the causes of cancer generally are pretty well understood like men overall get cancer at a higher rate than women so

explain that using his theory that lack of self-actualization and autonomy is the principal cause it well matt look we read immune we're pretty much experts on the immune system but uh gabber mate had some things to say about the immune system so maybe this will answer some of the questions so the immune system is like it's been called a floating brain it is a memory it is reactive capacity and um it um allows in nutrients and vitamins and healthy bacteria and keeps out and destroys what isn't toxins and unhealthy invading organisms and so on. In other words, the immune system and the emotional system have exactly the same role.

That's the first point. The second point is they're not separate systems. Physiologically speaking, emotional system, the nervous system, hormonal apparatus and the immune system are all one system. And there's a whole new science, when I say new, 60, 70, 80 years old called psycho and neuroimmunology that studies the unity.

So it's not even that all these things are connected. They're one. So therefore, when you're suppressing one aspect of it, you're also suppressing the other. So people that repress healthy anger, they have diminished immune activity. And this has been demonstrated. So the repression of emotions has a physiological function. And when you repress your immune system, you're more likely to have that immune system turn against you or

to fail you when it comes to malignancy. The immune system, like you and I have cancer cells in our bodies probably every day because nature makes mistakes. That's not a problem. The immune system recognizes them as cancer cells don't have on their surfaces markers that our normal cells do. So the immune system says, this is a foreigner. It's an enemy.

I'm going to destroy it. But when you repress your emotions you can also undermine your immune system and now your immune system will not recognize the malignancy and not destroy it and allows it to to proliferate two points chris um firstly this is all codswallop absolute nonsense the the second point is it's very reminiscent of the the other kind of brain body connection that new age people love which is the gut biome of course and there is this like you and i having read immune and now become expert immunologists have a healthy appreciation for the complexity of the immune system. It's absolutely fascinating. But what they like to do is to imply that there is cognition going on elsewhere in the

body. And they like to do this to really ramp up the interconnectedness of the brain and the body to make these really quite crazy statements. And, you know this it's a totally illegitimate parallel like it's true kind of some of the details you said about the immune system but that parallel between what the immune system is doing is is you have to let the immune system be free a suppressed immune system is not going to work it's got to be free to to sort of do things and if you suppress your your childhood trauma or your emotions or something then that's got to be free to sort of do things. And if you suppress your childhood trauma or your emotions or something,

then that's going to suppress your immune system. Like that's just a, that should be an obviously false analogy that rests on the most superficial similarities between these two systems. If you want to be the charitable interpretation of it, right, which has some validity to it and the kind of field he referenced, forget the name of it, neuroimmunology, whatever the start of it is. But there is a connection between like if you had chronic depression or, you know, like that you were somebody who was dealing every single day with high stress, that this will

have an impact on you because, you know, having strong emotions and dealing with stress hormones and whatnot, they're all taking part of the bodies, right? It's all connected, but it's not all the exact same thing. Like this is the issue with his definitions, expanding. And essentially by his definition, everything that is happening in the body is one thing. It is all the same system because it's all occurring in like a biological unit, which is connected, right? But there is a reason that we, yes, like, you know, if your immune system goes down,

it's a problem for other parts of your body as well. But it is also correct that there are distinctions between different systems in the body and like they're working together but yeah like look i think it's a perennial truth of all our gurus like there's always a grain of truth and they always take it way way too far and make it out to be the one primary thing that's responsible for everything i mean there is a sympathetic the nervous system a parasympathetic nervous system the brain the body is obviously connected and yes there is a collection of diseases where even like psychological things like stress stress anxiety and depression can be a principal risk factor for that's the reasonable version of it um but where they take it as to

cancer and things like that it's yeah yeah and i will also say i forgot to mention at the time but stephen bartlett's response where he responds saying this changes potentially everything we know about like this conversation that is the exact same same as Brett Weinstein saying, it's incredible that you could even suggest this. Like if your entire understanding of the relationship between mind and the immune system is being transformed by a conversation on a podcast, you're in trouble. You're in trouble. You have not got a firm basis in this.

And they're just, you know And they're saying that always. But I think that instills on the people listening that there's something fundamentally important and deep being said, as opposed to undercutting it by saying, for example, well, asking critical questions. Yeah, asking skeptical questions or what about this or whatever,

which is not hard. The sort of stuff that we're talking about, like is childhood trauma really the principal risk factor for cancer? I mean, you don't have to be an oncologist to feel some healthy skepticism about those claims, yet interviewers like this never do. I mean, these are claims on a par of Jordan Peterson saying that hospitals kill more people than they save,

and the interviewer goes, wow, amazing that you, you know, you've blown my mind. Oh, no, maybe it's not that bad. It's not like they would make some connection to like lung cancer, for example, you know, something like that and repression of trauma. There's a British thoracic surgeon called David Kisson in the 1960s who noticed what I noticed in my practice, that people emotionally repressed are more likely to get lung cancer. Most people who get lung cancers are smokers. But out of 100 smokers, only about 10 or 15 get lung cancer. Which doesn't mean that smoking isn't the major contributor to lung cancer.

It is. But he found that it was those of his patients that were emotionally repressed that were likely to get the lung cancer as a result of the smoking. And the more repressed they were were the less smoking they had to do in order to get lung cancer this is this guy noticed this in the 1960s so emotional repression has huge implications physiologically and emotional repression is one of the uh impacts of childhood trauma okay childhood trauma he's not saying it's the main cause. Like, of course, there is a relationship between lung cancer and smoking, but, you know, only about 10 or 15 smokers out of 100 get lung cancer. Which ones?

Yeah. They're all repressed, aren't they? Is that, did you, like, I know you can't do background checking on every single claim these people make, but did you happen to check that one, Chris? I didn't check that one. I was worn out of fact checking this, but I'll state now that my confidence on this is going to be low. Let's leave that as an exercise for listeners. I mean, check it out.

You know, maybe he's right and we're wrong. Maybe we're being overly skeptical. Maybe emotional repression and childhood trauma really is an important determinant of which smokers get lung cancer. Tell us the evidence. Yeah. And, you know, so we might be being unfair about the level of science, scientific rigor that has been applied here. Maybe he is just being, you know, appropriately skeptical and he's not just using alternative medicine rhetoric where they, you know, characterize a field of study or an approach

to denigrate it. The fact is that many more children are being diagnosed and medicated for this condition, particularly in the US, but also increasingly here in the UK as well, and in China and elsewhere. Now, as I said earlier, the fact is, here's the actual reality. Nobody's ever found a gene for ADHD. Nobody's ever found a gene that says, if you have this gene you're going to have ADHD. No such gene has ever been found. No group of genes ever been found that says if you're going to have this gene you're going to have this condition. Nor ever will be. And no such gene or group of genes have ever been found that if you don't have these genes

you will not have the condition. Now there are some diseases that are genetic. One runs in my family, muscular dystrophy. If you have the gene, you're going to have the disease. My mother had it. My aunt had it. That's a genetic condition. And if you have the gene, you'll have the disease. Very rare, those kind of diseases. Now, there are some genes that the more of them you have, the more likely

you are to have any number of mental health diagnoses, ADHD, depression, anxiety, even psychosis, bipolar illness. But there's no group of genes or set of genes or gene that themselves determine any one condition. As a matter of fact, you can have those same genes and not have any condition whatsoever. So something is being passed on, but it's not any kind of condition that's being passed on. What's being passed on is sensitivity. And the more sensitive you are, the more you're going to feel whatever's going on in the environment.

I find that annoying, right? Because I've heard this rhetoric before there's no specific gene located associated with a specific illness ergo it's not a real thing right and one that isn't the way that most genes work like there's not a single gene that determines your eye color or that kind of thing even in that case where you have a discrete eye color, right? There's a constellation of genetic stuff that applies to it. But also it moves from that saying there's no gene. So that's a problem because we would obviously expect one single gene, right?

And then it says, well, there are genes that are associated, like there's collections of genes associated with a higher risk, but they're also associated with high risk for other things. So that means they can't be for this specific one because they increase risk potentially of other things too. So that means like that just never happens. And then in other cases, the fact that it isn't 100% deterministic, if you have a set of genes, and then you absolutely will have a pathological manifestation of an illness that therefore there can't be a connection because it's variable, right? It's not 100% one way or the other. And all of that is setting up these kind of like straw man claims that yes, that isn't how genes tend to work, that they're not connected to anything else, that they only characterize like a hundred percent yes or a hundred percent

no. If you have the gene, it's on, you have gene, it's off. That does exist. That does exist. Like he says, but that's rare. Usually things are caused by interactive effects of lots of different genes and it's hard for us to predict but we can notice associations and we have yeah and there's a significant heritability to adhd so yeah yeah yeah yeah and all of these gurus have this fraught relationship with the scientific literature, don't they? Because on one hand, they do love to quote the little studies. Jordan Peterson likes to quote the study about, what is it, crabs?

Lobsters? Yeah, lobsters. Dr. K quotes these things. Gabor Mate is quoting them on occasion to sort of buttress their point of view. But at the same time, science is deeply flawed, right? They just really haven't quite got it right they've gone down the wrong path same true of brett weinstein eric weinstein too they sort of need it they want it but their version of science which is very speculative very idiosyncratic is is so much better than than the other stuff that's

out there yeah and just to illustrate that exact point, Matt, here's just an example of that in effect. Well, there's more trauma in their lives. Yeah, so the children, they do a study with 65,000. I forget, you're better than I am. 65,000, I read it. You made notes, I did. Yeah, with 90,000 of kids, yeah.

So, because I found that to be really, really sort of supportive of what you just said, where, again, I'm saying this from memory, but a study of 65,000 children and their parents, and they found that those parents who had more adverse traumatic events in their lives ended up having a higher chance of having a child that had ADHD. adhd so you know there was an association in a study another one of these big correlational studies and they find adverse life expects association with adhd and yeah like but it's it's always just these kind of isolated factoid studies you know the same way dr k is with the doshas like it's the exact same way to cite the studies right there was a study done with 20 000 people in india and they found that that yeah it completely validated the claim that you know doshic stuff was associated with personality type did it

yeah it didn't did it and like i said before there's just so many reasons why you might see a correlation there socioeconomic factors you know diet and pregnancy like there's probably a thousand reasons why you might see a spurious correlation and it isn't in fact the explanation that i'd like to sort of leap to which is whether it's doshas or whether it's childhood trauma. Yeah, confounding variables, Chris. Yeah, the last thing I'll talk about, Matt, there's two things, but one of them is to give a little bit credit to Mate. He's not completely dismissive of medication as providing any benefit, right?

So here's him talking a little bit about that. So some people may actually benefit from taking pharmaceutical medications if their situation is dire enough, but not as the final answer, but as a way of getting respite that allow them to go to work on the real issues that cause them to be depressed or anxious

or tuning out, you know know so any and all of these things a lot of people don't even want to open those doors though because they there's so much pain associated with maybe going back or revisiting an early experience that they just think it's better keep the doors shut yeah i mean it's it's almost um charming, this belief that talk therapy, or even just self-directed therapy, is going to cure all of these things when the evidence, when they do randomised controlled trials of psychological, psychiatric talk therapies, show remarkably little effect compared to the placebo condition it's almost embarrassing it is embarrassing frankly the only version of therapy that seems to show any effect at all is cognitive behavioral therapy last time i checked so you know it's it's quite an astounding statement which is okay you know you can use medications and stuff like that that's as a stopgap but just just wait for the real to give yourself time for the real cure to occur they're not doing the right kind of therapy matt that's right if they were doing this

yeah they're not recognizing the true cause and And just, again, on the medication point, he had medication himself, but it was just, like he says, a stopgap. It wasn't really solving the problem. When I took medication, it made me a much more efficient workaholic. It did nothing for my workaholism, just made me much better at it because I could stay up later now and I was more focused. I could get even more things done. So you've got to deal with these other issues did you I did did I deal with them yes I have and there's so much more like like dealing with the trauma like I'm telling you if your

friend's got ADHD I can tell you he had to stress early for years. And his parents were stressed. So deal with that. Deal with what conditions are you creating now in your life that create more stress for you. Are you taking care of your body? Are you exercising? Are you eating well? Do you get out there in nature?

Nature has a certain kind of harmony to it, which actually calms the mind. So are you doing all these things? If you're not, all you're doing is medicating a symptom. If you are taking the medication specifically to help you focus, but you're working on these other issues, you'll have a much fuller life, and you may find you don't need the medication after all. It's always the same.

Yeah, it's the same yeah just get get besides the moving bodies of water that'll negative ions be even negative ions go out into nature do your exercise find find meaning find me authentic relationships it's like you know the thing that annoys me about that all the way is like, you can summarize that in five sentences. You don't need 500 pages. You don't need 12 months of interior mental work, right? Go outside, do your exercise, spend time thinking about your life or introspection or whatever.

Eat well, have an enjoyable, authentic relationship. relationship you know like it's always the same things and it's actually when you break it down very trite and obvious things that people know you got problems in your interpersonal relationships deal with them it'll make you feel better or it's harder at the initially but but maybe it's not that easy and you know also you want to be feel better like doing more exercise eating better that would make you feel better does no one know that nobody's worked that out yeah like no mainstream medical authority is telling you that right like do exercise and eat well but this this is self-help in a nutshell, isn't it? Like you take the homespun truths that basically people already know and you weave a complex structure around it all that's very bespoke

and very, very complicated. Complementary alternative medicine is all the same. I mean, and it's not like you said, the basic common sense stuff is not wrong. I started, as I've told told you i started jogging recently semi regularly my god i feel better from going for a jog i'm outside by i'm near the ocean right like no debate i'm i totally negative ions are infusing you it could be the negative ions it could be just getting the blood moving in the morning instead of drinking coffee and slouching in front of my computer like those things are clearly good for you no debate i'm not saying you should go medicate yourself instead of

going for a jog but you know the thing i object to is just this monomania which is he's got his thing it's childhood trauma explains everything yeah and man he reaches way too far with that one it's like it's like everything is a nail because he's got a hammer yeah and you know the last thing matt is you heard him mention there like your friend because this was from them having an exchange where your friend you know was into has got adhd and he says i can tell they had stress in the early years and they were stressed by their parents were stressed right that's like this thing where we've seen with dr k we'll see it in the next episode where no hesitation to diagnose people that they've never met or they've only heard second hand yeah you know what kind of self one sentence that's all

i need one sentence description from the person in question or even a second hand one in question boom diagnosis now that's that's not how clinicians usually operate not good ones anyway he got in trouble for this because he did an interview with prince harry after reading his autobiography like a book promotion interview about his trauma and he diagnosed him or he says he didn't diagnose him but it's you know it's like one of these things like he certainly seemed to be diagnosing them with ADD and I can't remember what else, post-traumatic stress disorder or whatever. And psychiatrists and whatnot find this irresponsible, right?

You can't diagnose someone on like, you know, reading their biography and having a sit down podcast interview with them. But just to display that he has that tendency this is him talking about trump and hillary clinton okay i can give you the example of a donald trump who had a really traumatic childhood i mean his father was a this as described by his psychologist niece Mary Trump his father, Trump's father who is Mary's grandfather was a psychopath and who really demeaned

and harshly treated their children so Trump decides unconsciously that, by the way I'm not talking about his policies here this is not a political debate and in the book I point out that his opponent was also traumatized, Hillary Clinton.

So this is an ecumenical view of trauma in politics. I'm not choosing sides. I'm just saying that you can see his trauma and every moment he opens his mouth. His grandiosities need to make himself bigger, more powerful, aggressive. And he's as much as said in his autobiography that the world is a horrible place, a dog-eat-dog place where everybody is after you. Everybody wants your wife and your house and your wealth.

And this is your friends, never mind your enemies. That's the world he lives in. Now that world that he lives in reflects his childhood home. He developed that world view. He came to it honestly, you might say, because that's the world that he lived in. Trauma, trauma, childhood trauma. Yeah, if only he had

done a session with Gabor, perhaps the world would be a better place. But yeah, so that's it, Matt. And I'll leave the last word to Gabor, just to give his final overall summary of his approach in a nutshell. These are the two messages he wants us to take away from this.

In the last chapter, I don't lay out a political program. I don't see that as my role to do that. I have my own political ideas and preferences, but I don't want to impose them on the reader. and preferences, but I don't want to impose them on the reader. But I do say, first of all, we have to lose our illusions that this normality is actually healthy or natural. We have to just get cognizant that what we consider to be normal is actually bad for us. Number one.

Number two, just if we introduced the concept of trauma into healthcare, the average doctor, again, strange to say, doesn't hear a single lecture in their medical training about the impact of trauma on physical or mental health, which is astonishing, given that it was a British psychologist, Dr. Richard Bentall, who pointed out not that many years ago that the evidence linking what we call mental illness and childhood adversity is about as strong as the evidence linking smoking and lung cancer.

And the average physician doesn't hear a word about that. It's astonishing. It would be astonishing if no mental health professional was aware of the link between trauma and adverse life outcomes and health outcomes okay well i think we've heard enough um do you want to give your final sum up there chris what's your take on gabon mate well i think you know your point that he has a monomania is absolutely true. And like he has expansive definitions, not just of trauma, but of addiction, of the way that he perceives the immune system and so on.

And it but it all it all sounds so familiar to me. Modern society is toxic and making us ill. Capitalism, colonialism, and materialism are spiritually destroying us. You are unique and special. You're suffering from unprocessed trauma and you need to become actualized and authentic. Modern medicine won't help you because it'll only address the symptoms. It's only interested in prescribing drugs from the pharmaceutical companies that will only address the symptoms. What we need is a holistic approach, which takes account of the mind-body connection. And this is

being confirmed in emerging new fields of science, you know, epigenetics, the mind-gut-biome connection, all of this. It's all validating this approach to healthcare, and it will revolutionize things and maybe we can redress this you know descent into toxic hell that we're we're headed for um yeah one podcast at a time just one podcast at a time fingers crossed so it's just the same it's like you can regurgitate that across so many of the different gurus and they just have a slightly different prescription for what the key thing is. And it's different if it's Gwyneth Paltrow, if it's Dr. K, if it's Gabor Mate, but they're fundamentally the same. And the very last thing I'll say is none of this says you can't have gained insights from

his books. You can't have found the stuff that he's told you. gained insights from his books you can't find the stuff that he's told you how do you process genuine trauma in your life and that you don't find them insightful in some of the things that he writes about right that's not it but it's it's just i find this link to the notion that people's illnesses are very fundamentally tied to their inability to process traumas that they've suffered just to be like quite distasteful because it puts the onus that people are getting ill and like a lot of the times it's just because they haven't self-actualized enough that is the flip side of what he's saying yeah yeah yeah i'm bored with all of that. The whole episode, I was sort of comparing and contrasting

him with Jordan Peterson, because superficially, they're quite different. But I think on an underlying level, they are extraordinarily similar. And the main way in which they're similar is that they're very appealing to a certain kind of audience, partly because they appeal to some universal virtues that we tend to have or like to think we have in modern Western culture. This idea of individualism, these ideas of being authentic, that there's something wrong with modern society, things could be better, and self-actualising yourself and connecting with some real you, something beyond the here and now. And their flavours are very different because Jordan Peterson

speaks to all those points, but he does it through hitting all the tags of sort of conservative values, you know, taking charge of your own life, you know, making your bed, traditional values, standing up straight, self-discipline. And the stuff that's wrong with modern society is all, you know, postmodernism and cultural Marxism and so on. But with Gabo Mate, the appeal is to people with a more progressive kind of sentiment, this idea that we're all wounded and we're kind of harmed by the toxic and inequitable society that we live in uh it's all corrupt in a very romantic rousseauian kind of thing probably

because of capitalism and of course touching on all of that holistic health stuff and whatever so like you'll hear jordan peterson going on with the sort of Christian overtones. You'll hear a Gabon Mate going on with the spiritual and Eastern overtones, but fundamentally it's the same thing, right? And it's appealing, not because it speaks to anything that's actually an accurate description of reality, but rather because it speaks to people's personal values and what they perceive as virtues so so i find that all very interesting so i was thinking more about self-help and and this sort of clinical guru thing as a cultural phenomena rather than gabber matte specifically so yeah it's an interesting an interesting person to spend some time with yeah i did have a flashback to when i was six months old and i heard a bomb outside and it just like that people looked shocked and then i was just angry

with them i thought their shock fear scared me i've just been angry ever since so so what you're saying is it was colonialism that it was fundamentally yeah it fucked you up yeah and it was yeah there was a british flag wafting outside the window where some soldier pointed a gun at me and i was yeah i cried but and uh and now a single tear is rolling down my cheek another yeah i'm not making light of trauma i'm not making light of trauma. Another piece of the puzzle has fallen into place, if I'm understanding you, Chris. Yeah, yeah. Well, it is what it is. But, Matt, I know you've been here a long time.

I know your spirit is flagging, you know, your actualized self. It's authentic, but it's weak. It's weakly authentic. My authentic self wants to tell you to go to hell and just walk away and go get a whiskey. But I'm saying no, I'm denying my authentic self. Yeah, kick him or shoot him. I'm responding to these obligations of people like you and society.

Society. The listeners, your society. It's the obligations that are keeping me here. Damn you all. Right. Well, speaking of obligations, we should thank patrons. That's what I was going to say. But I was going to say all., God, that was blasted.

Yeah, no, but I also have to say, Matt, just one piece of feedback for this week. It's not even a review of reviews. It's a exit survey where people cancel the podcast or cancel the patron subscription. We can't cancel us. We're uncancelable. But you can't cancel your subscription. That can't you can't cancel us we're uncancellable but you can't

cancel your subscription that can't be done i like i like this so usually you know they're just like fairly mundane they're rarely actually people saying particularly mean things but this one just said some other reason didn't realize it was two people with special needs complaining about listening to things they don't have to listen to. Accurate. Accurate. Yeah, that was pretty good. I could also say, if you want actual reviews,

here's a positive and a negative. One star from Andrew underscore 671. Per all round, one out of five. Nothing of value to see here. From Great Britain. On the other hand, Crane91 from Poland, a much better country. Refreshing. Love the insights and the humor. Keep it up, fellas.

That's right. That's what we need. That's what I need to keep going. That's right. The slingers and arrows will not stop us. Yeah, we'll take them and we'll carry on. And lastly, Matt, we're just going to shout out just a handful of patrons. We're tired.

We're tired today. But we still must thank you. We must thank you. And we will thank conspiracy hypothesizers this week. Just a collection of them because they're easy to gather. They're like a herd. Gagne, Art and Illustration, Connor Carey, Wendy Heilert maybe, might be

a different tier, but nonetheless, thank you Wendy, Jenna Zardo, Lyndon Brennan, Joseph Riley, Matt Johnson, Sheila Underwood and Scott. Ah, legends. Every one of you. Thank you. thank you yeah experts in the field all dealing with

unprocessed trauma trauma that's what that's what led them to us so there's something right something inside them knew that we were the the key that would unlock all of that stuff get it gushing out and resolve it once and for all let that little crystal fucker right of you that's late it's time to act okay you're tired you're tired you're tired too crass let let that little crystal butterfly emerge from its chrysalis okay do that look at it go all right look at it go i feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions. And they've all circulated this list of correct answers. I wasn't at this conference.

This kind of shit makes me think, man, it's almost like someone is being paid. Like when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Well, that's it, Matt. Another day, another Guru decoded. We retire. I request that you go in faith to love and serve the Lord.

Please, please, Matt, I beg of you. I can do that. You're a mortal soul. Do it. Okay, okay. Yeah, I'll do that. I'm going to have a drink first, but after that, yeah. Peace be with you.

Peace be with you. Good night. Ciao. And also with me. Bye-bye. See ya. Thank you.