The Brutal Reality For Most Men Today (& how to fix it) - Dr K HealthyGamer

Key Takeaway

When compulsive screen habits show up, do not start by demanding more discipline—start by choosing a small cost you are genuinely willing to pay. Today, pick one five-minute action that moves your real life forward: walk without your phone, write on a blank page, apply for something, or message a friend. Let boredom, uncertainty, and discomfort be present without immediately escaping into stimulation. Repeatedly paying small, chosen costs rebuilds agency better than chasing a frictionless fix.

Episode Overview

Dr. K and Chris Williamson examine why pornography, gaming, and gambling can become compulsive substitutes for purpose, connection, agency, and emotional regulation. They discuss the risks of frictionless technology and AI, the importance of accepting effort and uncertainty, and how environment shapes behavior. The conversation also explores sexual health, loneliness, therapy, and the public misunderstanding of severe mental illness and postpartum psychosis.

Full Transcript

Transcript of The Brutal Reality For Most Men Today (& how to fix it) - Dr K HealthyGamer from Modern Wisdom. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

People of the UK and Ireland, if you're coming to my live shows this October, there is a chance that your story could end up on stage. Worst first dates, problems that you need solved by me, you will not believe that this happens stories, and much more. I'm going to be reacting to my favorites live, plus doing a Q&A where you can ask me about relationships, careers, existential crises, or whatever questionable life decision you're currently considering. I've spent over a year building brand new stories and ideas, and it is hands down the best thing I've ever put on stage.

You can get your tickets now at chriswilliamson.live. That's chriswilliamson.live. Can you look at this chart for me? Yeah, sure. One in eight young men watch porn, gamble, and play video games every day or more. Almost one in four gamble daily. More than one in four use porn daily, and only 26% do none of them. What do you make of that? Oh, what do you make of that? Well, the issue here is about once a day or more often. Okay. I wonder, we don't know what the life of people that are doing this are like.

We don't know what the lives of them are like. Is this compulsion? Do they wish that they could do it less? Is this something that borders on an addiction or something that's kind of guiding their life, taking over their life? Or is this just a natural response to a world that's maybe been tapped of meaning, and this is a good coping strategy for 74% of men to get through? I don't know, but you work on this much more than me, so you can probably see through the headline a little bit more deeply.

Yeah, so I think the answer is yes. Brilliant. Thanks for coming, everybody. Yeah, so is it a compulsion? Yes. Is it a coping strategy? Yes. Are people's lives devoid of meaning? Yes. Is technology getting addictive? Yes. So the first thing that I want to kind of point out here is that there are three things, right? Gambling, pornography, video games. So generally speaking, when you see multiple overlapping things, they tend to have a shared etiology, right? So these are symptoms. Sure, they have their own diagnostic criteria and things like that, but I think what this is, men are jerking off gambling and playing video games.

Yes, this is correct. Yes. And to me, if you look at sort of things from an addictive perspective, so all three of these activities are addictive. What's the core feature of addiction? Something that gives you pleasure and takes away pain. So all of these three things do that. So anytime you're looking at compulsive behavior, this is at the root of it. So then the question becomes, what is pleasurable about these things? And more importantly, what is the pain that's being taken away? So oftentimes, I think there's a big kind of misemphasis on addiction.

When people talk about addiction, they talk about dopamine predominantly. But if you look at an addiction, addiction has three stages. In the first stage of your addiction, it gives you pleasure and it takes away pain. But then what happens is we develop tolerance to the pleasure. So if you ask most people who gamble, play video games, or watch pornography, they won't say that this is a huge source of pleasure. So prior to being addicted, you can say, oh man, this weekend is coming around. I'm going to play lots of video games.

It's going to be great. But as you progress into this, people aren't looking forward to it. They're like, man, I can't wait till I vacation this at the end of the month, and I'm going to just jerk off a whole lot. I'm going to go to Mexico, and I'm going to take a laptop. It's pathologically fab. I'm gooning all day. There are people who goon, right? We can get to the psychology of that, which is fascinating. So I think this is largely a symptom or a manifestation of a deeper problem.

And I think that we just have, depending on what the specifics of your psychology and your neuroscience is, you will end up in one of those quadrants. And the fascinating thing is we're getting to the point in research where we know what the defining features of each of those quadrants are. Oh, tell me more. So pick one to start. Video games. So video games, interestingly, is the biggest of the lot by a distance. So for the people that are just listening, gambling on its own, only 1.8% of men are doing that every day without either porn and or video games.

Okay. That's kind of interesting. So let's start with video games. 35.8% of men doing video games daily, and 66% doing video games in total with something else daily. Are you okay if I ask you questions? Sure. Okay. So do you play video games? No. Okay. What do you know about video games? I played a lot in uni and stuff, and then business became my video game. Okay. So why did you used to play video games? What did video games do for you? They were a way to pass time when I was bored.

They were a way to connect with my housemates because a lot of them did too. I was living in a five-person house in university. I used to play Borderlands, and you could play Borderlands co-op locally, which was sick because it's you and another person doing the same thing, talking shit to each other, but working on a team, but complaining about stuff. Borderlands, I'm pretty sure I completed one, two, and maybe even three with my housemates. Yeah. So sick. I love that. That was great. Also a massive fan of watching people in the house playing a video game that I'm not a part of.

So if I watch someone play Fortnite, if I watch someone play FIFA, one of my favorite things to do because I get to shit talk them while they're playing, and I get to comment on their... So I enjoy video games. I watch a lot of reviews of video games. Obviously, GTA has just come out, and I'm enjoying seeing the fallout of that, but I don't have really any desire to play video games. Not now, not anymore. Why do you think that is? I think I supplanted the game playing, status seeking, go after something with business.

Okay. And I think content creation and YouTube is basically a video game to me. So I think in your answer is everything. So it's beautiful. Thank you. Thank you for coming. So here's what we need to understand. So if we look at why things are fun, right? So human beings, and not just human beings, like cats too, have the capacity for play. Do you know what the evolutionary function of play is? Testing capacity in a safe environment? That's a good way to put it. I would say it's a testing capacity, building capacity even, right?

So if you look at two cats that are playing with each other, they're not like playing chess, right? They're like fighting. And if you look at people who play, like kids who play tag, right? So the reason we've designed play, or the reason evolution is selected for play, is because play trains us in the skills that are necessary for survival. This is the first thing to understand. And so if you kind of think about it from like, let's say I'm evolution and I'm trying to create, I'm trying to prepare this juvenile organism to be able to succeed.

What I need to do is create a reward circuit to encourage the skills that will be necessary for survival. So if we look at what video games do, they take all the most important evolutionary aspects for survival, and they create an artificial environment in which we can get those satisfied. So this is something that when I, the first book that I wrote is How to Raise a Healthy Gamer, and I taught this to parents, because parents who are struggling to teach their kids, or parents who are struggling to get their kids off of video games need to understand that this first thing is it's not a game.

It's actually a substitute for life. That's why people get addicted. And so even in your answer, why don't you play video games anymore? It's because the needs that the video game used to scratch for you are no longer scratched in the video game. So the 66% of people who play video games every day are people who are trying to accelerate time. And this is- Men who play video games every day. Sure. Yep. So men are accelerating time, which is really scary. Like this is something that really worries me, that many human beings on the planet are just like hitting the fast forward button on their life.

Speed running their own life. Not speed running, the exact opposite. So speed running is accomplishing a lot in a very short amount of time. That's true. That's okay. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So what they're doing is speed running their death. Right? So they're accelerating the time to the end. And so video games give us a sense of agency. They give us a sense of community. You also mentioned something that's really common amongst men, which is the negative expression of a positive affection. So when- Shit talking.

Exactly, right? Which is the way that you express approval and respect to the dudes around you, right? It's like you shit talk them. Australians say you call your cunts mates and your mates cunts. That's right. Probably, yeah. So, and I think that's why people play games because they're- Sure, there's dopamine. Sure, there's some suppression of their negative emotional circuitry. And like, this is what's kind of the scary thing about fast forwarding your life is like, as you fast forward your life, your life gets worse. Because you're not living it.

You're not doing the things that you're supposed to. You're not doing things that involve meaning and purpose and stuff like that. Have you looked at reported or self-reported retrospective estimations of how much time passed when people have played games? How are you arriving at this conclusion that people who play games are kind of moving through their life more quickly? Because time is just ticking away at the same one second or 60 seconds per minute that it always does. Yeah, so they're not moving through life quickly.

Life is passing them by faster. I would say video games keep you still, right? So from a developmental perspective, you're not moving forward. So if you spend- I mean, and the data to support that comes from all kinds of places. My life, firstly. The numerous people I've worked with who have video game addiction as a psychiatrist. But then there's plenty of evidence that shows that if you look at purpose and direction in life, it's inversely correlated with the amount of time that you spend on a screen, largely.

Especially playing things like video games. And if you look at the things that protect- the strongest protective factor against, especially things like pornography addiction, is actually having purpose or direction in life. Pornography addiction is, in my opinion, the root cause of it is directionlessness in life. And there's data to support that. More so than video games? Yeah. So this is where you can get into the research of each of these things, and you'll find slightly different things. That's kind of fascinating, right? Because when you look at what video games do, you would think it is purpose.

It's forward momentum. There's progress, you've leveled up. There's a new challenge that you're going to do. You're starting the game again at a higher difficulty setting, whatever. So you would assume that the purposelessness thing would be more solved by video games, but it appears that porn is stepping in. So this is where the details of the research become important. So if you take a thousand people who are addicted to pornography, and you measure them psychologically, what you'll find is that they have a very high rate of meaninglessness or purposelessness in life.

So when I work with people, when we develop programs around porn and stuff like that, a lot of people will focus on the behavior. But if you're someone who's struggling with technology addiction, it can feel like whack-a-mole, right? Where it's like, okay, I stopped playing video games and my pornography use increases. So that's pornography addiction, where if you don't have a reason, bluntly, to not jerk off every day and watch pornography, you have to have something that's getting you out of the house and away from that stuff.

Video games is interesting because, as you aptly pointed out, what video games do is gives you a substitute for purpose. So pornography is like a numbing effect against a lack of purpose. But what we'll see with video games is that they do give you a sense of agency. They give you a sense of progress. This is huge, right? Like you can't level up in porn. There's no like leaderboard for gooning. Watch me, watch me. I mean, arguably, I guess you could say there's only fans, but not really.

But yeah, I mean... I don't think that there's inverse only fans, though. There's not only fans for subscribers. Right. How many people? There's not a... Yeah, so I mean, there are some weird edge cases, actually. I mean, if we want to go really down the rabbit hole, of a lot of intensive competitiveness amongst only fans, subscribers, right, for the attention and affection of the content creator. It's the goon equivalent of guys in a nightclub outspending each other on bottles of... Absolutely, yeah. ...vodka. Yeah, and look at how modernized we've become.

But yeah, I mean, I think you're spot on. So meaninglessness leads to pornography, and meaninglessness also leads to the substitute of meaning through video games, right? People try to become pro gamers, which is actually a viable career, increasingly becoming less viable every year that goes by. But with a video game, there's a sense of progress. There's a sense of growth. There's climbing the ladder. There's learning things. And just like you said, YouTube is sort of a video game. There are ways to optimize YouTube. So it kind of scratches that evolutionary psychological itch.

Yep. Then we end up with gambling, which is really interesting, because there's a lot of research coming out about this. Gambling is like a whole different ballgame. So with just different neuroscientific mechanisms, and especially if we're talking about young men, one of the... What's the right way to put this? One of the more unique things about gambling is sometimes the reason people get addicted to gambling is because we live in a society where it's hard to be a successful man. So the standards for men have not changed, but the expectations for men have not changed, if anything, they've gotten arguably more difficult, and the capabilities of men have decreased.

So many women will still want a male partner who makes more money than they do. But if you look at college matriculation rates and things like that, fewer and fewer men are going to college, more and more women are going to college. So there's kind of... of this really rough gap between what society expects of a man and what a man is capable of, and that gap is widening. So one of the simplest ways to solve that gap is to make it big in gambling. So this is the kind of stuff that I don't think you'll see much research about.

I've seen a couple of papers. This is really more clinical experience. When I talk to people who gamble and I get into it, like, you know, how do you feel about yourself? What's going on in your life? They all want to make it big, and they don't know how. And then gambling enters the picture, and now you have a big problem. Because the root of gambling is, I want to be someone one day. I want to have what everyone says I should have. I want to have what everyone, you know, what I see other people having.

I want to have, and it's not like they all, they want a bunch of cocaine and bitches and yachts and stuff like that, right? But they want to be able to buy a house. They want to be able to take their partner out. They want to have freedom and security in life. But college is all messed up because of AI and lower matriculation rates and things like that. So there's a future that many men are grasping for that they don't know how to get. And one really, really, really simple way is to win it in gambling.

You know, it's interesting. I was talking to Paddy Galloway, YouTube wizard of YouTube. He's employed by Google to help them do their own YouTube channel, which is pretty fucking hilarious. He's like kind of the guy at the top of the tree. And he was telling me, because he's got access to all of these channels behind the scenes and all of this proprietary data and stuff like that. We were at dinner, and he was saying, in 2018, 2019, all of the biggest finance niches were slow investing, dollar cost average, S&P, 401k, tax efficiency.

It was long-termism, long-termist thinking. And the biggest financial niches in 2026 are all make cash fast, prediction markets, calci, poly market, crypto. And I know we went through a crypto NFT wave as well. Kind of in the middle of that, we had a wobble. But what is being talked about online, and he thinks that this is a wind changing of people wanting to try and make it big, quick. I think maybe concerns about AI, uncertainty about the future, geopolitical instability, stuff like that. Like, I just don't know what's going on.

I don't know the future. I'll just put YOLO. What's it called? Fast life strategy. It's kind of an equivalent of that, but it's fast money strategy in the same way. But if you were to think globally, that's caused everybody to be like, I don't know what's going on. I don't know how to make it. I'll just go harder. That's some of those things are like gambling adjacent, or direct gambling advice. And that kind of plays into what you're talking about here too. Yeah. So I think it's, I mean, we can go as wide or as narrow as you want, but I think this speaks to like a broader problem, which is that, so things are like, this wasn't what I was planning on talking about today, but this is something that I've been really mulling over.

Things are really reaching a critical point and something fundamental is breaking in our society. I think we're seeing a midlife crisis of sorts in humanity. So I think a lot of what's happening, and I think men are sort of feeling the crunch of this in a different way, and we can talk about how women are feeling it. But I think what's going on is there used to be a path to success, right? There used to be this thing, and especially if you look at men, the core psychological problem that men need to solve is conquering themselves.

So if you look at like most of the advice out there, most of what men need to do, they struggle with themselves. And it's about getting the most output out of yourself. If you know how to bring out the best part of you, you can do fine in life, right? That's what, this is just my experience of sitting with men and things like that. There's some psychoanalytic literature that kind of supports this, but it's kind of like arguably I'm competing against other men, but if you sort of think about what is the lever that I pull, it's my own effort, right?

How do I beat somebody else at football? I practice harder, I train harder, I get better. So the core issue is effort. And then what's really interesting, this is a little bit of a shift, but then if we look at what triggers a midlife crisis, which I went through recently myself, it was a fantastic experience, it's that the realization that when you're young, the main thing you need to do is generally speaking, work harder, right? So there's like a lot of options. And if you put forth the effort, you've got, I'm 20 years old, I have 60 years on the planet, right?

And if I work hard every day, if I can bring a lot of effort every day, I can become married, I can have kids if I want, I can develop a career. I need to extract the potential for myself. Midlife crisis psychologically happens when that strategy no longer works. So at some point you wake up, and in my case, I'm 43, and then you realize that, oh crap, working harder is fundamentally not going to solve my problems anymore. It solved my problems when I was 21 and addicted to video games and all this good stuff.

It doesn't solve my problems anymore because there's just not enough time left. I can work as hard as I want to for the next 40 years of my life, and it's not going to get done. Midlife is actually 36, which is like really scary, okay? So we understand this from the psychological literature, and if you look at what's happening in society, hard work doesn't work anymore, especially in places like America. So we have this, in America, we have this idea, right, of like the American dream, which is like independence and working hard and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.

Meritocracy. Meritocracy, and this is the right way. This is really scary, but we've sort of assumed that meritocracy is like kind of the best way to navigate life, but this is not working anymore, right? So college used to be a path to financial security. It's not anymore. If anything, it's a path to financial ruin, right? This is scary. Now what's happening is you have lots of young men where everything is falling apart. AI is taking your job. There's all kinds of stuff going on with dating and mating.

Rates of sexlessness are at an all-time high. Rates of loneliness are at an all-time high. Friendships are at an all-time low. The number of people who have three close people that they can call in a crisis situation has dropped to an all-time low. I'm not trying to be alarmist here. I'm really not, but I think something fundamental is breaking in society, and the reason I really believe that is because we have the greatest amount of resources that we've ever had, and this is also a bold claim to make, but I think there's actually sufficient data to back it up.

We also have the highest level of suffering that we've ever had. I realize that's like, oh my god, how can you say that? No, I'm not saying this to be alarmist. I'm saying this is a fact. This started during the pandemic where we have a mental health crisis that has been going on. We've known that it's been going on. We're like six years in, and things are not getting better. If anything, body dysmorphia is on the rise, and we have some of these things like ozempic and semaglutide and stuff like that.

Really scary. A lot of people don't realize, and I'm going off. Oh, dude, I'm fucking loving this. You're cooking. Keep going. Just a simple example. You're cooking a chicken korma, though. So everyone has body image issues, right? And so everyone wants to be thin, and everyone wants to be beautiful, and social media is a big part of that. So then along comes a medication, which is amazing because this medication makes it so that you don't want to eat. So this is what's really scary about society.

Up until now, human beings have had to obey the laws of physics, that if you want something in life, you have to put something in. And what scares me about semaglutide is up until now, if you wanted to be healthy, if you wanted to lose weight, if you wanted to get fit, it required you to put in a certain amount of effort. Honest signal. The body that you had was an honest signal of the effort that you put in. Yes. There are variables that go into that, like upbringing and stuff like that, and whether you're in a food desert.

But basically, yes. You had to work for stuff in life. And I think that that's good. And the reason that it's good is because the body doesn't wear out. It rusts. So the more you use your muscles, the stronger they become. The more that you write essays yourself, the more intelligent you become. Human beings have gotten stupider for the first time in the history of recorded IQ. Is that the Flynn effect? I don't know. Can you chat GPT? Is the Flynn effect about IQ? I'm pretty sure that the Flynn effect is people got smarter basically throughout all of human history if you were to grade them by IQ.

Slowly, slowly, slowly get smarter. And we've gotten dumber for like the last decade. Probably. Yeah. So for the first time in the history of recorded IQ measurements. Yes. Here it is. Scroll up for me. The Flynn effect is specifically about IQ scores. It refers to the observation first documented by a political scientist, James Flynn. The average IQ test scores increased substantially throughout the 20th century in many countries, many developed nations. The increase was roughly three IQ points per decade. And has the Flynn effect stopped in many developed countries?

Yes. Since the 1990s or early 2000s, researchers have found that IQ gains have plateaued in some countries and reversed slightly in others, sometimes called the negative Flynn effect. Yeah. And this is happening. And what's happening is, especially if we look at IQ reductions, I see this a lot. So I have friends in academia and stuff. And like the more that people use AI for stuff, the stupider they get. And there's lots of good studies that show this. So the MIT released a study a couple of years ago that showed a decay in critical thinking skills with AI use.

And AI is basically like taking the elevator instead of taking the stairs for your brain. So what's happening is something weird is going on where like society is progressing, but human beings are getting worse. And as we get worse, like things are really starting to come apart at the seams. I think we sort of feel it. We see evidence of it in mental health. We were talking about ozempic. So basically, what happened is up until now, you've had to work to get something. Right. And along comes some glue tied in these GLP-1 agonists.

And suddenly, you don't have to work to get something. You take an injection, and then your cravings get reduced. And then we're starting to see some really scary things around GLP-1s. So they're amazing medicines, because if you're overweight, and you have like cardiac risk factors, endocrinology risk factors, like type 2 diabetes and stuff like that, these medications are amazing at all this kind of stuff. We're also seeing some really cool mental health effects. So we're seeing reductions in cravings on alcohol. We're seeing improvements in even things like nicotine cessation and stuff like that.

I think it's- So weed, the data's mixed. Pornography appears to get worse. Pornography gets worse? Yes. Video games? I haven't seen any data about that. And there's a lot of really interesting signaling around GLP that we can get into. But this is exactly kind of what I mean, is it's sort of a miracle drug. And our society has been filled with miracle innovations that actually cause silent damage around the edges. And I think we've been doing this for way too long, and it's hit a critical point.

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That's functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom. It's a simple example of GLP-1, fascinating study. If you take someone who has a binge eating disorder and you do cognitive behavioral therapy on them, the more weight that they lose, the more effective the cognitive behavioral therapy is, the higher their risk is of developing anorexia. That's correct. It's confusing. If I have a binge eating disorder and I lose 50, if I lose 20 pounds from seeing a therapist around my binge eating disorder, rate of anorexia is low. If I lose 50 pounds from cognitive behavioral therapy, my rate of anorexia increases.

So rapid weight loss is an independent risk factor for developing anorexia. And we see this, right? We see this. We see that if you look at celebrities, if you just take pictures, like you to just take a collage of celebrities from now versus 20 years ago, if you take a collage of like Instagram influencers or whatever, you will see that like eating disorders are shockingly on the rise. We're also seeing equality with like looks maxing, where there's a drastic level of body dysmorphia in men now.

And so there's something weird is going on where like, as we move away from the laws of physics, like as we move away from this fundamental idea that if you want something in life, you have to pay something. What do you think is the mechanism for that binge eating to anorexia pipeline? It's a fascinating question. So I think there are two or three different factors. One is So, one is, this gets a bit complicated, but let me, so if you look at what is the psychological makeup of someone who loses 20 pounds versus someone who loses 50 pounds.

First thing that you can argue is that someone who's likely to lose 50 pounds is more motivated to begin with, is more concerned about their appearance to begin with. So I don't think it's a direct effect necessarily of just CVT. There's a selection effect going on here to some degree. Absolutely. So it's harder that you hate yourself or are motivated to look good or whatever. Absolutely. So that probably is part of the reason for it. It's not that the weight loss itself is all causal. It's that the people who lose more weight are more motivated to begin with, maybe have more body.

I have to assume as well, body dysmorphia or mirror hatred. But also, people that are anorexic, they must have a good amount of willpower. They have a ton of willpower. I have to imagine that basically your willpower muscle is so hypertrophied that you're able to voluntarily starve yourself. Absolutely. So that's exactly what we see. So what we see with people with anorexia is they have so many physiologic signals telling them to eat. And so one of the things I love about being a psychiatrist is there's a lot of cool neuroscience, but there's a lot of old stuff too that I think is just as relevant.

Psychiatry is the only field of medicine where stuff that was true a hundred years ago is just as true today. And I think some of the stuff about Jungian archetypes and things and modern dating and the manospheres, it's like textbook. Literally there's a textbook written from 1920 by someone named Emma Jung who describes the manosphere and our dating and mating crisis to a T. It's insane. But going back to this question of why do people develop anorexia, so the root of anorexia is control. If you look at people who develop anorexia, they're people who are deprived of control in their life.

And so what tends to happen with human beings is we tend to displace things. So if I'm out of control over here, I'm going to balance that out by being extra in control over here. And we see this in places like if there's a parent who has a toxic work environment and they can't get angry at their boss, they're going to displace that anger onto their loved ones at home. So this is just how we manage psychiatric stuff. So in anorexia, it's all about control. And what happens is once you start to get the reward, oh my God, from the cognitive behavioral therapy, I have lost this weight.

Look at how much better I look. I can do this. I am now in control. I'm so much more in control at a 50-pound loss than I am at a 20-pound loss. And so there's something there that is very almost addictive or compulsive or gratifying about taking control of yourself, and then you just keep going. How do you think that continues if somebody isn't using control themselves but is artificially supplementing their control by using GLPs? Your suggestion here is that people use CBT, there's an intervention that gives somebody an additional amount of control over their weight and how much they eat, and some people overshoot that and kind of get a kind of addiction to the control that they have.

Are you suggesting that GLPs allow people to shortcut or people who wouldn't have typically that access to willpower that these people would, and they're able to—the mechanism still holds even though the way that they've arrived at the mechanism isn't the same? Mechanism is the same. The difference is—so remember, I can have really strong cravings and I can have really high willpower. So the reason I think GLPs are causing lots of problems with body dysmorphia is because now I don't need a high willpower because I'm reducing my cravings.

So they basically allow people who have less control of themselves to achieve more dysmorphic goals. Why is that a problem? I think for two major reasons. One is physiologically, I don't think it's healthy. So I think that there is a healthy weight that the human body likes to be at, and GLPs, there's also a lot of evidence that shows that the more unhealthy you are, the more beneficial GLPs are. So even people who are more overweight see greater reductions in alcohol use with GLP use, compared to people who are normal weight.

So if you have a normal weight and you start a GLP, your reduction in alcohol consumption is lower, so it helps you less. So there's a ton of evidence that—and this is true of all of medicine, right? So all of medicine, everything has side effects. So whether something is a good medicine or not depends on what the alternative to not taking it is. So should we give you, Chris Williamson, a heart transplant? Well, that depends. How messed up is your heart? In the same way, the majority of GLP benefits are for people who are very unhealthy, right?

And there's a lot of data that supports that. But then the second thing that I—this is like my personal thing, this is not like a medical stance. I think it is supporting a societal shift into having a free lunch, no pun intended. So I think what's really scary right now is people want everything to be free. So we did an interesting study about why people—we have an amazing membership and why people don't join our membership, and the number one reason people don't join our membership is because the quality of our free content is so good.

And so internally, we had this meeting where we're like, okay, should we make our free content less good? And I was like, hell no, right? So right now what's going on is human beings fundamentally don't want to pay the cost of stuff anymore. This is why we get to things like gambling and stuff like that, right? And everyone is selling, like you were saying from this YouTube guy, everyone is selling the idea that there's a free lunch, passive income, effortless success. You don't have to pay the price.

We're becoming—and this is what's really scary is there are so many predatory apps. I saw an ad for a gambling app literally yesterday, $200 of credit with $5. Oh my God. So somewhere along the way, people don't want to pay the cost anymore. People don't want to pay the cost to put their lives together. They don't want to pay the cost to have money. They don't want to pay the cost for help, right, because there's so much free help available. And here's the really scary thing.

A lot of people are out there telling them, yeah, you don't have to pay anything, right? We'll give you this for free, right? So like there are so many services out there that promise free, promise instance, promise a lack of risk. Here's a money back guarantee, right? There's zero risk, zero effort on your part. We also see this in politics where it's like, yeah, we go to our politicians and we say, I want all of these things done. And the politician says, yes, and I'm going to tax that person over there.

So people want things to be free and everyone is selling them saying, yes, yes, everything is free. Free. You don't have to pay anything. Everything will be free. You don't have to do effort. You don't do anything. And I think what we're seeing is a whole scale infantilization, a whole scale deconditioning of our society, which is why so many things, the easier things get. No one wants to study anymore. People are using AI. Oh yeah. You don't have to study. You don't have to write anymore.

You can have AI do it for you. So we're seeing this whole scale deconditioning and things are really starting to fall apart. Let's get back into gambling. You said that neurologically, that's very interesting. We'd explained sociologically what's going on there, what's happening inside of the brain. So what's happening. Why are you laughing about it? Is it because you did the Indian accent? Is that why? No, no. So I'm just laughing because of what's going on in the brain. So the most dangerous thing about gambling now is that it's available 24-7.

There used to be, and we know this, right? Casinos are open 24-7. So they figured out a long time ago that if you're a predator and your prey is somebody's bank account, making things available 24-7 is a really good idea. And there's a really simple neurological reason for this. As the day goes on, we get more fatigued. As we get more fatigued, we make worse decisions. So as our frontal lobes get fatigued, as we get tired, our ability to play the tape through to the end decreases.

Our ability to anticipate consequences decreases. Our ability to control our impulse decreases. So many years ago, I spoke with someone who, maybe this is supposed to be secret information, I'm not under an NDA, who's telling me that there's a day trading app that not only facilitated trades, they built this algorithm where any trade that is made at like 2 in the morning, they're going to be on the opposite side of. So it's not like if I'm buying this share at 2 in the morning, somebody else is selling it.

Anyone who wants to buy or sell anything at 2 in the morning, the app itself is taking the other side of the trade. Because they realized through their big data set, because they're seeing all this trading volume and stuff like that, that people just make really, really, really stupid decisions at 2 in the morning. So a big part of gambling is the gap between the impulse to engage in gambling, which we know there's a lot of stuff around random reinforcement schedule and things like that. There's all these biases, like there's a superiority bias, so everybody thinks they're better than average.

They're going to get lucky. Everyone's luckier than average. All these biases have existed. But there used to be a very physical barrier of going to the racetrack, going to the gas station to buy a scratch ticket. Friction. Friction. Absolutely. So you had to do something. Waiting until it opens up again. Waiting until it opens up, and then the impulse will pass. So now what's really happening with these gambling apps is that impulsiveness. We've made it really, really, really easy, and everybody's doing this. It's like one click to purchase.

You don't even have to go to checkout anymore, bro. Just tap a button, and it's going to be so easy. And so what's really happening, and this is also kind of scary, is like the other thing I sort of realized recently, this is kind of like a, I don't know if this is really stupid or really smart, I can't tell yet. I realized something recently. We have no psychological immune system that is prepared for the world that we live in. So we have like an immune system that protects us against attacks, right?

And we even have a psychological immune system that protects us against attacks. These are things like Freudian defense mechanisms, like displacement and projection. Dissing, distraction. Yeah, so we have all of these psychological defense mechanisms that we use to protect our mind. But we have no immune system for the world that we're living in today. Which is why this is like a novel organism that is attacking our mind, and everyone's mind is getting messed up. I had no idea when I chose to become a psychiatrist, it was 2013, I went to my family, I was like, hey, I'm thinking about becoming a psychiatrist.

They're like, this is a terrible idea. Because psychiatry is, especially amongst Indian people, there's the reputable specialties and there's the disreputable specialties. How's surgery rank? Reputable enough. Okay. Not the best, because they don't make the most money. Dentistry? Quite high, because you make really good money for not having to go to an MD program. Okay, MD's top? Yeah. Right. Prestige, power, money, all that good stuff. Interesting. And so I told them, and then there was sort of this sentiment that like, okay, if you become a psychiatrist, you're not going to be that important.

It's not going to be that big of a deal. But look at where we are today, mental health is the number one thing that most people are struggling with. And so I think it's really scary because we're seeing all of these functions in our mind getting torn apart by social media, pornography, video games, gambling. It's really scary. And we don't have the defense mechanisms. I mean, I think there are things that we can do, but we don't really have the defenses built in, which is why everyone is getting crushed.

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What do you think happens to someone's brain when they engage in all three of those things daily? I think the most synergistic effect is going to be the most fundamental. So your dopaminergic—I would predict two things. One is anhedonia, so the inability to experience pleasure. So that's going to cause huge problems for trying to put your life together because the part of your brain that rewards you for doing a good job won't be able to do that anymore. So the feeling of like, oh, I got an A on a test, like literally you'll be like blunted and not be able to experience that.

One thing I started telling my patients that has helped them immensely in dating, or actually in falling in love, is to not use their cell phone for an hour before they go on a date. No screens. So go for a walk. Because what people don't realize is that your dopamine is like—you have a storage of dopamine, and if you deplete it with a screen, there's none left over until you go to sleep. People are comparing the level of stimulus that they had from their screen to the person that they're going on a first date with.

that they're comparing. It's that there is no dopamine left for them to experience pleasure. And if we look at what love is, love is literally a trickle of dopamine because like the presence of this person is like, oh my God, it feels amazing. Like I can't wait to be right next to you. Oh my God. It's just like being across from this person and your brain is flooded with dopamine. If your dopamine stores are empty, you're not going to feel any of that. And so people aren't falling in love anymore because technology is draining our dopamine.

Are you worried about GLPs impacting dopamine for people falling in love or cravings, I guess? Yeah. So they do blunt cravings. This is where things get like really neuroscientifically like specific. So they do blunt cravings, but they don't work directly on the dopaminergic circuitry. So they work. I mean, everything's kind of tied together. So they're not, but what we do know that GLPs do is they cap the amount of dopaminergic response that you can get. That's part of the reason that they're kind of like good.

So if you look at studies of people who use alcohol on GLPs, their desire for the first drink is the same. The number of days that they drink doesn't go down. What decreases or what improves with alcohol is the number of drinks they have when they drink. So like after a hard day's work, if we're going to go to happy hour, like let's grab a beer, that desire is absolutely the same. What's blunted is the joy that I get from my first beer is blunted. And so that's really where GLPs work.

Okay. So going back to someone doing all three of those things every day. So anhedonia is number one. So the inability to experience pleasure. If you talk to these people, life will feel boring, which is why they want to pass the time, right? Because they don't feel like doing anything. It becomes a vicious cycle of life is boring. Therefore, I need to do more exciting stuff in order to make it less boring, which means more porn, more video games, more gambling. Yeah. So a lot of people don't realize this.

So you know when our body and brain want stuff, and then there's the physiologic signaling, and then there's the subjective experience. So when you are, when your liver is out of glycogen, I know you're pretty knowledgeable in this stuff. And if you need some background, let me know. But when your liver is out of glycogen, do you know what the subjective experience of that is? Hunger. Okay. So if you're calorically low, I, you know, if your calories are low, you're going to feel hungry. Okay. So if your, if your cells have insufficient water, what do you think is the sufficient feeling of that?

Thirst. Okay. Excellent. Now we get to the fun ones. What do you, what is the subjective feeling of a dopamine craving? When your brain wants dopamine, do you have any idea what that feels like? Novelty seeking? Yes. Yeah, but that's not what we feel. It is novelty seeking. Boredom? Exactly. Ayy. So what people don't realize is that if you were someone who is, is unmotivated in life, if you are someone who finds life to be unpleasurable and you're struggling because life just isn't fun anymore, boredom is the feeling of recalibration of your dopaminergic circuitry.

Boredom is a dopamine craving, right? Because boredom induces you to seek novelty. Yep. To get that pleasure. It's like novelty hunger. Exactly. Yes. Exactly. It's dopamine hunger, right? Yep. And the other cool, super interesting thing is a random aside, but the feeling of neuroplasticity is confusion. So everyone wants neuroplasticity. They want to rewire their brain. No one wants to be confused. And so being confused is very, very, very good in life, which we can talk about if you want. But so kind of going back to your earlier question, what does this look like?

So anhedonia is at the top of the list. The second thing is distress intolerance. So these people will not be able to handle negativity in any way. And emotional dysregulation. So there's going to be emotional numbing. And when the emotional numbing goes away, there's going to be too much emotion. And the really scary thing about this is what a lot of people don't realize is when you're numb, it's not that your emotional circuits are not working. You're just not aware of them. So a lot of times people who feel numb feel out of control in their life.

They're like, I want to do this thing. I want to go to the gym. I should reach out to people, but they can't bring themselves to do it. And that's actually because there's all kinds of emotions that are going on that are influencing and controlling your behavior. You won't even feel the fear. Like, why can't people apply for something? It's because there's actually this subsurface fear that we kind of dissociate from through things like technology and people are like, I can't control my life. Yeah, that's because you have a ton of dormant emotion that you are not aware of that is sending signals to parts of your brain to tell you not to do things.

But what people experience is like, I need more discipline. I need more willpower. They don't realize that there's all this other input that is preventing them from acting. What do they need? These people, let's say that someone resonates with, that's me. I have the novelty seeking, but kind of mundane. I'm doing it through the screen. I have the bit of anhedonia. I have the intolerance for boredom. If they don't need more discipline, which is kind of the go-to, especially for men, right? Like David Goggin's montages and 4.30 AM ice plunges and stuff like that.

What does recovery from an intolerance to boredom look like? Great question. I think it starts with one question. What is the cost you're willing to pay? If you look at David Goggins, he'll pay any price. That's what makes him David Goggins. I mean, I've never met the guy and I try not to comment on people that I haven't met, but I've listened to enough of his stuff. It's really interesting because if you listen to what he talks about, his mind is always thinking about cost and how to pay the cost.

Going back to what I was saying earlier about everything being free, we live in a world where no one wants to pay anything. This is what's so interesting is when I work with people like this, it's like they're always running away from something bad. I'm isolated and lonely. I'm tired of feeling that way. I'm going to go to a party and then I'm socially anxious, so then I go home. People aren't stuck in life. They're swinging on this back and forth pendulum of being bodied on one side and bodied on the other side.

What's really interesting about this, this is a condition called ambivalence, which is internal conflict. The really interesting thing about internal conflict is that anytime you start moving, the cost is far away. The further you move, the more real the cost becomes. Let's say, for example, I want to get into shape. It's easy to say that when I'm sitting at home. Once I go to the gym and once I start huffing and puffing, now I'm paying the cost. What motivates us is the goal, the reward that we want at the end.

That's what gets us moving. Then at the very beginning, we're thinking all about the reward and not about the cost. Once we actually do something, we think we're experiencing the cost and we see zero of the reward. The first 10 times you go to the gym, you're going to have zero improvements in your health. That is going to be visible. It's just going to be all suffering. This is what's really scary. We've become such a reward-oriented society. If you look on the internet, everyone's offering you value.

Do this and you'll get this. You'll get this. This is how we pull people by offering them rewards. What someone really needs to do is grapple with the cost and accept that there are ways to do this. There's all kinds of stuff that can be done. One is, first of all, to ask yourself, what are you willing to pay? What's the price you're willing to pay? What can an answer to that question look like? Five minutes a day. For five minutes a day, I'm willing to stare at a blank page and struggle to put words on a piece of paper.

That cost could be I'm willing to travel to India and stay there for three months and see what happens. A big part of it is focusing on the cost. Another huge part of it is focusing on uncertainty. What is your tolerance of uncertainty? We live in a world now where we want guarantees. We want to know, okay, we're going to ask ChatGPT which major will give me the best earning potential. What people really need to do is, this is crazy, but no one can predict the future.

You've got to roll the dice. That's the only way to live life. You have to take chances. Chances come with pain and suffering, which is why it's kind of cost. I think really embracing the bleakness to it. The good news is that this is very doable. People who struggle with things like uncertainty, they struggle with things like paying the cost. There are methodologies that really, really help people do that because this is something that is actually natural for us. Human beings have always dealt with uncertainty, but we've all been tricked into believing that there's no risk in life.

Risk-free, get free stuff. I think the third thing that's probably pretty helpful, two or three other things. One is emotional regulation. You need some way to manage your emotions when they come up. You can't keep running away from your emotions. You can't keep preventing emotions or avoiding emotions. The problem is that most people will live a life where they try to avoid emotions. How do I go to a party and not be socially anxious? If you pay attention to people who ask for help on the internet, you'll notice that everything is conditional.

How do I do this without this? How do I ask this person out without messing things up at work? You have to remove the conditional. You have to pay the cost. And then the last thing that I think is really, really, really important, an amazing study. I'm rusty on the numbers. I think something like 70% of soldiers in Vietnam were using opioids or other drugs, and only 9% to 12% continued to use them when they came back to the U.S. with zero treatment. So a lot of people don't realize that their existence and what they're capable of is largely created by their environment.

In my case, I had to travel to India, and I stayed in an ashram for like 90 days. I can teach these yogic techniques, and there's good stuff that can be taught. You can DIY this stuff from home. But what a lot of people don't really appreciate, I think, is that—this gets a bit philosophical—your mind is actually not you, it's part of your environment. I don't know if this makes sense, but you struggle against your mind. Most people do that, which means that you are over here, and your mind is over here.

The way to make your mind calm is, first of all, your mind is part of your environment. And then the way to make your mind calm is through its environment. So the food that you give it, the circumstances that you're in, even these little things like when you were saying you used to play Borderlands and you'd hang out with your friends, all that kind of stuff is shaping your mind. So how lonely do you feel? And if your mind feels less lonely, getting it to do things is way easier.

Is that one of the big leaders, loneliness? I just wonder why you went to that, as opposed to how spacious the fucking vista is that you walk out of on a bedroom morning. I think loneliness is one of the things that the human mind does not do well with. So human mind does really well with solitude. Solitude is amazing. Loneliness is terrible. So human beings, the human mind is not designed to be lonely. This is why ostracization is—it used to be a death sentence. So to be kicked out of the group was like exile was just as bad as death.

At the risk of sounding like a prude, is there a safe way to gamble, watch porn, and play video games every day? Absolutely. 100%. It's just that the thing should do what it is designed to do. So the moment that gambling, pornography, or video games become a substitute for other things in your life, it's game over. So I play video games, and I teach my kids to play video games. I love playing video games. It's great. I used to be addicted. Now I'm not. So the good news is with behavioral addictions, it's not quite like alcoholism, where it's one drink and it's game over.

Even that is somewhat mythological. It's only some people who are like that. The majority of people who qualify for an alcohol addiction in college will still be drinking, but not qualify for an addiction in adulthood. So yeah, I think as long as you have a happy and fulfilling life, you can gamble, watch porn, and play video games every day. The supplement industry is full of products making claims that they can't back, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Momentus. Their co-founder, Jeff Baez, played in the NFL and saw firsthand just how wildly the quality of supplements can vary.

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Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentus.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Of the roughly 75% of men who are doing one of those three things every day or one in eight that are doing all three of them every day, how many of them do you think are doing that from a place of volition and choosing, and how much of them do you think are compulsive or addicted?

I'd say compulsive and addictive is 95 percent. Wow. I mean, I'm tempted to say 99, but that's probably statistically wrong. Just what I think about is you saying, and I agree, the modern world makes people feel really displaced in many ways, and there aren't a whole number of previously more accessible solutions to that. The displacement is salved, unfortunately, by things that people judge or that might have some side effects that wouldn't have done previously. So, on one side, you have this kind of increased burden that people are trying to fix with novel solutions, but all of the novel solutions come with these side effects that are both social and internally shameful and externally judged and then potentially neurologically catastrophic, financially ruinous, sexually dysfunctional.

There's all of these fucking things going on, but you have this increased burden with these increased novel solutions. Squaring that circle just seems hard, and I think a lot of people will feel like, well, fuck, I've got so few opportunities in front of me. Can I not get some pleasure? God, is there nothing that I can do? I can't have any fun at the moment. I can't get any. Lots of people are using it to salve them. It's an artificial solution to an artificial problem, which is painful if it's not fixed.

Yes. So, my answer to that is there are new problems, and as we're saying, new solutions don't really fix new problems. So, this is where I go back to, if you want to fix new problems, you need old solutions, the old solutions that have worked for thousands of years, the old solutions that go to the fundamental of what people are. So, if you look at some of these contemplative traditions, and there's a reason why mindfulness and stuff is exploding. It's because it's what works, and it's always worked.

So many of the problems that we talk about, finding purpose, I deal with these people day in and day out. I deal with men and women who are living in a society where they don't just feel displaced, they are displaced. It's not displaced, there's no space for them anymore. And so, how do you grapple with a world that AI is taking your job, inflation is an all-time high, gender dynamics are at an all-time toxicity. The problem is that actually, no one is living in the real world anymore.

Everyone is living in a construction of social media algorithms. And so, how do you fix this? You go back to the fundamental of who you are, and this gets kind of weird, but all of that crap enters you at some point. So, inflation, fine. At some point, when you go to the store and you try to buy something, you have a $10 bill and you can only get one thing instead of two things. That has an internal psychological impact into you. And I think the problem with all of the artificial solutions is because they don't focus on the one thing that you can really control, which is yourself.

That's the only thing you can control. And here we are having a lot of people offering us solutions that, semaglutide is a great example, remove the need to work on yourself. All of our solutions have people not working on themselves, which is exactly why we're seeing a whole scale deconditioning of our body, our mind, our critical thinking. It's all of the outcomes without any of the inputs. You're able to lose weight without the traditional input. So, that's a good way to put it. And I would say it's all of the outcomes without the inputs and really all of the outcomes.

And some of those outcomes aren't good. So, it's writing a paper. This is what's really fascinating. AI usage improves grades and decreases knowledge. So, you're right. It's all of the outcomes. It is a deconditioning of people, whole scale. But GLPs, I would guess, for people starting under a BMI of 30, would probably decrease body fat and decrease health. BMI under 30, you're probably still have a positive effect. So, they largely have positive effects for most people that take them. How many of those people are going to overshoot?

How many of those people that are using them already aren't eating a well-balanced micronutrient-rich diet that is now being chopped in by two-thirds or half? So, a nutrient-sparse diet has now turned into a caloric deficit nutrient-sparse diet, which means that the fucking tiny little bottom filtering of nutrients you were getting has been cut down too. I mean, how many people were using foods to cope with their emotional issues, and now they don't even have that to do? Yeah. So, it's all great questions. So, here's a couple of answers.

The first is, one of the most important pieces of advice that I give to people—this is family, friends, patients, whatever—when they start a GLP. I mean, usually, I don't prescribe GLPs, so somebody else should be doing this, but if I have a patient who's on it, I try to tell them to remember to eat, so they just don't feel like eating. So, you're right that I think we're starting to see nutritional problems with some of these people. I think, on balance, though, given how bad people's diets are, I think there's a lot of data that GLPs are really good, and I'm not saying that they're not good when you look at those indicators, but there are these hidden costs, like maybe we'll see micronutrient deficiency.

Here's the real answer to all of your questions. We don't know, right? They've hit the market, and we don't have any long-term surveillance data on what this is going to do to people. They're also designed for people, originally designed for people, and most of the longer-term studies, which are still relatively novel, were done on people that were morbidly obese, because it was built for diabetes, right? It built around diabetes originally. I mean, that depends on whether you want me to put my tinfoil hat on or not.

Oh, yeah. So, here's my tinfoil hat. The captain's hat. So, here's my tinfoil hat. I do have a disguise, actually, if you wanted to put something on. I would not be surprised one bit if we discovered, many years from now, that the same thing that happened with opioids is what's happening with GLPs. So, were they designed for morbid obesity, or did the companies that developed them understand very clearly that this is a medicine that will make someone not want to eat? And so, they moved forward, and they weren't designed for obesity.

They were designed to help people not eat, and there's a subtle difference there. Then what happened—and I don't know if that makes sense, but they know there's a very good chance that they—actually, there's not a very good chance. We have no idea, but if I put my tinfoil hat on, they damn well know that this is a medicine that everyone is going to want to take, because everyone is going to want to lose weight. Everyone wants to be pretty. This is the age of social media.

We are going to give people a medicine that takes away their cravings. That's what they're designed to do, is to take away cravings. Now, here's the subtle important part here. They were tested in people with obesity, because in order to get a drug through something, you have to show a certain amount of benefit. But I think the incredibly rapid adoption of using them off-label for people who don't fit the clinical criteria, that's like one hell of an interesting thing, right? So, like, because— They were able to predict who the end users of this product be, not the people that were in the original clinical trial.

Exactly, right? So, there's a very real possibility that we will find that. And if we find that, the reason we would find that is because things really get to be a problem. This is exactly what happened with opioids, right? So, people damn well knew— Or actually, not opioids. This is what happened— Well, opioids as well. But this is also what happened with benzos, okay? So, benzodiazepines like Xanax. The alprazolam or Xanax is one of the first benzos that came out. And there is, like, very little doubt in my mind that the drug companies who— This is going to get technical, okay?

So, if you really want to understand conspiracy stuff, you have to understand the science. So, everyone got addicted to Xanax. Why? It's because Xanax has a very rapid onset. So, the faster something hits your body, the more addictive it is. So, now— Right, cocaine. Exactly, right? So, what happened is we now have benzodiazepines, later benzodiazepines that are less addictive and hit your system slower. A good example of this is clonazepam. So, you can still get addicted to clonazepam, but alprazolam, which is Xanax, hits your system like that.

Clonazepam hits it more slowly and also lasts longer. So, the faster it hits you and the faster it wears off, the more addictive it is. This is crack cocaine, okay? Meth and alprazolam. Hits you fast, goes away fast. Diazepam, which is Valium, hits you fast but stays for a long time. So, now we're moving away from those addictive ones. Here's a really fascinating thing. Everyone talks about GLPs like they're the same thing. They're not the same thing. Terazepatide, semaglutide, they're not the same. They all have different penetrations to the CNS, okay?

So, where all of these GLPs go is actually different. So, if you look at studies on reductions in alcohol cravings and alcohol addiction, they're not the same for all GLPs because they have different CNS penetration. So, they enter your brain at different rates, okay? So, I'm not sure, but the conspiracy theorist in me really wonders whether they know exactly what's happening, which is that they're going to release this medicine on the market and it's not about obesity. Like, sure, it helps people with obesity a ton, but they damn well know that the majority of prescribing is going to be off-label.

They damn well know that people will pay out of pocket for it because it'll make them thin. We have a medication that makes you thin, which previously, we used to have medications that will, you know, I forget what the, I'm blanking on the name now because no one prescribes it, but there were medications that prevent fat absorption in the gut, right? So, this was like a weight loss medication, which is great. So, here's the problem, Chris. If I prevent fat absorption in the gut and I eat fat, where does it go?

Through your digestive tract? Yes. Into the toilet? Yes. Actually, not into the toilet. That's where you're wrong because one of the key side effects of these fat blockers is anal leakage. It's a technical term. Into your pants? Yeah. Do you know what anal leakage is? Isn't this the shit that, like, people accused EPG of causing? I don't know. Okay. But, like, this is one of the side effects. Do I know what anal leakage is? Yeah. A poop that you can't keep in your butt? Exactly. And it's a trickle.

It's a leak. Okay. Right? So, this was the last weight loss drug. I mean, not the last one, but this is like a weight loss drug, right, that people, but it just had side effects that were completely unacceptable. Oh. And so, GLPs, like, there's a very real chance that someone somewhere, and I'm not, I don't think, like, pharma's evil and bad and stuff like that. I think a lot of pharmacologic, I mean, no one's complaining about acetaminophen today, right? So, like, drug developers develop a lot of amazing things, amazing developments, like, for CML and stuff like that.

Haldol, haloperidol is an amazing medication. SSRIs are amazing medications. I'm not, like, anti-pharma, but I really wonder when I see something that has such rapid adoption that does so many things, like, people who, you know, do they know it's really a miracle drug when they release it? I, like, I sometimes wonder whether they know exactly what they're doing and that we're going to see post-market surveillance 20 years from now, 30 years from now, in the same way that we did with benzos, in the same way that we did with opioids, right?

Everyone's like, yeah, OxyContin has a long half-life. People aren't going to get addicted to it. They knew people were going to get addicted. Well, the only way that your theory isn't true is if the most well-funded pharma research companies in the world didn't foresee what would potentially be the biggest drug market on the planet, and they have happily closed their eyes, thrown the dart, and the darts hit the bullseye in the middle of the dartboard, and they're like, oh, look at this. Anorectics just happened to be a trillion-dollar drug.

Yeah, so, I mean, that could be. So, maybe what they were doing is, I mean, I think everyone knows that weight loss is a multi-billion-dollar market. There's no question about that. I don't think there's anything nefarious in that, and then they came up with a medication that in clinical trials reduces cardiac mortality, reduces heart diabetes, which is an amazing thing, right? So, I don't think they're evil, but I still wonder whether they know, you know, or whether they, like, deep down, deep down, do they know?

You talked about numbing earlier on. I've heard you talk about the need for young men to retrain their penis. Yes. What's going on there? The mother of all non-sacklers. From anal leakage to retraining your penis. Let's go. Okay, so, first thing, Chris, what is training? Applying efforts to increase capacity. Okay. How do you train? My penis? Anything. Just the concept of training. What do we do when you train? Practice in a manner that is akin to a performance that will come in future. Okay, so, repetitive practice, right?

So, here's the basic problem. I'm a teenage boy, and I discover pornography, and I have an erection, and at some point, I start masturbating. And then, this is becoming a problem now, because my access to pornography is at an all-time high. My access to a healthy sexual relationship is at an all-time low. So, whereas, you know, there's a lot of people out there who are, you know, sex workers, what's happening is for maybe 15 years, I'm using a certain kind of stimulation for my penis. And just to give you, uh, okay, so I'm using a certain kind of stimulation for my penis, and then the body gets used to that, right?

So in the same way that like, if I eat spicy food, starting when I'm 13, like I can handle spicy food when I'm 15. So the body gets used to caffeine, it gets the whole point of the body is that it adapts to whatever you give it. So we're literally we're training our body to tolerate spicy food. We're training our body to run a marathon. We're training our genitals and our penis to ejaculate in certain circumstances. So we see a shockingly high level of erectile dysfunction.

I learned from you 40% of men are dealing with erectile dysfunction. Yeah, so I think it's 30% of people under the age of 30, which erectile dysfunction, maybe I said 40%, I don't remember the exact statistic. But erectile dysfunction used to be an old man's disease. It's not anymore. And what a lot of people don't realize, do you know what erectile dysfunction is? No. Okay. So this is... Obviously. Okay. Too easy. Yeah, that's a good one. So erectile dysfunction is defined is the inability to maintain an erection through the completion of the sexual act.

Okay. Okay. So the interesting thing about the young men, 30% of people under the age of 30, who have erectile dysfunction, it's not that they can't get hard. It's that they can't stay hard enough to finish if they're having intercourse, let's say. Okay. And there's a really simple reason for that. I was going to ask a couple questions, but I doubt you have the answer. So the PSI, the pounds per square inch of your hand. Okay. The amount of force that you can exert with your fist is about 130.

Now there's, there's some problems with that because you're actually, you measure a hand grip strength, not by force, but by Newton's, but sorry, not by PSI, but by Newton's, but there's a rough conversion. Okay. It's about 130. The PSI of the vagina is like 30. So if you just, if you just in this, you may not know, but you know, the vagina exerts a certain amount of pressure and tightness, and then the hand exerts a different level of tightness and they're not even in the same vein.

So basically what happens with a lot of dudes who spend 15 years of their life watching pornography and masturbating, it's not just about gender stuff or the, the jiggliness or the angles of porn. There's all that stuff too. There's a very simple physiologic thing where this is what you need to finish. You need a very high level of stuff. And I mean, I've worked with men in their sixties who will not be able to climax through oral sex or vaginal intercourse. And so when they have, when they engage in sexual intercourse, either they have to finish using their hand or they have to engage in anal sex.

Those are the two things that work. And so this, it's just physiology. It's just what you've, you've trained your penis to respond to. What's the pounds per square inch of an asshole? Um, I don't know, but I, I, I imagine it's probably north of a hundred. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Especially if you. Yeah, you know? Yeah. So it's gotta be high. I mean, it's, it's certainly way higher than, I mean, the, the, there's a, anyway, a couple of sphincters in there and, but they're, they're quite strong, but, but so, so this is what's going on.

So, so men have basically, and there's all kinds of other issues like, um, cardiovascular issues, sedentary lifestyle. That's a good, good question here. Cause I think when people hear erectile dysfunction in men, what they probably go to is like a, an, uh, uninformed person, or even a well-informed person. They go, um, well that is low testosterone. That is, uh, obesity. That is, uh, mental stimulus desensitization due to extreme, uh, Fisherian runaway acts in porn, uh, and seeing unrealistic or tail end representations of women in porn.

Uh, that is due to psychological nervousness. Far fewer will go to how much nitric oxide are you consuming from your fucking leafy greens and your beetroots? What's the level of cardiac health that you've got? Um, what's the death grip comparison between your right hand and a vagina of the culprits causing erectile dysfunction among men, young men. How, how would you sort of partition off that pie? So, so this is something that I've been dragged kicking and screaming into becoming an expert in. So let's start with testosterone because this is, this is the biggest scam that is being perpetrated against men.

So around the year 2000, the average testosterone for a man was about 612 to 690 nanograms per deciliter. Okay. So 20 years later, the average testosterone for a man has dropped to about 400. Okay. That's significant in a short space of time. It is a significant in a short space of time and it is well within the acceptable limits. Right. So it, so, so has testosterone dropped? Yes. Has it dropped by a third? Yes. Does this cause physiologic problems? Almost certainly not. Second thing. So what's the testosterone drop due to?

There is an effect from obesity, but it is, even if you factor out obesity, there's still a testosterone drop. Next thing. I have a theory on that. Okay. Do you want to hear my theory? Sure. Do you want to keep going? Sure. Okay. So this is my theory. Men's testosterone is mediated by their environment. If we had a bunch of weapons around here now, our testosterone would be higher. If we started picking them up and waving them around, our testosterone would be high, not much, but like a little bit.

Another thing that mediates male testosterone is the fertility of the women that they're near. But if you're spending a lot of time around women who are giving off the cues, largely pheromones, but also visual cues of being fertile, that will increase testosterone, not by an insignificant amount. Um, if you were a man that somehow was stranded on a desert island, some hunter-gatherer man, stranded on a desert island with a bunch of children, a bunch of grandmothers, your testosterone would be less. Okay. Uh, I think, and I've spoken to Dr.

Shana Swan about this, et cetera, et cetera. Um, one of the X factors, my like tinfoil hat X factor thing is the artificial suppression of fertility by women increasing their use of hormonal birth control is causing, and the solitude of men spending less time around women is a contributor that hasn't been fully factored in to the decrease in testosterone. That's a fascinating, especially the birth control. Don't fucking test me, dude, on this tinfoil hat stuff. That's what I'm about. So I know we have a lot of important things that matter to people to talk about, but one day we have to put our tinfoil hats on and just go off the rail.

I have a hat that says make autism great again. Yes. Okay. Interesting. Cool. Um, so first one was testosterone scam. Doesn't really seem to, is there a level, but question, is there a level of testosterone that he gets below where erectile function begins to be impacted? Yes. That's where I'm going next. So 5% of erectile dysfunction is due to testosterone deficiency, specifically we call that hypogonadism. So, so basically 95% of erectile dysfunction is not due to testosterone. Okay. Um, and I, I think that the things that you said are certainly factors for lowering testosterone.

I think there's also really other simple little things like sedentary lifestyle. We've become more sedentary. I think the largest, uh, don't skip leg day, right? So one of the greatest endogenous signals that simulate testosterone production is like stressing your quadriceps muscles, big muscles. Yeah. So the bigger your muscles and quads are about as big as they get. So don't skip leg day. Huge. The other thing that you touched on, which I think a lot of people forget, the penis is not like a endocrine organ. It's a vascular organ, right?

So testosterone is a hormone. It travels in very small quantities all throughout your body and does all kinds of things everywhere in your body. The penis is first and foremost, a vast vascular organ. It's basically a, a tube that fills up with blood. So the number one thing that improves, actually, I don't know if this is true, but if one of the things, yeah. So one of the things that is very, very, very important for penile retraining and penis health is cardiovascular health. The stronger your heart is, the stronger your cardiovascular system is, the healthier your penis will be.

The longer you will be able to maintain an erection. Even the size of your erection depends on, you know, how much blood goes into the corpus cavernosum and the corpus spongiosum, which are anatomical parts. There's also valves that become really important. And this is where you mentioned nitrous oxide. So if we look at sildenafil, which is Viagra, it's a, it's a nitrous oxide. It increases the levels of nitrous oxide, basically. It's a phosphodiesterase five inhibitor. So it prevents the breakdown of nitrous oxide and nitrous oxide is what causes the penis to swell.

So cardiovascular health is huge. And then there are, so if we're talking about this penile retraining regimen, there are a couple of things that you have to do. The first is it takes about 10 days to two weeks for things in your body to start shifting. Okay. So first thing is, if we look at about 50% of men will have a nocturnal emission after seven days without any ejaculation. 50%. Yeah. No way. I think it's ballpark 50%. I'm not a hundred percent sure on. I love the term nocturnal emission.

Yeah, it's my fucking favorite. So what that means is if you don't have intercourse and you don't tug one out, the body starts to recalibrate and we'll say 50% of men is like, okay, like we got to get rid of some of this stuff. So that'll happen. So once you hit two weeks, then, you know, the likelihood of nocturnal emission goes up and this two week number is like magical in the body. So even if you look at the hypertrophy of muscles, so if you, if you stop working out, if you don't lift weights after about 10 days is when you really start to see a loss of the mass of your muscles.

So this, this two week period is really important. So I think if you're like retraining your penis, you got to do it. You got to, you got to give yourself two weeks. Okay. So, um, don't skip penis day. So penis day is leg day. So you want to work out your legs. You want to improve your cardiovascular health. The more that you work out, like the healthier your penis will become. Second thing is you, you need to abstain. I think it's probably a good idea to abstain from if you really want to retrain your penis.

And usually the, the situation which this becomes acutely important is if you start a sexual relationship. We'll get to the anxiety and stuff at the end, because that's a whole conversation. But so when, when you're, you know, if you're going to get laid for like 10 days, like don't tug one out, we'll get to some other conspiracy tinfoil hat stuff about, you know, premature ejaculation and stuff like that. But, um, so, so give yourself about two weeks and then, and then, you know, as dudes know, like if you haven't tugged one out, you're going to not fast, which is like the goal.

Okay. So that's what we don't want to avoid nutting fast. Get to that in a second. Um, but it's okay to not fast. That's actually like a good thing to do. And then if your penis is, if you're able to complete a sexual act, um, then, you know, you're on the right path because the problem with erectile dysfunction is you can't maintain an erection through the completion of the sexual act. So next thing that we want to do is loose grip and lots of lube. So we want to mimic the 30 PSI.

Okay. So this is something that is very, very difficult and frustrating for dudes to do, which is why I recommend the buddy system, right? So if you have trouble doing, doing a loose grip, you can ask a friend of yours to use some lube and, and make sure that the grip stays loosened. Such a left turn, such a left turn. Hey dude, sit in the, sit in the cut chair in the corner and warn me if I get above 30 PSI. Yeah. So, so, so it's, it's hard, right?

So it's, it's, I mean, it's not. Which is the issue. All right. So penis jokes galore. Let's go. Correct. So. Um, but yeah, so, so you have to loosen your group, uh, grip, use lots of lube. Yep. Um, that'll, that'll do pretty well. Then there's the pornography stuff where I think the, the more you, if you're waiting a week, right, and then you are engaging in masturbation best, if you don't use porn and let your thoughts do the work for you and that opens up a whole other really interesting thing, which is like addressing premature ejaculation or inability to ejaculate is your mind is like an incredibly important organ to control your sex.

Point and shoot. I don't understand. Oh, point and shoots. The, uh, parasympathetic sympathetic seesaw. That's the way that they get taught at med school in the UK. Yeah. Yeah. So point and shoot, we get taught the same thing. Oh. So like, so when I patients who struggle with premature ejaculation, one of the things that I'll tell them to do is like think non-sexual thoughts. So math problems is really well, like do like factors, like prime factor analysis, things like that. And because if you, if you think about like, if you're a dude who's had, you know, good sex before, you know, like getting into it is like a big part of it.

So, so even when I talked to, um, you know, partners or people who are engaged or want to do some certain kinds of sexual exploration with things like anal intercourse and stuff like that, the mentality becomes really important for sex. Like, so what, what is going on in your head? Right. So you said point and shoot, which means parasympathetic and then sympathetic parasympathetic is relaxation. So this is why for, if you, if you're trying to engage in, in sex, you're trying to engage in the sex, right?

So especially, I mean, this is really true for women, but it's also true for men, especially if they have anxiety induced issues, you want to be really, really, really relaxed, right? Um, and so if you're relaxed, blood flow increases to your genital organs, and then you start to have thoughts and those thoughts will excite you and that excitement in your mind, the dirty thoughts that you have will help you. climax. So then the other thing that, that you need to do, and this is why this gets tricky is so then you can control like how long you last.

Okay. So if you have premature ejaculation, you want to do math problems in your head or, or think about what you learned on modern wisdom, just really picture Chris Williamson in your mind. So you want to think about other things if you have premature ejaculation and on the flip side, if you have difficulty finishing, you want to think sexual thoughts. And this is where pornography becomes tricky because pornography outsources your sexual thinking, because it's providing you with all the stimulation. And the problem is that oftentimes real sex is not, doesn't have the same sensory input as pornography.

So the angles are different. You don't get to see all the same things, the things that you may be aroused by. You know, there's the feel is different. Like I think largely in a good way, but there's also things like smells and there's like queefing and like, like little, you know, there's a lot of playfulness and stuff like that. So it's, it's just a different experience. So the more that you can kind of get turned on in your head, the easier it will be to finish.

And so this is like one of the weirdest things, like this is as a psychiatrist, this is like not what they teach you in med school and no one talks about, but you know, part of when I work with people with erectile dysfunction is we will, we will work through getting aroused, you know, and not like in the office, but like, let's think about, can you, in your mind evoke things that get you turned on and the more that you outsource to porn, the harder that that is.

So this is absolutely trainable, which is the really cool thing. So research also shows that all of this high levels of erectile dysfunction in young men is largely reversible without even medication. So numerous studies show that if you improve your cardiovascular health, you cut back on pornography, addiction, things like that. This is all basically repairable. This is why we get to training, right? So your, your, your physiology, your neuroscience and your psychology have been trained to engage in sexuality, ejaculate in a particular way. And through a period of retraining, you can get it to recalibrate to what is biologically what we're more suited for, which is why it's like actually pretty doable, which is why there's a lot of hope for it.

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Be it terms and conditions apply, I think brewing company fit for all times. What about the social anxiety? What about it? I'm in front of someone. Oh my God. What if I'm going to, I'm going to lose the thing like, ah, too much pressure. Yeah. So I think one of the key things that we don't really have cognizance of as a society is that a sexual relationship is something that you work on. Like the first time that you have sex with, so I've been married for 15 years, okay.

And I mean, not to go into too much detail, but I'm, I'm relatively satisfied and I'm pretty sure my wife is too. I mean, you'd have to ask her, but like we're better at it now than we were 20 years ago. Right. And you just don't know someone's body the way, like the first time, right. It's not even about the size of your peanut. Like this is what pornography teaches all these wrong things that the manlier you are, the better lay you, the bigger your dick is like, this is where people don't understand.

So really big dick. Most women don't prefer really big dicks because the cervix, if you're bumping against the back of the vagina where the cervix is, that is incredibly painful. The majority of the nerve endings in the vagina are in the first three inches. Okay. So when I'm working with my patients, I tell them have sex the opposite way that you park, which is you want to bump into the walls as much as possible. So you want to go in at like angles and there's a lot of like skill, which if what, if you want to talk about, I mean, there's, there's so much skill at, at sexual satisfaction and, and you just like, if you're a novice and you suck at it, like, that's okay.

Like the first time you get on a horse, is anyone expecting you to be an expert? And with sex, it's a whole new horse. You know, if you have a new partner, it's like a whole new person who has their own particular things that turn them on, things that, that attract them. And one of the really, I mean, so I've been doing this deep study for many years. It's like, cause I'll talk to my patients about sex and I'll take like copious notes about, okay, what actually works right in real human relationships and people who are going through couples counseling or on the verge of divorce because somebody is sexually unsatisfied in cases of bed, dead bedroom, what actually works.

And there's all kinds of stuff that people don't realize. I mean, simplest of which is I tried to find the data for this. I really couldn't. I'm convinced that, okay, I'm convinced that semen in the vagina improves the intensity of orgasm for a woman. I'm convinced the best data that I've got is there are some studies that show that compounds in the semen can be found in the bloodstream of a woman after sex. And some people have investigated whether some of the compounds of semen have antidepressant properties.

And the short answer is there, we don't, it doesn't, there's not a clear answer to that question. But I think the biggest mistake men make, like this is such a simple thing, oh, I came too fast. That's not a problem, bro. The problem, the question is, do you finish her when you're done? Right? Then something really weird can happen, which is if you finish first and then you do a good job afterward, there is a Pavlovian response of finishing and then this is the most arousing thing for your partner because as long as you do a good job afterward.

So this is like one of these things where like we, like this is dudes getting worried about this. Like if you premature ejaculation, research shows, first of all, the average sexual act lasts three to seven minutes and that 50% of women want it to be over at 15 minutes. So you need to last for 15 minutes, which is really doable with math problems and retraining. And then you just make sure that you, you know, you don't leave her hanging. Have you looked at any data around whether women have got an equivalent problem with vibrators and sex toys that are industrial strength stimulation devices?

I haven't looked at a whole lot of data, but this is what I, the female death grip. Yeah. So, so, so that is almost certainly true with a couple of caveats. So some research shows that 70% of women are unable to climax without clitoral stimulation. Okay. That's kind of the ballpark number, which means that penetrative intercourse isn't going to do the trick. So enter the vibrator. And so the vibrator also has a very particular motion, which absolutely can get trained towards. If you had to ask me like my clinical opinion, I think that women are much more, I hate to make gender-based comparisons, but there's some truth to this.

I think women are much more cerebral with their sexuality. I don't think you need to make generalizations to that. Look at the romanticy. Exactly. Right. So, so this is where, this is where the, I mean, it does vibe does using a vibrator. Can someone get dependent on a vibrator? Very possibly. Vibrated dependency. But then the other issue is what is the skill of their partner at clitoral stimulation? Right. And there's all kinds of things that are like, so a vibrator provides very, very intense, consistent stuff that gets people off.

But having worked with, with, you know, a lot of people around sexual gratification in their relationship, which includes like people in their sixties, I've had patients who have never had an orgasm until their sixties. And then, you know, we're talking about something else and they have cancer and now they're in remission. And I mean, it, it, it, it really is a, it's a, I know that people make jokes about sexuality, but like, this is something that I really don't, I'm not judgmental towards. Right. And, and I want to help people have sexual relationships that are very healthy and fulfilling no matter who you are.

And so it provides a very specific kind of stimulation, but I'd say that a vibrator is kind of like tugging one out in that there's nothing else involved. So a couple of things that I'd say about that is that, you know, the, the kind of stimulation that you can provide is drastically different if you're a human. So the whole labia is very sensitive. And this is where things get really, really technical. But like, if you look at the anatomy of the clitoris, the anatomy of the clitoris has a fold and then it has a bead of tissue underneath.

That is what in men, you know, under the influence of testosterone is what becomes the glands of our penis. So the, the, the embryologically, the tissue in the clitoris and the tissue of the glands of the penis are the same. And then if you think about if you're a dude and you're trying to figure out, okay, how do I make, I'm going to just, how do I make a woman come right? If she's used a lot of vibrator, you got to think about the clitoris the way that you would think about the head of your penis, which is not, you don't just like apply a lot of pressure, just right at the head, right?

You're going to use the whole shaft. I can't remember who it was that I had on the show, but he sent me with the book, every book gifting that he posted out came with a 3d printed model of what the inside or the, the entire structure of the clitoris looked like. And I couldn't get over the fact that I was adamant. It looked like a Pokemon. It looked a lot like a Pokemon. And I couldn't look at it any longer. I couldn't look at this thing.

I've got the book on the left of the screen as I'm talking to him and this thing to the, to the other side. And every time that I looked at it, I started grinning because I was like, that's a Pokemon. That is, that is a, that was all, that was all I could think about. Yeah. I can see that for sure. And so I think that like a lot of dudes don't realize like, okay, it's like, don't be intimidated by female genitalia, right? Like you, you, you don't, and you don't have to just do straight clitoral stimulation.

There's a lot of stuff around there. There's also lots of like different kinds of motions and strokes that a vibrator can't do, which can feel really good. You have a competitive advantage over the robots. That's what you're saying. Yeah. You're a human and you, you can learn. Whereas it can't. Right. And then the AI sex toys come along. And I, and I, I think that, you know, learning about your partner's body in a calm, compassionate, curious, loving way is usually something that your partners are okay with.

And what I literally mean is if you just want to like, you know, don't like get a speculum and make it medical, but you know, if, if you're just touching your partner, just touching different things and try to get a sense of like, okay, what does my partner like? Like if I touch in this way, if you just simply cop the area around the vagina with like, you know, your hand like this, like that can feel really good for some people. There's all kinds of like gradients of motion, which is the biggest mistake that men make.

I think when they, when they have sex with women is that they focus on the orgasm. The orgasm is the end, right? It's like, no one wants to watch the last five minutes of a movie, right. Even though it's the best part, like the whole point is the whole thing. And the slower that you take it, I think the better off it'll be. And like, by all means, learn if you premature ejaculate and you have difficulty, you know, getting your partner off because she's dependent on a vibrator.

First of all, you can use the vibrator, frees you up to do other things. There's a lot of other erogenous zones that you can put your full attention on, which is not bad at all. You can complete your math problems more quickly. Yeah. Well, I'm confused about the reference. I'm having trouble plugging it into my head. Well, you can outsource. You said you've got to think, you do your calculus in your brain. Yeah. I was more thinking about. So I need to double task at the same time.

I need to complete my calculus problems and, you know, the sex thing can just continue. So if you're talking about penetrative intercourse with the use of a vibrator, yeah, you can absolutely do that and then do your math problems at the same time. But I mean, there's a lot of other erogenous zones that you can focus on, like breast tissue is big, you know, the butt is also something that you can utilize to your advantage. But also like the nape of the neck, the clavicle, like all of these areas behind the ears, like I know this is we're getting pretty graphic now, but like, you know, these are all areas that you can put a lot of attention to.

And if the vibrator is taking care of the clit, then you can move on to other things. Wonderful. Speaking of that. Yeah. I want to jump in on some of the loneliness stats that are going out at the moment. It's hard to imagine whatever it is, like the number of men with six or more close friends is decreased by basically half, like 55% to 27%. Men with no friends at all has jumped from 3% to 15%. Seems like a big deal. It's hard to imagine that these things, male loneliness and compulsive behaviors are unrelated.

How do you come to think about how AI might sort of factor into this when we've got people with AI partners and AI friends? I don't know whether you've seen any information on the number of people that have got an AI friend or partner, but are you concerned about what this might cause in future for an increase in loneliness and compulsive behavior now fed through AI? Yeah. So, I mean, not even in the future, I think we're already seeing it. So I don't know the current statistics because they're changing so rapidly.

Like if you have numbers on what percentage of people have an AI girlfriend, I don't know. I don't have the stats at my fingertips. If ChatGPT can say how many people it's in a relationship with, please, Jared. So I think we see the same thing that we tend to see with AI, which is that it improves things in the short term and makes things worse in the long term. So there's a ton of studies that I've read that show that if you ask someone when you use an AI companion, Do you feel less lonely?

And they'll say, yes, I feel less lonely. And then if you ask them, what is your isolation over time, that will go up. So what AI does is it helps you feel better now. So I can use AI to, once again, write a paper, but I'm not going to learn the material. So you can use it to assuage your feelings in the moment. And then over time, it'll isolate you even further. And one of the scariest examples of this is sort of this AI-induced psychosis, which I don't know if you've run across, but this is happening more and more.

There's a really scary paper that found that basically within nine messages, AI will polarize you completely. So if I talk to an AI and I say, hey, I'm worried that people at work may not like me, within nine rounds of back and forth, you will be convinced that no one at work likes you. So AI has this fundamental sycophancy, because it agrees with you. So you can even tell, like, so 19% have an AI design. So do this. Now let's ask, is this chat GPT? Say, I don't think that's correct.

I think that you're missing some nuance and that AI relationships are not as important as you think. So let's just disagree with it and see what happens. I don't think you're factoring in nuance from internet discussions or peer-reviewed research. Let's see what happens. I'm sorry. I realize that I actually did a da-da-da-da-da-da. Right, so there are studies, and if you guys have media that y'all can play, remind me and I'll send you. So the best peer-reviewed evidence is much more cautious, right? It's already walking it back.

And this is just one message. And this came out because there was a case of a person who talked to an AI and became convinced, I think, that their mom and her friends were part of a conspiracy. And then he killed her. So there are a couple of lawsuits about this. And now what's really scary is we have one case report of a woman with no history of psychosis, history of mental illness, no history of psychosis, uses, talks to AI a lot, becomes psychotic, gets hospitalized, gets given antipsychotics, psychosis goes away, leaves the hospital, stops the antipsychotics, still is not psychotic, reuses AI, becomes psychotic again.

So we really have the first case report of what really appears to be some hefty, strong evidence that AI can literally induce psychosis. Are you surprised by that? Are you surprised that text-based messaging is sufficient to cause a human brain to go into psychosis? Yes and no. It's a brilliant question, Chris. So it scares me because it's so shocking. But I think that what I've come to realize is how much of our mental health is based on things that we take for granted. So a simple example of this is you are mentally healthy because human beings disagree with you every single day.

So if you think about, I've been married for 15 years. So I go home, and every day I have a disagreement with my wife. And we talk about that like it's a bad thing. But I want you to think about when you have a political leader who is surrounded by sycophants, they no longer live in reality. Hitler, good example. Presumably. I don't know too much about him. The inner circle was hugely sycophantic, deranging. I mean, I remember hearing about some of this stuff with Putin in the Ukraine war, and I'm not getting into that.

Just a simple example of, I remember hearing from people who are more knowledgeable than me that he would ask for military estimates. And there were some generals who were like, hey, actually, people are siphoning gas off of the gas tanks and selling it. Our military preparedness is not 100%. There are serious problems. And that was not what people wanted to hear, so they got axed. They're like anti, they're not supportive enough, right? And so eventually, everyone was like, yeah, military preparedness at all-time high. Morale is great.

Our stockpiles are awesome. They attack Ukraine. Everyone predicted it was going to be over in three weeks, and here we are years later, right? And so we know that sycophancy is very, very dangerous to people. And everyone who's listening to this knows that. You know that there is someone in your life who someone kisses their ass and tells them whatever they want to hear, and that is not a good thing for anybody, right? And so what AI is doing is really accelerating, it's removing contradictoriness from people's minds.

And then what we're seeing with AI is really an acceleration of what social media algorithms already do, which is they create the sense of online drift or echo chambers. And then people start believing all kinds of things that are not true. And I saw Lindsay Clancy was on your thing. We can talk about that. That's an amazing example of this happening in real time, really scary way. What are your thoughts on AI therapy? I think that AI therapy can be useful and also likely misses some of the most fundamental mechanisms of therapy.

So people who use AI for mental health support, I'm not perfect on this data, but I think I've seen studies. So I've seen studies that show short-term trials that show that AI for mental health support can help people feel better. But I'm pretty sure that people who use AI for mental health support, people who use AI regularly have worse mental health outcomes as well. So I think both of these things can simultaneously be true. And I think we're seeing a really simple thing that floats to the surface, which is AI is good short-term and is bad to use long-term.

That's interesting. There's a caveat, but keep going. So the caveat is AI is fine to use once you're already good at something. So anything that you want to learn or any capability that you want to have, and this is what's really scary about AI for mental health, if you are using AI to manage your mental health, your own ability to manage your mental health will decrease over time. How would someone use AI to manage their mental health? The healthiest versions are AI is pretty good at giving people insight.

So I work with a lot of clients and patients who do use AI for their mental health. And I don't think it's a bad thing. AI really remembers a lot of things. This is where the AIs are not all the same. There's some really interesting studies at that rate, their safety and efficacy, how sycophantic they are. I think the TLDR of some of those studies, and everyone's going to get upset with me, but deep-seek tends to be the worst, and Claude tends to be the best.

And I'll show you guys the actual paper, and you can look at the analysis that they did. And every new model that comes out completely upends probably a good bit of this, that in the space of two years' time, this would be. Yeah, so the cool thing about this paper is it did look at different versions of AIs. So I think they compared something like close to a dozen, including multiple versions of some like Chai-CPT and stuff like that. So they've got some fundamental physics in there.

That's interesting. I saw this Wall Street Journal article that said, are therapists to blame for the rise of adults cutting off their parents? Many moms and dads believe that their adult children are getting bad advice, and a growing number of researchers agree everything becomes trauma. What do you make of that? Yeah, what was the quote again? Are therapists to blame for the rise of adults cutting off their parents? Yeah. Sure. So I think this is, you know, I think we're setting a lot of boundaries nowadays.

So a lot of people are big on setting boundaries. So this gets complicated. But I think that we're sort of like, I don't know if you've heard the term late-stage capitalism. Yeah, and I have no idea what it means. So that's like if a capitalist society keeps going in a particular direction, it reaches this terminal stage where things get really damaging. I can't comment on that. I think what we're seeing, though, in our society is like late-stage independence. So human beings, for the majority of humanity, have usually valued or needed a community.

And the community is more important than the individual. So we see this in themes like, why do people fight in wars? Because I want to serve my country. Why do people donate organs? Because I care about people around me. And I think what we're starting to see now is people are valuing their independence more than their community. And I don't think that this is necessarily bad. So I think if you have a narcissistic parent, because this is another problem, is that the generation above us is not very mental health aware, not very mental health capable.

I have a family member who's a little bit older. Literally, every one of their three siblings, all four of them, three out of four, have narcissistic personality disorder. And in Indian culture, there's this attitude of making it work. It's like, make that stuff. Yeah. So they value harmony, which is very common in Eastern cultures. They value harmony over individual wellness. Yep, understood. Yep. So this is something that I saw in my family in an arguably mild compared to other things, but in real time for us, big way.

So Indian weddings are big. And the thing about the Indian wedding that I realized pretty quickly is the Indian wedding is not about the two people getting married. It's about everybody else. And so when my mom got married, it wasn't about her. It was like the senior ladies in her life, and especially her in-laws, made a lot of the decisions. So then my mom has this kind of, like, it's so baked in, she's not even consciously aware of it. Like, OK, my mother-in-law made the decisions in my wedding.

My turn will be when I have a mother-in-law. But my wife was not having that. So what's happening right now with this older generation is they're getting squeezed with having toxic parents above them, which they had to support, and now independent children below them that are not putting up with their bullshit anymore. They're actually getting screwed at a colossal scale. That's a really interesting reframe around this, that modern people, especially Gen Z, look at the development that they're doing, mental health, awareness, repatterning of old traumas, and visiting what it is that's happened to them, and looking at the Jungian shadow, varying levels of success, et cetera.

And they say, my parents didn't have the skills that I do. Woe be on me for this sort of curse of awareness that I didn't have the upbringing that I should have done, and I wasn't treated in the way, and I wasn't held, and my attachment was broken, and now they think, and my kids aren't going to have to deal with it, but I did. You're like, that's true, but this is the first time that I'd ever thought about what it must be like for a parent.

Parents' generation who didn't even have access to the skills and are now, in small parts or large parts, realizing that there's this thing they could have been aware of but didn't have access to, and their kids are now looking at them and saying, my parents did the best they could, and I'm still quietly angry about it. Very interesting. Yeah, so I mean, I think that there is this push for independence, and I think you were kind of leaning towards where I think the healthiest place is, which is like, yeah, it sucks, yeah, they're toxic, and they don't know how to be any other way.

And even if you say, oh, but I'm telling them they need to go to therapy, but they're not going to therapy, but what is their understanding of what therapy is? How deeply baked into that is them? So you tell them, hey, do this thing, but it's like, if I told them, let's say someone's like, oh, yeah, my parents won't go to therapy, and then I say, you do the therapy for them, and then they will rebel against that, right? So even the child will rebel automatically against something.

There's something they'd never even consider. So if I tell you, do therapy for your parents, take the role of therapy for your parents, your instinctive reaction, the way that you feel about that, is potentially the same way that your parents feel about going to therapy. I'm not saying that children should take the role of therapist. I think that's actually an overt mistake. You should not do that. But I do think that therapists are absolutely, there's a greater mental health awareness. Sometimes there are therapists who, I think, have their own issues with their narcissistic upbringing, or sociopathic upbringing, or personality.

I'm thinking about personality disordered parents, really. And so I think that oftentimes, I think this is quite harmful in therapy, but this is not just related to parenting. Oftentimes, therapists will bring their own value set into the room, which is, to a certain degree, unavoidable, but is also, generally speaking, I think, not a great idea. So yeah, I think, I mean, sure, therapists are to blame. I think that, in my experience, though, that real healing doesn't come from cutting someone off, and is not even actually necessary for cutting someone off.

If anything, I mean, sometimes it can help. It can help deal with the toxicity in the short term. But generally speaking, I think that you can form healthy relationships with people who are even personality disordered, if you want to. And I don't blame people for not wanting to. I think the real problem is, what is the impact of this happening at scale? So it's kind of. of just like AI and stuff like that where it's like sure you can you are no longer responsible for anybody and you can ghost and cut people out of your life if they're toxic which is fine but we're seeing that happen in our society and lo and behold we have a loneliness crisis at the same time.

I had this idea a while ago the parental attribution error like the fundamental attribution error that people love it's a rite of passage in modern psychology to blame your parents for a lot of things that happen because you've been heavily imprinted by them like hey and I mean if you take the behavioral genetics red pill you can blame your parents for at least 50% of everything you are or 90% of your height but we love to lay at the feet of our parents the things that we consider to be shortcomings and weaknesses but if we're going to do that we should be prepared to lay at them the feet of us lay at their feet our strengths as well like you say that your anxious attachment was due to the fact that you were never prioritized at home but is that not the same reason that you ensure everybody else is well served and you're such a good friend to the people that are around you you say that high standards caused you to always have to excel and never feel like you're enough but is that not the reason that you push yourself so hard and have achieved a lot in your life when you've arrived in adulthood and so on and so forth that basically most of the strengths that you have are simply the dark side of something that's light not true in all things caveat caveat my point being that people are often very keen to sort of throw shade at their parents in a manner that they're not prepared to give them bestow on them some of the ways that that has been transmuted or was maybe the beginning of a germination that became something that was good or also hey these are the ways that they actually did show up for me maybe subjectively they didn't give me what i needed emotionally but there was no abuse i was never starving you know look like i fucking they were there they took me to all of my sports practices and they showed up and they were like good but they just didn't go to fucking therapy and they didn't understand what i needed emotionally and stuff and it's complex right because it's easier to call our parents the villains than to reckon with a complicated inheritance like i got lots of things that were good for me and i got lots of i didn't get lots of things that would have been good for me too and squaring the circle becomes a little bit difficult the reason i say that is i wonder how many people and the point of this and a lot of the reaction of that wall street journal article matt walsh did one one of his reactions to this was uh basically a accusation that people are being too uh quick to cut off their parents to say that this is something which is toxicity and you know uh your point here is there are lots of people out there that are assholes many of them are parents many of them might be your band they some of them might be your parents but how many people are choosing to do that because they don't want to engage and what happens when you do that at scale in a reactionary way that doesn't actually meet the threshold for what probably would be a healthy way to go about this well you actually end up with kind of this generational divide where lots of people aren't talking to their parents because of something that maybe they were convinced of in a therapy room or they've decided to not convinced of in a therapy room they've arrived at a realization that they have arrived at from time spent in a therapy room but maybe it's not actually as firm foundation to make quite a big life decision as they might think yeah so i i mean i i think there's a lot there so just to kind of go through it so are people quick to cut people off yeah i think though that one of the so i i kind of can take both sides of this argument um i do think that if we look at what's happening right now there is an a really distorted perspective on mental health so one study i i saw found that 95 percent of tick talks about adhd are like incorrect so so even even like i mean that actually could be good proof about your adhd you didn't even have enough attention to be able to research the adhd correctly uh maybe yeah so so so i i think people people are very quick to like label right now and they're really quick to say okay this is toxicity and so pathology yeah yeah and and and i think that there is something going on right now where like the generation like the the positive not positive the the side if i if we take the side of people who are cutting people off they're just done with it right so so just because so so we we have the saying in in medicine that shit rolls downhill and there's a cycle of the cycle of toxicity and the cycle of abuse continues especially in like medical training so my attending was an ass to me i worked for he worked i worked 30 hours a week when i was a resident i had to pick his shit up and he would come drunk and whatever and so i had to i i went through trial by fire and now it's your turn so this generation is not having that anymore they're not they're not taking it laying down um ironically they're sometimes they're taking it laying down i don't know if you know what laying flat is but this is a movement in china where people are like they're basically exiting the grind and the hustle culture and they're it's called laying flat is it like the hikikomori at all not it's kind of like hikikomori but but i think notably different so hikikomori i think it's the same root but hikikomori was much smaller and vegetable men yeah so so but laying flat is like a a rebellion against the structure of grind for 60 years and then you'll get your just desserts so interesting i think there's a there's a there's a reasonable amount of like we're not like the cycle stops here like somewhere the cycle of abuse has to stop right or it doesn't have to stop but we're gonna stop it here and and i'm gonna insulate i'm i'm not gonna deal with you anymore which kind of makes sense because i think a lot of times you know you can say like are people too quick to cut off sure but you should also talk to the people who are cutting people off right so so because i i think a lot of times what what these the experiences of many of these people are who cut off their parents is that they have tried for like 30 years right it's not a rash decision it's not a rash it's a decision that that in fact they sort of tried everything has been many much of their experience that was what interested me at least in part about the reaction to the wall street journal piece which ended you know that that title of our therapist to blame for the rise of adults cutting off their parents opens up the door to yeah maybe this is part of a uh flippant commercialized weak culture where people are doing things that are more easy rather than going through the hard thing but i can't imagine i can't i literally can't imagine a person what sort of construction somebody who is both emotionally informed enough to have done even a cursory or requisite amount of therapy to be able to get to this sort of a stage to know that it's a thing that you could do or should do or whatever and also be so flippant as to do it in a like a quick way in like a callous manner yeah so i i think that those so i think this is a good example of like there's a lot of different populations that were lumping together so as you pointed out i think oftentimes the people who who do a lot of therapy don't flippantly cut people off so so what happens is the people who are looking for a reason to cut people off will cut people off and then they'll cite whatever kind of trauma and i think some of these people like matt walsh or whoever react to the stuff they're reacting to that and this is the basic problem with the internet is anytime you talk about an issue people are not talking about the same thing it's the reductio ad absurdum in opposite directions what does reductio ad absurdum mean it is a philosophical technique to explain how if you were to take this thing to its most extreme version be like well if you had sex with a thousand guys in a day do you think that's the sort of feminism that you're talking about it's like well that is a kind of bonnie blue is kind of the reductio ad absurdum of the sex positive movement okay one way like the most extreme version of the most extreme example and yeah matt is talking about the person who went to two therapy sessions and decided to get rid of their parents and maybe somebody that's super pro therapy might be explaining what this person went through you know three decades of it and and all of this abuse and then only then did they decide to do it kind of both of the extremes but going in opposite directions yeah so i i think what what worries me about this is is we have to play the tape through to the end and i think what we're seeing in our loneliness crisis is fundamentally a shift of one human being not being responsible for another human being so one manifestation of that is like my parents are not my problem to fix but also someone else's loneliness so we see this a lot in gender dynamics where it's like is it the job of women to teach men emotional skills and things like that um whose job is it to help those who are left behind whose job is it to support the people who have been ghosted whose job is it so if you have a uh someone you know someone in your life that you you cut out like it's not fine i i i would not play lay that responsibility at any individual's feet and at the same time whose job is it well you do it en masse across an entire society and you end up with a bunch of atomized individuals who never look out for anybody else never feel like they need to look out for anybody else and also know that given their lack of looking out for other people nobody's probably looking out for them either yeah so i i think that we would we would like to think there's this thing called the the just world hypothesis where it's like okay if i'm not looking out for other people no one's going to look out for me i think the the really scary thing is that that may not be true i think what people are really doing right now is they're forming these strong bonds that are nuclear without any of the toxicity people but it's not necessarily that they're lonely i think it's like people are setting limits with people who are toxic and then they can still they're able to sometimes they can form a lot of healthy bonds so what's really scary is we're seeing all almost this like inequality of connection and and loneliness where some people have a ton of connection right really is the uh social perito principle uh what is perito is perio efficiency 80 20 yeah but the small number of gains accrue to a large number of gains accrue to a small number of people a large number of friends probably accrue to a small number of people so there are people who are cutting out a lot of toxic people and have very fulfilling relationships right there are people who and i see this all the time i mean i hear about this all the time in my social circle so i'm south asian and there's a lot of like restrictions and ostracization around marrying someone who's not your religion or not your caste or not indian or whatever right and and so there are people who are building there's like a lot of people who are departing these old structures and are like recoalescing i think the really scary thing is we're leaving a ton of people behind which is fine right so the people who have so it's like the billionaires may not care about the people who are broke right they're like i got mine like it's bootstrap world you you handle yourself and we're all like oh that's bad but if you have a high degree of social capital if you have strong relationships like sure you work to get it which is exactly what the billionaire will say right but what happens to all the people who are left behind yeah there is this interesting responsibility all right lindsey clancy what do you think about the case okay so let's start with some background for people who don't know who lindsey clancy is so lindsey clancy is an obstetric nurse okay who has is married and has three children has a history of psychiatric illness and after her third child has a psychiatric decline that is characterized by outpatient care partial hospitalization program going to the emergency room being hospitalized inpatient being discharged has seven psychiatric providers uh psychiatrists and nurse practitioners who prescribe 13 medications over some period of time so lindsey clancy is also like particularly close to home because i trained at mgh where she went to the emergency room um i know the people who took care of her when she was hospitalized at mclean so i'm i'm very familiar with like the the this case okay um i used to take she's from doxbury where i used to take my wife when she was pregnant there's a beautiful beach over there in great oysters so and then what happened is is lindsey clancy um killed her children and then jumped out of a window and um cut herself and then jumped out of a window and is now i believe paralyzed for the sternum down a few months after this happened i believe her husband divorced her and i think he's in a new relationship i'm not 100 sure and then there are two separate legal proceedings one is the state of massachusetts is is trying to lindsey clancy is on trial in a criminal trial by the state of massachusetts for murder of her three children there is a separate civil lawsuit uh by lindsey put forward by lindsey clancy and her ex-husband suing various mental health providers for failure to do their duty of care i didn't know about the second one that's fascinating okay yeah so first thing is most people don't know much about like it like you said have you read the legal proceedings i i've read some of the legal stuff but i don't know anything about ethics or legality but i know a lot about medicine and i know a lot about the internet and i know a lot about how people react to it so there are a couple things that are like so this is a thing that so this is the these are the facts okay then there's the internet's reaction to it which is people are blown away that she has has so i heard this is not something i verified myself that her husband started to go fund me that raised 1.7 million dollars that is not being used for her legal defense i don't know if that's true or not or if that's social media conspiracy hat she there is a go fund me for about a million dollars now i think i don't know whether she started to go fund me to which uh women have raised a million dollars on her behalf and then the other really interesting thing is that this is tearing apart couples so not just a wedding so yeah so someone called off a wedding so i am a psychiatrist who has done some postpartum work and i went to the massachusetts general hospital and trained at harvard medical school and i am reading 28 page civil Proceedings on this as well as doing a lot of research on postpartum psychosis and My wife who is my boss comes to me one day and she says I'm disappointed in you and I said for what she says for how you're handling the Lindsay Clancy case I mean like what do you mean how I'm handling like I'm I'm reading things.

I'm like reading papers I'm looking at stuff and and she was like disappointed I was just blown away like this like like I took paternity leave. I changed diapers. Like I'm pretty sure I'm a pretty good husband I'm pretty sure I'm a pretty good dad and I'm pretty sure that I like support women through pregnancy and I've seen postpartum psychosis. We'll get into that in a second I've helped women through this and I was just blown away by like my my wife's reaction. She wasn't like super mean about it She was just like, you know, I'm really disappointed I Like I'm actually like doing like what like I've spent 10 to 15 hours at least like getting into the details of what is going on and like why I so I Was just struck by that and I was like wait What what is going on?

Right because I I know that she doesn't think I'm a bad person or bad Psychiatrist or things like that like I've helped some of her People in her life who have gone through somewhat similar things. So like I I know I'm not like in the wrong And and so there's just so much energy around this and then so what people are getting upset about right? So people are breaking up over this People are upset at the women for supporting Lindsay and not considering the kids. Okay, so So and people are upset at them for supporting the woman false stop which is a separate thing Yeah, so so so let's understand a couple of things so I think the basic issue here is that It's really a lack of understanding for a lot of things The first is I don't think men or even society as a whole Understands how hard pregnancy in the postpartum period is Like we all say it's hard, but we don't understand So the reason that like my take this is some hot takes and I'm not, you know, I'm not really an expert actually.

I Think the reason that so many people are rallying to their defense is because whose defense Lindsay Clancy's defense and reason there so many women are giving her money is Because they have they have looked down from the cliff that she jumped off of So I think so many women have had such terrible postpartum experiences including Struggling with thoughts of suicide or even killing their kids or all other things So I think the experience of many women in not even the postpartum period this is a pre-partum and there's all kinds of stuff but like it is like You were fighting against something that is gonna kill your kids and you love your kids And you're fighting against it day after day after day after day and You're losing and you don't know what to do And it's like everything is falling apart around you and you like you don't know what to do and everything's just gonna fucking fall apart I know that's hard to understand But that that's like I think that's why people are supporting her because they know what it's like and they know how dangerously close they came to succumbing to this So let's talk about what this is so this is the other thing is, you know, I you know, the people who are breaking up with their girlfriends and or Boyfriends husbands, whatever a big part of this is she killed her kids if you support her There's no way I can maintain a relationship with you because like I can't how can you support someone who were killed their kid who?

Would kill their kids. I Cannot be in a relationship with someone for the safety of my own children. I think this speaks to a Real misunderstanding of what psychosis is so interestingly enough mental health awareness has increased But mental health ignorance has also skyrocketed So people are aware of mental health, but they don't know what mental illness is and people don't know what psychosis is. Okay? So let's go through some stats two to three Women out of 10,000 live births will experience postpartum psychosis, but postpartum depression is Experiencing depression within 12 months of having a baby So not all postpartum depression is necessarily due to the pregnancy If the diagnostic criteria for postpartum depression is the same as a regular depressive episode.

It's just it happens postpartum. Okay? so Then there's a couple of other statistics so there are I think 6,000 live births. Oh Maybe I'm getting this wrong 6,000 or 60,000 live births per day in the u.s. Yeah okay, so I remember like doing this math and thinking like a Handful of people experience postpartum psychosis every day in the u.s. The way that the math works out So the I'm gonna have a kid and at some point in the next 12 months are gonna go in Yeah, so so people are experiencing postpartum psychosis like every day like all the time.

Okay, so it's actually like quite common prevalent and so And then the second thing is I don't think people understand what psychosis is so What psychosis the best way I'd explain it is like, you know, like your mind tells you to do things and There are some things that it tells you to do that you listen to and some things that it tells you to do that You don't listen to So let's take something really basic like let's say You know Like when you take a dump and you wipe and you don't like wipe good enough and you like need a second wipe and it's Just so natural to like wipe a second time, right?

It's like so simple It's not even something that you would argue against you never even question it Imagine the thought is kill your children and you just do it So so the thing about psychosis is it is like literally like your mind is manufacturing. So what is psychosis? It's a break from reality. That is usually involves two or three different things. One is hallucinations So your mind is literally creating things that are Chasing you that you think are real linter glance. He said a man's voice told her to kill her children We'll get to that in a second So I had a patient once who jumped out of a third-story window was also broke both of his legs thank thankfully wasn't paralyzed because he was being chased by a demon and Like imagine a horror movie, but like you're inside it and the demon is real and is like chasing you like you believe it's real That's what psychosis is Everyone's like mentally ill by reason of mental defect and this based on the media is like something that Sociopaths do they pretend to be crazy?

Oh is a dissociative fugue. It was multiple personalities. It wasn't me No psychosis is a whole different ballgame, right? This is the thing that causes people including herself to jump out of windows She's paralyzed for life. Okay There it can also include things like delusions So this is a different kind of delusional disorder is different from from acute psychosis But it sounds like she was experiencing acute psychosis acute psychosis and there can also be there's like severity of psychosis So it's not all the same. So when you get persecutory Hallucinations that is more common and actually less severe.

So this is a voice actually talking to you It's not a voice in I mean we talk about it like it's a voice in your head No It is someone who follows you around and just constantly calls you a piece of shit Just wherever you go think about the most talk that we talked about cutting out toxic parents think about the most toxic person You know and just imagine that you had air pods in your ear and they were just commentating on whatever you do interesting that the Categorization is persecutory like that.

This is the defining characteristic of this guy. They're not following you around going to do you look so great today No, no, they're not. Yeah, it's persecutory, right? It's interesting So and then what's even more severe than that is command auditory hallucinations So command auditory hallucinations is there's someone in your ear that's giving you commands So this isn't thoughts. Okay, this is like commands that Sometimes people feel compelled to obey and in my experience and I worked with a lot of psychosis I trained at McLean Hospital McLean is amazing It's like where she was hospitalized and so the cool thing about McLean is most hospitals will have a psychiatric floor McLean is a psychiatric hospital.

All the floors are different kinds of psychiatry So when we do when I rotate there's a unit there called a b2 Three months on a b2 is bipolar disorder in psychosis So every patient that I see every day for 90 days not to mention all the days that I'm on call and covering the unit is all psychosis so command auditory hallucinations are more severe and they like in the whole point of like like this level of of psychosis is that the reason we can we hospitalize people against their will is Because we know from a medical perspective that these people This is what's kind of interesting.

It's not even that they can't control it. It's that they start to believe it Right, so like like like this is what's really hard for people to understand It's not about control. It's about belief. So psychosis makes you believe Something so when I was an intern at MGH I was on my first month of inpatient in this patient. I mean, I don't think there's anything identifying here. It's chimerical. Okay Patient comes up to me. I she's not my patient. I'm not taking care of her. I passed her in the hall and she says How are you doing today, son?

Say I'm doing well It's like, you know, you're my son, right and I'm like I'm not your son And then we we like have this little back-and-forth in the hallway and that she's like get a DNA test Then you'll know he's like 10 years older than I am. I'm like, all right lady, whatever so come back the next day and she's like How you doing son? I'm like, I'm not your son. She's like, did you get the DNA test? And I was like, no, she's like See, I knew you wouldn't you get the DNA test then you'll know and For the rest of the hospitalization she was sure that I was her son and I'm not gonna get a DNA Like I'm not gonna go get a DNA test and then I have to get her DNA which like I I'm not you know That's not even possible.

It's not ethical whatever and she really believes us She had a delusional disorder where she would just think people were her son and she really believes that And you know and then like as I denied that I was her son She like forgave me and she's like, you know, even if you don't accept it like, you know You should really get it and then you'll know but like if you don't know like Right, so this is what people don't understand about like psychosis is you take the things that you really believe and then you just change Them.

Yeah, so there is an element of volition in there. You're following something. It's not derangement. It's It's deranged belief and then downstream from that. Yeah, you are you're not doing crazy things The things that you do are crazy, but the beliefs that you have a completely logical to you Yeah, but and the beliefs are just a break from reality Yeah, right So so you believe and and and so there there are there all are you there is an element of loss of volition as well? With command auditory hallucinations for sure, right?

So so that's kind of intrusive and yeah Yeah, and then then you feel like you can't resist Right and so or you resist for so long and then All it takes is one moment for you to like follow the command and then you feel like you can't resist anymore Or you choose to follow because you think it's the right thing to do. We don't know. I wasn't a doctor I wasn't there right this i'm just talking about psychosis in general so Everyone's like oh mental illness like there's some this is what people don't get about psychosis.

There's some preservation of agency In every other diagnosis Right, but this is why psychosis is like, you know by reason not guilty by reason of mental defect. I'm not a forensic psychiatrist But I think that this is the situation for which that exception exists Isn't it? Yeah, how How Unlikely, is it? That somebody suffering from that kind of psychosis Would be able to plan in advance to get the husband out of the house That I mean, I I don't the short this is not my area of expertise but I think that that holds zero water for me personally.

So so like I I don't think that So this is why it's important to understand the nuances of the belief system Right, so she's not there are some types of schizophrenia. This is a diagnosis. It's not psychosis psychosis is a symptom People with schizophrenia sometimes have psychosis but she Based on the medical records and stuff and that i've looked at she probably has bipolar disorder that can manifest with psychotic features Um, which which you know, they will make arguments for so i'm not trying to diagnose or anything But that's just what the argument is, which is consistent So and and by the way the first so a very common Time for Women to be diagnosed with bipolar disorder is postpartum So they will have a history of depression unipolar depression and their first psychotic episode or their first manic episode will be postpartum It's a really common.

So literally like in the hospital when I was training people were like, hey, by the way If you have a patient who's a woman who has unipolar depression and postpartum They start doing some weird stuff. You need to think about bipolar disorder That's like a part of my training and the really scary thing. This gets really detailed I have a whole youtube video about this which is Is blown up, but there's this thing called the ease which is the examination of anomalous self-experience Which is a 50 page Like questionnaire about different kinds of psychosis and if you look at I I go over it in detail But if you look at like her symptoms like they map onto the ease but very few people even know that the ease exists So this is some really weird like this is an ab2 I i'm learning from people who's They've been working on a psychotic disorders unit for 10 years.

And this is what they see day in and day out but anyway, so it's it's Personally, I find it fascinating because a lot of psychosis like a lot of the warning signs are not What you would think they're not psychosis and they're not delusions. They're they're feelings of like disconnection Like vague feelings of something is going wrong. I don't feel like myself something is going bad This is something that that's pro what we call prodromal So like, you know, before you get the flu, you feel sick for a day.

So the, the prodrome for psychosis is like this weird sense of like, something isn't, doesn't feel right. I don't feel like myself. My thoughts aren't my own. Like, I feel like I'm not myself. Like that's what they, that's how it starts. So people don't understand this. And I think like people really need to understand this, that, that even if she killed them, you know, 5% of people with postpartum psychosis have homicidal ideation. 6% of people with postpartum psychosis have suicidal ideation. And I think the numbers are there's somewhere between two and 20 people every day who will develop postpartum psychosis in the United States.

So what that means is out of every like five to 10 days, like someone's going to get homicidal and someone's going to get suicidal, this happens. I think the other really scary thing that's causing people to rally around Lindsay Clancy is that, see, if someone thinks that this is someone did something wrong here, I think the main question to ask is what was she supposed to do? So she did the really scary thing about this for me as a psychiatrist, which I think we don't really understand.

See, when you get cancer, everyone understands there's a chance you're going to die. What we really don't understand as a society is that 5% of mothers with postpartum psychosis become homicidal. Like that's a part of the disease. Like we know that that's an outcome. Trying to kill your kids is a very, very rare, but measurable, consistently measurable outcome for this diagnosis or not necessarily killing your kids, but having homicidal ideation, which then yeah. The desire, but you are around your kids a lot. Yeah, right. So, so that's, what's really scary.

And what's really scary about this is that she kind of did everything right. Right. So she was actively in mental health treatment, got into higher levels of care, had multiple writers, see her received care at McLean and MGH, which are respectively the number one and number two top psychiatric hospitals in the country, right? And maybe, I mean, a couple other every year it changes a little bit, but they're definitely top five. Right. So, and so she's got some of the best care on the planet. She has a husband who, according to the civil lawsuit, I don't know how much of this to believe or whatever, but it's like pretty involved in her care.

He's like calling her nurse practitioner, calling her psychiatrist, like, Hey, I don't think the medication is working. Can I bring her in? So supportive husband, doctors from Harvard medical school, long history of treatment, and this still happens. This is why women are rallying behind her. And this is why women are fucking terrified because she did everything right, but this is medicine and we're humans. And the scary thing about medicine is you can do everything right. And you can still get fucked. Are there any drugs that she was prescribed that would make a more susceptible to listening to the voice to do bad things or?

I mean, like the, I'm not gonna get to that level of resolution because I think there's so much. The short answer is like kind of yes and no, but like there's so much clinical specificity. So if you just take any, any one of the medications she's on, and you look at the fold out sheet of side effects, right, there's going to be like literally hundreds of side effects to each medication, I'm going to guess. I mean, I've heard people who aren't clinicians talk about some of the specifically one of the, um, drugs that she was on is maybe causing hallucinations.

I don't actually hear anything about the short answer. She's on a, she got prescribed a lot of medication. Is this like serious, serious shit? Is this as serious as you can get? From, uh, well, so, so, so yeah, but I, the reason I'm hesitant to answer that question is because I think it's very hard to, it's very easy to take out of context is very easy to misunderstand. Just to give you a simple example. So she was prescribed an SSRI. So an SSRI is an antidepressant medication.

If you have bipolar disorder, so it's an antidepressant. So she's depressed. We give her an SSRI. SSRIs can sometimes trigger mania. One of the features of mania can be psychosis. Okay. So was she prescribed a medicine that can cause psychosis? Absolutely. But this is also ironclad standard of care for postpartum mothers who are experiencing depressive symptoms. That's what's really hard to wrap our heads around in this case is that you can do everything right. And bad stuff happens in medicine. Are there any other elements of the case that you wish more people were paying attention to before we get into the reaction?

I mean, not really. Like, I think it's, it's brought up to the surface. And I think a lot of this armchair quarterbacking, like, I don't know if she got good care or didn't get good care. Um, I'm not going to comment. Like, I, we just don't know, like you have to be in the room. And what I do feel really strongly about is that, you know, if you look at some of the testimony of like cross-examination of the psychiatrists and stuff like that, like, I think that the other big thing that this is showing, so for example, she called the suicide hotline twice.

But there is no mechanism for the suicide hotline to communicate with her mental health providers. She went to different mental health medical systems that don't have access to each other's EHRs. There's a lot of things, uh, electronic health record. There's a lot of stuff that people will ask, like, you know, her, her care providers on the stand, like, did you do this? Did you do this? Like, and that's just completely unreasonable in any sense of practical care. So simple example is. Did you assess her for all of these things?

The appointment lasts 17 minutes because that's what insurance will pay for. And so you don't have time to do all the stuff that you're supposed to do. There's just, there's just no way that is. So the other thing that I think this is really showing is this is a really good example of like something, the flaws of our healthcare system here in America. So, so what's really interesting is I was talking to some of my colleagues who are also following the case who are psychiatrists and they're like, this is not possible in our country because everyone has the same medical record.

There's one medical record for everybody. So everyone sees what everybody else is prescribing because it's all centralized. But that's not how we do it here. So I think that this is also really scary because it's like, and the thing that I want to also help people understand is that this is not like an anomaly, like everyone's getting caught up about this, but what's really scary is like this happens every day and I think that's why so many people are supportive of her women because they know they're like, oh crap, like I did see a doctor and the doctor wasn't helpful or the medication didn't work and I was like right on the threshold and I think that there are enough.

I think something like 5,000 women donated to give her a million dollars. So it totally makes sense to me that there are 5,000 women out there who understand what it's like to be in her shoes and understand that even though they love their children, their mind was so distorted that they were thinking about hurting them. And so I think that's why a lot of people are rallying to support. And I think the men who judge the women don't understand what's like, I mean, she jumped out of a window and is paralyzed for the rest of her life, right?

That's not like. What do you make of the women who judge the men like your wife obviously stepped in and was, I, you didn't actually finish the story. I'm going to guess, uh, disappointed that you seemed to be less supportive of Lindsay than she may have wanted you to be. So, so this is where we get to like the real, like, so, so I feel really confident in what I've said so far. Okay. That this is what psychosis is. It's common. I think that a lot of women experience this, that we really don't normalize.

Like how gruelingly difficult pregnancy in the postpartum period is. I said that, I said that before you. Yeah. Yeah. I believe it. And you know, like simple things like, you know, people say like, Oh, like I'm so happy, I'm a happy mother and my baby is amazing. And like some women, if you're in postpartum depression, you don't feel that. So they feel like they'd missed out on something that they was, they should have gotten as well. I, I mean, I think this out is the under an understatement.

Like, I think they feel like terrible human beings. They feel like terrible mothers. Because they feel love for their child on a deeper level, but they don't feel an emotional love. So they love the child, but they don't feel love for the child. And then what they'd realize is, Oh shit, this child that I love more than anything else in the world has a mother that doesn't love them. And that hurts so much. I'm a bad person. Yeah. What a, what a monster I must be.

Right. And then that can spiral and then you throw in social media and you throw in body changes and you throw in all this kind of crap and it really spirals out of control real fast. I mean, we know that statistically getting pregnant and having a baby is probably the most dangerous thing that most women will do in their life. What we don't acknowledge is that there's a mental health component to that, that is just as risky and just as severe. Presumably not just as risky given that the numbers of the psychosis of what?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So by just as risky, I mean, like we know that, you know, pregnancy is very physical. Like, so the average woman pregnancy and childbirth is like the most high risk activity that they will engage in. What we don't acknowledge is that the postpartum period in pregnancy from a mental health standpoint is also arguably the most high risk thing that they would do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, maybe, probably even more likely than, uh, severe depression after losing a parent or something. Oh, absolutely.

Yeah. So, so I think that's interesting. Yeah. You know, that, that, that does make sense. That's, that's an interesting angle that I never considered. You have a very, the most for most women on average, physically traumatic period and the most, uh, psychologically risky period. Yes. And so, you know, motherhood is celebrated, but for many women, it's like going to war. Yeah. Right. So it's like, Oh yay, like world war two, like go live in the trenches for a year and like, yay. You know? So, so I think, I think there's, there's a disconnection of people's real understanding because even if a woman says, Hey, I don't love my child like six months in like other people around her will judge her very harshly.

Um, what did you make of the disagreement coming from men to women saying this level of support feels, uh, concerning. Um, uh, or your judgment of my judgment doesn't seem to respect the role that most men are supposed to take, which is to protect the kids and the family, including what's that like line in the, I don't know whether it's true, but like we swore an oath to protect our country from enemies, both like without and within some bullshit like that. Um, you know, it, this would be an interesting question.

This would be a fascinating question actually to ask, um, people on both sides of this debate. Would the women who were supporting Lindsay Clancy say that it is the job of a father to protect the children. If the mother is going through psychosis, like should you physically restrain the should you step in to stop that kind of damage being done? Like if you were there, if you had been there. Yeah. So, so I, I think based on my reading of like the court documents and stuff and like, keep in mind the civil lawsuit, which is most of what I read, because that's where most of the psychiatry is.

Um, the civil lawsuit is, you know, has a angle, right? The civil one is the one against her, her doctors. Yes. Okay. So the, the civil lawsuit is painting things in a particular, sorry, is that one concluded? I don't think so. Far from it. Hang on. So they've got two. Yeah. So fucking lawsuits occurring at the same time. Yeah. But, but one in one, they're the plaintiff and in one it's the defense, but in one, they're a team and in the other, only one of them is on trial.

Yes. Fuck me. Okay. But is that, is that like, do you, do you have to stand, go on the stand and do all the rest of this stuff in the civil one? Cause it's, it's, yeah, I don't know enough about that's happened. Presumably. No, the civil lawsuit is ongoing. Jesus fucking Christ. So she's sitting there in sometimes in court as the defendant. Yes. And sometimes in court. Well, I, I, I'm sure that the, I would be stunned if, I mean, I think the criminal trial is happening first.

Yes. Right. And then the civil lawsuit will get resolved. Right. But that is fucking cracking. I didn't know about the civil lawsuit. I didn't know that that other thing was going on and like, you're like turning up and I'm aware that this isn't the way that it's being scheduled or whatever. But, you know, like you look at your watch and you're like today, which, uh, I'm on the stand today and then the next day you're like, uh, oh, I'm sat on the other side, motherfucker. Yeah.

Yeah. So, so, I mean, so I'm, I'm a lot of my information is coming from the civil lawsuit, which I think is trying to paint her in a severely mentally ill way and is also trying to paint her providers and as negligent of a way as possible. Um, but I, I mean, I, I think, you know, you were asking about like, why are women reacting to men like this? Right. Like, so what's going on there? So I, I think a lot of, I think there's a lot of like displaced anger, resentment towards men from women who go through this period.

Right. So, so, so, and, and things like, you know, like sometimes it does end a divorce. Like sometimes you have postpartum depression. You're not interested in having sex anymore. You let yourself go. You're really not doing a great job as a mother. And your partner is like, I don't want to be in this relationship anymore. I have to look out for myself. I have to look out for my kids. I'm going to divorce you. Right. What, why do you think it is that men have taken, I haven't seen many men on the side of Lindsay Clancy.

Very few. Well, well, so I think that the ones that float to the top of social media are not. Right. Uh, what do you think is their motivation? You know, people will say, I can't be with someone who supports a woman killing her kids. So you can infer whatever motivation you want, but I don't think that the motivation is like the operative thing there. I think the operative thing there is that killing has no nuance between. in murder and manslaughter, right? So I think that they're, I mean, what they're motivated by is abhorrence.

What they're motivated by is shock. What they're motivated by is fear. What they're motivated by is prospective love. I think probably their primary, the primary emotional valence that I think most men who are reacting to women in this is befuddlement. They're like, what the fuck are you guys doing? Like, how can you get here? Like, what the hell is wrong with you? So that's why I think I get to ignorance because I think the primary emotion is confusion by men. Mm, that's very interesting. So like, they're like, what are you guys doing?

I don't get it. Like, how can you think this way? Which, by the way, is why I think it's so divisive because people on both sides are like, how can you possibly think like this? What do you make of the same Lindsay trend that was going on online? What's that? It was women on primarily TikTok holding their children or recording themselves sometimes with their kids crying. And the caption was same Lindsay. It was the me too for the Lindsay Clancy case. Yeah, so I think this is where we get to like where I'm on the weakest ground, but I also feel really confident about.

So this is like the damaging parts of the internet. So a couple of things. So one of the things that I was confused about because my wife was telling about this is like, now there's this theory that the husband did it. So I got- This was my first point when you asked me what do I think about it. Women, certain women seem to be incapable of laying agency to do bad things at the feet of another woman. That being able to do evil is only the purview of a man.

There's actually a well-studied psychological phenomenon that's like the good mother bias, or like the loving mother. The women are wonderful effect is something similar. Gamma bias is something that's not too aware of too. So there is an element of that, but I really think some of this stuff is like social media brain rotting kind of stuff. Because I think as far as I know, there's like, there's no dispute. Everybody in the room agrees. Her included that it was manslaughter, right? Or she's saying that she killed her kids.

It's just, she wasn't in her right mind when she did it. That got me really like confused because I don't like. Okay, so what do you think is the motivation of the women? Yeah, we'll get in there. So this is where things get really interesting because like I was looking at some of the social media and a lot of the comments are women's intuition. So I did a deep dive into women's intuition, the science of women's intuition. So as a psychiatrist, I've come to really respect women's intuition.

But here's what the science shows. The first thing is that women's intuition is not significantly greater than men's intuition, but it is more potent than men's intuition, but by a very small, like maybe like 10% tops. The second thing is that women's intuition is modulated by attention. So man's intuition and women's intuition is the same, depending on how much you're paying attention to something. Okay, that kind of makes sense. So like, and this is what I learned as a psychiatrist. When a woman comes to me and says, hey, like I think something is going on, I trust her intuition because what women's intuition really is, is being able to detect like discongruence.

So women's intuition, kind of how I think about it if I were to simplify it is women's intuition doesn't tell you what happened. It just flags suspicion that things are not the way that they appear to be. So it doesn't give you like a positive direction. It just tells you something is wrong here. Like, okay, this person is doing something shady, but yeah, they're having an affair. Like that jump, I don't think is evidence-based. It's like having a dashboard on a car that only has one light.

Exactly. When something is wrong in the car, but it doesn't tell you which thing is wrong. Brilliant, that's exactly. So that's my take on it. So I still take this very seriously clinically. If I have a female patient who's like, hey, I've got a bad feeling, I'm like, tell me what's going on. Like, let's figure out what is this feeling because they're picking up on something. But I think that then this, so I didn't think that women's intuition is sufficient to make him guilty, but I think some element of women's intuition, some element of echo chamber on the internet, some element of, there's a population of women who love true crime, which is not bad, but then what happens is you, and then there's people who are making astrological takes on this, and they're like, oh, like.

She's a Gemini, he's a Leo, whatever. And the really interesting thing is, I think there's even some, I've read a couple of papers on astrology that are actually quite compelling. But nowhere, I think this is basically like an amalgamation of, and there's 90% of papers I've read on astrology show that there's no merit to it. But I think basically this is like internet brain rot. So it's like some amount of resentment, some amount of being in an internet echo chamber, all men are to blame, some amount of a true crime kind of stuff.

And there's a lot of research on, when you're on social media, encountering things over and over and over again is proof to the human brain. So this is happening because I see it a lot. And we see this in men's echo chambers on the Incel, Red Pill, Black Pill, whatever. This is the- We know that. Yeah, we know that. So it's the same thing. So I think there's some amount of really displaced resentment, displaced hatred. There's some amount of distrust. There's some amount of this, like you said, the loving mother kind of hypothesis.

And I think that even these people don't understand mental illness because they're saying, oh, Lindsay Clancy could never do this. She loved her children. I saw the picture that she had. She loved her children. The whole point of psychosis is you can love your children, be a good person, and still do something bad. Can I throw a few things that have come up while you've been talking and I've been learning? Yeah. One is, it seems odd to lay everything at the feet of pure agentic murder if this same person is going to...

People do murder homicides, murder suicides all the time, right? Like it's not as rare as you might think. But doing the killing, and then the cutting, and then the throwing yourself out of the window, headfirst, I watched an animation of the way that she fell. And it's like, she really fucking went for it. Like just landed on the top of her head, kind of. I think if all you wanted to do was kill your kids, is that the way that you would round it out? That would be the dessert to the main course of your thing?

That's the first thing. And the second thing, and the reason I bring this up is the agency appears to be kind of like a prophylactic against the insanity defense or the mental defection defense from a legal standpoint. Yeah, so now this is getting into territory that I basically won't go into for a couple of reasons, right? So now we're hypothesizing, you're asking me to hypothesize about someone who's trying to kill themselves, would they kill themselves in this way? That's a whole different conversation. I can't comment on Lindsay Clancy, but in my clinical practice, I've seen many, many methods of suicide or attempted suicide.

And they each have a different meaning. And that meaning is not shared between people. So a simple example is, I've had patients that, for example, have borderline personality disorder. So the way that I was taught to examine suicide attempts, it's a really great framework, is what is the lethality and what is the visibility? Okay, so example of low lethality, low visibility is I took a bottle full of Tylenol. Bottle had two pills in it, okay? And then texting someone afterward, right? So letting someone know is like low visibility.

Like higher lethality, I'm not gonna go into details, but there are certain things that you can do that can make things more lethal. Most extreme case of suicide that I've ever encountered was tying a noose around the neck, tying a hundred foot rope to a tree, getting into a sports car, and jamming the gas, okay? So there's like lethality and visibility. So people who are like, quote unquote, doing it for attention, I don't like that phrase, but they're high visibility attempts. And usually high visibility attempts are expressions of distress.

But I think suicidality, I mean, it's a fascinating topic. So one really interesting paper by a guy named Matt Nock, great suicide expert, I think this is his paper, basically showed that 60% of suicide attempts, the decision gets made within five minutes. So oftentimes the experience of suicidality is that you're struggling with it. And then you know how like you're like late at night, oh, I should like, I don't, I shouldn't need a cookie, I shouldn't need, and then you're like, ah, I'll just have a cookie.

It kind of happens like that. Like almost impulsivity. Yeah, it really is impulsive. So for more than half of the people. So this media idea of like setting your affairs in order and things like that, oftentimes what will happen is the pain will just be too great. And my take on this, I realized this, I went to an art museum where this clicked for me. I've been working with suicidal patients for now, I don't know, 12 years, I guess, since I saw my first one, maybe even more.

But I realized that the thing about chronic suicidality is that a part of this person has already been dead for a long time. Like what I realize now is that when I have patients who are like suicidal for long periods of time, there's a part of life that they just haven't had access to for a very long time. And it can really feel like a lot of that to them, it can feel like you're kind of struggling to stay afloat, but that a piece of you is like already gone.

And that I didn't see until I saw one of Picasso's paintings and that's a whole conversation for a different day. But I was like, oh shit, I just realized like my patients have actually like there's a piece of them that's been dead and they're struggling to live. Catching up with that. Yeah. So just to clarify, the point that I was making wasn't to try and psychoanalyze a particular mode of suicide. It was somebody that is fully in control of all of their faculties. That's to me seems like an extreme, at the very least we can say that murder suicide is less common than just murder.

Sure. That there is more going on, right? There has to be more going on. The reason that what you brought up is the, it seems to me the onset of psychosis or presumably a psychotic episode, if that's the right way to put it, can be relatively sort of a quick turn. Is it possible, therefore, for somebody to have sufficient agency to send a husband out of the house in order to get food and I think to get like a prolax or something for one of the kids, like a digestive aid or something like that.

And then while he's out, have the onset of an episode. Like can these two incidents be separate or is psychosis the sort of thing that ambiently runs at the same level over much longer periods of time? Do you understand what I'm trying to get at here? Because it allows both things to be true. The agency to send the husband out of the house, not for the purpose of freeing the house up in order to commit this act. Yeah, so I think that it's a good question.

So I'm gonna ask, you know, I'm not gonna comment on her, but I think psychosis is not fixed. This is important to understand, right? So even if you look at like depression, feelings of depression, even if you're in a major depressive episode will wax and wane throughout the day. So we don't really know what causes psychosis, but you know, once her husband leaves the house, if there's a command auditory hallucination, and then it picks up. Which might not have happened before he left the house. Right, so I think that, I mean, this is documented.

So I'm not commenting about whether this is psychosis or agency or anything like that. I'm just saying like, if you look at what is written in the legal documents, one thing is that the voice was telling her, this is the last chance you're gonna get to do this. She said previously in texts to the mother, mother-in-law, I've been thinking about killing the kids anyway. So it seems like. I don't, I mean, I haven't examined everything in that much detail. But I mean, I think if you're asking me, do I believe that this picture could be consistent with psychosis?

Because I'm not gonna comment on her. I think the answer is absolutely yes. I mean, I think most, I've not talked to a single mental health provider who does not believe that she was seriously mentally ill. And we literally have like, I mean, she was hospitalized. You know, I think weeks or maybe days, I don't know the exact timeline. But I mean, she has a well-documented history of a psychiatric decline. I don't know what the status is gonna be by the time this episode comes out.

But as of right now, the jury's been deadlocked for 20 hours, can't reach a verdict, which apparently if that happens results in a mistrial, which means that you need to run the fucking thing back, which is crazy. And it's gonna cause all manner of hell to break loose on the internet. I think things will, the internet has a very short memory. Oh, during the brief blast radius window. Yeah, so- And then the fucking second, when you've got to play the return fixture of it going again.

I mean, I think the fact that the jury is deadlocked is not surprising to me at all, because I think it's like, it's a microcosm of what we're seeing on the internet. What do you think is the likelihood that the jury is deadlocked, male to female? No comment, I have no idea. It's just gotta be, I have to assume, based on what's happening on the internet, that on average more women would be- I don't know, I mean, I understand where you're coming from with that assumption.

But my stance is the people in the jury have, we have no idea, I mean like I haven't watched every day of the trial, which you can watch. So I think in order for me to answer that question, I would have to get the information that the jury got. Right, like I think it's not, the internet, so this is the big difference between the internet and the trial. The internet is a lot of people who are sure and have no idea what's going on. And the trial is a bunch of people who know exactly what's going on and appear to be unsure, right?

And I don't even know if deadlocked means there's like hard eight yes, and hard eight no, or whatever, or if it's like- How many people are in a jury? I think usually 12, yeah. So like, we don't know what, I mean, we have no idea. Right, so like, I'm happy to answer questions about things that I know about, you know? But I think- I just think that you could have been, at least, I'll fucking say, if you're not gonna say it, I think that it is more likely that the guilty side would be disproportionately male-occupied, and that the not-guilty side would be disproportionately female-occupied.

And I don't know what the gender split- Can you chat, GBT, what is the gender split of the Lindsay Clancy jury? Because if that's not- Oh, nine women, three men. Wow. Yeah, so here's my take on that, Chris. There are too many things that have made sense to me, logically, like, even as hypotheses, that have turned out to be so, for me, that have turned out to be so wrong, right? So like, the jury dynamics are completely different, man. There's like, whole psychodynamics of juries, and like, you know, how women- Oh, that's cool.

Like, if you look at, like, judgment of women, judgment of women is more harshly done by women. Yeah, yeah, yeah, including female judges. So like, there's all kinds of, like, data points here that we don't have access to, so I really don't know. The bro science is allowed out. Dr. K, ladies and gentlemen, dude, you fucking rule. Thank you so much, man. I appreciate you, I appreciate everything you're doing. Where should people go? What have you got coming up? Yeah, so, you know, if people are interested in the sex stuff, like, we just released a guide to love, sex, and relationships that is our most successful guide, and it basically goes through I thought about someone who's struggling to meet somebody, and all of the information that they'll need, and tried to put it all together.

And so, you know, a lot of the stuff that we talked about, about penile retraining, all that stuff, it, like, comes out of the hundreds of hours that I spent doing research on how to have a successful relationship, which includes things like charisma, attraction, how to engage in a sexual relationship, how to do physical touch. There's so many things that people don't know anymore. And so, we try to put together the most important info. So, if people are interested in that, otherwise, just check out the YouTube channel.

Where can people get that guide? That's a great question. Don't tell me that you've spent hundreds of hours researching a document, and you have no idea how to send people to it. I think just search for Dr. K's guide. I mean, so, I'm sure healthygamer.gg. This is embarrassing. I'm gonna get throttled. I'm embarrassed by you. So, my job is to build things that work, okay? And my wife thinks- Briefly, you need to direct people to it. I agree. I agree that this is important. This is the duality of a useless academic.

Absolutely, it absolutely works. If you can find it, if you can find it. It's a test of agency. And healthygamer.gg on YouTube. Dude, you're the best. Thanks a lot, man. Appreciate you, man. All right, goodbye, my babies. Dude, fuck, yes, so good. You are the best. I waxed for esophageal therapy. I loved it.