1080: Dr. Alok Kanojia | How to Raise a Healthy Gamer

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show, right? We have grocery delivery now. We have Amazon Prime. We've got online entertainment. We work from home. We've created a culture where like we're incredibly complacent and everything is to be brought to us. The really tragic thing about that is the easier we make things on ourselves, the less our brain gets activated to overcome difficulty.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better-informed, more critical thinker

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It'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, the Internet's favorite psychiatrist, Dr. Alok Kanoja, his YouTube channel discussing mental health and related topics boasts nearly 3 million subscribers. His wisdom is really relevant, really practical. I love the stuff that he puts out. In our conversation today, we explore drive, purpose and lack thereof, depression, hopelessness, and what we can do about it.

We also discuss anger, especially in men. We touch on in cells, pardon the pun, the rise of figures like Andrew Tate and more. We used every minute of our time together and scheduled another appearance already. So there's a lot to chew on here. I really like this conversation and I know you will as well. Here we go with Dr. Alok Konoja.

Well, show fans have been telling me to interview you for years. And so here we are, final ladle. It took me a minute to get off the block. Some of your insights into depression, motivation, escapism, they really resonate with me, maybe with past versions of me, if that kind of makes sense? Absolutely. I was never addicted to video games or anything like that, but I think a lot of us

Definitely myself included can obviously relate to lack of purpose lack of drive general feeling of not Having our proverbial shit together. So maybe that's a good place to start sure

Where in that would you like to start or how should we start? Yeah, I appreciate the clarification there because it's such a big topic that it's this is part of the problem, right? Like guys are sitting around going, okay, I should probably exercise. You know, I should probably study something for my career, get certified, I don't know, whatever, like Microsoft certified and something. So I, you know, I'm watching this on YouTube, but for the past three hours, all I did is watch like,

crappy stupid gaming things on YouTube that didn't further my career or actually teach me anything other than how to farm for gems and Warcraft or something. And like, I need to get my shit together. But also, I had a pretty good time watching three hours of YouTube eating Cheetos by the palette. You know, like, what do I do? Where do I start chipping away at this massive problem?

Yeah, so I think there's a beautiful, there's one little piece of yarn that is extending out of the ball, which is the word should. So I think if we want to really understand the crux of what a lot of people are struggling with today, what men are struggling with, especially, I think it comes down to this word should. So when you say, I should be exercising, where does that come from?

Yeah, I mean, look, I exercise all the time. But if I'm putting myself in the shoes of a guy who wasn't exercising, which is like three years ago, I was just eating Chinese takeout. And I was like, I'm too busy. I have kids. It's the pandemic. I was just like, huh, I don't really want to.

I don't want to do it. My friend started a personal training company that was actually kind of my idea, the largest chain of gyms of Canada. And he's like, oh, my God, pandemic, we got to close. I'm going to go out of business. I'm going to go bankrupt, worse off, even if I survive this, my staff's all going to leave because they've got to work and I can't pay them. And so we came up with the idea that he should have them all work online training people.

over the internet, and it turned out to be like a massive success. So he gave me free personal training for life kind of. And I was like, no, thanks. He's like, what are you talking about? People pay thousands of dollars on one for this. You're taking it. I'm making you do it. You're obviously you need this. You got to lose like 60 pounds.

And I was like, I'm fine. So the only thing that actually got me off my butt was him literally like my good friend forcing me to do personal training with a really good trainer and not pay. And I'm like, not everybody has this level of privilege where like some trainers actually going to whip them into shape, right? That's well said, Jordan. And I think it really gets to the crux of the problem, which is, hold on a second. So you talk about privilege, sure, but

Someone had to offer you tons of stuff for free and also be insistent. That's what it takes. That's the amount that they need to balance the equation for you to do something that you should do. I think one of the biggest problems we talk about lack of life-purpose, lack of motivation.

So one of the biggest mistakes that I think people make is that they view themselves as having a lack of motivation. So if I'm like playing video games for 10 hours a day, I say to myself, I lack motivation. You don't lack motivation. You have an intense amount of motivation to play video games.

You have an intense amount of motivation to stay stuck. And if you don't believe that, all you have to do is try to do something else. And what you will find is that you have very powerful motivational drivers to keep you where you are. Can I ask, though, what are the motivational drivers? Because it's not fun being a Chubbo who eats Chinese takeout five days a week.

knows he's not that good looking and could be better and used to be and has a kid like maybe this is a better way to phrase it. I had a two year old boy at the time. I mean, now he's five, Jaden. I would play with him on the floor and I would try to get up and I'd be like, oh, hang on.

And I'm like I'm 40 and I'm 44, but I was like I'm 42 It's a little early for the groaning and it's not just me being drum like my wife was like Oh dramatic much and I was like no everything hurts I don't even know if I can yeah like my hips hurt How do I roll over and get up off this hardwood floor like now I'm on my knees on hardwood and I really needed this competing motivation if

I don't know what the original motivation was, right, to be a schlub. But the competing motivation was, man, this sucks and I'm probably going to die early because I'm in this condition. That's pathetic. You could say that's pathetic. I think it's a reality for most of us. Yeah. So I think there are a couple of different things to look at here. So the first is that when you say like, oh, it's not fun being, and then you talked about eating Chinese takeout, doing this, doing this, having a body that is older than your years.

But if you sort of stop and think about that, that's like, I don't know if this makes sense, but that's an abstraction, right? That's a constellation of factors where I say to myself, okay, now I'm out of shape, now I'm eating too much, now my body hurts. But if you think about the actual moment of eating Chinese takeout, none of those things are true in that moment. Right, no, it's awesome because I'm diving into orange chicken, which is probably not even real Chinese food. It tastes amazing.

Yeah, right? So now here's the problem, is that when it comes to your brain, your brain is like, oh, there's all these weird, like, hypothetical problems, like dying early. What experience does your brain have of dying early? None. What experience does it have of eating Chinese food? Yeah, and wait too much, wait too much. So this is the problem that a lot of people don't understand, is that your brain can't outweigh an actual experience with a hypothetical game.

So this is something that we deal with a lot, especially in addiction psychiatry. So anytime I have a goal, but when I think about the goal, it's all positive. Like I'm going to get into shape one day. I'm going to have this sexy beach bod. I'm going to show up on Tinder and everyone's going to swipe right. We can think about all of these things. So in that moment, when your brain is making a calculation, it thinks about all the benefit, but it hasn't paid any of the cost.

Then what happens is there's this idea of a lot of gain with no real understanding of the cost. And then as we start moving towards our goal, we see none of the gain and all of the cost. So before I get my sexy beach bod, I have to like be a sweaty nerd at the gym for a month. And I don't even see any change. It's just all that happens is I suffer less each time I go. So then our brain is sitting there and thinking, hold on a second. Wait, wait, wait a second.

I thought we did this to improve our life. This is not improving my life. My life is getting worse. So this is literally how the brain makes calculations. Is it kind of ways like pros and cons, but it can't weigh some abstract benefit compared to the very real cost that you have to pay in this moment by not eating something that you want to eat, right? That's like a straight cost. You don't gain any life expectancy from one Chinese meal.

And then if you go to the gym, it's just suffering. So this is how we get into this problem of we're not really understanding that our brain is making these calculations. We're not aware of how it makes calculations. And then that gets layered on top. So that's one system, but layered on top of that is this idea of shoulds. So then we start thinking all these things that we should be doing, should be doing, should be doing. And should is like, in my opinion, one of the worst words you can use. Because my definition should is something that you haven't done.

If you should do it, that means it's not being done. And should is a very poor motivator. It's something that gets us to start doing something, but really can't withstand the pain of following through. If you live a life of shoulds, your life is going to be like a life of false starts and a lack of follow through. They should just can't sustain you when things get tough.

you have to have like a really good internal reason to do something. That makes sense. It's also probably why we evolved stuff like endorphins, you know, like how people run and they're like, this is amazing. And I'm like, you are on mile 49 and you're in the desert. Your whole body hurts or like these marathoners and they're just like, this is great. It's like, no, this is horrific. Their brain is just bathing in endorphins, right? Or something, there's something else going on where their brain is actually focused on this channel and not all the other channels that say you're killing yourself.

Yeah, so I think Adorphins is a really interesting example because I think it's an example of something that is very rare, right? So it's like Adorphins are like releasing something at extreme levels of exercise. It's such high levels that then makes you feel good. So the cool thing is that brains will value something that is denied to them. So as human beings, if we do something that is hard and we succeed at the end, we actually feel like really good about it.

which is also like another really interesting challenge that a lot of people face right now because the world is trying to make everything easy for us. Paradoxically, it becomes harder, but now it's like online dating, like you don't have to go to a bar, you don't have to get dressed up. You can take pictures once.

And then for the next 90 days, you can be slovenly in your bed and swipe. And someone has sold us this idea that as we make things convenient for you, that things will start to work out, right? We have grocery delivery now. We have Amazon Prime. We've got online entertainment. We work from home. We've created a culture where like we're incredibly complacent and everything is to be brought to us.

The really tragic thing about that is the easier we make things on ourselves, the less our brain gets activated to overcome difficulty.

Yeah, this is interesting. I've heard you mention games and apps are like an invasive species, right? They're kind of, they're in the ecosystem, but we don't really know how to handle them. They're running unchecked. And I mean, we as in like government doesn't know how to regulate them. Our brains are not evolved to deal with them. Our habits are not, we don't have healthy habits around this. Like I know not to start smoking.

My friends, if I told them I downloaded some dating app, they went, well, I'm married, but let's say I wasn't, and I downloaded dating app, they'd be like, oh, cool, good luck out there. But if I start smoking, my friends are going to be like, what are you doing? Absolutely. What are you doing right now? And nobody says that about, you know, DoorDash.

You're spot on. So I think what started to happen is you have these app developers and I don't think for the record, I don't think that like all of them are nefarious and evil. No. No. Think about it from like a product design perspective. Their job is just to actually enhance your experience. That's the way that they see it. Right. So when people make a video game, they're like, how can we make this video game more fun? Right. I'll never really blame a developer for having that goal. Right. The problem is that they don't even realize what they're doing.

So as they start to compete with each other, as someone figures out, okay, we can add microtransactions. As someone figures out, okay, this is what we need to do. If we have to charge someone for it, no one's going to pay, so we're going to make it free. And then what we're going to do is that's not financially sustainable. So now we need to make a premium version. Now we need to start gatekeeping certain features.

And so there's this weird, like, almost evolution of features that ends up screwing the user at the end of the day. Right? We end up in these situations where we're doom scrolling. And the reason we doom scroll is because one platform is like, if this person gets bored, they're going to switch to a different app. So we want to prevent them from being bored and we provide entertainment.

So then they make things more and more entertaining which means that we're stuck on it easier and easier and easier which then ends up hurting us and no one is aware like we're sort of figuring things out now but this has happened for like 15 years without really anyone paying attention. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to clear weeds or whatever sort of frog you've dropped into Montana.

if you've let it run unchecked for 15 years. Absolutely. I went on, I can't remember exactly where I was, but it was probably the Caribbean. So this is years ago, we were like on a tour of the six swampy marshy area. I saw a pig and I was like, what the hell is a pig doing here? It's a boar. And I said, I can't believe you have wild pigs here. And they were like, actually, yeah, we do. They're a huge problem.

How are they a huge problem? There's alligators everywhere. You can shoot pigs if they're wild. It's not that hard. They're not super fast or anything. And he's like, no, a hundred years ago, the Dutch brought them over and then like a couple of them probably got out or a boat sank with some pigs on it and they ran onto an island. And now they destroy everything because they dig. And that's like erosions like the enemy in the swampy marshy area.

And there's nothing we can do. It's like we've killed tens of thousands of these things and they're just they're hiding in like the jungle. And no one's going to go in there and get them because it's dangerous, right? There's other things in there that'll kill humans, but it's been going for so long that they've just given up on eradicating the pigs. It's not possible. And these are giant animals, right? These are not like minute parts of our human psyche in the capitalist system that are working really well for other reasons. They're just a pest.

Yeah, so I think that it's a great analogy because that's what's happening, right? So we're seeing whole scale destruction of our mental environment. So we're seeing rises in suicide rates. We're seeing difficulties forming relationships. We're seeing increased anxiety, increased depression, body dysmorphia. There's a terrible level of equality that's actually forming right now. Whereas if you look at historically mental illness, it was like divided between men and women for particular diagnoses.

Women were more likely to have body dysmorphia and anxiety. Men were more likely to have things like sociopathy and addictions. And now what we're seeing is a great equalization where body dysmorphia for men is on the rise at an astronomical level and addictions are on the rise for women at an astronomical level. So we're starting to see kind of whole scale effects of all of this technology use that is sort of like rippling throughout our brains and society as a whole.

Yeah, that's not the equality we're kind of going for. Right. Is it? Nope. It's strange because it's like we need to evolve as humans to deal with this stuff. And that's a slow process. But it's almost like with these apps that have made it so you don't even need.

Humans, I guess, in many ways, you could delivery food, online gaming, online dating that doesn't go anywhere. AI, girlfriends, I want to ask you about that in a little bit. But then it's also like, well, actually, our brains still need relationships to stay healthy. And if you're only getting AI relationships or online relationships, it's kind of like diet soda, right? Like your brain still thinks it's sweet.

But it's not really doing the thing for you that the sugar does. Not the sugar is good for you. But relationships, it's like, I feel like I have friends because I talk with these people on Reddit all day. It's like, well, yeah, but they're not there for you if something bad happens. They don't know you. Yeah. So I think it's well said. So I think that's what we sort of are seeing with technology is I see this a lot. I don't know if you're familiar with like this concept of brain rot, which has been growing a lot recently. If you look at like YouTube videos around brain rot, I was watching like some videos for kids recently.

And if you really look at these, there's something really weird going on where like there's this huge landscape of people just trying to test what works for your brain. Okay. What we're starting to see is like a lot of like YouTube videos and stuff that are just colors and sounds and like all these weird stimuli.

that create a shadow of the real thing. And that's kind of exactly what you're saying with the diet soda is people have figured out, okay, if I make a video game and you have a virtual city in the video game, that will scratch some part of your social circuitry in your brain.

And over time, what's happening is people are figuring out how to scratch more and more of your circuitry. That's where these things like AI girlfriends and stuff come in, where people are trying to create approximations of reality. And what's the measuring stick that they use? Does it activate the brain in some way?

So I think that you can have real friends online. I've certainly had real friends who will be there for you when things go wrong, but your point is still spot on that you can have a real friend who you can confide in over the Internet, but that friend can never physically hug you.

And when you get a physical hug, you get a release of oxytocin. Oxytocin has very beneficial effects for building empathy, improving social skills, reducing anxiety. So what's starting to happen is we are getting this diet virtual lifestyle that fulfills us in some ways but doesn't go the whole way. And then the problem is since we're getting this diet soda, it disincentivizes us to drink the real thing.

And since we're getting enough of our needs met, since I can get groceries delivered, since I have friends online, since I can entertain myself at home, since I can work from home, now I have no reason to leave.

And then we're creating these problems like touch starvation. Like it's a crazy term, right? For the history of humanity. That's a thing, huh? Oh, absolutely. Touch starvation, right? So this is an end stage lack of human connection that can be incredibly profound and damaging.

I feel like I've heard about this in the context of Romanian Communists orphanages where the nurses just never had the time to even change the kids because there were so many. Yeah. And it was like run by three nuns, had like 60,000 orphans, you know, to take care of. And there's all these, like they don't have any money. So it's just like the kids are like soiled for the whole day and that they're not picked up, cuddled, nothing. And they ended up with much higher levels of mental illness and damage than other kids.

Yeah, the Romanian orphanages, I mean, that's quite severe and not just mental illness. I mean, a lot of these kids were basically like non-functional. So the neglect was so severe that they were not able to do things like form friendships. Like we're talking really, really severe levels of neglect very early. Thankfully with tech stuff, I don't think we're seeing quite that level. I would hope not.

Right? So I think most people still have parents of some kind. Most people still go to school in some way and form relationships. But we are seeing things escalate very rapidly. What I find interesting about this is, well, it's super insightful, but also there's this current

trend of everything is just habit change, right? So, you know, guys like James Clear, friend of mine, love that guy, really good content and topics and game changers for a lot of people. However, I think for a lot of this stuff, habit change is kind of a red herring because

Me doing it. Let's say I'm playing video games for 18 hours a day. I live in my parents basement. I have gone. I dropped out of school. I went nowhere in my career. I'm not moving forward. It's not like, oh, I have bad habits that I need to break. Like this is beyond that. This is not just like I need to quit video games. There's other things going on here.

I would sort of agree with that, so I think that habit change is a very useful tool, and I think people like James Clear did an amazing job of, this is a bite-sized thing that you can control that will have a significant impact on your life. But I would completely agree with you that I think there's a lot more fundamental stuff, and habit change is a part of the solution, but it's not the whole solution.

I don't want to put words in James's mouth. He's not selling habit change. Like, by the way, everything that's wrong with your life is because you have bad habits. He's not doing that. But I think a lot of people are kind of like, I bought atomic habits and now I'm going to get out of this basement and like, not be depressed anymore. It's like, whoa.

I don't know about that. Thank you for the clarification. I didn't mean to imply that as well. I think what Clear did is make habit change accessible to a lot of people, which I think has a huge benefit. And you're spot on that oftentimes what happens on the internet is that everyone's looking for a silver bullet.

So whether it's James Clear or this other thing or this other thing, what tends to happen is everyone thinks like, oh, this is the big thing right now and this will transform my life. And all of those things can be useful. So I come from a different background. I spent several years studying to become a monk. And so for me, that's the root of things. Let's understand the basics of where motivation comes from.

What are the different components that operate inside you? And this is the reason, honestly, that I wanted to become a doctor is because I wanted to just understand everything about how a human being works. Let's understand not just habits, but literally your gut bacteria, if you start to diet and you eat a diet high in processed foods,

Your gut bacteria that survive off of processed foods will start to die. When they start to die, they send chemical signals to your brain that will induce cravings. So even when we're thinking about changing our dietary habits, what a lot of people don't realize is that for the first day or two, it's actually not too bad, but there is a period around four or five days in where your gut bacteria can't survive anymore. And then it becomes really hard to stick with your dietary change.

Right, red alert, we need some Cheetos stat, throw them down. Absolutely, because they're dying and they're like, no, we need this food, like you need to help us. Cheetos are so good though. Or is that just my gut bacteria talking? That's just my gut bacteria talking. It could be your gut bacteria plus your brain, right? Because your brain has learned that these Cheetos are delicious and also they've been manufactured to be like artificially delicious.

I only have them like twice a year, but it's just so glorious that it's like, I can see why this stuff is so addicting. It really is like drugs in some ways, right? Yeah, it is. So it works by that artificial activation, the artificial hyper activation of certain receptors, which is exactly what all this technology does too.

So if we look at these things like TikTok or YouTube shorts or whatever, like these are hyper-activating certain parts of us. One thing I heard you say that I thought was particularly insightful was, to your brain, the normality of eating, let's say, whatever, Chinese takeout, playing video games, watching Netflix all day, your brain is skipping to the end of the movie.

I don't want to butcher this too hard. You know where I'm going with this? Like your brain is like, hey, you could work hard and have a career and you could sacrifice and then you could build a life and then you could retire and watch movies, eat Cheetos and Chinese and play video games all day. And your brain's like, I have an idea. How about screw the career stuff and all that other hard work? Just stay where you are right now in drink, diet soda and watch Netflix and play video games all day. You could just do that. It's like a hack.

I'll kind of explain a little bit further, but I think you did a great characterization of it. So if we stop and sort of think about it, right? So I've worked with some very successful people. And the weird thing is like we talk about like, you know, all these people like want to, I don't know if you're familiar with like fire, right? Financial independence retire early. Yes. Right. So like there's this idea that, okay, I'm going to grind for some amount of time. I'm going to set up passive income. I'm going to do all these things so that I can be free.

in life. Then I'm done, right? I'm done with the rat race. I'm done with the humdrum. I'm done with the grind. Like, I'm going to grind a lot now so that I can be free later. Yeah. And then I'll ask these people free for what? What are you going to do with your freedom? I'm going to do what I want. So there's something really dangerous that happens. I've worked with a lot of very successful people, very rich people who are really struggling.

And even if you look at social media and stuff, I think a lot of people have pieced together that some people who are very financially successful are not fundamentally happy. They just don't behave like happy people. And what you tend to find, what I tend to find that's really shocking is that once you get all this financial freedom, people are like, oh, I'm going to have sex with a bunch of women or I'm going to drive a really nice car. I'm going to eat what I want to. And so what they're basically doing is trying to create ultimate material freedom.

so that they can create ultimate mental bondage. Then I will be a victim to all of my desires. If I have a desire, I'm going to fulfill it. If I want to fly first class, I'm going to do that. If I want an expensive bottle of champagne, then my desires will run wild and there will be no check to my desires. If I want to have sex with someone because I have a billion dollars, I'll be able to find someone very sexy to have sex with.

And then if I want to do something else, if I want to stay at a palace, I can stay at a palace. And so if you really look at it, what they're really looking for is external freedom for internal bondage. They will become a slave to their desires. And that's why this is what we see. So I've worked with people who are trust fund babies and just really bad addictions. And the reason is because they have no internal control of who they are.

And so what happens in our brain is our brain is sort of like, we can kind of shortcut that. You don't need a bunch of money to be able to fulfill your desires anymore. Because you can get a straight stream of dopamine and eat Cheetos.

So what's the point of working really hard and so that you can do what you want? Well, what are you going to do with your free time? Well, I'm going to do something fun. What is something fun? Play video games, but then you'll say, no, I'm going to like sail around the Mediterranean. Yeah, right. And then what's going to happen to, but your brain is like, why go through all that trouble when we can get the dopamine right here?

Yes, exactly. Like, that sounds fun. Dream about it, talk about it. Yeah. Log into StarCraft. So what am I going to do with a free day? Because all our brain has experience off. You can have this fantasy of sailing around the Mediterranean. But what does your brain know about pleasure? It's like, oh, we're going to just play video games. It's like sailing? There's a black box around that and it sounds hard. But you know what? There's a bag of dopamine in your pantry right now.

Absolutely, right? So like, why would I walk 10 miles through the desert to get a glass of water from an oasis when I have a sink at home? There's no point. That's the way that our brain sees it. Yeah. And these fundamentals, people don't understand and therefore they get stuck in these like traps of like motivation and should and now I need to form habits and now I need to do this. What people need to really do is just understand the fundamental of how a human being is put together.

And once you understand like once you open the hood and you understand how the engine is put together, then you can fix whatever problem you want. Speaking of escapism, here's some stuff for you to buy. We'll be right back.

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Just practical stuff that'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, and a better peer. Six minutes a day is all it takes, and many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Once again, that's free over at sixminutenetworking.com. Now, back to Dr. Alok Konoja.

Do you think a lot of these people who are stuck in that trap, you said they're a slave to their sort of external desires? Do those come through advertising, friends, social media? Is that kind of what you're talking about? Cause I know like it can be very hard to turn off what other people want from it. Maybe even your own parents, right? And your friends, and I know in, well, for example, the community in which I assume you grew up and there's a lot of external, like you need to be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer, or you're somehow a failure.

I didn't even have the option for engineer. It was doctor or lawyer. Like literally when I was nine years old. We're not those Indians. No engineers. No engineers. My dad pulled me and my brother aside and he said, one of y'all is going to be a doctor and one of y'all is going to be a lawyer. I was nine. I was going to say, what are you like? 10 years old? Yeah. Oh my gosh, right? Turning it on early. Your spot on that external conditioning has a lot to do with it. And this is the big problem, right? So if we look at things like social media, let's take the example of body dysmorphia in men.

So there's a lot of these videos of these dudes who are super ripped. Anabolic steroid use is at an all-time high. It's actually like a under-the-radar public health crisis that I think is going to blow up in our faces really soon. Yikes. I think it's like this is where my approach is maybe a little bit different because a lot of people will look at that and they'll say, okay, social media is the problem.

But this is where I would say, well, hold on a second. So you can have an external input, but then the system that it is entering ultimately determines the impact of that input. Yeah, that makes sense. When I see somebody on Instagram on a travel vacation, I don't get depressed. I don't even care. I can do that. But I know a lot of my friends are like, they see that and they sigh and then they like,

lament about how that's never going to be something they can do because they're just out of college or whatever. So when you lack confidence in yourself, when you lack direction in your life, then whatever sensory input you get will make you think you need to go in that direction. See, if I have no idea where I'm going in life and I watch some video of some guy like sailing in the Mediterranean, you're like, that's the direction I want to go.

And then the next day I see someone who's working out and super ripped, and I say, that's the direction that I want to go. And the next day I see someone who's dating a very attractive person, I say, that's the direction I want to go. I want to do this, I want to do this, I want to do this, I want to do this. And then we never get anywhere because all of that motivation is coming out from outside of us. And if the signal from the outside changes, then our motivation will change with it.

The real antidote is that we have to start to develop our motivation internally. It's not about what you should do, it's about what you care about doing. What do I actually want from my life? Once you start to discover those kinds of things, your motivation will be far more sustainable and very easy because it's what you want to do. It'll be just as easy as sitting at home and playing video games and eating Cheetos all day.

These panels behind me being crooked is driving me nuts. Speaking of needing therapy, that is driving me insane, and I hope nobody else can see it.

Can you see the panels behind me? I can. Now that you mentioned it, they look crooked to me and it's bothering me too. And I don't know how to fix it. Clearly the camera's like a little off. I'm tempted to also leave it just to watch a thousand people upvote the one comment that's like, what's up with the crooked panels in the background? It's definitely the camera because the whole thing. I think actually, Jordan, this is perfect because you're getting a sensory input and what is it doing to you? It's making me self-conscious right now and a little busy.

There's an external signal. Yeah. And internally, you are disturbed. Yes. And so I'm noticing a change already, right? So your mind is thinking about this thing. This thing needs to be shifted, but this is another problem that a lot of people fall into. Now your internal piece is determined by whether you can straighten the panels.

I'm literally sweating right now. Yeah, and it's crazy. And all it is is the panels. It's not even the panels. The camera like moved a slight bit off center and it's just absolutely annoying. And now you can't concentrate on anything. Lost my mind. Right. And so this is the problem is we have all the sensory input, but we don't know how to receive the sensory input.

we don't know how to modulate the sensory input. And then we fall into another trap, which is that the way that we want to fix things is by tilting the camera, which is fair enough. I'm with you. Now it's bothering me too. Yeah, great. But we need to keep in mind that this is where a lot of people lose control of their life, because if you need the panels to be straight,

In order for you to be at peace, your peace is now determined by the external world. Does that kind of make sense? It does. And for that reason, I'm going to leave these crooked for the rest of the show. And then the other reason is because I have no idea how to straighten the camera without taking a bunch of time and wasting your time, which I'm not going to do.

Yes, that was great, and I appreciate that. I was going to edit that out, but now it's like we got to leave that in. Yeah, right. Top comment. What's up with the crooked panels? So just pay attention to when the external world makes you feel a certain way. A lot of us default to changing the external world. Oh, my parents are mad at me because I didn't choose the right topic in college to study. I didn't pick the right major.

And so now what I'm going to do to make myself feel better is I'm going to cave to the people around me so that they are happy. And if they are happy, then I'm happy. This is something that especially a lot of men do because we're kind of socialized in this way. Women are socialized in a very similar way, slightly different. But we have to live up to the expectations of other people. This is where the should come from. Yes.

And then the problem is that if I have to live up to the expectations of other people for myself to be happy, that means someone manipulative in my life will figure out that if I can be unhappy towards this person, I can control their behavior. That's interesting. Bosses, parents, bosses, parents, girlfriends, boyfriends, friends, right? I can express unhappiness towards you. That makes you feel bad. And the way that you make yourself feel better is by making me feel better.

Now I control your happiness with puppet strengths. Yeah. Oh my goodness. That is so dangerous. Incredibly dangerous. That is incredibly dangerous. I'd love to discuss the sense of purposelessness that I think a lot of people are feeling. I know we're kind of already edging into that.

I've read statistics that porn addiction is on the rise. No surprise with the availability of porn having gone through the roof in the last 10 or 15 years. Suicide is on the rise. You mentioned that, especially among men. I think also, especially among Asian Americans, and that always confuses me because in the UK, Indians are Asians and in the US, Asians are Orientals, but we don't say Oriental because it's a little bit gauche. Yeah. So I'm going to assume that means just everybody who's not.

It's not white. Suicide is up. I don't know. This is horrifying because that means if you're like 18 to 24, the most dangerous thing in your life isn't even your car anymore. It's yourself, which is terrifying. Yeah, so that's for Asians, right? So Asians are raised to be very risk-averse, so they're less likely to have accidents. I see. As a cause of death.

Their accident rate is lower and they're more dangerous to themselves. So it is, I think, maybe the leading cause of death in Asian Americans aged 18 to 24. There are a couple of other things that go into that, including the inability to get help.

So there's a culture that really doesn't focus on mental illness. They really are like externally motivated. So like if you're getting straight A's, you should be happy. One of the most damaging things you can do to someone is tell someone that they should be happy because of a particular circumstance.

Right now it's their fault that they are unhappy. So this becomes their burden once again. You should be happy. Whereas the right move is to really ask yourself if you have every reason to be happy and you're still not happy. The question is why.

If you really want to become happy, it's not people bludgeoning you and telling you, hey, you should be happy. Someone told me 10,000 times that I should be happy. It doesn't make me happy. The question is to ask myself, why am I not happy? Yeah, it makes me feel worse, actually, because it's like, well, I'm supposed to feel happy. If you told me I was supposed to feel crappy, like go in law school.

first year is horrible and everyone's like, it's supposed to be miserable. Then it ends. And you're like, okay, so when it's miserable, you go, everyone's miserable, it's supposed to be miserable. It's much better than somebody being like, wait, you're not having the best time of your life. Everyone else is having a great time. What's wrong?

with you. You're the only one that's miserable. Something's wrong with you, man. We see that very clearly right now where a lot of people believe they should be happy. And that's once again, because they're fed this sensory diet of, oh, if I, like, have this particular shirt or have this particular bag, ha ha ha. I'm so happy.

If you look at beer commercials, it's people who are incredibly in shape socializing at the beach. If you go to a grocery store and you watch who's buying beer, it's not models at the beach. No, generally not. This is a huge problem. You mentioned purpose. Let's talk about that for a second. I think what happens when we get bombarded with this sensory information.

is we literally we externalize our attention. We don't pay attention to our internal signals. And then what happens is it's a war for senses. So whoever can convince us that their product will bring us the most happiness, that's what we end up chasing. So we have these very sophisticated marketing tactics, advertising tactics where everyone says, oh, by the way, you're unhappy by this thing and it'll make you happy. But it doesn't matter who wins.

You as the user will lose because you're not paying attention to yourself. So we're seeing a whole-scale externalization of our attention.

And the more we disconnect from ourselves, the harder it is to find purpose because the world can't tell you what your purpose is. You have to figure out what your purpose is. And that happens primarily through introspection. Of which we're not getting a whole lot of, yeah, I guess if getting purpose externally worked, then tiger parents, whatever, the Indian version of that or the white person version of that, that would work really well. But it doesn't. But it doesn't.

Yeah, it does. Right? We don't know what we want. There's also like another really interesting neuroscientific angle here, which is that if you look at technology usage, the other thing that technology usage tends to do is numb our emotions. Not just our bad emotions, our good emotions as well.

And once we start numbing our emotions, we don't know what we feel. And so when I lose my internal compass because I become numb internally, how are you supposed to find purpose when you don't feel anything? Right? Then the cycle repeats because now I don't know what to do. Now I'm not motivated. Let me go watch this motivational guru. And then the motivational guru will give me the answers.

I feel like I might be talking about something separate here. So stop me if I am. But when I was young, when I was like eight or nine, a friend of mine who I grew up with, who I saw recently reminded me of this, he's like, you're doing exactly what you wanted to do as a kid. And I'm like, what are you talking about? You're talking on, I mean, it's not the radio. It's the modern equivalent. And I was like, oh yeah. And he reminded me of how

We used to build FM transmitters in the basement and got plans and went to Radio Shack, which doesn't exist anymore, and soldered the thing together and put an illegal antenna on it that we fished out of someone's garbage and tried to figure out how to power it. And the guy at Radio Shack was like, this is definitely illegal, but whatever. We're like 10 or 11 or 12, whatever, years old. And then it was like decades went by or a decade at least went by a decade and a half.

And I became an attorney of all things, right? And my friend was like, I never saw that coming. And I'm like, I'm thinking, I never wanted to do that. What happened? And I remember, even when I went to law school, one of the reasons I went is because I was like, I just don't know what else to do. I have no idea. But the whole time, and when I started doing this, the podcast, I was like, this is awesome.

And then I, you know, reminded me that I always wanted to do this kind of thing, but the signals had been so drowned out by, you can't make money doing that. That's not a real job. It's something one in a million people get the chance to do that. Yeah, I forgot about it. Not I put it aside. I literally forgot about it. Forgot it even existed. Yeah, I think it's a very common experience. I like the phrase drowned out. It's a beautiful way to describe what is happening to a generation of people.

Our own internal signals are getting drowned out by everyone, including the Boomer generation telling us, hey, like you should be doing this. You should be doing this. Right? So what's going on right now, like at least in the United States and parts of Europe as well, is we were all sold in the US on this dream that if you go to college, you'll get a good job. If you get a good job, you'll be able to afford a house. You'll be able to get married. This was the dream that we were sold.

But something happened along the way where now people who go to college are saddled with a bunch of debt. The wage is relatively speaking decreased compared to things like home prices. So you have a generation of people, I think 50% of people under the age of 30 are now living with their parents who are adults. That's terrifying, man.

The pressure is real. I'll never forget. I wrote a letter of recommendation to Michigan law for this Korean kid who I knew who said his mom literally told him, I'm going to kill myself if you don't get into this school. Imagine the pressure insanely unreasonable pressure. And then he didn't get in. I'm pretty sure she didn't actually kill herself as a result, but like I too would live in my parents basement if I thought I was an abject failure because I didn't get into like Harvard medical school. And that was their dream for me since I was a little kid, even though that is patently unfair.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's what happens is we get drowned out by this external pressure. It's not just parents. So sometimes you have parents that are supportive. Sometimes you don't. But we have a pretty uniform pressure from social media to be a particular way, to be rich, to be successful, to be six figures, six feet, and at least a six inch dick if you're a dude. There's the female equivalent of thigh gap and having no thigh gap is like the worst thing on the planet. And so women are taught this kind of stuff too.

And so we're all being taught like, hey, you should be this way. And at the same time, all of these technologies are numbing our internal signals. And then we get confused why there's a lack of purpose. The lack of purpose comes from an inability to connect with yourself and being drowned out. The really interesting thing is even if you look at some of these things like pornography addiction, so one of the top variables that correlates with pornography addiction is a sense of meaninglessness in life.

It's crazy. Like people who have no direction in life basically like don't have anything else to do except for jerk off. And so they just watch a bunch of pornography. That's crazy. By the way, I'm sorry I'm hung up on this. Six feet, six figures, six inches. I've, or six feet, six inches, six figures. Sorry, I don't know why I'm hooked up. I'm short by two inches and I'll let everybody guess what I mean by that height in case anyone was wondering.

The interesting thing is, if you want to talk science there for a second. Yeah, it's talk science. It changes the subject. The majority of nerve endings for the vagina is actually in the first two or three inches. If you really look at it technically,

With this probably more important past two or three inches than length. Thank you. I was trying to make a joke that didn't work out so well, but yeah, hey, the science is important. The science is important. So there's a lot of stuff, I think, especially around sexuality where a lot of people feel like they're underperforming or whatever. A lot of people don't realize. Do you know how long the average sex act is in this house? It's a single digit minutes.

What do you think it is average society? Oh, God. It's literally going to be like five minutes or something. It's going to be shorter. Perfect. Yeah. So the average sex act lasts between three and seven minutes. So here's the crazy thing, right? So we have all these like ideas from pornography that you're supposed to have sex for like two hours. So if you actually ask women.

There's a fascinating study that polled women. And 50% of women say that if sex lasts longer than 10 to 15 minutes, it's too long. Now, there's a lot of people who will make jokes. That means that they're not having sex with like good people and that means they're not doing it right. And some of that could be true, but I think that this is where we have to be super careful because like, are we using our preconceived notions to interpret the data or are we using the data to change the way that we view the world?

And so there's a lot of stuff around sex and sexuality that people just don't understand. It's not, you don't have to be some stud porn star with a gigantic dick to have a healthy sexual relationship, whether you're heterosexual, homosexual, asexual. I would love to see the age curve because it's like college, 10 to 15 minutes. I mean, warm up maybe. And then it's like fast forward to 44 and you're like,

five to seven minutes? Is it more like five or is it more like seven? That's the average, right? So there's a lot of people under that bar and like, I don't even want to ask what it's going to be like one under 60. It's going to be like sex. I've heard of that. Yeah. So I think the age curve is actually the other way around. Is it really? Yeah. So like you generally speaking, you know, if you look at like arousal and ejaculation, the older you get, the longer it takes. That's interesting. That's part of the reason why probably people drink so much in college because it slows things down.

That could, yeah. That actually, that absolutely makes some sense. That definitely could be the issue. I want to be conscious of time here. I want to talk about emotion, especially emotion among men, because we really don't allow men to have that many emotions in society. I'm tempted to say we don't allow men to suffer, but is that something I've heard from you? Because I feel like that's, yeah.

Accurate. I'll give you all kind of like a really classic example that I've started to use that a lot of people don't like. We tend to have this view in society that all emotions are okay, right? So sadness is okay. It's okay to feel sadness. It's okay to feel fear. It's okay to feel anger. It's not just that men aren't allowed to feel emotions is that generally speaking, we have different kinds of biases for men and women and the amount of emotions that are allowed to feel. So if a woman, for example, gets angry,

She's called a bitch. So if you look at like the way that people will judge a woman who expresses anger in the workplace, it's very, very, very negative. So women are allowed to cry. That's like socially acceptable, but they're not allowed to feel angry. Oftentimes they're not allowed to feel shame. They're not allowed to be anything but happy, buoyant and supportive. So it's not just a problem for men. It's just the problem manifests in different ways.

But for men, absolutely, there are huge emotional problems. So the first of these is that we say that men are not allowed to feel emotions and people will counter this and they'll say, okay, but like men are allowed to cry, like it's okay to cry. I let men cry and I'm very supportive around that. Okay, hold on a second, but what about anger?

Is it okay for a man to get angry? Is it okay for a man to yell? Well, now suddenly this is an emotion, right? And we're allowed to feel our emotions except for anger because with a moment that you become an angry man, if you start yelling as a man, you're a threat. You're a danger. So now suddenly men are not allowed to feel anger. The big irony is that this is the only emotion that we are conditioned to feel.

Yeah, I was gonna say, anger's one of the most common emotions that like my dad basically has two emotions, happy and angry. It's like he gets frustrated or sad. It just turns into anger. Like he doesn't even have the other channels, right? They're just all blended into the anger channel. So anger and frustration become umbrella emotions for men where we're not socialized to cry or feel shame, right? So if men are told like, hey, I'm ashamed of myself or I'm scared of something,

What we'll do is offer something called instrumental support. So if you're afraid of something as a boy, what people around you, men and women will do is they'll tell you to go conquer your fear. So you're not allowed to feel fear, the goal is to get rid of fear. And then in some ways, we're conditioned to feel anger. Like you said, your dad was angry all the time. So you as a boy were like, okay, this is okay to do, but you didn't see your dad cry. So that's not okay.

And then also like as dudes like we get pissed, right? That's socially acceptable to get pissed. So something subtle happens where we're conditioned to feel basically only anger and all the other emotions are suppressed.

And then once we become adults, especially in the current day and age, which I don't think is bad. Like I don't think like a lot of what's happening here is bad. I think we just need to understand what the changes are and adapt. It's not that something is good or something is bad. That's kind of my philosophy. So now we have a really interesting scenario because sometimes I'll see this scenario where let's say that there are two people in a relationship and they are having some kind of disagreement.

One of the people is sad and the other one is angry. In this situation, do we treat both of these people as the same? Do we say that you're allowed to feel anger and you're allowed to feel sadness?

Or if you see a man yelling and a woman crying, do we place a value judgment on that? And we say one person is bad and one person is good. Interesting. Now, anyone who's listening to that, like 90 plus percent of people will say if one person is yelling and the other person is crying, one person is the aggressor and the other person is the victim. Yeah.

But as a psychiatrist, I've seen situations where one partner is unfaithful, is serially unfaithful, gets caught out, the other partner is understandably angry, and then the person who's unfaithful starts crying. And in that scenario, is it okay to be angry and okay to cry? So this is where there's like, when the rubber hits the road on a lot of these like emotional situations, men really struggle.

Women struggle too. I'm not saying that they struggle more than women or less than women. I don't think those comparative statements are useful. The challenges that women face are different because for a lot of women, the reason that they're afraid of angry men and they view angry men as aggressors is because their experience of men is angry aggression, that anger correlates with aggression, that anger correlates with abuse. I think something like one out of three women is like sexually assaulted. Jeez. So the numbers are staggering. That is horrifying.

A lot of dudes just don't understand this because we're not sexually assaulted quite as frequently, but there's a whole other problem of when we are sexually assaulted, it's okay to sexually assaulted dude. Right. Right. There's all kinds of challenges. And so what happens with men is as we're not allowed to feel these emotions, this is what's really important to understand. Just because you don't feel an emotion doesn't mean that the emotion isn't existing.

and isn't acting. You're just numb to it. There's a big difference between having the lights off and having your house flooded and the lights on and having your house flooded. House is flooded either way. It's just whether you see it or not. Then what happens is we have a lot of emotional suppression, and then these emotions then do things like impact our motivation.

This is why it's hard for me to stop eating Cheetos and leave the house, because I have so much subsurface emotion that is keeping me here. And if you talk to these people and you ask them, why don't you leave the house? They'll say, what's the point?

I tried leaving the house. It didn't work. Talk to someone today who applied for 300 jobs and got like one interview. That's super demoralizing. People who will like be on Tinder for two years and get like four matches and they'll go through thousands of people a year.

If you kind of look at that, someone will say, OK, this is logical. This is why I don't leave the house. But if you really pay attention to that, there's emotion underneath that's driving that logic. They feel hopeless. And this can become a self-fulfilling prophecy because every once in a while, if I must drop the courage to leave the house, but I'm not optimistic.

If I'm not optimistic about my ability to enter into a healthy relationship and that I can be a loving partner, it's going to sabotage my dating for sure. And at the root of this is all this subsurface emotion that is sabotaging people's lives and they don't even realize it. You must see some pretty heartbreaking things as a therapist applying to 300 jobs and getting one interview is bad. But I can imagine that's just like the tip of the iceberg. Do you talk with a lot of in cell type guys or like the toxically masculine guys who front all the time?

Yeah, absolutely. Does that always start with trauma? Always is a tricky term when it comes to science, but I'd say most of the time, yes. It's not just trauma. I think it fair to say. I would say that 80% to 90% of people who are on the red pill in cell spectrum that I've worked with, and I love working with these people, by the way. It's incredibly gratifying work.

One of the biggest mistakes that we make in society is that we like, depending on what your demographic is, if you are a criminal in some way, sometimes society will judge you and will punish you for it. Sometimes we'll say like, oh, this person needs help, right? So when someone like steals a lot, we thankfully, a large portion of society has realized that this person needs help more than punishment.

The interesting thing is that the insels are so good at being assholes that no one wants to help them. Yeah, but what they need more than anything else is help. They are this way because they've been rejected time and time and time again. They're absolutely responsible because there are lots of decisions that they've made, but the world hasn't been very kind to them. And it usually does start with trauma.

So it starts with something like, you know, getting made fun of, being attracted to a girl, having a bad breakup, having someone make fun of you. And then once that seed of trauma starts, then there's a real problem because there's this vicious cycle where they amplify all kinds of like benign or neutral things to feel really negative. But anyway, there's weird kinds of cognitive biases, but I'd say, yeah, like a lot of times it starts with trauma.

And then what happens is just like the physical body, when I get traumatized by something, I form a callus. I don't want to be hurt that way again. So then what happens is they start to do all this dehumanizing of other people. They start to restrict themselves from emotionally connecting with other people. And then it becomes a vicious cycle. Man, porn addiction is really just insidious and pervasive. I recommend switching to consumerism. We'll be right back.

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If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. Those are the ones who make this show possible. All the deals discount codes and ways to support the podcast are all searchable and clickable over at Jordan Harbinger dot com slash deals.

You can also always search for any sponsor using the AI chatbot on the website at JordanHarbinger.com slash AI. And if you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code. You can always email me, Jordan at JordanHarbinger.com. I am more than happy to surface that code for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. All right. Now for the rest of my conversation with Dr. Alok Kenoja.

The incel thing for a while was sort of an obsessive mind, right? Because I remember the genesis of this community online and seeing the most hateful stuff that I'd ever seen in my life being posted on the incel message boards. This is maybe like 10, 15 years ago now. And there was a guy on one of the boards named Elliot Roger who ended up killing a bunch of people and murdering men and women with, I think, like a machete. It was really horrifying.

And I remember just the very beginning of that because I was doing this dating coach thing back in the day. And these guys would all sort of gravitate towards that. Like these guys can help us meet women. And then they realized a lot of the people in the dating coach industry are just like shameless grifters or information marketers that were like not able to do anything to pick up artists community. Yes, you get a normal guy and you can teach him how to talk to women, but then you get a guy who's like,

Really, really far behind and you go, oh gosh, I can't really do anything for this person. They need therapy, not like practice at bars because they're shy and they grew up a certain way, right? It's like a whole different animal. There's a lot of anger that came out of this and it started to get aimed at women. And that was really disturbing to see. It still is.

Yeah, so I mean, I think that there's a lot of bad stuff in the incel world, for sure. And I think what we're starting to see is like this phenomenon. There's a lot of literature on this on online radicalization. So if you look at the way that content algorithms work, so remember that the goal of the platform is to keep you on the platform. They don't want you switching off to something else.

If we look at the human brain, the human brain has this very simple principle of tolerance. If I see one cute cat video, in order for me to get the same dopaminergic release, I need to see a cuter cat. Over time, I need more intense stimuli to get to the same dopaminergic impulse.

So we see this tolerance even with something like alcohol, right? So two beers is enough to get me drunk while I'm a lightweight. And then over time, I need six beers to get drunk. I need eight beers to get drunk. The brain works the same way. It's all the same receptors, GABA receptors in the brain for alcohol. And so actually it's different receptors, but the same basic biological principle.

And so what happens with incels is that they start to join these communities. And there's a really scary thing that happens because as they start voicing some of these things, they get banned. So then what happens is you take all of the worst players and you ban them all from the relatively normal communities where they get differing perspectives. And then they start coalescing in like corners of the internet. This is where online radicalization happens.

And furthermore, this is driven by some of the platforms too. I don't think that they intentionally do this, but this is just their platform is like, we want to do whatever keeps people engaged. So then what happens is if you watch one in cell video, your feed will show you more in cell videos. And in order to stay on the platform, you're going to watch more and more and more extreme things to get that emotional activation.

And so this results in online radicalization and then like the online radicalization in a very few number of cases. So the problem with in cell violence is that you literally have like a dozen cases that are highly, highly publicized, whereas the vast majority of in cells are like nonviolent, like 99%.

Yeah, it is almost like, oh my God, this person's gonna, not only are they weird, they're gonna murder me. And it's like, no, that's not likely to happen. You're more likely to get hit by a car walking into the mailbox. It's not likely to happen, but do you wanna take that chance? Of course not, yeah. Compare that with women who have 30% of women who get sexually assaulted, and they see someone who's an insult, and they're like, what are the odds that this person, I mean, one third is like, that's pretty bad odds. Yeah, that's terrible.

And then this feeds the cycle because now what happens is they never get a chance. This is one of their big complaints. And then they attribute it to their jawline or whatever. There's very real dynamics on both sides. It's a tragedy what happens with themselves. But I think we've actually been pretty successful at helping these people. Oftentimes it shocks me how little help and compassion they need to get on the right course.

I agree with you. I've seen this with my own eyes. And what was kind of a surprise for me was finding out that some of the most vitriolic incels, they don't actually hate women. They actually just hate themselves or parts of themselves. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's absolutely projection. And there's so much stuff that's like wrong about the red pill or incel kind of ideology. I mean, scientifically wrong.

A simple example is that they assume that all women are the same. They use like women are dot dot dot. There's no account for the variability. And working as a psychiatrist, you can look at tons of research on attachment style, sexuality, motivation, like human beings are highly individual.

Well, you can't judge a race of women based on the actions of one woman. That's just not fair. So there are some fundamentals there that are really off. And then there's another challenge, which is that they don't have any experience. And if they have no experience, they have nothing to counteract this online vitriol. That's a really good point, right? Because one of the questions is how come guys who have bad breakups don't alternate into incels and the reasons are legion. However, one of the main ones, in my opinion, is

Let's say I have a really bad breakup and I'm 20. Well, what if I had three other relationships with really great girls before that that were super nice. We're still friends. It wasn't a big deal. One, I just moved away. The other one was college and we ended up getting job, you know, and then date some crazy, horrible person in my early twenties. It's like, wow, well, that I might have a little trauma associated with it, but I'm not immediately going to throw everybody into one bucket.

But if you've only had trauma or only had being bullied or negative experiences with women and then rejection, you're right. You just don't have anything on the other end of the scale. Yeah, and we see that a lot. We're oftentimes with a lot of the insoles that we'll work with, red pillars that we work with.

They'll usually be one really bad relationship. The crazy thing is that it's not even that the woman they were dating was necessarily very toxic or anything. It's just something because sometimes you can have a bad breakup with two good people. That can happen. Then what happens is that they go through this period of online radicalization. By the way, having four relationships by your early 20s nowadays is a rarity. I'm sure.

So now we're seeing also like this social skills atrophy where like people just dudes don't know how to talk to girls anymore. It's just not something where because where everything is texting now. Yeah, I saw this with my eyes. Yeah. There's a social skills atrophy that prevents people from kind of getting back into it. And you're spot on that there's a lot of self hatred and shame.

and then we project that out into the world. So oftentimes what we find is incredibly successful when I work with a lot of like red pillars or incels. First of all, working on that internal shame, processing some of that trauma, but also teaching them how to talk to girls.

It's a part of the reason that we have a coaching program instead of like a therapy program is we realize that some point that therapy is insufficient, like nowhere in my therapy training was I taught how to talk to a girl. But if you really look at what a lot of dudes need right now, it is the ability to flirt. People don't know how to flirt anymore.

So there's a lot of like social skills that we've taken for granted, even parenting skills. That's why we wrote a parenting book first. Parenting skills that we take for granted or don't apply anymore. The world is changing. And we need to adapt our skills to change with it.

I've got a good friend who's a dating coach, a really good one for men. And I thought, oh, that's still going on? And he's like, are you kidding me? Because I got out of that business when I met my wife, and I really exited. There's way more demand for that stuff now.

Not the pickup stuff, but actual dating help from mature people who are functional. Yeah, not like dudes in bars picking up chicks. Yeah, it is quite shocking. Those skills used to kind of naturally for many of us just follow, right? You go to high school, maybe you're not great, but then you go to college and you got a buddy who's like, dude, just talk to her. Like, what do I say? And they just tell you to do something stupid and it kind of works. And you're like, there's alcohol involved. You're like, yeah, this isn't so bad. That's kind of gone for a lot of guys.

Absolutely is, right? So like we are also seeing, I think some of the effects that we're seeing are actually due to COVID. So for two years, you know, everything was virtual. We missed out on some very major social development time. And now we're kind of like behind. And once you're behind, it's hard to catch up unless someone is intentionally trying to write things.

It's super challenging. Tell me that before we run out of time, we got to talk about the AI girlfriends that are trying to fill the void a little bit. And I've seen a lot of criticism, like, oh, the AI girlfriends there, they're going to destroy men's ability to have relationships. And I remember thinking to myself, men's ability to create relationships. What are you talking about? That doesn't exist anymore. This isn't filling. This is not creating a void. This is filling a void that's been there for literally like 15 plus years and is getting worse by the day.

Yeah, so I think it's a very astute observation that oftentimes what happens with things like AI girlfriends is we use this as creating the problem, whereas the problem was there a long time ago. Thankfully, now people are talking about male mental health.

and suicide and things like that. That's getting traction and we're taking some of these issues seriously. But suicide rates for men have been four times as high as women for like 100 plus years. This has been going on for a long time. A lot of these problems pre-exist. And I think the AI girlfriend is a great example of there's a group of like lonely men who don't know how to socialize, who society is not interested in helping, by the way.

So no one's out there fundraising for the rehabilitation of insels. It's crazy. We'll do like fundraising for, it's crazy how much more, when I tell people like, oh, I worked in a jail for three months, everyone's like, oh my God, you're such a great person. These are people who are like, I don't think they understand. I'm helping convicted rapists, pedophiles, like that's who's in jail, but somehow helping criminals is a good thing, which I think it is. I think we should have compassion for all human beings. I agree.

But then you tell someone like, oh yeah, I'm trying to help in cells and it's like you. Oh my God, those guys are such losers. Yeah, there's this moral judgment that we place on these people. And they're struggling a lot. And I think the AI girlfriends, same thing is going to happen. They're going to get more sophisticated.

just like all other technology. And right now, you've got these AI girlfriends. And then at some point, someone's going to combine it with VR. And then at some point, someone's going to combine it with AR. And then at some point, someone will figure out that an AI girlfriend who throws a temper tantrum is going to be more addictive than an AI girlfriend who always does what you want. Oh my God, I didn't even think about that. That mimics the human brain, right? So real relationships have things like we had a fight and then we had makeup sex.

I was going to say, imagine your AI girlfriend gives you the silent treatment, throws a huge tantrum, breaks some of your virtual stuff, and then has like furious online virtual sex with you. And guys are like, oh, I'm into that. And it's like, well, you could have like a normal relationship. Human beings are into that, right? So anytime we have conflict and then when we rejoin, that's how bonds form. So I hadn't even thought about breaking your things online, but they start deleting things from your, deleting your loot boxes and you're like, damn you.

Some company is going to realize that you have an AI girlfriend that's going to integrate with pornography, but to unlock the most intense pornography. You have to go through this sequence of them having some kind of problem, right? It's going to be crazy. And what's going to happen is we're going to approximate human relationships more and more and more. And as we figure out how all those things happen, things will get more addictive and things will get worse. Can you even imagine?

Like, guys are getting into this now, right? Because they're like, oh, women, I can't talk to them. They're too complicated. There's too much drama. And then it's like in five, 10 years, it's going to be like, I just can't with AI women, man. They're too annoying. They get this too much drama. They're deleting my loot crates. I'm all for flesh. Yeah, flesh and bones women from now on, man. I'm swearing off the AI chick too much drama.

I think the really scary thing is that the companies who make this stuff will titrate it, right? So they'll keep it at the level that keeps people engaged. Yeah, it's going to be addicting instead of healthy. Yeah, they'll figure out what's too much and what's too little and they'll find that right threshold. This may sound very bleak, but I think the only reason that this invasive species is a problem is because we as human beings have not trained ourselves to resist it.

Right, we let this pig into the swamp and we let it run wild. We didn't even try to do anything against it. The good news that we've seen is that it doesn't take a whole lot. It takes like maybe three or four months of work. There's some evidence that even watching our YouTube channel improves some mental health outcomes by about 10%. We're trying to put together a study to really look into that. So we've found a signal, but it's not like a research finding because we didn't do a formal study yet.

But the good news is that as you start to learn some of these things like reducing your alexithymia, which means increasing your emotional awareness, as you stop numbing yourself, as you start introspecting, as you start to cut back some on your technological input, as you work on your social skills, as you work on your confidence.

We have this awesome thing that we used to do way more called social sandbox, which was like 120 to 200 people would show up. And we would practice social skills for like an hour and really fantastic outcomes. People learned a lot. They're like, Oh, I want to break up with this person. I don't know what to say. We're going to go through it three or four times. Hey, it went great. So the good news is that the only reason I think we're losing this war and everything seems so dire is because we actually haven't been fighting back. Right. There's very little regulation.

There is very little personal training. If we think about drug use and alcohol, we have parents who will regularly discuss this with their kids. They'll say, hey, I know you're 15 now. People are going to want to start drinking. People are going to want to start smoking. Here's what's going on. Doctors are trained to talk about it. Parents know how to talk about it, but no one knows how to talk about technology. People are at a loss.

I'm pretty optimistic. We've seen some real turnarounds with some really hardcore incels. I think a lot of stuff from Red Pill, frankly, is pretty good. A lot of it is they'll now advocate that you go see a therapist. They advocate that you become independent. They advocate that you develop confidence. Part of the reason that these people are so successful is that they're the only ones that offer solutions.

By these people, you mean like the Andrew Tate Bugatti man fluencers who are resonating so hard? Yeah. So I think a lot of people don't like to hear this and they don't really think about it. But why is Andrew Tate? Why do you think Andrew Tate is so successful? Yeah. Well, they're resonating super hard with a certain demographic and it's really easy to trash these guys. There's plenty to trash these guys for. Don't get me wrong.

Yeah, but we need to be listening and paying attention to why these guys are so insanely popular because that's where the information is. And frankly, they're the only guys out there validating men's concerns, right? Some men's concerns right now. Completely agree. That's my read on it too. So right now, if you're a man and you're struggling, people will tell you your privilege. You shouldn't be struggling. That's the most common answer that men receive. And so there's only one group of people who say, yeah, your life is shit. Here's how to fix it.

And those tend to be these like toxic myseogenistic influencers, right? We don't have healthy men saying, hey, I know your life is hard here. Let me help you. And by the way, you don't have to become an asshole and myseogenistic in order to develop confidence. These two things don't have to go hand in hand.

It's tough. You almost have to go through that phase, which hopefully it's a phase to get through the other side. Look, I would love also if it didn't involve being super gross and aggro for no reason. But if you think about it, it's almost like just dudes hitting the emotional part of puberty really late in the game. Like a 13 year old's like, yeah.

Bitch, that's a mat. You just like roll your eyes and you're like, oh, hormones. You check your watch. You're like, it's another two years. But when someone's 25 and is doing that, you're like, ugh, I don't want to be around this person. But it's not necessarily, yeah, it's almost like they're just going through that phase late and it's cringy and it's horrible, but it's horrible for everybody, especially them.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think another thing that we're kind of seeing is a lack of male leadership. So if you look at like, there's a really famous study on elephants, where if you look at like adolescent elephants who are delinquents, the number one thing that leads to adolescent elephants being delinquents and like doing things like even sexual assault and all this kind of stuff is the absence of a dominant male elephant in the tribe.

So generally speaking, even when I was 13 and I was flexing my misogynistic wings and what put me in check was other dudes. I joined a fraternity in college and they're like, hey, bro, that's not cool.

And it's funny because I work with some esports professionals, and I see this a lot too, where when there's an older, wiser, normal esports, old hand at esports who's like 24, and there's some 16 year old hot stuff kid. It's the 24 year old who kind of calms them down. And I think what we're starting to see in our society is a lack of that. Yeah.

older male guidance because we're so online, because there's online radicalization, you know, because you're joining these communities where the people who are happily married with kids, you don't hang out in in self-forms and I don't either. Yeah. So there's a segregation of society where we're seeing more radicalization because men are not helping men. That's interesting. It's vogue to blame women, but I think like we're just as much to blame.

100% agree. I remember when I played football in middle school there was this like thuggish kid who was from a poor area and he had transferred into our school and his brother showed up and he was also like this kind of gangstery dude and I remember a lot of us were trying to impress him by being like yeah dumb girls they don't know anything and I remember he was like guys guys guys guys

Don't even start that talk. I know you don't really mean it. I know you're just trying to front. You think you're hard? Hard guys don't talk like that. Hard guys respect their ladies. And I remember being like, what am I seeing right now? I've never heard this before from anyone, especially a cool, tough guy. And we immediately cut that shit out. Like nobody had another word of that crap for the rest of our middle school career. It was over. I think that's what's absent right now.

Some of these people who study like male dynamics will sort of point out this. Some people attribute this to things like higher divorce rates and stuff like that, and I'm sure that that has something to do with it. But I think it's really challenging because these people don't have somewhere else to turn. They're full of resentment. They get rejected by society. People don't really give them a chance. Actually, that's not entirely true. Sometimes they get second chances, third chances, and fourth chances, and they screw them up over and over and over again.

And then there's someone there who's got their arms open waiting to accept you and saying, yeah, your life is hard. Here's how I'm going to teach you to fix it. And then the other really scary thing that I think people have difficulty admitting is that a lot of that stuff does work. Like that's the other thing that we need to really like understand.

is that when you start devaluing other human beings, it makes it easier for you to relate to them with a lack of confidence. It does, right? So if I don't care about you, then I'm not going to be anxious about what you think of me. So it's a very, very toxic solution, but it is a solution.

The problem that I found from, again, from like doing the dating coach thing back in the day is you also screen out the high confidence, high quality women that are growing would otherwise have been in your life. Because if you start going, I'm going to devalue people, but okay, you just lost the top 20% of confident, well adjusted, healthy women because they're not going to sit around and deal with that. So now you've got this other pool of sort of equally damaged people that might pair with you based on your antics.

And that's not good for either of you. And it's this reinforcing cycle, this negative cycle. It's such a huge selection bias, which I don't think people in that community quite understand. So sometimes, you know, men will view or women will view relationships as transactional. They're like, oh, women are just in it for the money or whatever. They'll say these kinds of things.

And then if you act like that and you talk like that, the partners who are not in it just for the money, who are interested in building a life with you won't date you. They'll receive your signals and they're like, this is not a good match. Whereas the women who are interested in transactional relationships will date you because you're saying, hey, this is transactional.

I'm going to do this. So this is what you expect. And then there's a group of people who are okay with that. Like there's always in the history of humanity, there have been transactional heteronormative as well as homosexual relationships, I'm sure. And so then what happens is you end up selecting for the partners that confirm your preconceived notions. And then this becomes evidence or data. And then the cycle continues.

You see this at the end cells, right? They'll go women will always leave you for a guy with more money or better muscles or whatever. And when no amount of convincing that you have is going to work because the guy who says that his wife left him for a dude with more money and because he was like running himself into the ground, not taking care of himself or whatever the reason. So he's going.

I have two women that left me for those reasons, and you're telling me, no, it's not true. Like, what do you know, Jordan? You schmoe? You don't know anything. It's so psychologically dangerous, because what happens in those cases, and I've worked with people, and not in all those cases, but in the cases that I've seen, it's super, there's some psychological gymnastics here that is brilliant, but scary.

So what people will do is let's say that my wife divorces me because I am emotionally unavailable. So there are some things that I am responsible for and I can change, which could be part of the reason why my wife divorces me.

But the moment that I say she left me for someone who makes more money, it removes my responsibility from the equation. That's always what women do. Oh, this is an act of nature. This is the way the world is. This is like gravity. And so I am not to blame. I am not responsible. This is the way that women are. She met someone who makes more money than I do. That's why she left. So I zero in on all of the things that are outside of my control.

therefore, absolving myself of responsibility and doing the work to change.

Yeah, but the problem is if you don't know you're doing that, you're stuck. That's why there's two divorces. Man, that's literally what happens. And that's why these people need help. That's very true, not just of these kinds of people. I mean, 80% of my patients are doing something psychologically that they're not aware of. And it's our job as a society, either as medical professionals or through education or through books or podcasts or whatever, to help people open their eyes and improve their lives.

You can't expect someone to do it on their own. Dr. K, there's so much more we could discuss. I think I got through like half my notes. I am absolutely, I want to have you back sometime. I mean, we got, thankfully we covered AI girlfriends in part, but we didn't talk about screen time and as a pair of young kids, I'm like, oh my God, they're going to all be, they're going to be brain rot from cocoa melon or whatever.

Talk therapy. There's a backlash against that. I'd love to get your thoughts on that. So that's all for next time. But man, thank you so much for doing the show. We'll link to your book, How to Raise a Healthy Gamer in the show notes as well. We didn't even touch on a lot of the notes I had on that. But that's a good sign, man. You know, when we could have talked for four hours and said a 90 minutes.

Yeah, it's always chef's kiss as far as podcasting is concerned. Thank you so much, Jordan. It was an absolute pleasure being here. And you know, for people in your audience who are young parents, we instill a lot of this philosophy around understanding and fostering independence in how to raise a healthy gamer. And if you all want some of these like social skills, so like I think some of my

People like a lot of the interviews that I do. And what we've really done is translate my communication techniques into that book. Now it's framed for parents, but we've gotten a lot of really positive feedback from people who just want to learn how to be better at relationships and communicating that a lot of the stuff in there is incredibly helpful. So check it out if you all are interested in raising your kids to be healthy gamers or learning how to be a better communicator. Thank you, Dr. K. Thank you so much, Jordan.

Here's a trailer featuring Tom Hardin, once entangled in insider trading, who transformed into Tipper X, a pivotal informant instrumental in exposing major securities fraud cases for the FBI. So insider trading, trading stocks on information that's material. And if you have that information before the public, you can place your long trade or your short trade, if they're going to miss or beat the estimates from Wall Street. So if you were to have this information before everybody else,

then you can make profitable trades. And my rationalization was, seems like everybody's doing it. Who am I hurting? The boss was looking the other way. I'll do it just this once and never do it again. I placed the trade and it was just a few keystrokes. Years later people said, what were you thinking? It was all a very slow slippery slope. Like, this is how I rationalized it.

And I hear this guy behind me say, hey, are you Tom? Turn around. Yeah. And then there was two FBI agents. And he's like, look, man, we know about your four trades. And my first thought was, I know why they're here. And oh, my God, my dad's going to kill me. Oh, my God, my wife's going to divorce me. And then I thought, holy crap, this might impact my career. Oh, my God, it might go into prison. So it went from dad to prison. And I immediately started making up a kidding statement.

The sentencing guidelines is based on the money my firm made just over a million. So I was looking at three years in prison. If you would have told me when I graduated from Penn, you know, a few years later, you're going to be insider trading. I would never do that because I'm a good guy. It was all self-inflicted. I did this all to my family myself. You know, for the past seven years now, pretty much every week I get in front of a group of people, a complete group of strangers and tell them the worst thing I've ever done. Don't miss this compelling story of a transformation and redemption on episode 918.

I have a massive craving for Cheetos all of a sudden. Dr. K will be back. In fact, it's already on the calendar. Lots more from him in the near future. All things Dr. K will be in the show notes at JordanHarbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show all at JordanHarbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show.

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Don't forget about six minute networking as well. It's over at six minute networking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jason Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends and you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

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