Dr. K (Part 1): OPed Ayurvedic Medicine vs. Nerfed 'Western' Allopathy
Alok Kanojia, better known as Dr. K, is a charismatic psychiatrist and online streamer who offers a unique blend of psychological, self-help, and spiritual advice to guide individuals through the complexities of modern life, aiming to help them become Healthy Gamers™. Join Matt and Chris as they embark on a multi-part journey through the diverse biomes of Dr. K's content and try to ascertain the meta.In this first episode, Matt and Chris take a critical look at a 2019 video in which Dr. K discusses his views on Ayurvedic medicine, the problems with Western medicine, and the unacknowledged scientific evidence for Ayurvedic claims. We consider whether the evidence provided matches the rhetoric and relive youthful follies as we immerse ourselves in the all too familiar water of complementary and alternative medicine discourse.So join us as we learn about the universal mind and single type of depression proposed by modern medicine, how a tripartite classification is actually incredibly individualistic, how the shape of your nose and kink in your hair predicts the food you should eat and the quality of your bowel movements, and the surprising benefits of drinking elephant milk.In Part 2, we will delve into Dr. K's recent discussion/debate over Ayurvedic medicine with Dr. Mike, another popular YouTube doctor. And finally Part 3 will focus on the dynamics of Dr. K's long-form, somewhat controversial, mental health-themed interviews with influencers.Links Dr. K's Healthy Gamer GG websiteHealthy Gamer GG- Ayurveda Pt. 1: Gunas, Cognitive Fingerprint, PersonalityScience is Dope: Should we adopt Ayurveda | An Indian's response | Dr. Mike vs Dr. KList of Studies mentioned in the episodeSimon Singh's court case that Chris mentionedThe Iced Coffee Hour: Harvard Psychiatrist on How To Get Ahead of 99.9% of People (Starting NOW)Some of Matt's related papers: 1) Thomson, P., Jones, J., Browne, M., & Leslie, S. J. (2014). Why people seek complementary and alternative medicine before conventional medical treatment: a population-based study. Complementary therapies in clinical practice, 20(4), 339-346. & 2) Browne, M., Thomson, P., Rockloff, M. J., & Pennycook, G. (2015). Going against the herd: psychological and cultural factors underlying the ‘vaccination confidence gap’. PLoS one, 10(9), e0132562.
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown.
With me is Chris Kavanagh.
He's sitting there.
He's looking pretty enlightened today.
You're looking like your chakras are all in balance.
Your key is centered.
You are looking at one with the universe there, Chris.
That's a lie, actually.
You look tired.
Many people say that.
Many people say that.
So, yes, I'm feeling okay.
It's early morning, you know, the birds are out, the sky is bright.
What's there to be sad about, Matt?
The world is, you know, it's not like there's anything bad going on in the world currently, is there?
No huge conflicts and terrifying politics, none of that.
No, no, this is fine.
This is fine.
No, the wheel is turning.
Well, I'm fine.
I'm making lasagna today.
I'm making two lasagnas.
I'm glad I asked.
The world can go to hell.
I've got lasagna.
Yeah, so that is...
Well, I think dramatically, Matt, you might be hinting that we are looking at a candidate this week who is associated with mental health, well-being.
Spiritual development, so on and so forth.
Is that the case?
You would be correct.
We are looking at a fellow called Dr. K. How do you say his actual name?
That's his streamer online persona.
Yeah, thanks for handing that over.
Alok Kanogia.
Yeah, good job.
One of those two.
I did try to look up and I apologize for the myths.
Pronunciation if it was there, but more readily known around the internet as Dr. K. And Dr. K is an interesting fella.
He's part of our streamer and academic season, Matt.
So...
Listen to this.
And when I'm talking about that anagogic in and out of the imaginal augmentation of our ontological depth perception,
That's what I mean by imaginal faithfulness.
Enlightening Stuff.
You'll provide some interesting lessons for us today.
Decoding the Gurus, Streamers, and Academic Season.
Whew.
This is going to be really interesting.
Hey, that got me in the mood.
I'm ready for it now.
That's right, streamers.
I know what they're about.
Yeah.
Streaming all the time.
How do they do it?
Maybe not this one, Matt, because Dr. K is an interesting combination of things.
He is a streamer, but he is someone that also gives self-help advice.
As we'll see, I think a little bit of an advocate for alternative medicine or at least specifically Ayurvedic approaches and somebody that engages in therapeutic but not therapy discussions online to raise awareness about mental health issues in little informational videos and in In-depth interviews with influencers and streamers.
So that's an interesting confluence of streams.
Yeah.
So he's a psychiatrist by training, but I think he focuses all his energies on his online business these days.
His material is strongly influenced by, I guess, a complementary and alternative health approach, in particular Ayurvedic.
Approach to therapy.
Would you say that's right?
Yeah, I think it depends a little bit in the venue he's in.
But if you look at his output, like if you go to his YouTube channel and look, the tag for the channel is HealthyGamerGG, right?
GG the shorthand for good game.
And a lot of what he talks about is relating mental health issues to contemporary...
Issues and environments, including gaming, online communities, and addictions to, you know, online porn, all this kind of thing.
So on this channel, you'll have short videos focused on specific mental health issues, like you have Why Shit Life Syndrome is Holding You Back, The Neuroscience Behind Fixing Your Sleep Schedule,
Dr. K's Approach to Meditation, Why Having Free Will.
Holds you back, right?
And then you also have Dr. K chats with DanTDM, Dr. K chats with Ali Abdel, Dr. K chats with Mizkif, chats with Destiny, so on and so forth, right?
So you have mental health focused mini episodes.
Then you have the long form, often deeply personal interviews with influencers and streamers that to the untrained might resemble public therapy.
But he is clear that they do not meet that criteria.
We'll look at that later.
And then also, he established a platform by the same name, Healthy Gamer GG.
He describes it as an industry-leading mental health platform, a team of experts, and a commitment to providing affordable, accessible, and inclusive mental health resources to a new generation.
So what this takes the form of is that you can...
Take kind of online courses of his in specific modules, like anxiety module or depression module, right?
They're about 30 bucks each.
They're like little online courses that you can take.
Or you can sign up for coaching through coaches who have been trained in his particular system of healthy gamer GG advice.
And he is clear that Coaching and therapy are not the same.
Coaching is focused on building for planning, introspection and awareness.
And therapy is more about fixing something for clinical diagnosis, medication and /or treatment.
So he wants to say they're not doing therapy, they're doing coaching.
And it is focused on often people who are having issues that might be common in the online environment.
So in some respect...
Providing services for a community that might not be well understood by traditional psychiatry or psychologists, right?
People that don't understand online environments or gaming or that kind of thing.
Yeah.
And with respect to his sort of informational, educational videos, he certainly does create a lot of them.
I mean, the one I watched this morning was what enlightenment does to your brain.
The neuroscience evidence, apparently, for enlightenment and how to get it.
Well, I can play just a short clip.
From the introduction of that, to give a taste of that kind of thing.
So he does have an element to his output focused around what he sometimes refers to as like Eastern concepts and spiritual practices and whatnot, but linking them to science, right?
So, for example, the What Enlightenment Does to Your Brain video has this kind of thing in it.
So if you look at these Eastern spiritual traditions, they have this concept of moksha or liberation, enlightenment, this state of basically permanent happiness, which is impervious to all of the vagaries of the world around us.
But if we look at the science, we don't really see a whole lot of evidence of that, right?
So we have these studies on meditation or mindfulness that will show reductions in anxiety or improvements in quality of life, but no one using a mindfulness app is becoming permanently happy for the rest of their life.
So it seems like we don't really have any neuroscience evidence of enlightenment.
Or do we?
Oh, suspense.
So today we're going to understand the neuroscientific mechanisms of enlightenment.
How to cultivate particular things in your life that will lead you to happiness that could be a little bit more permanent.
That could be a little bit more impervious to your circumstances.
Yeah, so you get a sense of it there.
It's speaking to stuff that people...
There's obviously a huge market for it.
Everyone wants to be healthier, happier, more cool with the world.
People are interested in spiritual practices and like introspective things.
Yeah, breaking bad habits.
But not just breaking bad habits.
I think more in esoteric sources of knowledge tends to be quite popular.
So not just from a practical optimizer point of view, I mean that...
Religion is hot right now.
Religion is hot right now.
But I think health and wellness is perennially hot with everybody, not just people that are bodybuilders or min-maxing their various vital stats.
True.
And such people often have an interest in spirituality in various forms.
It can be Buddhist versions of introspection, or it might be Ayurvedic practices, or it can be homeopathy.
You have people that are more evidence-based and less evidence-based.
Combination is certainly common.
Yeah, not people like you and me.
We're dead inside.
We don't care about that stuff.
But it is popular.
Yeah, look, the other thing you heard with Dr. K's thing there is that heavy emphasis on science.
Like he's bringing his scientific background, his medical background, and explaining the scientific and evidence base behind a lot of these tips and tricks to improve your well-being.
Yeah, and actually, so his promotion for his stuff tends to emphasize...
Hey y 'all, if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health.
It combines over two decades of my experience of both being a monk and a psychiatrist and distills all of the most important things I've learned into a choose your own adventure format.
So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today.
Component, then you have the insights from time as a monk and meditation insights as well, like kind of combined to provide an alternative pathway.
So I think he very much emphasizes those things.
But just to say that not all the content is combining those two things.
So another recent video was why shit life syndrome is holding you back.
And there's no mention throughout that video of basically anything related to spiritual practices and you hear this kind of, I think, useful and accurate summary.
So the adaptations that we use to survive are the very things that prevent us from thriving.
Now, here's the really tricky thing, is it turns out that these adaptations that you make So, remember that the organism is in homeostasis with the environment.
We're trying to survive.
So, we're forming certain kinds of adaptations.
So, if we look at some of these adaptations, what we find is that these adaptations will become problematic in the future.
So, what we know is that when people have a history of trauma and when they suffer from depression, which, by the way, can be an appropriate, almost like an adaptation or maladaptation from your circumstances.
So, here's the chain of reasoning, okay?
Adverse childhood experiences increase the risk of depression.
So if you've had a shit life, you are more likely to have depression.
Once you add depression into the mix, that creates perspective problems.
So there are multiple theories behind this, but they basically all agree that there's some kind of bias in our mind.
So we have memory biases.
This is wild.
So what we know is that there are memory biases in depression.
So a memory bias for negative material.
Yeah, I mean, putting aside the specific advice there, like I really endorse the general points that he's making there, which is that, you know, having a better appreciation for our biological evolved tendencies and understanding that they don't always fit very well with the modern world and the kinds of things we have available to us,
you know, is really helpful.
I mean, really basic stuff like this is why we don't...
Jog.
Evolution didn't need to kind of encourage us to jog because in a natural environment, you just have to do a lot of physical activity anyway.
But we're so sedentary, we actually need to force ourselves to do something instead of saving calories, which is what evolution says we should do.
So yeah, I think those sorts of insights are helpful for people.
And yeah, you can hack yourself to some degree.
I'm jogging, you know, I'm there.
Yeah, yeah.
So I just play that to say that you're not going to see in every...
Video, like, you know, discussions of how you can put Eastern spiritual practices into your, you know, like to make your gaming play better or that kind of thing.
There's kind of different facets.
And this is why we've actually chosen, in this case, to look at a selection of content, right?
In particular, we're going to separate out a couple of things.
So let me explain the structure.
We normally take one or two pieces.
of content.
And then we focus on those and add in some additional clips to elucidate points or that kind of thing.
Now, in this case, we were originally going to look at an episode between Dr. K and Dr. Mike, where they got into a debate about Ayurvedic medicine.
But in doing research for that, we came across an older clip from four years ago where Dr. K is outlining more of his Ayurvedic theory and his views on it.
It was called Ayurveda Part 1: Guna's Cognitive Fingerprint and Personality.
And there was so much in that piece of content that when we clipped it out...
It ended up, you know, being as long as a normal episode would be.
And the Dr. K and Dr. Mike thing is then a more recent discussion, which touches on a lot of the same things about, you know, the potential overlap and disjunctions between Ayurvedic approaches and modern medicine approaches and whatnot.
So we're going to look at both of those as a two-part deal where we'll look at this older content first from four years ago, and then we'll...
Look at the more recent interview with Dr. Mike from just a few months.
And then separately, we'll do an episode specifically on the long-form interviews with influencers, which whether their therapy or non-therapy is debated,
and there's various ethical issues, there's various controversies around that, and there's some controversies around the Healthy Gamer GG.
Organization, right, that is set up.
But we'll get into all those things separately because they are, although connected, they're actually a bit of a different dynamic.
And the content that we're going to look at today is really a lot more related to the dynamics of complementary and alternative medicine versus modern medicine in a very traditional sense.
It seems like dealing with it all together would have made like a six-hour episode.
So we're gonna split it up into parts, which is a rare occurrence and kind of a credit to Dr. K in a way that his content made us feel the need to do this.
Yeah, that's right.
So there's quite a lot of material with Dr. K discussing Ayurveda.
And I guess complementary and alternative approaches to therapies.
And I guess we'll see the extent to which this informs his understanding of psychology and psychiatry.
Yeah, exactly.
And just one more little point to mention before we go in to look at the first piece of content that we're going to look at.
So this is from the conversation that he had with Dr. Mike talking about kind of his motivations, right?
And it speaks to this combination that we were just flagging up.
I just like clinical work.
I like sitting with people.
The other thing is I do believe I have, it's part of my spiritual path.
So I believe I have a dharma or a duty.
The way that I conceptualize my life is like I'm really lucky.
So I got to spend seven years studying yoga and meditation like in all corners of India, South Korea, Japan.
So I studied with a ton of different teachers, a ton of different gurus.
I learned so much different stuff, really high value stuff, transformed my life from being like...
2.5 GPA failure to like literally being faculty at Harvard Medical School.
So I found it personally very helpful.
And then I also had the chance to train with amazing mentors.
And I went to medical school at Tufts and like had some just brilliant psychiatrists that inspired me to become a psychiatrist trained at these amazing institutions.
And so what am I supposed to do with this, right?
So I have this very unique...
The world has invested 15 years into me.
And what am I supposed to do with this?
So I did what most people usually do.
So I'm complimenting alternative medicine.
A lot of people from famous people and CEOs and I was in Boston.
So HBS and MIT and all these like fancy people who are very wealthy started coming to me.
And then I realized that there's like...
Literally millions of people out there that no one is...
And these people that were coming to me, like, they have no shortage of people who want to help them, right?
Because they cash practice, you pay out of pocket, you charge a lot of money, right?
And so, but there's no one helping these other people.
So I sort of view it as my dharmic, which means duty or karmic goal to try to disseminate this information.
The world has invested like 15 years of understanding the mind from both Eastern and Western perspectives.
And am I supposed to use this to enrich myself and fly first class and go on vacations?
No. Right?
I'm supposed to disseminate this, try to help people.
So quite altruistic motivations, highlighting the unique combination of background preparedness.
You could say, if you're unkind, a roller traditional presentation for, you know, the secular guru archetype, or not even secular there, but, you know, trained in multiple disciplines,
traveled the world, was courted by CEOs and the elites, but chose instead to benefit the people.
It is a narrative that, you know, sounds very much like a lot of self-help.
Guru's story, right?
Yeah.
But I will say that I think he genuinely has a desire to help people.
I get the impression from his content that his channel was started out to provide assistance to people based on his experiences and an area that he felt was underserved.
And it does seem to be a genuine motivation that he wants to...
Help people now.
Weller dynamics have shifted somewhat and there are other creeping influences we'll get to, especially in the stuff about the influencer interviews.
But yeah, so that kind of gives an overview of his presentation of his motivations, right?
It's a Dharmic duty and he's had 15 years of input, so now he needs to give something back to the world.
Yeah, he's got dual training.
The conventional Western medical psychiatric training.
And he's had, I think, was it seven years of traveling and training and studying with gurus and so on in the subcontinent Japan in East Asia.
Yeah, and we heard reference, right, to Tufts, to Harvard Medicine, you know, prestigious institutions.
So not just the spiritual enlightenment seeker side, more the kind of Huberman side of things.
Since we're going to look at the content, one thing just to clarify for people, if you were around in the 2000s and late 90s, as I was, you might remember various debates about CAM and modern medicine, alternative
therapies versus reductive Western medical systems, right?
And this was kind of like the creationist evolution debates that you've seen on.
I myself, for example, Was following the British Chiropractic Association, suing the science writer Simon Singh for writing a critical article about them.
So it's been a couple of decades that I have been aware and interested in discussions around complementary and alternative medicine and the different kinds of rhetoric that surround that topic.
So do you have any familiarity with that topic?
Like you're approaching this cold?
No, I mean, I've got some data, published some papers on the psychology behind complementary and alternative medicines.
You know, in essence, individual differences in terms of how appealing people find them.
The basic framework that me and some other psychologists who studied that kind of thing is that essentially conventional medicine is widely used mainly because it works.
It's not particularly appealing.
It's not really generally fun to go to the hospital or to see a doctor or have a procedure done.
Whereas complementary alternative medicine tends to be popular because it's attractive rather than because it works.
There's a broad spectrum from homeopathy at one end to sort of chiropractic or osteopathy, massage-y type stuff.
Yeah, so this is not to say that absolutely nothing a CAM practitioner does could possibly be helpful, but the psychology of it is...
Basically, that people tend to go to them because of the good vibes that one gets rather than efficacy.
How dare you, reductive science man?
So Matt laying his reductive materialist cards on the table.
I prefer to keep an open mind, you know.
I don't mind the source of any practice.
If it works, it works.
Medicine is medicine.
So all I care about is the quality of your evidence.
But I...
I'm very familiar with the rhetoric in this space, and there certainly is a healthy dose of rhetoric applied in this area.
And you will hear in this content, but also in general around this topic, a constant setting up of dichotomies.
And on one side, you have complementary, integrative, holistic, alternative therapies contrasted with reductive Materialist, Western, scientific, allopathic medicine.
So this is the binaries that you will see and we'll come to have a look at them.
So the reason I mention all this is I have to say that when I first came across Dr. K's content, I was initially quite impressed because I hadn't seen content like his before.
The interviews that he did with creators, which we'll get into, was...
Very interesting, because yes, it did to me resemble therapy, but you know, it was kind of empathetic listening and questions freest in ways that elicited interesting responses from people.
And he seemed to have a very empathetic way about him.
And I thought, you know, if this is, you know, if there's going to be influencer types out, that this is not a bad one to add to the mix, right?
Somebody who's...
Being empathetic, talking to people about mental health, and just generally not being Andrew Tate or something like that, right?
So my initial approach was positive.
I would say the more I've dug in, it's become a little bit more nuanced.
And this video that we're talking about here is one of the reasons for that.
So Ayurveda part one.
Gunnar's Cognitive Fingerprints and Personality.
This is from 2019, so relatively early when his channel came out.
Now, we'll see, Matt, we're not cherry picking because we are going to look at content from this year or from a few months ago later.
But let's hear him set up what is the difference he sees in the Western and Ayurvedic approaches.
So that's how Western medicine works.
We sort of divide things into groups like cardiology, nephrology, hepatology, infectious disease, psychiatry, endocrinology, pediatrics, OB-GYN, right?
So we divide things into lots and lots of categories, and then we become super specialized in one category.
Ayurveda is completely different.
Ayurveda is not about zooming in.
It's about generating patterns from multiple data points.
So it's kind of looking at different dimensions of a person and trying to figure out how can we make correlations based on their physical body about what's going on in their mind.
Is there some way that we can understand someone's bowel movements and how that will affect their mind?
Is there a relationship between how prominent the veins on the back of their hand are?
Yeah, so the contrast there, I guess, is a very familiar one for people that like to contrast alternative medicines with so-called allopathic medicine, which is conventional medicine is very narrow.
It wants to divide the world and unweave the rainbow, zero in on a specific ailment and doesn't consider the holistic picture, doesn't understand that...
Different symptoms in, say, diverse parts of the body or connections between behavior and the mind and your physiology could be there, whereas alternative therapies do take that holistic view and treat the person as an individual, as a whole,
and give them a bespoke treatment as opposed to treating everyone the same.
Yeah, and to give it a little bit more about that perspective.
So an example of a randomized controlled trial is I take...
10,000 people, and let's say I'm trying to figure out depression.
Then what I do is I split them into two groups, a control group and an intervention group, and I give 5,000 people an antidepressant, and I give 5,000 people a sugar pill.
Then what I do, the reason we called it controlled is because we try to make the two groups the same.
We try to have them have the same socioeconomic status, the same average age, the same gender breakdown.
So we try to remove a lot of the individuality so we can isolate the effect of the disease and the treatment.
So we're trying to treat depression, not individuals, and we're trying to use randomization and controlling for variables to remove any individuality from So I'm trying to just look at a disease in isolation and a treatment in isolation and see what the impact of the treatment is on the disease.
So what this means practically is that Western medicine is not about treating people.
It's about treating diseases.
And so that sort of like, if you've sort of trained in Western medicine, you may think that that's the best way.
But as you learn clinical medicine, you begin to realize that people are fundamentally different.
So there you go.
Western medicine doesn't...
Really appreciate that people are different.
There are individual differences.
It really focuses on a disease rather than the person.
I mean, I'm not quite sure I graphed that distinction.
I mean, if someone has depression, say, and they come to you because they are hoping to not be depressed, I'm not quite sure about that distinction between treating the depression and treating the person.
It seemed to be one and the same to me.
Well, I think he wants to say that, you know, you have like illnesses listed in a textbook and the person comes and you identify the illness and then you apply the treatment from the textbook to the person.
And this is the model that is, you know, looking at there's something wrong.
We need to fix it.
Not looking about you as a person, not concerned about, you know, your kind of circumstances and individual constitution, but more.
Like, let's get rid of the ailment which is affecting you.
Now, yeah, there is an issue about saying that by treating an illness in an individual, you're not concerned about the individual because, like, when someone goes to an Ayurvedic practitioner, they're often going for a particular ailment as well,
right?
And Ayurvedic medicine is a traditional treatment from India.
Based on a kind of alternative understanding of what makes up the body and the universe and theories of how to treat things, it's actually a little bit like the four humours where there are substances in the body,
three in particular that we'll get to, that can be unbalanced or overrepresented.
Then you can take various things to balance them up.
It can be behavioural things, but more Readily like changing your diet or getting particular Ayurvedic medicines to help balance the energy.
So in the same way that Qi presents an alternative system for how the body and energy works within the body, that's essentially what Ayurveda is doing as well.
But yeah, so trying to treat depression, but not individuals.
When you go see like a psychiatrist, for example, and you have therapeutic talk therapy, surely that is highly individualized.
Or even in the case of receiving medication, it's often done with consideration about what other medications you're taking, your family history, if you have some genetic issues or allergies.
So I don't...
No, I completely agree.
But it is a useful framing mechanism to say that Western medicine doesn't care.
Oh, and one thing to say as well is that I will try not to do this, but there's a constant compilation of modern medicine as Western medicine.
This is very common in alternative and complementary medicine practitioners.
I don't think it's a good thing because it implies that modern Medicine is a property of the West, as opposed to a property of science, right?
Scientific application to medicine, whatever country you're in.
But in the presentation, it kind of puts an air of cultural chauvinism onto it, that if you want to advocate that modern medicine is better, you're implicitly denigrating all these alternative non-Western When in reality,
there are plenty of Western medicinal systems which are also non-scientific, including things like homeopathy and whatnot developed in the West, but also, you know, the four humors and various other treatments.
So we'll make that mistake multiple times in this episode, but I think it's worth flagging that that is something that happens a lot, like the contraposition of the West.
Versus the East and versus holistic therapies.
Yeah, it's a convenient framing for people who would like to be a booster of CAM because most progressive open-minded people accept that there are different cultures and different ways of doing things and none of us wants to be chauvinistic.
But as you said, Europe has a rich and long tradition of traditional medicines and also alternative.
What we'd call alternative in the modern world, approaches to health.
Ideas about miasma, ideas about before, humours, ideas about people's faces being related to their personalities in some way.
So much stuff, and it has been discarded, but only just very recently.
And obviously, modern medicine and scientific approaches generally are practiced by people all over the world.
So we will try to stick with the modern versus traditional framing.
Yeah, well, we'll feel, but we'll try.
So in any case, more about this issue about, you know, what Western medicine lacks in terms of interest in individuality.
I'm a psychiatrist.
I prescribe antidepressants from time to time.
Try to avoid it whenever possible.
But one of the things you quickly learn if you prescribe medication is that medication, even though antidepressants will have a moderate improvement in clinical trials for people, an individual may get better or may not get better at all if you give them an antidepressant.
There's a lot of individuality that enters medicine.
The funny thing is that our system of medicine doesn't sort of factor that in.
We don't really factor in individuality in terms of our clinical trials and the gold standard of our information.
So Ayurveda is fundamentally different because Ayurveda treats a person.
It presumes that all human beings are different and that in order to help someone, you have to understand individually how they function.
It sounds good, doesn't it, Chris?
Treating the person, just treating them as an individual, understanding how they in particular function, not just throwing pills at them.
You have to have them in your drawer.
And not treating them as a dehumanized illness, just a carrier for an illness.
Approaching them as an actual human.
Yeah, again, I understand on the one hand that modern medicine, often in developed countries as well, especially those with socialized healthcare systems, has a depersonalized feeling to it.
Take the NHS in the UK.
There's limited resources.
Doctors have to see.
X amount of patients and they cannot spend hours going through an individualized discussion with everybody that comes in the door, right, about their life circumstances.
They need to diagnose relatively efficiently, give whatever the treatment recommendation is or send them on to the next place and move on to the next patient.
And that's certainly unsatisfying in comparison by, say, could be a private practitioner, but also often alternative.
Health practitioners who do devote extra time, extra consideration to sit down, to devote significant portions of time to discuss the particular concerns of a person and have like an interest in their particular circumstances.
So that feels better.
And it feels like you are more being treated as a person.
But to some extent, you're paying.
For that privilege.
Because, as I say, if you pay a lot for privatized healthcare, you can often get very personalized, indulgent treatment as well.
So it's a little bit unfair to compare those systems to systems where there is more capacity for at least the appearance of personal investment.
But I can understand why people often have very legitimate complaints about their interactions with a modern Medical system and the impact of things like pharmaceutical companies and whatnot in the way that problems can be addressed where there is overprescription of antidepressants or overprescription of anti-anxiety medication or whatever the case might be.
The famous case like the opioid crisis in America, right?
And the overprescription of pain relief drugs and pharmaceutical companies doing various things that they were penalized for in helping to encourage that.
So there are plenty of legitimate complaints about modern scientific, pharmaceutically linked medicine as well.
But it is also often the case that when you look into alternative medicine providers, you know, they are not...
Individuals on corners like brewing up, you know, home remedies.
These are also multi-billion dollar industries with large transnational corporations producing supplements and whatnot.
So, yeah, that's something to know.
But it is true that alternative practitioners often, at least in appearance, devote more time to people's individual problems, right?
Yeah, yeah.
They can?
They can.
But yeah, the entire experience of going to a CAM practitioner, I've been to CAM practitioners as an experiential research.
I've had color therapy done, seen them for a variety of things.
And I can tell you that it is like a socio-emotional experience.
And it does feel individualized.
The treatments are often rather generic, but the experience of going there is certainly very, very pleasant.
I mean, one of the things I found and others have found too is...
There's a very strong correlation with large data sets found repeatedly between anti-vax and CAM.
And this is not to say CAM practitioners or people that are into CAM are necessarily anti-vax.
Many of them aren't, but there is a strong correlation there.
And there is a good, interesting theoretical reason for it, and it's connected to what we're talking about, which is that part of the psychological resistance to vaccines is that they are a generic one-size-fits-all production line,
medicalised treatment.
And we heard from Joe Rogan or other influence who's
I'm going to cheat a little bit,
Matt.
I know I said I'm going to focus on the content from the video that we talked about four years ago, but there's one...
Little exchange in the conversation with Dr. Mike that is relevant that I'll just bring in here, where Dr. K is contrasting the approach between Ayurvedic and Western modern medicine systems, and how they build up bodies of knowledge.
That I think is important because we'll go on to look at how this is applied in practice.
But this is a discussion about where they start from.
So if you look at our Western system of medicine, the idea is that a disease process is independent of an individual and has a treatment.
So the whole point of an RCT is let's remove all of the individuality, all of the specificity from an individual patient because if we take an individual patient, we treat cholesterol in this individual patient.
We have no idea how that's going to apply to the other 9,000 people we treat because this person is an individual.
So let's remove individuality from the equation.
Let's look at high blood pressure, and let's try to isolate this disease process.
Then we run into a problem in Western medicine because you can isolate this disease process in a laboratory, but the moment that you have a real person in front of you, things get complicated.
Agreed?
100%.
So Ayurvedic medicine just looks at it from the opposite direction.
They kind of say, okay, let's start with an individual.
And let's understand what works for this person.
And then they also generalize.
They sort of also have, you know, diagnoses, right?
Which obviously means that it's not, there's diagnoses that are shared amongst individuals, but they start from a more individual lens.
We are starting at a population level and we are trying to narrow down to personalized medicine.
They start at personalized medicine and they sort of extrapolate out to a more general way.
Isn't that flawed by design?
No.
It's only flawed by design if you presume that the population base and the existence of a disease process that is independent of people exists.
Yeah, yeah.
So again, this contrasting, this dichotomy between modern medicine and traditional medicines, in this case Ayurveda.
And it sounds good, right?
It sounds like a symmetry.
You've got the...
The scientific approach, which starts off like focuses on populations, focuses on a universal treatment and hopes that it works on an individual.
And then you've got the ayurvedic approach, which is to focus on the individual, but then go up to the population.
But if you think about that carefully, it's unclear what that means.
Isn't it, Chris?
Yeah, well, there's significant issues there.
Like, one of the things is, you know, it is true that randomized controlled trials are designed to try and find treatments that, you know, can be found to work reliably.
In populations, if it only works for one particular individual with one particular, you know, unique genetic makeup, then it wouldn't be that useful.
However, I don't know that the characterization of that isn't entirely fair because, like, let's say, for example, when you're developing vaccines.
Now, developing vaccines, you are developing a kind of one-size-fits-all approach.
But in each case, vaccines involve introducing a person's immune system.
To novel viral information, which they then build up antibodies to.
And the reaction of people's immune systems are going to be different, right?
But broadly, we're all humans, so they're acting on similar principles.
But you will have people that have more strong immune responses than others, and you will have people that have stronger side effects than others.
And it's not like we aren't interested.
In that.
We are.
And if there are rare negative reactions in, you know, subsets, we would be very interested.
You know, if there were people with rare genetic disorders that reacted very badly to a particular treatment, that's something you would want to know.
Or men and women consuming things differently.
And also clinical trials, you know, go through different phases where you have tolerance trials before you get to testing whether things work.
So there's a lot of sweeping suggestions that the individual is just really unimportant.
And it's not completely untrue, but I think it does a disservice to the fact that in developing medications that reliably work, modern medicine is still interested in how that applies to an individual when it comes to giving them the treatment.
Like your doctor won't just be...
It doesn't matter what other medications you're taking.
It doesn't matter if this medication works for you.
We're just going to keep doing it.
They adjust depending on how people respond to things.
There's obviously a huge amount of scientific investigation into interactions and the effect of things on different subgroups depending on this or depending on that.
So it is a bit of a straw man to say that there's no interest in...
The specifics of individuals.
But as well as that, there is a big logical problem there with the idea that you base your knowledge on an individual and then you extrapolate out somehow to a population.
Because, first of all, if you are coming to a patient with a blank slate, not applying knowledge that you've gained from...
Other people, populations.
Because that is where all knowledge, whether it's traditional or modern, has got to come from your experience with others, right?
So you are generalizing.
For you to bring knowledge, any knowledge at all, to treating a patient, you have to be incorporating general knowledge.
And so it just doesn't quite logically...
Yeah, and there's actually, again, I'm cheating a little bit by, you know, sticking with the Dr. Mike content, but there is a point almost immediately after that where Dr. K contradicts what he just said.
He did talk about, you know, moving from the individual to the more general, right, and applying it at a higher level.
You know, he kind of hedges a bit there, but listen to this.
No, no, yeah, but so this is a fundamental misunderstanding.
The whole point of Ayurveda is you don't generalize one to the broader population.
You develop a system that works for each person ideally.
That's what their approach is.
There's no generalization.
I mean, there's some generalization, some necessary generalization, but their whole point is that...
When someone comes to you and this guy is a bro science and he says this works for you, the Ayurvedic doctor says this worked for you, let me try to figure out.
The next person comes along and they try to figure out what will work for you specifically, what will work for you specifically.
They don't care about populations, they care about individuals.
Right, yes, so that's contradictory to what he was saying before, but I think...
And he sounds uncertain, of course.
He's sort of moving backwards and forwards.
And I think that's because on some level he recognises the contradiction there.
It doesn't quite make sense that you are somehow a practitioner with knowledge that comes from somewhere, but at the same time approaching someone as a perfectly unique snowflake, which doesn't share a whole bunch of things in common with other people.
Because if they did, if they were like an alien, then there was no way you would have expertise that could help them.
Yes, we'll see if it is true that Ayurvedic systems approach each person as a completely individual, unique constellation of factors in a moment.
But that last point about the possible interest in interactions versus the reductive nature of modern slash Western medicine.
We know that these things are clinically correlated, but our system of Western medicine...
Looking at individual things and tunneling down doesn't look at patterns and doesn't look at overarching changes.
But we sometimes, clinically, we know that even though our system isn't designed with this in mind, we still see evidence for this idea.
And a good example is something like exercise or meditation.
Exercise improves everything.
Meditation improves everything.
Meditation improves depression.
It improves anxiety.
This is from later in the episode, and I think a bit more sweeping in the things that are stated.
But also, again, Western medicine doesn't know that exercise is generally beneficial to health across different...
Well, including mood, right?
Yeah, it does.
It's one of the most well-supported treatments, most well-evidenced and most well-studied effects, which is that exercise...
Elevates your mood and it's one of the best things to make you feel good and feel happy.
So, again, it's just the straw manning and the false dichotomies there.
The premise is that modern medicine doesn't account for correlations when, of course, the vast majority of research is actually focused on correlations and individual differences.
So, yeah, anyway, let's continue.
Yeah.
You know, that just reminds me of Joe Rogan, who similarly is like, doctors will never tell you the exercise.
They'll never tell you about vitamin B or vitamin D or diet.
And you're like the consistent, if you go to the WHO right now on Twitter, they have a specific thing dedicated, just tweeting out about the importance of health and diet and exercise.
And nobody pays any attention to it.
This is the problem that they have consistently been saying.
Exercise and good diet is important and not smoking and these kind of things, but it's just nobody pays attention to them.
Before we get too caught up in furiously disagreeing with Dr. K, Chris, I think one thing to recognize here is that he's very eloquent and the rhetoric is extremely effective.
Those framings do feel very convincing if you don't stop and dissect them a little bit.
I think we have to give credit to his rhetorical strengths.
Yes, well, that is true.
And I'll now move a little bit to the Ayurvedic.
So there was a claim that there's a unique approach to each person as an individual.
So let's see how that applies in practice.
So I'll give you guys kind of an example.
So Ayurveda divides all people into like these three, you have this thing called a doshic balance.
And doshas are sort of the three major patterns that kind of govern what people are like.
So Ayurveda says, unlike Western, so Ayurveda says that individuals have like a cognitive fingerprint that is like different.
And that different people have different kinds of cognitive fingerprints.
What do I mean by a cognitive fingerprint?
When we think about Western psychology, we tend to think that all human beings sort of have like the same psychology, right?
If you study psychology, you don't study like an individual.
You study like the different like patterns of psychology.
So you study like motivation, you study things like habit, you study things like, you know...
Let's say like hedonics.
You study like cognitive behavioral therapy.
You study like these general principles about the mind and like cognitive behavioral therapy applies to like everyone, right?
You study kind of like one thing and it sort of assumes that it works for everyone because everyone's mind has cognitions, has emotions, and has behaviors and that those three things are related.
Ayurveda starts by saying that everyone's mind is unique and that in order to help people, We have to understand what kind of mind they have because the kind of treatment or intervention that we want to use depends on the kind of mind that they have.
So I started using this phrase cognitive fingerprint.
Once again, this strong emphasis on the flattening.
And universalization of modern...
No, Western psychology.
Western psychology, yes.
Yes, Western psychology.
So putting aside the fact, as I said, that the vast majority of psychology research is focused on detecting correlations and effects in cross-sectional samples, that is, individual differences.
Putting that aside, the point that he wants to emphasize is that Ayurvedic approaches...
Phenomenological.
They treat people as complete individuals.
But we sort of got a hint there in terms of those different fingerprints or those different types of people.
It might be actually that they do also put people into sort of flattening categories.
Yeah, so you have the statement about cognitive fingerprint, which, you know, fingerprints are unique to each person, right?
You commit a crime and you could be caught because of your fingerprint, which is not like Anyone else's, but it's made up of basically the same lines and whatnot.
So we're familiar with this, but you can equally say the same about genetics, right?
We're all made up of the same double helixes and whatnot, but the genes are expressed differently and that leads to differences.
But in his system, or the Ayurvedic system, there were three categories, right?
He said three major patterns.
Govern what people are like.
Doshas.
And so contrasting that with, like, if you present Western psychology or Western medicine as having a single type, just one type, then that would be an improvement.
Three versus one.
You know, the Western version just has the universal mind, which applies to everyone.
But like you just hit that, Matt, that is absolutely not my understanding of Western psychology.
Even in, you know, the old school version of psychology where you're dealing with Freud, because you had people in different levels of the sexual, social, or what is it, like stages of development?
Yeah, psychosocial stages of development, people with an oedipal complex or not, or people who have a fixation.
Oral fixation, like Freud's particular pathologies are well noted, but almost all.
Even very early, psychological systems are talking about these typologies of different categories or tendencies amongst people.
And actually, now, a lot of them, as it turned out, are not well evidence-based.
But even Freud, right, again, you had the id, the superego, and the ego.
Those are free...
Components of the mind which can be in different degrees of balance.
So I'm not really sure.
Like, couldn't you say the same thing?
That if you can have different ratios of control, you know, versus super ego or being driven by the id, it sounds like you could come up with the same kind of argument.
The thing is that the modern conception of personality in psychology is not a categorical one.
It's very much focused on a dimensional approach.
So the most prevalent one is the ocean model.
Is it, Matt?
Dr. K might beg to differ, but I'll get his rejoinder.
Oh, no, no.
Let's hear Dr. K's impression of psychology approaches to personality.
Yes, let's.
But just to mention, Matt was going to reference the ocean model, the big five personality features.
We'll talk a bit about that.
But let's hear Dr. K's version of it.
Remember that Western psychology assumes that the mind is like uniform, right?
The body is uniform.
The heart functions a particular way.
The mind functions a particular way.
That's how it works.
And then Myers-Briggs comes along and says, people are fundamentally different, that not everyone is the same way.
That there are introverts and extroverts.
That there are people who judge and feel, right?
Intuitive and perceptive.
That fundamentally, there are different kinds of human beings.
Where do they get that idea?
Why is it so contrary to the rest of Western psychology?
Because it's based on Jung.
Because Jung said people are fundamentally different.
And then the question becomes, where did Jung learn it?
We'll get to where Jung learned it, but you might have been, maybe, you know, Ocean might be a little development of the Bayer's Briggs.
So there was a single unitary mind, right?
The mind always functions the exact same way in all people.
It's the same.
Then Myers-Briggs comes along and applies Jungian archetypes to, you know, develop different personality types.
And then we go from there, right?
And maybe...
Ocean comes out of that.
Is that a fair representation of the history of psychology?
No, no, no, no.
There are just layers and layers of wrongness to that explanation, Chris.
The Myers-Briggs type indicator is a relatively very uninfluential and unimportant particular personality model of which there have been probably dozens or maybe up to a hundred.
Within psychology, it is a very influential model within industry, unpopular conceptions of psychology, right?
It may well be.
That's right.
And it is popular with industry and just with the general public for the same reason that star signs are popular.
There is a little thrill in filling out the MBTI and finding out that your category is...
I'm an INTP, by the way, Chris.
Oh, I don't know what that is, but yeah, I'm glad we're here.
It's basically like a Scorpio.
So yeah, the thing is that it's extremely poorly evidenced, and that was determined very quickly, and that's why it had very little influence within psychology.
In other words, the data just doesn't support...
This model.
But it remained popular, as you said, with corporations and stuff, because it's fun for staff training things.
Now, the actual influential models in personality research in psychology, which is obviously focused on individual differences, so this is not conforming with this idea that we just treat people all the same, is things like the ocean model.
So openness to experience, extroversion, agreeableness, things like that.
That's right.
And the reason why the MBTI and any categorical model of personality is not just wrong, but it cannot be right.
Because the way personality operates is that it is on a continuum.
It is a dimensional thing.
You can be very extroverted, a little bit extroverted, kind of in the middle of the distribution, and you can be in the other direction as well.
And same for all of the other...
Characteristics or ways in which we might describe personality.
It's fundamentally a misconception to think that there are personality categories.
Now, Matt, you as a psychologist, consider me your pupil, right?
I'm raising an objection to the teacher.
Now, many people, Matt, will know people in their life who they regard as more dramatic or more prone to.
Anger, you know, angry people.
They'll also be aware that you can get clinical diagnoses for, in extreme cases, like psychopathy or whatever the case might be.
So doesn't that mean, like, we have lots of cases where people layer conceptual categories over continuous variation and then say, this is a type of thing.
There's always going to be edge cases.
What's wrong with that, Mr. Psychologist?
Yeah, look, it's certainly true that you can use conceptual categories to describe very complex things like psychopathology because they are, for one, clinically useful.
And while there is an underlying range, there tends to be a stage at which things kind of spiral out of control and we say that that person kind of has a disorder.
So this is very much true for...
Gambling problems, for instance.
There are population screens and people make diagnoses of you have gambling problems, right?
You have an addiction.
And that label, that category can be useful.
But it is still an abstraction that's foisted on to what is an extremely complex underlying thing.
So in the physical sciences and to some degree in biology, categories make a lot of sense because events happen or they don't happen.
You're dealing with things at a very sort of microscopic level.
So like a molecule.
Protons, neutrons, molecules.
Protons, neutrons.
For example, an isotope of uranium might decay or not decay.
The event happens or it doesn't happen.
So it is a binary event.
And so categories make sense there.
Well, except though, Matt, you'll know about probabilistic outcomes and, you know, quantum indeterminacy.
And you'll also know in biology, we have complex interacting systems, which are not molecules.
They're organisms in ecosystems.
So take that, reductive science man.
How do you deal with that?
I mean, there's obviously a continuum.
I was going to get to biology.
Like in biology, you tend to have like chromosomes express themselves or they don't.
There is a binary categorical aspect to DNA.
An organism reproduces or it doesn't reproduce, right?
Now, yes, there are shades of grey there because, as you said, you are even at the level of microorganisms.
You're dealing with a very complicated system.
But still, often, the idea of categories scientifically can make sense.
When you start talking about personality and you were talking about normal human variation, then a property like extraversion...
is caused by a huge number of different factors.
There's no one single underlying mechanistic event that makes you an extroverted person or not an extroverted person.
Rather, there's probably thousands of different little things contributing to that personality trait.
Genetic, environmental, and so on.
Yeah, exactly.
Social, cultural, and so on.
That's right.
We don't even understand most of them.
Now, for that reason, it's a statistical fact, right, that when you average a whole bunch of effects, The original distribution of the effects could be binary, could be a binomial distribution, it could have any kind of distribution, but when you lump them all in together into a composite effect,
then things tend to converge mathematically to a normal distribution.
So this is why, you know, not just empirically, like the evidence supports models like the ocean model, dimensional models, but also theoretically it almost has to be a...
Dimensional thing, not a categorical one where you put people into MBTI categories or doshas or anything else.
So how about, Matt, may I ask?
Last objection I'll raise to you, Mr. Psychologist.
We have nationalities and we have cultures and we recognize different national cultures, but you can also recognize, you know, Swiss people, German people, there's overlaps, there's language overlaps, there's cultural things and, you know, there's fuzzy boundaries, but the categories themselves remain.
Useful under a co-occurrence of various features that make us refer to someone as German as opposed to Swiss.
And yes, you could do it by passport, but often people are just going by a kind of clustering of features.
So is there not an argument to be made that you can get that kind of clustering with personality factors and therefore develop a broad typology where you say could have 16?
Core types that regularly reoccur?
Because I think that would be an intuition that people would have.
Yeah.
Look, it's definitely true that for some, I guess, high-level or complex sort of constructs, like we deal with sociology and psychology, there can be a degree of clumpiness, right?
That things can sort themselves into categories.
So if you go, say, from Germany to Poland and you measure culture somehow...
And as you move along, you'll find it's like German, German, German, all pretty similar, and then it switches to Polish.
Now, you may find along the border, there is a bit of a fuzzy boundary, sure, where people are culturally a bit German and a bit Polish, but still, your point is true, that you can get useful categories to describe these complex phenomena.
But with things like that, there is always a mechanism.
And the mechanism there, of course, are national boundaries.
National boundaries have this homogenizing effect, makes somebody, you know, 50 kilometers from the border between Poland and Germany, on the German side, much more German, and likewise on the Polish side.
So with personality, you would have to not only rebut all of the evidence that there's no evidence for categories, but you would also be looking to identify the mechanism.
Like, where do these personality categories come from?
I mean, there's lots of interesting things that you can look at, and there's the disputes about the degree to which various personality models apply cross-culturally, right?
The measurement, at least, of them, whether they're appropriately culturally specific, but the big five tends to do better than most when it comes to cross-cultural.
But, you know, we're not here to get so much in the Indigenous psychology claims or the role of cultural determinants of personality and so on.
But just to say we recognize they exist.
So to return, Matt, to the point, though, one thing in this whole presentation that struck me is he is presenting it as Myers-Briggs invented differences in psychology.
But he references Jung like...
He took Jungian categories.
But so like Jungian archetypes, that means existed prior to the Myers-Briggs, right?
And Jung was working from Freudian systems.
So that implies that there actually was different types, right?
But in any case, he raised the issue about where did Jung get his archetypes from?
You know, psychoanalytic archetypes.
Where do they come from?
Let's find out.
One other question that I want to get to is someone asked about Myers-Briggs.
So I do believe that there's some correlation with Myers-Briggs.
And the reason for that is very simple.
For those of you guys who don't know, does anybody know what Myers-Briggs is based on?
What's the foundation of Myers-Briggs?
Anybody know?
You can be a chubby vata.
Nope, Myers-Briggs is not based on the Big Five.
Yeah, so Esther Q has it right.
Based on Carl Jung.
You know what?
This is fascinating.
You know what Carl Jung's theories are based on?
Did he come up with them himself?
Nope, not Freud.
Incorrect.
Nope, not Nietzsche.
Dake Moses has it correct.
Carl Jung's theories are actually based on Ayurveda and Hindu philosophy.
Right?
So Carl Jung studies Ayurveda and then comes up with theories.
And then Myers-Briggs studies Carl Jung and then comes up with Myers-Briggs.
And so it correlates to Vata, Pitta and Kapha.
We'll get to Vata, Pitta and Kapha shortly, but you didn't know, but actually...
You know, Western psychology actually got its insights via Myers-Briggs from Carl Jung, who was studying Ayurvedic systems.
And no, not a big influence from Freud.
Wrong.
Incorrect.
That guru-treator, it's likely a pedagogy tactic that people sometimes do where they want to elicit a specific response and they're like, "What's the answer?"
"Nope, nope."
And then, you know, until you give the correct answer.
But like...
What is Carl Jung's main influence?
The correct answer is Freud.
He was a pupil of Freud.
And the claim that he was primarily studying Ayurveda and developed his theory of archetypes out of that literature?
No, not true.
Actually, Carl Jung had...
Yes, he had an interest in world religions, including Hindu systems and myths and legends, but he took concepts from...
All different traditions, various East Asian religions as well, and Western sources and myths and legends.
So there are elements taken from Hinduism there, but it's very much not a primarily Ayurvedic system.
And he wants to say that essentially he's saying the bit that Western medicine got right is because it was reflecting from Ayurvedic insights.
So yeah, it's challenging to cover this segment because he's just wrong in so many different ways simultaneously.
Like he's wrong about the MBTI being like a well-recognized psychological instrument.
He's wrong to assume that there's any evidence for it really at all.
He's wrong about the influences and he's fundamentally wrong that there is a categorical approach to psychology that modern medicine shares with Ayurveda.
Yes, well, so we question the claims about Western psychology that he makes there and welcome arguments to the counter.
But it is surprising for somebody with significant training and expertise in this area to have that version of the history.
But in any case, let's spend a bit more time with what the Ayurvedic system has.
So he mentioned Vata, Pitta and Kapha.
One other thing that Dr. K will do is make reference to computer games analogies because of the audience.
So here's how I'm explaining these a bit more with reference to Pokemon types.
So I'll give you an example.
They think that you should be disciplined.
They think that you should be focused.
They think that you should wake up at the same time every day.
They think that these are the things that lead to success.
Whereas Ayurveda says, actually, that's just one route to success.
And if your cognitive fingerprint is different...
That the way that you can be successful is to kind of play to your strengths.
So I think this is going to be way easier to understand once I actually start explaining specifics.
So the first thing is that there are three doshas.
Vata, Pitta, and Kapha.
So Vata is kind of like the wind.
Pitta is kind of like fire, and Gaffa is kind of like earth, okay?
So this should work great for gamers because these are like the elements of your Pokémon, right?
So like if you have a Vata mind, you're like an air Pokémon.
If there's an air Pokémon, or like grass or some shit, right?
If you're a Pitta Pokémon, you're like a fire Pokémon.
If you're a Gaffa Pokémon, you're like an earth or water Pokémon.
Now Matt, I feel like you're not going to be a big Pokémon player, is that?
Fair to say?
That doesn't help you out.
We've reached the limits of my expertise there, Chris.
Yes, so I can provide a bit more.
There's information I can provide about each of those types.
But let's hear a little bit about the general types.
He highlighted there isn't one single path to success or achievement.
His implication is the Western...
Modern psychiatric approach would be there is only one way to do things correctly, right?
And if you deviate from that, you're kind of doing things wrong.
Whereas at least in the Ayurvedic system, they have three potential factors that might come into play.
And yeah, so here's a little bit more about how that might apply and another gaming analogy to help you.
But the difference is like at the end of the day, like we both ended up training at Harvard Medical School and we're both faculty at Harvard Medical School.
And so how is it that both of us wind up at the same degree of, like, professional success?
It's because I understand that I'm a Vata, and I created a Vata life, and that she's a Kapha, and she created a Kapha life.
And so you have to figure out what's your Dosha, and how can you develop a life that is structured to be easy for you, right?
If you've got, like, mage stats, like, you want to be casting spells, you don't want to be, like, melee DPSing someone with a dagger.
But the problem is that our society says that like melee DPS is the way to go.
And then you also have your tanks who are like, we suck at melee DPS.
And so then they look at themselves and they say like, I suck at life because I suck at melee DPS.
What I'm trying to tell you guys is like, well, you're a fucking tank.
So you're supposed to be doing a different thing.
You have a different job.
And what I like about Ayurveda is that Western medicine says that melee DPS is the only way to go.
This is success.
Society says that this is the only way to go.
This is how Western society works, right?
We think in terms of polarities.
We think in terms of, like, good or bad.
We don't really think in terms of shades of gray.
We think, like, Republican or Democrat.
We think, like, conservative or liberal.
We think about, like, everything is like a polarity.
And, but that's just not how we are.
There's, like, human beings are a spectrum.
And the more that you understand where you lie on the spectrum, the more you can understand how To, like, structure your life in the right way.
Okay.
So you've got to find out whether or not you're a Vata or one of the other ones and live a Vata lifestyle, but also understand that you're incredibly unique, not the same as one-third of the population of the world, and it's dimensional.
But look, another quick comment from me, Chris, there is that, just more of a meta comment, is this idea of, like, differential...
Like finding your learning style or finding your lifestyle and customizing things to it, it does come out of psychology a few times and gets very popular in other disciplines.
So things like learning styles, are you familiar with this?
Yes.
There are some people that are visual learners, some people that are auditory learners.
So it's like, you know, you've got to find your modality and then customize your learning or your teaching to each student or to yourself so as to suit that modality.
This is vastly popular and is still taught throughout Australia in education departments.
And it's bullshit.
But I mention it because it's appealing.
Like, you can understand why this kind of customised sort of thing has traction.
And it goes back to what I was saying about the difference between CAM and conventional medicine, is that sometimes you have theories or knowledge that is well accepted because it works.
Not because it's appealing.
Vaccines are the ultimate example, right?
We sort of reluctantly embrace vaccines, even though we don't like needles, we don't like anything really about the concept of it, but because intellectually we have to accept that they work.
But then you have other types of frameworks like different learning styles or like you're finding out if you're a wind person or a fire person or whatever, or a star sign.
And these are popular because they're appealing.
They're just appealing.
Yeah, so in some sense as well, you know, there's these things called Barnum statements, right, Matt?
You might be familiar with them, where they're designed to sound personalized, but they are so broad that almost anybody can make them apply to themselves.
So you say, you know, like, you're somebody that can be confident sometimes, but at other times you feel like, you know, you don't want to be around other people.
And everyone's like, yeah, right?
And they've done these studies where they give people these statements and ask how much they apply to them.
And a lot of people think that they're very accurate to describing them, but they're designed to be generic, right?
I mentioned this because Dr. K would say, no, no, no, no, that is not what we're doing.
And also, you mentioned...
The potential issue, you know, the contradiction of saying there are three types and that everyone is unique, right?
And he does attempt to justify this, but let me first just highlight that there definitely is a tripartite classification system there.
And he also said, if you are a Vata person, you should live your life as a Vata person, right?
If you're a Kapha person, you should go with that, which, like, it implies a very, like...
There is a destiny, right?
Like, you shouldn't go against your nature.
You should recognize your limitations and your benefits and play to them.
And that can be empowering, but it can also be rather restricting if somebody classifies you as a particular type, right?
I mean, you know, in the Indian context, obviously, the caste system is the extreme form of that.
I'm not saying that's what's applying here, but I'm just saying that kind of thing when you're talking about, you know, karmic destinies and whatnot.
It's often nice to the people who, they have a future where they can see things going well, but when it applies to, you know, people in worse circumstances who don't achieve much in life or, you know, don't leave their mark on society,
does that mean they didn't fulfill their karmic destiny or just that the majority of people in the world cannot be the heads of industry and the leaders of nations and whatnot?
But in any case, so Vata, Matt, Vata.
What is a vata like?
So vatas are like the wind.
So I'm super vata.
So vatas have memories and mindsets that are like the wind.
So I get really, really passionate very easily.
Like I blow, I'm like a gust of wind.
So I get super excited.
And I say that I'm going to teach about Ayurveda today.
And I get super hyped up about it.
And I blow really hard about Ayurveda.
And then like a week later, just like the wind, I just randomly die down.
So my mind gets super excited about stuff.
And then like randomly dies down.
I get excited about stuff, but follow-through is very difficult for my mind.
Other examples of vatas include interests that change very quickly.
A month ago, I was reading a bunch about Carl Jung, and now I'm like, okay, I'm done with Jung.
I'm ready to move on to something else.
And so that's another example.
So interests like the wind.
The other thing about vatas is that their mind learns very quickly.
So vatas, much like the wind, can blow really hard in one direction.
So if you drop me in a random job, within two or three days, I'll be really good at it.
So when I was in medical school, I did a really great job because I learned super fast.
The downside to vata is that you forget super fast too.
So vata memory...
Kind of, like, is easy to learn and easy to forget.
So when I meet people, people think I'm super smart.
Like, you guys think I'm super smart.
And then, like, the problem is that, like, if you know me for a while, I'm not going to seem nearly as smart as I come across, like, at the very beginning.
Because vatas are super dynamic in their memory.
Like, we just learn things very quickly, but we forget things very quickly.
Okay, so that's vatas.
We've got two more types, but one thing is, you know, there's pros and cons, right?
I still think vatas sound...
You know, kind of good from that description.
It sounds like the kind of enigmatic genius, you know, who's the forgetful professor, right, with the kind of piercing intellect, but can't concentrate on individual things so well.
So, like, Vata sounds pretty...
Nice to me.
But he does mention, you know, they're not good at sticking with things, and they're a bit material, this kind of thing, right?
And also to say, Matt, Dr. K highlights some of his failures, and it is relatable, I think, to his audience.
So I'm going to tell you guys this very simply.
I'm fucking lazy.
I'm not disciplined.
I'm fucking lazy.
I still love to play video games.
I procrastinate.
I don't like to do work.
I play video games instead of doing work.
I'm actually no different from you.
I don't think my stats are different from pretty much anyone on stream.
I think the biggest difference is that I understand I'm Vata.
I get it.
And I recognize that this is the way that I am.
And then I structure my life to suit...
Who I am in my mind.
Structure it to suit my cognitive fingerprint.
And if you start structuring your life to be designed for your cognitive fingerprint, we'll get to the other doshas in a second.
Then you're going to start to do a lot better.
But that's relatable.
Lazy fuck.
And it's an important point for someone like him to make that is looking to, I guess, convince.
His audience said the system works, right?
Embracing the ideas works because I'm super successful.
I've been to Ivy League places and, you know, whatever.
I'm a big deal, but it's not because I'm special.
It's not because I've got some attributes or whatever.
It's rather because I've embraced these ideas.
So if you embrace these ideas, you can too.
I'm skipping ahead a little bit here, Matt, but it thematically just connected.
I feel I have to play this clip because it relates to this.
We'll get back to the Tridoshi system in a minute.
So exactly what you said, that Dr. K is saying the system is what gives him the stats boost.
And if others follow the system, they'll get the same benefit.
I just want to make it clear that he really is making quite strong claims for the degree of benefit that he derives from following this system, not just for him, but for the people he treats.
The reason that depression is hard to treat is because people treat it like a monolithic disease.
Like, I don't know.
I mean, there are all kinds of reasons why this could be true, but I have very good results with the people that I work with with depression.
Like, I shit you guys not.
Like, I'm really not trying to toot my own horn, but there are people that are in my practice.
That have been on treatment for, like, have been in therapy and medication for anxiety for, like, 15 years.
And within six months, we're taping them off of medication and they feel fantastic.
Why?
Is it because I'm a brilliant clinician?
No!
This is what I'm saying.
I'm not actually any better.
It's just, I use tools that none of my colleagues use.
I use Ayurveda.
And it's like, it's OP, man.
I'm not actually a better clinician, so this is what I want you guys to understand.
I'm not actually saying I'm better than anyone else.
All I'm saying is that, like, all of my colleagues who are treating anxiety as a monolithic illness are doing themselves a disservice.
Because anxiety is not a monolithic illness.
There are different kinds of anxiety.
And once you understand that, once you start incorporating, like, anti-vata diets, people get better.
Okay, so the Ayurveda is the superpower.
OP, overpowered in humor analogy, right?
Yeah.
Other psychiatrists don't understand that people are different.
They treat conditions as being exactly the same for everyone.
But Ayurveda is the key that allows you to see people as individuals.
Unless you cure people who have been on medication for 15 years, Matt, unable to be helped, then you come, you use the Ayurvedic diet treatment and they're better.
They're cured.
That's some pretty big claims.
Because if that is true, you're essentially saying that there is a very, very effective system of medicine.
Now, the way that you've got to apply it should be interesting because, you know, as he's just explained earlier, you can't apply any generic principles, right?
It has to be each person approached individually.
But it is claiming, like, people get better.
He said it.
People get better.
And it's not that he's better.
It's the system that he's applying.
So this just speaks to the level of confidence that he has in Ayurvedic treatments.
And he really does see it as a distinguishing feature of what he offers.
So we'll see this slightly different in the later content.
But I just want to note that that is there.
And also just to say as well that...
When you look at, for instance, the modules that are offered on the Healthy Gamer GG thing, like the depression model has as part of it, you know, understand clinical versus non-clinical distinctions,
but then also has pancha kosha theory.
Discover how this ancient yogic theory can help you frame feelings of depression.
So, you know, I think it's still...
A significant component that distinguishes what he does from other people.
Okay, I felt we should continue there, but we need to get back to the different types of people, different types of doshas, right?
So you have vatas, you have pittas, maybe we'll get to them later, but let's hear about kaffas.
The third dosha is something called kapha.
So kapha is like earth and water.
So kapha is a lot of people that I know...
Think that they're not smart when actually they're just kaphas.
So one of the things to remember about kapha is that they learn slowly, but they also forget slowly.
So kaphas take time to get up to their...
They have slow acceleration, but they can hit very high velocities.
Whereas vatas have very high acceleration and very high negative acceleration and low velocity at the end of it.
So kaphas take their time to get...
Started.
Guffers are also what we call big bones.
So they tend to be heavyset.
It's easy for them to gain weight.
They have very round features and guffers tend to be very, very resilient.
So they can withstand large amounts of negative situations and sort of handle that pretty well because they kind of have high constitutions or high endurance.
But did you ever play Zelda?
No.
What's that about?
There's these rock people.
That they're like, you know, they're little circular, bolder people, that they're very, you know, like kind of friendly, but they're a little bit slow and they're, you know, like they can help you out.
They can absorb a lot of damage.
That's why Kappa, based on this description, is like, Kappa certainly sounds like the, you know, if you had the pig, if you had the pig between Vata and Kappa.
Kapha is a heavy set.
People think they're dumb, but they're not.
They're big boned.
They can't actually change that.
I don't want to be a Kapha.
But every team, every raiding team needs a couple of Kaphas to absorb those DPM.
I wonder, is there cross-national ratios of different people?
Because obviously there are genetic differences between People that might be in extreme circumstances better adapted to living in low oxygen environments because of isolation or whatnot.
Chris, I hear what you're saying.
I hear what you're saying.
You're saying that 80% of the population of Samoa...
Akafers.
It's a shocking revelation.
I'm not saying that.
I'm just saying, you know, like Sumo is dominated by Mongolians, Japanese, and Samoans, like, to a certain extent.
But I'm just wondering what the way that would apply.
But in any case, we haven't won all our type as well, but, you know, we'll get to them.
Basically, they're like the fire type.
They're kind of passionate.
Imagine Elon Musk, like, kind of driven, and they argue a lot.
But they're very inflexible and this kind of thing.
That's the other one, right?
Now...
Alongside this, how do you determine which one you are?
How would you work this out?
You could go to an Ayurvedic practitioner and they could find out.
Let's see some signs that you might be able to detect which one you belong to.
So remember that Ayurveda says that your mind has correlations with your body.
So vatas are also what we call people with fast metabolisms.
So if we look at...
If we look at, like, people's physical bodies, we know that there are three groups of people.
Like, you can sort of just look at people, and everyone knows this.
The first is that there are people with fast metabolisms.
So I can basically eat whatever I want to, and I'm not going to gain a whole lot of weight.
Then there are people who have medium builds, and then there are people who are what we call big-boned.
So medium builds are pittas, and big-boned people are kaphas.
And so kapha people who are, like, big-boned, they can eat salads every day, and they're still going to be chunky.
That's just what their Ayurvedic dosha sort of dictates.
And vata people are going to always kind of be thin.
The other thing about vata body types is that they have angular features.
So if you look at my face, my nose is very angular, right?
It's sharp.
The features of my face is sort of angular.
And if you guys saw, for example, on the last stream, we had Joro.
Which, by the way...
Joro did do his stuff, which we'll talk about in a minute, but we had someone named Joro, and Joro's a classic Gaffa.
Like, he has a very round face.
Like, I can't even, like, grow a full beard.
So Vatas have very, like, scant facial hair, whereas Gaffas have, like, full facial hair.
And Vatas also use their hands a lot.
So, like, I use my hands a lot when I'm talking.
So, I'm starting to get confused, because, like, I've got a beard, right?
But I use my hands a lot, and I'm...
Kind of flighty attention.
So I'm like, am I a Kapha?
I don't have a Ryan Fierce.
I suppose that's it.
Yeah.
So, yeah, it is big claims, right?
That you can basically tell somebody's personality and basically a whole bunch of things about their mind and their proficiencies, their cognitive abilities.
Just from looking at them or just from feeling their skin or seeing how much hair they've got or whether they've got a round face.
I mean, these ideas that you can tell what a person's nature is from the shape of their face or their head or their body have a long history in other places too and they are generally not looked upon very favourably these days.
Yeah, phrenology.
One system.
There are others.
There are systems about criminal appearances, facial features that are also discredited.
So, yeah, it's physogeony, right?
Isn't that the general term for this style of reasoning?
Physionomy.
I think there's two pronunciations, the American one and the everywhere else one.
So whichever one, choose your pick.
But everyone knows what it is, right?
And that came out, everyone knows there's three types of people, right?
There's athletic people, there's normal people, and there's fat people.
That's essentially what he said.
And I'm like...
I don't know.
This is a good example.
There's a continuum.
There's a continuum.
This is a good example of what I was saying.
Like height and weight.
You don't even have to go to personality.
Height and weight are multiply determined by a whole bunch of different factors, both genetic, environmental, lifestyle, etc.
They all contribute.
And that's why these things are on a spectrum.
You look at the distribution of heights and weights and there's a normal curve.
Maybe some heavy tails, but a curve, a spectrum.
There are not...
Fat people.
I know we use these concepts.
You might point at someone and call them a skinny.
Big bone, sorry.
We might call them skinny.
We might call them tall.
That's true.
But that doesn't mean that there are categories of heights and weighted people.
I don't know, Matt.
You've heard the term skinny fat, right?
That's me.
I'm skinny fat.
Yeah, so people are asking if you're skinny fat.
So skinny fat is a...
It's just you being unhealthy and vata.
Like, so instead of getting big bone, like, vatas can be fat.
It's not like you can't be fat.
Skinny fat is a vata that doesn't take care of themselves.
But they don't balloon like a gaffa, and they're not going to get fat in the same way that a bitta does.
They're going to get skinny fat, right?
Like, just look at that phrase.
Skinny fat.
You don't call yourself fat.
Intuitively, we recognize that this is a different kind of fat.
We call it skinny fat.
It's just a completely different kind of fat.
It's not a big-boned fat.
It's a skinny fat.
So vata is like...
Doshas are simple to see in your own life and simple to observe.
You can see kind of the proof right in front of you with the term skinny fat.
It's not big-boned fat.
It's skinny fat.
They don't balloon like gaffers.
There's a term skinny fat, Chris.
You're aware of it.
It proves it.
It proves what he's saying is right.
How can you date that?
You know, it's not just...
Your general overall weird, right?
You know, we heard mention of your angular features and whatnot, but there's more, Matt.
So I want you guys to look at the top of my eyelid and see how it covers, like, the top of my iris.
That's classically vata.
So there are even things like the more of your iris you can see, that's like bitas.
You can see the entire iris of their eyes.
And so there are all kinds of physical...
Oh, this is great.
Appetite.
There are all kinds of physical features.
So my diagnostic question for vatas is, are your eyes larger than your stomach?
And what I mean by that is that, do you get intensely hungry and then get satisfied with a relatively small amount of food?
Like, you feel like you can eat, like, you know, 10 pounds of barbecue, but then you eat, like, half a plate, and you're like, actually, I'm kind of full.
So that's a classic vata appetite.
Where your eyes are bigger than your stomach.
And you feel super, super hungry.
And you feel hungry erratically.
Bittas have sort of an excessive appetite.
Gophas have sort of a stable, regular appetite.
Vathas tend to be prone to constipation.
Bittas can have indigestion.
And can have acid reflux and stomach problems.
Eyelids.
Matt, eyelid coverage of the iris and the way that you're approaching eating meals, right?
And you heard quite clearly there, fat is prone to constipation, bitter is indigestion, acid reflux and stomach problems.
That is saying that there are types of people that are identifiable by physical characteristics and it's associated with proneness to particular Illnesses, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Now, look, we're not a debunking program, but a lot of this smells like bullshit.
It is not inconceivable that there could be some physical indicator, maybe a trivial one, like something about your eyelids, that might possibly be correlated with some surprising aspects of your personality or physiology.
One of the things I think you mentioned to me, Chris, that maybe this isn't backed up very well.
I'm sceptical myself, but I think that they do investigate the degree to which finger length ratio might have a connection to various traits and conditions like athletic ability, fertility and risk for certain diseases.
And the hypothesized mechanism is that they're mutually influenced by prenatal testosterone exposure.
Now, I have no idea whether or not that's true.
There's probably better examples.
But, you know, I'm just saying it's possible.
But your default assumption...
When somebody is claiming that, "Oh, we know that from this eyelid shape that you're a vater and you're going to get heartburn."
Your first response should be bullshit until proven otherwise.
I'm not convinced about the fingered link ratio and testosterone exposure, even though there's heaps of papers in the literature about it.
You really need to be convinced, and it doesn't seem like there's any critical evaluation of these claims.
Oh, well, Matt, now we haven't got to the tri-dosia, but we do need to talk about your claim.
There's no evidence.
So let's first of all talk about how you might classify people.
I mean, you could just look at them.
You can just see, are they skinny fat or vata?
You can look at their irises, but maybe you want to be a bit more systematic for it.
So here's some discussion about the content of a questionnaire to help you distinguish the different types.
So here's an example of the Prakriti questionnaire.
So this includes physical and mental stuff.
So I don't know if you guys can read this, but this is weight.
So vatas are usually thin, often difficult to put on weight, visible ribs.
Medium build, good muscle tone is Bitta's.
Bitta's are larger, difficult to lose weight, heavy bones.
Vata's skin is dry, cool, thin.
Bitta's skin is oily, smooth, and warm with a lot of freckles or color in their face.
So you guys should go look at Joro and look at the fucking color in his face.
He's got a ton of color in his face.
Bitta's have thick skin, cool skin, oily.
So hair tends to be thin, kinky.
I don't know if you guys see this, but like...
My hair is, like, kinky as fuck.
You guys see this?
Like, it kinks.
Like, you see this action?
Like, it's not straight.
So, Bithas have, like, male pattern baldness, oftentimes.
And Gaffa's hair is, like, thick, wavy, oily, lustrous.
Thank God Guffer's got something.
You can't lose weight.
They're slow and, you know, they're repentable, but at least they've got luscious locks.
That's something positive.
Yeah, so there's a questionnaire that you can apply and you can work out your relative, like, quite clear here, and we'll get back to it, this issue that...
He is talking about three distinct categories, but he will go on to argue that he's not doing that, right?
Like he's talking about relative proportions and everybody is a little bit of each of them.
But you mentioned evidence and I want to correct you, Matt, that they are not concerned with evidence.
So let's hear some about this.
You're going to hear some science, Matt.
Get ready.
Let me send you guys.
You guys want to see science?
Is anyone wondering whether...
Anyone wondering whether there's any science behind this stuff?
Like...
Yes.
Is this, like, just...
This is just theory, right?
There's no, like, science behind it.
This guy's, like, he's one of these complementary and alternative, like, homeopath Reiki people.
It's not real.
Come on.
Can't be real.
Right?
There's no way.
So, you guys want some science?
There's the science.
Okay?
So I'll tell you what these two papers show.
Yeah, it's some voodoo shit, right?
The first is that what researchers in India did, there's an emerging field called IU genomics.
So what researchers did is they said, okay, they gave a bunch of people these questionnaires, and they said, like, okay, for all of the people who are Vata, let's check their genome.
And for all the people who are Pitta, let's check their genome.
And are there statistically significant correlations between your genes and your dosha?
And the answer is absolutely yes.
So sorry, Ma.
Did you want science?
You got it.
I think our poor Dr. K may have been infected by hubermanitis, but nonetheless, he's brought the science to the dinner table.
And are you going to eat, Matt?
You need to eat your words, right?
Okay, so statistically significant associations between your genotype and your doshas.
You checked this out, didn't you?
I did, Matt.
There's a paper.
He flashed it up on the screen.
The two papers he references.
The first one...
It's "Prakriti and its Associations with Metabolism, Chronic Diseases and Genotypes: Possibilities of Newborn Screening and the Lifetime of Personalized Prevention: Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine."
This is a narrative review by two advocates for Ayurvedic medicine being integrated.
Would it surprise you that they survey the evidence and decide that there is Promising signs, it is apparent that multiple linkages of Ayurvedic tri-dosha principle with modern scientific biochemical and genetic markers are being unearthed.
As a step further, it can be envisioned that in future newborns can be screened for various prakriti types, which will open up possibilities of creating lifestyles and environments that lead to prevention of diseases that particular prakriti types are prone to.
I found what I think is a message from one of the authors on LinkedIn.
Which mentioned allopathy doesn't have all the answers.
Allopathy or Western medicine, while being quite progressive and diligent, still doesn't have all the answers.
In addition, the attitude of Western medicine is sick care and not health care.
You just have to look at the health care costs of the U.S. to see that it's not sustainable.
Finally, Western medicine is not holistic.
It's trying to be, but it's not, since most of the Western medical science is based on the Cartesian paradigm.
Please see the book Turning Point from Fritjof Capra for more.
So I'm not sure you should completely take the assessment of people who are advocates for Ayurveda as, you know, the final word when it's just their opinion man, as the dude would say.
But the other one, the study from 2015, genome-wide analysis correlates Ayurveda-Prakriti.
This is from Nature Scientific Reports.
A journal associated with the nature.
It's not the real nature.
I'm published there, so it often confuses people.
And he mentioned, the way he described it is, you know, they look at all the people, they check their genomes, and they find statistically significant correlations.
Now, that is somewhat true.
Somewhat true.
But this is the hubermanitis in effect, because one thing, Matt, is finding statistically significant correlations in Data sets.
Not very hard.
Not very hard.
And what you want to be concerned with is, one, well, statistical significance is not practical significance, but two, have you constrained it such that these statistical correlations you've identified wouldn't have been expected in another circumstance?
Like with a model that has five categories or something, right?
And this study...
3,416 male subjects from Ayurvedic institutes, ages 20 to 30, right?
A rather selected sample there.
And from that sample, we're only able to assign, you know, applying these kind of questionnaire things, 970 to a dominant one.
Around 30% of the sample could be assigned.
So this is a problem if you want to claim that it works because 70% of the sample wasn't able to be distinguished.
Then from that 30%, they selected 262 participants randomly to do the GWAS, right?
It's a very small sample size for a genome-wide association analysis.
Usually Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, right, for that kind of analysis is recommended.
And then they looked at 405, 782 single nucleotide polymorphisms and took the three categories from the questionnaire and looked for correlations, right?
Wow, yeah.
So almost half a million things to look at.
And they do indeed find that they can find correlations using a principle code.
Ponent analysis.
Yeah, so it's also, on top of everything you said, for people who don't know, in general, these genome-wide association tests are, you know, they can be done well, I assume, but they do tend to be the kind of thing where people sift the tea leaves and find quite spurious things.
They are, although I would say when used appropriately by population geneticists, they often have very robust and interesting life.
Yes, they are known for being abused, is what I'm saying.
So look, in a nutshell, we don't need to belabor the point, but the study that he cited is extremely weak methodologically.
And the claim that it's supporting is an extremely strong one.
And just like with Huberman, there is this tendency of these influences to be a little bit like birds spotting shiny, Yes,
and so just to highlight, you know, the Hubermanism that applies here, there's an objection from the chat.
A legitimate one about potential biases to people approaching things from this perspective.
Listen to how he responds to this issue.
Someone else was saying, "Doesn't this create a cognitive bias?"
Yeah, it can, but I don't think it's a cognitive bias because people don't know anything about this.
They just circle things.
A cognitive bias requires knowledge ahead of time.
The other thing is I'm confident, based on the genetic testing that is statistically significant, that this has real scientific merit.
Wrong approach, Matt.
The replication crisis should have taught people, especially well-informed, scientifically-minded people, that simply counting statistical significant results is a bad way to approach science.
You have to look at the overall quality because there are plenty.
of low-quality, badly-controlled studies that report statistically significant results, which cannot be replicated when people apply good controls.
What you would want is pre-registered studies with large sample sizes, with researchers who are not invested in proving the outcome correct.
And just to give an illustration that people may or may not know.
There was a study conducted in a premier psychology journal that proved that you could do the psychological manipulation, like give the stimulus, after taking the outcome measure.
So you got people to come into your lab, you took an outcome measure, then you give them the stimulus.
The effect from the stimulus traveled back in time and produced different effects depending on what stimulus people were presented to.
And this proved retroactive causality across nine experiments, all of which reached...
Statistical significance.
So there we go.
Science has proven that effects can travel backwards in time and that psi appears to be a real thing.
No, no, it didn't.
Daryl Bem did that study in 2011.
It was roundly criticized, could not be replicated.
And there's an illustration of the issue with using lax methods and allowing researcher degrees of freedom to impact designs, right?
Basically, if you...
If you analyze things, if you exercise degrees of freedoms, you can arrive at statistically significant results, you know, exercising enough researcher degrees of freedom.
But Huberman and Dr. K kind of act that finding statistical significance, that solves the issue, right?
It's been proven.
And he also says there that a cognitive bias requires knowledge in advance.
I'm not sure that's true, first of all.
Like, you can have biases that don't require advanced knowledge, but...
In this case as well, in the particular study he's citing, this is people from Ayurvedic institutes.
Like, I suspect people who are completing Ayurvedic questionnaires do have at least vague knowledge of the system that they are completing a questionnaire for.
So, yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
Unfortunately, Dr. K doesn't seem to be aware of any of those issues you mentioned.
Very similar to Dr. Huberman.
Yeah.
Or if they are aware of them, they certainly don't seem to influence what they say, you know, particularly strongly.
And just to note that this matters, right?
Because listen to this.
So that's what's awesome about Ayurveda.
Like you can make predictions about your life.
And if you sort of understand that, then that's fantastic because you can start to live accordingly.
So the cool thing...
About Ayurveda is that if you do have an autoimmune disease, if you do vata-lowering treatments, your autoimmune disease should get better.
Right?
So, like, if you adjust your vata, now we get to the next thing, which is someone was asking a little bit about changing your dorshik level, which you absolutely can do.
Ayurvedic treatments can cure autoimmune diseases.
That's funny, because so can, you know, all-made diets, and so can...
Practically everything that people talk about in health and wellness spaces, autoimmune treatments, older age.
Yes, yes.
Yeah.
Fecal transplants, gut biomes.
Well, we'll get to those.
We'll get to those, Matt.
But, you know, so this is like Ayurveda makes predictions.
It cures people, right?
It's OP'd compared to reductive Western medicine, which isn't interested in correlations or, you know, other factors.
Yeah, like again, just to emphasize this.
Just think about this for a second.
People who have fast metabolisms, they have to share certain traits.
Our metabolism is common.
People who are big boned have a metabolism that's fundamentally different from people who have fast metabolism.
So that has to be our body types.
Any person can look down the street and you can say, oh, there's a thin person.
There's a person who's big boned.
And there's a person who looks thin, but they clearly take care of themselves.
Their thinness is not natural.
It's due to effort.
And you can just look at someone on the street and you can tell.
There has to be a physiology behind this.
And that's just how it works.
So Ayurveda has been looking at this.
And so, I mean, the second paper that I sent you guys is very interesting.
It actually correlates brakruti.
Which is vata, pitta, and kapha, with different kinds of metabolism and diseases.
What they did is they correlated brakruti, like your vata, pitta, and kapha, and how likely you are to have a particular kind of chronic disease.
So vatas are prone to autoimmunity.
Autoimmune disease is a vata disease.
Pittas are prone to other kinds of diseases.
Kaphas are prone to things like type 2 diabetes.
Right?
So there are correlations now.
So now there's a huge area of research emerging in Ayurveda.
And the more that we study it, the more that we scientifically analyze it, the more correct it turns out to be.
Yep.
Does it predict disease proneness?
It's not surprising.
Gaffes are prone to type 2 diabetes.
I would have guessed that.
All the descriptions of them.
But constantly proven correct, Matt.
The science is just lining up.
Yeah.
And you also hear like, so like with Huberman, you know, there are times where things are stated responsibly around science and whatnot.
And then there are times like this.
There's a fascinating study done by the Benson Henry Institute, which looked at something called MGUS, which is a monoclonal gammopathy of unknown significance, which is a pre-cancerous state.
Taught those people who have this kind of precancerous state meditation, and then assessed their genetic activity, and actually found that the procancerous genes are less active after you learn how to meditate.
So this may be the first evidence, or there may be other evidence, I'm not really sure because this isn't my area, but this is actually a really interesting data point that suggests that meditation actually prevents the progression of cancer.
And it also treats depression.
How does that work?
It's because there are some overarching principles behind human health and wellness that once we start accessing those principles to things like exercise, meditation, everything about you is going to get better.
So there are claims about meditation preventing the progression of cancer.
There's a study that was done and they looked at monoclonal gammopathy of unknown significance, a precancerous state, and they, you know, Genetic activation and they find that if you're taught meditation, this will be less.
So if we just got all the people that were potentially more likely to get cancer, if we taught them meditation, wouldn't that be great?
Everything's going to get better.
Well, Calum is skeptical about the benefits of meditation specifically to prevent the development of cancer.
Again, a very huge claim.
We're not going to comprehensively debunk it.
I think good advice to take it skeptically, Chris?
Well, I'll just say, Matt, if it's the study that I was able to locate, you're talking about a sample of 45 in the response resiliency relaxation program versus a weightless control of N equals 48, and you've got a whole bunch of p-values hovering close to the 0.05 significance threshold.
So, of course, not pre-registered.
Of course, dealing with, like, one thing that people need to know about is whenever you have either, really any kind of data, but data that is very dense, like physiological data, for example, heart rate data, there's lots of different ways that you can look at it,
right?
You can look at the just heart rate, but you can look at changes over time.
You can look at peaks versus troughs and all different ways.
And it allows you to analyze the data in a whole A host of different ways.
And if your goal is just to achieve a significant outcome, it's not that difficult, especially in smaller sample sizes, to get results that are by chance or by random variation just under the significance threshold.
So if you get lots of results that the cost is a significant threshold, this is a warning sign.
And what you would really want is people pre-registering studies, having large, hard designs, and Clearly indicating what their key outcomes are in advance.
That's what you don't get.
That's what you don't get.
Instead, you just get reference.
It was a significant outcome, right?
And also very little consideration of the magnitude of the definites.
So, you know, like if there is a statistically significant difference between groups, it can be like 0.1 or it can be one group is a hundred and one group is a thousand, right?
And in these kinds of studies, the differences are often very small, but reaching Significance threshold.
So again, it could be true, but if so, this is weak evidence for it.
It's a low quality study and you would want much more before you talk to an audience so confidently, you know, or enthusiastically about meditation being a preventative treatment against cancer.
That's correct, Chris.
That's right.
I mean, this is, I mean, look, it's useful to talk about it because this is scientific literacy.
And for the layperson, like a good rule of thumb is just to be skeptical of claims like this.
And you can see those red flags there.
Is the claim really big?
Is it like super duper surprising?
You're hearing it for the first time.
It's been rattled off super confidently and a single study is cited.
If you do want to dig deeper and actually look at the study and look at the literature, then yes.
I mean, pay attention to.
Are the researchers highly motivated to prove this thing is true?
And the other thing to look at is, as you said, those researcher degrees of freedom.
So when you're dealing with these complicated data sets, the GWAS is a good example.
It's very high dimensional.
You use complicated statistics on it.
It's a whole bunch of choices in terms of how you analyze it.
If you are motivated to prove the thing is true, or maybe you're just a researcher who's motivated to bump up your publication record, you're trying to get it accepted at a good journal and they won't accept null results.
With those motivations there, then, you know, people can intentionally or unintentionally basically produce dodgy research, even when other aspects of the methodology, like the sample size and stuff, is good, which in this case, it generally isn't.
But, I mean, look, the takeaway here for me is that Dr. K is very similar to Huberman in his role as an influencer, you know, being a font of wisdom when it comes to, I'm dropping truth bombs on you on how to optimize your life.
They reference these studies as window dressing.
You really can't rely on them as a source of scientific information.
Yeah, and I know you want me to move on from it.
I can sense it, but I'm going to give you one last example.
This is a citation of a study about rats and fecal transplants.
Here we go.
And you guys got to tell me if you really want references because I feel like it breaks my flow, but I feel like it's important for me to back up what I say.
So, I saw a fascinating study.
They took a bunch of depressed rats, extracted their stool, transplanted their stool to healthy rats, and the rats became depressed from a stool transplant.
That is insane.
It's completely insane.
There are two kinds of bacteria that have been found in people who have high levels of anxiety.
So they ask someone, are you super anxious?
People who say yes, they test your gut bacteria.
There are two kinds of bacteria that people have high levels of bacteria if they're anxious.
If people test low for anxiety, there's a different two bacteria that are very prominent.
Fascinating stuff.
Here, again, I went to due diligence.
I only want to illustrate this to...
Talk about, you know, the way that you should approach these things, because I find what I think is the study he's referencing.
Fecal microbiota transplantation from chronic, unpredictable, mild stress mice donors affects anxiety-like and depression-like behavior in recipient mice via the gut microbiota inflammation brain axis.
A paper from 2019 published in Stress.
This is what he described, like there was, you know, fecal transplants and they use various mechanisms to try and control the study, you know, like wiping out the gut fauna and whatnot before they start doing the post-transplant tests and so on and so forth.
But even with that, this is a study with each group of mice in the different conditions having eight mice in it and a whole bunch of the outcomes.
Hovering round about that magical 0.05.
There are other studies, a more recent one from 2022, doing a similar thing with different genetic strains.
One mice that are more prone to depression that does a similar kind of thing and finds effects again.
But again, we're talking about samples with like 10 mice per condition.
So, you know, it's a developing literature.
It might be an interesting finding, but I would be...
Highly skeptical until you have stronger quality evidence.
And the way it's presented in Dr. K's material is this is just constantly validating all Ayurvedic insights and anticipations.
And the evidence is much weaker than he implies.
Yeah, there's statistical significance.
That's true.
But nothing is pre-registered.
Nothing is like large sample sizes or this kind of thing.
The appropriate response is skepticism.
Yeah, and it's not like one can't talk about tentative findings like this.
But when the results or the conclusions of the literature are so weak, you can't be referring to them like Huberman or Dr K does, as if science has proved my particular bespoke theory right.
Look, look, here's their study.
That's the wrong way to be using it.
It's very misleading.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so Matt, there's some other areas that we should talk about, but one thing I should get back to, just so people can understand, is there is the claim, despite what we've talked about with the tripartite system, that this is the wrong way to conceive of the doshas.
So listen to this.
Yeah, so then people are talking about mage tanks, right?
Yeah, so you could be a battle mage, right?
You could be like...
Like, you can wear heavy armor, you can cast some spells, and then you can also, like, wield a fucking two-handed sword.
You can do that.
So, some people are Baidoshik or Tridoshik.
And the thing to remember about people that are Baidoshik or Tridoshik is that they're no, like, better or worse than other people.
It's just, like, if you're a battle mage, you're not going to be as good of just a straight-up spellcaster as a straight mage.
You're also going to be, like, not have, you're not going to have the same weaknesses.
So my weaknesses and my strengths are very, very polarized.
I'm not like a middle-of-the-road kind of person.
I'm super Vata.
And so if you're a battle mage, you're like a Kapha Pitta Vata, right?
So you do some spellcasting, you do some melee DPS, and you're kind of tanky.
You're not going to be as extreme as any people who are Vata Pitta or Kapha, but you're going to be kind of like well-rounded.
So some people are Doshik like that.
So, in that case, Matt, he's talking about people who are multi-class, right?
In between the categories.
So, you've got the concept that there are, you know, people who are pure, like doshas, and then there are people who are in between, right?
It's not an exact classification.
But you also have this.
Can people have, like, multiple amounts?
Absolutely.
So, some people can have, like, a vata memory and, like...
A kapha...
Let's say, like...
Let me think about this.
So, like, people can be, like, have kapha friendships and a vata memory.
Like, generally speaking, they kind of lump together, but everyone is draidoshik.
Everyone has some level of each.
Okay.
So, moving away now from the categorical approach to these types, which he sometimes talks like that, but I think...
Now he's falling back to what I think is a more accurate reflection of what Ayurveda says, which is that people have these different amounts of these three things, pretty much like in traditional European things, they have different levels of the humors.
Too much blood, too much yellow bile, that kind of thing.
And he actually compares it to D&D, you know, the kind of gamer analogies again.
So, like, listen to this.
So I want you guys to imagine that you have, like, imagine these are, like, stats.
So, like, instead of, like, strength, intelligence, and, like...
Imagine that you have a vata score, a pitta score, and a kapha score.
So I want you guys to think about these as stats.
And everyone has a certain number on each stat.
The other thing is it's not like higher numbers mean better things.
So disease or problems in Ayurveda arise when each of your dosha stats is too high or too low.
So I have a dynamic mind.
I learn things very quickly.
And if my Vata stat, like, goes 5 points higher, like, let's say my Vata is, like, a 75. If it goes, like, 10 points higher and I hit 85, then I have ADHD.
At that point, my mind is so dynamic that it can't focus on one thing and it becomes, like, problematic for me.
Whereas my Guffa stat is, like, super low.
So, like, if my Guffa stat drops a little bit more, then I get, like, sick.
So I physically, like, get ill very easily.
Like, I was as sick as a kid.
Like, it's kind of like you have a low con stat, right?
Like, my poison resistance and my disease resistance and all that kind of shit is, like, really low.
You can see why this is appealing, right?
Especially, I think, the people.
Because it sounds, you know, one, you can kind of intuitively get it.
But also, now we're talking about people.
Like you said, you can raise and lower your stats and your basic build might be a Vata type, but you can bulk up and maybe you become more bitter for your diet and your habits and whatnot.
But that goes against a lot of the stuff that has been previously talked about.
Vatas can't get properly fat.
They can get fat, but they're skinny fat.
There's a combination depending on what you want to Emphasize that it's either like a typology which is quite strict versus a very flexible system where you're a Vata type, but in these aspects, you're much more Bitta or Kapha,
right?
Well, Chris, I think that's linked to the Barnum statements thing that you mentioned before, which is...
There's that flexibility.
So you say, oh, you're a Scorpio.
You feel like this.
And someone's saying, well, hang on.
No, actually, sometimes I don't.
Well, yes, of course, because in some situations, you know, Scorpios will be like this, but then, you know, it's very flexible the way it's applied.
That's right.
And the last clip I'll play for this part is just, you might have been curious, he's a Vata type.
What type is his wife, who is the CEO of the Healthy Gamer?
Anytime my kids get sick, I get sick.
My wife is skafa, so she, like, everyone in the house can be sick, and she's gonna be fine.
So, like, my immunity is weak.
So I have, like, a low con stat, high int.
Right?
So, I want you guys to just imagine that everyone has, like, different levels of these.
And you could be thraidosik.
You can be, like, in the middle for each of these.
And I hope if you guys take a look at the questionnaire, what you see is that there are different dimensions.
And that, like, You know, you can have, like, Vata and memory and, like, Gaffa and friendships and, like, Bitta and career.
And that's just the way that you are.
Yeah, so there's so many degrees of freedom.
What happened to the GWAS and, you know, the autoimmune system is for Vatas, right?
Like, so now, no, you're like...
You can be in the middle and all of them.
You're a rich tapestry again.
That's right.
Then you can be like a vatter in this way, be like a kaffir in this way.
It all depends and it's all very complicated.
So it can at once be a very simple and intuitively satisfying thing, but also complex and nuanced enough to fit any situation.
Yeah.
This is a bad theory, Chris, by the way.
Just structurally, that's not a good property for a theory.
There's a lot similar to the four humors, like when they're out of balance and you had individuals who were phlegmatic or, you know, whatever the case might be.
So, yeah, yeah.
You might say it's a pre-modern pseudoscientific approach to medicine.
One might.
One might well say that, Chris.
One might, but...
Let me just make you consider the issue of depression.
But it's kind of bizarre that in psychiatry, if you look at the DSM-5 criteria for depression, you can have insomnia or hypersomnia.
Just think about that for a second.
They call it sleep disturbance.
But they say that depression is the same whether you sleep too much or you sleep too little.
That just doesn't make sense to me.
So another DSM-5 criteria for depression is appetite changes.
What that means is that you can eat too much or eat too little.
Both of those qualify as depression.
It blows my mind as a clinician that a disease where you eat too little is the same as where you eat too much.
Those are two different diseases, my friends.
If you sleep too little or you sleep too much, we call both of those things depression.
Those are two different diseases.
There's a Vata depression and there's a Kapha depression.
There's an anxious depression and there's a neurovegetative depression.
So this is how stupid the DSM-5 is and the diagnostic criteria for depression.
Did you think that was a reasonable critique there, Chris?
Well, if you take it in a generous spirit, there are complaints about a lot of psychiatric and psychological disorders that they're...
Diagnostic criteria is a little bit generic or broad so that, you know, it's possible for a lot of people to be classified within them and there are issues with overprescription.
So in that regard, I think that you could have objections, but the particular ones that he raises in regards to like sleep disorder, too much sleep versus too little sleep being fundamentally absolutely different.
Of course, they are different, but each individual person can have different things.
So if you're somebody that sleeps usually nine hours a night and then suddenly you're sleeping four hours a night, that would be a change to your sleeping patterns.
And if you were someone who was usually sleeping six or seven hours a night and then suddenly couldn't get up for 10 hours, that would also be a sleep disturbance.
So I do think that he's...
Overstating the degree to which it's silly to regard sleep disturbance as a diagnostic criteria, because surely that's just recognizing there could be individual variation in what that counts for.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You know, that's just one criteria from all of the diagnostic criteria, of which there are many.
You know, the most important one being...
Being depressed most of the day.
Not taking pleasure in many different activities.
Significant weight loss.
But here's another example.
Or weight gain, right?
So again, disruption.
Psychomotor agitation.
Fatigue.
Feelings of worthlessness.
A whole bunch of things.
And it's not just, do you sleep too much or too little?
It's not the case.
His reasoning there is bad.
It's not the case that just because one of these indicators, the disruption can be in the positive or the negative direction.
It doesn't imply that the underlying disease is an entirely different thing.
There could well be different types of depression, but it's not because of that symptom.
There are various different types of depression as we'll get to, but let's hear him talk about this a little bit more.
And clinicians understand this.
If you talk to someone who prescribes antidepressants, we have two classes of antidepressants.
Clinicians understand this.
We have activating antidepressants, which give people a pep in their step, and then we have calming antidepressants.
We have some antidepressants that are also anti-anxiety medications, and we have some antidepressants that are not anti-anxiety medications.
So clinicians understand that there are different kinds of depression, but in Western science, we just haven't...
I haven't figured this out yet.
Okay.
Is that true?
Remind me of the question, what hasn't Western science figured out?
No, well, so there are antidepressant drugs that can be activating and there are ones that are calming.
You know, the drug profile is doing different things and clinicians will find that people respond differently to different types of drugs, right?
Some people might need a calming type.
Antidepressant, then some might need an activated one.
So he's saying this speaks to there being an underlying different pathology at play, right?
So there are different types of depression.
My clinicians recognize it, but Western science does not.
Right.
Well, that's odd because there are different types of depression, as you said.
I mean, obviously, everyone reacts differently to particular drugs and the underlying, you know, if it's kind of a physiological basis to the depression.
I can well imagine that there are different mechanisms.
So, yeah, I mean, my understanding is that a psychiatrist will see how a patient responds to, one, it doesn't work for everyone, and if that one isn't really working, then they might put someone on to another one, right?
They might have side effects that are too strong or that the patient doesn't feel comfortable in the way that that applies.
But I think what Dr. K wants to say is...
The reason for all that is because, you know, they haven't fundamentally recognized that there's different types of depression.
Okay.
Did you want to play another clip or did you want me to read your list?
I'll play another clip before you, because I think this might address what you were about to read.
So let's play another clip and see where the argument goes.
I know this is maybe not what you guys are interested in.
Anger attacks.
So this is fascinating paper.
Here we go.
Maurizio Fava.
Okay, you guys have to check out this paper.
Fascinating.
You guys want to see Bitta Depression?
Read this paper.
Maurizio Fava is the Associate Chief of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Guy's absolutely brilliant.
He's a depression researcher.
And he discovered back in 98 that there is another subtype of depression.
Not just anxious, not just neurovegetative, but what he calls depression with anger attacks.
That's Bitta Depression.
The neurotransmitter profile for depression with anger attacks is different from the neurotransmitter profile for anxious depression and neurovegetative depression.
The neurotransmitters in each of these depressions is different, and that's been studied.
So I'm telling you guys, Ayurveda has this spot on.
And if you understand that when you're under stress, do you get anxious?
Do you get pissed?
Or do you get depressed?
Why is this thing?
Glory.
So, this is an example of Ayurveda, right?
So, the thing there, Pat, is first of all, the paper that he brings up, anger attacks in depression, it's from 1998.
And it is, like you said, a depression researcher talking about a specific subtype of depression.
When I looked up about the major subtypes of depression in the DSM-5, you get atypical depression, melancholic depression, anxious depression, treatment-resistant depression, psychotic depression, seasonal affective disorder,
Actually, sorry, I read the subtypes and then I read the...
Principal types.
Disorders, right?
Yeah, major depressive disorder, persistent depressive disorder.
I could go on.
There's also other specified depressive disorder, unspecified depressive disorder.
There's a lot, is the point.
It's almost as if modern psychiatry doesn't assume that everyone's depression is exactly the same, Chris.
That's the impression I'm getting.
Yeah, there's even, like, there's ones which sound like they're characterized by atypical presentations, right?
And he himself was citing a paper from 1998, which is identifying, like, arguing for, you know, a subtype of a subtype, right?
This seems to contradict his point before, that Western medicine refuses to recognize These differences.
And his logic there seems to be that because he's read this paper and he thinks he sees like a connection between this subtype and bitter depression, then that's a validation of Ayurveda.
It's Ayurveda.
Yeah, this is a little bit like a callback to Carl Jung.
Because he mentioned reading about Carl Jung, but I think he might have been reading sources that were presenting Jung as being...
You know, essentially an Ayurvedic practitioner in Obatneum, but that seems like a little bit of a skewed presentation.
So yeah, the logic doesn't seem to hang together to me.
It's like you're saying, nobody in Western medicine is recognizing this.
Then you point to examples of people recognizing something which is parallel and is itself building on an existing foundation of different...
Yeah, like the DSM-5 is almost at fault for having too many different subtypes.
It's massive.
There is so much specificity there.
It sometimes gets a bit overwhelming.
But also, there's many different streams of treating depression.
These depressions are not treated the same way either.
I mean, beyond just...
You know, selecting different pharmaceuticals and modifying them depending on how people are responding to them.
In terms of the psychology of it, like, I'm aware of heaps of different approaches to depression which might suit the different causes better.
Like, you know, cognitive behavioral therapies, for instance, focus on...
The links between, you know, thoughts, feelings and actions and try to interrupt unhelpful cognitions, you know, that sort of spiral.
So if that's one of the key drivers for you, then that kind of therapy could be most helpful.
On the other hand, there are these more humanistic or interpersonal type approaches which look at maybe some more existential or self-actualizing problems in your life, which might be more of a deeper, I guess, cause for being unhappy and dissatisfied.
And you can, you know, you can help the client.
There are so many different kinds.
Ones that focus on family, you know, behavioral activation, which focuses on the physiology, getting people moving around.
So it's not like there's just a one-size-fits-all.
So I am reacting a little bit, I suppose, to what I feel is a straw man version of modern psychology and psychiatry.
Maybe some people would argue that in the American context, there is a stronger...
Push towards simply like a kind of carpet bombing with medication, right?
And like one-size-fits-all.
That might be the argument that he's operating within that system.
But even there, I think there's still a lot of...
Different talk therapy style things and stuff in the American system.
I don't doubt that there are therapists and clinicians who do a one-size-fits-all approach, but I am absolutely sure that even in all alternative health systems that you're going to have people applying, you know, despite what he's talking about, there are going to be products and treatments which are very commonly applied to Vata and Bitta people,
right?
Yeah, and even then, when there is a treatment that is very commonly applied, like it's the first kind of go-to, it's often because it's very effective.
Like, for instance, you know, schizophrenia for a long time was totally untreatable, really.
No amount of talk therapy is going to help you if you're having those episodes.
And these drugs came along, they're not perfect, but, you know, they resolve it for many people, so it makes sense to kind of try that first.
So anyway, anti-psychotic medications and psychotherapy or whatever, right?
And support.
So yeah, that makes sense.
But well, so linking it to the approach that Ayurvedic might take that would differ from the Western style, there's a little bit of discussion about diet.
So people are wondering, what food do I eat to cure depression?
See, this is the wrong thinking.
Remember, we just talked about how there are three kinds of depression.
There's anxious depression, there's depression with anger attacks, and there's neurovegetative depression.
Depression is not one thing.
That's a Western concept.
There's one thing called depression.
And all depression has the same treatment.
That's exactly what I'm trying to say is incorrect.
There are different kinds of depression.
What kind of depression do you have?
What's your Ayurvedic dosha?
That's where you're going to find the right treatment.
You guys get that?
Like, that's the whole point behind what I'm saying.
This is why depression is so fucking hard to cure.
Because it's not one disease.
Again, that contradiction at the start.
He said depression with anger attacks, anxious depression, neurovegetative depression.
Surely those are not...
Ayurvedic terms, right?
And then he said that it's a single thing, it's a Western concept, but he just listed three different types.
So yeah, it just, it feels like a little bit contradictory, but the strong through line is Western medicine is reductive.
It applies a single treatment to a single kind of patient and it's only...
Interest in treating a disease.
Like depression, one treatment, it applies to everyone.
Yeah, and so I just have to...
You can't think that he's unaware of all of the different subcategories of depression.
He's a credentialed psychiatrist.
But he mentioned them.
He literally mentioned some of them in the sentence before he said that they don't distinguish.
And he must also be aware of all of the different kinds of treatments.
Like, what about, you know, the systemic family therapy, which looks at depression in the context of family and the social networks you're embedded in and looks at the dynamics and the way that you're communicating.
I mean, that kind of thing is not going to help you if the basis of your depression is kind of physiological, essentially.
But it can help you if that's kind of the rude thing.
And so there is just a huge amount of diversity of approaches as well.
So, again, I just feel like you must be aware of that.
But I guess in the context of this conversation, maybe that knowledge isn't useful.
Yeah, yeah.
I think in different contexts, he probably would be less dichotomous around us.
But here it's strong.
This is part of the reason I wanted to do this before we get into the one where he's, you know, debating with another doctor, right?
And is more presenting a favorable interpretation.
To some extent, of modern medicine.
But that focus, Matt, about, like, his audience were asking about diets, right?
And he told them off a little bit, like, there's no single treatment.
He was like, there's three types.
Three types, right?
It feels a little bit about being gaslit, you know, to say there's infinite diversity.
And then, like, very often it comes to three.
Three that relate to the doshas, right?
But this focus on diet, that is a...
A somewhat unique aspect, because I don't think if you go to most psychiatrists, they're going to give you a specific dietary regime.
I mean, McKenna Peterson might, but...
Yeah, that's right.
McKenna Peterson would definitely endorse that.
But no, I don't think your typical psychiatrist is going to say, oh, you're feeling very depressed, get more roughage in your diet, but that'll fix you up.
Well, not just diet.
So here's a little bit about the kind of, you know, Holistic approach, shall we say, Matt, as it relates to diet and some other bodily activities.
So we're going to talk about diet and vata right now.
And then we're going to also talk a little bit about different mental health issues and vata, pitta, and kapha.
And then we're going to jump to questions.
Simplest thing you can do for vata.
You have to get your bowels moving regularly.
So if you're constipated, fix the constipation.
Number one.
Okay?
Even bowel movements.
Vatas are cold and dry, and so you want to eat foods that are warm and moist.
So anytime you have an option between soup and salad, pick soup.
Vatas have weak digestion, so their digestive power is not very high.
So you want to cook foods before you eat them.
If we think about if you eat a cooked carrot versus a raw carrot, they taste very different.
Both of them are sweet, but a cooked carrot is way sweeter.
So some of the process of digestion has already been done for you.
You've broken down some of the walls of the cellular structure of carrots so that the sweetness is more available to you.
So vatas should eat foods that are warm and moist.
So avoid things like toast.
If you have an option between toast and oatmeal in the morning, go with oatmeal.
For pittas, you want to...
Avoid foods that are warm and wet, so you want to eat things that are cold and dry.
So, like, a sandwich is a great food for a pitta.
Salad is a great food for a pitta.
Kaffas are cold and wet, so you want to eat foods that are warm and dry.
So toast is great food for a pitta.
I mean, sorry, kaffa.
Okay?
You know, again, just the contrast between infinite diversity.
Everybody is tri-do-shake.
You know, you can be a kapha in your marital relations and a vata and suddenly kaphas are the only ones that are supposed to be eating toast because they're cold and wet.
You know, it's quite a whiplash between the claims.
That you're going to be treating everything individually to, like, very strong generic pronouncements about, you know, whole food types and all vatas shouldn't be eating toast, right?
Like, so, sorry for vatas.
Sorry for them.
Presumably he means, he's saying if you're a vata, then you're a vata with respect to your food.
So you're cold and wet maybe, just specifically with respect to food, but maybe you're warm and dry with respect to interpersonal relationships.
Like, is that an alternative reading?
I don't know.
I'm just guessing.
Oh, it could be.
Yeah, it could be.
And the bowel movement thing.
So this is also a feature that came up when we were looking, you know, at Michaela Peterson and the kind of various diet gurus, right?
And there actually used to be this doctor.
Well, she wasn't a doctor.
She was a nutritionist version called Gillian McKeith, who was constantly obsessing over people's bowel movements.
And she would diagnose all sorts of things.
And it's not that there's...
Of course there are...
There's information there.
If you only choose to look, Chris, there's lots of information there.
But you're right.
Obsessing over it does tend to be a feature of alternative health.
And also, I should say, of pre-modern European medicine.
The doctors back then, that was the first thing they wanted to do.
They wanted to look at your stall.
Yeah, and there is, following that, a recommendation for the chat.
To go out and find out this kind of information.
Like, you know, it's easy to find out.
So here's what he suggests.
So, cold and dry is vata, so you want to eat foods that are warm and wet.
Pitta is warm and wet, so you want to eat foods that are cold and dry.
And kapha is cold and wet, so you want to eat foods that are warm and dry.
So that's the simplest change to make.
You guys can also, like, Google different, like, you can just Google Ayurvedic diet, and I'm sure you guys will find stuff, and you can sort of test it yourself.
Yeah, so, you know, just find an Ayurvedic diet list, identify which of the doshas is you, and that determines the foods that you are most suited to consume in three broad categories.
Yeah, and I kind of realized while that clip was playing that alternative interpretation that You could be a different dosha across a multiplicity of different aspects of your life.
That seems to be contradictory with the idea that you can tell your dosha by your physical appearance, right?
Because you've only got one, right?
So that implies that you are what he's saying.
You're a bitter or a...
I keep forgetting a kapha.
Yeah, like if it's based on your physical appearance, right?
If that's a strong diagnostic indicator, then you've got to be just one, right?
You can't have a multiplicity of different doshas in different dimensions, at least according to Dr. K's explanations.
This is Ayurveda filtered through Dr. K, and we're talking about him rather than that.
It's the Barnum nature of it.
I think this is the infinite flexibility, right?
That it is both quite prescriptive and a clear typology.
When it needs to be, you can inject infinite variation by saying, well, there are also certain aspects that don't apply to everyone and maybe in this specific way.
So you actually shoot it that food because this interaction means it responds well to your doshik balance.
It does remind me how our Scorpios are always cold and harsh.
But we can be very warm and giving if we're the right person in the right circumstances.
Yeah.
It doesn't make sense, because I am sometimes...
But it can make big changes, Matt.
So, like, for example...
So, gluten is a prime example of, like, Western thinking.
So, gluten sensitivity says that gluten, one individual compound, is the problem for everyone.
So...
If you have a pro-allergic thing to gluten, that allergy is vata.
But what I would say about gluten sensitivity is if you fix your vata, your ability to tolerate gluten should get better.
So remember that some people have celiac disease, which is a true allergy to gluten.
And then some people have gluten insensitivity.
But if you improve your vata, if you lower your vata, your ability to tolerate gluten should improve.
So one thing to note there, I think he...
It's correctly diagnosing that there is a genuine illness, which means you react very badly to gluten, which is rare.
And then there is a perhaps cultural phenomenon where a lot of people feel that they are very sensitive to gluten ever since it became a cultural phenomenon that this was discussed.
And so I can't entirely tell there, was he saying that you cannot You can't cure celiac disease with this, but you could deal with the milder,
more subjective one.
You could be right.
It's like inflammation, isn't it?
Or feeling tired.
Before we give too much credit, let's just be clear that it's not like that's all.
He says about diets and this kind of thing, though.
So he does go a bit further.
We have...
Yeah, so it's autoimmune, but that's exactly what I'm saying, right?
You guys have to understand that VATA corrects, in general, autoimmunity.
So if you have MS, if you have rheumatoid arthritis, if you have lupus, any of the patients that I work with, when they come in with these things, I give them VATA-reducing diets, and they tend to get better.
So rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, They are symptoms of imbalance in doshas, really.
Just a little side note there.
You notice the reliance on his clinical experience, which is understandable.
And there is a legitimate divide, I think, between researchers and clinicians.
Because there is experiential knowledge that you get from...
Hands-on practice, whether you're a nurse or a doctor or a psychiatrist or whatever.
There's stuff you can learn from being experienced at it that you probably can't get from a textbook so much.
But at the same time, we know all about the kinds of biases and things like that that can kind of creep in.
Like there's all kinds of, you know, treatment effects, rebound effects, things that there are ways in which your personal experience in terms of, oh, I did this and it seemed to work and whatever.
This is why we do RCTs, because your individual experience is very dodgy sometimes there.
And there's plenty of people with legitimate clinical experience and expertise, long careers, who promote absolute nonsense.
Anti-vaccine, insanity, you know, so I'm Peter McCulloch for just one example, right?
So I think a clinical expertise is relevant, but it...
It cannot be used as a substitute for actual robust evidence.
Because Jordan Peterson, similarly, often references his clinical experience, right, to justify his insane culture war TX.
Well, that's right.
If you listen to Michaela Peterson and Jordan talking about the magical treatment properties of an all-meat ruminant diet with vinegar, not just with themselves, but with other people, you know, from their personal experience...
It works every time, right?
It's perfect.
It's the magic bullet.
And I think that they're in good faith.
They really believe that.
It just illustrates one can be led astray from that.
Yeah.
Well, so all of this conversation might sound a little bit familiar to people in regards to the increased attention given to gut biome.
In various areas of research and the discourse sphere.
And Dr. K touches on that here, linking it up to, you know, the Ayurvedic concern with diet.
So I think what we're going to have to do, if you guys are curious, we just have to have someone come on and then like, we'll talk about some specifics of Ayurveda.
But the first thing to start with is diet, diet, diet.
First line treatment for mental health problems in Ayurveda is dietary change.
Change your diet, your anxiety, your depression.
Your anger will get better.
And now there's an emerging field.
The hottest topic in medicine right now is brain gut.
It's this idea that if you change your gut bacteria, your mental health will change.
And Ayurveda has been saying that for thousands of years.
So now we have scientific evidence that correlates what happens in our gut and what happens in our brain.
Right?
So this is the coolest study ever.
He's going to reference the rat study that we already talked about there.
But I genuinely think people should note this because the level of enthusiasm with which some hot new research topic is approached, especially one where people are prone to making significant overextrapolations from limited evidence.
So most researchers who are like...
Responsible, right?
Discussing the gut biome and, you know, the connections to mental health.
They want to be in line with evidence, right?
And careful in what they're saying.
When they see a field like kind of blow up and become, you know, like a hot new topic, they increase their skepticism about the level of claims being made, right?
Because it may turn out that...
This is a revolution in the way that we understand how the body works and how the brain connects with the gut and all these kind of things.
And there are legitimate connections.
There is very interesting research being done.
But it's also like quantum physics, an area that just attracts people layering on top pseudoscience and over-extrapolations.
And that's why almost all health and wellness influencers You will hear that when they reference the gut microbiome, that it validates whatever their model is.
It doesn't have to be Ayurvedic.
It can be any other.
Well, do you remember the episode we did with Gwyneth Paltrow, the person she was interviewing?
That was a good example.
Yeah, it's like the magic bullet that fixes everything.
Or, you know, everything is boiled down to inflammation, which was another...
Key topic.
You know, information is important.
It is a signifier of important things.
But, you know, it's like these tech bubbles that come along from time to time that people have made that graph.
There's the enthusiastic zoom up and then there's the sort of reality crash that comes along too.
But in health and wellness, by the time the crash has come, people have already got some new.
Hot thing to focus on.
Yeah, and that approach, like you described earlier, Matt, you know, he's going to reference a study of mice, like a very small sample size with, you know, the p-values have very near significance, but presented as, you know, the coolest study ever.
Huberman does this as well.
It's everything.
It proves I was right about such and such.
Five since of years.
Yeah.
Like, they knew this five since years ago.
And it's one very weak, small-end study in rats.
With a p-value of 0.05 or something.
Yeah, it's just not a good approach.
It'll just lead you to bounce around from one shiny thing to the next in a constant state of confusion.
Yeah, so you mentioned inflammation, Matt.
Just a note.
So how does diet improve depression?
It's because there are some bacteria that are sending inflammatory signals to your brain that cause depression.
Also a fascinating...
Really fascinating study that I just saw recently.
People did a brief clinical trial of giving people anti-inflammatories when they're depressed, and their depression got better.
So some bacteria create a lot of inflammation, like bacteria that digest processed foods create a lot of inflammation.
And when they create inflammation, it causes depression.
Yeah.
So...
Like, the fascinating thing is that, you know, people have been believing in Ayurveda.
You want to believe in it.
Fine.
The reason that I'm excited behind it and the reason that I'm such a proponent of it is because there's actually science to back it up now.
We're not quite at the level of clinical studies, but the basic science really suggests that Ayurveda is good and is correct.
And I've seen enough clinical or anecdotal improvement to where I believe it.
Fair enough.
That's his opinion.
Well, that, like, but you heard there the reference to processed food creating bacteria generates inflammation.
Yeah, there are specific bacteria that process food specifically, and these are the ones that send inflammatory signals to the brain, and that's what causes depression.
I mean, I haven't looked into this specific claim, Chris, but on the face of it.
Yeah, you're right to be skeptical and referenced this study.
There was a fascinating study where they give people anti-inflammatories under depression.
Again, big news if true, because if it were that mostly it's the bacteria and you can just simply give anti-inflammatories and depression goes away, then great.
That should be easy to demonstrate.
Yep.
It'll be, yeah, huge if true.
Like, everyone would love to know this.
This would be great.
You feeling a bit down?
Like, I've got anti-inflammatories.
You don't even need a prescription.
Well, anti-inflammatories are used all the time, so surely, like, if there was overprescription...
We would have noticed.
Yeah, I mean, because this is how a lot of effects get discovered.
Like, for instance, there was, like, a drug for, you know, I think the Azempic, Chris.
Wasn't that originally, like, a quit-smoking treatment?
I thought it was an anti-diabetic.
True, man.
Oh, right.
I could be getting mixed up.
I think there was a different one then that was non-smoking.
But anyway, they just noticed that the patients who were taking it, you know, it's easy to notice that suddenly they're losing weight or they're not drinking as much or whatever.
So if it was something as common as anti-inflammatories, which people take all the time for all kinds of things, and people notice that their mood was better, man, we would really, I mean, like you wouldn't even be, you know, anyway.
Well, the fact that you referenced inflammation before knowing that there was going to be a clip on it, it just speaks to how well these things go together.
There is a correlation for you, but there's also a little bit of an issue, and this will come up a lot in the later parts, the other material that we're looking at.
Because in this case, you know, discussing a kind of approach that he likes.
This isn't an interview with someone or this kind of thing.
But there is still a disclaimer about this not being medical advice.
But let's see what happens here.
I have one person in my practice.
I mean, I also treat people with skin problems and IBS and things like that.
People who haven't had solid shits in a decade.
And then we start them on Ayurvedic dietary changes.
And they have solid shits.
And it's like, it's crazy.
It's like, it's not, I'm not doing anything, I'm not doing anything like extraordinary.
I'm just telling them to drink yogurt and water mixed together in like a one to two ratio with a pinch of cumin and a pinch of hydrogen sulfide or pink salt or Himalayan salt.
And there, it gets better.
Okay.
So once again, I can't, I can't provide medical advice over the internet.
But I will tell you, so if you guys have a medical problem like diarrhea or IBS, you should go and see a doctor.
And at the same time, something that you should just try is to take yogurt.
So take just plain yogurt, not Greek yogurt, not low-fat yogurt, nothing, no sugar or anything, just plain yogurt.
Two ounces of yogurt, six ounces of water.
Two and a half ounces of yogurt, 5.5 ounces of water.
Mix it together.
Add a pinch of toasted cumin.
Add a pinch of pink salt.
Drink it every day.
Assuming you're not lactose intolerant.
If it gives you problems, don't do it.
See what happens to your bowel movements.
So there was, you know, again, the kind of interesting bowel movements.
That's fine.
That's Ayurvedic stuff.
But no, I can't give medical advice.
But here's a specific recipe for yogurt that, if taken...
We'll cure, like, and we'll make, you know, your bowel movements regular and healthy.
But I'm not saying that you should do that.
In my clinical practice, it works every time.
Yeah.
I mean, just incidentally, too, I mean, this particular treatment, the little cumin, I love cumin, by the way, but a little cocktail of yogurt water cumin and Himalayan rock salt, that's the easiest thing to test in the world.
Uh, using an RCT.
Easiest thing.
Easiest thing.
Yeah, he didn't say anything about the dosage, but I think that's a vata treatment, so you need the first vat.
Did he say it's just for vatas?
I can't remember.
I can't remember the surrounding, but like vatas in general, weren't they the ones that were having problem pooping?
I can't remember.
Whatever the case, you could easily design a study where you apply that, look at their eyelids, and then classify them into vatas, doshas, and then just use the vatas if it was the case.
Even that would be better.
You could then, you know, if you had all of them, and they all did it, and it only worked on the vata.
Once, then that would be, you know, like an even better demonstration.
That would be a good demonstration.
Yeah, somebody should do that.
I think I could have been accidentally taking this treatment for years, Chris, because, you know, I cook a lot of Indian food.
I don't want to know.
Do you want me to describe how I'm doing?
No, I don't.
I will say we'll see.
I mean, this is in some way laid to groundwork because these...
Kind of discussions about your bowel movements and whatnot.
This is all going to come up in the interviews with influencers, right?
So he does put into practice what he preaches here.
Yeah, so for me, the only important thing really in that clip was the kind of disclaimer alongside what sounds like Roller's specific advice about a particular thing.
But there is still the disclaimer.
Now, if you have...
Something more serious, please go see a doctor, which is good.
I'm glad that he adds that in, but even still.
Chris, I'm not a financial advisor.
I can't give you financial advice, but you should go all in on gold right now.
Go all in because I'm seeing very good results.
A lot of people making a lot of money on gold.
That's not financial advice, though.
Just keep that in mind.
Yeah, and so...
Cannot, you know, give it medical advice online.
Also, not doing diagnosis, distance diagnosis, not doing that.
It's a discussion about health and mental wellness and whatnot, but not that.
But this is a little bit of interaction with the chat, and I'm specifically talking about one of the chat members.
People in chat are commenting about various attributes of Vata, Pitta, and Kapha.
And so now, like, what would be fascinating...
Is if you guys like go back and look at the comments that people are making and see if there's a consistency with Vata, right?
So Gizmo has been saying that I think that they're pretty Vata.
And so they're talking about different attributes that are all Vata.
So Vatas are reactive, yes.
They tend to be very reactive.
So we got reference to Gizmo there, right?
And Gizmo is identified as likely to be Vata.
And the recipe there, Matt, of like going back and looking for consistency and stuff, like this would be the kind of thing you might be concerned about confirmation bias or even...
Leading, given that you are doing a stream that is telling people all of these things are bad characteristics, right?
So, you know, his advice there, you know, just like a fun little exercise, but seems almost by design to produce false positives if people apply it.
Yeah, agreed.
But not that serious.
So anyway, a little bit more about treating Nevada and what happens and also this gizmo character.
Yeah, so Gizmo.
Gizmo is our textbook vata.
Lupus gets anxious.
That's what I'm telling you guys.
So the cool thing, the really cool thing about Ayurveda is if Gizmo balances their vata, their lupus is going to get better, their anxiety is going to get better.
Their sleep is going to get better.
Their skin is going to get better.
Their bowel movements are going to get better.
Because if you lower the vata...
Everything that is associated with elevated vata is going to get better.
And in Western medicine, we understand this concept clinically as well.
When I'm working with someone who has depression and addictions, when one thing goes bad, everything goes bad.
So in psychiatry, we have a saying that all boats rise together.
So, if Gizmo were to...
Because I think he's putting into the chat various things that he...
Suffers from that kind of thing.
And so the reference there is, you know, if he balances his Vata, then, you know, all of these things are going to get better.
Not offering medical advice, though.
Now I'll just talk about ways that you can.
You know, recipes and whatnot that you can balance your doshik thing a bit better.
Or, you know, look them up for yourself.
Yeah, it's a great area, isn't it?
This medical advice versus just talking about your opinions about health and wellness.
So I have one more clip, Matt, that relates to the gizmo character and the non-diagnosis issue.
Absolutely.
So I want you guys to look back at, like, everything that gizmo has said.
Gizmo is textbook vata.
Has fucking lupus.
Has ADHD mind.
Is super vata.
Has eyes that are larger than their stomach.
Right?
Like, has an autoimmune disease.
Like, I can't diagnose people over the internet, but, you know, we kind of diagnosed gizmo over the internet.
Like, I don't know anything about gizmo, but I can predict that the likelihood that gizmo has an autoimmune disease is greater than other people who are bitta or kapha.
So that's what's awesome about Ayurveda.
Like, you can make predictions about your life.
And if you sort of understand that, then that's fantastic because you can start to live accordingly.
So the cool thing about Ayurveda is that if you do have an autoimmune disease, if you do vata-lowering treatments, your autoimmune disease should get better.
Right?
So they are mad, right?
I think the facade breaks a bit of saying...
I can't diagnose people over the end of the day, but we have diagnosed them.
He's a vata, so he's kind of joking around, but that is the dance, right?
Yeah, because it is a diagnostic framework.
When you figure out someone's a vata, then you can understand the causes of their autoimmune problems, illnesses.
Yeah, and you can advise them on what they ought to do.
They need to lower their vata.
Isn't it also consistent too?
Because the other thing that's coming through is just how enthusiastic he is about Ayurveda as a basis for psychiatric practice.
It's coming through strong, but didn't he say elsewhere that it doesn't inform his practice or something?
Well, he says this, no, Lee, your time, you've slipped into the time streams.
So in this one, it clearly does.
So it's later that he talks about it not being a big component of what he does in his output.
Oh, okay.
So I'm sort of, I feel like I'm adopting a pro-Ayurvedic stance because of the way you're asking questions, but I don't use Ayurvedic medicine with the majority of my patients.
I use evidence-based techniques with the majority of my patients because they are reliable.
But yeah, here he is, you know, enthusiastic and saying that it's the OP.
Special skill that he has that others lack.
Okay, I see.
So one other part that came up, and this is just, this is a little bit of a silly exchange to point out, but it just struck me a little bit when I heard it.
And it does speak to the dynamics of interacting about the chat, you know, how the way the streamers often interact with their chat.
So this is him talking a bit about Milk.
So we're going to play a fun game, Twitch chat.
How many kinds of milk can you come up with?
Let's see if you can hit all of them.
Whey isn't milk.
Whey is a compound within milk.
Nope.
Nope.
None of these are correct.
This is not milk.
There we go.
There we go.
Soy milk is not milk, my dudes.
Skim milk is not milk.
Goat.
Cow.
What else?
Where else can we get?
Human milk.
Absolutely.
Sheep's milk.
What else?
We've got four.
You already said milk.
Human beings don't drink cat milk.
Buffalo milk.
Five.
Good.
So we've got goat, sheep, cow, human, buffalo.
What else?
What else do humans drink milk from?
Anyone know?
Camel milk.
Yes.
And?
Not daddy's milk.
That's disgusting.
Trees?
No.
Bats?
No.
We already got goats.
One more.
A horse, yeah.
And elephant.
Elephant is the last milk.
It's fascinating.
This page, humans don't drink cat milk.
Humans drink milks from hooved animals.
That's what we drink milk from, right?
We drink milk from domesticated animals.
We have domesticated elephants in India.
So, this exchange, right, Matt?
Again, this is not...
This is not a Dr. K thing, but just a human thing where people have a specific answer and they ask people.
And they're like, no, no.
Even though, like, name a milk.
Sorry, milk.
No, that's not milk.
Skim milk.
No, that's not a milk.
I feel these are milks, but, you know, he wants to be, no, it's these five specific animals.
But he also, like, who was going to guess elephant?
And when he follows that up...
By saying, you know, elephants.
Elephant is the fifth missing milk that humans drink.
And they said, humans drink milk from hoofed animals.
And my brain, when I heard that, was like, first of all, I was kind of mind-bored that humans are drinking elephant milk.
But secondly, I was like, elephants have hooves?
I've always joined them with three big clumpy toes.
I checked it, and elephants are not hooved.
I'm quite correct.
There you go.
And also, I can't find much evidence that there is a significant cultural habit of drinking elephant milk.
No.
No, I haven't heard of that either.
I think he was just saying that mainly that people drink milk from domesticated animals.
They're generally...
But he said they domesticated...
Yeah, he said, yeah, we domesticated elephants in India.
Like, so, what's wrong?
And he's the one that said, elephant is the last milk.
Like, the whole point was the categories of milk.
Well, anyway, it would be hard to extract elephant.
Milk.
Like, I looked into this.
It's difficult.
It's not clear that it's a good thing for humans to do.
No, I suspect it isn't.
Okay, so why is he so interested in elephant milk, Chris?
Well, it's because of the Ayurvedic stuff around milk, right?
So let me just play it.
We don't drink milk from carnivores, but we do drink milk from herbivores.
We drink milk from hooved mammals.
And then this text and page of Ayurveda says that the different milks are good for alleviating different doshas.
And that different milks are treatments for different things.
So if a human being is recovering from malaria, they should have a certain kind of milk.
And if they have active malaria, they should have a different kind of milk.
Like this is the specificity that Ayurveda has.
It breaks down each and every food that we have.
And says that...
An apple is different from an orange.
That a lime is different from an orange.
That a lemon is different from a lime.
That all fruits, five servings of fruits and vegetables, they're not all the same.
And we know this, right?
That's why.
That's why he wanted to know.
And I don't know if elephants can't die.
I can't remember if they're in the little diagram that he's talking about it or not.
But, you know, this is the thing.
Goat milk for certain, you know, malaria or whatnot.
Common milk for recovering from malaria versus malaria fever.
All this kind of thing.
This is the great thing about Ayurveda.
It's so specific.
It has a specific benefit to a particular species of Of milk that is relevant to a specific disease, even at a particular stage.
And I'm sure he's correct about the Baroque complexity of it.
I mean, it's a typical thing of CAMHS in general to be incredibly detailed and incredibly confident about all of the different things.
So yeah, that does make sense.
Of course, the key thing is like anyone can write a whole cosmology.
There were thick textbooks that people studied in the Middle Ages with an inordinate number of folk remedies for every specific thing that you can imagine.
That doesn't mean that any of them worked.
I think it gives you a false sense of confidence that the prescriptions are so detailed.
Yeah, just the fact that there's an encyclopedic reference to this kind of thing means that Why would they write down all those specific treatments, Chris, if they didn't work?
Why would they do that?
Yeah.
Why, Matt?
Why indeed?
It doesn't make any sense.
So, yeah.
So, there we have it.
We've come to the end, Matt, basically, of this particular beginning.
It's like Lord of the Rings, though.
This is not the end, Matt.
This is just the beginning.
I'm not here to tell you how this ends.
I'm here to tell you how it begins.
That's a Matrix reference.
If you want.
Yeah, it'll have the end of the Matrix, I think.
Unfortunately, the movie's continued.
They've got much worse.
But one thing to note, though, Matt.
So this is content from four years ago, as we noted.
And Dr. K does make a promise at the end, which goes like this.
It's clear to me that we're gonna have to do a lot more stuff on Ayurveda, so I'm gonna have to like write stuff up for you guys.
Like guides to this stuff.
From start to finish.
I'll do it.
I've started already.
Right.
More to come.
But in some of the more recent content that we'll look at, he has stepped away.
Or no, sorry.
Stepped away might be putting it too strongly.
He has suggested that he is not putting so much of an emphasis on the Ayurvedic approach.
But...
We'll see how much that applies when we look at the more recent content, right, from a few months ago.
And just as a little taster, Matt, this is from a conversation you had mere months ago with people from a show called Ice Coffee Hour.
Graham is extremely good at grinding, like putting his nose to something.
He's guffa, which is earth and water.
So stability, like low acceleration, high top speed.
High acceleration, low top speed.
That's really funny.
Interesting.
So we have this joke.
I'm the kite, he's the string.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
That's our joke.
He's the rock, you're the kite.
Yeah.
That makes complete sense.
Wow.
So the cool thing about Ayurveda is that you're able to make these diagnoses because there's physical correlations with mental attributes.
So if you look at like the veins on the backs of your hands are going to be more visible than the veins on the backs of his hands.
He has a roundness to his face.
You have more angularity.
So what could you tell about that about like facial structure?
So your face is round, right?
His is more angular.
Your nose is round.
His is more angular.
His ears stick out more.
My ears stick out more.
By the way, what do you think I am?
Is this an angular nose or a round nose?
Absolutely, right?
So I have high vata too.
That's why we're vibing so much and we're like nice.
This is the other thing to understand about vatas is that the current society is very Bitha favorable.
So the way to success, right?
So you're talking about, like, all these people who come on and will say, this is the road.
So our whole society is biased towards Bithas.
Okay.
So, yeah, it does seem like a little bit of Ayurveda was coming through there.
I did detect a note.
Yeah, it's just very familiar.
So, you know, that is from mere months ago.
So I know some people will say, well, this is, you know, old content.
Things have changed.
But I...
I think we will see not change so much as some might suggest, but there were definitely echoes, a few hints there of things that we heard in the older content.
Yeah.
Well, it's definitely been a confusing tour you've taken me on, Chris.
On one hand, maybe there are three types of people and you can tell everything about them from that.
On the other hand, maybe everyone's a unique journey, a unique story, a phenomenological snowflake.
Yeah.
Maybe science and scientific medicine just treats everyone the same and thinks that all depressions, for instance, are the same.
Or maybe it doesn't.
It's confusing.
I'm still figuring stuff out.
Confusing, perhaps a little inconsistent, maybe even just a little.
But we won't do a wrap-up on the general thing because I think we should leave that.
Until we approach the end of the series, or at least cover the other content related to the Ayurvedic topic, right?
Because the next one we'll look at the interview with Dr. Mike.
But I will say, and this perhaps tees up the content for next time, that I feel like if this was a traditional Western system, if it was referencing homeopathic,
Principles and making reference even perhaps to Christian concepts as opposed to Hindu or, you know, concepts which are less seemingly exotic to a Western audience.
I feel like there'd be more pushback.
Is that what you're saying?
Well, I feel, yeah, I feel there is something where if somebody was doing this with like astrology or whatever, people would be quicker.
To respond critically.
With skepticism, yeah.
Yeah, but when there is a cross-cultural component, people seem to...
Are naturally reluctant because it's not a good look, as they say.
But yeah, I think if someone's come to the table with a breathing life back into the four humours, with blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm, being the key components that you need to understand about keeping in balance because they have basically influenced...
Everything to do with the body and the emotions and you need to treat things in order to bring your blood down or bring it up, depending.
You know, I think people would be sceptical and structurally it's a very, very similar model to the one that he's describing and probably with the same similar degrees of evidence.
I mean, I think if it was coming from a Western tradition and we were talking about understanding the nature of a person's character from...
The shape of their skull or their facial features, then...
People would have concerns.
Yes, they would.
And there's actually a channel I want to mention, Matt.
There's a channel called Science is Dope by an Indian doctor.
I'm not sure his name.
I don't have it handy.
But he did an episode called Should We Adopt Ayurveda?
An Indian's Response.
Dr. Mike versus Dr. K. So he's commenting on the...
Dr. Mike and Dr. K video that we looked at.
But he spoke as somebody, you know, from an Indian background who has taken Ayurvedic treatments and has a lot of experience with people.
So if you want to hear that, like a critical perspective from that background, you can go check that out on YouTube.
It's a good video.
Yeah.
I thought it was a very good video.
And one of the points he does hammer home is that prescribing alternative treatments generally, but Ayurveda is one example.
It's not consequence-free.
It's not necessarily harmless.
He spoke to another clinician who basically treats patients all the time who have serious liver dysfunction from being dosed arbitrary Ayurvedic treatments.
And, of course, it can substitute for conventional modern treatments that would be more likely to work.
And, admittedly, a lot of that...
A lot of the time that happens because people do not have access to modern medical care, and that is the underlying problem, perhaps.
But yeah, it's a really good video, and I thought he makes the points very forcefully, but also very politely, and he responds directly to Dr. K about Ayurveda.
Yeah, yeah.
And one other point he made, Matt, the last thing I'll just say, and it relates to some of the things that we talked about, was that he...
Based on his experience dealing with Ayurvedic practitioners was arguing that it wasn't such an individualized process as Dr. K presents.
It was much more there is a checkbox system and his argument was this is actually the way that it is normally practiced in India.
Practice differs a little bit from the theory.
That's been my experience.
I've had traditional Chinese treatments actually in Japan from time to time.
And yeah, that was very much like that.
Like it was, oh yeah, let me look at the thing.
Okay, take that.
It wasn't that different from going to the conventional doctor, I've got to say.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, we'll get to more of this as we look at all our content, but that's it for now.
We set the foundation and now we'll move on to start building our house and look at more recent content and then some of the...
Therapy episode.
So this has been a journey, but we are now at the end of our journey, Matt.
And at the end of the journey, one thing that we need to do is tip our hats to our fellow travelers, to the people that support this endeavor, that allow us to do a three-part series.
Because it's what the world needs.
The world urgently needs this.
Who do we blame?
You guys are heroes.
You guys are the real heroes.
Yeah, so who we will thank today is Neil Deskin Holdaway OJ Simpson Gus Alibon Salt August Owen Liz The Tomler Bill Duras Stock
Just The Worst Ever Marlene Smith David Hall Zeno Kajawa Just Me She Know David
Sam Lemming Siobhan Murphy Sarah S Adrian Lee Domas Crivellis Sigata Trechicocas And Catherine Esperanza
I'll stop there.
But I don't know what level those people are, Matt, because this is missed shoutouts.
Long-term missed shoutouts.
So I'm going to give them all the Galaxy Brain Guru shoutout.
Welcome, welcome.
You're all welcome.
We tried to warn people.
Yeah.
Like, what was coming?
How it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything.
Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense.
I have no tribe.
I'm in exile.
Think again, sunshine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, so consider this too pro-science academics' response to what I would characterize as...
Alternative pseudoscience heavy material, right?
I do not think that means that everything Dr. K recommends will fall into that category or that he cannot give any good advice or do useful things.
But I just say on the basis of this content, I would be skeptical of his scientific claims in the same way that I'm skeptical of Andrew Huberman, even though Huberman also Can say many things which are valid and correct.
You're so quick to rush to judgment, Chris.
It's only been a couple of hours.
I have an open mind.
I'm giving him the better for the doubt.
You're too mean.
I'm a vater, Matt.
That's what we're like.
We're flighty.
No, I'm a bitter.
You're a bitter, bitter man.
I want to know what I am because I've got a carrot-shaped head.
It is triangular with a...
A puffier thing on top.
Clearly a carrot face.
I'd have to discuss your bowel movements in great depth to work it out and look at your Irish shape.
I simply can't, Matt.
I can't.
I'm done.
I'm out of here.
I'm like the wind.
I'm gone.
Damn it.
You're so unreliable, you goddamn vatters.
Yeah.
What you need is a good kapha in your life, a good kapha.
Well, with that pearl of wisdom, Go check your own doshas out.
Discover your elemental affinity and balance out those energy levels.
Whatever way you know.
Crystals, antidepressants, coffee.
Get those spells moving.
Just mix them all.
But not, for God's sake, not elephant milk.
No, dangerous to get.
Unpleasant to drink.
They're not going to be happy.
They're not going to be happy.
I think I looked up that humans can't digest elephant milk.
Anyway, just, you know, if you're an elephant milk drinker, let us know.
