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Aug. 3, 2024 - Decoding the Gurus

02:48:20

Gabor Maté: Achieving Authenticity, Tackling Trauma, and Minimizing Modern Malaise

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	Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
	I'm Matt Brown.
	I'm the psychologist from Australia.
	With me is Chris Kavanagh.
	He's the cognitive anthropologist from Japan, formerly of Belfast, as he never ceases to remind us.
	He's not the hero we need.
	No, he is the hero we need, but he's the hero we don't want.
	Is that how it goes?
	I forget.
	You're Batman.
	Don't worry.
	Be happy.
	Yeah, I feel you're just disparaging the fact that my accent reminds you that I'm from Belfast and you have an anti-Irish prejudice.
	So you feel like I'm telling you I'm from Belfast, but it's just the way I speak, goddammit, Matt.
	Have some tolerance.
	I've heard people from Northern Ireland express surprise at your accent.
	You're from Northern Ireland, are you?
	Those people...
	They are barely sentient.
	We don't even need to acknowledge them.
	They're just troublemakers.
	They're enough trouble.
	And speaking of trouble, you know, we don't do intro segments anymore.
	I'm just going to say the guru's fear is a flame.
	It's a flame at the minute.
	There's too much going on.
	They're running into each other like headless chickens.
	The whole events in American politics about the attempted assassination, the dropping out of Biden.
	And it has led to the great flourishing of hot takes online.
	And we will cover it.
	We will cover it.
	But good God.
	It's amazing, Chris.
	Brett's brain has melted into a small pool of butter.
	Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson are tripping the light fantastic together.
	There's too much gold out there for us to mine, but we're going to get to it.
	We are.
	We will, but not today because today is a decoding episode and we were On the third part of our Dr. K series, but we fancied a break from Dr. K. You've all been suffering from Dr. K overload.
	And we thought, okay, so before we get to the Dr. K stuff on therapy, not therapy, streaming, and all those issues, we would instead have a look at somebody that's been requested for quite a while.
	Hungarian Canadian physician.
	Public, intellectual, person who writes books on trauma, stress, addiction, so on.
	Gabor Mate.
	Gabor Mate, indeed.
	He's a somewhat elderly man now.
	He was born in 1944.
	You know, he's worked as a like a like a doctor, like a medical doctor, but also written a huge amount of books.
	You know, I think fair to say with a self-helpy psychiatric self-actualization, maybe even new age vibe to them.
	And yeah, he's a public figure.
	You know, he's a guest on podcasts and on videos.
	He does public speaking and he's advocated for alternative approaches.
	A range of things, yes.
	Yeah, we'll get to some of them.
	So I think he's 80 or 79 now.
	In any case, he's up there in age and actually looking very good for it, I will say, in terms of physical appearance and delivery.
	Yeah, yeah, that's right.
	He's still got all his faculties, that's for sure.
	Any issues that we might have with him, I don't think has got anything to do with his age.
	If he was wrong about something.
	I feel like it was something he's been wrong about for decades.
	Yeah, that's probably true.
	Now, the content that we're going to look at is his interview with the diary of a CEO, Stephen Bartlett.
	This is somebody, I think we have come across him in some interviews previously.
	But yeah, we'll get to the dynamic in those interviews.
	But there is one thing I wanted to say, and this applies to the...
	Dr. K material as well.
	And I think in general, it actually applies to anybody that we cover that offers self-help advice and therapeutic content.
	So if you are someone that has listened to a public figure, be it Jordan Peterson, be it Gabor Mate, be it Dr. K or whatever, and you have found this very beneficial and helpful, it's provided you...
	Either with, you know, therapeutic benefit or just you feel like you've come to understand something about yourself more from it.
	That is perfectly fine, right?
	It doesn't make you a simpleton or an easy mark or somebody like falling for a fraud.
	A lot of the self-help advice, including from people who are not particularly great, but also including people that are, you know, relatively on the up and up.
	Is helpful to people, and in particular circumstances, it might resonate with you.
	But this really common mistake I see is that if somebody feels that they got genuine benefit from someone, that this then translates to overall their approach must be valid and their claims must be reasonable,
	as if...
	If that is not true, it would mean that the benefit that they gained is somehow tainted or not true.
	And I just want to say it is possible and indeed advisable to separate those two things.
	Did you find something beneficial?
	Do you take benefit from it?
	And is the evidence for this person's claims and their overall model of illness or mental health?
	Is it scientifically valid and well supported by evidence?
	Those are two entirely distinct points.
	Yeah, that's right, Chris.
	I mean, I remember us pointing this out when we started this podcast a few years ago, that we had a couple of academics.
	We look at things from that academic, science-y point of view.
	So we're looking for stuff like, are the arguments well put together?
	Are they founded in good evidence?
	Is it, you know, somewhat rhetorical?
	Is it stuff that sounds good but isn't necessarily true?
	That kind of thing.
	And that's different from whether or not they're groovy politically or whether or not they provide content that's helpful to some people.
	Sometimes those things go together.
	Sometimes they don't.
	So, yeah, that's what we do.
	That's the lens through which we operate.
	Yeah, and I'm not going to go into great detail here, but I will also say that I think there is a lot in Gabor Mate's output that would make him particularly appealing to a wide range of people.
	A focus on trauma, emphasizing mind-body connection and holistic practices, talking about the toxic modern environment and how...
	It's harming us mentally and politically, psychologically, all sorts of things, spiritually.
	And this emphasis on each individual being unique and pathologies being put onto them by society and stuff.
	There's just a whole bunch of things that come together to make this very attractive and including references to colonialism and so on.
	Yeah, that was my impression too.
	Now, we're going to show, not tell, so we won't say too much about it, but that was what was going through my mind too.
	It's really quite interesting, actually, the degree, I think, to which people like Gabo Mate might reflect a cultural zeitgeist and, I guess, the kinds of values or concerns that sort of affect us.
	Culturally and therefore appealing to us.
	So, yeah, let's explore that as we go through it.
	Okay.
	Now, the first thing, Matt, we're going to get to Gabor quite quickly, but I just want to highlight a little bit the dynamics of this particular podcast setup.
	Here's the kind of introduction, like the teaser trailer that plays at the start of the podcast, right?
	And it's a podcast with quite a high level of production.
	The episode is 193, The Childhood Lie That's Ruining All Our Lives.
	So this kind of click-bitty title.
	But here you go.
	This is just a sample of the kind of diary of a CEO framing.
	Financial stress on the parents translates into physiological stress in the children.
	They didn't inherit anything in terms of a disease.
	They're just reacting to the environment.
	People call Dr. Gabo Mate the people whisperer.
	Legendary thinker and best-selling author.
	He's highly sought after for his expertise on addiction, stress, and childhood development.
	The evidence linking mental illness and childhood adversity is about as strong as the evidence linking smoking and lung cancer.
	And the average physician doesn't hear a word about that.
	It's astonishing.
	I can give you the example of Donald Trump.
	I mean, his father was a psychopath.
	You are the enemy of the people.
	Go ahead.
	It sounds like a trailer.
	Yeah, it's powerful stuff.
	Powerful stuff.
	Yeah, so that's the vibe.
	We're going to have to look at his host, Diary of the CEO.
	I think maybe just a little short divergence at the very start might be helpful before we get into the meat of the trauma.
	This is something that you find in a lot of these podcasts, right?
	You hear this in trigonometry, you hear this just in general.
	This is YouTube culture, but this kind of thing never...
	Feels to amaze me.
	I think this is fascinating.
	I looked at the back end of our YouTube channel and it says that since this channel started, 69.9% of you that watch it frequently haven't yet hit the subscribe button.
	So I have a favour to ask you.
	If you've ever watched this channel and enjoyed the content, if you're enjoying this episode right now, please could I ask a small favour?
	Please hit the subscribe button.
	Helps this channel more than I can explain.
	And I promise if you do that, to return the favour...
	We will make this show better and better and better and better and better.
	That's a promise I'm willing to make you if you hit the subscribe button.
	Do we have a deal?
	That's a promise, Chris.
	You can take that to the bank.
	He's going to make it better.
	Yeah.
	Is that fascinating?
	I feel the delivery is doing a lot of work.
	You're right.
	That is.
	I know.
	You're right.
	This is YouTube culture.
	This isn't specific to this bloke.
	But yeah, it is just so blatant.
	I dunno, people don't seem to have any reluctance to...
	To do that kind of hard sell.
	Yeah, whatever.
	Anyway.
	Yeah, well, it's that thing that, like, it's spoken as if you're having, you know, an intimate chat with the creator.
	You know, I've noticed this thing in the back end that, you know, 69%, and I promise to you, right?
	It's like, it's very used car salesman in a way, but, like, with more parasocial sincerity in there.
	And I just, yeah, like, you know, if you break it down, what's being said is, I've noticed that more of you...
	Could subscribe to my channel.
	And if you do, that will help my channel get bigger.
	Please, please, please do that.
	But somehow it's intoned with moral weight and like a personal, yeah, this is an agreement between me and you.
	So yeah, he's not the only one to do that, but it never fails to amaze me that...
	This is something I've also noticed, Chris.
	I've been going through the metrics on our podcast, and of all the people listening, only a small percentage actually subscribe and pay us money on Patreon.
	Only a small percentage.
	And it would really, really help us if more of them would.
	I mean, I don't even know how many of them subscribe.
	I mean, many people on the Reddit have never heard of me.
	It's really annoying.
	Less than 100%.
	It's fascinating.
	I don't know.
	So, yeah.
	I mean, that would be self-serving, but like, you know.
	It would be self-serving.
	Yeah, but that's fine.
	Speaking about self-serving things, listen to this.
	Quick one from our longest standing sponsor here.
	I can't tell you over the last, I'd say over the last, really it's been about two and a half years.
	It was really...
	Post-pandemic, how much my health has become such a huge priority in my life.
	Huel has been probably the most important partner in my health journey because I've been in the boardrooms, I've been to their offices.
	Tens and tens and tens and tens of times.
	I've seen how they make their decisions on nutrition.
	And that's why it's such a wonderful thing to be able to talk to this audience about a brand and a product that is so unbelievably linked to my values and the place I am in my life of valuing the gym, exercise, movement, my mind, my breathing, and all of those things.
	And most importantly, my nutrition.
	That is the role Heal plays.
	And so every time I get to read these ads out, I do it with such passion because I really, really believe every word I'm saying.
	And I absolutely love the brand.
	So if you haven't already tried Heal, And you've been resistant to my pestering, then give it a go and let me know how you get on.
	Again, that's a hard sell.
	I realize we live in the real world and this is their job, right?
	They're running a business.
	But it would just be nice to acknowledge that and be a bit more upfront about it.
	Like, this is my business.
	I do interviews.
	I make YouTube videos.
	And if you're going to do endorsements or read out advertising...
	I think just be a little bit more honest.
	Like, I'm doing this for the sponsorship money because that's how I earn my living.
	Well, Matt, what would you imagine from that ad read that Mr Bartlett's involvement with Fuel is?
	I assume that they're a sponsor of his show, right?
	That's correct.
	They are a sponsor of his show.
	Would you imagine that he is on the board of Fuel?
	No, I didn't.
	Did not pick that up.
	Is he?
	Yeah, that didn't come up.
	He didn't mention that.
	But yes, he is on the board of Hero.
	So his wholehearted endorsement of this product that he just really believes in, that perhaps is a slight conflict of interest that you might want to mention, that this is a company...
	No, look, that's just happenstance, Chris.
	He just happens to be on the board.
	He might have some shares.
	He might be getting paid money to sponsor.
	It's more...
	Huell accords with his values, where he is right now in his life, really valuing health.
	Don't you value health?
	I value health.
	Come on.
	Yeah, I do, I guess.
	I just find that slightly distasteful, like that you wouldn't mention, you know, that this is your company or a company that you have a direct stake in that you're promoting.
	So, yeah.
	Anyway, that's the influencer world, I guess.
	But, well, now.
	Oh, yeah, well, this actually will lead in.
	I was about to move on, but there's one last clip I have to play because it's podcast dynamics at play.
	There's a question we often ask each other in flippant conversations, which we usually kind of brush away because it's the convenient thing to do.
	Yeah.
	That question is the question I wanted to start by asking you, which is, how are you?
	Yeah.
	So that question for me brings up two dimensions.
	One is how am I at this present moment?
	Am I at this moment?
	Which is all there is.
	I'm well.
	I feel rather peaceful inside.
	I'm very happy to be here with you.
	If you'd asked me two days ago, I wouldn't have said that.
	I would have said I was feeling somewhat anxious and kind of troubled.
	In the moment answer, I'm well and I also know how to keep well as long as I stick with what I know.
	And when I forget what I know, then I can be very not well.
	And so the last year since we've met has been in many ways a tough year for me.
	Also one of deep learning.
	So if the question is how have I been, I'd say I've been up and down and I've had real challenges that I've had to learn from.
	How am I right now?
	I'm really well, thank you.
	How are you right now, Chris?
	Well, you know, if you're talking about how I am in this minute...
	God, Matt, God!
	Podcasts should never be invented!
	Like, I know this is not a big thing, but this ability for podcasts to imply hidden depths to this question of, "How are you?"
	You know, we ask it every day, Matt, but do we really...
	Ask it.
	And it's all in how seriously you deliver it and how serious the partner takes the response.
	And as long as you both do the very sincere thing, it's fine.
	But if any one of you were just like, well, I'm fine.
	How are you?
	To be absolutely clear, because I do not come from this, you know, clinical American, frankly, culture.
	Whenever I ask you, Chris, how you doing?
	I want to hear the word fine.
	That's it.
	That's all I want to know.
	And you understand that.
	That's why we get along.
	This is good.
	Yeah, yeah, that's it.
	So anyway, that's indulgent podcasting 101.
	But I thought it's interesting because, like I say, if you are the solemn tone to the question, it kind of just leads to pseudo-profound answers, even though the thing is quite trite, which is, I'm okay.
	But if you mean, am I always okay?
	I'm not always okay.
	I've been bad sometimes.
	Like, no shit.
	Yeah, but this is all part of the, again, like YouTube interview culture, which is, it's not just a normal interview.
	Like, it's not like a journalistic interview with a politician or even an expert or something like that.
	It is a meeting of minds.
	It is a deep emotional.
	Like, you almost feel like after an interview like this, the two people are going to go off and rent a cottage in the country somewhere for the summer.
	But of course they're not, right?
	Like, it is, Gabor Matto's going to leave and these people are not going to talk for months and months.
	But that's what they do.
	They engage with people fully.
	They're fully present and they see each other, Chris.
	They see each other fully.
	Yes, there is such intimacy implied there.
	Although, I did get the impression that Gabor Matto has been a big influence on this.
	Well, it's hard to say because Stephen Bartlett is very good at giving the impression of whoever he's speaking to.
	He's the biggest fan.
	Yeah, it changed his life.
	Yeah, the most important figure.
	But I think in this case, it is a little bit like he's probably read his book and took some influence from it and that kind of thing.
	But, you know, there's certainly a lot of people that Stephen Bartlett interviews that have a significant impact on his life.
	But this is the job of a YouTube self-help, self-actualization, how to be a more successful, more productive, more healthy person.
	This is the style, isn't it?
	I mean, the podcast title is Diary of a CEO.
	So, yeah, that makes sense.
	And his first book was called Happy Sexy Millionaire.
	That sounds nice.
	Yeah.
	Isn't that what you want?
	Don't you want to be a happy sexy millionaire to buy my book?
	Second book, Matt, The Diary of a CEO, The 33 Laws of Business and Life.
	33?
	That's a lot.
	I remember when there was only seven habits of highly successful people.
	Yeah, or 12 Rules for Life.
	And actually, I also see Stephen Bartlett on British Airways.
	He's at that level.
	He's in the safety video telling you how to plug in your seatbelt.
	Seatbelt.
	Yeah, your belt and stuff.
	So, yeah.
	Okay.
	Anyway, so they're setting the stage for what is going to be a very deep and meaningful question where they fully engage with each other as real people.
	That was a little bit of a sneaky move by me because it's actually from a different episode, but nonetheless, it doesn't matter, right?
	So, to not start off too negative, Matt, here it is, I mean, we did start off negative, but...
	We did, we did.
	We're going to wind it back.
	I'm going to let Gabor outline his background just a little bit and, you know, why it might be worth listening to him about topics like trauma and care for others and this kind of thing.
	And in those 33 years, what was your practice?
	What did you specialize in?
	What did you focus on?
	So I was a family physician, which meant I delivered a lot of babies and I looked after people's problems from beginning to the end of life.
	I also worked in palliative care.
	I was the director of a unit at the hospital, which looked after people with terminal disease.
	That was 22 years or so of my practice, 20, 22 years.
	And then I switched gears altogether and I went to work in the downtown east side of Vancouver, British Columbia, which is North America's most concentrated area of drug use.
	Yeah, long career as an actual practicing clinician in various roles.
	And look, I mean...
	A little aside here too, Chris, I know maybe you didn't get this impression, but my feeling was that despite the disagreements I have or the issues I have with the assertions he's making, we'll get into all of that, I got the vibe that what we have here is a somewhat wise,
	dare I say, man who, you know, just in terms of being a human being and just being kind of...
	I don't know.
	That's just the vibe I got.
	I know very little about Gabba Mate and I don't know anything about him apart from his thing.
	But he just gave me those vibes.
	So don't burst my bubble.
	Don't shatter my illusions.
	All I'll say is I understand because I think his tone of delivery and the atmosphere about him is...
	Endearing and authoritative.
	He comes across as genuine, speaking from the heart, and with empathy.
	I did get that.
	But I think there's a danger there in that.
	Just imagine him with a squeaky voice, Matt.
	Like a squeaky voice.
	It wouldn't make a difference to the substance, but I feel it would make a difference to that.
	I appreciate that point.
	A lot of it is about style, and I was just thinking about how my initial impressions of Brett Weinstein and Heather Hanging were similarly positive, purely based on the vibe they gave off from their first video that I saw, which, my God, how embarrassing.
	But, yeah, you know, I mean, even apart from the sound and the vibe, I mean, you know.
	I'm going to buttress your point for you.
	There's a little bit more about his experiences in palliative care and whatnot.
	And, you know, by the way, he talked about working in the east of Vancouver.
	I lived in Vancouver just for a month when I was traveling around Canada.
	East Vancouver was no joke in terms of drug use and that kind of thing.
	So, yeah, you know, that's just very limited experience for me in passing through that area.
	No offense to anyone who's from East Vancouver.
	I'm sure it's a lovely part of the town.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, maybe it's changed.
	But in any case, a little bit more about palliative care and his experiences there.
	That experience working with patients that were in palliative care.
	So that's, for anybody that doesn't know, that's patients that are approaching the end of their life, that have terminal illnesses and that are aware that they're going to die.
	What did that experience teach you?
	It took an acceptance.
	Of one's lack of omnipotence as a physician.
	Because you want to cure people.
	You want people to heal.
	And now it takes a tremendous acceptance to say, you know, we've reached the limit of our knowledge.
	And that doesn't mean we can't help people, but we certainly can't cure them.
	Yeah, that's the kind of thing that I mean.
	Like, it's just sort of human reflections that are informed from actually having...
	Yeah, yeah.
	And he also mentions this just a little bit more in that topic.
	Acceptance.
	You learn a lot of acceptance.
	It challenges you to do your best when you know your best isn't going to be saving anybody's lives, but it's to help people live a life of as little suffering as possible and as much dignity as possible.
	So it really challenges the best parts of you to show up.
	Patience, acceptance, intuition.
	Personally, it taught me a lot to listen to people.
	Interesting enough, people really want to be heard when they're dying.
	They want to make sense of their lives.
	They want to tell their stories and they want their stories to be heard.
	And so I listened a lot.
	I just sat by the bedside and I listened.
	Yeah, at various times.
	Been in palliative care units, not for myself, obviously, but with other people.
	I can imagine that working in that environment makes you have to grow up a bit.
	Yeah, and I think those insights that we can't control everything, it's good to listen to people who...
	Are coming towards the end of their life and people are inclined to try and make meaning of what's happening to them and stuff.
	Very empathetic.
	All good.
	Like from my point of view, this is the kind of content where I don't have any issue with what's being said.
	And I think it is the kind of experiences that might incline you to be reflective about, you know, the nature of existence and what is meaningful in life and so on.
	So, yeah, this was just a...
	Pull it back.
	We had a bit of negativity to start, but it's not all bad.
	We're not mean, nasty, cynical, bitter people just looking to tear everybody down.
	That's not us, Chris.
	That's not us.
	And there are a couple of clips we'll probably get to towards the end of the interview where I quite liked what he said.
	But we can save those for later.
	Yeah, yeah, there's more stuff to come.
	But one of the things that I think is helpful to understand...
	Gabor's whole approach is the stress that he puts on trauma and experiences in early childhood.
	This is him talking, I think, about his own childhood trauma, but listen here.
	So your mother gives you away for five to six weeks in order to sort of save you from starvation in a ghetto that she was going to, right?
	That's right.
	This is after...
	After your grandparents were killed in Auschwitz by the Nazis.
	How do you know in hindsight that that moment of those six weeks created that sense of abandonment in you?
	I wouldn't say it's just that one moment.
	Children very much view themselves through their interaction with their parents.
	Now, first of all, I had no father because he was gone.
	I hadn't seen him.
	Except very briefly when I was a month old.
	But there was no father in the picture.
	My mother was grief-stricken and terrorized and full of woe and worry about what's going to happen to us and just the task of surviving each day.
	She's not playful with me.
	She's not smiling at me very much.
	She's worried-looking.
	She's stressed-looking.
	The infant takes everything personally.
	That's just the nature of the infant.
	As infants, we're narcissists.
	We think it's all about us.
	So when things are great, hey, we're great, but when my mother is unhappy, it's because she doesn't want me or I can't make her happy or I'm inadequate.
	So that separation from my mother certainly set a template for some of my relationship interactions with my spouse.
	Decades later, but the sense of not being good enough and being responsible, that was inculcated in me throughout that whole first year of life.
	Yeah, so Marder's family is obviously the victim of crime and trauma from the Nazis, you know, that lost his grandparents, father endured forced labor, aunt disappeared.
	But yeah, so his experience is describing there when he was separated from his mother for over five weeks.
	He was aged between one and two years old.
	Yes.
	I think he said that whole first year of life.
	But yeah, for five weeks.
	So I don't know if that's zero to one or one to two, but it's very early.
	Very early.
	And his description is quite vivid of his experiences during that time.
	So that's surprising.
	Yeah, he describes his sort of anger or something with his mother for having abandoned him.
	But yeah, anyway, it seems unlikely to me, I have to say, just from what I know of developmental psychology.
	I don't know if experiences like that at that age is something that...
	One actually remembers as an adult?
	No, typically not, Matt.
	There's a thing called infantile amnesia, where most infants don't have the brain complexity necessary to have long-term memory storage until around three or four years of life,
	autobiographical recall.
	No, not to say you don't have any experiences.
	You can't have emotional...
	There can be neurological changes that may somehow persist.
	But actual episodic memories...
	Yeah, you can.
	From everything that I know about this literature, the brain just isn't developed like that.
	So you will have people talking about their memories of being in the womb and whatnot, but they may very well believe.
	That they have those memories.
	But the nature of memory is not a ticker tape.
	So you could have a vivid memory that is not actually a memory of an event that occurred.
	Or it's a reconstruction of other people's accounts.
	So if he was describing this as this is what he has inferred happened from the various accounts that he's pieced together, that would be a different thing.
	But that's not what he's saying.
	Yeah, I mean, it's maybe a small point, but it is very well understood by psychologists, the tricky nature of memory.
	Our pop and subjective feeling of it is it's almost like a video camera recording or something like that.
	But when you study a little bit of psychology, you understand what a malleable and what a reconstructed and what an unreliable thing it is.
	So, you know, it's just maybe illustrative, I guess, of...
	Mate's approach to psychology, perhaps, that he doesn't...
	Yeah, it's also illustrative of an earlier approach to psychology, a kind of psychoanalytic approach that absolutely prioritized the very earliest stages of development and attributed a lot.
	You know, this is kind of the caricature of Freud.
	But in any case, just in case it sounds like we're being unfair, here's how I'm explicitly explaining this.
	In this book, The Myth of Normal, I actually talk about an experience with the psychedelic mushrooms with a therapist.
	This is not that long ago, seven years ago maybe, when I'm at least 70 years old.
	And I'm in this therapeutic session with the psilocybin, the medicine, and the therapist.
	And I know that I'm 70 years old and I know this is a therapy session and I know her name and I know...
	Who I am in the world.
	But at the same time, I'm experiencing myself as a one-year-old baby.
	And she's my mother.
	And I start crying.
	Tears come down to my face.
	And I say, I'm so sorry I made your life so difficult.
	Now that was an unconscious memory of my sense of myself as a one-year-old.
	That I made my mother's life so difficult.
	Because that's the way the baby interprets it.
	Even if your mother loves you, which mine did infinitely, not that she always treated me the best way possible, but she did love me.
	And can you imagine what a great act of love even giving me to a stranger in the street would have been for her, you know?
	But because of her own unhappiness, I can only conclude that I'm not good enough.
	And it's my fault.
	Yeah, so this does almost come across as a caricature of Freudian psychology, that This incredible emphasis on these very early experiences.
	The idea that there's this sort of psychosexual traumas that are occurring very early in life, which then have these far-reaching implications.
	Up to 70. Yeah.
	And it's kind of connected with, I think, a broader cultural zeitgeist around that idea of repression and repressed memories and reliving trauma, that kind of thing.
	Yeah, I mean, all I can say is that it is not in line with the scientific evidence about how brains work.
	No.
	It may well be popular amongst certain kinds of clinicians in the US, but it is out of step with our understanding of the human brain.
	Yeah, and the issue I would point out here is like, it isn't that Mate cannot believe that he has had this insight, which is...
	Had a transformative experience of his sense of self.
	That is not in question.
	I fully believe that he could have that.
	But that it is based on his experience as a one-year-old, which he unlocked for a mushroom trip, facilitated with a therapist when he was age 70. And it is a correct representation of his emotional trauma that was locked away until that session.
	No.
	No, it's as far-fetched as past life regression, to be honest.
	Yeah, I'm afraid so.
	But to highlight how Mate will present this as processing it as being very important, there's a clip, Matt, where he talks about the subjective nature of being wounded by trauma.
	How does somebody at 70 years old go about correcting that sort of interpretation you had of that traumatic early event?
	Well, by bringing it up to the conscious level, then when I notice that sense of guilt or responsibility in me, I say, oh, that's what it's about.
	So it's a meaning.
	See, trauma, as I define it, is not about what happens to us.
	It's about what happens inside of us as a result of what happens to us.
	And so the wound in my, and trauma means wound, so the wound in this case is my sense of deficiency or not being good enough, not being worthy enough.
	Once I realize that, oh, this has got nothing to do with anything except this interpretation that I made of my own experience all those years ago, then when I notice it, I can no longer believe it.
	I don't have to any longer be a subject to that interpretation of myself in the world.
	So awareness is one step.
	It's not adequate, but it's an essential step towards letting go.
	So I think he's talking about how it allows him to process the experience, but I actually think it reflects on the level of kind of subjectivity involved in reinterpreting that experience.
	That one belief that you weren't good enough, how did that rear its ugly head throughout your life?
	It made me a workaholic physician because I had to keep proving my worth.
	And it doesn't matter, I don't know if you've ever had an addiction, but the nature of it is that we're trying to get from the outside something that only can arise and fulfill us from the inside.
	When you're looking at it from the outside, it's addictive because you get it temporarily, but then that internal emptiness, that hole, never goes away.
	So it has to be filled over and over and over again.
	It can only be done so temporarily.
	So it becomes runaway addictive.
	So then, you know, work becomes an addiction because I keep trying to prove my worth.
	And it doesn't matter how many times.
	You know, I may show up in a positive way at the beginning of someone's life, at the end of somebody else's life, or any time in between.
	It never fills that emptiness that my sense of lack of worthiness creates.
	So that's one way it shows up.
	Another way it shows up is if in my relationship I don't feel as satisfied.
	My wife doesn't please me the way I like her to.
	Then I get angry.
	But why am I getting angry?
	I'm getting angry because it's my sense of not being good enough that's being now revealed.
	Big consequences from that first year experience.
	Yeah, it led to persistent feelings of not being good enough and overwork, constant need to prove yourself, being angry with your wife, etc.
	I mean, Chris, maybe it's too early to comment about this kind of thing, but I think this kind of talk is interesting because it does represent this sort of clinicalization and medicalization of everything.
	I think Gabo Mate is speaking to a lot of things that everybody feels, right?
	A lot of people feel, oh, am I trying too hard to please people?
	Am I working too hard?
	Am I feeling unfulfilled?
	I feel bad because I wasn't very nice to my partner.
	All of that stuff, these are all totally normal human things that are extremely common.
	But I guess the appeal of psychoanalysis and that kind of clinical analysis is the same as almost like a spiritual type frameworks in that it gives it a legitimacy and it gives people a kind of language to analyze themselves.
	I don't know.
	What do you think?
	Well, there's some components there, because in one way, there's the part that Mate is usually presented as somebody pushing back against over-medicalization, in a way, because he's somewhat critical about pharmaceutical interventions and medications,
	as we'll see, right?
	And he has this book, The Myth of Normal, where he wants to argue that a lot of behaviors are...
	That are classified as potentially mental illnesses or whatever, or just variation.
	And actually, I can play a clip of him making this point in regards to his diagnosis of ADD that I kind of feel aligned with.
	This is from later in the interview, but just to highlight this first point.
	So you were on medication, you did the work, you're now not on medication.
	Do you still have the symptoms of ADD?
	To a certain degree, but not in a way that in any way blights my life.
	Like one thing I can be sure that when I go on a speaking trip, I'm going to lose something.
	I'm going to lose my portable electrical tooth cleaner.
	In this case, I left my rain jacket in Budapest when I came here.
	You can take it for granted that my attention will just not notice something that I haven't packed yet.
	That's okay, I'm going back to Budapest next week, so I get to get my rain jacket back.
	But sometimes it's the cost of being me.
	So what?
	So no, not in every way.
	But that's not the point.
	Nobody's life has to be perfect.
	It just has to be a life that I want to live and I can enjoy living.
	That I have.
	So who cares if...
	Sometimes I forget something or I lose something or even if I'm listening to a symphony and I can't keep my attention on it.
	Okay, so I can't.
	So that, you know, I like that because I have perhaps some of the same tendencies.
	And I have a similar point of view, which is there are variations of personality and stuff.
	And there is, I think, a tendency towards over-medicalization in contemporary society.
	Perhaps my use of the word over medicalization was not quite the right one because it's a different kind of clinical talk where you develop, you know, coming from a psychoanalytic thing or a new age thing,
	talking about various types of trauma in your life and forming quite complex theoretical explanations for why you...
	How to fight with your partner, for instance.
	That's a bit different, right, from the, like, over-prescribing drugs to treat ADHD.
	No, but I think there is something to that.
	So, like, in regards to his definition of trauma, right, which in typical definitions usually refers to, like, a severe event, right, a severe, usually unpleasant event that people have experienced.
	He takes a more expansive...
	Definition, shall we say?
	How do you define trauma?
	I know society has defined it in its own way, but how do you define it, the word?
	I define it very specifically.
	It's not something bad that happens to you.
	I went to this movie last night and I was traumatized.
	No, you weren't.
	You were just sad or you had some emotional pain, but you weren't traumatized.
	Trauma means a wound.
	That's the literal meaning of the word.
	It's a Greek word for wounding.
	So trauma is a psychological wound that you sustain.
	And it behaves like a wound.
	So on the one hand...
	A wound, if it's very raw, if you touch it, it just really hurts.
	So if I have a wound around not being wanted, or the belief that I'm not, then decades later, if anything reminds me of that, it hurts as much as it did when I originally incurred the wound.
	So in one sense, trauma is an unhealed wound.
	That touched, we get triggered.
	That's what triggering means, by the way.
	Some old wound gets activated or touched.
	And the other thing that happens to wounds is that they scar over.
	And scar tissue has certain characteristics.
	It's thick.
	It has no nerve endings, so there's no feeling in it.
	So people traumatize, disconnect from their feelings.
	Scar tissue is rigid.
	It's not flexible.
	So we lose kind of response flexibility.
	So when something happens, we tend to react in typical, stereotypical, predictable, dysfunctional ways.
	Because of the rigidity and scar tissue doesn't grow like healthy flesh.
	You got quite into the metaphor there, but actually in this clip, he was sounding like a more restrictive version of trauma, but he has a concept of big T trauma and little t trauma and that they're both valid forms of trauma and little t trauma is not.
	You know, the kind of big suffering.
	It's more the kind of thing that maybe other people wouldn't regard as hugely traumatic.
	But he essentially wants to say, like, even if you had a very nice life and you were living, you know, a relatively comfortable existence, you could have had significant mental trauma because of the relationship you had with your parents or this kind of thing,
	right?
	Which is a...
	It is a kind of psychoanalysis thing where you might have thought that things were generally okay, but actually, deep down, there were all these dysfunctional relationships which have caused huge damage, and you need to bring them up in order to properly process them.
	So his approach is more expansive than it somewhat sounded there.
	Yeah.
	I mean, look...
	Trauma is obviously real, but it is a very strong word, isn't it, in just natural human language.
	And it can refer to people that are the victims of extreme violence, refugees, people that are subject to extreme persistent abuse as a child or from a partner or something like that.
	So there is that sense of the word which undoubtedly...
	It has persistent psychological effects.
	But at the same time, you have to recognize that it's a very popular word in the modern zeitgeist.
	I mean, there's trauma-informed yoga.
	There's trauma-informed mindfulness practices.
	There's trauma-informed massage.
	So it does have the scope where I think there is something very satisfying for people that feel a bit bad to...
	Look to some events as being traumatic and to frame themselves as being the victim of traumatic events in the process of healing.
	Part of this involves, and this is a very common refrain whenever we're looking at alternative medicine practitioners or people advancing revolutionary theories, which Gabor Mate absolutely is, is that they have to present that the mainstream Medical establishment doesn't in any way grapple with trauma or doesn't really understand it.
	So what I'm saying is that this way of looking at what we call disease as a process is so much more accurate scientifically, actually, in understanding the mind-body unity.
	And then, you know, naturally when people are traumatized, that has a huge impact on their physiology.
	Their psychological trauma has a huge impact on their physiology.
	It's just science.
	But it's science that's not taught to medical doctors.
	It's just for some strange reason.
	Well, the average physician never hears a single lecture about, say, trauma and its relationship to illness, and yet there's studies internationally, thousands of them showing those relationships.
	So there's this strange gap between science and medical practice.
	But it would change medical practice for the better.
	Because what would happen if you went to a physician and you presented with your symptom and they'd say, "Okay, look, we'll give you such and such medication to deal with your symptoms and then let's look at your life in the context that you live it and see how the stresses that you may be taking on,
	the traumas you may be carrying might be affecting the physiology of your body."
	No, they don't have to be all trauma therapists to do that.
	They just have to raise the question.
	And to begin the inquiry.
	Yeah, I mean, like, historically speaking, there definitely was, like, a lack of recognition of the persistent psychological effects of traumatic experiences, like shell shock, for instance, right?
	Yeah, but when was that?
	1914 to 18?
	Yeah, it was a while ago.
	It was a while ago.
	You know, you had soldiers returning from, you know, Vietnam, the classic goes, The helicopters send them off and stuff.
	So, you know, there's obviously been recognition since then, very strong recognition of the impact of traumatic events.
	I mean, what I am skeptical of is I think a lot of the audience of the books are people that like to think that they are the victim of trauma or still processing trauma or something like that.
	And I am a little bit concerned that the word can be expanded and broadened.
	To such a degree that it loses its meaning.
	Let me ask you, Chris, what percentage of the population do you think Gabalate believes is currently suffering from some degree of trauma?
	I think they talk about it at some point, and it's very high.
	Like, it's over...
	Over what?
	I think over 50%.
	Over 50%, okay.
	Yeah, so if your definition of the word trauma...
	It includes over 50% of the population, then I think you have diluted the meaning of the word to such a degree that it doesn't really mean what you think it means anymore.
	Well, yeah.
	So, like, listen to this, for example.
	There's those obvious traumas, or the obvious trauma of being sexually abused.
	So, men who are sexually abused, according to a Canadian study, have tripled the rate of heart attacks as adults.
	You know, and all kinds of physiological reasons.
	But that should be the case.
	So there's those self-evident big T traumas that we call big T trauma, T with a capital T. Trauma with a capital T. There's a certain percentage of the population, much larger than we think, subject to that.
	If you include all the known factors such as physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, spanking, by the way, has not been shown to be as traumatic as...
	Harsher forms of physical abuse.
	Spanking, which is still recommended by so-called experts, who should remain unnamed for the moment.
	The death of a parent.
	Violence in a family.
	Parental violence against each other.
	A parent being jailed.
	A parent being mentally ill.
	Did I say a parent being addicted?
	A rancorous divorce.
	These are the identified big traumas, big T traumas.
	Not to mention poverty.
	Not to mention extreme inequality, war, and so on.
	But then, if you remember that trauma is not what happens to you, but what happens inside you is the wound.
	People can be wounded not just by bad things happening to them, but small children can be wounded in loving families where they don't get their needs met.
	Yeah, so that is making that point about...
	It basically suggests that maybe everybody is processing trauma to some degree, at least a small t trauma.
	And there is certainly validity to the point that the subjective experience of your childhood or whatever could lead to various...
	And it doesn't mean that you need to have somebody who was a crack addict as a parent and you were living in poverty in order to develop neuroses or whatever the case might be, like, you know, just pathological thinking habits or whatever.
	That's absolutely true.
	And a lot of it is down to subjective interpretation.
	But it is that broadening of the definition to...
	I think there would be very few people who could attend a counseling session who would be unable to locate family trauma with such an expansive definition of trauma.
	Yeah, I mean, even his definition of big T trauma was pretty expansive and would have included a pretty large percentage of the population.
	Anybody with a rancorous divorce experienced, and there's a lot of divorces in America, for example.
	Yeah, a lot of people were spanked, right?
	Not that I condone it.
	It's not good.
	It's just a conceptual thing, really, I suppose.
	If your conception of human psychology is one in which we are such fragile beings, such that what are normal, basically,
	statistically normal experiences in the modern world, which by any definition...
	It's one of the safest, again, statistically speaking, environments that humans have ever existed in.
	And if we are so fragile that that is traumatizing a very large percentage of us inexorably, then I think you don't quite have an accurate model of how humans work.
	Yes, we will get to his presentation of the modern world and what the status.
	Of it is as well.
	But before that, Matt, there was one other part in that clip, Matt, at the start where he talks about a Canadian study and that men that were sexually abused have tripled the rate of heart attacks.
	You might notice it said men because I looked up that study and the pattern doesn't exist in women.
	And the authors of the study make it clear that we need...
	They released press releases, of course, about this finding, but they also said, of course, we need independent replications of this finding because it was a huge cross-sectional database.
	And I'll just state the obvious here, that there are probably hundreds of correlates of...
	Yeah, but they control for things, Matt.
	They can control for like 10 things.
	So that means it doesn't...
	Yeah, so this is...
	But that way of citing studies, like one, I looked into that, was looking, was there any follow-up study?
	No.
	Nothing, this is not.
	But this is very much the kind of Dr. K. Huberman website in studies is like, remember a factoid and be like, okay, so a study of, you know, in Canada showed that this relationship is there and like, did it?
	Or was that a correlational finding?
	And like, why would it only be in men if it was that, right?
	And why is it only that kind of trauma, like sexual?
	Abuse in man.
	Why not other kinds of trauma?
	Yeah, I mean, that's right.
	And heart attacks?
	Yeah, citing an isolated study that kind of gives inconsistent results, you know, hasn't control for everything, is cross-sectional, doesn't hold up in other populations like women where you would expect it to hold up if it was the mechanism that wasn't followed up by any other research to actually establish it.
	You know, dropping that stuff in, it's really just because it fits with the framework that he is aligned to.
	In his framework, social, psychological experiences, early childhood, that kind of thing, the processing of trauma has massive biological implications for your body and your health.
	So little scientific nuggets like that can be dropped in to support the pre-existing framework that one has.
	Yeah.
	And you mentioned about the leaning towards, you know, various alternative therapies and body work and these kinds of approaches being somewhat attracted to this expansive model of trauma,
	right?
	And like ways to process it.
	And just to highlight the connection there.
	Well, for you to say how to go about it, you already must have some degree of awareness.
	If you didn't, you wouldn't even be asking the question.
	So that's the very first step of realizing that there's something here to work on.
	There's something here to work through.
	It does not need to be the way it is.
	That already is the biggest step.
	The Buddha said that to recognize the source of your suffering is the first step towards relieving the suffering.
	And so as soon as you ask how you go about it, you've already taken a huge step.
	Because a lot of people don't even know that there's an it.
	They just think this is reality, that this is life.
	So realizing that this it doesn't have to be the way it is, that's already a huge step now.
	Beyond that, yoga, meditation, nature, therapy of all kinds, body work.
	Of all kinds, like somatic experiencing or craniosacral treatments or even massage therapy.
	It's incredible what can be revealed just through body work like that.
	Then all kinds of forms of therapy, the ones I teach, the ones other people teach, journaling, certain exercises in this book that we recommend.
	Just ask yourself, will you have trouble saying no in life to things you don't really want to do and working that through on a regular basis?
	So there's lots of ways once you open the door.
	It's interesting, isn't it?
	The sort of progressive-leaning healers will often cite Buddha and yoga, whereas Jordan Peterson will be citing Jesus Christ and prayer.
	You know, it's kind of similar.
	I mean, it's similar in the sense that in both cases, there is a strong spiritual component to what is purportedly psychology and purportedly informed by scientific evidence.
	Yeah, there's that kind of, you know, Dr. K dancing, this is the cutting edge of science that we're getting to, but...
	A lot of it seems to also be hearkening to traditional ancient wisdom and alternative modalities and, you know, just getting more in touch with the actual you, which is very much aligned with the self-help wellness approach of the kind of American self-help industry.
	So it's funny because Mate is sometimes presented as like a critic of like the indulgent, hyper-individualized commercial.
	But I don't see a huge amount of difference, except that he will reference commercialization and capitalism and stuff, but that's hardly unique.
	They often will all reel against materialistic societies and the toxic products that are causing us problems.
	Indeed, indeed.
	Yeah, well, if you wanted to draw some more parallels to the more indulgent side of the self-help work, clips like this might help.
	So, we are created in an image of God.
	I mean, you know, whatever your religious views are, but that sense that we're created in images of God means that we are creators, because the essence of God is creation.
	In fact, we call God the creator and we call the result of that creation.
	If we're created, then if we're offshoots of that creative dynamic in the universe, then it means that it's in us to create.
	And whatever form that takes, I mean, you know, you don't want to see me do art, you know, unless you...
	I can do a pretty good stick figure, you know, but I'm married to a nurse.
	So that creativity doesn't have to take the form of formal art, but it does have to take some flow of something that's inside you that needs to come out.
	Otherwise, as Celia says, you get hopelessly hemmed in by frustration.
	And so in that sense, everybody's got that creative urge, and that may take the form of social intercourse, it might take the form of gardening, I don't care, community with nature, athletic expression, I don't care what.
	But everybody's got it.
	And if people don't realize they have it, it's only because life has hemmed them in and they're too busy.
	And sometimes they are trying to make a living or trying to survive or too disconnected from themselves.
	But it's in all of us.
	And to the extent that we don't give it expression, we suffer.
	Yeah.
	Well, on one hand, he reminded me so much of Jordan Peterson there, just in terms of the logical flow.
	Or lack of it.
	In terms of, you know, we're made in the image of God.
	I don't mean religiously, but I mean metaphorically.
	We clearly are made in the image of God.
	And God's a creator.
	Therefore, we're creators as well.
	And we all exist to create.
	And you can express creativity like doing anything.
	Like podcasting, I assume, is a way of expressing your creativity.
	And if you're not expressing your creativity, it's because you've been hemmed in by life.
	The whatever, repressive individuals or trauma or something.
	I mean, it doesn't make really any sense, like analytically.
	But I can see that it's extremely, like it's appealing, right?
	Like these are all things, good vibe things that you would like to feel about yourself.
	We all feel like we're restricted a bit by the situations we're in and life hasn't quite given us the opportunities to flourish as much as we would like.
	We all would like to feel that we're creative and humans.
	As a pretty intelligent species, are, I think, inherently creative, just in the sense that we don't have pre-programmed behavioral responses to things like a lizard.
	We are pretty good at generating novelty.
	So I'm not saying there isn't grains of truth there, but it is mainly nice-sounding fluff.
	Don't you think?
	Casual disparagement of lizards aside, it's a very flattering.
	It is a flattering message.
	We're all artists, Matt, in our own unique ways.
	We're all capable of artistic expression.
	And even if you haven't, you know, if you don't think you've got that in you, you do.
	It's just not being expressed.
	Yeah, you might be shit at painting, shit at music, shit at writing, but you can garden.
	You can garden.
	You can podcast.
	We can all podcast.
	We can all podcast, that's for sure.
	Yeah.
	Like you say, it's not a...
	It's not a negative message by any extent.
	It's like it's a kind of, you know, but that's the point.
	It's the kind of message that everybody wants to hear, that inside you there's something, you know, that is a little bit special that hasn't been fully given the chance to flower.
	And that's just, it's a nice sentiment, though, the reality that artistic talent is not.
	Completely, evenly distributed across the population, I think deserves to be said.
	You know, we're all special snowflakes.
	It's true.
	We're all very special, Chris.
	Don't tell me I'm not special.
	There are people that are more creative than other ones.
	So, yeah.
	Well, but the thing is, you're using a restricted definition of creativity, aren't you?
	That's right.
	I mean, what you need to do is use an expansive definition.
	Just like trauma can be everything, creativity can be everything too, Chris.
	Everything can be everything.
	I'm an artist on Twitter.
	My tweets.
	My tweets are shit hot.
	My insulting tweets.
	My insulting tweets.
	That's a form of art.
	That's a form of art.
	That's how you express yourself, right?
	I'm not going to have anybody criticize you for the way that you express.
	Okay, okay.
	That's the way it is.
	And this is a little bit of a low blow, but not really, because I think it highlights it.
	So when your reference that you reach for, when you want to talk...
	About a topic is this person.
	It does put you in the self-help genre.
	The myth of normal.
	Yeah.
	Four words to sort of pull people in and to in some way summarize a 550-odd page book.
	Why those four words?
	Why that phrase?
	Can I pause for a moment to find a quote on my cell phone?
	100%.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So this is, are you familiar with the work of Eckhart Tolle?
	Oh, Eckhart Tolle, yes.
	Okay, yeah.
	So Tolle lives in Vancouver like I do.
	And in one of his books he says, the normal state of mind of most human beings contains a strong element of what we might call dysfunction or even madness, you know?
	So Eckhart Tolle, you know, if he's the person you're reaching to, I feel that's only one step up from Deepak Chopra.
	What's the deal with Eckhart Tolle?
	I don't really know much about him.
	Oh, we'll cover him.
	We'll cover him.
	He's a little bit like a more guru version of Anthony DeMello, to be honest.
	But Oprah Winfrey Mystic, that's the way to understand Eckhart Tolle.
	But alongside that, whenever you're talking, About, you know, this kind of thing.
	One thing that's important is authenticity.
	Being true to yourself.
	Finding your true person.
	So hard to do, Chris.
	Americans, you freaking love this.
	You love this shit, though.
	You love this shit.
	I'm podcasters too, but listen to this.
	This is Stephen Bartlett, primarily.
	It will lead us into the topic.
	That's the first step that you say is missing from the book, which is that sort of awareness.
	The next thing which I've been, it's been really front of mind in my life recently, because I've been asked this a few times on stage, and I've been trying to find the words to really articulate the importance of it, is, and this is one of your forays in this book about how to heal, is authenticity.
	Really interesting concept, because I've been trying to articulate why the fact that I've just shared all this stuff with you, and the fact that I do this every week, I'm getting closer and closer to that sort of authentic self where there's really...
	The mask is kind of dropping on me.
	Why that's been so healing for me?
	Why is authenticity such a good way, an important way for us to heal?
	I can tell how authentic a person his host is by those ad reads he did at the beginning.
	The whole time I was listening to it, I was thinking, this is an authentic man.
	He's all about that.
	Matt, Matt, your sarcasm showing through there.
	But let me highlight a little bit of what he was referencing.
	There.
	I actually think Gabor offers some good advice in response to this, but this is the kind of personal anecdote sharing that he's talking about.
	Okay.
	And so my early memories of like looking at my mum and dad are this kind of violent verbally, not like physically, this incredibly stressful screaming, one person screaming at the other.
	That's what I remember.
	But from reading what you've written in this book and from what you've said now, I actually might have learned, sort of learned to...
	That I was the problem to some degree?
	Children interpret it that way.
	That's just the whole point.
	That's what I mean about kids being narcissists.
	I don't mean that in a negative sense.
	I just mean, actually, they think it's all about them.
	So if your mother is unhappy, it's your fault.
	You know, and you're not good enough.
	So then you have to go out there and work to prove to the world and to yourself that you're good enough.
	So that, going back to your first question about how these things show up in our lives.
	That's how they show up.
	No, wasn't there some inside there, you know, children often taking the blame on themselves for parents, you know, screaming at each other and internalizing that it's something to do with them when it's not.
	And Stephen's sharing that experience.
	So isn't that authentic, you know, trauma work in action?
	By authentic, you mean fine?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I mean, the way that that, that is what they're talking about, right?
	Like, in the way that he presented there was, you know, maybe he's making some insights into how that experience affected them through this conversation and through reading his book.
	And he's sharing these personal experiences that, you know, that you normally wouldn't.
	This would be oversharing in most circumstances.
	But he's talking about it to an audience of, you know, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions.
	So, yeah, is that being more authentic?
	Well, I have to admit I'm a little bit triggered by the word authentic and I'm using the word triggered advisedly because that's something that happens from trauma.
	But I mean, it is absolutely a buzzword in modern Western culture.
	Even my university and other ones have got this thing of like authentic assessment, you know, living your authentic self, like being here in the moment authentically, finding your own inner voice.
	It pops up in consumer.
	Culture, in advertising, in corporate stuff, in this kind of clinical self-help type stuff.
	And it's related to all of that self-actualization, personal growth kind of thing.
	But what it really is, is an expression of our cultural values, right?
	These Western values, right?
	We all live in a society.
	We all have some need to conform, to turn up to work, to not...
	Let the inner voice out every moment.
	But we also have these cultural values of rampant individualism and this sense that every one of us needs to leave a mark on the world and be special in some way, shape or form.
	If not, be just like a blinding success in the eyes of everyone.
	And if you don't, then you're kind of a failure.
	So everyone has imbibed this cultural value of...
	Of authenticity, being your true self.
	It's incredibly appealing to us.
	And I suppose I just want to make the point is that not that it's wrong or right.
	It's just that it's not actually, it's not a fundamental component of human nature or psychology or anything.
	It's rather just an expression of our cultural milieu.
	Yeah, and some cultures might even regard it as rather indulgent.
	Some cultures that may exist in the contemporary world may regard the focus on self-actualization as a somewhat indulgent fixation of the more North American of our societies.
	But just to highlight your take there, let's hear Gabor talk a little bit about authenticity.
	It's much more than a way for us to heal.
	It's actually who we are.
	What you're really asking is, why is it important for a creature to be true to its own nature?
	Because that's what we're meant to do.
	We're meant to be here as ourselves.
	And when we're not ourselves because we had to abandon ourselves or betray ourselves or disconnect from ourselves in order to survive, we lost connections with our essence.
	I mean, how does it feel to be a successful CEO and, you know, more than realizing your financial dreams, but to be a workaholic and not to be available to yourself in areas of your life that really matter to you,
	as opposed to being honest about your stuff, sharing it with other people, dropping the veil, dropping the...
	I mean, to answer your question, what does it feel like?
	I mean, can you sense the difference in your body?
	It feels lighter.
	Well, yeah.
	Expansive.
	Exactly.
	Well, that's the answer.
	Yeah.
	That's why it's so important.
	Millionaires talking about the importance of them feeling more expansive and lighter.
	Like, I get it.
	They're all humans, right?
	We all have our hangups and whatnot.
	But at the same time, I just...
	I do find this thing where you'll have Elon Musk or Jordan Peterson sit down and reflect on their philosophical worldviews.
	It's very indulgent.
	It is extremely indulgent.
	But the other thing too is it's very fluffy.
	Those sorts of phrases, connecting with your inner essence because that's what we're here on Earth to do.
	Meant to do.
	Your natural self.
	These are pseudo-religious kind of assertions that don't really mean anything, except for, as I said before, an expression of cultural values.
	But they're so abstract and vague.
	It feels good.
	The words all have, just like Jordan Peterson, they all have these associations which are good.
	But what does it mean?
	I don't really know.
	Well, there's Stephen Bartlett runs a bit farther with this and I just like what he describes as being inauthentic because it's a lot of things, right?
	So here's a bit more like what inauthentic lives are like.
	So many of us, so many of us live inauthentic lives because as you said, it's either because from an early age we were escaping.
	you know, reality in order to help us to survive.
	Or then the other thing that happens a bit later on in life is we develop an identity, which becomes a career, which becomes a social circle, which becomes a prison of our inauthentic selves.
	We get trapped in there, you know, because I was good at something or because I, you know, I felt accepted in this job as a lawyer.
	So I am now living inauthentically as this robot in this prison.
	And it's a, it's a,
	And there's often a real perception of risk and loss and danger of trying to get out of that prison, of trying to get close to our authentic selves.
	We feel like we'll lose our friendship circle.
	We'll feel like we'll let our parents down who wanted us to become a lawyer.
	You know, all of these things.
	I guess you see that a lot in your work.
	So you've got adopting a...
	Persona or developing a thing to fit in with social circles, but also developing a career, becoming confident in particular areas, falling into social roles.
	All of this is kind of alienating you from this true, crystalline, pure, authentic, self-realized self, which exists under that, unburdened by society.
	Expectations are nothing.
	It is the pure you.
	That society has stolen and hidden away.
	This little perfect gem that you must mine out.
	All those people that are holding you back from getting there, you know, cast them aside, right?
	Cast them aside because they don't know the real diamond.
	Like, it is very self-indulgent.
	Another way to characterize that is just that you develop your personality as you go through life.
	You inhabit social roles.
	You get more obligations as you go on.
	The priority in your life cannot always be yourself and your feeling of self-actualization or whatever the way they present it.
	Yeah, it's a very individualistic approach.
	It is.
	That's exactly right.
	I blame Jean-Jacques Rousseau for all of this.
	He's to blame.
	James Lindsay.
	James Lindsay.
	The French Revolution.
	It's the black feminist postmodernists.
	But it is definitely, you know, there's this arc of, I guess, cultural values, which you can see all of this speaking to.
	And, like, on one hand, there's very trivial...
	Natural human things, like feeling, I don't want to go to work today.
	I've been writing a bloody 150-page report for the New South Wales government, and it hasn't made me feel very self-actualised.
	I haven't really been expressing my true authentic self with that, but I kind of got to because it's my job, and maybe then that means I shouldn't.
	To quit my job, but I have to make money because I have a family to support and all that stuff.
	Is that wrong?
	In a trivial sense, we all do things and live things that might not be the thing that gives us the most satisfaction.
	And so that's a natural human feeling.
	I think there's a natural positive response to this kind of talk because you think, yes.
	I sometimes feel dissatisfied too.
	That's me.
	People are bastards to me sometimes.
	That's right.
	Like, am I trying too hard to please people, right?
	I wanted to tell my partner, my friend, my boss, whoever, what I really think of them, and I bottled it up.
	That's probably causing me trauma right now.
	But really what it is is just an expression of this cultural idea that we...
	I don't know, get to do whatever we want, basically.
	You know what I mean?
	Or there's something missing and that if I was just completely free of all obligations, all social pressures and things like that, then I could be the better person that I imagined myself to be.
	I don't know.
	There's a little bit more in authenticity, Matt.
	Just a bit more, and then we'll get to the potential of the injuries.
	I'm so sick of authenticity.
	Yeah, you would be, you husk of a human, you inauthentic self, just wrapped up in a Canadian shell, an Australian shell.
	Inauthenticity has gotten a bad rap.
	I'm all for it.
	Like in Japan, people are extremely inauthentic, and I love that about them.
	And look at the amount of suicide, Matt.
	Look at the amount of suicide.
	They're all depressed.
	That's true.
	Maybe they're a little bit too inauthentic.
	Look, there's swings and roundabouts, swings and roundabouts.
	Although they're actually, yeah, the suicide rates are somewhat exaggerated.
	I'll tell you one thing about authenticity, because like I said, it's a funny thing.
	Like Australians, I think, are probably more authentic in a trivial sense than Japanese people.
	As a result...
	The service in Australia is absolutely terrible.
	People are just rude to you and mean to you all the time because they're expressing what they really feel.
	I think I told you, Matt, that my Northern Irish friend who moved to Australia temporarily found the lack of authenticity in Sydney very upsetting.
	So maybe it's the Irish show.
	Maybe you guys are the peak authentic.
	Well, I don't know.
	I think the Americans could give you a run for their money.
	No, look, who's the true authentic?
	We can't adjudicate it here, but we can learn about the benefits of being authentic.
	Yes, there are some costs, Matt, but there are benefits.
	No, it's true that if you develop the whole set of relationships based on your inauthentic persona, some people in your life may not like it if you gradually move towards authenticity.
	They may not like it.
	It's not what they wanted from you.
	You're going to find out who your friends are.
	You're really going to find, because your real friends will say, oh, I'm so happy for you.
	People are waiting for this.
	Other friends will say, it's not what I signed up for.
	The question is, you still have to decide.
	As an infant, as a young child, I had no agency in the choice between authenticity and attachment.
	No, I do.
	Which one do I want to go with?
	What is the cost of being inauthentic?
	I can't make that decision for anybody else.
	Nobody can make that decision for anybody else.
	But most people will find that choosing authenticity has benefits way beyond whatever they might lose.
	That's what I find.
	On the positive side of this, Matt, if you want to cast it in a positive light, you can be like, maybe you've got in with a group of people who are holding you back.
	They don't have...
	High expectations about, you know, what you can achieve or whatever, and they make fun of you because you want to do something which is a little bit outside the box or something like that, right?
	And so that could be the positive view of you have to be willing to not let other people's judgment hold you back, right?
	That's the positive side of it.
	The other side is, say you're an evolutionary biologist teaching at a lesser-known liberal arts college.
	And you've gained some fame through various public controversies and whatnot.
	But a pandemic strikes and you suddenly realize you have insights about COVID.
	Your friends are saying, maybe cool it with the anti-vaccine rhetoric.
	But you find this other group who are willing to recognize your authentic evolutionary insights.
	Your old friends, they're calling you a conspiracy theorist.
	But these new people are recognizing you saying, you know, express your truth.
	Say it like it is.
	Don't be hemmed in by society.
	Welcome, Brett Weinstein, into your authentic self as a conspiracy maniac.
	And there you are, right?
	You've cast aside those friends that were holding you back.
	You're now hanging out with Robert Malone and RFK Jr.
	How does that not fit with this narrative about realizing that others...
	We're preventing you from being your best self.
	I think it does apply just as much as somebody who goes and tries a new career where their friend said they didn't think they were going to be able to make it.
	Yeah.
	No, that's right.
	I mean, look, I don't want to give the impression that...
	We're totally cynical and I don't think that there's any scope for people to have personal growth or become more mature or that expressing yourself and thinking about what it is you want out of life and accomplishing it, not jumping around fulfilling the expectations of others.
	These are all good things, right?
	But it swings and roundabouts at every point.
	Like you said, listening to the opinions of your friends who maybe have concern about this new angle you've taken, then they could have good grounds for that concern or they could just be expecting Unreasonable things for me, right?
	You can't tell.
	It's neither good nor bad.
	It could be the right thing for me to do, to quit my job, because what really gives me satisfaction is painting and gardening, and that's what I want to do.
	It's going to make life difficult for my wife and children, but they need to accept me to live my most authentic life.
	I mean, it's not helpful advice to be more authentic or be less authentic or be more accommodating or less accommodating.
	There's no sweeping guidelines you could portray there.
	Well, there is in their approach to things, right?
	You were asking, Matt, about what does it even mean to be authentic?
	And as it turns out, people haven't been authentic for 15,000 years.
	It's actually a long-term problem.
	It's a big problem!
	We have circuits in our brain dedicated to the attachment relationships, and that's so important all through our lives, but especially when we're infants and young children.
	No.
	But we have another need.
	We've already talked about it.
	I just haven't named it.
	The other need is for authenticity, which is to be ourselves, connected to our bodies and our gut feelings.
	Because again, without access to our gut feelings, we don't survive out there in nature, where we evolved and where we lived until 15,000 years ago.
	And so that authenticity is very important, to be connected to yourself, so that you know when you're safe and when you're not.
	You know what you want and what you don't want.
	You know how to say no when you don't want something.
	You know how to say yes when you do.
	That's authenticity.
	Auto, the self, being ourselves.
	I'm sorry to mention this again, but it really does remind me of why I hate the romanticism.
	Of that stream of thought that started with Rousseau, with this back to nature.
	Society is this sort of constricting, corrupting influence, and we need to peel back the onion skin and find the true id in there, which is our real self, and only that way we could flourish.
	It is just...
	It's not a helpful frame of mind, but it sounds so good, I know, because...
	We all naturally do feel irritation, frustration.
	We all feel like there are burdens.
	We have to be polite to people.
	We have to satisfy other people's explanations to some degree or another because we're social animals, right?
	I just want to make the point.
	There's also all these books about how we're cultural animals, where we're ritual creatures.
	We live in these highly cooperative, non-kin-based societies.
	That is natural for our...
	Because that's the kind of species we are.
	That's why we track so many social relationships.
	But it's always presented that, like, contemporary, basically, civilization is not what we were supposed to do.
	And it's this teleological...
	Not even civilization.
	Like, any time people were living in groups, like I'm thinking of a hunter-gatherer tribe, they would have had huge amounts of expectations, huge amounts of roles and things.
	Even much more than contemporary Australian or American culture, right?
	Depends on the society, but yes.
	Probably depends on the society, depends on who you were in that society, all sorts of things.
	Exactly, yeah, that's the one, who you were.
	I'm just amping up your point, though, that it is entirely natural for humans, being social primates, who have created culture as well, to basically create...
	These interlocking interwebs of mutual responsibility and obligations.
	And we're not wolves.
	Well, I'm a bit of a wolf.
	You might be a chattering monkey, Chris, but I'd like to think of myself as a creative wolf.
	I'm a, yeah, I'm a social primate that just wants to groom everyone around me.
	And I pick the fleas.
	You can pick fleas off me any day of the week.
	Actually, wolves were, that was a terrible example.
	Wolves are very social.
	Wolves are highly social, but they're often used as the lone wolf example.
	So it's fine, Matt, just don't highlight it.
	But, you know, maybe our objection to this is actually because of our colonialist intuitions, because we're so for colonialism.
	You know, me, as an urban Irish person, very, very in favor of colonial endeavors.
	So that might be why I have an objection.
	And if you can't quite see the logic, listen.
	So authenticity is not just a new age concept.
	It's actually a central dynamic in staying healthy human beings.
	Oh, one more thing.
	So yesterday I was in Westminster Abbey.
	And I was looking at all these...
	Beautifully and articulately worded monuments to all these colonialists, to all the people that oppressed and murdered and robbed and despoiled native people all over the world.
	They're the heroes of the British Empire.
	And I think one of the reasons there's such a strong pushback against the idea of trauma in this society is If we recognize trauma, which exists not only on the personal, individual level, but very much on the collective level, the ruling elites in this country would have to come to terms with the fact that their wealth is based on the traumatization of foreign peoples,
	which incidentally was one of the crimes of Harry, is that he pointed that out.
	Let's face it, the royalty, the wealth that I was born into.
	was achieved at the despoilation and oppression of people around the world.
	So trauma is not just a personal issue.
	It's very much a social and collective and historical issue.
	So I agree with his concerns about the British Empire, but however, I feel that's a rather self-serving for me that like, if you don't think that my approach to emphasizing that everything is trauma and trauma is the...
	The thing that we should all be focusing on is possibly because you're pro-colonialism.
	Yep.
	Yep.
	Look, I'm just going to leave it.
	I'm going to leave it there.
	Leave it hanging.
	Well, yeah, that's that.
	So, you know, well, okay, look, I'm going to get to what I consider possibly the worst aspect of this map because it relates to what trauma And feeling to process trauma causes.
	But just before I get to that, just to put a little cap on it, the flip side about romanticizing traditional society or romanticizing the state of nature, us running around the forests and being at one with our authentic social primate self,
	is that you must present the modern world as toxic and damaging.
	And, you know, not aligned with the true spirit of humanity.
	So just a few examples of this.
	So in medical parlance, normal means healthy and natural.
	So there's a normal range of blood pressure, normal temperature.
	It's a range.
	Outside that range, there's no life.
	There's no health.
	Either too high or too low.
	You're gone.
	So normal means...
	It's equivalent with, synonymous with healthy and natural.
	However, we make that same assumption that out in society what we're used to, what we call normal, is also healthy and natural, which is a myth.
	Because I'm saying that in this society, what we consider to be normal is neither healthy nor natural.
	In fact, it's hurtful to us.
	So that we're using the word normal in a way that...
	It doesn't apply in a narrow medical sense.
	It's accurate, but in a broader sense, that which we're used to in our society, we consider normal, is just not good for us.
	And norm is kind of a statistic, or it's a kind of an average.
	So if everybody in London mistreated their dogs, and if you didn't, then you'd be abnormal.
	It's a myth to say that what is normal is healthy and natural.
	That's what I mean by the myth of normal.
	So his point there is that, okay, natural and normal to what to some degree means healthy and good because, yeah, you know, like blood pressure or temperature and stuff like that falls outside the normal range.
	Yeah, you will die.
	Okay, that's good.
	So his thesis in that book and elsewhere is that that doesn't apply to many things connected with normality in the modern world because the modern world itself is abnormal,
	is sick or corrupt and sick.
	Yeah, but he layers on top of it the same thing that Dr. K did where he also adds in the confusion about the average because he says, you know, like if you lived in a society where kicking dogs was the dominant thing and you were the average person then you would be Kicking a dog.
	So like, yes, he is highlighting that our norms are pathological and that, you know, like if you grew up in a Nazi society and you were a normal member of Nazi society would not make you a monster.
	Right.
	But, but also this kind of notion that like the average mean is kind of a goal or something, but it's that ends up with just like a completion of the word.
	Normal or average or, yeah.
	Typical.
	Yeah.
	Like the typical person is not, I don't know, a millionaire.
	Does that mean that we think being a millionaire is not good?
	Like, I mean, the thing that I got from it, Chris, is once again, I'm sorry, beating this drum, but this is, again, the stupid part of romanticism to a T. Seeing the modern world as corrupt, idealizing some imagined alternative natural.
	Authentic.
	Authentic, as the authentic way that people should be living in authentically.
	And, you know, modern society and the expectations being artificial and constraining.
	The idealization of this sort of, like, just being this sort of free-floating, totally expressive, you know, think of some more buzzwords, insert them there.
	And, you know, this is so popular in modern health and wellness, complementary and alternative medicine.
	It's sort of, it's infused into all of it and melded with some fuzzy notions of Eastern spirituality and stuff as well.
	And it's just...
	I don't know, I just think it's pretty empty.
	You know, it is appealing because we're always dissatisfied with the state of things as they are, right?
	That's just kind of human nature.
	If things got twice as good tomorrow, within a few days, we'd start feeling dissatisfied.
	Yeah, I don't think it's very helpful.
	Well, maybe he doesn't have that much of a negative view, though maybe we're overstating it.
	Do you think society is getting more toxic?
	And if so, why?
	What measure shall we use?
	Your measure.
	You know, if we use the measure of a number of kids being medicated, a number of adults having chronic illness, autoimmune disease, a number of students, university students being depressed, contemplating suicide,
	a number of children in the United States killing themselves, the number of people on medications of all kinds.
	The degree of safety that people have in society, the rancor or peace that characterizes political discourse in this world, the intolerable fact that eight people in the world, I think, own as much as the bottom half,
	as the bottom 3.5 billion.
	You know, if I look at all those things, by those measures, if you look at what's happening to the environment, if I look at the fact that the people who are...
	The worst polluters in the environment also happen to be the most successful people by a certain measure of success.
	By any number of parameters, if I look at how racism still affects the lives of so many people, and not just affects it in an emotional sense, but actually physiologically, you know,
	then yeah.
	This is a toxic society and those measures are getting worse.
	They're not getting better.
	And inequality is getting worse here in the UK and elsewhere.
	So yeah, I think it's getting more toxic.
	Things have never been worse, Chris.
	Never been worse.
	I can't think of any other places in the world or times in human history where people have had it worse than modern people living in the West today.
	It's the flip side of, like, Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson's triumphalism.
	Like, you know, the society is just perfect and getting better.
	Like, I feel the person that was accurate about this is kind of Hans Rosling types, the ones which are talking that things are getting better.
	But yes, there are, you know, that doesn't mean that everything is good.
	It's great.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, the environment is a problem, etc.
	Yeah, we should get him and Steven Pinker together and get them to touch fingers, see what happens.
	I think that exploded in a matter-antimatter reaction.
	You know, it just highlights that that's the worldview.
	The modern world is toxic.
	Things are getting worse.
	People are slipping into depression.
	They're all over-medicated.
	That's right.
	This is the point I want to make, is that these are not...
	Statements about reality.
	These are not statements of fact.
	Whether it's the triumphalism of Charles Murray or whoever, or the complacency, some would argue, of Steven Pinker, or this kind of, you know...
	My lingering?
	Yeah, this kind of attitude, which is a very popular one.
	I mean, what they really are are an expression of your values, right?
	It's an expression of your own personal values.
	It's fine to express your values, but I think don't conflate it with statements about reality.
	It doesn't make sense to talk about the world today being toxic, culture being toxic, society being toxic, if there has never been...
	In any time in human history, a society that's been, like, less toxic?
	This is the pentagulf.
	Yeah, like, well, if all human societies are toxic, like, I'm sure if push came to shove, he wouldn't say, oh, no, in whatever, Stalin's Russia, things were better, or in Napoleonic France, things were better.
	Egyptian, ancient Egypt.
	Egyptian were better.
	Go back as far as you're like, I think it would be hard to back the argument that it was a much more authentic.
	We're self-actualizing, personal freedom, flourishing type situation for the majority of people.
	Were the Mongols living authentic lives when they had the...
	Riding around the horse, waving a saber, shooting arrows from your side?
	Maybe that was authentic for them.
	I wonder, like, whenever Kublai Khan took over, you know, the Mongol...
	Empire from his father.
	And actually, they ended up, you know, expanding.
	And there were various other sons and family members in different parts of the Mongol Empire.
	But there were concerns that he had become too sinusized because of the influence of Chinese culture.
	Right.
	So that, yes.
	He was Mongol, but not an authentic Mongol.
	So, you know, Kublai Khan, even he wasn't living his authentic steppe lifestyle.
	Not authentic enough.
	Yeah.
	So, I mean, just my point is, it's not that everything's great now, but it's just that if you want to describe a state of affairs, whether it's for Mongols or Egyptians or contemporary Americans, it's a relative statement.
	Relative to other situations, either cross-culturally in other parts of the world or historically to other times and places.
	It doesn't make any sense to describe it as toxic or unhealthy or broken with respect to some idealized imagined nirvana which hasn't existed and doesn't exist.
	Yes.
	Well, now, Matt, let me turn to the topic that I've been serving.
	Why I think this goes into the realm of pure toxicity in a way.
	This relates to what unprocessed trauma is supposed to be able to manifest and be responsible for, right?
	So let's get started because there's quite a few clips here to get through.
	Just to be clear, Chris, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but...
	When we talk about unprocessed trauma, we've already discussed trauma.
	Trauma can be a lot of things and probably most of us have it.
	And when we talk about unprocessed trauma, we're talking about trauma that hasn't been treated either via consultation with a therapist.
	It's repressed.
	It hasn't been acknowledged that it exists.
	You have not processed the experiences that you had as a young person that have left wounds on you.
	Right.
	You haven't processed it.
	You haven't sort of recognized it and brought it into full consciousness in a Freudian way.
	Right.
	Okay.
	All right.
	But I presume you need to read a book or get some therapy or someone to help you.
	Maybe you could do it on your own.
	I believe there is a system which, since you asked, it would involve something like this.
	It's one of the seven A's of your...
	Of healing, as you say.
	The first being a topic we've talked about already, which is acceptance.
	The next being awareness.
	Well, awareness, I wish we had put into this book, but we didn't.
	Not into this book.
	In this book, I put four A's and I left out awareness and that was an omission on my part.
	Really?
	Yeah, it was.
	I'm sorry, but it was.
	So in the book you have authenticity, anger, autonomy.
	Authenticity and agency, yeah.
	And acceptance.
	So awareness, you've said before, before this book, that awareness is the starting point.
	Yeah.
	I found that to be so true in my life, but it's not very easy.
	I feel like awareness is a luxury or a privilege that is very hard fought.
	Yeah.
	Because you're guessing.
	Yeah.
	You're guessing based on pattern recognition.
	So there are seven A's of healing, perhaps four in this book, but these are part of it.
	Respond, there are also the five R's that you should consider.
	It's interesting in your work, throughout your work, you use alliteration a lot as a way to kind of summarize and make ideas really memorable.
	It really helps.
	It's an old trick.
	It's a trick.
	It's a writing trick, right?
	Well, it also works, you know, forays or...
	The four R's?
	I don't want to say, you know, I'm denigrating my work if I say it's a trick.
	No, it's just something, just the way things occur to me.
	That's all it is.
	One of the, one of the alliteration devices you use is also relates to limiting beliefs and how we can undo self-limiting beliefs with the five R's.
	Yeah.
	Relabel.
	Re-attribute, refocus, re-value, and recreate.
	Yeah.
	Re is getting a lot of...
	You're doing a lot of work there.
	Is that kind of cheating with the alliteration if you make them all...
	Or the prefix?
	Yeah.
	Is that prefix or post-position?
	It's a prefix, right?
	Yeah.
	So, yeah, that's a very common thing in self-help world, right?
	Like the four whatevers of emotional...
	Regulation or...
	Yeah, the four stages of healing.
	The sevenfold path, Chris, or whatever it was.
	I don't know.
	Yeah.
	But it is buzzwordy, right?
	I think that's the comment.
	I mean, they're all nice-sounding words, but, you know.
	This is something the academics are just as guilty of, I will say.
	They like to do this, like the five R's of female...
	Extremism.
	And so on.
	And also, they like to make acronyms that spell out words.
	Like, weird.
	Western.
	Educated.
	Industrialized.
	Rich.
	Democratic.
	Yeah, I know.
	In fact, my colleague did that.
	I forget.
	I even forget what the acronym was.
	But it's spelled drastic or something like that.
	Yeah.
	So it does work because, you know, when it hits.
	It manages to get your thing very memorised, the byte model of Cultish Control or whatever.
	Over-reading the byte model of you.
	Yeah, but this just reminds me, before I get to the thing that I've set up, there was a thing which just caused me...
	My own process trauma.
	I flash back a few years ago to listening to Jamie Wheal and Jordan Hall.
	I was again in front of a computer hearing people sense me at me with extended metaphors.
	And yeah, just let's see if it produces the same trauma response in you when you hear this.
	It reminds me of an analogy I've been talking about in the last couple of episodes of this podcast.
	The distinction between being driven and being dragged.
	Yeah.
	It's like, which side of the lorry am I?
	Flying down the motorway.
	Am I tied to the front and am I running and pulling the lorry?
	Or am I just like my ankles attached to the back of the lorry as it flies down the motorway because I'm being dragged?
	But if I may, I would say that neither of those are particularly desirable.
	But it's the distinction that I made before between being driven and being called.
	Yeah.
	Because if you're called, you see, if I call you, say, Stephen, would you come and have dinner with me?
	You can say yes, you can say no.
	I just gave you a call and you can say, literally, I'm talking about a call now, a telephone call.
	You can say yes, you can say no.
	There's a decision there.
	But you're the one who's making the decision.
	When you're dragged or pushed or pulled, you're not making the decision.
	I'm a slave to that.
	Autonomy, Chris, is so important.
	I've often said so.
	Autonomy.
	It's, yeah, just saying.
	That metaphor took a...
	Freaking rude.
	I felt I was dragged along behind it.
	Like they're dragged, they're driven, they're on the lorry, but there's a call and a call like a telephone call.
	So, and that call is a call that you choose the answer, not like being driven and you're like, oh my God.
	And like, you know, it's just people have a lot of fun when they're doing this.
	But I think this is a type of person that really enjoys this kind of.
	Yes-sounding metaphorical insights.
	I know that people enjoy that.
	I just find it excruciating because I'm like, what are you actually, you're just saying something very trite in a dressed up metaphor.
	But like, it's so trite.
	That's the bit that gets to me.
	It doesn't need this many words.
	And you're also just playing on the word.
	Call, so like telephone call.
	Yeah.
	I mean, there's always a version of it that makes sense.
	There's concepts in psychology of you can be attracted to it.
	Behavior can be rewarding because it's a relief from negative affect.
	Or it could be rewarding because it's giving you a positive pleasure.
	So you could say that that distinction they're making there between are you being sort of dragged towards something or pulling the thing or called.
	I forget how the analogy works.
	But if you work hard, you can find a reasonable way to put it.
	But the way they put it is usually dressing it up and connecting it to a lot of pretty vague and fluffy things.
	I mean, just be specific.
	And get your terms straight and don't dress it up.
	That's what I'd prefer.
	Yes.
	Well, so analogies.
	They have their uses.
	They also have their limitations.
	I just feel some people perhaps don't recognize the limitations as much as they should.
	But that would be, you know, that's a minor complaint really, Matt.
	People like analogies.
	Some people like metaphorical language.
	Some people are abstract painters.
	You know, whatever.
	Whatever floats your boat.
	But when it comes to this, I think there's less room for positive interpretations.
	Again, my view is, as I pointed in this book and in previous works, who gets sick and who doesn't isn't exactly accidental.
	There are certainly personality patterns based on traumatic experiences in childhood that make disease more likely.
	And people very often realize that throughout their lives, they had abandoned who they were, they lived a life that wasn't meaningful for them.
	Just to say that, again...
	This is this valorizing of autonomy and control and individualism, right?
	That you have control over whether or not you get sick.
	You get sick, yeah.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And this is where the sort of touchy-feely, progressive, liberal types are hand-in-hand with the Joe Rogans of this world.
	Because the common denominator is this sort of romantic, naturalistic sort of version of health where...
	You get to control everything, right?
	By having the strength of character and by doing the right things, you will have complete control and autonomy and power over sickness.
	And the dark side of it is that when people are not healthy, when they do get sick, whether it could be from COVID even, right?
	It's because they haven't been doing the right alternative health practices.
	So one thing that you have to do when you're going to go down this route is that you have to explain that the medical profession and medical model is unfit for purpose.
	You know, we've already saw they don't get any training, Matt, about trauma.
	They don't recognize the connection there to any illness.
	So yeah, so let's just hear a little bit about that.
	As it relates to treatments, how do you think that the medical profession and the psychological profession would respond differently if we removed this idea that there is a normal?
	How would our approaches change to treating people?
	Well, it's a multi-layered answer.
	First of all, we would recognize that our diagnoses are not explanations for anything.
	I've been diagnosed with ADD, you know, legitimately so.
	My first book was on it.
	But it doesn't explain anything.
	So I tune out easily, very easily, you know, and sometimes when I don't, often when I don't want to, but, you know, unless I'm highly motivated.
	So you might say, this person has ADD, how do we know?
	Because he tunes out a lot.
	Why does he tune a lot?
	He's got ADD.
	How do we know he's got ADD?
	Because he tunes out a lot.
	So first of all, we have to understand that our understanding of normal and what's outside the normal, it doesn't explain anything.
	They can describe, if you describe my mental functioning as that of somebody who's got an automatic tendency to tune out, you'd be accurate.
	So there's a description.
	It's helpful as an explanation as to why this person isn't behaving quote-unquote normally.
	It doesn't explain a thing.
	So it's just, the medical profession is just about describing things.
	They're not about the actual cause of things.
	That's not something that modern medicine is concerned about, right?
	They only concern with identifying symptoms and then matching it to...
	Papology in the textbook, and then that's it.
	That's all modern medicine as a bike.
	But I guess there's a very superficial sense in which it's true, right?
	Like, you might be diagnosed with heart inflammation, and that diagnosis is kind of what the doctor at the hospital often cares about because they're looking to treat it.
	It may or may not give you some guidance about what was the underlying cause of it?
	Oh, absolutely not, but the corollary there, Matt, is...
	Modern medicine isn't interested in what the risk factors for heart disease are, what the causal linkages are there, whether genetic factors apply, whether lifestyle factors apply.
	Is that the case?
	No, that's not the case.
	That nobody has been particularly interested in what causes ADD, right?
	The way that he presents it is no, you know, by just simply...
	Identifying that set of symptoms and giving it aneum, we don't determine everything about it.
	Yes, true, but there actually is a thing whenever you have identified a kind of categorical illness or cluster that you can then set about investigating the ontology or the causal relationships and whatnot.
	Well, let me put it this way, like medical science.
	Research in medicine is absolutely very, very concerned about what causes disease, right?
	Absolutely.
	But it can sometimes be the case that a treating physician who is busy and has lots of people to treat and we don't have infinite resources for each patient might go, okay, I can diagnose this person with a particular kind of schizophrenia.
	That gives me some guidance as to how I can treat this person, right?
	There's heaps of research on schizophrenia and the causes of it, but for this particular person, what may matter most is actually the diagnosis and the treatment, not whether it was some combination of genetic or environmental or whatever factors.
	That kind of thing can often be unknowable for the individual person.
	So it is very much shades of Dr. K, right?
	Oh, yeah.
	This straw man version of conventional medicine which doesn't care about...
	Any of the interesting facets that make you you, that just wants to put you in a box, treats some symptoms, and doesn't really care about the underlying causes.
	Right.
	And part of that is that there's often a disparagement about the kind of way that mental illness is approached in the modern medical profession.
	And there are plenty of things that you can critique here, but just listen to the way that it's presented here.
	Why do you say so-called?
	Well, look, the disease model is, as long as we understand it's a model, it's okay.
	When we think it describes reality fully, it doesn't.
	So, for example, we talk about mental illnesses.
	And we're assuming that there's a kind of definite pathology there, just as in rheumatoid arthritis, you can describe the inflammation of the joints and the blood levels of certain antibodies being abnormal and hormonal levels being disturbed.
	We're making the same assumption in mental illness.
	There's no such evidence in mental illness.
	There's no physiological parameters that you can say somebody's got mental illness.
	There's just been a study a few months ago of thousands of brain scans of people with mental illness diagnoses.
	There's nothing diagnostic about the brain scans.
	It's not like I can take an x-ray of a lung and say that this lung has got what we call consolidation or fluid indicating inflammation.
	There's nothing like that in mental...
	There's no blood test you can do, and so on.
	So illness is a model.
	I mean, it might...
	Somebody's really depressed, even suicidal perhaps, and they might need pharmacological intervention, which would really save their lives.
	That may be true.
	And in that sense, you may say that they're ill, as long as you realize that this is a construct that we're applying here.
	But there is no actual measurement of that.
	I might disappoint you here, Chris, because I think I agreed with all of that.
	You do disappoint me, Matt, because that is fairly standard anti-psychiatry style rhetoric.
	There's plenty of illnesses, including physical illnesses, which are not defined by a very specific presence of something.
	Like those types of migraine headaches, right, that are expressed differently.
	This is presenting it as like the only thing which is a real illness is like a genetic defect that you can do a scan and you can show it's there.
	Well, I think what we're getting at is you're thinking about where that line of thinking leads.
	And like in very simple terms, not thinking about any of the implications of what someone might do with that.
	In basic terms, it's completely true, right?
	Someone can be diagnosed with having a behavioral addiction to something like gambling.
	And it is a somewhat arbitrary categorization based on the constellation of behavioral indicators and self-report and all kinds of things like that.
	There isn't a blood test you do for it.
	And it is an abstraction.
	To categorize somebody as being mentally ill by being addicted to gambling, that is a convenient categorical abstraction we apply.
	But this shouldn't be taken to invalidate the utility or necessity.
	What about severe schizophrenia?
	What about it?
	So you said addiction.
	It's a fuzzy category.
	People can be fitted into it.
	So there are issues around it.
	Oh, yeah.
	Look, no, I totally agree with you.
	It's true not just of the softer, if you like, things like a behavioral addiction, but it would be true of acute schizophrenia.
	It would be true of a lot of physical ailments, like you said before, right?
	Medical diagnoses of all kinds are not necessarily, I don't know, grounded in a single observable, 100% reliable black-white sort of test.
	Right.
	So this rhetoric is very familiar to me in that what will usually be referenced is things like addiction or ADHD or ones where there is some debates about the relative fluidity of diagnosis and over-diagnosis issues.
	What it's not typically referred to is when people are talking about severe mental illnesses.
	Which often lack the ability that you cannot do a blood test or do an x-ray and show on the chart where is the severe schizophrenia in this x-ray.
	You can't show it.
	But does that mean it is not an illness?
	But in that recording, in the clip that you just played, he didn't say that you shouldn't regard something like that as a real illness.
	Is there some further recording you would like to play us in which he goes down that path?
	Well, let me play some more and see.
	Maybe people will agree with you or agree with me.
	But he does extend this, just first of all.
	You might take that as to being applied to mental illnesses, right?
	But not normal illnesses, but not true.
	But even in physical disease, we make certain assumptions.
	For example, somebody has rheumatoid arthritis.
	Nothing wrong with that statement on the face of it, but there's an assumption there.
	The assumption is that there's this thing called rheumatoid arthritis.
	And there's this person called me.
	And this person has this thing.
	Now, you know, the example I often give.
	Here's my cell phone.
	I'm holding it in my hand.
	I have a cell phone.
	It's not part of me.
	It says nothing about me.
	It's a discrete object.
	Its nature doesn't depend on my nature.
	Nothing.
	Is that true about rheumatoid arthritis?
	Or is it more true to say, as I found out, that this is a condition that shows up in people with certain life experiences and certain ways of functioning in the world?
	And that because of the science-documented unity of mind and body and the impossibility of separating the activity or emotional apparatus from, say, our immune system, because it's all one organismic unit.
	Therefore, when the immune system turns against the body, as it does in rheumatoid arthritis, the immune system actually attacks the body.
	Is that a thing that's got a life of its own?
	Or is there a process that's happening inside that person because of certain aspects of their lives?
	That is some very obfuscatory warble, I have to say, Chris.
	It's very hard to figure out what he's implying there.
	Like, I know that you're reacting against the implication, right?
	It's the implication.
	It's the implication.
	I guess I'm reacting to the sort of trivial and mundane interpretation, which is like, of course, right?
	So you could say something like chronic liver disease, right?
	That arose in exactly the same language that he used, right?
	As a complex interplay of all your emotions and your behaviors and your lifestyle.
	It's inside your body.
	It's not like a phone.
	That's right.
	It's not a phone.
	That's right.
	I mean, so what?
	You know what I mean?
	It's like medical conditions like having a chronic liver disease or any of them are just technically speaking an abstraction, right?
	A category.
	We say, okay, you've got it or you don't.
	But that's just a convenience and it's just a trivial thing and sort of philosophizing about it is meaningless to me.
	Ah, perhaps you're missing the implication.
	Yes.
	So let it be spelled out.
	Now if I say it's the thing that happens to you, then that thing has got a life of its own.
	And that's how most doctors see it.
	They see somebody with rheumatoid arthritis, they say, okay, this is the kind you've got, this is what's going to happen, this is the only thing we can do is to mitigate the symptoms.
	I find that's not true.
	I find that the rheumatoid, but not just I find it, the science finds it.
	That rheumatoid arthritis is very much related to stress and trauma.
	And the more stressed there is, the more likely it is to flare up.
	And if people deal with that stress, if they know how to prevent it, their illness abates.
	Which means that it's not a thing that's separate.
	It's a process that happens inside them.
	This is a subtle concept.
	I'm wondering if I'm explaining it clearly.
	No, you are.
	And it's really making me question how much we misunderstand the relationship between the mind and the immune system.
	Yeah.
	That's the important connection to understand if you are to accept all the things you've just said, which I don't think typically we understand, that my mind and my immune system have such a close relationship.
	See, there's a segue there, Chris, right?
	So it starts off with making this straw man version of conventional medicine, which is it doesn't care about...
	The causes or treating the underlying disease.
	All it cares about is kind of making the symptoms go away.
	Well, first of all, it's not true, right?
	If you get diagnosed with a chronic liver disease, they will ask you about how much do you drink.
	And if you drink more than whatever, they will tell you to stop, right?
	That's got to do with the etiology of it, right?
	The causes, right?
	So I'm sure it's true of every other disease out there.
	Then they segue to, well, the alternative way to do it, that...
	Gabba Mate does, is looking at the fundamental interconnectedness of all things and things being a process and then happening inside you and it's not a distinct object that is somehow separate from you.
	And this is all meaningless warble, right?
	No, no, it's not.
	I think this is the same thing with Dr. K. It's not meaningless warble.
	It's his alternative system, which is that...
	These diseases, so-called diseases, are really the kind of natural consequence of the body dealing with stress and trauma that causes it to manifest.
	Dealing with you not living your inauthentic life in the inauthentic society that we've created for ourselves.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And if you think that is me reaching, okay, allow me to illustrate this while I...
	Clearly.
	Things like rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, inflammatory diseases of the gut, and so on.
	Why?
	So, those diseases tend to happen to people, not just according to my own observation, although it's very much my own observation when I was working in Family practice and palliative care, before I did addiction medicine,
	I noticed that who got sick and who didn't wasn't accidental.
	That's the subject of my book, When the Body Says No.
	And then again, in the myth of normal, people tended to be compulsively concerned with the emotional needs of others rather than their own, identified with duty role and responsibility, so their work in the world rather than.
	Their own true selves.
	They tended to suppress healthy anger.
	So they tend to be very, very nice and peacemakers.
	And they tended to believe that they're responsible for how the people feel and that they must never disappoint anybody.
	Two fatal beliefs.
	So these are the people that, according to my observation, but according to a whole lot of research as well that I didn't even know about, but have since found elegant research, these are the people that tend to develop Now in this society, which gender is more acculturated,
	programmed to suppress their healthy anger, to be the peacemakers, to be the caregivers?
	Women.
	There's so much to unpack there.
	But first of all, I was kind of joking, but I was right, wasn't I?
	It is actually not living your authentic self.
	And that is responsible.
	No, I was agreeing.
	I was genuinely agreeing.
	That is it.
	I'd actually forgotten this little segment when I listened to this.
	Okay.
	There's a trivial sense in which this is true, right?
	Not specifically what he said, but just that there are heaps of lifestyle.
	Environmental and social factors that are risk factors for stuff like developing addictions and many other health and psychiatric issues.
	But the way he spins that is, well, one, emphasizing them to the exclusion of all other causes.
	And two, specifically, he sees lack of authenticity in being a people pleaser as being the fundamental driving thing behind a lot of physical ailments.
	For me, the first takeaway, Chris, is that, one, you, you're golden.
	You're fucking bulletproof because no one's called you a people pleaser.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Hey!
	Hey!
	You don't need to get a thing that's really just run with me.
	Stray bullets, catchy strays.
	Now, I'll leave you out of it.
	But I looked into it, I'm sure you did too, about this higher prevalence of autoimmune diseases in women compared to men.
	Yeah.
	Because I thought that would be interesting, wouldn't it?
	First of all, it is surprising that he's right that about 80% of all people with autoimmune diseases are women.
	So that's interesting.
	But as to the causes, well, it turns out the causes are pretty well understood, right?
	There's a range of genetic factors and hormonal factors and perhaps some degree of environmental factors.
	This is probably very much a tertiary.
	Impact in terms of maybe being more exposed to cosmetic products and things like that.
	But also women tend to have stronger immune responses compared to men.
	So there are a lot of interesting sex differences which have been looked into.
	But he doesn't look at any of that.
	No, no, no.
	Modern medicine isn't really interested in what causes that.
	Oh, I forgot.
	Yes.
	They're just like, we don't care why women get...
	Autoimmune.
	They've got the box.
	They've got some symptoms.
	How can we make these symptoms go away?
	That's what we need to do.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, steroids.
	Steroids is the answer.
	But also, Matt, just to highlight how strongly this goes.
	So we mentioned women.
	And I think, again, this clicks into that progressive kind of rhetoric where this is about the suffering of women, which has gone on the ground.
	So if you're questioning this.
	Are you saying that women are not, like, forced to repress how they feel?
	And I'm saying that harms them.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I think that's worth a note because, like, you know, when he gets rhetorical, he does lean into these progressive tropes.
	And the right-wing gurus that we cover do the same thing, right?
	They make some highly dubious statements, but they link it to the hot button.
	Political convictions of their audience.
	And what happens, of course, is that your brain switches off.
	Oh, he mentioned colonialism.
	He mentioned the plight of women.
	Well, I'm on board with this, right?
	So you accept the other claims more uncritically, I think, including the complete nonsense about these causes for autoimmune diseases.
	And Dr. K did this with...
	Dr. Mike, right, when he brought up the, like, maybe you're being, like, kind of Western chauvinist towards Indian culture, right?
	And that worked.
	That worked.
	And just to point out how far he is going with this.
	So listen carefully to the claim here, Matt.
	And what tends to happen is, is that men then, women at some point get to the, if they're healthy enough, if they're not strong enough to assert themselves, you know what happens?
	They get sick.
	And I know this is a mouthful, but a lot of women's cancers and autoimmune diseases are precisely because of this self-repression.
	And I could talk about that at great length, the physiology of it.
	But either the body will somehow say no for them.
	So women's cancer, women who get cancer, are often manifesting cancer because they're...
	Unwilling to express their true feelings.
	And this is like kind of bubbling up like a toxic physiological symptom of their mental repression.
	I find that so distasteful because it's presented as empowering.
	You know, women should be told that they're able to stand up for themselves and say what they think.
	But it is victim blaming.
	It's saying you got cancer.
	It's likely.
	That you haven't manifested your authentic self.
	Otherwise, you know, your body would be dealing with this.
	It would be processing it.
	And it's never stated so categorically, but it is.
	Like he said there, women's cancers and autoimmune diseases are precisely because of this self-repression.
	And it'd qualify if you ask them.
	But the message, that is not empowering.
	It's the flip side of Gwyneth Paltrow saying, the universe only sends what you can grow from as a challenge.
	And you're like, so the people that are sexually abused as children, that was to help them grow.
	Yeah, yeah.
	The implications are often distasteful.
	But of course, the most objectionable part about it is that it's nonsense.
	It's blatantly...
	Untrue.
	Like the causes of cancer generally are pretty well understood.
	Like men overall get cancer at a higher rate than women.
	So explain that using his theory that lack of self-actualization and autonomy is the principal cause.
	Well, Matt, look, we read immune.
	We're pretty much experts on the immune system.
	Yeah, we're experts now.
	We're immune now.
	Gabor Mate had some things to say about the immune system.
	So maybe this will answer some of the questions.
	So the immune system is like, it's been called a floating brain.
	It is a memory.
	It is reactive capacity.
	And it allows in nutrients and vitamins and healthy bacteria and keeps out and destroys what isn't toxins and...
	Unhealthy, invading organisms and so on.
	In other words, the immune system and the emotional system have exactly the same role.
	That's the first point.
	The second point is they're not separate systems.
	Physiologically speaking, the emotional system, the nervous system, the hormonal apparatus and the immune system are all one system.
	And there's a whole new science when I say new.
	60, 70, 80 years old, called psycho-neuroimmunology, that studies the unity.
	So it's not even that all these things are connected, they're one.
	So therefore, when you're suppressing one aspect of it, you're also suppressing the other.
	So people that repress healthy anger, they have diminished the immune activity.
	And this has been demonstrated.
	So the repression of emotions has a physiological function.
	And when you repress your immune system, you're more likely to have that immune system turn against you or to fail you when it comes to malignancy.
	The immune system, like you and I have cancer cells in our bodies probably every day because nature makes mistakes.
	That's not a problem.
	The immune system recognizes them as cancer cells don't have on their surfaces markers that our normal cells do.
	So the immune system says, this is a foreigner, it's an enemy, I'm going to destroy it.
	But when you repress your emotions, you can also undermine your immune system and now your immune system will not recognize the malignancy and not destroy it and allows it to proliferate.
	Two points, Chris.
	Firstly, this is all cod's wallet.
	Absolute nonsense.
	The second point is it's very reminiscent of the other kind of...
	Brain-body connection that New Age people love, which is the gut biome, of course.
	And there is this, like you and I, having read Immune and now become expert immunologists, have a healthy appreciation for the complexity of the immune system.
	It's absolutely fascinating.
	But what they like to do is to imply that there is cognition going on elsewhere in the body.
	And they like to do this to really ramp up.
	The interconnectedness of the brain and the body to make these really quite crazy statements.
	And, you know, it's a totally illegitimate parallel.
	Like it's true kind of some of the details you said about the immune system, but that parallel between what the immune system is doing is you have to let the immune system be free.
	A suppressed immune system is not going to work.
	It's got to be free to sort of do things.
	And if you suppress your...
	Your childhood trauma or your emotions or something, then that's going to suppress your immune system.
	That should be an obviously false analogy that rests on the most superficial similarities between these two systems.
	If you want to be the charitable interpretation of it, which has some validity to it and the kind of field he referenced, I forget the name of it, neuroimmunology, whatever the start of it is.
	There is a connection between, like, if you had chronic depression or, you know, like that you were somebody who was dealing every single day with high stress, that this will have an impact on you because, you know, having strong emotions and dealing with stress hormones and whatnot,
	they're all taking part of the bodies, right?
	It's all connected.
	But it's not all the exact same thing.
	Like, this is the issue with his definitions, expanding, and essentially by his definition, Everything that is happening in the body is one thing.
	It is all the same system because it's all occurring in a biological unit which is connected.
	But there is a reason that we...
	Yes, if your immune system goes down, it's a problem for other parts of your body as well.
	But it is also correct that there are distinctions between different systems in the body.
	They're working...
	Look, I think it's a perennial truth of all our gurus.
	There's always a grain of truth, and they always take it way, way too far and make it out to be the one primary thing that's responsible for everything.
	I mean, there is a sympathetic nervous system, a parasympathetic nervous system.
	The brain and the body is obviously connected, and yes, there is a collection.
	Of diseases, where even psychological things like stress, anxiety, and depression can be a principal risk factor for.
	That's the reasonable version of it.
	But where they take it to cancer and things like that, it's, yeah.
	Yeah, and I will also say, I forgot to mention at the time, but Stephen Bartlett's response...
	Where he responds saying, this changes potentially everything we know about this conversation.
	That is the exact same as Brett Weinstein saying, it's incredible that you could even suggest this.
	If your entire understanding of the relationship between mind and the immune system is being transformed by a conversation on a podcast, you're in trouble.
	You're in trouble.
	You have not got a firm basis.
	And they're saying that always.
	But I think that instills on the people listening that there's something fundamentally important and deep being said, as opposed to undercutting it by saying, for example, well...
	Asking critical questions.
	Asking sceptical questions.
	What about this or whatever?
	Which is not hard.
	Like, the sort of stuff that we're talking about, like, is childhood trauma really the principal risk factor for cancer?
	I mean, you don't have to be an oncologist to feel some healthy skepticism about those claims, yet interviewers like this never do.
	I mean, these are claims on a par of Jordan Peterson saying that hospitals kill more people than they save, and the interviewer goes, wow, amazing that you, you know, you've blown my mind.
	Oh, no, maybe it's not that bad.
	It's not like they would make some connection to lung cancer, for example, you know, something like that and repression of trauma.
	There's a British thoracic surgeon called David Kissin in the 1960s who noticed what I noticed in my practice, that people emotionally repressed are more likely to get lung cancer.
	Most people who get lung cancers are smokers.
	But out of 100 smokers, only about 10 or 15 get lung cancer.
	Which doesn't mean that smoking isn't the major contributor to lung cancer.
	It is.
	But he found that it was those of his patients that were emotionally repressed that were likely to get the lung cancer as a result of the smoking.
	And the more repressed they were, the less smoking they had to do in order to get lung cancer.
	This guy noticed this in the 1960s.
	So emotional repression has huge implications physiologically.
	And emotional repression is one of the impacts of childhood trauma.
	Okay, childhood trauma.
	He's not saying it's the main cause.
	Like, of course, there is a relationship between lung cancer and smoking.
	But, you know, only about 10 or 15 smokers out of 100 get lung cancer.
	Which ones?
	They're all repressed, are they?
	You can't do background checking on every single claim these people make, but did you happen to check that one?
	Chris?
	I didn't check that one.
	I was worn out of fact-checking this, but I'll state now that my confidence on this is going to be low.
	Let's leave that as an exercise for listeners.
	I mean, check it out.
	Maybe he's right and we're wrong.
	Maybe we're being overly sceptical.
	Maybe emotional repression and childhood trauma really is an important determinant of which smokers get lung cancer.
	Tell us the evidence.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, so we might be being unfair about the level of science, scientific rigor that has been applied here.
	Maybe he is just being, you know, appropriately skeptical and he's not just using alternative medicine rhetoric where they, you know, characterize a field of study or an approach to denigrate it.
	The fact is that many more children are being diagnosed and medicated for this condition, particularly in the U.S., but also increasingly here in the U.K. as well, and in China and elsewhere.
	Now, as I said earlier, the fact is, here's the actual reality.
	Nobody's ever found a gene for ADHD.
	Nobody's ever found a gene that says, if you have this gene, you're going to have ADHD.
	No such gene has ever been found.
	No group of genes has ever been found that says if you're going to have this gene, you're going to have this condition.
	Nor ever will be.
	And no such gene or group of genes have ever been found that if you don't have these genes, you will not have the condition.
	Now, there are some diseases that are genetic.
	One runs in my family, muscular dystrophy.
	If you have the gene, you're going to have the disease.
	My mother had it.
	My aunt had it.
	That's a genetic condition.
	And if you have the gene, you'll have the disease.
	Very rare, those kind of diseases.
	Now, there are some genes that the more of them you have, the more likely you are to have any number of mental health diagnoses, ADHD, depression, anxiety, even psychosis, bipolar illness.
	But there's no group of genes or set of genes or gene that themselves determine any one condition.
	As a matter of fact, you can have those same genes and not have any condition whatsoever.
	So something is being passed on, but it's not any kind of condition that's being passed on.
	What's being passed on is sensitivity.
	And the more sensitive you are, the more you're going to feel whatever's going on in the environment.
	I find that annoying, right?
	Because I've heard this rhetoric before.
	There's no specific gene associated with a specific illness.
	Ergo, it's not a real thing, right?
	And one...
	That isn't the way that most genes work.
	Like there's not a single gene that determines your eye color or that kind of thing.
	Even in that case where you have a discrete eye color, right?
	There's a constellation of genetic stuff that applies to it.
	But also it moves from that saying there's no gene.
	So that's a problem because we would obviously expect one single gene, right?
	And then it says, well, there are Genes that are associated, like there's collections of genes associated with a higher risk, but they're also associated with high risk for other things.
	So that means they can't be for this specific one because they increase risk potentially of other things too.
	So that means like that just never happens.
	And then in other cases, the fact that it isn't 100% deterministic, if you have a set of genes and then you absolutely will have a pathological manifestation of an illness that...
	Therefore, there can't be a connection because it's variable, right?
	It's not 100% one way or the other.
	And all of that is setting up these kind of like straw man claims that, yes, that isn't how genes tend to work, that they're not connected to anything else, that they only characterize like 100% yes or 100% no.
	If you have the gene, it's on.
	You have the gene, it's off.
	That does exist.
	That does exist, like he says, but that's rare.
	Usually, things are caused by interactive effects of lots of different genes, and it's hard for us to predict, but we can notice associations, and we have.
	And there's a significant heritability to ADHD.
	All of these gurus have this fraught relationship with the scientific literature, don't they?
	Because on one hand, they do love to quote the little studies.
	Jordan Peterson likes to quote the study about What is it?
	Crabs?
	Lobsters?
	Yeah, lobsters.
	Dr. K quotes these things.
	Gabor Mate is quoting them on occasion to sort of buttress their point of view.
	But at the same time, science is deeply flawed, right?
	They just really haven't quite got it right.
	They've gone down the wrong path.
	It's true of Brett Weinstein and Eric Weinstein, too.
	They sort of need it.
	They want it, but their version of science, which is very speculative and very idiosyncratic, is so much better than the other stuff that's out there.
	Yeah, and just to illustrate that exact point, Matt, here's just an example of that in effect.
	Well, there's more trauma in their lives.
	Yeah, so the children, they do a study with 65,000.
	I forget, you're better than I am.
	It was 65,000.
	I read it three hours ago.
	You made notes, I did.
	Yeah, with 90,000s of kids, yeah.
	So, because I found that to be really, really sort of supportive of what you just said, where, again, I'm saying this from memory, but a study of 65,000 children and their parents, and they found that those parents who had more adverse traumatic events in their lives ended up having a higher chance of having a child that had ADHD.
	So, you know, there was an association in the study, another one of these big correlational studies, and they found...
	Adverse life aspects, association with ADHD.
	And yeah, but it's always just these kind of isolated factoid studies.
	You know, the same way Dr. K is with the doshas.
	Like it's the exact same way to cite the studies, right?
	There was a study done where 20,000 people in India and they found that, yeah, completely validated the claim that, you know, doshik stuff was associated with personality type.
	Did it?
	Yeah, it didn't, did it?
	And like I said before, there's just so many reasons why you might see a correlation there.
	Socioeconomic factors, you know, diet and pregnancy.
	There's probably a thousand reasons why you might see a spurious correlation and it isn't, in fact, the explanation that I'd like to sort of leap to, which is whether it's doshas or whether it's childhood trauma.
	Yeah, confounding variables, Chris.
	Yeah, the last thing I'll talk about, Matt, there's two things, but one of them is to give a little bit of credit to Mate.
	He's not completely dismissive of medication as providing any benefit, right?
	So here's him talking a little bit about that.
	So some people may actually benefit from taking pharmaceutical medications if their situation is dire enough?
	But not as the final answer, but as a way of getting respite that allowed them to go to work on real issues that caused them to be depressed or anxious or tuning out.
	You know, so any and all of these things.
	A lot of people don't even want to open those doors, though, because there's so much pain associated with maybe going back or revisiting an early experience that they just think it's better keep the doors shut.
	Yeah.
	I mean, it's almost...
	Charming.
	This belief that talk therapy, or even just self-directed therapy, is going to cure all of these things when the evidence, when they do randomised controlled trials of psychological,
	psychiatric talk therapies, show remarkably.
	Little effect compared to the placebo condition.
	It's almost embarrassing.
	It is embarrassing, frankly.
	The only version of therapy that seems to show any effect at all is cognitive behavioral therapy, last time I checked.
	So, you know, it's quite an astounding statement, which is, okay, you know, you can use medications and stuff like that.
	That's a stopgap.
	But just wait for the real, give yourself time for the real cure to occur.
	They're not doing the right kind of top therapy, Matt.
	That's right.
	If they were doing this Gabor Mate's top therapy, that would be...
	Yeah, they're not recognizing the true cause.
	And just, again, on the medication point, he had medication himself, but, you know, it was just, like he said, as a stopgap.
	It wasn't really solving the problem.
	When I took medication...
	It made me a much more efficient workaholic.
	It did nothing for my workaholism.
	It just made me much better at it because I could stay up later now and I was more focused.
	I could have even more things done.
	So you've got to deal with these other issues.
	Did you?
	I did.
	Did I deal with them?
	Yes, I have.
	And there's so much more, like dealing with the trauma.
	I'm telling you, if your friend's got ADHD, I can tell you he had to stress early for years, and his parents were stressed.
	So deal with that.
	Deal with what conditions are you creating now in your life that create more stress for you.
	Are you taking care of your body?
	Are you exercising?
	Are you eating well?
	Do you get out there in nature?
	Nature has a sign of harmony to it, which actually calms the mind.
	So are you doing all these things?
	If you're not, all you're doing is medicating a symptom.
	If you are taking the medication specifically to help you focus, but you're working on these other issues, you'll have a much fuller life and you may find you don't need the medication after all.
	It's always the same.
	Yeah, it's the same.
	Get beside some moving bodies of water.
	Negative ions.
	Be even negative ions.
	Go out into nature.
	Do your exercise.
	Find meaning.
	Find me.
	Authentic relationships.
	The thing that annoys me about that all the way is you can summarize that in five sentences.
	You don't need 500 pages.
	You don't need 12 months of interior mental work.
	Go outside.
	Do your exercise.
	Spend time thinking about your life or introspection or whatever.
	Eat well.
	Have...
	Enjoyable, authentic relationship.
	You know, like, it's always the same things.
	And it's actually, when you break it down, very trite and obvious things that people know.
	You got problems in your interpersonal relationships?
	Deal with them.
	It'll make you feel better.
	Or it's harder initially, but maybe it's not that easy.
	You know, also, you want to feel better?
	Like, doing more exercise, eating better?
	That would make you feel better.
	Does no one know that?
	Nobody's worked that out yet.
	Like, no mainstream medical authority is telling you that, right?
	Like, do exercise and eat well.
	This is self-help in a nutshell, isn't it?
	Like, you take the homespun truths that basically people already know and you weave a complex structure around it all that's very bespoke and very, very complicated.
	Complementary alternative medicine is all the same.
	I mean, and it's not, like you said, the basic common sense stuff is not wrong.
	As I've told you, I started jogging recently, semi-regularly.
	My God, I feel better from going for a jog.
	I'm near the ocean, right?
	No debate.
	Negative irons are infusing you.
	It could be the negative irons.
	It could be just getting the blood moving in the morning instead of drinking coffee and slouching in front of my computer.
	Those things are clearly good for you.
	No debate.
	I'm not saying you should go medicate yourself instead of going for a jog.
	You know, the thing I object to is just this monomania, which is he's got his thing.
	It's childhood trauma.
	Explains everything.
	And man, he reaches way too far with that one.
	It's like everything is a nail because he's got a hammer.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, the last thing, Matt, is you heard him mention there that your friend, because this was from them having an exchange where your friend, you know, was into, has got ADHD.
	And he says, I can tell they had stress in the early years.
	They were stressed by, their parents were stressed, right?
	That's like this thing where we see it with Dr. K, we'll see it in the next episode, where no hesitation to diagnose people that they've never met or they've only heard secondhand, you know, a kind self, very confidently.
	One sentence, that's all I need.
	One sentence description from the person in question or even a secondhand one in question, boom, diagnosis.
	Now, that's not how clinicians usually operate.
	Not good ones, anyway.
	He got in trouble for this because he did an interview with Prince Harry after reading his autobiography, like a book promotion interview about his trauma.
	And he diagnosed him, or he says he didn't diagnose him, but it's, you know, it's like one of these things, like he certainly seemed to be diagnosing him with ADD and I can't remember what else, post-traumatic space disorder or whatever, and psychiatrist and whatnot.
	find this irresponsible, right?
	You can't diagnose someone on like, you know, reading their biography and having a sit down podcast interview with them.
	But just the display
	I can give you the example of a Donald Trump who had a really traumatic childhood.
	I mean, his father was, as described by...
	His psychologist's niece, Mary Trump, Trump's father, who is Mary's grandfather, was a psychopath and who really demeaned and harshly treated their children.
	So Trump decides unconsciously that...
	By the way, I'm not talking about his policies here.
	This is not a political debate.
	And in the book I point out that his opponent was also traumatized, Hillary Clinton.
	So this is an ecumenical view of trauma in politics.
	I'm not choosing sides.
	I'm just saying that you can see his trauma in every moment he opens his mouth.
	His grandiosities need to make himself bigger, more powerful, aggressive, and he's as much as said in his autobiography that the world is a horrible place, a dog-eat-dog place, where everybody is after you.
	Everybody wants your wife and your house and your wealth, and this is your friends, never mind your enemies.
	That's the world he lives in.
	Now, that world that he lives in reflects his childhood home.
	He developed that world's you.
	He came to it honestly, you might say, because that's the world that he lives in.
	There you go.
	Trauma, trauma, childhood trauma.
	Yeah, if only he had done a session with Gabor, perhaps the world would be the better place.
	But yeah, so that's it, Matt.
	And I'll leave the last word to Gabor just to give his final overall summary of his approach in a nutshell.
	These are the two messages he wants us to take away from this.
	In the last chapter, I don't lay out a political program.
	I don't see that as my role to do that.
	I have my own political ideas and preferences, but I don't want to impose them on the reader.
	But I do say, first of all, we have to lose our illusions that this normality is actually healthy or natural.
	We have to just get cognizant that what we consider to be normal is actually bad for us.
	Number one.
	Number two, just if we introduced the concept of trauma into healthcare, the average doctor again, strange to say, doesn't hear a single lecture in their medical training about the impact of trauma on physical or mental health,
	which is astonishing.
	Given that it was a British psychologist, Dr. Richard Bentall, who pointed out not that many years ago that the evidence linking what we call mental illness and childhood adversity is about as strong as the evidence linking smoking and lung cancer.
	And the average physician doesn't hear a word about that.
	It's astonishing.
	It would be astonishing if no mental health professional was aware of the link between trauma and adverse life outcomes.
	Hellfire comes.
	Okay, well, I think we've heard enough.
	Do you want to give your final sum up there, Chris?
	What's your take on Gabo Mate?
	Well, I think, you know, your point that he has a monomania is absolutely true.
	And, like, he has expansive definitions, not just of trauma, but of addiction, of the way that he perceives the immune system, and so on.
	But it all...
	It all sounds so familiar to me.
	Modern society is toxic and making us ill.
	Capitalism, colonialism and materialism are spiritually destroying us.
	You are unique and special.
	You're suffering from unprocessed trauma and you need to become actualized and authentic.
	Modern medicine won't help you because it'll only address the symptoms.
	It's only interested in prescribing drugs from the pharmaceutical companies that will only address the symptoms.
	What we need is a holistic approach.
	Which takes account of the mind-body connection.
	And this is being confirmed in emerging new fields of science.
	You know, epigenetics, the mind-gut-biome connection, all of this.
	It's all validating this approach to healthcare.
	And it will revolutionize things.
	And maybe we can redress this, you know, descent into toxic hell that we're headed for.
	Yeah, one podcast at a time.
	Just one podcast at a time.
	Fingers crossed.
	So it's just the same.
	It's like you can regurgitate that across so many of the different gurus and they just have a slightly different prescription for what the key thing is.
	And it's different if it's Gwyneth Paltrow, if it's Dr. K, if it's Gabor Mate.
	But they're fundamentally the same.
	And the very last thing I'll say is none of this says you can't have gained insights from us.
	You can't define the stuff that he's told you.
	How do you process genuine trauma in your life?
	And that you don't find them insightful in some of the things that he writes about, right?
	That's not it.
	But it's just, I find this link to the notion that people's illnesses are very fundamentally tied to their inability to process traumas that they've suffered just to be quite distasteful because it puts the onus that People are getting ill and,
	like, a lot of the times it's just because they haven't self-actualized enough.
	That is the flip side of what he's saying.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, no, I'm bored with all of that.
	The whole episode I was sort of comparing and contrasting him with Jordan Peterson because, like, superficially they're quite different.
	But I think on an underlying level, they are extraordinarily similar.
	And the main way in which they're similar is that they're very appealing to a certain kind of audience, partly because they appeal to some universal virtues that we tend to have or like to think we have in modern Western culture.
	This idea of individualism.
	These ideas are being authentic, that there's something wrong with modern society, things could be better, and self-actualising yourself and connecting with some real you, something beyond the here and now.
	And their flavours are very different because Jordan Peterson speaks to all those points, but he does it through hitting all the tags of sort of conservative...
	You know, taking charge of your own life, you know, making your bed, traditional values, standing up straight, self-discipline, and the stuff that's wrong with modern society is all, you know, postmodernism and cultural Marxism and so on.
	With Gabor Maté, the appeal is to people with a more progressive kind of sentiment, this idea that we're all wounded and we're kind of harmed by the toxic and inequitable society that we live in.
	It's all corrupt and a very romantic, Rousseauian kind of thing, probably because of capitalism and, of course, touching on all of that holistic health stuff and whatever.
	You'll hear Jordan Peterson going on with the sort of Christian overtones.
	You'll hear Agaba Mate going on with the spiritual and Eastern overtones.
	But fundamentally, it's the same thing, right?
	And it's appealing not because it speaks to anything that's actually an accurate description of reality, but rather because it speaks to...
	People's personal values and what they perceive as virtues.
	So I find that all very interesting.
	So I was thinking more about self-help and this sort of clinical guru thing as a cultural phenomena rather than Gabba Mate specifically.
	So yeah, it was an interesting person to spend some time with.
	Yeah.
	I did have a flashback to when I was six months old and I heard a bomb outside and people looked shocked and then I was just angry with them.
	I thought the shock fear scared me.
	I've just been angry ever since.
	So what you're saying is it was colonialism.
	It was colonialism.
	Yeah, it fucked you up.
	Colonialism, and it was, yeah, there was a British flag wafting outside the window with some soldier pointing the gun in at me, and I was, yeah, I cried, Matt, and now a single tear is rolling down my cheek.
	I'm not making light of trauma.
	I'm not making light of trauma.
	Another piece of the puzzle has fallen into place in understanding you, Chris.
	Yeah, yeah, well, it is what it is, but Matt.
	I know you've been here a long time.
	I know your spirit is flagging, you know, your actualized self.
	It's authentic, but it's weak.
	It's weakly authentic.
	My authentic self wants to tell you to go to hell and just walk away and go get a whiskey.
	But I'm saying no, I'm denying my authentic self.
	Yeah, take him out, shoot him.
	I'm responding to these obligations of people like you and society, the listeners, your society.
	It's the obligations that are keeping me here.
	Damn you all.
	Well, speaking of obligations, we should thank patrons.
	That's what I was going to say.
	But I was going to say...
	Oh, God, that was bastard.
	But I also have to say, Matt, just one piece of feedback for this week.
	It's not even a review of reviews.
	It's an exit survey where people cancel the podcast.
	Or cancel the Patreon subscription.
	You can't cancel us.
	We're uncancellable.
	But you can't cancel your subscription.
	That can't be done.
	I like this.
	They're usually, you know, they're just like fairly mundane.
	They're rarely actually people saying particularly mean things.
	But this one just said some other reason.
	Didn't realize it was two people with special needs complaining about listening to things they don't have to listen to.
	Accurate, accurate.
	Yeah, I thought that was pretty good.
	I could also say, if you want actual reviews, here's a positive and a negative.
	One star from Andrew underscore 671.
	Per all round, one out of five.
	Nothing of value to see here from Great Britain.
	On the other hand, Cray91 from Poland.
	A much better country.
	Refreshing.
	Love the insights and the humor.
	Keep it up, fellas.
	That's right.
	That's what we need.
	That's what I need to keep going.
	That's right.
	The slingers and arrows will not stop us.
	Yeah, we'll take them and we'll carry on.
	And lastly, Matt, we're just going to show just a handful of patrons.
	We're tired.
	We're tired today.
	But we still must thank you.
	We must thank you.
	And we will thank.
	Conspiracy Hypothesisers this week.
	Just a collection of them.
	Because they're easy to gather.
	They're like a herd.
	Andrew Arbour.
	Zach.
	Sam Pinkerton.
	Steve Grobski.
	Emily Wolfe.
	John Gunning.
	Aaron Lane.
	Grey Meckling.
	Claudia.
	Johan Peters.
	Eric Edder.
	Bill Betty.
	Jonathan Gagne.
	Art and Illustration.
	Connor Carey.
	Wendy Hylet, maybe, might be a different tier.
	But nonetheless, thank you, Wendy.
	Jenna Zardo, Lyndon Brennan, Joseph Riley, Matt Johnson, Sheila Underwood, and Scott.
	Legends, every one of you.
	Thank you.
	Experts in the field, all dealing with unprocessed trauma.
	Trauma.
	That's what led them to us.
	Something inside them knew that we were the key that would unlock all of that stuff, get it gushing out, and resolve it once and for all.
	Let that little crystal fucker out of you.
	Sorry.
	That's late.
	It's time to act.
	You're tired.
	You're tired.
	Too crass.
	Too crass.
	Let that little crystal butterfly emerge from its chrysalis.
	Okay?
	Do that.
	Look at it go.
	Look at it go.
	I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions, and they've all circulated this list of correct answers.
	I wasn't at this conference.
	This kind of shit makes me think, man.
	It's almost like someone is being paid.
	Like, when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within.
	We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
	We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
	Well, that's it, Matt.
	Another day, another guru decoded.
	We retire.
	I request that you go in faith to love and serve the Lord.
	Please, please, Matt.
	I beg of you.
	I can do that.
	You're a mortal soul.
	Do it.
	Okay, okay.
	Yeah, I'll do that.
	I'm going to have a drink first, but after that, yeah.
	Peace be with you.
	Peace be with you.
	Good night.
	Ciao.
	And also with me.
	Bye bye!

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