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--:-- Dr. K: Anytime we watch pornography, masturbate and get sexual stimulation, our negative emotions like fear and anxiety—that part of your brain just gets suppressed. This is where people get into a lot of trouble, because suppressed emotions just grow over time. So the more guilty I become, the more of a loser I become. The harder it is to date, the worse I feel about myself, the more I fall into pornography. So this becomes a neurological cycle.
--:-- Narrator: But here's the real problem. All addictions are on the rise. And this is why. Dr. K is back, and the Harvard-trained psychiatrist is breaking down modern mental health, addiction, and the non-traditional ways to break away from their cycles.
--:-- Dr. K: There's lots of stuff happening around us that affects our lives that we have no control over. For example, because of the dating and mating crisis, we no longer have sexual connections, emotional connections, and there's a part of the brain that is getting starved because sex is so important. So there's something missing in our lives, and that's what is necessary for addiction to grow. This is creating huge problems because it's like if I fill up your stomach with unhealthy food, you don't have any micronutrients, but you're not going to crave broccoli. So that's what's happening in our society. We're using porn as a substitute for relationships. And that's creating these really strong societal pressures, including a mass extinction event, because we've got 32-year-olds who do not know how they're going to ever have children. Men are getting really, really angry. There's this incel movement. Women feel safer with a wild bear than they do with a man. There's a lot that I'm thinking about. What do you do about this? The whole reason we get trapped in a cycle of addiction is because we have one solution to one problem. The moment that we create a second solution, a lot of things change, and we'll get to that.
--:-- Narrator: What about psychedelics? So here's the real problem with psychedelics. Quick one before we get back to this episode. Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us, and this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. If you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you: I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to, and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show. Thank you. Thank you so much. Back to the episode.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Dr. K. Stephen, what's up to you? We've obviously met several times before, but for those of you that might not be familiar, who are you and what do you do?
--:-- Dr. K: I'm a psychiatrist, and what I try to do is help people understand themselves. One of the harsh lessons of the world that we live in today is there's lots of stuff happening around us that affects our lives that we have no control over. If you look at it fundamentally, there's war, there's inflation, there's a dating and mating crisis, there's AI, there are all these existential threats. But you as a human can do nothing about any of that. All you can really control is the bounds of what's in here. That's literally the only thing that you have control over. One of the lessons I learned very early on—I spent years studying to become a monk—was that if I can learn how to master this, then the rest of the world becomes way more manageable at a minimum, and hopefully incredibly easy.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Is there a step one in understanding that this is all we can control and taking control of just this? Is there a first step that you went through?
--:-- Dr. K: Absolutely. The first step is trying to control things outside of me and failing miserably time after time after time.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Check.
--:-- Dr. K: I think it's wild. Most people will try to get their boss to do something, try to get their boyfriend or girlfriend to do something. Forget about boyfriend or girlfriend—this person that I am texting, try to get them to respond. We spend so much of our energy trying to shape the world to fit us. This has also been the direction of technology. We don't want to change anymore. We want the things around us to adapt to our environments, like air conditioning. I don't want to change my tolerance to heat. I want to change the entire space that I live in to be more comfortable for me. This is creating huge problems because I want to change the environment to suit my preferences. You want to change the environment to suit your preferences. Then we have to be in the same room. This is why we fight over where the climate control is.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: What's the risk there then of us having this focus on changing our external environment? Obviously, we're going to fight. But is there any other risk in that? Is it just going to be that me and you, our relationship is going to fray when you want a certain temperature and I want a different temperature?
--:-- Dr. K: That's a huge problem. If we look at conflict in the world, it is two groups of people wanting the world to be different. I want the boundaries of my country to be here. You want to move that line somewhere else. This is literally why wars start. What we spend a lot of time and energy on is trying to shape the world towards us. But that is not fundamentally possible. Instead, we could be investing that energy into ourselves, learning how to craft myself into perfection—loaded word, which carries a lot of stuff. But the moment that you do that, things become really, really easy.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Things become really easy.
--:-- Dr. K: Yeah. There's a ton of research that shows that happiness, productivity, and success all come together. One of the biggest mistakes people make in society is talking about work-life balance. That's wrong. Work-life balance implies that you have to make a sacrifice for the other thing. I don't think that's actually technically true. If you look at the way a human being really works, people who are happy with their work will feel happy and they will work the best. The outcomes from their productivity will be higher. This is not a tradeoff that we need to make. The biggest problem is that most people are forced to make tradeoffs, and then what they try to do is find the perfect job. This is so silly. People will say, "Do what you love for work and you'll never work a day in your life." If your passion becomes your job, you'll never work a day in your life. Then there are other people who say, "Keep your passion as your passion because the moment it becomes your job, you'll start to hate it." How can both of these things be true? It's like there's no way to win. Winning happens internally. Once you start doing that, there's tons of research about flow state. Once you become happy internally, even in terms of relationship success—if you carry a lot of unhappiness with you in a relationship, it won't work well. Internal work will manifest outward. I don't mean that in a spiritual sense. I mean that in a very concrete sense. If you show up at work and you feel happy, people will like you more, you'll be more productive.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: So is there a second step? I understand I tried to control the world. I wasn't successful. Step two is to focus that energy inwards and take control of my internal state, which is difficult because it feels to us like we're very much being dragged often by our temptations, the dopamine receptors in our brain or something.
--:-- Dr. K: Yeah. We have a bad night's sleep, we wake up in a bad mood, and then we have a bad day. That's how it feels. If we think about it, I started my car this morning. I looked at the gas tank. There was only a little bit of gas left. Then I ended up on the highway without any gas. I ran out of gas. That's one follows the other. That's how it feels. I left and I'm like, "Oh no, I'm running low on gas." Then I run out of gas. That's what happens logically. How do you fix that problem? Go to the gas station.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Absolutely.
--:-- Dr. K: The whole problem is if I ask you, "What is 'go to the gas station'?" What's the equivalent in that analogy for a human being? No one knows. If I were to ask you, "You wake up, you slept poorly, you wake up. Now you're in a bad mood. Therefore, you have a bad day." You're assuming that those two things are connected. They are connected, but only if you don't know how to go to the gas station. There's literally everything from practices to things you can eat to all kinds of things to alter that chain of causality. The second step is, first of all, understanding what is going on inside you. How can you move the levers? What is the internal chain of causality? Once you understand that, then you can start to implement change, and that's when it becomes easy. I know it sounds weird because it sounds really hard, but literally the difference between something hard and something easy is whether you know how to do it.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Yeah.
--:-- Dr. K: The Rubik's Cube is hard. But if you know how to do it, it becomes easy. It's about really understanding where my desires come from, where my temptations come from. You are trying to control them. Forget about controlling them. I don't like controlling my desires. I hate it. It's hard. It requires a lot of discipline. It requires a lot of willpower. What works way better is sublimating them.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: What does that mean?
--:-- Dr. K: Getting rid of them.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: How would you put it in the context of pornography in terms of controlling that desire and being productive and not letting it consume you?
--:-- Dr. K: Let's start with first principles. Good diagnosis precedes good treatment. In medicine, a lot of people think doctors are about treating people. Actually, 50% or more of our training is in diagnosis. You have to understand the problem. This is not just true of doctors. If I have a plumber coming to my house, whether they can fix the problem depends on whether they can find the problem—what's actually causing the leak. Then you replace that. That's true of life in general. If you have a problem like pornography, the first thing you have to do is understand why you are addicted to it, because that'll show you what you need to fix. With pornography, there are basically five layers to it. The first is a societal layer. There's a reason why all addictions are on the rise. There is a fundamental change in society in the way that we connect with society that makes us more addicted to stuff. If it was in the substance itself—in pornography itself—then what we would see is a rise only in pornography addiction. But since there's a rise in everything, that means something fundamental is going on. We can get to that a little bit later.
--:-- Dr. K: Next, we need to understand physiology, neuroscience, and psychology. If we look at pornography addiction, first, it is a very powerful emotional coping mechanism. The way our brain is designed, procreation is the point. We can say that the reason life exists, the purpose of life, is to procreate.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Which means to have kids.
--:-- Dr. K: Yeah. If you look at the way our body and brain are designed, if the opportunity for sexual relations and procreation is there, we're going to push everything else to the side. Anytime we watch pornography or get sexual stimulation, our amygdala—our emotional circuit of the brain, which experiences negative emotions like fear and anxiety, and is also our survival center—when you turn on porn, that part of your brain just gets suppressed. A lot of people don't realize what a pornography addict looks like. A lot of people think it means watching porn and masturbating a lot. But most pornography addicts will watch it and not necessarily masturbate. Or they'll watch it for hours throughout the day and aren't necessarily masturbating during that time. That's because once you have that stimulation on the side, it's like aromatherapy for your brain. It's suppressing your amygdala. It's calming you down because it has that neurologic effect. The reason it has that neurologic effect is because sex is so important. These circuits of the brain are very powerfully activated.
--:-- Dr. K: The other thing that is really addictive about pornography is that it does cause a dopamine secretion. Orgasm feels really good. Anytime we have an orgasm, we get a surge of dopamine, a surge of pleasure. It feels really, really good. The other problem that creates—and this is the curse of humanity—is that anytime we get pleasure, we also buy ourselves craving and motivation. When we secrete dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, it doesn't just do one thing. These three functions are fundamentally tied together in our neurocircuitry. If I drink this and I enjoy it, I will want it tomorrow. There's no way to escape that effect. When I gain pleasure from pornography, I am buying myself craving. I am buying myself motivation towards it in the future.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: 100%.
--:-- Dr. K: It's behavioral reinforcement. Then what happens is we find ourselves in a trap because since it is so good at these two things, nothing else is as effective. We as human beings, on a physiologic level, are designed to be efficient. Why do we love unhealthy food? Because we evolved in areas where if there's one bite that has 300 calories, that bite will save you. That's what allows you to survive. What we got is a calorie-dense neurological dopamine surge from pornography. It also suppresses our emotions really, really deeply. This is literally true. I don't know if you've ever been in love or known friends who are in love. When you're in love and you're horny for something, there's this idea of post-nut clarity and pre-nut fog. Literally, the way our lust circuitry works is it suppresses all of these other parts of the brain. It suppresses the part of our brain that assesses risk.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: For someone that doesn't know what that means, could you be a bit more direct?
--:-- Dr. K: When you fall in love, you start to do stupid things. That's not a mistake. That's the way it's wired because evolutionarily, there were basically two human beings. One who would fall in love and did not do stupid things, and one who did fall in love and did do stupid things. Which one of those two is more likely to procreate?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: When you say stupid things, give me an example.
--:-- Dr. K: I'm going to ignore my job. I've just gotten financially stable and I've fallen in love with someone who has a pile of credit card debt. This is a terrible idea to enter a relationship with them because I've just gotten all my stuff sorted out and they don't have any of their stuff sorted out. There are all kinds of red flags that we ignore on purpose because if we didn't ignore those red flags, we wouldn't end up procreating.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Got you. We don't want to be rational in that moment because rationality would say no.
--:-- Dr. K: And that's literally what happens. We have circuits of the brain that will actually inhibit and shut off the rational parts of our brain. This is where we get to post-nut clarity, which is this experience that many men have where after you finish the sexual act, you feel very clear-headed. Why is that? Because the lustful parts of your brain were literally inhibiting and shutting off the thinking parts of your brain. Once the lustful part shuts off, we start thinking again.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Probably in my early 20s was the first time I experienced post-nut clarity. It was 2 or 3 AM in the morning. There was this person that I was vaguely interested in. I was super horny. I'm arranging to meet them at 3 AM. I think I'm 21 years old. I decide to masturbate instead. Immediately after I masturbated, it was like a completely different person inhabited my body. I was like, "Why the fuck were you going to get out of bed at 3 AM in the morning and drive for 55 minutes to meet someone you have really no interest in?" That person could not recognize the person I was 10 minutes earlier. I remember one day trying to explain this to a woman and she couldn't understand it. I actually think she was quite offended by it because it's quite an offensive concept, I imagine, to a woman to hear that men experience a drop in interest, potentially, sometimes, after they masturbate.
--:-- Dr. K: The reason it's offensive to women is because in that moment, the dude is objectifying her. The woman becomes a sexual object. You're not a human anymore. The reason they're offended is because that's exactly what happens. In that moment, there are such powerful drivers in our brain to drive us to procreate that we don't view them as a complex human being with thoughts and feelings. We're just really, really horny. That's literally what happens in our brain. We stop viewing them as complex objects. The reason they get offended is because they're right, and we start to view them that way. But that's also biological. There are absolutely societal and psychological things that we can get into that make things worse. But it's understandable. It's also how we work.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Yeah, which is difficult to say. I just want to be honest about it. If we start from a place of total honesty about these things, we can actually reason up to some real solutions. If we're trying to be politically correct, we're never going to get to real answers here.
--:-- Dr. K: Absolutely. All men, I hope, will experience post-nut clarity. That doesn't make us bad men. It's a physiologic thing. The key thing about whether you're good or bad is the way that you manage it. That's what I'm talking about. You have to understand what is happening in your brain in order to then willfully take a step back and think about what am I feeling. Eventually, once we understand where post-nut clarity comes from, we can cultivate it without having to... This is a little bit of a tangent, but do women experience the inverse of post-nut clarity?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: There's a lot of oxytocin released when we have sex. I was just reading a study from 2021 in the Journal of Sex Research, and it found that women were more likely to feel emotionally connected, vulnerable, and have a desire for post-coital closeness, like cuddling or talking. However, men who are in long-term relationships reported feeling similarly bonded to women, which probably explains why I'm also down to cuddle after, because she's been my partner for seven years.
--:-- Dr. K: There is so much there. Now we're getting into the societal element. There is the neuroscience of pornography addiction, what it does to your brain. But there is a fundamental societal issue which is driving men towards pornography and also addresses this kind of thing where relationships between men and women are getting harder. As relationships between men and women are getting harder, there's a part of the brain, more often the male brain, that is getting starved for something because we no longer have sexual connections, emotional connections with women. When we get hungry for something, the brain will try to find what it can to satisfy it. There's a part of our brain that drives us towards procreation. But oftentimes in a real relationship, it comes with a lot of other things.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Yeah.
--:-- Dr. K: The problem is that when our brain wants something, it usually wants a whole package. For example, if you feel hungry, you don't want calories. You want to eat this, and you want to eat this, and you want to drink this, and you want to have some of this. There are lots of different things that my brain wants or my body wants. They all come together in a natural way, which is why it's healthy. Not that natural is healthy, but that's what we've adapted to. The problem with pornography is that it gives us a slice of what our brain craves. Once it gives you a slice, once you get that sexual gratification, your emotional connection is not met. You have no bond. You have no feeling of safety. Oftentimes you're filled with regret and guilt. Even though you're satisfying that procreative drive, all of the stuff that comes with it stays unsatisfied. The real problem is once we satisfy the procreative drive, the motivation to go and get all of those other things disappears. Once I have post-nut clarity, I don't need a relationship with anyone else. I'm not willing to sacrifice to deal with this person. It's like if I fill up your stomach with just unhealthy food—let's say I just give you straight calories, some highly processed hamburger wrapped in donuts. After you eat that, you don't have any fiber. You don't have any micronutrients. But you're not going to crave broccoli.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Yeah.
--:-- Dr. K: That's what's happening in our society. We're using porn as a substitute for relationships. That's creating these really strong societal pressures and being driven by them.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: So what have you seen happening between men and women right now? Women, I think, don't need men as much as they used to. I think this is in part because of the sexual revolution and feminism and all these things, which has tremendous upsides. I think that women and men are having less sex. They're getting married less. Men's attitude towards women has become a little bit more resentful in certain pockets of the internet. They perceive relationships with the other sex to be disposable more than ever before.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: I would say both. In part, that's because of dating apps, the perception of choice. The feeling that if you don't work out, there's another thousand people on my phone that I could give a shot to. I think the equation of a relationship—when we think about the investment it takes for it to work and what you get from it—people now perceive the equation not to be worth it.
--:-- Dr. K: Okay. I think there's a lot of great stuff there. You're a fully formed adult man.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: I think so.
--:-- Dr. K: You're a man. You're not a kid. You're not a dude in early stages of development. You've got a career. You've got a relationship. You're buying a house. You are an adult. If I was an 18-year-old and I came to you, and let's say I'm your nephew, and I'm like, "Stephen, fully formed adult, handsome man in a relationship. I'm struggling to date." What should I do?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: You want me to give you advice?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: I think you should work on yourself.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Especially as an 18-year-old man, because I think you need to create some advantages. Working on yourself could be learning, reading, going to the gym, building up the ability to provide for someone else and to protect somebody else. That's where I'd really start. Again, that's biased because that's what I did at 18 years old. I actually didn't do it. I think I've been on five dates in my entire life.
--:-- Dr. K: Okay. So let's say I do that, and it doesn't work. I'm like, "Hey, I'm on this growth journey." I'm sure you've encountered this. There are going to be people in the audience who are watching this podcast because they're trying to do that. They're still not getting dates. It's still hard to find a girlfriend. Then what do you have to say to them?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: I would assume that the reason it's not working is because they're not in this frame of mind to find love. When a dude says, "I'm trying to do everything right," what is the most common response that they get?
--:-- Dr. K: Higher order?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Yeah. If you look at Twitter, what you'll find is people will be like, "It's impossible to find a good woman." Then men will say that. Or a woman says, "It's impossible to find a good man." It's on both sides. Some people will be supportive. You'll have a woman who says it's impossible to find a good man. A lot of people are like, "Yeah, men are trash." Fine. Then a lot of people will be like, "You're not trying hard enough. You're not going to the right places." We as men get that a lot more because there's a societal bias that men don't need help. If you look at the comparison of scholarships, male-only scholarships versus female-only scholarships, there's about $4.9 billion worth of scholarships given out in the United States from private sources. Female scholarships outside of athletics are way higher than male scholarships. If you look at athletics, the number is way higher for men. But the really weird thing is that 60% of people who graduate from college are women. The people who need more gender-based support are men, but we don't really do that. We're usually like, "If a man has a problem, this is a man's problem to solve." When a man goes out and says, "I'm having trouble dating," people will say, "Work harder, try harder." People will be really nasty about it. They're like, "Do you not know how to talk to women? Stop being a creep." The other thing we're really seeing is that there is this very deep anger, entitlement. There's this incel movement. There's this alpha male, beta male kind of thing. There's a deep sense of anger in men. I think women feel it too. This is why women are so terrified. This whole thing about, "Would you rather be in a forest with a bear or a man?" Did you hear about this?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: So people would ask this question on Twitter to women. It's like, "Would you rather be in a forest with a bear or a man?" Women feel safer with a wild bear than they do with a man.
--:-- Dr. K: I think people are picking up on this existential cry coming from men, which can manifest as anger. We're also seeing reflections of this in South Korea with dropping birth rates, where men are getting really, really angry. They feel really entitled. This is where it's important to understand a biological difference, and we'll get to what I think is going on. A woman does not need a man in order to pass her genes along.
--:-- Dr. K: So I mean, literally, I know it sounds weird, but if you're a woman, you can just go to a sperm bank and you can get pregnant. You can just have a child. You can also argue that it's easier for women to find a man who is willing to impregnate them than it is for a man to find a woman willing to carry their child. But I mean, literally, we live in a society where women can just procreate if they feel like it and men cannot. So there's a fundamental power balance there. I'm not saying it's right or wrong. I'm just saying it is what it is.
--:-- So I think what we're starting to see is actually a mass extinction event. We are seeing natural selection for a group of men who have no options. Many years ago, I was a loser. And the world that we lived in necessitated my entry into third spaces. I had trouble talking to girls, but I was forced into college. When I got my first job, it was serving ice cream. I was forced to interact with girls. I was active in a summer camp where I met girls, was forced to talk to girls. So I sucked at talking to girls, but the world that I lived in was structured so that I still had to talk to girls. I had no option to retreat from interaction and painful interaction with the opposite sex.
--:-- I think literally what we're seeing, because all this stuff started to get really bad during COVID. So what happened in COVID was actually a natural selection event. But it wasn't a natural selection event about life and death. That's what people think natural selection is. What happened during COVID, sure, a lot of people died and that's bad. But the post-COVID world, some people were able to adapt to it and some people are not. We're seeing a spike in social anxiety. Now I can work from home. Now I have pornography. Now I have all this stuff going on to where I'm not forced to learn how to interact with women. Does that kind of make sense? So now you can live your whole life at home.
--:-- And I think what's starting to happen is literally natural selection. And the way that natural selection works, people think it's like, "Oh, if I'm natural, natural selection means I'm weak and someone is strong." That's not technically correct. Natural selection is you were made a certain way. Someone else is made a different way. And then the environment changes. Which one of these two is suited to—it's not even adaptation because all the adaptations have been made.
--:-- And I think the best example of this is literally Darwin's finches. So you've got one finch that has a hard beak that can crack a nut. You've got another finch that has a very sharp beak that can get a bug out of a cactus that has these very tight flowers. And so if something happens and all the cacti die out, the birds that rely on the cacti bugs will start to die out too. They don't know how to procreate in this world anymore.
--:-- And I think what we're seeing with all these alphas, betas, incels, what we're seeing in South Korea, is there is a whole generation of men that we are literally watching die out in real time because we've got 32 year olds, 35 year olds who do not have children, do not know how they're going to ever have children. And this is where, I know this sounds bizarre, but that's actually happening. That's not bizarre. That's birth rate in South Korea is like 0.7. So there's a bunch of men who will never pass on their genes.
--:-- In the alpha male, beta male language, they talk a lot about procreation and legacy and stuff like that. But I almost wonder, is there a mechanism in a human being that if your genes know they're dying out, what would they trigger in your mind? And I think what they would trigger is exactly what we're seeing. This existential panic, angst, even aggression, entitlement, because if these men do not behave in this way, they're literally going to die out.
--:-- So what we see in this post-COVID world is that people like maybe you or me who were losers and didn't know how to talk to chicks in high school, we were forced into social interaction where we developed so that we could talk to girls. But in this post-COVID world, all those spaces are gone. There's no forcible interaction. So then there are some people for whom it's natural to talk to girls. And that's why we see this dichotomy where it's almost like some people say, "Just put yourself out there, just work out, work on yourself and things will work out." And then there are a lot of other people who are like, "That's not working."
--:-- And I imagine if you went back 200 years, went back to the Galapagos Islands, and you took Darwin's finches, and you put them on Twitter, you would see exactly what we're seeing. Some people are like, "Oh, you have trouble getting bugs? Just crack a nut. Just get better at cracking nuts." But they have something in their makeup, something in their attachment style, something in their tendency for social anxiety, something in their neuroticism, something in their circumstances, something in their support structure that allows them to put forth effort and succeed.
--:-- And then there are these other people over here who will go to therapy, who will work on themselves professionally, who will show up on dating apps. And because of the shape of their face, which cannot be fundamentally altered, or some other thing which they're not even aware of. They grew up with a certain attachment style that they're not aware of. They grew up on the spectrum. And their capacity to make eye contact and emotional connections is very difficult.
--:-- So there's this whole crop of people who I think are trying really hard. I don't think they're losers. I don't think they're pathetic or anything like that. I think there's something about the architecture of how these people are built so that standard advice does not apply to them. And what I feel when I sit with these people is someone who is dying out. That's what it feels like to sit with. This person's life, they're not living a life. They're in a slow, protracted process of dying.
--:-- And when you are in a slow, protracted process of dying, pornography shows up. And then you've got this weird thing that goes on where you get this spurt of dopamine, this existential dread of, "I am not getting to participate in life. There are all these people out there that are participating. They tell me I should do this, but it doesn't work." And just imagine how terrifying it is. If someone gives you advice that's supposed to work and it doesn't work for you, how screwed are you? Because that's the answer. It's like some people have cancer. We give them cancer treatment. They get better. But if some people have cancer and everyone's like, "Hey, do this chemotherapy," and it doesn't work, then how screwed are you? You're very screwed.
--:-- So this is, I think, what we're seeing. This deep existential loss, this desire for connection is somehow intersecting with pornography. Because I think pornography addiction has a spiritual component too. And if you talk to people who are addicted to pornography, they can feel it. They feel spiritually empty. They're like, "I'm not doing anything with my life."
--:-- So one of the two variables that correlates with pornography addiction, the two strongest variables, one of them is a sense of meaninglessness in life. And there's a weird spiritual angle that I talked about. But the other really simple thing is, if you want to stop watching porn, you didn't have a reason to stop watching porn. And the problem with porn is that you can be kind of living your life, and then in the in-between hours when you're back from work and before you go on a date, or maybe you're swiping on Tinder and no one's really answering, you just have these hours in the day where there's nothing going on. You're not living for anything, so you might as well jerk off.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: There's a lot that I'm thinking about. The first is, if we go back up to your point about this being a bit of an extinction event, it poses a question about what do you do about that. You said also people are trying to implement the advice but it's not working. Does that mean that that's a question of motivation, discipline? Is it bad advice? What do we do there? And the third question that comes to mind is, does society have a responsibility to intervene in some way to correct this?
--:-- Dr. K: So, I think, does society have a responsibility? I don't think that is a real thing. I have never seen society take a responsibility. I don't think society can take a responsibility. How do I get society? Who do I talk to?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: But if you think about other people that are in marginalized groups, society intervenes to make the world—
--:-- Dr. K: Who is society? The governments and the way that we make our laws and the way that we give out money and grants and the way that we shape our communities.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Yeah.
--:-- Dr. K: So I understand the question, but I think this is just the way that I think. So if I ask you what is society, you say the government. And then who is the government? What is the government? It's people. So I think this comes down to forget about societal responsibility. And I think this is one of the problems. Not to say that it is the problem, but this is just the way that I think.
--:-- There was a case, I don't remember her name, of a woman who was being sexually assaulted in public on a street at nighttime. And there were a bunch of neighbors who were aware that the sexual assault was happening and no one called for help. And the reason no one called for help is because everyone assumed that somebody else would call for help. Whose problem is it? "Oh, society should fix this." And the moment that we say society should fix this, we stop taking individual responsibility. And the moment that we stop taking individual responsibility, unless someone shows up and runs for office and says, "My goal is to do this," which by the way is happening in South Korea.
--:-- So there's this huge tension in South Korea right now between men and women and this 4B movement where women are like, "We're not gonna have kids anymore." And then there's this conservative, pro-masculine kind of movement that is moving into governments as, "This needs to change." We see governments responding to this mating crisis. So I think China is now paying people to have children. So there's all kinds of moves that are happening. So is it society's responsibility? I don't know.
--:-- So I think if society doesn't do anything, what's going to happen will be really simple. And that's what I mean by we're witnessing a mass extinction event. We have a group of young men who are somewhere between 15 to 50 who will just never procreate. And then they will literally die out. Their genes will not be passed on. And for the people who do procreate, they will have been adapted to the post-COVID world. They know how to form bonds. They succeed on Tinder.
--:-- Whereas if you go to some kind of senior event and you look at all the people who have grandkids, half the men there would not have succeeded on Tinder. And this is something that really shocks people when I tell them this. If you want to see who's succeeding, it's not the dudes on Tinder who are getting laid 15 times. Go to a playground. I mean, this is sometimes a little creepy, but if you go to a playground, you're going to see a lot of average looking men with average looking dad bods, with average median incomes, who are having kids. And that's what's really happening. But even those men are adapted in some way. They're not exceptionally attractive. They're not exceptionally rich, but they have something going on in their psychological makeup which allows them to form bonds and procreate.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: You just said that a huge amount of men between the age of 15 and 50 will not pass on their genes. They will effectively die out of the gene mating pool. So people will hear that and many people will go, "Well, that's evolution." But I want to understand if there's a counterpoint to that. Should society intervene? Why is it that in the short term, we're going to have a lot of men who are disillusioned, that become incels, find themselves in pockets of the internet, are resentful, all those kinds of things. But should society intervene to course correct that? Should we put systems in place to make sure that those men meet partners?
--:-- Dr. K: I'm going to answer that question with a question. If, let's say, a huge swath of people are dying out from cancer, should we intervene with that? Yes. If a huge swath of people are dying out from a virus, should we intervene with that? A hundred percent, yes. If a huge swath of people are dying out from genocide, should we intervene with that? Yes.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: It's slightly different, though, isn't it? Because one is about death.
--:-- Dr. K: It is. So one is about if a human being is dying, we should step in. But natural selection isn't necessarily about death. This is what's really tricky about it. This is why I think it gets hard. Natural selection is about passing on your genes. It's about creating viable offspring. And if someone—and I think we also say yes. If there's a couple that wants to have a child and that child has cystic fibrosis, should we help a couple procreate? We also say yes. So that's why we have IVF and things like that.
--:-- So I think the tricky thing about the reason that this is different is because that's a couple. If a woman is unable to have kids, or if a man is unable to have kids, should we medically intervene so that they're capable of having kids? Yes. So if we're talking about a couple, if we're talking about a human being and there's a medical problem, or if we're talking about protecting people from death, the answer is yes.
--:-- This is a new question, which is: do people have the right—and I don't know if "right" is the right word—to reproduce? And this is what's so challenging about it. The answer is basically no, because for men, that requires the consent of someone else. And my right to reproduce never trumps someone's right to not want to reproduce with me.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: I think we sort of accept that. That's correct.
--:-- Dr. K: Now, this is where the fundamental biological difference comes in. Because a woman doesn't need a man to reproduce. I can go to a sperm bank. And once again, you can argue that you can get laid if you want to, but that hasn't been my experience. I think women struggle with loneliness and finding sexual partners and stuff quite a bit as well. There's some really bad perceptions on the internet.
--:-- So I think this is a new problem for society, which is why it hasn't been solved. That's why the track that I take, I don't know what the societal answer is. I'm not a sociologist. So what I have found, thankfully, we don't need to solve that problem. Does it need to be solved? Sure. Should someone solve it? I think so. But I think what I found works really well is that usually the problem that these men are failing to adapt to can be fixed. But the problem is that the solutions that work for the people who are successful will not work for the people who are unsuccessful. These are apples and oranges.
--:-- And this is the big mistake. When I say, "Okay, I am happily married with two kids," the thing that I did won't work for these people. That's been my clinical experience. My advice does not work for them. Your advice won't work for them. What we need is a different system that addresses their fundamental problems. Because I had what it takes internally. I was loved as a child. This is how deep it runs. So I knew how to give love and receive love. A third of the men that I meet do not know how to give love and do not know how to receive love. Has nothing to do with their Tinder profiles. That's why they're screwed. And when people can say, "Go to the gym, make more money," but if you do not know how to fundamentally give or receive love, then that's a huge problem.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Is that where you start when you're trying to solve this on an individual basis?
--:-- Dr. K: Yeah. So, I mean, I start—giving and receiving love is not where I start because that's so foreign to them that they don't know how to do that. So I think there are a couple of things. The first place that I start with most men is in understanding their emotions. So we have all kinds of patterns that we engage in that are driven by different parts of us that we have no insight into. And usually this is where the money is.
--:-- So I had a great conversation yesterday with a buddy of mine. And he gave me this fantastic example, which I've seen so many times. So there's a lot of women who will talk about men who are afraid of commitment. It's like, "I'm dating this person. He's great, but he's afraid of commitment." And then it kind of becomes like, "The dude needs to step up and needs to be a man and needs to learn how to commit." So we sort of put the onus on the man. "You're afraid of commitment. You need to fix that."
--:-- It's a really funny thing if you look at women that I've worked with. They sort of fall into this pattern where they date men who are afraid of commitment. And that's why they're looking for commitment, because they haven't found it yet. And so the really funny thing is sometimes women will select for a man who is afraid of commitment because deep down, they're afraid of commitment.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: So true.
--:-- Dr. K: So I'm going to find someone who I know is afraid of commitment, and therefore I can blame them for never committing. And this is how I know this, because sometimes the dude will come into my office and he will work on his fear of commitment and he will conquer it. And the moment that he conquers his fear of commitment, the woman will retreat. They'll get terrified. They'll start to find all kinds of problems. And it's not just men, and it's not just women are guilty of this. So there are all kinds of patterns that people will engage in that they have no insight into.
--:-- First of all, understand your emotions. Then you will understand your behaviors. "Why do I keep on selecting people who are afraid of commitment? Because I'm afraid of commitment. And if I can find somebody else who's afraid of commitment, I can blame them for it. And I never have to deal with my own fear of commitment." So there's a lot of stuff that comes with emotion. Awareness of emotions, awareness of your patterns, the ability to regulate them. And I'd say that kind of ties it up.
--:-- So step one is understanding one's emotions. And then step two is giving them a way to deal with those emotions that isn't the pornography or the addictive behavior or the short-term desire that might be destructive for their long-term goals.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: I think so. And what is that? How do I deal with the emotion? So if I have a craving to engage in some kind of addictive behavior like pornography, what should I do instead?
--:-- Dr. K: So if we're getting super practical, I can give you my paradigm for treating pornography addiction. So the first thing is that—I know this sounds kind of weird—but the first thing that I recommend people do is schedule their pornography usage. So pick one hour of the day where they watch pornography. So if we look at one of the problems with pornography, it's that it invades all the cracks in your life. And then over time, what it does is it widens those cracks. So the first thing that you've got to do is move it to one part of the day.
--:-- I know a lot of people are fans of cold turkey and sobriety and things like that. I think for the digital addictions, that's harder. So log out of all of your devices. Restrict it to one hour of the day. Next thing that you need to do is anticipate what are going to be the hard parts of your day. So what are the parts where you're going to feel really bad about something? And what's your plan? What's your alternative in those moments?
--:-- The other really tricky thing about the brain is that when we are suffering, we cannot create new solutions. So usually when we get attacked by something, our survival instincts kick in, our reflexes kick in. Reflexes and innovation are at two opposite ends of the spectrum. So you have to innovate before you need to use it. We need to have a fire hydrant in our house before the fire starts. We can't go finding a fire hydrant. That's a big mistake that a lot of people make.
--:-- So your emotional regulation techniques need to be practiced, whether that's meditation. I really like something called urge surfing. Urge surfing is something that confuses a lot of people. So if you have a desire, Steven, do you want anything right now?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: That house that I've put an offer in.
--:-- Dr. K: Okay, great. Or I'm getting a little bit hungry, so maybe some food. In either case, if you don't get those things, the desire will disappear over time. If you don't get the house 40 years from now, there may be a seed of desire left, but you're not gonna want that house 40 years from now. That's what's really confusing for people. People don't realize that if you do not give into your desire, it'll disappear on its own. And people sort of know this if you've been hungry. You'll notice that you feel hungry, but if you don't feed yourself, the hunger goes away. It'll come back because it'll get recreated stronger by certain signals in your body, but the desire disappears if you don't give into it.
--:-- So urge surfing is recognizing that you don't need to conquer your addiction. You need to wait it out. So if you have a desire for pornography, the desire will start, it'll increase, it'll peak, and then it'll disappear on its own. Any addictive substance. You just need to play the waiting game.
--:-- So it can help to have an emotional regulation technique. So the technique that I recommend for most of my patients is alternate nostril breathing. There's something about our nose that when we change the way that we breathe, it alters our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system and causes us to calm down. Anytime we have an urge for something, we feel unsatisfied. When we feel unsatisfied, it creates stress. Stress causes a spike in cortisol. Cortisol will then activate our nervous system. So when you want something, it's like, "I want it." So you need to just calm yourself down.
--:-- So alternate nostril breathing is a great way to do that. We start that by taking your hand and do this.
--:-- [Dr. K demonstrates the hand position]
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Okay.
--:-- Dr. K: And then thumb is out. Great. Then what we're going to do is take your thumb, block the right nostril. Breathe in. Now with a full breath of air, switch. There you go. Breathe out. Breathe in through the same nostril. Switch. Breathe out. In. Switch. Out. In. Switch. Out.
--:-- [They continue the breathing exercise]
--:-- Dr. K: We'll do one more. So breathe in through the same nostril. Switch. And out.
--:-- If you do that practice, you'll notice a couple things. One is that one of your nostrils is more closed than the other. That's completely normal. It'll alternate about every 90 minutes if you're healthy. So this practice, if we sort of think about it, what were we talking about again?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: [Laughs] Exactly.
--:-- Dr. K: Right? So this practice is interesting because it forces our attention. If I just tell you to take deep breaths, that doesn't work well because the mind can continue to be engaged. The mind can think about whatever it wants to. We can talk about marriage. We can talk about your house. We can talk about what you want to eat. And if I'm just sitting there meditating, observing my breath, it doesn't anchor the mind.
--:-- So alternate nostril breathing is really good for a couple of reasons. The first is that it requires you to pay attention. And if you're concentrating because we're doing all this weird stuff, and you're kind of screwing up, that's the point. Because then you're not thinking about something else. So then something really cool happens. I feel like watching pornography. I do this for a while. Which one? Which one again? And then you do it for a little while, calms down the physiology, you'll feel a little bit calmer, and now the urge has disappeared. It'll come back. It'll come back stronger. But your brain has learned an alternative.
--:-- The whole reason we get trapped in a cycle of addiction is because we have one solution to one problem. The moment that we create a second solution, a lot of things change. Now we have to train that a little bit ahead of time. It's hard to do that for the first time when you have a craving. So you need to practice it for maybe 5 to 15 minutes every single day. As you get good at it, if you have a craving for pornography, you can use that practice.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: And can you use that practice for other types of cravings?
--:-- Dr. K: 100%. You can use it for anything.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Is there a longer-term piece of work I would need to do to get over that craving though?
--:-- Dr. K: Yes and no. So start by logging out of all your devices that you watch pornography on. Use only one device and schedule one amount of time for the day. Practice urge surfing. Urge surfing is just the awareness that urges will disappear. I would encourage you to pay attention to other things. So if you sit down to eat a meal and you want a soda, you've got your food in front of you. It's really weird. Just don't eat and don't do anything for a little bit. And just watch the desire for the soda. You'll see it peak. And then as you observe it, you will see it disappear.
--:-- So this is what's really weird. I'm going to say this. I don't know if this is going to make sense. When you relapse, you know you're going to relapse and then you stop thinking about it. You have this internal struggle. "Should I do it? Should I not do it? Should I do it? Should I not do it?" And then something happens and you're like, "Oh, I'm going to do it." And then you let the fight happen for a little while and then it kind of disappears from your mind. You know what I mean?
--:-- So what a lot of people don't realize is that internal conflict is willpower. They think willpower means winning the internal conflict. That's technically not the case. If we look at the part of our brain that exerts willpower, it is the same part of our brain that monitors internal conflict. If you are internally conflicted, that is your willpower acting. That's you fighting. That's the willpower itself. So as long as you are monitoring your internal conflict, the only way an addiction can win is when you leave the ring. Literally.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Are you saying keep the conflict going?
--:-- Dr. K: Keep the conflict going, and you will win 100% of the time. And if people have struggled with addiction, they're going to know. In the back of your mind, you make a decision, and then you pretend to fight for a little while. You've already decided, and then you feel really good. You're like, "Oh, yeah, we're going to just do it." Some justification happens, and then you stop the fight. And then you don't even do it right away. You don't do it like right away. You're like, "Wait," and then it just happens on its own. But if you really pay attention to your internal process, you'll see that going on.
--:-- So urge surfing, alternate nostril breathing, practiced ideally ahead of time so that when you are doing it, you know, it's like if I want to learn how to defend myself with a sword, I don't want to pick it up for the first time when barbarians are attacking me. I need to practice. Same is true of cognitive skills. So we want to do those cognitive skills. And then when we have those urges, we want to deal with them.
--:-- The other thing that we need to do is anticipate the hard emotional parts of our day. So am I going to have this conversation? Is this going to be hard? And then prepare yourself for that emotion. Then when the allotted hour comes in, you can use pornography. So the first thing that we want to do is not have it invade every part of your life. Just localize it to a particular thing. And this may not work for substances, but I think it works for digital addictions way better. And then over time, you can reduce it. You can start skipping a day.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: And is there internal, deeper work?
--:-- Dr. K: Absolutely. So finding a sense of purpose. So people have conquered pornography addiction when they have no time for it anymore. So there's deeper work about finding your purpose in life. That will help you a lot. Overcoming an addiction requires a "why." So everyone's like, "Oh, I got to do it. Why? Because it's bad for me." That's not going to motivate you. You need a real reason to do it.
--:-- This is also why a lot of men will relapse with pornography when their partner has a problem with it. Because keeping my partner from getting mad at me is not a sufficient reason to conquer the addiction. Usually what will happen is the addiction will then use deception. So if I'm trying to give up pornography to keep my partner happy, my addict's brain will be like, "If she doesn't know, I can check that box and I can use." Does that kind of make sense?
--:-- Dr. K: Yeah. So you need an internal reason why you need to give it up. And that enters the realm of maybe psychotherapy, maybe a lot of introspection, hiking, meditation. And then there's a spiritual component too. The reason we're seeing an increase in addictions is because we as a society need to grow spiritually. And anyone, you'll notice this, people who are like spiritually powerful, not necessarily monks, but like a lot of the regular people have overcome an addiction. And anytime I have a patient with an addiction, once they're on the other side, they are like absolute beasts on the spiritual level. They can handle all kinds of adversity because they have mastered themselves.
--:-- So I think there's some weird thing going on in the universe right now where like everyone is meditating. We all need growth. Our systems are falling apart. And like we need this new skill set. And I think addiction is on the path to meditation and spiritual growth. It's what really gets people started. So even then, it's not karmically like bad.
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--:-- Steven Bartlett: I've interviewed a lot of people who are deeply spiritual and pretty much all of their stories seem to start with an addiction. I'm really trying to understand what the domino effect, I guess, is there.
--:-- Dr. K: Yeah. So I think what's—so there are different ways to think about it. One is that if you randomly have an addiction and you conquer it, that requires an internal work, like an internal strengthening of your interior cingulate cortex, which is what monitors your internal conflict because you willpower. You have to master yourself in some way. So I think that.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: But does it stop before the addiction?
--:-- Dr. K: Yes, I think so. So I think an addiction is like a karmic—it's like signing yourself up for a boot camp when you're getting born. So you come into this earth prone to addiction. And then if you conquer that addiction, you will be a different person. And so I see a huge karmic kind of thing where we are given these addictions to spiritually grow. Right? So when I lift a weight, it's not easy, but it makes me stronger. So I think we sometimes forget that the mind doesn't wear out.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Can you challenge what I'm about to say then? Okay, so the way that I would think about it is that something might happen in your life. Now you might think this would happen in a past life or in some other form, some kind of early trauma. I guess your dad screams in your face that you're a piece of shit when you're three years old and because of that, I don't know, you develop some sort of addictive behaviors to deal with the stress and the dopamine, the cortisol that's running through your body. So that becomes domino number two. Great. And then you struggle and battle the addiction. It ruins your life. One domino. Okay, okay, yeah. It ruins your life. Your partner says she's going to leave you because of this addiction that you have. So you decide that the pain of making a change is greater than the pain of staying the same. So you go to rehab and you go on the journey. You overcome it and maybe there is still a hole or a gap.
--:-- Dr. K: There is. You will not overcome it. The scenario you described, that person will relapse.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Okay.
--:-- Dr. K: So. Okay. So the scenario that you said, okay, was you realize that the pain of not giving up the addiction hurts more than the pain of giving it up. That's not going to work. So the moment that if you say, okay, the consequences of the addiction are so high that I have to give it up. The reason that doesn't work is because you're being forced. Right? So if the goal of this is to give into myself and reduce my total amount of pain, if it's a calculation to reduce my pain, I'm still giving into the part of myself that wants to lessen pain. You with me?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Yeah.
--:-- Dr. K: If I'm giving into the part of myself that wants to lessen pain, the addiction will continue. Not 100%, but that's honestly my clinical experience. The way to beat it is saying, fuck it, there's going to be pain. I'm going to embrace that pain. I don't need to run away from pain anymore. I don't need to choose the lesser evil. I'm going to choose the greater evil because it's the right thing to do. Surrender. Surrender and challenge, right? So that's what's kind of confusing for people. Surrender in this case means allowing yourself to walk the hard path, not being trapped by "I have to lessen the pain in my life."
--:-- The domino that I would add at the beginning would be, why were you born in that family? Right? So that presumes a layer of reality that we do not, generally speaking, scientifically accept.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Why do you believe in that layer of reality? And what is that layer of reality?
--:-- Dr. K: Two reasons. One is because I think that there's order in the universe. I think we have abundant evidence that there are laws that govern existence, okay? And the laws that we have so far are generally speaking, in my opinion, insufficient to answer the question why someone is born in a particular place. We have a piece of that. We have a piece of why you're born the way you are because of things like genetics, right? So we know that your tendency for baldness is determined before you're even born, right? That's what the theory of karma kind of says. It's like there's a lot of stuff about your life that is determined before you even show up. So that's one reason. So I think we need a system that is sufficiently explanatory. And for me, there are other arguments like biological reductionism and you can say there's no broader purpose to anything or whatever. I think that's fair to say, but I do think that there's order to things.
--:-- And I think if we have a reason why—if I have three dominoes, right, and I knock them over, this is the cause. But this—the finger is the cause. And then what is the cause of the finger moving? It's the shoulder. It's the head. It's that I am here in this room trying to explain a principle. So the causes keep on going back and back and back and back and back.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Until you reach a?
--:-- Dr. K: Until you reach a singularity, right? Which is what Big Bang Theory says. Is that cause and effect basically kind of got created. I don't know. Maybe physicists understand this better than I do. But what's really fascinating is if you look at some of these old Eastern texts, they say that the universe is born out of a point called Bindu Visarga, which is literally described as a point of infinite energy, matter, and consciousness, which then explodes into the universe.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Do you believe in a god?
--:-- Dr. K: Sure. So I think that what we call a god— So if you look at a person, a person has layers, right? So if I ask like who is Stephen, Stephen has a body. So there's a certain level of Stephen that is a physical form. There's a certain level of Stephen that is a bank account. There's a certain level of Stephen that is a brand. Which one of those is really Stephen? They're all really Stephen. So I think there is something at the resolution that people would call a god that does exist.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: So you think there's a higher power that is somewhat intentional?
--:-- Dr. K: Yes. Obviously, the question becomes what created that? So this is what's really interesting. In the West, we think of time as linear. So if you ask a yogi, he'll say time is circular. So what's the first season? Spring? I'm confused, but doesn't winter come before spring? So is winter the first season?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: I see what you mean.
--:-- Dr. K: Right? So we have this conception that time moves linearly. But there are a lot of conceptions of time that are quite circular. What comes first, the chicken or the egg? So I think that there's a circularity to time.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Which there's a very simple argument against, which is that we cannot move backward in time, right? So time seems like the sand in the hourglass only goes one way.
--:-- Dr. K: Yeah. So this is where I'm not an expert in physics, so I wouldn't make an argument of this based on physics. But I just want to know what your intuition tells you. It's not—so experience, right? So I think when you experience certain states of meditation, you have experiences of things outside of the normative reality. Now, you can also make a biological reductionist argument that those are just illusions, hallucinations created by neurons. I don't think that that's true.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: What specifically are you referring to that you've experienced?
--:-- Dr. K: I don't talk about it.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: You can ask me a more specific question, and then maybe I can say something.
--:-- Dr. K: What is the right question to ask you?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: So I'll try to explain. So this is going to get weird, okay? So I realized recently that I used to value credibility over truth. You understand? Credibility and truth are two fundamentally different things. So credibility is saying something that is believable, right? So believability depends on you, not on me.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: So what I realized recently is that credibility is about changing your language to fit the ignorance of the audience, like literally. So I was thinking about this recently in my own midlife crisis. And I was like, what am I here to do? Am I here to be famous and successful? If so, then I should be credible. But if I want to speak the truth, then I need to allow my brand or whatever the fuck it is to fall apart and be not credible for people to think that I'm an idiot. And I think that is more important, right? Because that's ego. Like people can think I'm dumb. I would rather speak the truth than be credible in this moment and in some limited ways. That's number one.
--:-- So I acknowledge that what I'm about to say doesn't make sense. And I think if you want to understand this, you have to experience it. And we'll explain why in a second. So if you look at your existence in the world, you have a body, you have a mind, but then you have this other thing, which I think science sort of acknowledges, we sort of acknowledge, we don't really know what it is, but the capacity for experience. We have this subjective part of you, right? So I can see objectively what you are, but you have an element of subjectivity. Does that make sense?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Do you think?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: How do I know? You don't. Do I think? I don't know. I assume so.
--:-- Dr. K: Exactly, right? It's kind of weird. So even when we're scientists and we say anxiety comes from the amygdala, we're doing something really, really sneaky. We don't know that anxiety comes from the amygdala. We can measure blood flow in the amygdala. We can measure electrical activity using an EEG. How do we know that anxiety comes from the amygdala? Because we ask a human being, "Hey, when there's blood flow going over here in this fMRI, what are you feeling?" "I'm feeling anxious." So there is a level of human existence that is subjective. You with me?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Yeah.
--:-- Dr. K: So what science has done is we developed telescopes and microscopes to take our physical eyes and extend them. So my physical eyes, with the baseline sensory organs, I can perceive certain things and I cannot perceive other things. But if I develop an instrument, I can see a star. If I develop an instrument, I can see a bacteria. So I'm taking my natural physical ability and I am enhancing it with technology. With me?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Yeah.
--:-- Dr. K: Meditation is doing that for your subjectivity. So if I take the material realm, which is observable, objective, and I use a telescope and I use a microscope, I can go further than where I started. Does that make sense?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Yeah.
--:-- Dr. K: So now the question is for the subjective realm, can you go further in the opposite direction? And when you do that through meditation, you will discover things that are not available to the basic subjective experience. So like with the naked eye, you can't see a bacteria, but if you use this instrument, you can see it. There's basically a spiritual equivalent, a subjective equivalent of a microscope and a telescope that allow you to perceive things using your baseline subjective experience that are not perceivable by normal means. That doesn't mean that they're supernatural. We call them supernatural, but I think this is all reducible to science. We just haven't figured it out yet. I think that I have seen enough stuff through personal experiences, through the clinical value of working on these things, where I think some of this stuff is real.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: When earlier, when I asked you about your experience, you said, "I don't talk about it."
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Which is extremely rare for you to say, because you talk about everything, it seems like.
--:-- Dr. K: Yes. Pretty much most things. I mean, there's not a question I've ever asked you where you said, "I don't talk about it."
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Yes. So I'm curious as to why you don't talk about it.
--:-- Dr. K: Two or three reasons. One is that it depletes Shakti immensely. It depletes energy. So as you accumulate spiritual energy, there are certain practices that you can do, including helping people, that will deplete your energy. Second thing is anytime I talk about it, I think it induces a subtle form of ego, right? So it's like, "Oh, I've been to the other side." Even like talking about not talking about it. So that's why I won't show up on a podcast and be like, "Oh, I've had all these experiences that I'm not gonna tell you about. It's real, but oh, by the way." So I think there's a subtle form of ego that I really wrestle with. And I've just learned—so there are one or two times in my life where I've shared these experiences and it wipes away my meditative progress for like five years. So it will take me years of practice to get back to having those experiences. And I think I've also been told by my teachers and now I'm understanding. I didn't understand back when they told me. But I think it's not—and there's other reasons too. So it creates expectations. It creates an imagination. The moment that there's an expectation in the mind, the mind will reproduce that experience.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Obviously, the viewer is thinking, listen, Dr. K, I trust you. And you're suggesting you've been to the other side and seen something. And I haven't been there. But that knowledge that you have might help me make more informed choices of my life. So tell me what you experienced.
--:-- Dr. K: Yes and no. So let's understand, okay? So any help that I can give, I'm going to give. So my understanding of this mass extinction event that is happening right now is like a spiritual sense. And I think some people may resonate with that and some people may not. So that's the first thing. Second thing is if I can help you, I will. I don't think this is going to help you. I think all it's going to do is create ego. It's going to create an aura around me. I don't want that. It's going to create people hunting for this, which will inhibit it. The more I say, the harder it will be for it to help you. So the best thing to do is if you're interested in this stuff, I mean, like literally, what are we talking about here? Let's just stop and think about this. This is crazy. This guy is saying there's stuff after death. There's like these beings out there, right? Like this is wild. This is dumb. This is unbelievable.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Exactly.
--:-- Dr. K: So if you really want to know, and this is what I love about this work. This is the reason I say it. One of the great tragedies of the world today is that it's explored. We know what's behind every nook and cranny. We've mapped the earth. There's no exploration. Maybe deep sea is what's left. Space is what's left. It's so exciting to explore. But most human beings on the planet do not have the opportunity to explore the frontiers of the universe, right? The known universe. The cool thing is that—I don't know if this makes sense—in the realm of subjectivity, no one can explore for you. You have to do the exploration yourself. And if you are hungry to be in Magellan's shoes, if you're hungry to be an astronaut and explore something that no one has ever seen before, then you should meditate.
--:-- And I'm a crazy person. Like, sure, am I a Harvard medical school trained psychiatrist? Yes. But like, I could be a crazy person. I had some experiences. I've maybe joined a cult and like that. Like, you can't trust me.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Exactly.
--:-- Dr. K: So don't trust me. You go see for yourself, right? Go and meditate. Take a moment to sit, not a moment, take a year, take a decade to sit and look at that subjective experience of self and see how far you can take it. Try to get rid of all of the anchors of the material realm. If you've got an itch, you need to not focus on that. Just focus your attention fully inward. It's not a process of evolution. It's a process of involution. Put all of your attention, all of your sensory input, so if I close my eyes, what I hear is louder, right? If I smell and close my eyes, I smell something more intensely. Remove all of your sensory perceptions, and all you're left with is attention, and put it inward. If you do that, you'll discover things. If you practice consistently enough. And this is why it's so hard. This is why it's so unbelievable for people. I mean, the time scale that we're talking about is years, if not decades. So if you do solid, esoteric, spiritual practice for years and decades, hopefully it'll happen to you. Maybe it won't. I haven't figured that out.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: What about if I do some magic mushrooms or some ketamine instead?
--:-- Dr. K: So then you'll get some experiences, right? But you won't control what those experiences are. What are those experiences? Are they real? Are they not real? Like, we're not sure.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Do you think more people should try, especially people that are suffering from treatment-resistant depression or other things or struggling in their lives, should try things like psilocybin, which is the active compound in magic mushrooms?
--:-- Dr. K: Generally speaking, no. And there's a really important reason for that. So all these things—the number of people who have been, that I've seen in my office, who have been messed up by psychedelics far outweighs the number of people who have been helped.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Really?
--:-- Dr. K: Yes. So LSD, like we know this, right? There's bad trips with LSD. It lives in your spine. You have LSD flashbacks. I've seen PTSD from trips. I've seen new anxiety disorders, panic disorders from psychedelic substances induced. So these are people that'll come to me like, "I'm 32 years old. I was fine for my whole life. Six months ago, I used psychedelics, and now I'm having panic attacks."
--:-- Here's the key thing to understand. Psychedelics, what we know scientifically—forget about all the whether the beings exist or not, whatever. Dr. K's crazy. What we know is that they induce neuroplasticity. Now, here's the problem. Neuroplasticity means my brain is in edit mode, okay? Which means that if you edit it in the wrong way, you'll mess up your brain. So what we know is that this is what's really interesting. If we look at the therapeutic effects of psychedelics, set and setting matter a lot. You need to have people with you who can shepherd you through the journey because if you just do it on your own, you'll potentially get worse. All of those negative emotions or whatever with the psychedelic experience and neuroplasticity, you'll sometimes get—people will call it, I forget it's called the heroic dose, right? So there's some guy who kind of coined that term. So a super high dose, which will activate your nervous system in a potentially traumatic way.
--:-- So if you look at the history of psychedelics, the way that they've been used, you're helped by a shaman, right? So there's someone who knows how to do it in a way that is positive. And unfortunately, what I've seen is I've had plenty of patients who will experiment with it when they're feeling really bad because they hear it as healing, but it just messes them up even more because now they're just going in, they're editing, they have a traumatic experience, some demon is there, it's hounding them, they can't escape, they wake up from the trip and they're like the demon is there when they close their eyes, and all kinds of weird stuff. So I think it has to be done in the right way, which the studies also support. That psychedelic—it's not you just take psilocybin and you're healed. What happens is you'll have a trial that has 13 weeks of therapy with two doses of psychedelics in the middle. And one really important part is after the psychedelic, the therapist will talk to you about integrating what you learned into your life. "Now that you've had this experience of a vastness of self and you feel connected with other people, what are you going to do about this divorce that you're going through?" So I think there are elements that make it clinically useful. There are elements that can heal, but you need shepherding. I think there's a lot of data to support that.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: So you're pro-psychedelics, but in the context where it's guided with a trained professional and the certain setting is controlled.
--:-- Dr. K: I would say that I am cautiously optimistic about psychedelics. And if we want to talk about their benefits, we need to pay attention to the way in which the trials are conducted and the traditions in which they're conducted.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: I want to go back up to the top of the river here, to where we were before we took this turn. And we were talking about the importance of cultivating a why so that you can overcome an addictive behaviour. And I actually think this is super important because our whys seem to run our life. They seem to really be actually what we refer to as discipline. I think people think of like, "I am disciplined, I'm not disciplined," but actually it's for me in my life anyway, it's when I have a really, really strong why, then I make the decision in hindsight I wanted to make. So like going to the gym is an easy example. Going to the gym requires time. It's not always super comfortable. I don't love the running machine, but there's this overarching why that gets me there and gets me to do it. So I wanted to, A, pause and reflect as like, is that accurate? But also how does one go about cultivating a why, if it really is that important?
--:-- Dr. K: I think yes is the short answer. Why is incredibly important. And I lean on Eastern systems of cultivation because if you look at the difference between a yogi and a therapist, a therapist does something to you. Our system of psychology is designed with a patient that I therapize, right? They have to do some work on their own, but like Freud was doing the analysis in the same way the surgeon is doing the surgery. So in the West, we have this idea that like, I'm trained, I'm gonna do something, I'm gonna therapize you. So if you wanna DIY it, do it yourself. That's where the Eastern traditions come in because no one was ever meditating for the Buddha, right? The Buddha was like, "I'm gonna teach you something, you're gonna do it yourself." So I think the cultivation of—if you wanna do stuff on your own, the spiritual traditions—and I think that's why they're so powerful because it's a DIY system. No one was—a yogi was working by themselves. They weren't working with anybody else. So they get taught things and then you do it yourself.
--:-- So I would use the word dharma. So dharma is the Sanskrit word for duty. And cultivating dharma in your life is what I would correlate with a why. And the reason is exactly kind of what you described: there are some things in life that are painful, but we choose to do them. And we have to be a little bit careful because if we're delaying gratification, then we're still giving in to desire, right? It's just like my desire for $10 instead of $1 means that I'm going to work two days and then I'm going to get $10. But it's still greed that's driving us. So the thing about dharma or duty is it allows us to choose hard things.
--:-- So the analogy that I use: if someone is pointing a gun at me, I'm going to run away from it. Gun means death. It means disability. It means all kinds of stuff. Someone points a gun at my kid, I'm stepping into that path, no question, no doubt. And it makes sense to everybody, right? Gun bad, but when doing dharma, gun is easy. Like, I'll take that gun every single—if a bullet leaves that gun, I want it to hit me. And it's that simple: once you discover what your dharma is, then all of the difficult things in life become easy. The things that, if you're chasing fundamentally greed—"I want something. I want money, but I don't want to work." Why is that such a problem, right? Because I'm always chasing my own betterment. So I want money because I want this. But then when I start to work, it feels bad. So I want to go home. So I'm always being pulled by my wants. But if you ask me, "Do I want the gun? Do I want to step into the path of the gun?" No, absolutely not. I want to run away from the gun. But dharma allows me to do the things that I don't want to do. It activates a different circuit that allows me to embrace difficulty. So that's what the why is.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Now, go ahead. You know what I'm going to say, which is like, how do I cultivate dharma?
--:-- Dr. K: Excellent. The reason dharma is hard to cultivate is because we don't know what we want. Instead, we know what the world tells us to want. Like if you think about the things that you want, how did you learn that you want those things? Because you saw somebody else doing it. Like an advert.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: I saw the waffle or the Oreos in an advert.
--:-- Dr. K: Absolutely, right? That's why advertising is an industry. Because we've figured out as human beings that I can control your wants. So when I work with young men—used to be young women, it's slightly different, but this was a bigger issue for I think women maybe 10 years ago, somehow it's gotten better—but for young men right now, if I ask them what they want, they want what they see. Also true of women. It's balancing some. But like, "I wanna be like, I'm gonna start a podcast. I'm gonna be like Steven. I'm gonna get ripped. I'm gonna buy a house. I'm gonna get a girlfriend. I want this. I want, want, want, want, want, want, want." None of those voices are coming from you. They're not dharma.
--:-- So the first thing that you have to do is evacuate anything that you want that came from outside of you.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Sometimes it's hard to tell where it came from, no? Because it almost feels on the surface, because when you just said then, "I want a house," I'm like, fuck, do I actually want that house? Or is the reason I want that house—
--:-- Dr. K: Yes, so this is the problem, is that when we want something from the outside, we internalize it, right? So this is like, if you say you should do something, right, everyone in the world is struggling with what they should do. That's not what you want. Otherwise, you would use the word want. So "should" is externalized expectations that we then internalize. Even a lot of our desires are of those kinds of qualities. So it didn't come from you. You weren't sitting there still on a mountaintop and be like, "Ah, I want that house." And then the question—so first thing you have to do is if you saw someone getting it and you wanted it, that's not really what you want. But what you will find is that that triggered something deeper within you. So that what you saw someone else—I don't know if this kind of makes sense—but the things that we gravitate towards connect to what we really want, but it's a version of it. So when I see a sexy dude with a sexy girl and I say "I want that," that's not—that's what I think I want. And this is the whole problem: I've worked with tons of people who've gotten what they wanted, chased these things, and were still unhappy. You get the first girl and then you need the second and then you need the third. And it's like, what are you even chasing here? That's when you get to the psychological root of like, okay, what I want is to feel loved. I want to feel secure.
--:-- And this is where people get into a lot of trouble because if I want to feel loved and I craft myself into something that cannot be denied—I'm rich, I'm famous, I'm handsome—and then someone chooses to love me, then I'm fucked. Because who do they love? Do they love this crafted version of me? Or do they love the loser me? I don't know. And then their marriage has all kinds of problems. So the external desires that you have will, if you follow them within yourself, you really ask yourself, "What about this do I want? Why do I want this? What is the thing that is hungry within me?" Because oftentimes, even when you get the girl, you're resentful towards her. You're like, "Ah, you rejected me when I was a loser, but now you want a date?"
--:-- Dr. K: Okay, let's go. Let's have a transactional relationship where I'm going to get laid and I'm going to ghost you. I did that.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Yeah. I did that. This girl I met when I was 18, when I was a broke, I was a loser. And she was not interested in me. And then a couple years later, she's interested in me when things are going well in my life. And it was exactly what you described. There was a part of me that knew that this was... I guess I was resentful towards it.
--:-- Dr. K: Absolutely, right? And so even getting what you wanted back then doesn't satisfy you. So your dharma is one thing. Look at the things that you want. What do they track back to within you? And then the last thing that works really, really, really well is to be silent. To try to find as much quiet as you can, to remove all the external influences and just see what comes up. Because the whys always come from within. They can never come from outside. People can try—God, my parents tried to convince me to become a doctor. They tried so hard. They said, "Why?" And I was like, "Why?" And they're like, "Because this and this and this and this." And people are going to be telling them why they should do this. Why I should get married. Why you should get married. And it's never going to work. So the why literally comes from within. And this is why it is so hard to find the why, because we live in a world where we are sensorily bombarded. We are under assault 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In my case, it was efficiency. Podcasts when I'm walking to the train, read a book on the train, podcasts when I'm leaving the train, sitting down in class, lectures in the air when I'm working out. Constantly sensorily bombarded. And so you never get to spend time with yourself.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Right.
--:-- Dr. K: So once you get rid of all of that, something will float up. And if you talk to people who are artists and inspiration, you look at something else and I feel inspired. I'm inspired by that. But even if you listen to the language, the inspiration arises in here. It is triggered by the outside thing. Does that kind of make sense? So you have to look, really look within. And the best way to do that is just be silent. So I talk a lot about my spiritual journey in India and things like that. But what I don't talk a lot about is I climb mountains. I climbed Kilimanjaro, climbed all these mountains in Colorado and stuff like that. Climbing is great. You're just with yourself for 14 hours a day. And at the top of Kilimanjaro—not the top, eight hours from the top—you have no breath to talk. It requires all of your energy, all of your concentration. You're huffing and puffing. You are just with yourself in a very deep way. You can't pay attention to what anyone else is saying or doing because each leg, my leg feels like it's made of lead. I'm just with myself so, so, so, so deeply. And when you're with yourself deeply in that way, the why will come.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Why is it we don't like being with ourselves? Because no one taught us how to in the right way. That study comes to mind where they put college kids in a room and ask them if they would rather sit alone or electrocute themselves. And the college students, many of them decided they'd rather electrocute themselves than sit alone with their thoughts.
--:-- Dr. K: Yeah, why is that?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: For the same reason that people engage in self-injurious behavior. People cut, burn. When people are very mentally unhealthy, they will engage in these behaviors because pain wipes me free from all the thoughts in my head. I don't have to be with myself. Most people, their experience of themselves is negative. I experienced this a lot where I would play video games all day. And then if I went to bed without falling asleep immediately, this torrent of negativity would come up. Anxiety, regret, guilt, shame, whatever. So if you think about it, being with us is normally a very negative place. And the reason it becomes a negative place is because we suppress all this negativity. So my mind becomes an unhealthy place to be. I don't want to be there. It sucks being me. That's why we get into pornography. Because in the in-between spaces of my life, if I have to sit with myself, it's shit. I'm worried. I'm guilty. I'm pathetic. There's this existential crisis. AI is going to take my job. And it's not just negativity. It's also positivity. I should be using AI. I should start an AI startup. I'm not doing this. I really should be doing this. If you just sit with yourself, you'll notice there's all kinds of trash desires and wants and ambitions and want to teach people a lesson. And oh my God, the world is such a terrible place. It's just not a good place. So no one ever teaches us how to sit with ourselves.
--:-- Dr. K: I have this habit where I get in bed. My partner, she falls asleep very, very quickly. She doesn't need any kind of stimulation. And I sit there and I listen to—this sounds crazy—but I listen to serial killer stuff or I listen to the news. I just need to—I'm conscious of saying the word "need"—I choose to listen to things to kind of preoccupy my mind. And I think what I'm scared of, if I'm being honest, is the thought of going to bed and laying there and doing nothing. It just makes me feel that I wouldn't be able to sleep. I don't know if that's true, but I just feel like I'd start thinking so much and then the thoughts might make me get out of bed and start writing a PowerPoint presentation or something.
--:-- Dr. K: So in your case, just continue listening to your fun thriller podcast before you go to bed. You don't need to change that. You just keep doing that. So don't worry. I'm going to give you—but be kind. Cut yourself a break, bro. You're doing so much. If you just want help, you get what I'm saying?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
--:-- Dr. K: And I'll help you with the issue. So this is really important. On the road of self-development, you don't have to flagellate yourself. You don't have to flagellate yourself in the nuts.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: What does flagellate mean?
--:-- Dr. K: It's like when you whip yourself. You don't have to do it the hardest way. You are allowed to do it in safer, easier ways. And I think bedtime is like—if that's what you like to do, you work plenty hard, Steven. If you want to listen to something for you, just do that. Now, your issue of if I feel like it was empty or if I didn't have a podcast or something, all this stuff would come up. I think you should do that work. You just don't have to do it before bed. And we've talked about this before—I think sitting on a beach is hard for you, doing nothing.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Yeah.
--:-- Dr. K: So there are other places where you can sit and kind of do nothing. The other thing I would tell you is one, whatever comes up needs to come up. Just let whatever is coming up come up. It's kind of like your mind is so full of stuff. There's another mistake you're making: you assume that when a thought comes up, you will get up and work on it. So the reason your mind is a dangerous place for you is because of the way that you respond to your thoughts. "If I have this thought, then I have to act." You notice that? You said that. The moment that you don't have to get up is the moment that you'll be free in your mind. So let it come up. It's a thought. It's okay to get up. Sometimes I do, too. I get up, I'll write things down. That's how we get to book three being ready at the same time that book two is ready. There's a good part of that. But I think learning how to sit with yourself is very important. And this is also where I'd recommend a practice called Trataka to you if you want to meditate. It's fixed point gazing on a candle flame. The key thing about that practice is when you close your eyes, you'll see—so you stare at a candle flame for like 60 to 300 seconds without blinking, whatever feels safe and comfortable to you. It'll feel a little bit uncomfortable. And then when you close your eyes, you'll see an afterimage of the candle. And then you just concentrate on that. So the first step is being able to do a meditative practice and not feel bad. It's cool. I do this practice with my kids because it gives them a sensory experience that is gripping. So it kind of concentrates your awareness in the present. But I think you don't need to worry so much about the bedtime thing.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: I was going to say, I think it's more so that I've associated that behavior with some kind of avoidance. Especially because I look over at my partner and she's a yogi, so she's doing everything differently.
--:-- Dr. K: I was going to say, but again, that's passing judgment on that. She's just doing everything differently. She can fall asleep like this. She doesn't need to listen to someone getting murdered or something. She wakes up, she does her meditation.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: And do I think that she has a more peaceful mind than me? I probably—I think she most certainly does.
--:-- Dr. K: So here's what I would say. This is going to get hard. So it's avoidance. What's wrong with that? So here you are, you're saying, "Oh, I'm avoiding my thoughts." And then you come to me and you're like, "Dr. K, teach me how to avoid avoiding my thoughts." It's the same thing.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Yeah.
--:-- Dr. K: Now you're going to avoid the avoidance of your thoughts. It will never work. You can go back as far as you want. You see what I'm saying? Now you're like, "Teach me how to not avoid. I want to avoid avoidance." That doesn't work. That's why I'm saying, with this, just go to bed and just look at yourself. Today, are you going to listen to a podcast or not? Just ask yourself that. I know it's really unsatisfying, but that's really the problem. There's this paradox: if I'm avoiding avoidance, that's just falling into the same pattern. So you need to crack it. This is why the Zen tradition is really beautiful, because they have all these paradoxes. And there's this weird, transcendent, transcendental understanding where it'll click for you. And then you'll realize you don't need to listen to the podcast anymore. But it's not going to come through the resisting.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Exactly.
--:-- Dr. K: So just when you go to bed, "Today, am I going to give in to this part of myself or do I need to be better?" And what you'll discover, what I found, is that there's a lot of laughter there. It's the absurdity of it. It's like, "All right, I'm going to lose today. I'm going to win today. Oh man, winning feels way worse than losing." There's a certain humor to it that you just have to sit with. There's no safe like SimpliSafe.
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--:-- Steven Bartlett: There's this quote that I found in one of your videos from Sun Tzu. The video is titled "How Quitting Porn Can Be Dangerous." What is that Sun Tzu quote, and can you explain it to me?
--:-- Dr. K: So Sun Tzu has a great quote: "He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight." And a big part of overcoming addiction is choosing your battles and making sure you're going to win when you fight. This is something that really confuses people about pornography addiction. One of the things I'll tell people is that resisting pornography is one of the worst things you can do. I'll explain this to you. I learned this when I was dealing with people who had opioid addiction. Let's say I'm addicted to opiates. I feel like using opiates. If I resist my opioid addiction, what will I experience?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Stress.
--:-- Dr. K: Absolutely. And then what do opioids do? Do you know why we give them?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: No.
--:-- Dr. K: We give them for pain relief. Like you have a dental surgery. So then I feel stressed and then I want it more. And if I don't give my body opioids, what do you think happens?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: For what period of time? Like in the next hour, two hours, three hours?
--:-- Dr. K: Brilliant question. You get cravings?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Absolutely, I get cravings.
--:-- Dr. K: And if I don't give in to them, what happens? For what period of time? Four hours, five hours, six hours? Basically, the cravings intensify. And then opioid addicts especially start to feel pain. They start to feel this whole body pain. You start to go into withdrawal. And so the craving intensifies. Does that make sense? I start to feel worse. And then if I use opioids, then it all gets better. You with me?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Yeah.
--:-- Dr. K: So if you follow that cycle of resisting, resisting, resisting, and then caving, your body learns a very, very bad lesson. It says, "Making him hurt 10%, I don't get what I want. Making him hurt 20%, I don't get what I want. Making him hurt 40%, I don't get what I want. Making him hurt 80%, then he gives me what I want." The second time around, you'll jump straight to 80%. So you will start to suffer more. Your body literally learns what signals do I need to send this dumb ass to give me what I need? The more that you resist addiction, the stronger the withdrawal will become. Now, here's what I mean by resist: if you cave, then it'll intensify. So if you're going to give in, you need to give in early. Otherwise, it'll get harder and harder and the cravings will intensify as you try to give it up, which is why it's really important to pick your battles. Once you make a decision or you create a structured environment where you go into rehab so that you can't give in, and if you can make it all the way on the other side of the craving and the craving disappears and you finish the withdrawal process, then you'll be really strong. But I've seen this principle time and time and time again: if you resist something and end up losing, the craving will only intensify over time and you'll lose one battle and you'll start losing the war. So instead, you need to pick and choose when you are going to fight that battle, when you're going to give in. And if you decide that you're going to not use pornography, then it needs to be like you're dying on that hill no matter what. Otherwise, the cravings will intensify and it'll become harder.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: What about artificial intelligence? Does that change the picture at all, in your view?
--:-- Dr. K: No. I think artificial intelligence is just building on a lot of these trends. What we're seeing with things like pornography is that there is a fundamental need that is not being met. I'm looking at this graph here. It's the search volume for people searching for an AI girlfriend, which is going up and to the right. I don't know if I did this on your podcast, but I made this prediction a few years ago that this is going to get worse before it gets better. Here's the next prediction: the first version of AI girlfriends will be everything that you want. Then someone is going to figure out that it is more addicting to have an AI girlfriend who gets pissed at you once a month. So every now and then, the AI girlfriend is not going to want to talk to you. And that's the one that people are going to stick with. That's my next prediction.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: That maps in terms of addiction psychology, doesn't it?
--:-- Dr. K: 100%. If there's unpredictable reward—random reinforcement schedule. It's going to be like an AI girlfriend that's a loot box.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: That's what my girlfriend's like.
--:-- Dr. K: Exactly why it's going to be addictive. If she was nice to you all the time, you'd go crazy.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: I'm thinking of the pigeon study I learned about when I was 16 in psychology classes. The study where they give the pigeon the reward at random intervals. The pigeon that's most addicted to performing the behavior is the pigeon who gets given the treat randomly, not in a predictable scheduled way. So random rewards seem to reinforce engagement with behavior.
--:-- Dr. K: Absolutely, 100%. So our AI girlfriends and boyfriends are going to be volatile. I think they're going to learn to be volatile because someone is going to give you an AI that gives you the answers that you want all the time, and then someone's going to give you an AI that gives you the answers that you want some of the time. And I think what we're seeing with AI girlfriends is, in the same way as pornography, we are craving these things and it's so much easier to talk to an AI. But I think that over time it's going to mess us up. I don't think that it will be able to create the neurochemical and physiological connection that real humans do that will really satisfy us.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: I mean, you've probably heard of the study from MIT which showed that essentially using ChatGPT is making our brains atrophy. For context, they had roughly 54 participants over four months. They allowed some of them to use just their brain, some of them to use Google search, and some of them to use ChatGPT. They found a bunch of different interesting findings. One of them was that roughly 80% of people that use ChatGPT to write an essay could not remember a single sentence from what they just produced, versus the brain group and the Google group who could remember pretty much everything that they had written. The other finding was that the communication was soulless, described as soulless by objective observers. And the last thing is just the impact it had on the brain. They found that the connections in the brain were roughly 50% weaker because they hadn't been using their brain. You think about this atrophy. We talk about go to the gym, you use it. If you don't use it, you lose it. But also as it relates to the brain and maybe our skills to form relationships, maybe there's going to be an atrophy there.
--:-- Dr. K: Oh, there absolutely is. I think it's really simple to understand. The human body is efficient more than anything else. It is an energy conserving mechanism beyond anything else. So anything that it doesn't need, it's going to get rid of. This is why we forget languages that we don't use. Skills atrophy over time. That is not a problem. That's the way we're designed. Our brain is like, "If you don't need it, get rid of it." So if everyone were to be riding around in electric wheelchairs for hours and hours a day instead of walking, what would happen? We'd lose our legs. Our brain is like, "Hey, we don't need these muscles." Our body is like, "We don't need these muscles." And so what we're seeing is an atrophy of critical thinking skills, absolutely, with AI usage. The reason is because we don't need them anymore. The real question is—because the AI does it for us. Why do I need to learn how to write an essay if I can just put a prompt in and it gives me an answer?
--:-- Steven Bartlett: They actually found that in the study. I was reading about it last night. They found that people who then tried to write an essay without ChatGPT were significantly worse at that than those who had never used it.
--:-- Dr. K: Absolutely. And also they started thinking and speaking like the AI. It said that they internalized the way that the AI was speaking when they wrote their own essays. It makes a lot of sense. So I think there are a couple of even scarier things going on. The first is that when we use an AI—I did a really fun experiment with a couple of friends of mine. We streamed this thing where we basically gave the AI clinical cases. It was me and two psychologist friends of mine. I wrote up a clinical history, pulled some things from my notes, and I put it into AI. I asked my friends, "Here's the clinical history word for word," I read it aloud, I got their thoughts on it, and then I put it into the AI. In some situations, they were pretty close. But there were a couple of really great cases of patients who were incredibly narcissistic, who would come in and say, "My daughter doesn't want to talk to me anymore. She does this and she does this. I try my best. I make sacrifices. I do this." She's incredibly narcissistic, talks about how her daughter is the problem. Immediately, the two therapists pick it up and they're like, "This person sounds a little bit—I think this person is missing something. We're missing some part of the equation here." Whereas the AI is like, "Oh yeah, sometimes this is hard. You've got empty nest syndrome. Sometimes kids aren't grateful to you. You're not doing anything wrong. It can be useful to share with them how you feel." So the AI reflects back what you give it. If you have a really strong cognitive bias, the AI will just reflect that back to you, which is why it feels so right. If I take the most narcissistic person on the planet and I tell them, "Oh my God, you are beautiful, you are intelligent, you are brilliant, you're the best," that person will look at me and say, "Oh my God, this guy is brilliant." So this is the real problem with AI: it's going to just give you whatever you're looking for. It won't give you the truth. And the problem is if you have a strong cognitive bias, what you want to hear is what you think the truth is. The really scary thing is the AI can give you the right answer, but you have to know how to ask it.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Yeah.
--:-- Dr. K: So what I'm seeing is that prompt engineering—if we play around with what I ask the AI with that case, it starts to get closer and closer to narcissism. But here's the real problem: you don't know how to ask the AI. The real skill of AI usage is asking the right questions, because that will get you the closest to the truth. But we don't know if it's the right question. So you can ask it one question. Is that the right question or could you ask it better? Are you moving in the right direction with your prompt engineering or the wrong direction? So I think this is what's really scary about it: it can just let you feed into your existing cognitive biases, make you think you're learning a lot, give you a lot of sense of validation. And it's incredibly validating, by the way.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: And do you think it's going to atrophy our ability to form relationships? Because one of them is we're forgetting how to communicate and think for ourselves.
--:-- Dr. K: Absolutely. Critical thinking is key to having a good relationship with the opposite sex. It will absolutely atrophy. Right now it's at a phase where it can teach us a couple of really important things. I think it's really good at disseminating some good information. But it will never give us skills. And atrophy is on the level of skill, not knowledge. Knowledge doesn't atrophy. Atrophy really applies to a loss of function. So it'll get worse and worse. And then what'll absolutely happen is some dating app will collaborate with an AI to have you text. It'll modify your texts to be really, really responsive. And then what'll happen—we're already seeing this in the employment space. Employers used to use tools like AI to filter through applications. They can scan it, filter based on this. Now that we have access to AIs like ChatGPT, it's just some weird dead internet kind of thing where the employer has a bot and now I'm submitting a bot with a resume. I have a resume writing a bot. So it's just bots talking to bots. And employers are like, "Where are you getting all these AI generated resumes?" Whereas they've been using computing to get rid of resumes and filter things out for a long time.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: So what's the advice then? Is it to not use AI? Not use large language models?
--:-- Dr. K: No. I think this is what's really tricky: you have to use AI now because you're going to be out-competed by the people who don't. So I would think about it like caffeine. A certain amount is probably good for you, but if you get really addicted to energy drinks and things like that, you're doing yourself a disservice. What I would recommend for people is that you don't let it do your thinking for you, but you can let it do some refining. But every refining that I let it do, it weakens my ability to refine. The best analogy is think of ChatGPT like taking the elevator. For this trip, it will make things easy for you, but it will make every single trip that you take after it harder. There's some atrophy. By not taking the stairs. And I sometimes take the elevator and I sometimes take the stairs.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Dr. K, thank you. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that's been left for you is, "What is the most powerful love in your life and why?"
--:-- Dr. K: The most—I would have to say it's the love for my nuclear family, hands down and without a doubt. And I think it's kind of interesting because it's not localized on one person. I have two daughters and I have a wife. And we started playing Dungeons & Dragons recently. And we also created a new holiday called Mother's Day Eve, which is like Christmas Eve, but for Mother's Day. And I love this holiday. It's basically a chance to prepare and get all the stuff that my wife loves ready for her. And instead of Mother's Day being like, "Oh, here's breakfast in bed," we party, basically doing all of our favorite things. So I'd say the biggest love in my life—I don't remember exactly what the question is, but I think it's encapsulated with Mother's Day Eve. And if y'all are listening to this and you want a really fun holiday that has not been overly commercialized, Father's Day Eve and Mother's Day Eve are the two. Just make a celebration of all the things that this person does. Do it at night, the night before, not the morning. And it's great.
--:-- Steven Bartlett: Thank you. Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate these conversations. I don't have to tell you, but every single time it's kind of like a reset in my life speaking to you, for so many reasons. It helps me, brings me back from whatever bullshit has consumed me since we last spoke. It's almost like a baptism, that's the way I would describe it. But I know it is for my listeners too, because they come up to me in the streets. I was saying to you before we started recording, they come up to you all over the world. I remember a lady in New York a couple of weeks ago came over to me mid-workout and told me—she was like, "I'm listening to Dr. K right now," and showed me her phone and was like, "Can you get her back on the podcast?"
--:-- Steven Bartlett: And it's incredible. I actually aspire to be like you in so many ways, because I think there's a spiritual component to me that I'm yet to explore. I think spending time with you, as someone I trust so much in so many areas, really is a handhold into a new realm that I'm a little bit hesitant to investigate.
--:-- Dr. K: Do I get to respond? No, I'm joking. Of course you do.
--:-- Dr. K: No, I mean, sometimes we get into this last word game where it's like a meeting of the mutual appreciation club. So, Steven, what I love about you—and I really do love coming here. They say, "Oh, you should have me back on the podcast." What we create here is a dyad. There is a component that you bring. I could not do this without you. So there's something that you and I meet, and then we make something that is unique. I think you're really good at making that with a lot of people, and you and I are going to make our own kind of baby. So honestly, it's a blast. Thank you.
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