TJ Power: How Social Media Is Destroying Our Brains And How To Become Happier Humans

0:01I am so glad you could join us. I'm your host, Mo Gaudet This podcast is nothing more than a conversation between two good friends sharing inspiring life stories and perhaps some nuggets of wisdom along the way This is your invitation to slow down with us Welcome to Slow Mo

0:34Welcome back. My guest today is multilayered. Let's just put it this way. Studied psychology, is a tech geek. He is a neuroscientist the modern way. You know, neuroscientists with half a million followers on Instagram, but so deeply thoughtful about a topic that, of course, I'm very passionate about mental health and well-being in a very, very unusual way. TJ Power is what I just said, someone who's trying to spread well-being through the dark world of social media, as well as the use of technology and gamification. But more interestingly, he teaches it in a way that I think all of us need to learn.

1:26Some much more simplified, though not shallow, approach to neuroscience. A conversation that was introduced to me by my dear friend, Susie Flory, who was a guest on this podcast in season one, who introduced us. And now finally, three months later, we are together to share with you something that I really think you will enjoy. neuroscience the modern technological way tj power thank you so much for being here wonderful to have you thanks for having me i'm excited to chat i love what you do i really and honestly think that the mix between you know a scientist you should be grumpy and old and not fun but you seem to be teaching neuroscience or sharing neuroscience and mental well-being really really successfully to the masses on Instagram, mainly half a million people or so.

2:19How did that start? Why would you do that? And why is it working, do you think? Yeah, it's an interesting first question. I think how did it start for me was, I was actually someone that had a period in my life that was quite tough for my mind to deal with. I, between the ages of like 16 and 21, lost five people in my family in five years. and many people in our world go through loss. And for a young brain, I was like, wow, this is a new thing to try and cope with. And during that period of time, I went heavily into kind of the partying, dopamine-y addiction world. And during that time, I was also studying psychology.

2:58At the age of about 21, 22, I started thinking like, wow, I'm not feeling that good in my head with this kind of lifestyle. And went on kind of like a three-month retreat. I kind of I knew my grandpa who lived out in nature and went to stay at his house for three months to try and like kind of sort myself out and during this three months I basically experimented with all the different behaviors that we'll probably chat through today and got myself feeling pretty good and then was kind of looking at my friends and family and like why do people online and thinking wow a lot of people are feeling these things feeling like flat low in drive worried whatever it might be and I started thinking this worked for me I'm gonna start making videos about it and started sharing the videos.

3:38They started to connect for people kind of in that COVID time, in the end of COVID. And yeah, kind of went from there. You studied psychology, but you're very much into technology. You founded NeuroFi, which is about gamification of, you know, well-being and mental health. I want to cover that deeply. And your upcoming book is The Dose Effect. Yeah. That's when? In August? That is in January 2025. January 2025. Month where people struggle a little bit with how they feel. I know. And hopefully it's going to be a good game plan for how to take on that period. And basically that's about, you know, the hormones that affect our bodies and how we can, you know, use that.

4:17When we were chatting before the, you know, starting to film, you were saying, yeah, it's a bit of a complex mind in there. All at age 26. How is it that you combine all of these? Like, where does the passion come from? Yeah, I think I grew up as someone that definitely just loved technology. I thought technology was so cool. I remember being like, I think I was about 10 years old when the iPhone came out. I thought, wow, that looks cool. What? Something around that? I was so old when it came out. Man. And I remember getting an iPhone and just like, I loved that one. I thought social media was really cool.

4:51Like I wasn't averse to any of these things at all. And I also got super fascinated by psychology. I played pretty high level golf as a kid and I wanted to be a professional golfer. That was kind of my original pursuit. And when you do high level golf, you get psychological training quite early in life because golf is so stressful when you hit a bad shot. And I became interested in tech. Then I got really interested in psychology. And then the kind of philosophy on psychology on how I believe humans could get themselves feeling really healthy and good in their minds came later in my life during that period when I was kind of rediscovering what it means to get healthy.

5:24First of all, on golf, just so that we agree, I now realize why I hate it so much. it's so stressful there really is and in a very in an engineer's way to me you know as an engineer if you do the same exact action you're supposed to get the same exact result no that's not that's not true with golf so yeah i think on the third session i was like this is not um this doesn't follow the scientific method it doesn't maybe if a robot was playing it and i and somehow in my mind i was like there is really no clear path to getting better at this in my mind so i'm you know i'm not going to do that so a lot of what you discuss is that there are those four hormones those dose yeah that govern all of our well-being do you want to take us through that very quickly yeah so you've got dose which is dopamine super famous one and then you have oxytocin which connects humans serotonin all about our mood and energy system and then endorphins which is very connected to kind of de-stressing and relaxing the mind and effectively the whole premise of the dose effect is that our brain didn't develop those chemicals in the last hundred years it developed them over the last kind of 400 000 years as humans were evolving and for 99 of that evolution the main things we needed to do were be able to hunt and connect with one another find new places to live and survive that really hard experience and those chemicals are designed to thrive in that environment and when you or if you could like transport our ancestors into this world and suddenly they'd go from waking up every morning to bright sunlight and hunting and building and doing a lot of like effortful action if suddenly they started waking up and sitting on phones and not talking to each other and having a sugary bowl of cereal they wouldn't feel good very quickly their brain would send them a message and say no this doesn't feel good this isn't good for our survival and with this dose theory i basically am suggesting that our brain is sending us all a very clever message suggesting that this current path we're on as humanity is not going to be good for our survival in the long term if we continue to engage with too much of this unhealthy behavior so therefore these chemicals are very sophisticated machines that are saying guys don't do this don't do that and then it reinforces positive stuff do this do that the more you understand these hormones and align to them the better you feel i mean i need to clarify what you just said there do you think that this pandemic of stress and and depression and you know sadly suicide and so on are actually collective signals that says humanity at large this is the wrong path i never thought of it this way i really do believe that i think at the core of like the human being or any species survival is the goal like that's the reason it is here is to survive and procreate itself and continue going forward and when you look at the different behaviors we do some give you this kind of like guilt shameful feeling within like if you spend two hours on your phone or you watch like pornography or you eat really sugary food there's like this feeling that arises in your body of like this doesn't this isn't valuable to me and the opposite occurs if you go for like a 30 minute walk outside in nature you get this reinforcing feeling and I think our brain is so sophisticated at knowing our future and knowing what's going to be advantageous and like the the perfect comparison there is if you were to watch porn or have sex both achieve a similar outcome for your body but one leaves you not feeling good and one leaves you feeling great and the only difference is one of them is not going to be valuable to human survival.

8:45If anything, it's going to reduce procreation. And the other one is a valued survival. And I think on all the different behaviors we engage in, I think our brain is very clever at telling us which are a value to the future of our civilization. And so accordingly, even though we could be getting the same hormone maybe and the same biological response to something, somehow if it's not pro our survival, our psyche will not feel good about it? With something like the variation how the hormone would actually be stimulated it would be on the speed in which the hormone increases the hormones are not supposed to increase super quickly like if you took an example of i'm a hunter-gatherer i'm out there i need to provide food for the family and i wake up in the morning and that's my goal and i go out for three or four hours in the pursuit of trying to find some kind of food foraging for fruit or finding an animal or whatever it might be the rewarding chemical that's driving you to do that is dopamine and dopamine is going to go through this kind of slow curve as you gradually get closer to that food then you'll experience a rewarding experience and then it will slowly calm back down if you take something like entering tiktok your brain is suddenly experiencing more dopamine than it would get even if it was successfully hunting an animal and it gets it within like five seconds and then because the brain is always seeking for homeostasis for balance it's like how the hell did i get up here so quick so then it crashes us and our dopamine goes below its baseline level and when we're in this kind of apathetic demotivated low mood kind of headspace that is our dopamine level crashing and that's where so many of us are of us are today like we wake up we have sugary food we scroll social media and i think for so much of society we then are in this low state and then we start thinking about our life and our job and our relationships and we think all of our problems are there whereas i really believe a significant proportion is just our brain is chemically imbalanced and it's causing worrisome thoughts that is an incredible way of looking at i have to admit i've never thought of it this way and it makes so much sense before we dig deeper can i ask you to explain very quickly the dose so what each of them is and how it is supposed to function in the body for our listeners who are not aware of them definitely so dopamine controlling all of your motivation and it will rise when you do anything that's effortful the most simple example of dopamine is we all have the annoying task in our life of having to change and wash our bedding and it's not particularly fun task but eventually after you've taken that duvet off and you've washed it and dried it and put it back on and done all the annoying buttons you get into a clean bed and you suddenly like oh i'm so happy i did that you never get into a clean bed and regret that effort and that's your brain rewarding effort that's going to be a value to you so anything in your life that's effort it's going to build it oxytocin then connects humanity together so whether you're in a good conversation making eye contact contributing someone physically connecting with someone being grateful to someone all of that is going to stimulate oxytocin serotonin is then interesting a brilliant scientist called Appleton really created this whole framework that 90 % of the serotonin is made in the gut which is now really widely known and any time in which you do something that's going to support the health of your body whether that's nutritious food sleep sunlight time in nature even the whole kind of calm breathing practices that we have that's going to stimulate serotonin and raise our mood and our energy levels and then endorphins really interestingly is actually just designed to help us cope with physical and psychological stress if you were in a situation where you had to actually fight an animal or run away from an animal we needed a mechanism that in that moment of extreme physical exertion a mechanism that would kind of take all the stressful thoughts out of our brain and take pain out of our body like if right now i said to you run a mile down the road as fast as you can you'd probably get out the door and be like i've got a stitch i can't be bothered but if a bear was chasing you up these stairs you'd probably be able to run and endorphins release into our brain they take all our stress out of our thinking and that's very valuable obviously like we're not getting chased by bears now but if you are stressed it's very good to release the endorphins and what what would trigger the the release is the activity itself so if you're feeling rewarded you get dopamine if you're subjected to stress you get endorphins or the other way around it would be if you've experienced stress from anything relationship work phone whatever it may be endorphins will release if you physically exert yourself so the the base one is of course exercise but even something like stretching your body even singing songs quite loudly you get an endorphin release so i feel it's quite good to sing if you uh go into a hot environment like a sauna if you laugh like really hard so anything that gets the body like physically active is going to release them your personal story is that your release if you want at a point in time through was through sort of those addictions like you know porn or alcohol and so on and so forth and then somehow you find the path to say no no hold on this is actually not working well for me i can find that through other activities why would you figure that out and others are not i mean there are so many people in the world that are stuck in that replacing human relationship and real sex with porn or replacing you know calm and a good connection with alcohol why are we stuck in those addictions firstly they are very powerful these substances it's very hard for humans to manage that amount of pleasure like if you put mice or rats in any kind of dopamine behavior like a rat for example if it has access to cocaine will choose the cocaine over food and water until it's dead it won't even it won't touch the food and water and our brain operates very similarly like it's very powerful these substances so i have no kind of judgment to society for the fact we've got ourself into this situation in terms of how I made the shift I love feeling good and I always found that during the exam periods at university I'd have like six weeks where I did a very healthy lifestyle and I'd be working every day extremely hard like eight to ten hours a day of revision and writing and all that kind of stuff and although I always perceived those periods as like oh these are going to be stressful and stuff I actually found I felt really good when I was in a much more disciplined lifestyle I felt my happiness level was more consistent and I started pondering throughout that final kind of exam period at university do I want to feel good for kind of like 10 % of my day or do I want to feel good for the majority of my day and that started then setting a framework of like if I keep engaging with all this quick dopamine stuff like I have a short period in the evening where I feel great but for the majority of the day I feel low and I feel worried in my head and I started testing it out just like can I engage with more behaviors that lead to me feeling happier for the majority of the time and i just way preferred that experience and i think for much of society we're also hooked on this dopamine that we just haven't spent enough time away from it to actually know what it feels like to feel really good that's such a good point and i think a lot of people i think mental health is interesting because there is this percentage of society say five to ten percent that are really in a state of clinical anxiety and depression and like we need to do all we can to help alleviate that pain and move people out of it but there is also a percentage of society that are all kind of like four to six out of ten in how happy they feel like they don't feel really bad but they also just are not feeling really good and i think if those sort of individuals experience just like a week of discipline and think like wow this actually feels awesome it then begins to motivate the change but you've got to like touch it to be able to know how good it is i think that's really really really core i mean in a very interesting way in my work i recognize that a lot of people don't even recognize what it's like to be calm what it's like to be unstressed or what it's like to have a pain-free body or what it's like to be actually joyful.

16:13We've replaced those either with addictions like you rightly said or with acceptance which I think is a very very scary place to be because we and I'm to blame as much as anyone else like you know my physical stress is normally very high most of the time because of the amount of travel and activities and engagements that I go through and my body's aging and my body's not really as capable as it used to be when I was 26 and you You know, and it is definitely something that I, for a long time, sort of hyper normalized. I was like, yeah, it's fine. You know, it is what it is. And it's just part of trying to make a difference or to be successful in life and so on.

16:53And I find that to be quite scary, really, because it's becoming almost the norm that we're killing ourselves. It is. And we are becoming kind of too tolerant, I think, of that feeling. And as I said at the start, like we're all individually being sent this message, this feeling within us that we're engaging with some behaviors that are definitely not a value to our lives. And if we just learn to tolerate that feeling, we're never going to change how people live and the experience of life people have. And we all get this period of time on earth. And it's like, be so nice if a vast majority of that time was spent enjoying it and not hating it.

17:28And especially like when you lose people and you think, oh, that person didn't get to experience life and I am getting to experience life. and then it's like oh i really should try and make the most of this experience and have a good time doing it and it's not to say like bad times aren't going to come you're gonna have stress with work and family and kids all that kind of stuff but there are definitely changes we can make that could shift the percentage of time we spend in kind of a happy spot on absolutely gamification of mental well-being or of well-being in general i have to admit intrigued me a lot so when i was researching your work what you're trying to do with neurofi is i'll let you explain it better but Basically, you're trying to say that there are certain habits, there are certain activities or practices that would activate the dose balance, if you want, the dose effect.

18:13And that those don't necessarily have to be kickstarted through your typical approach to life. You can gamify the approach to, you can play a game or a challenge, go through a challenge, and then that will create a habit that will, you know, balance your dopamine, for example. I have to say this is very intriguing because I'm a video gamer and I can easily say that real gamers by the way not addictive gamers real gamers there is so much meditation there is so much focus there's so much dopamine of course clearly yeah not all unhealthy though but exactly some can be great when you're yeah and I really find it almost difficult to explain to people that as a gamer, I'm not what you see at all.

18:59It's not like there are aliens on the screen and we're slicing each other. That's not the experience at all. It's a very, very embodied, very present, very flow kind of experience where it really, if they replaced the aliens with ducks, it would be the same. And if they replaced the movements of my guns and bullets to just a crosshair on the screen and red dots, I'll, you know, it's the same flow experience. So I am a huge believer that you can actually create massive mental states and practices through gamification of things. Wellbeing, though, that's a tricky one. So tell me first, you know, how would that look like?

19:43What would the experience look like? And why do you think it would work? Yeah, I think on that gaming topic, for example, the key difference in gaming just for context is those games you're describing that you engage with probably require effort to experience joy so the curve is slow on the dopamine rise whereas if you compare the game maybe you're thinking of in your mind to like candy crush where it's just colors that kind of thing would crash you out so gaming is very varied in terms of how it impacts the brain in terms of the gamification of it i think to an extent i think the human life experience is a game of like even if you let's not go there they uh well i mean we even all have like a app on our phone that we log into and it has a number and it's like a point score and that's our bank balance like we are kind of kind of playing a game already and the reason i found the gamification so valuable is we spent we train like quite a variety of ages all the way down to kind of like 10 years old up to kind of adults in their 50s and 60s and stuff like that and when we started doing these sessions I started the approach of between each of the sessions, we do four, one on each chemical, between the sessions, setting them really specific challenges to complete in groups before the next session begins.

20:57And I found that as soon as someone had some kind of challenge to complete, they were more likely to engage with the behavior. And it was like a very, very specific challenge around cold showers or like a certain amount of minutes in flow state or whatever it might be, a discipline-based challenge. And we are living in kind of a addiction world and whilst I think that's creating much of the challenge we have for our brain I think there's also much to learn about like wow how do you get humans to engage with stuff and it's very clear that because of how addictive sugar is in cereal we'll eat loads of cereal or how addictive pornography is or how addictive social media is and that is all coming from the perspective of dopamine hits in the brain and I've kind of had to try and think down the lens of like how do we get people to experience dopamine hits off healthy behavior not just from engagement with the behavior itself but from the feeling of completion of a challenge and therefore if with this process like we have five key behaviors within each chemical these 20 core behaviors across dose that people are trying to integrate into their life if they feel like they're kind of winning a challenge it then increases the dopamine and i believe the most important thing for society is we get everyone into a naturally high dopamine state because if you're someone that's in a high natural dopamine state you're the opposite of like apathetic you're like really action oriented and in order to survive like a world where there's sugar everywhere and porn everywhere and all this different stuff you need to be someone that is very motivated and very disciplined like i just think that's an integral skill for all of humanity to develop in the world that we're living in we'll have virtual reality coming and we've got ai that we've got to try and manage and being someone that's like good at taking action is key so if not only do we get them to engage with the healthy behaviors that boost all the chemicals but because of the gamification they feel like they're getting this rewarding i'm going to the next level and we have it done in levels as they go through if they feel like they're going to the next level like a game they're getting dopamine off that and healthy dopamine because it's like an actual effortful challenge to complete the higher the dopamine we get in society naturally the better we're going to all feel but then in that case what you're what you're trying to do is you're sort of almost replacing the dependence of that person from a negative or a you know a harmful addiction and replacing it with the addiction of the game in a way is that is that a fair thing to say i think to an extent like in this world we're in now we're all going to be addicted to something i think i think it's like let's just let's just accept it and then we might as well just be addicted to the good things yeah i think that like that almost is the case like you're gonna you might be addicted to your work you might be addicted to some of the unhealthy stuff whatever it might be but if we can get those addictions like predominantly to be healthy addictions like life is going to be a lot better and like for me personally like I was someone that was really hooked on partying like I can't quite do it justice when I talk about the on these podcasts about the kind of lifestyle I lived but it was far from the lifestyle I live now and the only way out for me was spending a lot of time thinking like what else could I get like a big dopamine hit from and the reason that like neurofi looks how it looks and dose is making the progress it is is because it is my new addiction effectively and someone could find an addiction in the creation of a work idea but you also could get pretty hooked on like a really detailed artistic drawing for example like i had a young girl come up to me recently in a in a school and she was about 13 years old and she was struggling quite severely with adhd and adhd for context from a neuroscientist perspective is low dopamine levels and humans have known this for a long time although the medications that treat adhd things like adderol and ritalin they're dopamine based pills are they yeah and someone with adhd you could genetically be born with low dopamine levels and therefore have this like predisposition to anything addictive is going to be super tempting because you're going to get bigger spikes off it but it also means that if you engage with a healthy behavior you also have the capacity to get this bigger spike and this girl was talking to me i said to her like what do you really like doing what gets you into flow state because I teach these kids about flow state and she was saying how much she likes digital art on her iPad and I said like in the in this next seven days before you come back for the next session just make that your 100 % focus it's like really developing the digital art and because she had that as her focus she's then doing something that was effortful to build dopamine instead of just scrolling TikTok which to a young person they don't see any difference they're like it's an ipad it's the same thing but one of them is creating effort in her brain and she came back the next week in a much more energetic excited motivated mood because her brain had engaged a load of effort so dopamine had risen i think it's just so important that people begin to see the distinction can i ask you why are we trying to treat adhd at all why is adhd a problem that's an interesting question i think part of that is because it doesn't fit particularly well with the school and education experience like being someone that's hyper like kind of excited by things and the reason you're hyper excited by things is because like if something does excite you it really excites you because you experience these big elevations in dopamine but what i think is interesting because i've done a lot on adhd we've built this whole new model on adhd which we're working on that i've been teaching at schools and if you took a hunter-gatherer that had adhd as we call it this low level of dopamine in their brain they would grow up and by the age of say like 10 years old they're beginning to have to contribute to that tribe and they would go out there and they might hunt for food forage for food be good at building the shelter but what would be interesting is the individual with adhd would experience the greatest levels of increased dopamine when they engage with the behaviors they would feel the best of these behaviors and actually probably become the best at them so i actually reckon back in the day those with adhd would have been the highest performing individuals.

26:45And in our modern world, I think it's now becoming the opposite because they're trying to fit into being good at lots and lots of things. Whereas an ADHD individual needs to find one thing and get really, really good at it. Exactly my point, to be honest. I mean, in a very interesting way, I think neurodiversity in general is being positioned as something that needs to be treated because it is a question of fit within the capitalist society. If we didn't need to put kids in school and instead we allowed them to find out what they're passionate about, digital art, for example, and then tell them to go ahead and just focus on that and make that their entire life.

27:21They'll be amazing at it. Amazing. Right? The best of the best. And you take any neurodiversity, like any kind, even, you know, an autistic child, for example, will have maybe low social skills, but very high talents in other areas and so on and so forth. And I think the trick here is that we're trying to mold everyone so that somehow we become all probably lowest denominator of all of us. It's like, you know, something that fits all of us. It's uniform for all of us. And that's easy to cast through education systems and universities and then interviewing skills and basically get them to take uniform jobs, all of them exactly the same.

27:58And it sort of gets to me a little because we cause so much panic to a parent and go like, ah, your child is, you know, diagnosed with ADHD and you should be concerned. A woman in my team at NeuroFi is experiencing that exact thing at the moment. Yeah, and I think the exact opposite should be the case. It's like, you know, jump up and down in joy because your son is diagnosed with ADHD. Just find out what they're really good at, what excites them, and they'll be amazing at it. You know what I mean? I do, and I think one of my challenges with this is there's this thing called the DSM in psychology which categorizes all of the different challenges society experiences, and it's like the the bible of psychological difficulty and when you take something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder my biggest pain with it is the fact we've put this word disorder on the end of all of these things yeah i had ocd as a young kid like quite severely ocd and my mom was fantastic at helping me like navigate it and learn to live with it and stuff like that but one of the ways in which she did that is she just didn't let me hear these words that I have a disorder like as a young kid because then I would have kind of through a self-fulfilling prophecy gone down like a wrong path with it and with this model we teach with ADHD we've actually renamed it to ADHA where it's attention deficit hyperactivity ability and get kids to actually think of this as like wow I have some kind of superpower rather than some kind of disorder and I think when you look at that hunter-gatherer idea and I always come back to this just because that's what humans did for the majority of our time here having a tribe of 70 people where everyone had a really valuable unique skill would create a thriving tribe because someone's really good with the bows and someone's really good and then i think as society scaled up and started living in these massive groups and stuff it became clear from the kind of top of the system to be like right let's make sure everyone is the same it's going to be easier to manage exactly and i think uh it's like let's put them in the mold if they don't fit in the mold just you know push the mold a little harder give them a pill effectively yeah this is where i think it's interesting with the technological world we're heading towards because that mold was built so that at mass scale everyone would go through school and then go into corporate kind of systems and work within those organizations but and like the kind of peak of that being law and finance and things like this but if a ai has this capacity to kind of really automate a lot of this stuff like i was with some of my brother's financial friends who are very successful financial people the other day and i was showing them what they could be doing with ai and how much it could be saving their time in their work and they were completely blown away at how much of their job is done could be done by it and these people are kind of the top of society as we currently perceive it but what i do wonder there is that if a lot of the automated kind of corporate life gets taken by ai does that then mean we might walk into a world where more individual kind of artistic skills may become more required it could could we walk down a path where more individualization is good i definitely think this is where we're going to i think we're going to get to end up back in the cave years, right?

31:00Interesting. Not in the caves. We would, but, you know, imagine a world of abundance where most of the work is done by machines, hopefully where society realizes we don't need to compete on a capitalist gain anymore. At the end of it, basically, we may just suddenly realize that sitting on your desk all day was never the life purpose of anyone. Like we were supposed to be out in nature, sitting around the campfire, chatting and getting to know each other and doing physical activities and connecting with nature. And this actually is the original design of humanity. And we went through that transition in the middle where we created money and we created jobs and we created this and that and the other.

31:39And so instead of going out hunting in the morning, you have to go out and do accounting in the morning. I'd rather do the hunting. Absolutely, which is really not really what we're made for at all. And yes, there will be resistance and pain to go back to that original design. but in reality if everything happened in abundance you might as well imagine if i had you for the next six hours and we had the most incredible chat about understanding neuroscience and everything else and there was no pressure to go through you know all of the transport network and having to make money and all of that stuff it's possible it's possible but would it happen i don't know i i think that even if it ends up being our next reality it would go through a lot of teething problems and a lot of pain on on the way because we're so used to this now i think uh as we make that kind of more merge with with tech as a species i think probably the most important thing we could possibly do is make sure the human instinctive part of us is very well satisfied effectively because if we just become these like digital humans coming back to the beginning like that message is going to get really loud in our heads of like the body is not going to enjoy that experience i even heard you say on a podcast the other day that you think uh well-being should basically become society's number one priority and uh i think we're going to hit a you know i mean you know more than i that this uncertainty around what's about to happen is a very big reason for a lot of mental health issues right humans we don't like that we don't like change we just like our life shitty as it is let me keep swiping just just let me keep i know i know how to do it you know this is this is good for me yeah right and i think the the resistance at the capitalist society level at a believe it or not at a at a governance level at an individual level it's it's just going to be very fast it's almost like when you say about dopamine hits that are so quick I think we're getting into a stage where there is so much happening.

33:47And I have to admit openly, TJ, that you're so much smarter than I am. That's not true. It's the truth, you know, because of lots of things. But you're made with a processor that is fit for this a lot more than my processor. Interesting. And maybe I still have a sort of like a bit of code in the background that you may not have acquired yet. You'll acquire over the next few years. I hope so. Yeah, but the truth is that from an interface to this world, even though I spend hours and hours and hours and hours and hours trying to keep up with what's happening on AI, I'm absolutely certain you would crush me if we were to compete on using AI to create something, right?

34:32It's so integral to the way that you are. But in a very, very interesting way, my wish is that this is not this does not become the direction we go to even though i tell everyone you have to learn the tools but believe it or not like you just said i think we should somehow use this opportunity not to merge with the tools but to merge back with our humanity oh yeah that would be that that would be the right way to go i mean there is a need to merge with the tools now because we think that this is the way to advance in the coming world. But it will be so short lived that we are needed next to the tools.

35:15Very, very quickly, the tool will not need you at all. Yeah, we almost need to strengthen the uniqueness of being human. So then both can live together as if we try and become a robot. We're just not going to be as good at that. 100%. Yeah, and basically it will almost completely deprioritize our differences. Think about that because you and I as humans are so different, even though so similar in some ways, because we're not attached to something that's 10x our intelligence. Agreed. Right? So you and I would analyze a problem from two very different aspects. If we both add our 10 % to the 10x, then it becomes irrelevant in terms of differentiating us.

36:04We all become like the machine. It makes us far too similar. Yeah, it makes us far too similar. That's the truth. Interesting. And coming back to that conversation of celebrating the uniqueness of each individual, we need the uniqueness to thrive. We need to go the opposite way. Would you be okay to share a few of those disorders, allegedly disorders? And what would be, so if you were to talk to several mothers in school and say, your child has OCD, it's not a D, right? Your child has ADHD, it's not a D, right? Because the ADHD child, first of all, is very creative, is very impatient, is very passionate, is very good at one thing.

36:46See those values in your child. If you take some of those Ds that would come to your mind and tell a mother, this is actually useful if you apply it in the following way, what would you say? OCD, for example. What is OCD good for? I really believe that all of these quote-unquote disorders are effectively overdone survival mechanisms. Like I think within our brain, with OCD, for example, it's of great value to be hyper-organized and disciplined and litigious with how you organize your life. however it can go too far for sure and you can end up washing your hands 20 times a day which then would become like quite a challenging experience i think step one is your kid not believing they have a disorder like i started developing this at a super young age i think i was about five or six years old and i started having that kind of you have obsessions with things like i had to kind of for example i'd be in my bedroom i'd have a thought in my head that i had to go into the garage which is outside in the middle of the light middle of the night and turn a light switch five times otherwise this event would happen parents would die or something that would be like a and i was five years old it's such a young brain to even be able to compute this stuff but to my brain obviously like effectively what happens to those cities you engage with the behavior once you go and turn the light switch off the outcome that you were seeking to not happen doesn't happen and then it gets reinforced and you're like it worked so then you get into a difficult path with it and wow the first kind of step my mom took because my mom also identified with these things and she took me to what i believe was called brain training and never told me i had this ocd thing and began working with people to understand this but effectively the main thing she did was normalize it so i didn't feel weird like it's because then she thought if you feel really weird you might start like it might become more and more extreme so first of all just normalize it it's not unusual to experience it it's just your brain like doing something extra than what it would normally do and then with this ocd one specifically you have to in a nice calm environment allow the young person to like engage with the thing that they're fearful of like it's something simple that i think actually many people have is this three drains thing where you think if you're walking down a sidewalk and there's three drains if you walk over all three it's unlucky yeah i know someone under a ladder is unlucky or whatever and those are like light level OCD type tendencies and the thing you have to do is as soon as the thought comes in of oh this will happen if I do this you have to immediately engage with the thing that you're not supposed to do immediately walk over the three drains and if you're working with your kid like you would do this with them you'd walk over the three drains with them or whatever their fear might be in their mind and begin to prove to them that it's not reality and then you begin to break that kind of like conditioned response within their brain so OCD I'd say normalize it and then calmly work through engaging with the behavior and help them to realize that it's not reality.

39:38And also help them see the massive strength in it. Like, I'm so grateful for the OCD that I have within my brain from a kind of meticulous detail point of view. Like, the only reason Neurofi looks how it looks is because I'm willing to spend five hours working on one slide because I can get, like, really into something. Your slides, oh my God, man. Thanks, man. They really are really good. Thanks. and so I see value in these things I don't see it as all negative by any means and so that would be kind of the the route for OCD if it was ADHD I'd be going much more down the really realizing it's a superpower like I think ADHD is of so much value to the brain if you can find something that you can get hyper focused on and often when I talk to parents about this they very quickly will say to me my kid doesn't have anything they're interested in and this is a really interesting thing for society because a lot of society doesn't have hobbies anymore and doesn't know what they're interested in and their hobby is have a glass of wine and scroll instagram reels effectively that's become the modern hobby and i then started really talking to kids about this trying to figure out how the hell do we find their hobbies because the hobby has become the phone and then i started thinking about deeper if for example when you were growing up and not to say you're older than current young kids but you didn't have an iphone when you were growing up if you had like an urge within you to engage with some kind of behavior like you suddenly thought cooking was cool for a second or you thought music was cool or you thought art was cool the only way to satisfy that craving within you was to go and engage with the behavior and i think this is this challenge we have in society now is all of us have an urge to engage with like hobbies and stuff like that but all we're doing is watching other people that are exceptional at the hobby engage with it instead of doing it and we're kind of like vicariously experiencing oh man you're talking about me now like i'll think like oh cooking meals is really nice like chopping but instead of actually doing i'll watch someone do it or it might be music it might be art i mean if you count the number of nothing else matter videos that i have on my to keep list and then you never even go back to that because i don't i know my guitar is in there and i really have to tune it and i have to start i don't have the time for that but i can actually look at the video it's so interesting and i think like many of us are vicariously experiencing hobbies effectively and coming back to the brain chemicals the only way to actually stimulate the dopamine is to play the guitar it's not to watch someone playing the guitar it's for your brain to engage with the experience playing the guitar so when a parent comes to me and they say oh my adhd child doesn't have any hobbies or no interest i get them to like chat with the kid and get the kid to really observe carefully what videos are standing out to them on their feed like what is the main thing they're enjoying watching and it will be cooking or music or art or gaming or whatever it might be such a good and your your thing is in the thing you like watching most a hundred percent it's in there and like i grew up i used to love watching videos of people like out in nature bear grills and stuff i thought that sort of thing was so cool when i was a kid like watching too yeah and i just watched it for 20 years and then suddenly realized in my head literally only recently about six months ago like i can do that i can go into nature and make videos like that's also an option for me and like now i found so much joy and like really immerse myself in nature more regularly and stuff like that and i think it's really important that we all ask ourselves that question what is the standout video that's grabbing our attention regularly what kind of style is it and then can we personally engage with it ourself or the parents with their kids hold on this is my therapy session now uh yeah i absolutely i'm crazy about nature crazy about the guitar crazy about carpentry crazy about cars awesome i just recently actually don't don't judge me don't judge me i'm not very judgmental i invested in a garage a workshop cool to go back to fixing cars with my own hands that's smart for your dopamine levels it's incredible i mean imagine every saturday after a very stressful week i just go report to my team like i go like in an overall and say hey guys you know what do you want me to do and they'll just point me at something and say unassemble this and that's it a saturday of wonderful engagement with reality and that is so the key of it because your thoughts then get a chance to rest and so much of our brain is spent like worrying and anticipating and future and past and all this sort of stuff if you really engage in a hobby you enter that flow state idea of deep focus where no thought occurs and that's where the brain always used to be as hunter-gatherers we'd have always been in no thought we'd have been hunting and then building and then like raising a kid and cooking the food and like now we've got so much time to ruminate in our heads because we sit there worrying whereas like when you're in that shop on a saturday that will be such like good kind of active rest for your brain where your brain will be like de-stressing itself because it's not computing oh what happened with the team and what happened with this and what's next it would just be here's a car and i gotta try and fix it and that's so important i have all of those can i can i just quit and stop like i love this too i love slow-mo as well and I love all of the other stuff that I do but I'm actually so obsessed and I'm being very open here it just hit me at a point in time that yes I hopefully will live a long life and will continue to contribute and so on how many more years can I actually carry a heavy log of wood and put it on my chainsaw or bandsaw or whatever and and just you know cut it and turn it into something not so many and it's quite interesting it's hitting me very strongly now that I need more time doing my carpentry i need more time playing my guitar i need more time fixing cars and restoring them i need more time and and it's just suddenly i'm almost shifting the other way i'm like now sort of wishing my whole life was hobbies am i going to make it doctor like what's wrong with me i think uh nature oh my god i am totally want to buy a place in nature and build my own home there yeah i mean that would be pretty hunter gatherer as well if you did that especially if you build it yeah and uh i think it's interesting i think work is great i think part of the real value in technology is we can start getting much more efficient with like task completion like things can be executed much faster than i think a lot of the time we make things take them and like with that whole flow state idea the brain can operate very fast if it gets into flow stay so with the working portion of your life like if you get super disciplined with executing fast and not necessarily and this is something i'm working on so much but like believing you have to work nine to five i think is such like a big thing like sometimes what do you work nine to five seven days a week on a good day nine to five yeah that's a short day but i am genuinely like working on this idea of like sometimes like if if the brain wants to engage with a hobby on like a wednesday at like for an hour and then it's okay to do that and so many people would push back like my work won't allow this and this one this and all that stuff but then like all i would ask is that you go and look at your screen time and the amount of hours you spend on social media throughout the day and everyone has the time it's just like where i call it the cold play test anyone tells me i don't have the time i say if cold play came to play in town tomorrow somehow the time pops up right we can impact the time and like we all spend like five hours on our phone a day now so we could probably oh my god yeah we could get that back do you know i actually recently saw a young person's screen time i'll come back to that topic of pop it but it was 19 hours 54 average no way yeah 19 hours yeah and it's about 10 hours of tiktok in the night which is like it's so unimaginable what that would do to the the dopamine and the brain and wild can that be fixed yeah we we need like a replacement behavior something else that's going to like heavily stimulate the dopamine effectively we can come back to that but with your hobbies i think as you like make progress in your career i think working smart when you're working but allowing yourself the piece of feeling i imagine you love productivity i imagine you love achieving i love making things like it's fun to achieve stuff and like a huge amount of your dopamine for example maybe from that source the only thing i mean i i was asked at a point in time you know how it is when they fill your head with shit and you know at a point in my life i thought that my life's purpose was to help startups create technology that's you know super technology like google everywhere in the world and i used to publicly say that how i came to that i have no idea i really honestly i mean it was just honestly like looking at the world around me and saying there are many things I do well.

48:07One of them is to guide startups and help mentor founders and so on. Then that might be my life's purpose. That was a pile of crap. Like that's absolutely, I don't even engage in business anymore. I mean, it's really not my nature at all. I'm good at it. That's because of the training, right? But it's so interesting when you really dig deep around what you really stand for. And one day I was on stage and someone told me, describe yourself in one word. and I said maker okay that's you know every all of my behaviors are around making things whether it's writing a book or you know recording this wonderful conversation or whatever and that one word flipped my life upside down and I don't know why it popped out but and I may end up you know in five years time saying oh I was you know wrong about that too but it is so true to who I am and what would you say is fulfilling you the most at the moment in from that making side of you what activities or providing the most rewarding experience it's it's normally the simplest of all of them believe it or not so before i got married i you know had given myself the final permission around 10 12 months ago i said you know what you're single you're never going to meet someone anyway so uh you know you might as well just literally build the home that you want to live in okay and so i ended up deciding to build to turn my living area into a total nature spot so all you see you still you can see a bit of wall because the plants are not fully grown yet yeah but i wanted to build a space where it's fully green cool and life so it was fish tanks embedded within greenery and and i'm really good with my hands and you know i really like to take care of of plants and i really know how to take care of aquariums and so on and i love all of those things so it took a lot of time to build it now all i really need to do is to cut a leaf here or you know take care of the fish there or whatever takes me takes me 25 minutes maybe 30 minutes a day and that's not much time and it's not much time but it's pure joy yeah that's a good activity it's total meditation yeah it's total flow exactly meditation so you're looking at every root and every leaf and every fish and every quality of water and so on and so forth and it's complex you have to learn those skills but now to me it's just so such a joy it's my little corner of nature within my own living room and i absolutely love it but in general i think hobbies and you're you really you say this so eloquently i think the one of the biggest challenges of our modern world is that we dropped hobbies yeah yeah we have nothing other than either being productive or being completely passive like you know either make money or you know raise kids or whatever or be completely passive you know plug your head into a netflix series and and just do nothing yeah it's interesting as well because when you our brain loves flow state like it loves that deep state of focus and effectively when we're scrolling the phone in comparison to say the flow state of doing the uh the garden room in your house i'm going to call it the garden room yeah i'm going to call it the garden room too we're effectively like creating artificial flow state in the brain correct yeah the brain is experiencing like these big dopamine rises so it's like wow we entering flow state and you'll notice like that idea of not thinking about anything it does create you don't think about anything you just take in the information take in the information but then we almost have like a rebound effect the other side where our brain goes the opposite of that present experience into a really worrisome state because it's uh correct yeah seeking to get to get back in control a hundred percent and i think we all must like find something we can engage in and get better at like our brain is so designed to want to get better at things like it's so rewarding when you become better at taking care of that room or better at anything in work whatever it may be but the challenge with a lot of the the work we do in our lives is like it remains very similar so like you don't necessarily feel like you're advancing significantly in your working life so you need something outside of your working life to feel like you're making progress on and that is how dopamine is completely designed like as you make progress towards something dopamine rises and rises and rises just so that like if you were hunting down an animal you would get the greatest spike just before you actually got the animal so that you'd get more dopamine more and more focus and i think so many of us are just kind of living lives that are always the same they're not necessarily feeling like they're advancing and like they need to like imagine imagine a hunter hunter gatherer's life like i i love this there's a show on disney plus called primal survivor and this guy goes and visits all the hunter gatherer tribes that are still in the world today africa and south america and so on and it's fascinating for so many reasons one of them is they're all so happy which is just yeah yeah it's like they're all like yeah like i tell people about this idea and they go i wouldn't want to live like that like that'd be so horrible and it's like you actually look at the people doing it and they're much happier than we are more motivated and connected and less stressed out and all that kind of stuff even though they're having survived like anacondas and shit and uh when you look at them all they all have such a specific skill set like there was even this this lady that's like 85 years old in the south american tribe and it's really important to know these people lived a long time like we actually think that life expectancy was like 40 back then it was by no means 40 like humans lived for ages back then it's just we had like higher uh mortality rate mortality rate yeah and she had literally spent her whole life 85 years becoming the best at putting poison onto an arrow tip in order to like craft these arrows so they could successfully hunt with them and like the joy you saw in her like building these arrows and she literally was saying how she'd like got better invested her whole life like she's still fine-tuning the skill and it's like we all need to fine-tune a skill and it can be in work but it also can be outside of work in like artistic pursuits or whatever it might be but that fine-tuning of your garden room or your new mechanic shop like that is going to be very good for your brain and i think for you as someone that loves to work but loves hobbies i think it could be a cool goal to try and have an equal equal number of hobbies to an equal number of working tasks that is a great idea if you have podcasts and i'm not too like familiar with exactly what your business is like how you're operating it but the main business kind of two or three things that are operating within the business if you try and match that to your hobbies like the quantity that would be a good balance that is a great idea honestly thank you for that I'm going to text you and see if you do it.

54:36No, but because I was thinking about that. I'm very mathematical about everything. And, you know, the reason why I asked you about the D's is because my young brain truly was just numbers. And I know it sounds really weird now because now I can understand the rest of the world very much better. But at a younger age, all I could understand was mathematics. and to have come from that into a world where I now can have so many hobbies and so many engagements and so on. So when I was looking at my current life saying maybe by 60, 62, whatever, can I reach 50, 50, like 50 days, 50 % of work and 50 % of retreats and silence and hobbies and so on.

55:17And it's possible, you know, it doesn't mean I will do less. I'll probably end up being doing more you'll be so productive when you work if you nail the other side of it if the other side was you scrolling on your phone and eating crap maybe not good if the other side is healthy behavior it's gonna up your ability exactly so so we focused a lot on dopamine i want to talk about oxytocin in a world where loneliness is becoming an epidemic what's happening here why are we unable to put the phone down and go hug someone dopamine is a really powerful chemical so it's kind of overriding our capacity to desire the oxytocin and again we're getting a very strong message that we're doing the wrong thing like a feeling of loneliness and low level of like love in your life if that emotion isn't really strong like oxytocin is love effectively and and for context oxytocin most predominantly release in the moment of birth so the mom and the baby have this massive surge amongst their brains in that moment of birth and it pair bonds them then you go through breastfeeding and physical touch and cuddles and then you go into like being an infant family relationships and friends and then romantic love and all of that just drives this human connection within us and I feel like humans are effectively so addicted to the dopamine that's overriding our capacity to get hold of the oxytocin but when we get hold of it we really feel the importance of it like in COVID for example eventually like that first lockdown was kind of like novel and everyone's like wow what's going on everyone's hooked on the news and like it was actually quite a high dopamine experience of like curiosity within society i think in the first one by the second and third one it started to get pretty boring and pretty lonely and that loneliness and that like urge society had to like oh my god we can all go out and see each other and we're allowed to hug each other and that like strong feeling we all had in those lockdowns to go and see our friends and family that was oxytocin that was pulling us towards each other and we spent much of lockdown for example just engaging in dopamine alcohol sugar phones and so on and like it is powerful oxytocin and it's really important you start like consciously thinking like am i stimulating this chemical like do i have enough connection in my life and even for example like if you're a married couple and you're sitting on the sofa every evening either end of the sofa both on your phones with the tv on there's no oxytocin at all there whereas even if you want to have the tv on it's fun to watch tv if you could just sit next to each other and not have your phones like oxytocin is going to connect through your bodies and it's important we get conscious of it if i were asked to you know to prioritize anything honestly i i know for a fact that one thing that could lead to a lot more happiness is to force ourselves into oxytocin into into a human connection of some form agreed and i have to say it's becoming it's almost unimaginable for the younger generations that this thing exists and and i think for the older generations because of the pressures of life and having to go to work and so on and so forth and the monotonous rate of life we're just sort of almost giving up on it when you talk about gamification are there practices that you believe we can gamify challenge let's give people a challenge to 100 yeah that's where yeah i definitely love this side of things so we have these five core behaviors in oxytocin i can give like a really simple challenge on each of them first behavior is called contribution and we all have like a warm feeling inside when we support someone else like if you do anything kind of someone else you suddenly get this buzzing feeling within you and that's oxytocin it's rewarding you for contributing to the wider group effectively and that's so imperative to our hunter-gatherer survival that we have this desire to not only focus on ourselves so the first one would just be can today like in the next like 10 hours after listening to this podcast those people that are listening do some kind of random act of kindness for someone else like can you consciously do something there's nothing to do with benefiting you and that could be sitting and listening to someone for a while it could be asking a barista in a coffee shop how's your day going it could be helping someone with something picking someone up taking someone's dog for a walk but something that consciously supports someone else is actually going to increase oxytocin in you and them and that's the goal is both of us so that's one physical touch is massive and when we've looked into different bits of research and how valuable can actually be to physically connect with one another.

59:34We've seen that if someone can average seven hugs a day, there is actually substantial benefits to human health. So you could have a conscious desire today to hug more people. That one really can't be underestimated. Like teenage girls in schools is a group that I'm really trying to help as much as I can with this dose stuff. They really struggle with confidence and friendships and bullying and all that kind of stuff. Self-belief, image. We get them completing this challenge, but in the live interactive session they all like hug one another and I suggest to them right everyone has this there's this interactive software they put in their score of how many hugs they're getting a day it's always like an average of one a day and then they all have to hug one another and as I suggest it to them they all look at me like oh my god why has he suggested that like I don't I feel awkward and I don't want to do that and then they all hug one another reluctantly then after like two minutes they're all like buzzing and smiling jumping around they all look back at me and I say like look how valuable that was you're all suddenly so happy even though you thought that wasn't something of value to you.

1:00:32And then we get many messages from young girls saying, like, just coming into school and hugging my friends has made me feel more accepted by my friendship group and more confident in myself and so on. So hugs, whether you're young or older, is powerful. Why is it in society that we've refused that now? Is it because we're afraid of, like, what physical touch might lead to? Why are we not? I mean, I'm a serious hugger. Like, I hug anything, right? but it's it's in western societies it's a little less accepted somehow isn't it i do see that i think over definitely threw us through a bit of a ring on physical contact and i think there is like some underlying kind of like awkwardness between society now because i just don't think humans are in their natural form i don't i don't think we're operating in our fully natural state and i think uh for many reasons like amongst this conversation and therefore i think physical touch one of those things has become like maybe uncomfortable for some people and i think it's very important that it's something you just like constantly consciously reintegrate and like if you're raising a young family right now for example like the amount of physical touch you end up desiring as a human is very very much based on how much you experience as a young young baby that's correct and if you've got young kids even if you're not someone that loves physical touch if you can start cuddling them they're going to become someone that craves it and gives it to more people and shares that like feeling of physical love and as we like go on this like more robotic human journey like these are basic things that humans just can't give up on like we need it we need to physically interact like that elbowing each other when we saw each other in covid where we had touched elbows like it felt wrong it felt like we need to just hug one another please and uh it's like just give it to me i'm fine i'm i'm gonna cough that's fine yeah it's fine so you're saying five experiences five uh you know we said physical touch we said contribution yes third card is called social life this is the third challenge and it's very simply just making sure you engage in some way socially every day and the main component of that is making sure you consider what's called active listening so that in a conversation rather than kind of while someone's talking to you you are constantly thinking about what you're going to say next you actually consciously like listen and then respond and it's a very different form of conversation when people do that with one another so really active listening with people that are really into their tech and spending their time on tech there's also this fascinating study i found when writing the book that had two individuals texting one another on their phones and measured their oxytocin release and they had zero and as soon as those two people called one another oxytocin began to release so even if you're going to connect via the tech for your social life challenge it's really important to be on facetime or calling or at a minimum voice notes because the sound of the voice is actually really important to the release of the hormone so you've got your contribution challenge physical touch a social challenge today to engage socially fourth one is gratitude which i'm sure you're very familiar with it's powerful for the human being i think one of the most imperative components of gratitude in our world today is that we're living so deeply in states of envy and jealousy in comparison to one another and if comparison is constantly thinking about what you don't have grassroot is basically thinking about what you do and it's a very important counterbalance to engage otherwise you're going to live in like just a constant state of dissatisfaction which isn't going to feel very nice so some grateful thoughts or we run this often with families in schools whereby families try and engage in a conversation around the dinner table where each person kind of shares what they're feeling happy about at the moment and grateful for and it becomes a discussion which is powerful and the final challenge is oxytocin doesn't just release when you engage love with one another it actually it releases when we engage love with ourself as well and we all have a relationship with ourself that relationship can be very unloving and very tough and critical and and not very kind and it's really important to be able to just say kind things to yourself and i found this so much when i first started trying to get myself healthy i tried to get off my phone in the mornings and we go on these quiet walks in the morning in nature without my phone and I was so bored and I was so critical in my head of myself it was a horrible experience to be honest but I had this feeling of like out here in the quiet there are like answers that need to be listened to effectively like messages that need to be listened to and eventually after like days and days of doing this I started thinking like I can't just be a bastard to myself every day in my head like it's too it's too upsetting talking to myself like this so I started this process of just like can I at least say one kind of and we call this card achievements kind of just celebrate one achievement and it can be anything made my bed got off my phone did something nice for someone and they started this daily process which I've now done every day for like three or four years where it's just like you do your grateful thought and then you go into like just celebrating one achievement from the previous day and it begins to build a different style of conversation in your head like if you had a parent that was really critical of their kid that would be like one of those are like not necessarily that lovely dynamics between that parent and kid the pet the kid might not like them and so on and we are like that with ourself in our head like super tough on ourself and critical and then you might not really like yourself and you want to build a friendship with yourself and therefore saying good job for doing this thing to yourself it begins that conversation of kindness so contribute to someone physical touch a social engagement a grateful thought or celebration of an achievement they would definitely boom the oxy if you do one of those i have to say the world is i i'm less concerned about the world when someone like you is in it That's really, really cool.

1:06:04Can I stay on oxytocin for a minute? Yeah, for sure. You know, when it comes to love and romantic relationships, I find that in today's world, there is a tendency to sort of prove oneself right rather than to maximize oxytocin for everyone. Okay. Let me try to explain this because I find I'm developing with my wonderful wife, Hannah, what used to be called Finding Love, my book about love and romance, she looked at it and she said, that's wonderful, but you're not taking psychology into consideration at all. And a lot of the mechanics that I describe, she says, is triggered from our scripts as children and how we view ourselves.

1:06:51And so part of what we're looking at is that idea of if you maximize oxytocin, and a lot of the conversations will be easier. So rather than get into an argument with the objective of proving yourself correct, and accordingly the other person wrong, can you go into a conversation where you're trying to make them feel good about themselves and feel good about this connection? And often you may not even need to get into the argument because you know what, it's not even important. Like I love you so much, you're wonderful anyway. we've lost that in our not only in romantic relationships i i believe in every relationship especially relationships online where all that we're trying to do is to prove ourselves right not be kind to others can you see where that i mean where is that in a natural tendency that ego of trying to be right rather than trying to connect i think that's yeah that's an interesting question i think there's kind of two things at play one is we as a society are becoming pretty hooked on being right about things because of the divisiveness of social media so we're beginning to kind of almost get addicted to that experience of being right and that actually really plays out on social media part of the way in which the social media algorithms are designed is they will help you develop a perspective on something and then they'll send you more videos on it because you get greater dopamine hits if your belief system is affirmed so then you'll be like oh i really believe this and then you'll see a video that's very much on the other side and you'll think those people are stupid and i'm very right and that's like why we are very divided as societies because we're getting so clearly shown messages that are different from one another so i think there's a like an underlying impact of society and technology that's making us seek to be right and then i think when it comes to oxytocin in this situation like there of actually trying to be right i think it's so important to understand that from purely an oxytocin perspective one of the deepest desires we have as a human is basically to feel seen and as a baby literally that means as logically as our parent is looking at us and making sure they're not being eaten by something and and like as a baby yeah it's important it's a very important survival mechanism and even like if for example you measure the oxytocin in a baby's brain you'll see that if they can hear their primary caregiver's voice oxytocin releases because of a feeling of safety that that person is near them and i think often in arguments one of the greatest challenges we can have in a relationship is like not feeling like our perspective is seen and i think it's if you're definitely arguing with someone that's proving themselves trying to prove themselves to be right you're definitely not going to have your perspective seen and i think in conversations like it's super important to just like slow things down a bit and if there's a really complicated thing you're trying to solve i'd definitely advise like getting yourself into a natural environment to try and solve it because the body's just going to be much better out there or maybe to your garden room everyone can go for sessions in the garden room you can chop around the outside and if they can help with the work yeah that would probably calm their relationship but i think the objective really needs to shift to like how much can i try and understand this person's point of view even if you think you are right and maybe you are right in this specific negotiation it's just important like for that individual to feel like okay my perspective has been seen and the likelihood of you coming to a good conclusion of that conversation is much higher and And I think it's really important to just think about that in general.

1:10:18Like when you're engaging with another human, how much are you making that person feel seen? Like I think sometimes I see this like in friends and conversations, like people can be so self-focused now where like it feels that everything is about their experience. And I think social media has done that to us because we all suddenly have these profiles where we constantly see our own name and our own pictures. And like we're so focused on ourselves, whereas prior to the Internet, you didn't really see yourself. so effectively you were just like focused on whatever was in front of you and it was likely the other people in the world we basically flipped on its head to the main focus in our life is ourself rather than the group and i think whenever you're with people like really making a conscious effort to make sure they're seen and you ask them great questions about their life and families and work and all that sort of stuff things very important in a negotiation and an argument but also in general relationships for maximizing the oxy you're a child of the internet yeah for sure And you're using it so well and you're, you know, you're learning from it so well.

1:11:18If I told you that I have a switch that can make it disappear tomorrow, would you prefer that word? Oh, that's so interesting.

1:11:30No, my gut feeling is no. I think. And I depends how far if you could if you click a switch and go back to hunter gatherers, I think I'd potentially take that. Seriously. yeah i think society would be happier and healthier if we were in that state and i think like the kind of objective as a humanist to like have a good experience and like contribute to others and i think that would be very fulfilled if we were this is such a profound point to put to put into conversation so all of the progress we've made so far futile well it's not that i don't think it's incredible like i think i have so much admiration for every bit of progress we've made and medicine and transport and like every education i think it's phenomenal what we've done but i think if you yeah i just i find when i watch these shows of humans living in the original way i think and i think what we can get caught up on is like when we think back in time people's brains look back on like 100 or 200 years ago when there were like plagues and like life was carnage back then so comparatively to then yeah this world is extremely good and safe and clean and healthy definitely compares like a few hundred years ago but if you jump really far back like we didn't really have disease and stuff out in the wild because humans weren't close enough together to form disease and germs and like everything was very clean and stuff so i do think that life would have been a very fulfilling magical experience very like spiritual experience connected to like death and life and i do think it would have been pretty cool i do the question you asked me when i turn the internet off the reason i'm probably suggesting no is i think there is so much wisdom and education to be like shared through that media yes and what i would probably prefer is we didn't necessarily have social media but we just had more had kind of youtube type platform i was going to say exactly that i would turn the whole thing off but youtube yeah like yeah video education and like i like written education like if youtube had that kind of feature as well i think that that kind of thing is fantastic podcast all that kind of stuff i think uh the kind of profiles and seeking for like that kind of yeah validation and stuff which obviously i'm in that world of seeking for that kind of thing i think that's quite complicated so yeah yeah maybe keep the videos and cut the other stuff tell me i'm not going to tell anyone other than the few tens of thousands listening are you also addicted to those uh living off the grid videos on youtube yeah they're cool oh my god all the time i watched a video of a guy building his like uh cabin in costa rica the other day yes and it looked so cool he was fully off grid and he like created some clever like system with water and that kind of stuff yeah i i i literally daydream about which tools i'll take with me i think is like because you're you're a thriving human in this world and you would have probably just been an exceptionally good hunter gatherer like when i sit across from people because i spend so much time in this like deep visualization of this world and because i have these different like ocds and stuff like i am so hyper fixated in my brain on this idea i spend basically 12 hours a day thinking through this lens and when i'm with people i almost see people in their hunter-gatherer form where i can imagine you as a good hunter you you you stay in the cave you stay back but like and as hunter-gatherers like the term would then linger just hunting but there's so many required skills in order for that group to thrive and like i can imagine you in that kind of construction of the tribe world whereby like all of the huts and stuff and yeah yeah i'd be the mechanic it's like everyone would bring yeah they'd bring back their arrows and their you know their spears and everything and i go like yeah not balanced i'll balance this one for you 100 % not balanced and things you would have done that and like that i mean like if you imagine like you're waking up every day and you were doing that with your daytime and then you also had like a family and a partner you were connecting with and you were eating only healthy natural food you were sleeping and you're like you would feel so good so like it and that is my my whole goal is like as we go more and more advanced like how do we just like really build that instinctive part of ourselves how do we satisfy that urge and then i think humans can go into this like next phase feeling good and optimistic about like all the innovation that's going to come as a result of it and the abundance the opportunity to work in new ways and stuff but i think this whole body and brain needs to be very happy with how it's being treated and like getting as close to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle as possible is the way to do that i could talk to you forever honestly i mean i think we should just let everyone else go and keep going yeah we could i'm happy to do i mean this is so honestly we covered so much ground and also some of those points are so so deep to think about that idea of balancing the dose You know, I really love where you're coming from on this.

1:16:21It's accepting the fact that situations and circumstances will trigger a hormonal imbalance within you. And that your need for those hormones in your body will drive you to do behaviors that are not always good for you. And that there is a way for you to actually get those hormones in a healthy way. It's a bit of an addictive approach to it, I have to say. But it's a very healthy addiction. it's almost like being addicted to working out the interesting thing with the phrase addiction is my absolute favorite kind of definition comes from andrew huberman and yes he describes addiction as the progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure and when you are addicted to stuff whether it's like your phone or social media or porn or alcohol like very quickly that becomes your primary pleasure source and everything else feels kind of crap in in comparison and then they describe a good life as the progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure and that would be the opposite of addiction and although like i framed it in a way whereby people are trying to complete levels and go through these kind of processes and getting dopamine hits we are really trying to expand all the things that are going to bring someone pleasure in their life so they're getting pleasure from nature and people and food and sleep and cleaning and like all these like core things humans need to be operating well and if you can expand what brings you joy instead of it just being your phone and your unhealthy dinner then you're going to feel way happier it's been three months in the making i i i texted you the very first time when susie told me about you three months ago oh my god it's been worth the wait thank you man this has been such a joyful conversation so mind-opening uh yeah i probably will demand that i buy you coffee every now and then and just think what you're doing what you're going through and what you're thinking about you're an amazing amazing young man i'd love that i'm so honored that i met you this was a wonderful conversation thank you so much for being here thank you so much for having me man absolutely beautiful and everyone honestly i keep thanking you for giving me the chance to meet so many incredible humans and and i have to say tj just blew my mind today so many things to think about and uh you know disappointing in a way that i'm so old and yet i have to discover all of that new stuff.

1:18:36In any case, I am very, very grateful that you're here. I'm very grateful that you're listening. I would definitely urge you to follow TJ. His contribution on social media is always positive, is always a plus for your life. So this is the part of social media that's good for you. Otherwise, let's all hold hands and pray that all of social media disappears other than YouTube, podcasts and e-books. I think we would have a much better life that way. Actually, let's have all of podcasts disappear, but this one, I think this one, that would give me a significant advantage. Whatever it is that you're doing today, please look at your activities and find healthy ways to find mental health balance.