E532 Dr. Tara Swart

27:48And then I help people to create an affirmation that's the opposite of that belief. Yeah, because sometimes it's like the thought will be, man, this isn't good enough. And it goes back to the belief that, you know, I would always set my goals ridiculous. So always I felt like I was underachieving, always. Because I had, I don't even know what my goals were, but I just knew that I needed to get my mother's attention. I needed to get some feeling. I needed to get some response, right? And I would try everything. And so, and nothing worked. And so I think it may, it created this thing inside of me where you always have to keep trying.

28:27There's never a piece. You have to keep trying and it's always never going to work. Yeah. Everything you do will never be enough. Yes. Just to even get that minimal piece of attention from your primary caregiver. Yeah. Yeah. Everything I do will never be enough. And so it started is it then that kind of went through my life, I guess, you know. So have you heard of a part of the brain called the amygdala? Yeah. So this is where all our basic emotions come from. Like caveman stuff, huh? Yeah. Yeah. And there's that movie, I think it's called Free Solo about the guy who climbs like a crazy vertical cliff face in Yosemite.

29:02Oh, yeah. That guy's really interesting. Have you seen his brain scan? No. Okay, so they found out that basically he doesn't really have an amygdala or any activity in his amygdala, so he can't feel fear. And that's why he'll do things that you and I would be like, I'm not going to do that because I'm going to die if I do that. Yeah. Yeah. My buddy Jeff was like that. Yeah, he would just burn a lot of shit in his house and stuff. And he was just an idiot. Oh, wow, this is that guy's brain scan? This is so cool that you do this, by the way. Yeah, it's neat to be able to see things, you know. Wow, so he doesn't have a fear.

29:40So some people have less fear than other people. So fear is actually our most basic emotion. And in this movie, in this documentary, they showed that the reason he could do these crazy things was because he wasn't experiencing fear. But in similar research, we see that female primates who have damage, physical damage to their amygdala, will neglect or even physically abuse their babies. so what's becoming interesting now is that this psychological stuff like you say I think my mom had some form of emotional autism it's becoming much more aligned to physiological stuff so kind of now we say anything biological probably has a psychological element and anything psychological you know may be underpinned by some kind of neurological issue so you know it's perhaps too late to investigate that but it just makes the point that there are so many reasons she could have been like that and none of them are actually to do with you.

30:35Right. Um, yeah, because as a youth, you think it's your, yeah, when you're, of course, when you're a baby or a kid, you, everything, the world revolves around you. So if the world isn't giving you any, a lot of stuff back, then you think it's your fault, you know? And so that's where you create ideas like, oh, I'm not enough. Nothing I ever do will be enough, you know? Um, and how do you think this has played out in your relationships with women throughout your life? It's been tough, I think. You know, it's been tough. I remember I would be like, I didn't know how long to look at a girl when you when you looked at them, you know, I didn't I would get super nervous.

31:12I remember like in my 20s, if there was like intimacy or something, you know, I got super it made me super nervous. I always felt nervous. It gave me like, yeah, sexual problems because just the mistrust. Like I think just not knowing how to be around somebody, those types of things for sure. And then I think fear, like I put women on a pedestal a lot of times. you know it was like if they were always kind of unattainable in a way inside of me you know it's like oh I'm not going to get a girl that I want I'm just going to get a girl that you know I hope the best that a girl will want me right so that was kind of maybe some of my some thought patterns those aren't all the things that I have today you know some of that is certainly eroded and I've learned a lot over the years and stuff but those are some of the things I think if that's what you're asking about yeah I mean it makes sense because it's basically a mirror of you know no matter what I did I couldn't get my mom's attention so women must be so far away I won't be able to get their attention yeah and then if one did I would like kind of I would be overbearing kind of sometimes you know I just you learn all that kind of stuff the hard way then you're like you know if a girl looks at you one time or even like you know Even if she's just taking her garbage out or whatever and you're hiding in the bushes or whatever.

32:46But even if she looks over, you're like, damn, this might be something real. I would fantasize. Before I'd even – I would adjust kind of my plans. I was like, I'm going to go out of town. But then I'd seen this girl. I was like, maybe I'll stay in town a few extra days. Maybe I'll see this girl again. Just like very – I kind of based a lot of my life around the hope that there would be some connection. So that kind of stuff I think wasn't very healthy. And then when I did get a connection with a woman, I couldn't do it. It was too much. It was very hard to lock in on a relationship. I'd always find myself cheating, that sort of thing.

33:28Have you heard about this hormone called oxytocin? Yeah. Yeah. So actually, the way that we build the emotional architecture in our brains is through eye contact with our mom. So you didn't have that. And you also didn't get physical affection, which, you know, your mother holding you or kind of, you know, cuddling you would induce oxytocin. And that would help to build healthy neural architecture in your emotional system. So you didn't have that. No, the architecture was very limited. It was luckily, it was a damn, you know, it was more of a Hardee's. I felt like that somebody had built a Tim Hortons inside of me.

34:05it was very yeah it was just a you know it was just like more of a kebab shack you know then it was like a real fixture of love it felt like you know i was going to say i don't know what tim hortons is so i couldn't just kind of like a drive-through establishment okay you know it wasn't a real place of like uh you know there wasn't a ton of value like in the architecture I don't think. And in your life now, whether it's through friends, family, pets, um, you know, sometimes even things like bathing or getting a massage, how much physical affection do you get? Um, well, it's weird. Cause I kind of created a life that's kind of isolating sometimes.

34:47Um, because I think that's maybe what I was used to. And then, uh, but now it's gotten better. I go do get more massages. I find myself, I am able to lock in a little bit more on communication with women. I feel more confident. You know, I've been like done therapy for a long time. I did some ayahuasca seminars, things like that. So plant medicine. So there's been things that I think have helped me, you know? Okay. So for people who are lonely, because I think this is a, you know, an issue as well at the moment, bathing instead of showering actually gives you oxytocin because you're enveloped in warmth.

35:20It's kind of like a hug. So that's one thing that people can do. Oh, yeah. When you get out of a warm bath, you're just like, oh, man, you know? Yeah. You almost feel like a baby kind of. Do you think this is the reason that you sleep with the air conditioning on so high and so that you're wrapped up in lots of blankets? It could be. Oh, I notice if I don't tuck the blanket under my feet, then it's very hard for me to sleep. So I'm still, yeah, I'm definitely a very tall baby. I think you know yeah I think so so that's okay I have to remember that sometimes you know yeah I mean I'm in like recovery programs and they're always like we're all babies we're just retarded or not I don't know if people say we're just babies that are having a tough time you know like if you saw a baby smoking or drinking a coffee you'd be like god this baby he isn't doing well the baby was taking like propitia or something like god this baby needs some help.

36:19So yeah, I'm one of those babies, but I'm getting better. I feel like I'm a kind of a, I'm like, now I'm like a camp counselor of the babies, you know, I'm not as much, you know, I'm still kind of a baby, but I'm, I'm evolving out of it pretty quick. I hope. So another tip for you, I'm pleased to hear that you're having massages and therapy, but I find that there's a place that talking therapy can't go beyond. And that is trauma that is stored in the body that you're not even consciously aware of. Have you heard of that book, The Body Keeps the Score? Yeah. So it was written in the 70s, but it's back in the bestseller list, which is making me feel hopeful that more people are realizing that since the pandemic that we've got trauma stored in our bodies.

37:00So I've actually recently been doing some somatic therapy called body realignment. And it seemed to be for me surfacing emotions that I perhaps don't allow myself to in talking therapy or in regular life. I think there are some emotions, for example, anger that it's quite still socially unacceptable for women to express. That's a good point. Yeah. Women aren't allowed to get super angry, I guess. When I did boxing, I actually felt like I released a lot of anger as well. I can only do that physically, whether it's through a sport or this kind of body thing. And I think for men, And it might be things more like sadness that it's not socially acceptable to express as much.

37:42Yeah, probably so. I think a little bit. Even though it's more now, I think people are kind of, now everything's a little bit more free. What type of trauma really can get held in our bodies? Oh, all sorts. So that phrase psychosomatic is that all the various emotions that we can feel can end up showing up as physical symptoms in our body. and that can be actual illness but also it can just be aches and pains for me it's like tense shoulders and just aches and pains and but when I actually had the body realignment therapy there were parts of my body that I wouldn't even think like kind of like the size of my ribs and things that was so painful and the therapists they know which parts of your body can you know certain emotions get stored in so I think for that one you really have to find someone that can guide you through that.

38:34But another point that I really wanted to make is we talk a lot about trauma. And like you set such a great example to people of don't just keep focusing on the trauma and be a victim. I actually think we have as much access to generational healing as we do to generational trauma. So horrific things have happened in the past, like the Holocaust, apartheid, slavery, the treatment of the first Americans. Yeah, France won in the World Cup as well, some people would say. That was bad. That was pretty...

39:12Yeah, well, it will affect people for generations into the future. Yeah, totally. Some people it will. But what were you going to say? So I was going to say that we can also get access to ancestral or ancient wisdom. And if we put that together with the somatic stuff, Think about what our ancestors did when they didn't really have resources spare to have fun, right? But they danced, they drummed, they chanted, they hummed, they sang, they painted. These physical activities are actually really good for us and can help us to release some of that stored trauma. So I'd love people to go away with that message that, yes, you might have stored trauma that talking therapy hasn't completely got rid of.

39:52But there are things that you can do at home. You don't have to pay for a massage. You can do self-massage. You can take a bath. You can dance around your living room. And all of these things could also help you to release that kind of trauma. Yeah. Yeah, I've noticed there will be times where I've done yoga and a certain thing, and then I'll lay down after it, and tears will come out of my face. Really? And it's just pain, something being released. sometimes a memory or something might be with it or a feeling, but it's, it's, yeah, it's pretty amazing that that kind of thing can happen. In yoga, hip opening particularly releases a lot of emotions.

40:24So again, people can Google some, some of the like hip opening poses and you're supposed to stay in them for longer, like five minutes. And if it produces tears, then it's definitely helping release trauma. Yeah. I feel like we've kind of been all over the place right now. I want to talk, so let's go through a couple of things. So I want to know, like, does stress affect men and women the same? This is a really interesting one. So there are different forms of stress. One is called adaptive stress, and it's actually a very healthy response to a short-term stressor like a deadline or a podcast interview or something.

40:59And then there's the chronic stress, which is bad for us because it starts to erode our immunity. It causes a lot of inflammation throughout the body. But the differences between men and women aren't with regard to those. It's with regard to how we respond to being in either of those situations. So men, and all of this is based on population norm studies, so it's most men and most women, but not all. Men are very good at reacting to a crisis and, you know, releasing all of that cortisol and adrenaline and fighting off the monster or whatever it is, but they have to rest afterwards. Women can actually find ways to recoup resilience during long periods of stress.

41:41So they'll still be dealing with the stressful thing, but at times they'll find, you know, whether it's speaking with a girlfriend or taking a bath or, you know, going for a walk in nature, they find ways to keep their resources topped up. So they don't have that crash that like more men tend to have. I wonder sometimes if a lot of like, um, cause we have so many, everybody feels so stressed out and it seems like it's such a thing, you know? I wonder if sometimes I think like it used to be, we had to literally like be weary of like a lying attack in us, you know, it was like really fight or flight.

42:15Like it was, but now that's not the case, right? But I wonder, I wonder if that, that thing that was worried about everything out here just started to go inside of us because there wasn't anything else out here to fight really. Yeah, absolutely. The biggest threats to our safety now are psychological threats. So things like your partner leaving you, you losing your job, your friends not liking you anymore. Yeah, the fears started to become internal as opposed to external. And I wonder if we're partially just in a phase of that. You know, like we're evolved, you know, it's almost like an evolution because, yeah, the lions now are the fears inside of us.

42:54Like you're saying, our partner leaving us or us losing our ability to feed our families or a goal that we have not working out or something, losing a job. Yeah. Yeah. The things that you need to kind of keep your basic life on the road that it's on, you know, not lose the things that make you feel psychologically safe. Are you less stressful if you're in a relationship? Does relationships or like love having somebody, a family, does that affect stress at all? It depends what kind of relationship, right? So yeah, if it's an interdependent trusting relationship where, you know, both parties are in it for the long term, then that inevitably will reduce your stress levels.

43:37But I mean, what I'm seeing a lot of at the moment, actually, is as women, we tend to be having the same conversations that, you know, whether you're in your 20s, 30s, 40s, whatever, of kind of, you know, want to find a nice man and settle down. but just feeling like that desire for commitment isn't the same as it was, you know, basically since there have been apps and stuff like that. But I've actually got some really close male friends, and they've been confiding in me recently that, A, they don't really talk to each other about deep things like they do with me, and that some of them have no one to confide in.

44:16Wow. Wow. And, you know, lovely guys who I think would make, you know, nice husbands for some of my friends, but have been so broken by toxic relationships that they've been in that they now just want noncommittal, casual relationships. and this is where the problem starts is where a guy says let's say it was you and I and you say Tara I've had all these issues I've just told you about my upbringing mummy issues etc I can't commit to you but you know we can hang out but if I'm thinking well you know I'd like to marry you so I'm going to hang out with you in the hope that you'll get to know me and like me and change your mind that happens so much and then it leads to issues obviously for both parties when it doesn't work out.

45:02So that's an incredibly stressful place to be in, no matter what gender you are. And the outcome only reinforces for both that you're not worthy of love. Yeah. How does it reinforce that? So for the woman, particularly if they're actually being intimate, she will be experiencing a lot of oxytocin. Basically that happens through cuddling and physical intimacy, but like off the scale when you orgasm. So she'll be getting more and more bonded to the guy. If the guy has no intentions of this becoming a committed relationship, then he'll be experiencing a lot of reward, like the dopamine, the reward chemical, lots of testosterone.

45:47And there's also this hormone called vasopressin, which in both genders is to do with our blood volume and our blood salt. But for men, it's also to do with bonding, social bonding and aggression. But aggression in terms of protecting and being possessive of your partner. And so if men don't get to have sex straight away, that hormone will build and build and build, and then they'll become bonded to the woman. And then they'll also start releasing oxytocin when they orgasm. So there's better value in creating a relationship if you don't have sex immediately. It will work better for the woman in terms of chances of the man bonding with her, yeah.

46:26Yeah, it's like, I feel like sometimes I romanticize the past and it feels like that used to be more of the thing, like people would wait till marriage for sex. And so that had a lot more value to it. Like, yeah, I think sex and animacies kind of like was, I don't know, for a lot of guys, it got replaced by pornography too, I think really damaged it, especially for me. Once I found pornography, there was like a way to have a feeling, a connection with a woman that was safe enough for me to be in. I knew I wasn't going to be hurt. There was some sexual reward to it. And I could start it and stop it as I wish.

47:09And it was the only kind of relationship I could even really handle. I was in other relationships, but none of them were as long as my relationship with pornography, to be honest. Yeah. um yeah and now right now i'm like i think i'm 77 days off of pornography and 70 days off of masturbation so i've had um sexual activities but i haven't um been you know uh touching my wiener or whatever people just say different stuff but you know i'm saying like i don't know what they say in your country you know topping off the wanking yeah okay wanking yeah yeah yeah yeah know thinking of the queen or whatever they say you know i don't know what they say um queen takes rook or whatever that's like a chess move but um yeah so that's been kind of different you know for me that's been different but that was a that was a huge thing how is it different well for one i quit thinking about it it's like i don't think about pornography i don't think about like masturbation i don't have that weird feeling where like i'll masturbate and then i'll just right where i was but i've like kind of ejaculated or whatever because like sometimes like like semen or some people call it what i don't know what people call it or whatever like party sauce or whatever i don't even know if people call it you know on the street or whatever but like i feel like the more i keep it in my body the more masculine i feel right and the more of myself i feel as opposed to just having a leak of it constantly you know it's kind of like almost had a leak of my masculinity and I would cause the leak, but the leak would happen.

48:48And it was just like a dripping pipe. It was like, you look at a dripping pipe, you're like, ah, you know, but you look at a pipe that's not dripping. You're like, Hey, this is some pretty good construction. I love that phrase, leak of my masculinity. So yeah, that's kind of what it felt like, you know, now that I really think about it. And then, um, I start to look at women a little bit. I don't think of it just so much in, in, I've always thought of women in more than just a sexual sense, but the sexual part isn't as strong. It's not like, let me just think about sex. It's given me a little bit more space in myself to be like, well, let me think about who this person is and do I really want to engage with them?

49:24It starts to give a little bit more value to sex for me. And by that happening, intimacy is kind of created because for one, I have a little more intimacy with myself. Right. It's like, um, I respect my intimacy a little bit more. I'm not just masturbating. I'm not just like, you know, tossing my intimacy off to some person through a screen or something that doesn't really mean anything to me. And so I think those are some feelings in my head that start to, um, to, to happen. And in my, I start to feel a little bit more, I don't know if it's integrity, but it is a little bit more sense of intimacy with myself.

50:01that's lovely so one of the reasons that people resort to things like that particularly after a breakup is that the brain circuitry that is to do with unrequited love is relieved by certain activities because they cause the same kind of chemical cocktail and those activities are things like alcohol cocaine pornography yeah um yeah yeah sorry yeah well it makes it make sense right Right. This is why people go to those things. Yeah. And obviously they're, they're addictive. So then it becomes something that you need to do more of to get the same reward. Right. And that becomes your relationship.

50:41Yeah. Yeah. And so then it's like, well, yeah, of course other relationships are going to be different because I don't even realize the relationships that I put in front of. And the other thing is that pornography creates such an unrealistic idealized version of what a woman should look like and what she should be prepared to do in an intimate relationship or even not in an intimate relationship, you know, like in a one-night stand or very early in dating, that that's very damaging to male and female relationships as well. You know, the expectation that you will naturally have if you've been looking at that every day.

51:15Oh, yeah. And to not have it in my brain and my imagination starts to start up again. Like that's one thing that's disappeared over the years, I feel like, is our imagination because we have access at anything you want to see. You want to see two gay guys attack a squirrel or whatever in a marina or whatever. But you can Google it right now and you'll find it. Anything you want to find out there, it's like we don't need our imagination. We used to have to imagine things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so now my imagination starts to start up again because I'm not attaching porn to women I meet now. And there, right there, squirrel attacks twink right there.

51:59That is. Yeah, I don't know. And that might have been the rebuttal. Who knows where the first attack started. But yeah, so that's something that's been really neat just on this recently that I've been doing. And really seeing some reward from it. And you know what's so crazy? For years I tried different blockers on computers and stuff. And I got started with this kind of recovery coach. And he just said, why don't you text me at night? And he said, tell me something that felt good during your day. Tell me something you felt like maybe you could have done a little bit differently. And then tell me how long you've been off of porn and how long you've been off of masturbation.

52:40That's for some reason, that's all it took. And it's just been so easy. Well, it's accountability. Maybe that's it. It's like accountability with somebody that I trust. or yeah, that I trust. And that you respect because you will feel like you've let them down if you can't send those messages. That's a good point. Yeah, it's funny. I didn't feel that as much, but I did. I just felt I was shocked at how easy it started to help me, you know. So that's one thing that's been really nice. Do couples, what is the chemistry that happens in the brain if you're in a, like, if you've created a, you're in a comfortable relationship or you mentioned earlier that, like, families have better chemistry if they sleep together.

53:30Did you say something like that? Or sleeping under one roof, you know? Like, a lot of my Mexican friends are always so happy and most of their families live together. Intergenerational. Yeah, oh, they sleep on each other's backs sometimes. They just, you know, they're really close-knit. Yeah, yeah. Um, what is it? Is there, is there scientific evidence to back any of that up? Yeah, lots. And the research was done on, um, prairie voles. Prairie, like little animals? Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Bring up one, prairie dog. Vole, not dog. Prairie vole, they call them. Y 'all make everything fancy. We know what they are.

54:05It's not a dog. It's like a little mouse thing. Oh, it is? Well. Let's see who's right. See? Oh, prairie vole. I've never seen that. Oh, dang, that's rodentia. Yeah. Wow. Is that a, oh, that almost looks like a little bit of a hamster or something or a little gerbil. Gerbil. Yeah, you don't have them. You got them. Gerbil. Oh, it's pronounced, I guess that maybe the J is silent or whatever. It's not a J. That gerbil, baby, look at them. Those are a couple. I'll make slippers out of them bad boys. I'll make a newborn a set of slippers with them little warm, them little chunks of warmth. Make your slippers out of the marsh voles because they are promiscuous.

54:46These ones are monogamous. They mate for life. Oh, they do? Oh, that's beautiful. And so they studied them and they found out that these are healthier animals? Is that what you're going to tell me? That's a little bit oversimplified. Okay. I would say that the research, so basically they're the same kind of vole, but some of them live in the prairie and some of them live in the marsh. Okay. And in the marsh, there's plenty of food and shelter. So, you know, why not have sex with lots of other she-vols? Because you can. It's partying. It's like being in the city. Yeah. In the prairie, to make sure that your young would survive, it's more advantageous for you to settle down with one Mrs.

55:24Vol and protect the children, protect the territory, and share the job of finding food for them. So what happens in the prairie vols compared to the marsh vols is that certain receptors, so for some of the hormones we discussed, like oxytocin and vasopressin and dopamine. So if we were prairie voles rather than marsh voles, then you would get a dopamine hit every time you saw me. You would choose me over a different vole. It's like a new strange vole. You'd say, no, I'd rather stay with my vole. And you'd have higher levels of vasopressin and oxytocin. And we'd both have more receptors in the reward centers of the brain for those hormones.

56:05so we would just feel so good every time we see each other if we saw the other one in distress we would want to comfort them um why did they create more receptors we don't know we don't know why it's not just that you have more of the hormone but you have more of the receptors in certain parts of the brain it's just it's part of the bonding kind of like um increases the bonding the fact that you've got more of the hormone and more of the receptors and it's in the reward part of the brain. But actually it's not just like if we just hung out together and looked after the babies and fed them and saw each other frequently, that would happen.

56:42But sexual activity actually intensifies the wiring. So it's kind of like the genetics and the receptors load the gun, but actually having sex pulls the trigger. Interesting. Wow. So, so that's why you You see, if it's a healthy family, then that's why people want to be in a healthy family because it feels good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the co-sleeping is a different thing. That's oxytocin. Co-sleeping? Yeah, which is like sleeping together like you two and the kids. Are those people healthier? Or even just the couple sleeping together because some people don't sleep together because they snore or whatever.

57:21Oh, yeah. I know you're talking about people in New Jersey. Thank you. I know it I've been over there The women snore too. Dang. Yeah, you're like, gosh, is this my wife or is this a refinery I'm laying next to? A lot of puffing puffing. Anyway, with no other issues like that, it is more healthy for you to sleep together because you increase both of your levels of oxytocin. So you feel better. Your brain feels better sleeping with someone that it cares about or just anyone. you would get some benefits of sleeping with just anyone but it's it's much more if it's somebody that you care about and that you love and if a family's closer together do you guys there's a uh that's even more yeah well indian families like mexican families sleep together yeah um or at least one of the children let's say there's a widowed grandparent one of the children grandchildren would sleep with them so no one sleeps alone Wow, that's pretty cool.

58:25Are there animals that do that as well that you think that we learn that from? All animals do that. They do? Well, obviously some animals like snow leopards, they're completely independent. They don't even stay with their children after a certain age. I know, it's really sad. But most animals will sleep together. And so there's a few things that go on there. One is that you actually share your gut microbiome. So we have an oral microbiome, a skin microbiome, and a gut microbiome, which are the good bacteria that help us not just to digest and help our mental health, but also contribute to our immunity.

59:03So if we ate together, kissed, slept together, then I'm guessing I've got a better gut microbiome than you. I would actually donate healthy cells to you as part of a relationship. Really? Yeah, and improve your immunity. Wow. Wow. So there's a lot of value in being close to someone, and there's a lot of neuroscientific value. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, I guess it makes sense. It certainly makes sense. Well, we had to be part of a tribe to survive when we lived in the cave, right? For sure. And if you've ever seen a group of puppies or whatever, somebody has a box of dogs or whatever, they always look like it.

59:43So if you see them all right there by the mom, it looks like the funnest thing in the world. Even just looking at a puppy with big eyes would make you release oxytocin. God. Then I need to start dating animals then. You know? I don't know what you guys' laws are, but might have to come over there to do it. But here's some of the world's most solitary animals right here. Platypus. Yeah, I could see that kind of. Maybe polar bear. That's sad, man. That's sad. Because it's so cold and they're just up there. And polar bears, every video you see a polar bear, it's like the polar bears looking for food.

1:00:17It's just like, God, like. And the ice cubes. Did I say ice cubes? Yeah, it's floating on like a little, it's floating on like, you know, four grams of ice or whatever. And it's just like, it's, God, it just seems like a horrible life. Snow leopard, sandpiper, Hawaiian monk seal, the chukwala lizard. Snow leopard's beautiful. I feel like I would want to be one, but I wouldn't want to be on my own. You'd have to be, though. I'll just be a regular leopard then. That's fair. Okay, you're allowed, miss. First of all, I'd like to say thank you to Dan Morgan and everyone over at Morgan & Morgan. We had an issue with Kai the hitchhiker, and he filed a lawsuit against us, and he made quite a hullabaloo.

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1:01:54That's F-O-R the people dot com slash this past weekend or dial pound law pound five two nine from your cell. This is a paid advertisement. What is it about love today that makes it seem like you think it's harder to find or am I just romanticizing it? I think that one of the reasons is that we're living so much longer. So to be honest, in cave times where all we had to do was survive to reproduce our genes, you and I, we, it wouldn't be worth us being alive anymore at the ages that we're at now. Right. So now that we're living much longer and the divorce rates are like 50%, people are looking for that, you know, second long relationship or even third long relationship that they might have in their life.

1:02:45So I think it's just very hard. obviously people did stay together for like you know 50 plus years or whatever i just think society has changed it's all about you know sort of instant gratification and short-termism and our attention spans have changed because of the internet and smartphones and apps and things like that and and it's just become more socially acceptable as well so in many cultures they still you know still won't divorce but our the cultures that we exist in like It's kind of quite normal now. It's a swap meet, yeah. Yeah. It's very much a swap meet, it feels like. Yeah, I know you talked about maybe coming out of the pandemic that people would sense a return maybe to faith.

1:03:29Is there any proof that having faith and higher power has a positive effect on your brain? Yeah, so having a moderate amount of faith or some sort of spiritual belief is beneficial for the brain, but having none or too much, like fundamentalism, is actually not good for your brain. Really, like how does having too much affect your brain negatively? Well, it might become associated with certain levels of paranoia or mistrust or sort of survival emotions like anger or hatred or fear, because it kind of often means that you have to be against someone. Right. Right. So when you get to the point where you're against somebody or where you're so for just one thing.

1:04:13Yeah. That you're then inherently against other things. Yeah. it can get uh it's not as healthy for you um you advise like in your work you advise like a lot of very like powerful people you know because i know that you um have worked with like a lot of like you know a lot of the a lot of the powers in the world will come to you to help them um what are problems that powerful people have and successful people have like um that maybe would surprise us do you think? You don't have to get specific, but if you want to share anything. Well, the first thing I will say is that the problems are pretty much exactly the same, whether it was a patient I saw in the National Health Service as a doctor or, as it is now, as an executive advisor to very senior people.

1:05:02And because I'm a stress expert, I do tend to see people who are managing really high levels of stress and complexity. And they're also traveling a lot so their sleep might be really disrupted they often don't really believe in sleeping that much anyway um so it's all those sort of habits like people who don't get enough sleep who i mean they would tend to eat well because they can afford to but they might not be eating in what i call like a brain first approach so they might be eating because they want to run a marathon or because they can afford expensive things but that's not necessarily what's best for your brain so I can help them with that um really is eating certain ways better for your brain because yeah I find most of the time I eat just because I have to like if I didn't have to eat I would a lot of times I would just keep working or doing something you know and I don't eat like a lot of variety of stuff yeah I don't I'm not a foodie I guess you know I maybe would be once I get married or something if my wife wants to get something or order something then I would try something like more new or something.

1:06:08But I just like, I just usually make a quesadilla or have a smoothie because it's easy. Wow. So you wait till you're hungry and then just eat something because you have to. Yeah, that's kind of how I am. It's a little bit, it's kind of sad really, but it's okay. Maybe it's because you don't know that even though your brain is such a small percentage of your body weight, it uses up 20 to 30 % of everything that you eat. Really? Yeah. Your brain does? Yeah. Wow. So when you're asleep, your brain's using up 20 % of what you ate that day. What a peep, huh? It's just energy hungry. That's what we would call it.

1:06:44And so when you're, you know, really focused on something like this, you're probably using up about 25%. But if you're under a lot of stress, your brain will take up 30 % of what you're eating. Wow. What happens to our brain while we're sleeping? So the brain - Do you know? We know quite a lot more about it now than we did, let's say, 20, 30 years ago. Okay. don't know everything because we actually don't. Well, we've only recently understood why we need to sleep for eight to nine hours. And that's because that cleaning process I mentioned. Nine now? Well, eight hours and 15 minutes is the ideal in the sort of population norm studies.

1:07:19Let's round it up. I'll take nine if we're willing to do it. Nine in bed so that you get at least seven to eight hours of sleep. Yeah. because that cleansing process takes seven to eight hours. And that process is flushing out toxins that are exactly the same pathologies that we see in dementia and Alzheimer's and things like that. And they build up due to the daily wear and tear of life, stress and alcohol and processed food and all that kind of thing. I know there's a big debate in this country at the moment about ultra-processed food, but from a brain point of view, don't eat it. Really? Yeah.

1:07:55It's really bad for you. Really bad. Like what are some of the effects that processed foods have on your brain? Well, everything comes down to inflammation. So these ultra-processed foods, for your body to break them down, is going to cause a lot of like cell activity. And then it's also leaving the waste products from that food for your body to get rid of. And this is going to cause some of the cells to become inflamed. And when your body's under stress, and that's the only nutrition that it's getting, then basically your cortisol levels go up and that crosses the blood-brain barrier. So it supplies blood to the whole brain and body.

1:08:36And it will just cause inflammation in your gut. Your gut talks to your brain all the time. Your brain talks to your gut. Gossiping. You know? But that's good. It's actually a three-way gossip because your gut microbiome also signals to the gut and the brain separately. Wow. So your brain is super busy, huh? If it can have such an effect, then what are things you recommend that you would eat? I mean, obviously, some of it seems kind of obvious or things you would or wouldn't. So I would suggest this is ideal, ideal. Okay, this is what I do. But it's taken me years to get to this point. I eat 30 different plant products per week.

1:09:19Now that can include coffee, dark chocolate, spices. So especially like if you eat a lot of Mexican food, it's actually not as hard as you think to do that. But you do need to vary the sort of vegetables that you're using. In South America, they actually call squash, beans and corn the three sisters and attribute that to the blue zones of longevity in parts of South America. then you do need to eat some good quality protein. So lean proteins like eggs, yogurt, tofu. Fish. Can we do fish? Fish. Can we have it? Yeah. Oh, good. Fish. Yeah, I like fish. I like having fish. Yeah, even like. And it looks cool if you see it in the water.

1:10:07That's the only thing I don't like. You have a thing about fish. You think? Yeah. Maybe I do. but cows you look at me like this thing is dumb as fuck i'm not eating this thing that's how i feel a lot of times you know especially the one with the bell on his neck or whatever you're like this one's dumb but at least he's trying to party but it's like it's like cows i i know people are like meat eaters you got to eat them but sometimes i look at a cow and i'm like dang man this i don't want to be eating this thing just seems kind of dumb you know no offense to cows either but you know what I'm saying kind of just like they're just standing there you know they're just could easily be victims of crime or whatever but a fish you know it just looks like that's how I would like to be you know okay so if you'd be an animal you'd be a fish yeah or just something more exciting you know I'd have yeah so sometimes I think like oh I should eat things that are like things that I want to be like maybe that would be cool that's actually cool because I try to eat things that look like a brain like a cauliflower or a walnut oh really that's crazy dude dude.

1:11:08Wow, that's cool. It kind of makes sense that it would help it. A walnut looks just like a brain, huh? That's crazy. Yeah. And if you cut a cauliflower in half, it looks exactly like a brain too. Yeah. Wow. And then the good fats, we can't forget the good fats for the brain. So that is your oily fish, avocado, eggs, nuts, seeds, olive oil, all that kind of thing. And then dark skinned foods are better for your brain than regular colored foods. So purple sprouting broccoli instead of green broccoli, blueberries instead of raspberries, because that purple color has antioxidants in the skin of the food called anthocyanins, which really help with neuroplasticity.

1:11:57That process we talked about of changing your brain. So, you know, I try to eat kind of, I tried to take the purple version of everything, but basically quite just like saying dark skinned stuff is better for you. Well, I mean, yeah, I think I've heard. Yeah. I mean, I got BLM. I mean, people like different things, you know, you got to, you know, everybody likes somebody, somebody. Yeah. My friend only dates brothers, honestly. And yes, and there's a lot of value in that. So, yeah, I could certainly see that. so yeah explain it actually can i share a story that is a really really kind of important one that had a massive impact on me and i i would like to share it because i think it could really help people yeah i would love to hear so standing on the street outside my house waiting for a taxi and a young blonde woman walked past me but then i i could see out of the corner of my eye that she stopped and turned around and came up to me and she said are you tara swart and i said yes and she said, you saved my life.

1:13:02And I was a bit taken aback. So I said, you know, what was it that I said that resonated with you? Because I feel like I can speak so broadly that I don't always know what it is. And she said, I struggled with a really serious eating disorder for years. And I heard you say that you choose what you eat because it impacts your brain. And it immediately changed my relationship with food. And I have heard, I mean, when I was a psychiatrist, the eating disorders ward was like a hopeless case. There was really not much we could do. And I've heard that recently the latest way of dealing with eating disorders is tying people to their beds and forcing them to eat.

1:13:40And I can't believe that's helpful for anyone. But just hearing this person say that one thing I said changed her life so dramatically, it was kind of just made me feel like everything I've done has brought me to the right place. Well, that's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that yeah it's so it's so powerful if somebody comes up and you can tell they're being real or genuine you know and they share something with you and um you must get that i meet a lot of people and sometimes you know it's like and sometimes there's moments you're like oh this is really cool you know and it's like you can share and sometimes you'll be having a bad day and they'll tell you something that they heard you say that helped them and you're like well shit tell it back to me right now i know same you know it's like well look thank you for coming back and telling me because it's like the exact thing I needed to hear right now.

1:14:27Sometimes people, my friends, send me a page, a photo of a page from my book and they're like, you wrote this. Like, why are you being like this now? I know it's so hard to help ourselves a lot of times, but that's why we need each other. You know, my friend James Beshara, he always says that we're the keys to each other's locks, actually. Oh, I love that. I think you might have done, did you do a podcast in Venice one day? You ever do one in Venice? Maybe with Sahara Rose. that hasn't come out yet. No, this was with a man, Senj. Oh, Drew Purahead? No, it was an Indian man. Yeah, he's Indian. He is?

1:15:00Yeah. Yeah, maybe it was him. Yeah. Was it in Venice, do you think? It was in LA. It was in LA? Yeah. It looked like my friend James' studio. I saw someone, I was like, oh, that kind of looked like James' studio. Oh. Because I have no idea if it was or not. It looked a little similar. Okay, let me ask you a question. Okay. Did you know that we actually have a second nose that's not connected to the brain. Uh-uh. We have a second nose more than the one on our face? Yeah. Okay. It's called the vomeronasal organ, and it detects the smells of things that, when you eat them, they give off a vapor, like a spicy food, and it actually connects to your heart and makes your heart rate go up, but it doesn't connect directly to your brain.

1:15:41Huh. And dogs have them. It's got a special name in dogs, which I can't remember, but that's why they can smell pheromones. and also I got this research from my colleague at MIT who who creates artificial noses and he's created an artificial nose that can detect prostate cancer before any of our current diagnostic tests can no way and get this this this might cause some trouble for some people that you know it can detect pregnancy earlier than any test at the moment and it can tell who the father is Oh my God. So it's going to be like Snorri Povich or whatever. What are they going to put the nose on?

1:16:27I don't know. How do they do it? They just hold it up to something? Yeah. And what's it made out of? I think titanium, but it's, it's connected to a machine, obviously. Okay. Yeah. Wow. So it's a robotic nose that can tell if you have cancer and can tell if you're pregnant and tell who the father is. What? Oh. I wonder how expensive it is. Hopefully you can just put a dollar in the back of it and find out. Nano nose. Here you go. Early this year, Mershon and his team. Yeah, Mershon. He's my friend. They had created a robotic nose powered by AI that could identify cases of prostate cancer from urine samples with 70 % accuracy.

1:17:06Wow. So really like a real piss sommelier or something they would call it, or urine sommelier. um wow the nano nose what else can it do um early detection of lung cancer it'll they'll start going across the cancers so cats and dogs in in old people's homes they go and sit outside the door of the person that's dying and and that's because cell death starts to happen before you actually die and it happens in a certain order and they can smell when that's happening that's crazy Andreas Mershin also told me something but I can't remember why so I'm going to say it on this podcast so I can send him the link and then ask him to explain which is that if you inject rabbits with urine from pregnant women they get their period no

1:18:01wow if you inject them with urine from pregnant women they get their period you man so next time a pregnant woman's like i'm not a problem i'll be like yeah but you obviously are into some you got sorcery running through your body right now because that's crazy yeah that's crazy to think that yeah i've never seen anything like that i wouldn't even do it to anybody and early go back to that nano nose i want to see what it's what else that can do that's fascinating to me. And do they have, do they show any use of that nano nose? Yeah, for detecting cancer and pregnancy. But I'm just wondering, do they have it on the end of a stick or something?

1:18:42How it's actually used, yeah. He also told me that way more women are super smellers than men. Really? Yeah. I could bet that, because also women are, I think, over life, they're like the chefs, and they do more of like the, they have to smell if the kid's okay or whatever? Probably. Do you think that's why? Yeah. I think so. It makes sense. Okay. Electric nose accurately sniffs out hard to detect cancers, an odor-based test that sniffs out vapors emanating from blood samples. It was able to distinguish between benign and pancreatic and ovarian cancer with up to 95 % accuracy. That's crazy. But Theo wants to see a picture of how they use it, like what it looks like when they're actually sniffing patients.

1:19:27cause of cancer deaths in you. And there's a one in five chance for a preventive medical checkup. The late detection of prostate cancer often means the removal of a part or the whole organ. But there's hope at the Parque Scientific de Barcelona. Wow, that's incredible. Where does our intuition and our gut instincts come from? That's one of my favorite questions. Is it really? Yeah. I love intuition. It's like my superpower. Oh, yeah? Yeah. So basically - Because it's so cool. It's kind of this, it's like this ghost that's in us a little bit. Yeah, kind of. Yeah. The ghost of wisdom or something.

1:20:07I mean, Andreas Mertian also said to me that things like extrasensory perception, they're not woo-woo. He was actually comparing that to the fact that most people don't know we have the second nose. He was like, there's science about it. We just haven't discovered it all yet. So intuition was a bit like that. People didn't, because they couldn't see it. It wasn't tangible. They didn't really take it that seriously. Like, I've been teaching at MIT for over 10 years now. And 10 years ago, senior leaders would say, that's not a sense I would use at work. You know, I'm not going to use that for hire or fire.

1:20:39But then, actually, the older, wiser guys would say, that's exactly the one I use for hire or fire, because, you know, I've learned over time to trust it. Yeah. So I honed my intuition by journaling and reading over my journal and writing down every decision that I made. If like logic told me one thing and intuition told me another, and I decided to trust my intuition more and more. You really mapped it out. yeah um i think i was naturally quite intuitive but sometimes i was afraid to trust it when i felt like something else was the right thing to do logically um so what we need to live our normal life is called our working memory and it's stored in the outer cortex of the brain and then our sort of beliefs and thought patterns you know sort of what we were discussing earlier on that's in systems in the limbic part of the brain which is the shape and size of your clenched fist So obviously yours is bigger than mine and the cortex is around it.

1:21:35And then through a process called Hebbian learning, which is named after the neuroscientist Donald Hebb, because you can't remember everything that you've experienced in your life, but you have experienced it. So that information, like neurons that fire together, wire together, gets stored deeper in your spinal cord and your gut neurons. And that's why intuition is sometimes called gut instinct. So that's why you kind of feel right there. you kind of go there in your brain. Like, what is my gut telling me to do? Yeah. Like butterflies in your stomach tells you that you're nervous. Right. Yeah.

1:22:08But the sense of like, this is the right thing for me to do, or this is the right person for me to date that might, you might not feel it viscerally, but you'll just get that sense. Yeah. Yeah. Cause like over time it's like, yeah, you have to believe that your intuition gets honed as well because of you've had experiences. Yeah, but it can also, actually, a really important point is that neuroplasticity can be a bad thing. If you repeatedly go for, you know, people that it ends up being a toxic relationship, and you have a breakup that drags out and damages you, and then you don't really heal, and you just go back into a similar type of relationship, you're going to kind of, that's your intuition telling you the wrong thing, right?

1:22:55Right, but you're following it. Yeah. So you could actually, you could mold your intuition negatively as well. Yeah. Oh, wow. Like obsessing over a breakup. That's, that's neuroplasticity. Yeah. Yeah. I used to do that, man. That was the worst. God, I would be so heartbroken. The most heartbroken fricking weirdo ever, dude. Smoking or whatever. Just walking around the neighborhood. Um, what else? How do we change our perspective? How do we use, is our perspective, of our brain? So this is called the hard problem of neuroscience. And that is the question of whether our brain is our mind or our mind is our brain.

1:23:36And basically, if we're being very scientific, then our consciousness, which is everything that we think and feel, arises from neurons and chemicals that are physically part of our brain. There's a big move more recently, And this has happened in the past. In ancient times, we believed in seers and shamans and mystics and things like clairvoyance and claircognizance and things like that. And we've moved away from that in modern times. Yeah, we believe in a lot more astrology, the moon, that sort of thing as well. Yeah. But science is now starting to look at some of this ancient wisdom in a way that we may have actually forgotten things that we knew before that are crucial to our mental health in the modern world.

1:24:25So I mentioned some of those things already, like drumming and chanting. But what we believe now is that our brain might actually be filtering our consciousness down so that we can survive in this material world. But actually, our minds are capable of a lot more than what we think now. So in terms of perspective, that is all the filters that your childhood and your upbringing have put on how you see the world. And you can absolutely challenge your perspective. It's not your brain. It's a version of reality that your brain's creating. And I have some really favorite exercises that I have that people can do at home.

1:25:03So one is if I have a dilemma, or particularly if I'm really struggling and just feeling like things aren't going to work out, I describe myself sitting here, what I'm wearing at my age, and I ask the question, like, what should I do? or, you know, what's going to happen to me? Like, you know, when you're really kind of a bit desperate. And then I get up and I walk seven steps and I turn around and I say, I'm Tara, seven years older than you. And I've seen what happens in your life in the next seven years. And I answer the question, I give advice. So that's kind of like... Ooh, that's pretty cool.

1:25:41Thanks. Because you're kind of putting yourself in a place and then you're using your same self. and my intuition and your intuition and who even knows what what powers the world grants you if you say okay now i'm going to put myself seven years ahead and speak back to myself yeah there's i it often feels like there's so many hidden abilities that we have that we just don't know about yet like even with like five senses it's like i bet there's 30 senses we just don't even know some of what they are yet. There's up to 33. Is there really? They told us there's five. Did they tell you that, dude?

1:26:21Well, not at medical school. At medical school, I obviously knew there's more than five, but I didn't know there's like 22 to 33. They don't trust us with them, dude. I think, yeah, you got it. I guess if you go to school, you get more senses. You don't You've got them as well. You've got chronoception. You understand the passing of time. You've got. I got five, but they give you five senses. Yeah. Right. Touch, feel. Touch and feel are the same. Okay. Sorry. My bad, doc. Touch. Taste. Taste, smell, sight. Hearing. And hearing. Sorry. But there's more than that. Way more. Unreal. Wow. Wow. That'd be cool to go through all of them one day.

1:27:07Whenever I come to your country, we'll have to go through all of them. What country do you live in? Live in London? Yeah. London's not a country. It isn't? No, it's a city. Oh yeah. Told you guys, huh? Enough with the attitude. All right. Yeah. Manchester's the real England. I'm joking. Well, people think different things. Wow. So your perspective, you can do that exercise or you can ask yourself, what advice would I give my brother? Because it's just about taking yourself one step out of the situation that you're in because then you can't see the wood for the trees, you know? Yeah, you're stuck in yourself.

1:27:41But yeah, what advice would I give my brother? That's a great idea. What advice would I give my sister? What advice? Because it is crazy. You'll give them the best advice, then you'll get off the phone and do the worst thing. Yeah, totally. That's so fascinating. I mean, because some of my advice is like pinned on social media, Yeah. Me and my girlfriend were laughing so much about some of the things that I say. And then in my real life, I'm like, why is this happening to me?

1:28:09I know. It's so funny. I think we all take turns being something that someone needs to hear, you know, even in the sense that somebody came up to me in the airport and was telling me something like, oh, man, where'd you hear that? And like, you said that. I'm like, well, I needed to hear that right now. It's like, we all kind of take turns, even throughout the day, throughout the moment, throughout the years, being each other's champions at certain little moments, you know, I think that that's pretty remarkable. That's kind of a gift. You've talked a lot about like manifesting and stuff. Do you really believe in it?

1:28:39A hundred percent. Yeah. I've been actively doing it myself kind of personally for 15 or 16 years. And then in 2019, my book, The Source came out where I shared that more professionally. And the response to that was actually quite phenomenal in making me believe in it even more. Wow. It's a bestseller. Yeah. Yeah. Congratulations. Thank you. So cool. Thanks. So cool to write a book and like, and have people want to absorb it. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about that manifesting because we forget about it. We forget sometimes that we're the captain of this ship. Sometimes we just feel like the stream owns everything, you know?

1:29:16Yeah. And I think some versions of manifestation can still make people feel like that because it's about the universe and vibrations. I wanted to explain manifestation through psychology and neuroscience in a way to say, look, it's your brain that's doing it. It's not some outside force. And I think that's way more empowering. and that's what people really liked about it that I write a lot about vision boards but I call them action boards because I say you can't just create a fantasy and then sit at home and wait for it to come true like look at how hard you've worked to get to where you are it's very easy for people to say oh I'd love to have Theo Vaughn's life but you've really struggled and worked really hard to get here so I absolutely say that that has to be part of it it can't just be expecting like things to fall out of the sky and come into your life.

1:30:05But if, you know, manifestation is basically setting goals and desires, knowing what you want, finding images of them to put on a board that you can see at least twice a day. And if it's only once a day, then seeing it just before you go to sleep because it imprints on your subconscious. And it can be very literal or it can be metaphorical, like something that, you know, you could have a horse on there and it could mean one thing to you and something else to me, for example. And basically, I ask people to make this board, look at it daily, visualize these things being true, because your brain doesn't actually know the difference between something happening in real life and a strong visualization.

1:30:43And then, yeah. And you won't be afraid of it. If you've already visualized it, you won't kind of meet that dream girl and say, oh, maybe I'm not ready. You'll have told your brain that you're ready to take a healthy risk. Wow. So your brain doesn't really know the difference between, say that again? Between something that happened in real life or something that you strongly visualize. Wow. It's the same reason why when we watch a movie or something, we're able to get lost in it. We're able to believe in it because it, wow. So you could create enough of a visualization for yourself if you really were to powerfully start to focus on it and do that and build that ability to visualize something that your brain at one point would have to think it's so true that the world would meet you and put it into your life i love the way you put that wow dude that's crazy and it feels that's what feels like another sense that that to me feels like another sense that it's like 200 years from now they're to be like people are just gonna be manifest it's just everything you know to me everything's gonna be so over manifested but you know what it is that's one thing that i feel like there's like some elite people in the world and they really learned that sometimes when i see some people who are operating at a very elite level or um the deep state or whatever i start thinking oh they that's what they're using to the best of their ability wow yeah your brain and then the world is like, oh, well, it has to have happened because they put it in there so much.

1:32:20That's crazy. And what kind of things can you manifest? Off the example, because people write to me all the time saying what they manifested. So it could be a certain kind of home, a relationship, a family, pregnancy, their own career. A lot of it's like quitting their job and actually starting up the business that they've always wanted to do. travel is quite a big one yeah yeah what are some side effects of the pandemic that we never treated as a society because that's fascinating to me it's so it's just we kind of went through it and like you said earlier we're just now we're just here and we never looked at i mean even in recovery rooms like the shutdown of all of the 12-step rooms and people couldn't go to those meetings killed there's no way it's in kill 100 000 people you know oh yeah at least just in those Yeah.

1:33:16I think there were mental health issues during the pandemic, but there were slightly different ones since. And nobody's really talking about that, which is so scary. I think they involve three sorts of loss. So a loss of your sense of self and your purpose, like who am I? What direction should I be going in? Totally. A breakdown of relationships, whether that's marriages, other romantic relationships, working relationships, friendships. People are more like disconnected and lonely. When some people lost a loved one and had to go to it over Zoom and never even got to grieve it or have the family be there together when they lost their grandmother.

1:33:56Yeah. There are people that were hoping in the next couple of years they would find a loved relationship. And then suddenly there's three years where they can't even date. Yeah. And what was the third one? Sorry to interrupt you. The third one was going to be loss of actual loved ones, you know, and grief. And I think one of the things I'm seeing, it may have been creeping up before the pandemic, but it feels very evident now, is the world feels like a really difficult place for young men. The idea of what it means to be a man now doesn't feel clear. and you know I've sort of had male friends say to me that yeah we're equal but we're still different and men you know they want to love and protect someone but it feels like women are saying I can do everything by myself now I don't need you yeah um so that that feels really sad and that's I think happening more in the younger generations and than it did when we were that age Yeah, I think some people start to view themselves as men and women.

1:34:58I think some of the gender lines and stuff are getting blurred. And some of that I think is probably good because you want everybody to believe they can do anything. Because there has to be some value in being a man. Just like there has to be some value in being a woman. We want there to be. I don't want to be with some woman and it's a man. I would like her to be a woman. you know, most of the time. And so it's like, that's a thing. Can I put that slightly differently? Yeah. I think it's about having masculine and feminine energies, which we can both be capable of. So I think for a man, you know, men are obviously physically stronger.

1:35:40And so there are things that men can do for women that could be helpful in terms of the fact that they've got more physical strength. But equally, men are capable of emotional intelligence and intuition. And it would be nice if that could be more balanced in in both the genders yeah because i think in the end i think it probably goes back to some of our nature too you know it's like i think we want to have someone sometimes it's like if you don't have somebody you'll start turning into the thing you want too which is kind of weird what do you mean i feel like sometimes if you're a maybe you're a gal and you're having maybe trouble getting a guy or you're not having success in that world you might start kind of like maybe doing more masculine stuff, maybe doing like you'll create what you need.

1:36:31Yeah. I guess you have to, if you have to get on in life, you might have to do things that you didn't do if you were in partnership. Yeah. That doesn't make any sense really. I didn't know where you were going with that. I didn't know either. I was trying to like think of an idea and I thought you were going to say something really outrageous. Oh no, I don't, I don't know what I was going to say, but I just, whatever I said didn't really make any sense. Yeah, it is tough. I think it is interesting for young men. I think it's interesting a lot for just men these days. But then also there was women, like when women didn't have access to a lot of money or they didn't have money, they were taken advantage of.

1:37:07And so it's like, maybe this is just the eddy of the river, the path of it that we have to get to a place where women have more finances and ability to make choices for their own. And then once they feel comfortable in that space, then they can let themselves just be women again. Does that make any sense? I think it's a bit more complex. Somebody's going to get upset about that. Yeah, I think it's a bit more complex than that. I think we could say that both as men and women, and particularly as parents of the younger generations that are coming up now into adulthood, that we have a responsibility to not emasculate men to the point that they are taking their lives.

1:37:54Because women have changed a lot. If you think since cave times, or even just since the 1950s, women have had financial independence, women have been able to use contraception, women have been able to use hair dye. It's completely changed how particularly older women can survive in society and be valued in society. but men haven't really changed that much let's say since the 1950s so there's obviously some sort of evolution or adaptation that needs to happen because things were so unfair before but I just think we've got to do it in a way that isn't unfair now if you know what I mean like navigate it together in a way that men and women can be in harmony um because when the me Me Too sort of conversations first came out, obviously there were a lot of women that were saying, you know, all the bad things about men that they could.

1:38:44And I just kept repeating the same thing. We have to remember most men are good. There's no value in us suddenly hating men because this Me Too movement has come up. That's not going to help any gender. Yeah. And that was a huge thing. Every man, men were scared to look at women. Men were scared to pat a woman on the back even. It was definitely getting real risque out there. I think even things like, should I hold the door open for a woman or not is a confusing decision for men these days. I agree. I'll be on an airplane and a woman will maybe be about to lift her bag and put it up. And it's like, I don't know.

1:39:18Am I going to get the lady who's like, I can do it myself. Or am I just going to get the lady who was like, thank you. Or just lets me feel good because I can do it and I'm able to help out. Not that she can't do it. For a lot of guys, it wasn't that you can't do it. It was like, we want to do it. yeah we want to be of service we want to be able to show off a little bit give us something we can do you know yeah and i i love it you know i think it's yeah i have this joke this is a long time i forgot about this it was like um i was talking about women want to be men now like you see women that are like dead lifting weights and i'll be like if you put down the barbells and you look lost for a minute then a guy will show right up you know like there's something about the thing that you just you know you want to be able to be a guy and i think when it gets confusing as to what does that even mean where are you allowed to be what are you allowed to do um yeah you start and then also like all the sex toys came out and you're like well we can't even what are we doing you know what i'm saying like you know like my nuts are powered by a battery powered by the lord or whatever like i can't compete with these you know uh ingenuity or whatever it's not the same as having an intimate relationship no but it's also threatening you know when it's like you know you know you hear some of the other room and it just sounds like it should have a fan belt on it it's like some of these it's like it's just into i don't know i think that's kind of you know i don't know what i'm talking about but i don't think we should end on this note theo i'm pretty lonely as well.

1:40:57What's something you feel like before you leave that you would like to share with us or something else we can think about? Well, the main thing I would really love people to know, which is an umbrella over everything that we've talked about today. And like you've said, there's so much more we could talk about is that you have so much potential in your brain. Your brain is amazing. And if you know how to use it properly, you can make your life so much better than you ever dreamed it could be. Really? Yes. Wow. How does somebody who doesn't believe that start to believe it? I would make a set of tweaks in some very basic fundamental areas, and I would make them micro tweaks.

1:41:44So where I talk about sleep, diet, hydration, exercise, and stress management, I always say change 10 things by 1 % not one thing by 10%. So if you went to bed half an hour earlier or you drank an extra glass of water every day or you ate some more vegetables and you you know walked a thousand steps more than you usually do and spent some time in nature and we haven't even talked about neuroaesthetics which is a whole other topic. Yeah then if you do a few things like that every day they're physical things that are building the foundation for your brain to be in a good environment where it can be better, you will, I guarantee you, you feel so much better within a matter of weeks that you'll think, okay, what else can I do?

1:42:28And then you can build it up to a point where physically you're in really good condition. And then you could do a vision board or, you know, whatever your goal is. Maybe for part two, we could ask people to write in and say, this is what I'd like to achieve. How can I do it? yeah that'd be cool yeah you know what one thing you said it is it's so easy to create a pattern it feels hard the first day is a little tough the second day is a little bit tougher but then that third day you're like holy shit this is a pattern and it feels different and it feels cool and then you get excited about it and there's nothing bigger i've learned in my lifetime than um get like realizing if you do this and then you do that and then you're like oh now the landscape looks different now what else could i do what else could i do yeah yeah you're a classic example of that i just can't sometimes i'm like what else can i do what else like holy shit the world's like like i could do some what else to what else could i do yeah i don't know yeah but man it really is especially yeah there were times when i just didn't feel like i could do you know and yeah also for you there are millions of people that some of them you might know about some of you will never know about the influence that you've had on them and that's another thing that you're doing passively by doing everything that you do which is huge yeah yeah we don't know the effects that we're going to have on other people and stuff like that it's pretty magical that's why we need each other you know we need each other to build our oxytocin up huh yeah dude we got to get more oxytocin going on.

1:44:03Well, laughter creates it. So you're spreading oxytocin like crazy. And is it, do we have synthetic oxytocin or they don't have that? I don't know if I even want to get you to Google this, but you can actually purchase it over the internet. You obviously do not know what you are getting. So please be careful. In lab experiments, they used a nasal spray of oxytocin and they showed guys pictures of women that they had to rate them on attractiveness. before and after taking the spray. They rated them all as more attractive after taking the spray. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, dude. I looked up oxytocin and nose spray was the top search.

1:44:43So there's an oxytocin nose spray. Don't get crazy, guys. But maybe I'll take a hit of it next time we do the, next time we record. What, you and I? I'll take at least a hit, yeah. I don't think you need to. That's quite insulting to me. Oh, sorry. I'll let you take a hit then. You're going to need it. I'll tell you, dude. Yeah. If you look at me, you're going to need some oxytocin, man. Or we can give a little to a pup or something. Yeah. And see what he, you know. Yeah, we could do that experiment. Give some to a puppy and see what happens. Oh, hell yeah, dude. Is that legal? I don't know. I'm sure some people write in the comments if it is or not.

1:45:21Tara Swart, thank you so much. Your book, The Source. I haven't read it, but I would like to. Okay. You know, so I'm going to keep it on my list of stuff to read at some point. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for just being somebody that wants to help share the information that you have and are learning. You're really on the forefront of things that are possible for the future. Neuroscience is crazy because we just don't know what our brain is capable of. What percentage of information about our brains do you think we currently know? Well, that's a really good question. It's hard to put a percentage on it, but if I think about how much has changed since I was at medical school, and if I align that with the fact that what we used to watch is science fiction as kids, like a lot of it's true now, I just don't think we know how much potential there is.

1:46:04I think it's big, you know, all I can say is it's bigger than what we think. We're not capable of knowing that yet. Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy because we're not even capable of knowing it yet. That's the wildest thing, man, is we're not even capable. Like, again, you got to get there. Sometimes you got to get that next place to then see what else is even possible. Yeah, and now with AI and everything, it's, you know, it's just changed the whole. Who knows? Yeah. I mean, we could both be, yeah who even knows we could be living in an orphanage right now or something or who knows ai can do so many things you know so um dr tara swart thank you so much for coming thank you yeah i look forward to catching up with you too when i'm in your country i'd love that yep and um your book the source are you still teaching at mit yeah wow that's crazy dude that's like really mit dude you're like oh yeah that was something i manifested that i never thought really yeah And that's crazy Because I don't even know where it is You hear about it a lot You're like Oh yeah They're doing something illegal It feels like But probably pretty good Yeah Thank you so much for coming Thank you Theo And thank you for my wonderful gift as well Very sweet of you love I'm going to have a little bit of this When I'm feeling a bit down Yeah Good on you miss You're welcome Now I'm just floating on the breeze And I feel I'm falling Like these leaves I must be Cornerstone Oh, but when I reach that ground I'll share this peace of mind I found I can feel it in my bones But it's gonna take