Why Your Doctor is Not Your Mommy – Own Your Self with Kelly Brogan, M D – #635

And really what it is to inhabit a belief system that instead of saying, you know, we're flesh robots on a dead rock spinning in the middle of nowhere, subjected to the random forces of, like, bad luck, bad timing, and bad genes, in fact, we are given this incredible organism that transduces elements of our deep spiritual reality to our conscious awareness through the symptoms that we experience. That everything has inherent meaning, that there is emergent beauty, and there is incredible interconnected balance in all things at all times.

Bulletproof radio. A state of high performance. You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is about cats. Why? Because studies show that anything having to do with cats gets more clicks on the Internet. And really, all that matters at the end of the day is clicks. Actually, none of that's true, except for the fact that the cool fact of the day is about cats. And it's interesting because it's about attachment styles. And cats, apparently, according to new research, have attachment styles that mirror people's attachment style. So cats form these weird, deep, secure bonds with their only slightly psychopathic owners, Researchers say now, sorry, I'm a dog person. No offense there. I like cats, too. Anyway, attachment theory was developed back in the 50s. That would be 70 years ago. So if you can live to maybe 180 like me, imagine 70 years from now, what we'll know. Anyway, so it was developed in the 50s, and it suggests early in life, people form one of four styles of attachment. There's secure attachment, insecure, called ambivalent, avoidant, or disorganized. And all the bad dates you've been on were one of those three at the end. And now there's a new study that finds out cats are the same way, which makes so much sense. And for those people who think cats don't care about us, it turns out 64% of cats are secure attached. 30. 30% are ambivalent, and the rest are mostly avoidant. And this explains so much about cats and about cat people. I'm just saying here. And it's funny, those percentages actually mirror attachment styles in human infants and other animals, including dogs and monkeys, according to Oregon State University. And apparently they think cats have greater flexibility and depth of social relationships than we used to think. Just because some cats are jerks, not all cats are jerks is the moral of this cool fact of the day. Now you're like, okay, Dave's totally going to talk about cats. He's going to be a veterinarian on today. But, you know, that's not true because I have someone infinitely cool than a veterinarian. We're talking about someone who's a women's holistic health psychiatrist and doesn't use drugs as a psychiatrist, board certified in psychiatry, psychosomatic medicine, integrative holistic medicine, and looking at root cause resolution approaches to psychiatric syndromes and symptoms. So basically, I think you could say hacking crazy people. Although I'm sure I just pissed her off when I said that. Kelly Brogan. Or say, Dr. Kelly Brogan, author of a brand new book called Own Yourself. Welcome to the show.

Pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Have you ever heard anyone mix the cat lady syndrome with hacking crazy people in the same introduction to you?

I'm not often left speechless, but you might have achieved that just now. It's like I got nothing here.

To be fair, I am drinking my third shot of espresso for the day, made with he's under the Influence Bulletproof Clean coffee beans. You know it. But yeah, I'm just on a roll today. And because I'm working on the book launch for Superhuman, my anti aging book, which came out just about three weeks after your new book on yourself, which is doing really well. I'm in book launch mode. This is my fourth podcast interview of the day. And I'm just all over the coffee.

Time is looping and you're not sure if you already said something or you're about to say it. It's like this. I've been there.

I was looking at you on Skype, Strange Dimension. Your face was morphing into a cat. And I'm like, no, I'm in that Twilight Zone series. That didn't really happen either. I'm just making up stuff. But I do want to talk about owning yourself, because, look, there's a lot of people who are coaches, and I love coaching. In fact, I started a coaching program, Human Potential Institute, with Bulletproof and Dr. Mark Atkinson. That's going strong. And one of the things we teach our coaches is like, you're not a therapist. My wife's an MD at Drug and Alcohol Addiction Emergency Medicine, and she had to do advanced therapist training, but she's also not a therapist because there's another year of training that goes into that. And there's psychologists and then there's psychiatrists, which is sort of the prescription pad, heavy duty version of that. And you are the heaviest of the heavy duties in terms of that hierarchy I just described.

Yeah, very much so. In fact, I was about the fifth decade into the effort on the part of the guild of Psychiatry to legitimize itself as an actual medical specialty through, through the adoption of psychotropic medications. That's one perspective on how it is that psychopharmaceuticals got such a foothold is because psychiatrists, fundamentally, we have an identity crisis. We're not sure if we're really doctors. We don't examine patients often, we don't need to do blood tests much of the time. And the nature of our diagnostics are so subjective that there really is no associated biological, you know, sort of testing or rigor validated approach. So we, we are very vulnerable to, I think, the reductionist aspects of conventional medical thinking, looking at the body as machine, that kind of a thing. But I was a huge believer, so much so that I specialized in prescribing to pregnant and breastfeeding women, actually.

So you were basically working for the dark side, weren't you?

Very much. It's still in me. So watch out. It's still in me.

I am not your father.

That was my worst Harry Potter and Voldemort.

There you go. In fact, knowing what I know, having written a book on holistic fertility and all that, it's not that there isn't a place for prescription drugs in certain cases of life saving things around pregnancy, but generally speaking, I would say steer away from those if you can, because they're unknown and unintended side effects versus things like food, where we kind of know what most of it does. But even then green tea, it turns out, depletes folic acid if you drink too much of it. And we say, oh, drink green tea instead of coffee. There's stuff we don't know, but at least foods are generally safer. So the holistic approach seems like a good first line. Where did you get that mindset? You did this for a lot of your career and you've changed your mindset. Where did it come from that made you believe that we're meat robots? Essentially?

I think that I am a product of our dominant culture, that I ultimately had a childhood that gave me a sense that there is a certain kind of character, that if I could adopt that to as close to perfection as possible, I could finally achieve a sense of belonging, love, acceptance and safety. And I think that so many of us were raised with the experience of conditional love because our parents were raised with conditional love, that we very easily fell into this programming that control is a means to security, right? And ultimately a means to accessing love. And of course that's the ever receding oasis on the horizon. We never actually get there. And that's how and why you can end up having all of the accolades, all of the achievements, the best selling books, and check off all the boxes and somehow still often in your 30s, get to this place where you're like, why do I feel like everything I've been doing just isn't working? And I have this sense of hollowness, you know, like I feel like I'm wearing a mask. I feel like there are whole parts of me that if anybody ever saw them, you know, they would run the other direction. And I don't even wanna look at them right. So this, this mindset lends itself to mastery achievement, productivity. But in, in this kind of desperate grab for something. It's like licking an ice cream cone when what you're really thirsty is for water. It'll do something for you, but it won't get you to that primary need. And I got really far on that program. When I was in MIT for college, I worked a suicide hotline. It was mentored by psychiatrists. And a lot of what we did was help get people into the mental health center at MIT and get them access to medication. And I thought, okay, we've cracked the code of human behavior. We know how to ease suffering. We just need to get people more access to medication. And that seemed like the best way I could help people. But, you know, I wouldn't even go so far as to say I don't recommend medications. I'm a big, big believer in informed consent. And I developed an appreciation for informed consent when I was prescribing to pregnant women. It's just that I was only ever exposed to a keyhole of the science at that stage in my training, because it's the nature of the system. It's not something that the conventional system ever stated it would provide, which is tools for wellness and healing. They provide tools for symptom suppression. And so that's what you get when you go there. But if you want the full picture, if you really want informed consent, we're in a position to inform ourselves, obviously, which is why we have conversations like this.

I love your description of what happens in your 30s to a lot of people. So what was the wake up call that made you say, all right, I'm going to be a little bit more functional and holistic in my approach? That ultimately led you to write a book with the crazy title of Own Yourself, which I actually really like. Tell me about. Did you wake up one day, some patient came in and threw their Wellbutrin at You or something. What was it?

That would have been nice. I should look into alternate storylines. You know, it was the rumbling of my soul, right? So it was around. It was during my fellowship, I was, like I said, specialized in prescribing to pregnant women. So I was writing this woman a prescription for Zoloft. I myself was also pregnant at that time. So it's like this empathic bridge, right? And I had this feeling, this intuition sort of rise to the surface that I wouldn't want to take that medication that I was prescribing this woman that I cared about who's in my office, that I wouldn't do it. I don't care if there's 25,000 cases in the medical literature substantiating the relative safety of this medication. I wouldn't want to take it. So I just kind of ignored that because it was inconvenient. And it wasn't until I was nine months postpartum that on a routine physical, I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's thyroiditis. And that same feeling, that same voice came through again and said, you're not gonna take a prescription for the rest of your life. You better find the escape hatch, right? And so I knew I could have written my own prescription. I knew what conventional medicine had to offer. And so I highly, uncharacteristically found myself in a naturopath's office. And I was the kind of person who was. Huge, huge eye roll, major dismissal with the arsenal of the published literature on my side to talk about how dangerous supplements were, how reckless and irresponsible alternative medicine was. And I worked with this naturopath who happens to be quite an intellectual, so that helps. She wasn't, like, wafting sage around or dropping feathers on the.

A good naturopath should be able to school you if you want to say that stuff doesn't work. And you're like, oh, yeah, all right. Okay, good. So you found a good one.

Okay, I did. And I needed that bridge of science because of my native skepticism. If I didn't have that intellectual bridge, I don't think I would be here today. And I do think a lot of people need that. Like, we need to see in order to believe, even if we fundamentally already believe. And then we would be able to see if only we chose to. But I found myself in her office. I saw my thyroid antibodies go from the high 2000s, my TSH of 20, into the normal range in black and white. And I made very basic dietary changes. That's all I did. And you would think like I would have been so excited and sparkles coming out of my head. And instead I was like launched into this incredible righteous rage. It obviously came from deep, it could have been ancestral for all I know. I mean it came from deep within. And I just felt this fire ignite in me that burned and blazed through the night for years. I spent thousands of hours on PubMed. Just indignant really that I had never been told. I had one hour of nutritional training in my entire medical school experience. And I wasn't sleeping through class, I was doing the work, I didn't miss it. And I had never been told that you could put a chronic condition, like an autoimmune condition into remission. And so I felt duped, I felt betrayed, which is the first emotional sign that I had parentified the medical institution that I had, you know what I mean? Like projected traits onto the practice of medicine that are more appropriate in a daughter parent dynamic where I just trusted without questioning. And when I found out that I hadn't been told the full story, I was, I was quite angry. So I have had to burn some of that off over the past couple of years. But I was surprised and I wonder what you'll think about this because I thought once people have the information. So I wrote my first book, just dumped all this information in there, the science, and I thought, well once people have this information they'll never touch a medication again. And what I found was that's not the case, right? That there's much more that goes into taking a medication. Even though, you know, nobody really wants to take an antidepressant. Surprisingly they do it because they don't feel they have a choice. But once they even have more information about the lesser known risks or the highly over promised benefits or perhaps some evidence based alternatives, they might still not choose to opt out. And so that's when I became interested in the role of belief and how what's really happening when we're talking about the engagement of health practices is the exercising of a belief system. And so I started to study the anatomy of that, right? So the placebo, nocebo effect, expectancy and really what it is to inhabit a belief system that instead of saying, you know, we're flesh robots on a dead rock spinning in the middle of nowhere, subjected to the random forces of like bad luck, bad timing and bad genes, in fact we are given this incredible organism that transduces elements of our deep spiritual reality to our conscious awareness through the symptoms that we experience. That everything has inherent meaning, that there is emergent beauty. And there is incredible interconnected balance in all things at all times. That's another option, right? So I found that there's science for both, right? There's science for both. So which one feels better? Because yolo, right? Choose what feels better and begin to create a safe incubator for that belief to grow.

How long did it take you to get over your sense of righteous rage?

I'm not sure. I'm totally over it yet. This has been a lot of the nature of my spiritual work and honestly, because I don't know how many folks listening are going to be affronted by references to reincarnation or you should affront.

The hell out of people who have problems with being affronted because it's good for their personal growth. If you're listening and you're affronted, the unsubscribe button's over there. And you can either listen and learn or you can get the hell out. And I'm okay either way, I'll still love you.

I'm the kind of person who affronts just by waking up in the morning.

I was going to say you already mentioned soul, which pretty much, I think they pull your medical license for talking about souls and now you're talking about reincarnation. And by the way, guys, I know I never did go to Tibet and learn meditation from the masters or do ayahuasca with shamans. So there's no such thing as reincarnation. You can just be safe in your little shell. Don't even worry. Okay, Keep going, Kelly.

Nothing to see here. Nothing to see here. Yeah, you know, so I've been told like many, many times actually by different clairvoyance that I have many past lives as a warrior, right. And that I came in with a lot of those gifts, if you will. And that's not actually what I'm here to do this time around. And that's very resonant to me because, you know, so many people have told me over my career, like, oh, you're so courageous, thank you for your bravery. And it's never felt accurate because it doesn't feel that. It feels actually harder to self suppress than it does to express in this way. It's very easy for me to whip my sword out and try and like David and Goliath this situation. And there were times where I thought, well, maybe I'm here to take down the pharmaceutical industry single handedly. Right. And I understand, of course now I'm several years in understanding that that's actually not only not what is representative of my healing path personally, but it's actually not the way that I'm going to serve humanity either.

So only someone who's been a warrior and is willing to fight, who is a licensed psychiatrist, would talk about seeing clairvoyant in past lives. So like that takes serious balls. Can I just say that.

Somebody said to me, so if your current self met your past self from like 10 years ago at a bar, would they even talk? No, definitely not. Definitely not. I've had a micro reincarnation in this, in this lifetime. But no, I mean, it's been the nature of my work to see that as long as I fight the system, I am perpetuating the war.

It makes it stronger. You got to should be able to do it better. We have some commonalities there. Yeah, there's great pleasure in breaking big dumb evil things, but maybe you can evolve them instead of breaking them. I'm begrudgingly working on the same thing.

Or maybe I just focus on actually myself. Maybe I just focus on the chopping wood and carrying water of, of being the healthiest version of Kelly Brogan that I can every single day, which by the way is a full time job. And the rest will organically emerge or become obvious or apparent the way in which I can serve best. And so I've really in the past couple of years focused my advocacy on making sure that I can put a microphone and a video camera on these recovery stories that defy the dogma of the conventional system. They're not supposed to exist, these outliers, these spontaneous remissions, these remission cases that shouldn't be possible according to everything that I've learned. And they are possible. They're living and breathing evidence. And if I can showcase those, then people can know what is possible so that they can make a more informed decision. Because if you're diagnosed with Graves disease, for example, and you don't know that it's possible to put that into lasting remission, then you might opt to have your thyroid surgically removed. You might weigh the risks and benefits as told to you by your doctor, and you might make that choice. But if you know that it's possible, even if it just happened one time, and we just published the first case I've ever found of lifestyle based remission of Graves disease in a peer reviewed published paper, and now many people hopefully will know it's possible so that they can make the choice. They might still opt for surgery, but that's where informed consent comes in. It's Almost like crowdsourcing the information that you're not going to potentially get at your doctor's office.

I really like the way you're thinking about that and you're talking about your personal evolution. You sort of have an unfair advantage because you studied therapy and you've studied psychology and you studied psychiatry as just part of your medical training. So you can see the layers of things and other people that you're treating for sure. And someone walks in like, oh, this person has ptsd or this person has not enough acetylcholine or whatever else. You've kind of got that laser vision. When you hold it up to a mirror though, does it work? Is it easier for you to have self awareness with all of your training than a muggle?

I have to say I've been the toughest nut to crack because most of the people that I've worked with, either directly as patients or through, you know, my, my online program, their, their shadow material, if you will. The, the secrets that they're hiding from themselves are often like their light parts, right? Are often the fact that they are like bold and intelligent and capable and strong and all of these things that they don't identify with, they identify with the, with the bad objects, so to speak, in psychological terms. And they project the good object outside so they see all the people with their wonderful lives who are having these amazing experiences, but they're full of the badness, right? I have had something of the opposite experience where my shadow material, the sort of small man behind the curtain, like, pulling all the strings, was so invisible to me that I literally didn't know it was there. And it includes my fears, you know, like, I've spent many years of my adult life totally unaware that I had any fears.

Like, what are your fears?

So, like, for example, I never thought I was afraid of dying. I thought, die or not die, who cares? I could die in 10 minutes. What do I care? I also was an atheist for many, many years, so that was. Yeah, so it's kind of this nihilistic thing like, whatever, who cares? I never felt afraid of embarrassment. I never felt afraid of loss. I just didn't. I didn't feel afraid of, you know, big industries coming after. I just didn't have access to that. And today, you know, after developing intimacy with these parts of me, the lazy part, the manipulative part, the liar, the cheater, you know, like, we all have all of these. We all have all of them. It's part of the kaleidoscope of the human. So if we all have all of them. You're going to be hiding some aspects from yourself so that you can develop familiarity and a sense of control over the curated aspect of you that you're presenting to the world. Right. And so as I've developed familiarity with my shadow realm, I've found tremendous amounts of pain there that I, I just wasn't aware of because my defenses are that effective.

I've noticed coming up through engineering in Silicon Valley, the more hyper rational people are, by the way, computer science kind of guy here, from a family of PhD engineering types, the more rational you are, the more defended and less attention you paid to any of those other sides of yourself. So if you believe you have no soul, you believe that emotions don't matter because there's no reason to have an emotion, therefore I don't have an emotion sort of thing, that the harder it is, the more pain there is. That's just my observation because I came up in the tribe of the engineer. Is that a true statement for non engineers or is that just more for something that I observe because of my environment?

I think there's a lot of accuracy to that. The intellectual defensive structure, there's all sorts of different defenses, right? Avoidance, self recrimination. Mine is when I feel threatened. Okay, so here, how do I know when I am afraid? How do I know when I'm afraid of rejection or abandonment or betrayal or experiencing pain? The signature for me is that I get a little tightness in my chest. I get like a hot flash up the back of my head and then I feel this urgency to communicate my point by text or email.

I don't want to say it, I want it so you can't respond.

Right, right, right, exactly. So it's not by phone conversation, it's not meeting up at a cafe, it might be by voice note. And that's because when I am afraid and my defensive structure comes online and my powers of rhetoric are sharpened, my intellect is more available to me. And in this way I feel no feelings. None. I feel no feelings. So I can deliver my point and then I can walk away and go to dinner with a friend. In fact, I would feel relieved probably. And no fear, no sadness, no shame, no nothing. And that's the mark of an effective defense when you start to recognize that signature and it normally has a sense of urgency around it. And again, avoidance is another signature, one for a lot of people, like I gotta get out of here. When it has an urgency around it, that's like a little tap on your shoulder to say like stuff in there, right? There's like unmetabolized pain in there. And you can choose to check it out and learn about it or not, but know that it is running the show, know that it is the reason that you are responding, the way you're responding and why you can't access the equanimity of a pause, perhaps, or, you know, this kind of more adult dispassion around the outcome of whatever the situation might be. And obviously this comes up a lot in romantic relationships with when we feel like we are right about what we're saying and that's the signature of pain. And again, it's optional to explore that, but when you do, you begin to understand how to no longer live. It's like a whack a mole game where you're just constantly shoving it down from one place, it's popping up in another all over your relationships and all over your dynamics at work and. And it's exhausting. And then you never really get to feel authentically whole. You never get to feel like, you know what? This person knows my whole situation and they still love me. That's an experience that not many of us have had because we are wearing that mask. And instead of just taking it off and looking in the mirror and saying, wow, who is this? What does she look like? What is she made of? We're just strapping it on tighter and tighter and tighter and we're self medicating either through actual medications or alcohol or workaholism that was a huge one and has been from a huge one, or sex or whatever it is. We're trying to meet these primary needs in these secondary ways and it never quite feels right.

So you're saying my problem with coffee is a problem.

There's childhood trauma beneath that.

All right, I actually really resonate with what you're saying. And if you're one of the people listening, who's the highly rational skeptic types, I'm with you. My knowledge here, and the reason I'm telling you this is, Kelly, I want you to shoot holes in what I'm saying, if it's worthy of having holes shot in it, is that you have a rational part of your brain and it's useful and you have at the same time an irrational part of your brain that's also useful and they coexist and they don't always agree, but neither one is superior to the other. That took me a long time to understand. Because if you're a truth table philosopher or computer scientist, it's a zero Or a one. And you can't be both a zero and a one, but your consciousness seems to be both. Accurate, not accurate.

There is an order of recruitment.

Okay, yeah, talk about that.

Of those parts of the brain. And I don't love being super reductionist about, you know, the reptilian part and the midbrain. However, we know behaviorally in our bodies what it feels like to not have access to our rational executive functioning. And we know what it feels like when that comes back online and when it's not available. We look a lot like most of us, like little kids who need it our way, right. And are having some version of a tantrum. The reason that I have achieved what I have in my lifetime is because my version of a tantrum is something that society values, right?

So like, oh my God, that's a great quote. Okay, that kills me. All right, keep going.

It's true. So as I was saying, you know, like my defensive structure, my version of a tantrum is to become even more articulate, if you will, and to have more access to my intellect through, through the fear vector, right? But for most people, it's like they can't think straight. They start saying things they're going to regret. We know what it feels like in our bodies when that part of our brain is being recruited in an order of primacy. And then we know what it feels like to shift into our cool and to begin to inhabit the other's experience. Because when we are in our animal brain, we are incapable of inhabiting another's experience effectively, such that there's only one reality. Now, you may be interested in perspectives that suggest, well, actually there are relative realities and there are multiple versions of every experience or not. But all you have to do is think about five people witnessing a car accident to know there's going to be five different stories of what happened. And that is the nature of our day to day lived experience. So the more you can get into another's perspective and, and hold what I call maybe mind, right? So hold your version of reality, your story about it with some lightness and with room for the possibility that there might be an entirely different version of the story. Because that's what I found to be the most powerfully operative in the realm of physical illness, encounters with the medical system and diagnostic labels and associated medications is we can either tell, you know, this story that something is wrong with you, you're sick, you're fundamentally broken and you're destined to be a patient for life and see how that feels, right? See if you can ever fully shift out of fight or flight when you're living in that paradigm, or we can tell a totally different story. That may also be true, maybe more true, maybe less true for you, which is that these symptoms are a meaningful expression, an invitation to balance and to understand something about yourself and the way in which your body expresses these needs, and that it was never a reflection of something being wrong with you. And in fact, that's the feedback I get, is that from many of the people I've worked with or encountered. I amazingly was one of the first to ever tell them that nothing was wrong with them. And that's all that it took for them to start this healing journey that ultimately led in shedding a diagnosis and shedding seemingly decades of medication or potentially lifetime orientation towards a system that they would be dependent on.

What do you recommend that people throughout the world, when you're dealing with a critic who's either a science troll or just a hater, for lack of a better word, what is the inner dialogue trick? What is the thing you do so that you're either not feeling the pain or so you feel the pain, but then process the pain and go through the process that you have in your book on yourself. How should people deal with critics, especially public critics?

Bless them.

Oh, bless them.

Here's why. Here's why. There are a couple of different reasons. One, and an important reason is I have had much experience with trolls, and actually I've seen so much so that I've been able to observe over time how their tactics have changed.

Isn't it cool? Okay, tell me.

Yeah, because the biggest troll wave I dealt with was in 2016, and it was actually based on, or the sort of trigger for it or whatever was a home birth article that I wrote.

High five. I delivered both my own kids. You're so right. Okay, so keep going.

Apparently not everyone agrees that this. Well, you know. Okay, so here's the thing. A whole website was established calling me an ableist. You would be accused of the same label. So you should know that this could happen to you as well, Dave.

At least a canist. This was a biblical quote, right?

Sorry. An ableist is apparently somebody who believes that other people should be able to do things just because I'm able to do them, including have a natural home birth. Right?

Do ableists understand that some people have penises and some people have vaginas? Because I'm pretty sure some people can do things other people can't? Just sayin'.

I don't think it's Like a well explored, slanderous term, but it's almost has a eugenics kind of vibe to it in the way they use it.

You're constantly improving as a species over time under our own conscious development. Oh, God, no, let's not do that.

I would be very susceptible to this.

There we go.

Yeah. So the implication was that I'm shaming people who are not able to be without meds or whatever, not take whatever it is that I do. I'm shaming people who can't do that. And so I've come to. Okay, so let me back up. So there was this massive troll wave. And it was an important element is that pharma funds many seemingly neutral outlets, and so people think that they are totally independent and they're not necessarily. And many of these are like automated efforts. Right? So Cheryl Atkisson, I don't know if you've seen her TED talk on astroturfing, but it's must watch. It's a must watch. And she talks about how the idea with astroturfing and how it's operationalized is to create the impression suppression of organic and real grassroots sentiment that's actually totally synthetic. And so then real people think that's organic and they glom onto it. So. But the nidus of it is robotic, it's automated, it's algorithmic, even sometimes. And one of the ways you'll see be able to detect. I don't need to tell you this, but a troll comment is It'll have like 20 likes in the first 10 minutes, right? Or 15 minutes. And then it's just not probabilistically the case for most, you know, at least not my following it wasn't the case. And so that's how we could start to see. But the troll approach used to be, you know, calling me a cunt and saying they would spit in my face and cut me and all this stuff, right?

You gotta love people like that. You're like, yeah, that's gonna work.

But it's so ultimately they're like, okay, maybe there's a subtler, more nuanced technique we can employ. And so over time now, I've seen that it's. It's like I've been following you for so long and I love everything you do, but now that you've said this or referenced this study, I'm out of here. Right? So it's like approval and then dismissal. They have like kind of a new technique. And again, some of it I still think is part of organized industry effort.

Oh, you can pay for that stuff. It's real. Yeah, that's the dark side of public relations. It's real. By the way, the antidote for that that I found works 100% of the time is you literally say, that's fine, the unsubscribe button's over there. And you make a little arrow with the greater sign and two little dashes. And when you just show zero shits given to people who act like that, everyone else who's a real follower is like, they'll give you like 50 thumbs up or likes or check marks or whatever service you're on. They're actually like, oh, this is a person with integr. And like, you don't live and die based on whether someone reads your content, because your content stands on its own worth. And so that's what I do. And it works really well. What do you do? Do you have something I can steal?

Yeah. So I. No, I don't. So I never engage. But I also am strangely wired because I don't care. It really doesn't bother me and never has. And maybe that's because I've been on the side that would have trolled myself.

Me too.

So, like, I sort of get it and I get how threatening, you know, what I'm saying is to the paradigm. It is, it is. And so, of course, you know, my energy, I'm gonna suck in their energy. I made a joke at some point there was this. I'll just call her journalist. I don't know.

Sometimes there's a lot of people who use that label, but they really don't deserve it. Okay, so a paid shill of the.

Pharma industry got it so focused on me, like messaging about me on Twitter every day, that I thought, wow, this woman is thinking about me every day. We have, like, this very intimate relationship. Like, what is this about? This is so strange, right? It's like a really deep connection, because there is a connection in that kind of engagement. And so when you engage in response, then you're saying, I consent to this relationship. Right? And if you set a boundary the way you have, or you just don't engage, then you're saying, no, I don't consent to this relationship. You can continue to put energy towards it, but I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to reciprocate. And for the most part, it's a very important skill, I think, to cultivate for all of us as adults to understand how we can let people be who the hell they are. This has taken me a very, very, very long time. And I don't pretend to have expertise in it yet, but it is something that I have now established as like a core value that I believe everyone should have the liberty to be who they are and not need to be a certain way in order for me to feel okay. And I'm not going to be a certain way in order for them to feel okay. And we'll all just sort of work towards that in our separate realities, living out our own level of consciousness.

How does that work, even from like an own yourself in your book perspective? So if it's okay for them to be the way they are, okay, if they're for flaky, judgmental assholes who spray glyphosate on their soil and throw plastic in the ocean at a certain point, even if I'm a highly enlightened being, isn't it okay to punch them every now and then? Okay, that was a joke. But in all seriousness, isn't there a limit to this? We have billions of people on the planet. How does that work?

Yeah, I know I'm talking mostly on an emotional level, because the truth is I do believe in regulatory legislation and checks and balances and I think the lack thereof in the fox guarding the henhouse of every regulatory institution in this country is a huge, huge part of the sickness and corruption. Right? So I believe in that. However, I'm speaking on a very individual level, on the emotional level, because I very much inhabited the perspective that people needed to the big industry folks, the big pharma folks, anyone fundamentally representing a power that I disagreed with, they needed to be a certain way and I knew exactly how they needed to be the challenge, and it may just be a spiritual challenge, but the challenge in that is that it's still based on control. I am seeking to control these individuals and I feel unrest inside of me until and if they confront to what I need them to do. And so in my experience as an activist, and particularly around pharmaceuticals, I have found that to really eat me up inside and it makes me a less effective activist, less present, less heart centered, less available to the mission, because we burn out through that path. And so instead if my focus can be on my own healing, on my own nervous system, on my own self care, then when the opportunity for self expression comes, when the opportunity for clear and present action presents itself, then I know exactly what it is, I know what to do. And I'm not gonna have an inner tantrum about it, because in a lot of the activist realms, I Traffic in it's way dark. And it's like Nietzsche says, we can become the monster that we're fighting. And so I've kind of been learning that over time.

I'm going to step in it big time. The whole idea of activism, I don't understand it. I used to have Asperger's syndrome, I'm an engineer, I'm like if you have a problem, just go solve it. But I was talking to my kids about the climate strike. I actually fund research with the XPRIZE foundation on carbon capture. I believe this matters and I'm working really hard on getting grass fed agriculture back out that have restricted store the soil and the whole carbon cycle seems important. So I'm working on this. It's built into the ingredients I use. Our oil is coconut based, not palm based because we need more jungles. You can see it. But I'm talking to my kids and a bunch of kids took a Friday off of school to go raise climbing water. So my kids, they all had their parents drive them somewhere to go stand around and protest something. And then they all got in cars powered by fossil fuels and drove home. Like what did they accomplish? And my daughter said, well they're saying that they're raising awareness. And I go, and what was the outcome of raising awareness? And nobody knows. But from where I sit, as someone who's like, I'll roll up my sleeves and solve the damn problem, right? How do you, and this is going to be a real tough question I think, but how do you think about the emotional, spiritual, logical side of being an activist for the things you believe in, like home birth, like replacing drugs with lifestyle and things like that. What's the role of activism versus actual action? And is there a difference?

Yeah, I think, I love this question. I think that authenticity has become the most powerful form of social currency and, and that we are so sensitive to inauthenticity that we are no longer going to get away with telling the world how it should be without actually practicing and living that. Right. So my greatest credential is not anything on the wall behind me, right? My greatest credential is that I live this life. I have a pharma free household. I am dedicated to not reflexively reacting fearfully to my symptoms. I meditate every day. I eat organic food. You know, I am, I do coffee enemas. I'm, I live, I live this life. And that's also how I know, you know, the layers that are uncovered through a dedication to the path of self discovery which of course I Think of as the healing path, as the health oriented path. It's learning more about yourself, about your body organism. So I have absolutely come to conclude what you have, which is that the more we focus on beating the bad guy out there, right? And this idea that as soon as we win this one issue, as soon as we get our way, everything's going to be fine, that's such a distraction, you know, from actually making the day to day choices. The householder experience of activism I have found, and that's why I've said that I believe that self care is the greatest form of activism today. Because if you don't know, if you're not choosing the coconut oil, then you don't know what it is to have an experience of making a different choice that you want the world to also make. And I think that that level of authenticity transmits to people and we can kind of, kind of smell it otherwise. And we feel manipulated and controlled or like somebody's telling us what to do, even if we happen to agree with it. It's not inspirational. It's like expectation oriented or judgment oriented.

Right?

Yeah, exactly.

It was Mother Teresa who had definitely did some good things and probably some things that I wouldn't really be in alignment with, but overall pretty darn good. She had a quote that I really love. Someone asked her, said, will you come to our rally against the war? And she said no. And they're like, what do you mean? She said, I'll come to a rally for peace, but I won't come to rally against the war. And for her it was like, it doesn't work that way. And what I've learned in the neuroscience side of what I do with 40 years of Zen and meditation and all this, is that it seems like our nervous system, our emotions, it doesn't understand the word not very well. It doesn't understand negatives. So when you have that don't be evil, which our friends at Google was their slogan, all your emotions and spiritual side here is be evil because it doesn't understand the negative. So when you're protesting against the war, you're supporting the war. When you protest for peace, you're supporting peace. And so when someone says, I'm going to go to a rally for climate awareness, I'm like, I'm aware of the climate because I'm breathing, thank you very much. What are you going to do? Right? So if you're going to go to a rally to clean up the oceans, I'm like, hallelujah, you go do that. But if you're going to go there to tell me what to think. It's like, how about you pound sand? Because I already kind of know what to think. Right. Whether you're in a rally for something, I believe or don't, I don't care. Like, stop rallying, start doing. And I don't know, I might get a lot of hate mail for that, but whatever.

No, I've had a lived experience of exactly what you're describing. Like, I fought the system. When I learned everything that I hadn't been taught in medical school, I went out there to fight. And I found there was very limited yield to that. And also I was miserable.

There's that too. Yeah, it really makes you feel empty to do that.

And my poor kids. And then when I shifted, instead of giving my energy to fighting what exists, as Bucky Fuller says, you can't fight the existing system. You create one that makes it obsolete. So I focused my energy on the creative. I focused on channeling my efforts towards celebrating these healing stories of people who had recidivistic schizophrenia, now in remission of bipolar disorder, with multiple suicide attempts, now in remission of lupus and Graves disease and migraines and one after another after another. And I have this whole team of clinical volunteers to write these up because it brings me joy, because I literally weep with joy about it. And so if that's how I am engaging in activism, not only is it again focusing on the creation of what's possible and fostering that, but it also creates an experience in me that's better for everyone in my life, not to mention my daily experience.

How does this tie into something that's in your new book? You talk about the teleologic perspective in epigenetics. What's the connection here, if there is one?

Yeah. So when I first began to learn about epigenetics, which really had not a whisper of mention in my. The timing was such that in my medical treatment, so this was all kind of self taught, I guess. I remember thinking, okay, so if we can modify gene expression through environmental inputs in practically real time, then why haven't we adapted to perchlorate from the dry cleaner and glyphosate and all of these 100,000 plus unstudied industrial chemicals and GMOs and whatever, like 5G networks and Wi fi, why haven't we adapted to that? The human body is extraordinarily resilient, always seeking homeostasis. What's the deal? And I came to what I guess is again, this quasi mystical perspective. But it could also just be framed as teleologic or purpose oriented, which is that we're not meant to, right? We're not meant to that there is a kind of meta homeostasis, there's a meta balance of all living beings and nonliving contributors, agents and forces on this planet and then systems beyond that requires that we conform to a certain kind of expression. And you could, you could call what's happening now evolutionary mismatch, right? That we've wandered off the path of what we are destined, how we are destined to express. And the symptoms that we are experiencing, inflammation driven are a callback to that path for a reason. Because we are meant to move our bodies and be out in the sunlight and sleep in a certain way and experience certain types of stress and not experience others. We're meant to experience pleasure and sensuality, we're meant to feel joy, we're meant to eat actual food so that we can have that informational dynamic with the natural world. And we're meant to really limit, if not eliminate our exposures to these synthetic.