Kaizen Asiedu
Appearances
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
I didn't have the confidence because I did get the vaccine. Ultimately, I did capitulate. But what I noticed was that there was this trend of me being told I need to be afraid. And then when the actual thing happened, it didn't seem as bad as what I was told it was going to be. So I'll give you an incident that's related around the same time. George Floyd. Right.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So at the time of George Floyd, I was living in L.A. I'm black. There was this incident involving a white cop and a black man. Right. And I remember seeing the reaction from everyone around me being, oh my God, black people are being so oppressed and there's so much police brutality toward black people.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And I remember thinking to myself, I have never had a negative experience with a police person in my life. And I had friends like asking me about my experience and I almost felt like there was this expectation that I buy into the narrative that there's this oppression and I've been subject to it on the basis of the color of my skin as well.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So that was one of the early wake-up calls that, hey, okay, what people are being told is going on doesn't necessarily match my own experience. And that started to create a general default of more skepticism toward narratives about what was going on versus what was actually going on.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So when we say confidence, I wouldn't say I was confident because I'm not a scientist who was verifying the information for myself about the vaccine. But when I thought about this just from first principles, I thought, okay, Well, this is something that we've known about for months. It's been happening in China, and then it was happening in Italy, and we were being told it would come to America.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Now we're being told it's happening in America. But what we don't have is some situation where there's incredibly high mortality. It might have high virality, but it's not necessarily high mortality. So at minimum, we can start to ask some questions about, hey, do we actually understand the mechanism of action of this thing? And do we actually understand who's at risk here?
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Those are, I think, basic questions that any regular person should ask. But instead, the narratives seem to be expect a severe winter of illness and death, right? That's what President Biden literally said on the whitehouse.gov website. And that's not at all what happened. So for me, it was less about confidence.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
It was more about, hey, is there a dissonance between my personal experience and what I'm being told to expect? And anywhere I see that kind of gap, then there's an information gap that's not being bridged either by me as an individual or by the authorities who are telling me to believe something.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Yeah, and that should be the attitude anytime you see incongruence between what you're being told and what you're seeing. Right. Like, again, to give the example of you go on the street, if someone on the street tells you, hey, there's a deadly virus coming and everyone's going to die. Well, you would start to look for evidence confirming that fact. Like, do you know anyone who's dying?
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Do you know anyone who's falling deathly ill? If you don't see that, then you're going to start to doubt the source of information, who is the person on the street. But remember, by the time that the vaccine came out, we had been in lockdown for like a year. Right. So we had had a long period of time where you could see in your own personal experience where things impacted.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And at least in my personal experience, like I didn't know anyone who was dying. I knew people who had gotten it and gotten over it. So by the time that the vaccine was available in 2021, for me, I'd had like a year's worth of data. And it suggested that this is not as bad as we originally told it could be. And to be clear, like there was a period where we just didn't know, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Like in March of 2020, no one knew. So it was reasonable to think there was a non-zero possibility that this is something like the bubonic plague. Of course there is. But as time goes on, you need to increase, you should increase confidence in your hypothesis by getting more data that confirmed the original hypothesis, which was that this was going to be a severe winter of illness and death.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And it wasn't the truth. It Yeah, I mean, you know what I think is going on, and this is, it particularly bothers me when we're talking about people's health, is people are being told to ignore their own experience, to ignore their own senses and own discernment about what's going on in the world, and instead listen to what an information source is telling them.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And it's causing people to just abandon common sense and common sense intuitions and ask questions and really like form their own worldview. And that I think is perhaps the most dangerous part of this information ecosystem that we've now formed. It's overly reliant on expertise and authority while abandoning intuition and common sense.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Yeah. Well, one, they weren't hearings because no one was hearing anyone. It was like an interrogation. Honestly, it was the first time that I ever watched a Senate confirmation hearing live, the Kennedy hearing. And one of the first things I noticed was there was just a lack of genuine curiosity on the part of the senators who were questioning him.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Because you have Bernie Sanders go up there and, you know, show baby onesies and talk about the baby onesies and how they evidence that he's an anti-vaxxer when RFK is saying, hey, I'm not even a part of that organization. I can't control whether they sell these onesies. And then Bernie Sanders is like shouting him down. Do you denounce these onesies? The entire tone of the conversation was like,
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
an interrogation. It was punitive. It was like, let me catch you on something and confirm my existing belief and show everyone that I'm right and you're wrong and you're a bad person. I'm a good person.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Similarly with Elizabeth Warren, you know, I made a video on this of all, pretty much all the hearings and like some of the most vitriolic moments, literally shouting him down and just cutting him off before he asks a question, before he answers a question. And What it showed me was, oh, okay, these people are not actually interested in the truth.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
They're actually convinced they already know the truth, and what they're trying to do is appear right, rather than be genuinely open to having their views updated. So it's no surprise to me that now that RFK is actually in office, this is continued.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Because when people are so convinced that they're right, it clouds their opinions and makes it impossible for them to even consider the idea that they're wrong. And then when you layer on financial incentives, incentives to need to get elected, incentives to get clicks on the behalf of news organizations, it becomes very difficult to even have an honest conversation.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So yeah, the confirmation hearings are just political theater. I suspect they've largely always been the case. But this particular set of confirmation hearings, not just RFK with Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, the tone was particularly emotional.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
I don't even remember saying that. That's a banger. I got a bunch more. Oh, love it. You know you're out of touch with the truth when things are not working. That's how we know that we're working with the truth. Like if you're building a rocket and it explodes, then you're out of alignment with the truth of what's needed to get the rocket to fly in the air and go to another planet.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
If you even compare it to the last set of hearings for Biden's candidates, because I think it's always been the case that both Democrats and Republicans were trying to beat the other team. And I think that's just kind of how politics operates. And there's an inherent level of tribalism that we're probably never going to be able to get rid of entirely.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
But this felt more like a holy war, like a crusade, like this is a bad person and I'm going to show you they're a bad person and nothing can change my mind about that. And It's strange to me because it's like, well, hopefully we can all agree that the state of health in this country is unacceptable, especially for a first world country and a superpower. And it's only getting worse.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Like the chronic disease burden is only getting higher. Kids are getting fatter. We're putting kids on Ozempic and all these things that we don't understand and are really surface level bandaid solutions to deeper problems. And it would behoove us to try anything differently, right? But when we see something genuinely different come along, we're like, no, no, no, not that. Let's not do that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Rather than being humble and demonstrating some intellectual honesty and recognize, well, what we've been trying isn't working. So maybe we actually need to risk overcorrection in the other direction while we find the actual middle. But there's not even an openness to that. So. Yeah, I think we're going to we're going to see this happen over the next four years.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
This this level of like dogmatic commitment to a position. And I actually was hopeful that after Trump's election, like things would die down because now there's not an actual like national decision to be made about what direction we go ideologically. But it's pretty clear that a lot of these people are just going to be kicking and screaming to the very end.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Yeah, so I think there's a cultural argument, there's a scientific argument, and then there's an argument about public trust. I think the cultural concern is that someone like Bobby Kennedy, although he might have some points that he's correct on,
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
introducing him into this system threatens an entire system that has worked up to this point of vaccines and preventative medicine and allopathic medicine that has gotten us this far as a country, right? Because if you look at it, it's like, we're not collapsing as a civilization. So evidently what we're doing, some of it works.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Similarly, in our own personal lives, we know we're out of alignment in the truth in our health when we're dealing with health problems because there's something that we're doing or some way that we're relating to the environment that's hurting us.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And people have pointed out like the polio vaccine saved millions of people and RFK is creating vaccine skepticism that is being broadly applied to every vaccine, not just the COVID vaccine. So the strong argument would be, look, maybe he's right about, let's say, 1% or even generously 10% of vaccines.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
But what about the 99% to 90% of vaccines that are helping us and have gotten us to this point as a civilization? He's creating a culture of dogmatic skepticism that is an equal and opposite reaction to scientific dogmatism that he's trying to correct for. So he's just swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And if we had had him around during maybe the polio vaccine, maybe he would have made this argument and then millions of people wouldn't have gotten the polio vaccine and died. So that's part of the cultural component. Part of the scientific component of this is he's not a scientist, right? He's someone who speaks a lot about science.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
He's someone who's interacted a lot with scientists and scientific institutions. But there's genuine questions about whether he has the scientific discipline and training to actually evaluate some of this stuff on first principles. And there's a difference between being a creator and a critic. Right. So you can be a creator of novel scientific solutions to problems, which is very hard. Right.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And people spend their entire lives just trying to come up with one novel solution to a problem that's plagued us forever. It's much easier to be destructive. So you could argue that RFK, he's doing the easy job of a critic, which is just to critique fall flaws and fallacies in what is overall a functional system. So that's also part of the concern.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Or if we're having trouble with our relationships, well, there's some way that we're interacting with other people that's getting in the way and we're not seeing the truth of something that we need to see.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
He's not actually in a position to evaluate the science directly himself. The third concern would be about institutions more generally. Ultimately, all nations rely on a social contract and rely on a level of trust. You just can't have a functioning, thriving civilization if you don't have a basic level of trust.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Because as I mentioned earlier, trust is why people believe things that they do, not verification. So why do I believe trust? that the vaccine schedule maybe is generally good for kids because that's what scientists and scientific institutions have told me, not because I verified this myself.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
However, if we now have a default skepticism about everything the government says, everything institutions say, everything scientific bodies say, then we can't coordinate anymore. And if you don't have trust, then you need a bunch of rules or you need conflict every single time you're trying to make something happen. And you simply can't make progress that way.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And what it'll do is it'll actually, rather than correcting the system, it'll just cause a system to come to a screeching halt. So that is what I would say is like the steel man argument against RFK. He's spreading a level of skepticism that is just as dangerous, if not more, than dogmatism. He is not a scientist and not in a position to evaluate scientific claims on a first principles basis.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And he's eroding trust in society most generally. And that's getting in the way of coordination and it's contributing to polarization.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So when it comes to this idea of the matrix, this web of expectations and ideas that are preventing us from being in touch with the truth, the first thing to do is look at our own experience and see what's dysfunctional there.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Often, particularly when we're talking about abstract ideas like political concepts or cultural norms, it can feel so difficult to discern what's real and what's truthful that we say, oh, it's just all your truth, my truth, it's all relative. But that's not actually true.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
I mean, there are things, there are standards, there are beliefs that are more effective at producing lives that people want to live. So the way that you get out of the matrix per se is to look at what relationship do you have with reality as you're living it? And is it creating the results that you want? And if it's not, then there's clearly something dysfunctional about your worldview.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Absolutely. I mean, the most uncomfortable topics are the ones that are most important to talk about. And what's been happening is over the last, I don't know, decade, maybe two decades, this anti-free speech culture has been developing. And Maybe it's because we're like nearly 250 years from the founding of this country.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
I don't know why, but people have seemed to lose touch with the real value of free speech. The value of free speech is not demonstrated when everyone is saying things that are true. The value of free speech is demonstrated when people are saying things that are false and other people can counter those false things in public. So you counter bad speech with good speech.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
You counter hate speech with loving speech. You counter misinformation with real information. But instead, what's been happening is people have been saying, hey, don't talk to this person. How dare you platform them? How dare you talk to them? How dare you entertain their views? How dare you be associated with them? Which is silly, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Because you can't have a good faith dialogue if you're not curious about the other side of that dialogue. How do you know that you believe what you believe is true if you're not talking to people who believe what you believe is false? So we just need to believe that the truth is good and the truth always wins.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And if someone is spreading falsehoods, all that needs is contact with the truth in order for that to be exposed as a falsehood. But instead, what's been happening is we've been canceling people. We've been shunning people. We've been removing people from the public town square. But it's not like those people go away.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
They go into the alleyways and they preach in the alleyways and they gather their adherents who are only hearing their views in their echo chamber outside of the town square. So I'll give you an example of this. Recently, there was this incident with Kanye and he went on a racist rant on X. Did you see this?
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Yeah. So he went on this racist rant about Jewish people and, you know, just insane stuff he was saying. And a lot of people just dismissed it as the ravings of a mentally ill man. And there's something to that. I mean, it was completely unhinged. That said, he's been saying a lot of this stuff now pretty consistently for about a decade.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And the fact that he's getting louder is actually emblematic of the fact that he's not the only one who believes the things that he's saying. But before, what we did is we tried to just silence him. He got banned off of social media. He lost a bunch of contracts. People just tried to remove him from existence. That didn't work.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Instead, his views were moved to a fringe, and that fringe has only grown. So this is what happens. Like, if you silence people, then they get louder. And if you try to completely silence them, then they can get violent, first with their speech, then with their actions.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And then when you look at that, you realize, okay, I have ideas that I've inherited from authorities or my parents or schools or my peer group that are getting in the way and implanting these ideas that are causing problems in my life. And then you look outside of yourselves like, oh, where did I get these ideas from? That's how you start to see the matrix around you.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So the way that you deal with bad ideas like the ones that he's been spreading is you need to actually talk to him in public, in full view of everyone, and show everyone how ludicrous the ideas are. Because otherwise... Other people who actually might agree with him in the background don't have their ideas exposed to tension and healthy pressure.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So they harbor those ideas and they go secretly go follow that person. So no matter how heinous or odious the idea is, the point of a culture of free speech is that free speech is a counter to bad ideas. But instead we seem to have forgotten that and we want to shame people for even talking to people who disagree with them.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Or we want to label people as a conspiracy theorist or anti this, racist that, misogynist, whatever the term is. And it doesn't actually kill the ideas. It actually just gives them more power, just it gives them power in a place that we don't see. And then when massive hateful movements start to rise, we wonder where the hell did this come from?
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Well, because we shoved it out of the town square, it festered elsewhere, and that's overwhelming the town square. So, yeah, when we go back to RFK, for example, you know, originally what they tried to do is silence him, right? The Democratic Party, they engage in lawfare.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
They basically tried to shut him down in a bunch of states so that he literally could not win the presidency, take him off the ballot. The news media tried to cancel him, deem him a conspiracy theorist, bring up stuff about bears in Central Park and all this stuff.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And fortunately, that didn't work because I personally believe that he's actually providing a really healthy counteraction to what's been going on in the country. But there's many people who agreed with RFK. And what happens is when people agree with him and they see him being mistreated in the public, they don't stop believing what they believe. They actually double down on their position.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And they're like, you know what? Screw these people. We're just going to dogmatically believe what we believe now because you guys weren't even willing to talk to us about it. And as a result, you get dogmatism on both sides and both sides stop thinking clearly. And that's how you get tribalism and conflict. So no matter how much we disagree, we have to have dialogue.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
That's the only way that we can actually mutually arrive at the truth. But I think many people have forgotten that and we've become so... Unaccustomed to difficult conversations that we would rather label the other side as bad people and hateful and crazy than engage with them and see, okay, what is there that they're saying that actually is a useful contribution to the discussion?
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
That is the only way real healing can happen. And that's the only real way that tribalism can end because it's not about one tribe winning over the other.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
But my critique of the right is they're often not in touch enough with their emotions, too. So if one side is too much heart on the left, I think the right is too much head. And both sides need each other to a degree. And I think the truth is we need to go more rightward because I think we've swung too far leftward. But both sides have something to learn from one another.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
That's how you got to see the ideas that were implanted in you that are causing dysfunction in your own life and in society at large.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
The reason I mention this is because the tendency I see on the right is to dismiss and dehumanize other people. And when we think about, you know, the way Trump was treated, being labeled a fascist and Nazi, and this is the next Hitler thing. I think that was massively hyperbolized, but there's not nothing to it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
That's like, just like when people call Kamala a communist, I don't think she was strictly a communist, but there's something to it, right? Cause she's on the left side of the spectrum. And if you go left enough, you reach communism. Trump is on the right side of the spectrum. If you go far right enough, you do reach fascism. So often a mark of,
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
the fastest movements that people are concerned about, like Mussolini, Hitler, and so on, is that they dehumanize people who disagree with them. They ignore them, they treat them as essentially subhuman. And it starts with the ideas, and then it starts with the personhood. So part of where this comes from is, I think, a lack of connection to one's own heart.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Because if instead we viewed people who are on the left and maybe are deranged, some of them at least, as scared, confused, and feeling disenfranchised from the direction that the country is going, I think people would take a softer approach. And that would actually be more effective for the governance of the country.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And actually, it would be an effective way to recruit people to a vision of America that I think we can all benefit in. Like, I think Trump getting elected is going to be good for all of America.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And I also recognize that shouting at other people and calling them names and dehumanizing them and treating them like they're lesser people because they believe something else is not going to be effective. It's not about right or wrong. It's like, do you want to be effective or do you want to feel right? And there's two different strategies that you take based on that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So, yeah, I think being in touch with one's own humanity is recognizing like, oh, OK, well, maybe people on the right, they felt oppressed and dehumanized and mistreated for the last decade. 10 years. And I think they very much were. I think there was a large part of America that felt like it was left behind during the Obama years that was
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
I think especially among like white people, I think there's been like an anti-white movement. I think there's been an anti-male movement in this country as well. So I think there's a lot of people who feel like, yeah, you guys just treated us like shit. So we're going to just treat you like shit.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
But if we do that, we just keep on swinging the pendulum and everyone has their turn feeling oppressed. And then everyone else has their turn feeling like a victim. And then someone else is the victor. And we just keep on doing this over and over. And it's exhausting.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So, yeah, I think being in touch with one's own humanity is recognizing, hey, look, there's people just they're afraid they don't understand what's happening in the country. They feel like they're personally unsafe or people that they care about are unsafe. And the opportunity when you're in the position of power is to. Listen to those people and help them feel safer.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
You don't have to agree with them. You don't need to tolerate bad ideas from them, but you need to make them feel like, hey, same team. We're not going to just like run roughshod over you. We're going to help you be a part of this awesome stuff that's going to happen too.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Well, I think first we need to start with the assumption that we all are stuck in trouble thinking. It's just a matter of the degree. We're all brainwashed. It's just a matter of the degree. So that just needs to be axiomatic. None of us came up with all of our beliefs around the world.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
We're all raised in an environment and we take on ideas from, again, our parents, our school system, our media, our government. And we run that software throughout our lives. And some of it just works and we don't have to think about it that much about why it works. Some of it doesn't work, but we run it because everyone else around us is running it too.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So you can't see your conditioning until you accept that it's there. And you might not know what conditioning you have, but if you're at least willing to see it, then you can see it. So me, I know I have conditioning. Of course, there are areas where I'm being influenced or tribal or incentivized to not disagree with a certain group.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So right now, the risk for me is that I am tribal on the MAGA movement, right? Like I don't consider myself MAGA. I consider myself Kaizen, but I realize I'm more politically aligned with the right right now. So the way I need to look at myself is, okay, where do I feel afraid to say certain things? Am I afraid to criticize Trump? Am I afraid to criticize Elon?
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
When I see them do something that I genuinely find reprehensible, am I willing to speak out about it? If not, why? Is it because I'm afraid of losing followers? Am I afraid of losing money? So it's just a constant act of like auditing oneself to see, hey, where is their fear? And usually... The mind is easily diluted, right? It's so porous. There's so many ideas that can come in.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
It can be really hard to know what ideas are true without really careful examination and talking to people on the other side. But you know when you're afraid, right? You can tell when you're afraid. Oftentimes people mask that fear with anger and they just get bigger rather than like slowing down. It's like, okay, I'm afraid. Why am I afraid?
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Yeah. I think one of them was this idea that there's such a thing as unbiased information when it comes to the news. That was probably the first thing that I realized was distorting my own worldview and not causing me to see the political landscape clearly. So to give you a little bit of background, I was a lifelong Democrat and pretty much Democrat by default because I'm Black,
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Oh, okay, because I believe that if I say this view and it goes against the tribe, then I'm going to be excommunicated. Now I can see, okay, so what is this preventing me from even maybe admitting to myself about how I disagree with a tribe? So I think I'm not someone who believes that emotions are a bad thing. I think our lives are emotionally driven.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Like every logical goal that we have or every log, All goals are emotional in nature. We all want to experience something, and we use logic to help us achieve our emotional goals. So if at least we can acknowledge where we are emotionally, then we can see where maybe we have some logical fallacies to look at.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Absolutely. You know, what's interesting is that. We're living in such an algorithmic age. So even when you do disagree with someone, if your audience is generally leaning in one direction or another, when you disagree with someone, it doesn't get as much visibility as when you agree with them.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So for example, in the times that I have criticized Elon, I get like a fraction of the viewership on those. So even to the extent that I've criticized Elon or Trump, you probably don't see that as much. You see the stuff that my audience blows up because I'm generally more aligned with them. But yeah, there are several things. One, I...
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
I think a lot of their rhetoric lacks emotional grace and intelligence. And what I mean by that is I think they're directly right on a lot of stuff. I agree with what they're doing with those with dismantling bureaucracy.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
I agree with what they're doing with removing some of the excesses of DEI, which sometimes was just masking race based quotas and affirmative action that was really damaging to social cohesion. I think a lot of what they have been doing with USAID, like shutting down a lot of what we're doing overseas has been really healthy.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
But a lot of the time, I feel like their rhetoric is unnecessarily combative and dismissive of people who disagree with them. And I like to think that what people like about me is I don't feel dismissive of other perspectives. I like to show that I understand them, even if I disagree with them.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And I'd like to see that a bit more, a lot more from our commander in chief and Elon to an extent, too, because, you know, there are times where he's dunking on people on X and it's like, oh, this is just like unnecessary and actually just creating more, more division than there actually needs to be.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
and also i recognize they're humans right and they have their own way of doing things and this is kind of the downside of them doing things so it's like i'm not sitting here thinking that they're perfect i never had an expectation that they were um and i'm okay with them being more correct than incorrect and i think they're much more correct than incorrect
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
But yeah, there are times when, for instance, Elon, like he'll like retweet something that's not true or repost. And, you know, for instance, you talked about immigration and someone posted this stat saying it effectively demonstrated that Bush and Clinton did more deportations of illegal immigrants than Trump did.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
But it's not actually strictly true because that number included people who were turned away at the border was not really what we're thinking when we think deportations. We're thinking of like, you know, going into the interior of the United States and removing people who are here and ushering them out of the country. So I'll correct him on that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Or when he did that hand gesture at the inauguration, that looked like a Nazi salute to a lot of people. In my video, I mentioned that, hey, even if it wasn't a Nazi salute, I think it would have been a good move of leadership from him to just acknowledge what it looks like, because I think it would have helped a lot of people in the country feel safer.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
With Trump, I mentioned that I think the way that he dealt with California's water issues was... unnecessarily forceful, or at least it looks unnecessarily forceful. To give you a little bit of context, when the L.A. fires happened, there was all this commotion about fire hydrants being dry and reservoirs being dry and stuff. And there were legitimate issues. And I've been very, very critical of
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
I was born in New York. I worked in tech. I lived in California. It was just Democrat reinforcement all the way around. And I never had to really think deeply about my beliefs. It was just socially reinforced and passed along to me by my parents and everyone around me.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
We're in L.A., local leadership around this. But then he announced that he sent the military into California to, quote unquote, turn on the water. And he signed an executive order doing that. And just the mere appearance of I'm going to use the military to force through my goals in a state that disagrees with me. It's a bad look from a leadership perspective. It creates unnecessary fear.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
I get that maybe in campaign mode, you need to be like kind of a strong man uncompromising. But there's a difference between how you run a campaign and how you run a country. So, yeah, I think I have plenty of criticisms. They're mostly about... demonstrating more grace and emotional intelligence than it is policy.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And I like to think that if they do something that's really egregious, I'll speak out about it. But, you know, there's also fear, right? Because, yeah, as you said, Elon has been retweeting me a lot. And obviously, when one of those influential humans on the planet does that, that helps me a lot. So if he stops doing it, that's something that I'll suffer. But I like to think that
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
my internal peace and my internal congruence and integrity is more important than that. So that I'll say what I need to say when I need to say it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So when I started seeing the New York Times or CNN or many of these mainstream news outlets who I just trusted as sources of objective, unbiased information, say negative things about Trump, I just took them at face value. I was like, okay, if they're reporting these negative things about Trump, they just must be true. Because when I look at news, I was like, oh, well, this is, what do you mean?
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Yeah, so I think first some context on how I even got this name would be helpful. For most of my life up until I was 30, I was very in my head, constantly chasing achievements and validation. achieving things and not actually feeling better and feeling pretty empty. And I didn't really feel much emotion. Like I felt pretty much just frustration or anxiety were the only things I felt.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Not much happiness, very rarely peace. Suicidal ideation was pretty regular for me. When I turned 30, I had quit the tech industry. I was working in the video game industry. And I had gotten to a point where I felt like I wanted to figure out what I wanted to do with my life that wasn't about doing something impressive to other people. So I quit my job and that was also 2020.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So social distractions were removed from COVID and work distractions were removed because I quit. So I had to just like look at myself and spend a lot of time with myself. And I realized I was really unhappy. That was when I decided, okay,
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
clearly something about the way that i'm conducting my life is not actually giving me the level of fulfillment that i want so i need to change something and that's when i just became really obsessive about introspection and my own personal growth and understanding my mind and understanding like why am i unhappy even though i keep achieving things so around that time i had experiences with plant medicine that really changed my life and i came out of that
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
feeling good and feeling peace for the first time in a long time. And I was reading a Tony Robbins book, Awaken the Giant Within.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
great well i didn't even finish it but i got this out of it i remember reading one page of it and i talked about the word kaizen and i've been familiar with the term kaizen because of the business world it's like a development philosophy but tony presented it in the context of life more generally he's talking about how in japan it's like you have a kaizen of your relationships like how do you constantly develop your relationships causing of your spirituality and your wealth and your career
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So it's more of a general disposition of always seeking to grow and improve. And when I saw that word, it was just like, this is so beautiful. And I've always loved Japanese culture. And the word just continued to reverberate in my consciousness for months. And then I was like, I think this is my name. So I went and I legally changed my name to Kaizen. And my birth name was Derek.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
That's not my middle name. Kaizen is my first name. Now I forget where the original question was, but I wanted to get at least some background on that. And you tell me if you got your answer.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Yeah. I don't know if this is a humble thing to say, but I think it gives me intellectual humility. Because if my commitment is to the process of evolution rather than any predefined point, then that requires a commitment to, oh, I'm going to be wrong about things. And that's okay because that's what it means to evolve. Like you need to shed old skin to gain new skin.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
It's bias. It's the news. It's just information. And then we get to choose what we do with that information. as I started to realize that this entire idea of objective people was itself a fantasy, I started to realize that the idea of objective institutions was itself a fantasy. So everyone has a perspective. Everyone's a walking perspective.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So the way I approach my content and everything I talk about is I might be wrong and I know I'm biased and I know I have a perspective. I'm here to seek the truth and understand it as best as I can. Understanding that in life, it's, it's always a point in the future. You never arrive at absolute truth about everything, or at least I'm very far from that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So yeah, for me, it's like, it's a, it's a philosophy of curiosity as opposed to conclusions. It's like, okay, if I'm going to analyze any issue, I'm going to give my best interpretation of it at the time, recognizing that in a week, in a year, I might look back and say, oh, wow, there's so many things I see about that that were untrue.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So yeah, it's like a philosophical commitment to growth and change as opposed to like a static arrival point at truth.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Yeah, to give that a little bit more color. So yeah, I've had a lot of experience with plant medicine, ayahuasca, bufo, which is 5-MeO-DNT, aboga. I think the most recent insight that I've had is just how much we're in our heads.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
like genuinely i think maybe it's a western phenomenon in particular but just how much we literally spend our time just in our own thoughts rather than in our senses and actually present you know people talk about like mindfulness right this movement of like look everyone should be mindful and i actually think i know it's just a word but we need to be more mindless
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
We're so full of mind that it prevents us from connecting to our other ways of perceiving life. And your mind is not the only way that you perceive life. It's like your senses and your physical experiences. And when people talk about common sense, that's like your sense, your sensory experience and like your intuitions rather than your concepts and ideas of what reality is supposed to be.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And I think the thing that plant medicine has really done for me is help me get out of my head. It's like get out of my head and pay attention to my moment-to-moment experience more, which I guess you could just call presence, rather than trusting every wayward thought. Because I have a mind that's very, very active.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And it's like a full-time job to try to quiet it and pay attention, like what's going on right now, not what are my ideas about who I am and what I'm supposed to be and all the things that I did wrong. And yeah, it's hard to imagine getting to this point without plant medicine for me in particular. Now, and somatic work, a lot of somatic work as well.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
I'm sometimes kind of skittish talking about plant medicine because I don't want to view this as an advertisement for it. And I've had a very non-conventional path, but it's not so much about the modality as it is the value.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And the value is just like getting out of our heads because so much of our thoughts are just fear, like fear of the future, fear about who we are, fear that we did something wrong in the past. And I think that's why we have so much dysfunction right now.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
We only have the interiority of our own experience and our own beliefs and ideas that we come up with. So even if you're trying to not be subjective, you are still subjective. It's the same thing with institutions. I don't think the New York Times was necessarily trying to demonize Trump intentionally, although I think they kind of are now.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Yeah, me too. And you know, Peter Krohn? I do. Yeah. So I was listening to him. I respect him greatly. I did. I did the first podcast with Peter Krohn. No way. Yeah. Peter's great. I was listening to a conversation that he was having with someone where he said, yeah, a lot of real health makes sense, but not dollars.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And that's the real issue, like the financial incentives to have medicine that actually just works and works once and doesn't require you to take it for life is just not there.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And that's why I'm glad RFK is around, because it just takes a degree of moral clarity and courage to say, hey, we're going to do this thing, even if it doesn't enrich other people, because we care more about actual health and healing that we do. industries and companies enriching themselves so yeah i'm i'm hugely in support um obviously there's potential downsides and
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
As someone who's been in a lot of spaces that are very plant medicine friendly, I can also see what happens when people are basically just treating them as drugs without the proper set and setting and integration. So I get why there's some fear, but there's so much tremendous potential for healing. And it's funny to me to hear, I think RFK was a heroin addict, as you said.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
It's funny to hear some of these drugs like ayahuasca considered a gateway because I'm like, No, once you do these medicines, like those become less appealing because you actually get in touch with a thing that you're using those drugs to address. So I think it's absolutely fantastic that he has a plant medicine friendly agenda.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Of course, there's ways that we need to structure systems so that it's used responsibly. But I think that can be hugely transformational and even go deeper than helping people who are in extreme scenarios like drug addicts and PTSD. I think just helping people
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
call it evolve their consciousness or just be themselves or be more at peace internally because i wasn't in some situation where i was like i need to break some massive addiction i was more i guess mentally ill in the way that everyone is mentally unhealthy to a degree um and i think it can help tremendously with that people fear changing their minds because it feels like losing a part of their identity
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
I think they just had a perspective on what the world should be, who's a good person, who's a bad person. And they distributed that perspective to everyone else, including New York Times readers like me. So once I realized that, oh, I have a default assumption that these other people are objective, but they can't be because they're people just like me.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Yeah. So I think one of the earliest insights I had about myself was I'm not my thoughts and I'm not my mind. I have my mind, but if my mind changes or my mind has bad beliefs, it doesn't make me a bad person. It's okay to change your mind because you're not your mind. And the mind is where the ego lives, right? The mental construct that we call I, that's ego.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So when people have to change their mind, they view that as ego-threatening. They're not literally thinking that, but it feels ego-threatening. It's threatening to the I, this thing that we hold on to, your ideas, your concepts. And then that becomes even scarier when your I has a role in your tribe. So again, we talked about being a lifelong Democrat.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
If the I, who is a Democrat, changes to independent or, God forbid, Republican, then I risk losing my status in the tribe that I had before.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
so that's why changing mind is so hard because it feels ego threatening and only when you get touched with a sense of self that is prior to any ego identification like the real you or you call the highest self authentic self your god self whatever you want to call it can you create enough distance between you and your ego to be willing to change your ego or abandon your ego temporarily
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Now, I'm not sitting here saying I've abandoned my ego entirely. I'm not sure that I really believe in this idea of total ego death. But I at least have enough space between me and my ego to not feel so attached to changing the beliefs of the ego. Because I recognize that's not actually me. It's, you know, you think about the term person, right? Persona comes from the Greek persona.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
a Greek root, which means mask. So persona in Greek, that's mask. So it's just a mask. It's not you. It's a socially constructed identity. And the mask can change. But you, you want to call it your soul or your true self, you're there. And there's no, none of your beliefs can change your fundamental value. But in practice, that's harder, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Because it requires courage to be yourself because being yourself means being rejected by other selves, right? And that can be really hard, right? Because we live in relation to other people. Like, I'm not going to sit here and say, you know, don't give an F about anyone else's opinions. Like, of course you're going to give it, you know, you're going to care about other people's opinions.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
But the goal, and again, I think plant medicine helps with this, is to just... get in touch with the real you that is prior to any identification with groups or beliefs and recognize that that you is going to be there no matter what. And you can fall back to that without having to be wrapped up in this more contingent you that is the ego.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Then I started to gain a more nuanced perspective on the sources of information that I was consuming. And I realized, oh, I've just been taking everything I've been told at face value. I've been taking everything I was told about Trump at face value.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Yeah. So I studied philosophy in college and it's kind of funny thinking my role now. It's like now it's coming back because for years I didn't really use it. It's like I studied philosophy and then I graduated working video games. Like where's the philosophical part? I wasn't a very good student. I spent a lot of time playing video games in school.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
But in the few philosophy classes that I went to, one of the philosophers I really resonated with was Kant, which is like not that special. And a lot of people resonate with Kant. But one of the things that made Kant so brilliant was this idea of the categorical imperative, which is don't treat people as means, treat people as ends, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
If I treat you as just a way to reach a goal of mine, whether it's to have more podcast followers or whatever, then I'm not actually interacting with you, Drew, the human. And that's what dehumanization actually looks like. It's not necessarily something as extreme as like racism or...
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
dismissing entire ethnic groups, it can literally just not be seeing the humanity of another person and treating them as an end unto themselves. So lately, I'm on a social media break right now. And I mentioned that part of the reason I'm on the break is because I felt like I need to focus more on my relationships. So I was just really caught up in social media. I realized that
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
I went through this kind of like flip in the last week. I was like, wow, I feel like people who focus on people are the wealthiest people. It's like achievement is cool, but I had been for the last eight months so focused on my online presence and getting my message out. And it was cool and made really massive strides, but I still felt this emptiness that likes couldn't fill.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And likes are not the same thing as love. Everyone needs love. And love can only happen when you're actually engaging with people as ends, not as means to something else. So yeah, that's been one framework that's actually coming back as really useful for me. Stop trying to get past and onto the next thing and onto the next person and onto the next status symbol.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And rather than considering that a perspective among many perspectives and trying to reconcile that with other perspectives that I heard, I had just been locked into one perspective and saying, oh, this is the truth and there's nothing else. And to make this like practically understandable, I mean, like we're here in Santa Monica.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Really focus on being present with people as ends into themselves. Another is John Rawls, another philosopher, Western philosopher, and he has this idea of, I'm gonna mess this up, but basically reasoning behind a curtain.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So rather than reasoning about your political beliefs and beliefs about how civilization should work from your personal perspective, which is inherently gonna be very biased, because you're gonna be looking at things in reference to what's good for you, not necessarily what's good for everyone, Try to reason as if you don't have a persona at all.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Like if I wasn't black man living in California named Kaizen and I was just like this person, identity-less thing, what policies and politics and structures would I want that would benefit the whole? So I think that was a really revolutionary concept when I was introduced to it because it's like basically it's being more impersonal when reasoning about the world.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And that's very difficult because, again, the ego is attached to itself. So abandoning that can be scary because you're like, well, what if my needs aren't going to get met if I abandon this way of reasoning? Because everyone is self-interested. I don't think that's a bad thing. I think we can all have it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
enlightened self-interest where we look at our interests and we try to coordinate them with the interests of other people. But I think it's extremely useful to be able to reason without reference to your own personal identity. But it requires finding a level of safety in oneself to do that in the first place.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Watching TV.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
watching white lotus i i started with like season two and i was like this is really great it was like two years ago so now i went back and watched season one and the first episode season three so that was good yeah just doing fun stuff man like hanging out with my friends hanging out with friends i haven't seen in a bit um going on walks with my dog um i think it's you know like coming back to oneself sounds like this like high flute and elevated thing but just like do normal human stuff without trying to get somewhere um
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And then I'm a big fan of yoga. I'm not like really on a path to get better at it. I just like love going to hot yoga. I love how I feel. Acupuncture is great for me. Meditation is really important for me. But for me, the way I tend to veer is like anxious and like always need to be doing something. It's like a compulsion.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
You were to go out in the street and one person was wearing a shirt and they said in New York Times and they told you a fact, you wouldn't just automatically believe them because it was very clear that a person gave you perspective. But for some reason, when...
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So for me, it's actually really important to do things that don't have a point. Like just eat food I like. Don't worry about whether it's the most healthy, optimal thing. Like I like orange chicken. I'm going to eat orange chicken. Or like not try to optimize my sleep hygiene. It's like, yes, I know I should go to sleep at 10 p.m., but I always do that.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
I actually want to stay awake late for fun just because it feels like it's like being like a kid again. Kids operate with very little agenda. I think that's one of the things that makes kids so pure and innocent and endearing to us. So letting myself just like let loose more.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And yeah, even after my social media break, I think it's important for me to have more of that playful disposition toward my life. You talked about health.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Yeah. We can't control many things, but we can influence anything. So in our personal lives, you know, there's the things that we can control about, like what we put in our body. But we can't control what government policy is. We can't control what incentives Monsanto is subject to, but we can influence them.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And the way that we influence them is by choosing to even be aware of what's going on, choosing to be curious, and then saying something. So there's a personal decision we make about our personal life and health and food and all that. And I think that's fundamental. Without doing that, America is never going to be healthy. There's nothing that any one politician can do to make everyone healthy.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
the label new york times or cnn or whatever three-letter accurate acronym is put on an information source and a website on the internet we're like oh well this just must be a fact which is silly and i get why we all default to just believing in objective sources of information because we're all subjected to so much information we just want simplicity like we don't have time to verify our own facts and do our own research we just want to move along and
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
That is a choice. However, I think choosing to commit to one's personal health can coincide with choosing to commit to being an influential person. And it doesn't mean you need to be on social media doing what I'm doing, but even being willing to have a conversation about this stuff, like, hey, is fluoride in the water good? Do vaccines cause autism? Is glyphosate on our crops good?
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Is red 40 good for us? having those conversations, even within our local communities, with our families, with our friends, that's influential. And unfortunately, I think people feel so disempowered that they almost feel like their words don't matter. And we get told to avoid controversial topics in America. Like, don't talk about politics. Don't talk about religion. And what's lost there is
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
our ability to influence the minds of the people around us. And if you influence enough minds, then you might not be able to control something, but as a people, we can. And ultimately our governments, which are setting our policies, which influence companies, they serve at the behest of the people.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Like we could stage essentially a legal insurrection, which I think is what basically is happening with Trump. I don't even think of him as a Republican. I think of him as part of a populist movement that then took over the Republican party. It's a different thing entirely. So, yes, no matter what the policies are, we as individuals have to make healthy choices.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And I think a degree of freedom is good. Like we don't want to have a world. I don't want to have a world where McDonald's can't exist. And we have to get the policies right. But in order for the policies to be right, the people have to be talking about them. And I think many people feel like, oh, it's just too overwhelming. It's hard to even know what the truth is.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
You don't need to know the truth. We just have to have enough curiosity to ask the right questions. Questions are way more important than answers. We'll always have, we'll always have questions, right? It's like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Have you read that book?
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Yeah. It's a, it's a great philosophy book, actually. It's basically a book about the power of curiosity. And this goes back to what we were talking about way at the beginning. I think we have an like an incurious culture that we started to develop of trust the science, trust the experts, say what they tell you to believe.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And we should listen to the experts, but ultimately we need to pass everything that we're hearing, whether from experts or not, through our own critical lens filter, compared against our own experience. And when we see a dissonance between our experience and what we're being told, question that so that we can collectively arrive at the truth. But yeah, personal health.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
I mean, I think personal health is foundational to even thinking clearly. Like if you're dealing with a bunch of toxins in your body and you have all these parasites in your gut and bad bacteria in your gut and that's influencing your thoughts, it's very hard to think clearly. So I think that's a precursor to actually thinking as clearly as possible.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And once we're thinking clearly, we need to speak clearly. And even when we're not sure, we still need to say something. But we don't need to become so attached to what we're saying because we recognize that the question is more important than the answer.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
put food on our table, take care of our families, get our career on track, all these things. But And there's nothing wrong with taking other people's word for things. That's how humans have operated. That's how we scale our understanding of the universe. We can't all be scientists and verify everything.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
But the problem becomes when we become emotionally attached to our beliefs, it makes us really susceptible to manipulation. And it causes us to be attached to things without even understanding why we're attached to things in the first place. So I think one of the first... collapses of the paradigm that I was in was this idea of objective information or objective news sources.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Yeah, yeah. And how tragic it is that people are cutting off relationships because of political views. It's like politics is supposed to be how we are humans together. And if we're just cutting other humans out of our life because of political views, then we kind of have things backwards. It's one of the things that really saddens me about seeing people do personal cancellations in their life.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Like, I get that one might want to hang out with people who have similar values. I think that's normal. But... You know, I've personally had experiences where I've experienced hostility from someone who personally knows me because of our opinions about people neither of us know. It's like, you could disagree with me about Trump, but you know me. Like, you know who I am.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
We've collaborated, or I've helped you, and this is how you're behaving. And that's when it's very clear that people have inverted the priorities. And we're forgetting that the point of politics is to support our lives, not be our lives. And I say this as someone who talks about and thinks about this stuff all the time. And yeah, it's like...
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
I've had so many cases where someone who I respect said something that was very discordant with me. And usually I was like, oh, God, like, how is this possible? Like, how do I reconcile this? And then either I just brought in my perspective like, oh, OK, like they just have a different perspective and I can see where they're coming from, even if I disagree.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Or, oh, wow, they've actually exposed something that was dysfunctional about my view. This actually happened with Peter. So I remember when I was following his work really closely when I first came across him, I was like, oh, wow, this guy's great, so brilliant. And then he came out with a lot of resistance to the vaccines. I was like, oh, my God, how can someone this brilliant not get it?
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And I realized, years later, I'm the one who didn't get it. And I am glad when people like him who I respect for their views on another area can at least expose me to an alternative view and help me sharpen my own thinking. And yeah, I think that just requires a level of humility from everyone and a genuine interest in growth. And it sounds like you exhibited that with Dave Ramsey too.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And even if you think about the ideas like news stories, they're stories, right? So they might be based on facts, but the arrangement of the facts is what creates a story. What facts you choose to highlight versus what facts you choose to marginalize, that's a subjective decision that people are always making all the time.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So once I started to look at the news that way, it helped me just become more flexible in my thinking and start to question a lot of the things that I took to be true.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Yeah.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
and the other thing is we'll not seek it out when it can be something it could truly benefit our lives for the better 100 and um that matches some of my intuitions about hormonal birth control by the way and i think there's societal implications for having young women be on medications that modify their biochemistry from a young age, right?
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Like there's social implications, there's implications for how likely people are to even get in relationships and be committed to each other and the family unit. So there's a whole bunch of conversations that we need to have. That's one of them. But if we're not even willing to have that conversation, we can't have all the conversations that happen after.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
I think we just need to be okay asking questions, any question, and finding out what the answer is. But when we shut down questions because they're too politically charged, then we don't get the right answers. And then we become very confused about why so many things are not working. So to go back to the vaccine and autism relationship, the assertion needn't be that vaccines cause autism.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
No, the assertion should be we need to ask good questions about what relationship, if any, exists between vaccines and autism. And the answer might not be vaccines cause autism. The answer might be vaccines interact with a bunch of other negative things in the environment and they co-contribute to autism. but we're not even willing to ask these questions.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And as a result, we end up in situations where we are not even willing to do research to get to answers and people are sick and they're suffering as a result. So yeah, I mean, I hope what people walk away from this conversation with is an appreciation for curiosity and nuance.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Because everything that you just said, which is so beautiful, by the way, we can't compress that into a 10-second statement. So that's why you go to Senate confirmation hearings and it becomes, are you pro-vax or anti-vax? Which is like, that's a binary that we should be rejecting entirely.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
The question we should be asking is, hey, in what situations do what particular vaccines cause what particular beneficial or negative effects? And for each individual vaccine, is the risk trade-off worth it for this particular individual? Like everything in reality involves nuance.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And I think there's very simple truths, but often when we have a bunch of different factors interacting, that's when things get complicated. But if we're not even willing to entertain that complexity, entertain that multiple people have different pieces of the answer, we're never going to get to the answer. So- I think that's a real solution to the information swamp that we're in.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
It's I think for so long, we kind of harbored this delusion that there's like right people and wrong people. And there's sources of information that are completely true and sources of information that are completely false. And I think as humanities, this is part of the conscious evolution is like we need to expand our consciousness to harbor and accommodate multiple people.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
differing views that seem to conflict with one another and see, is there a reconciliation of them all? And then also discover which ones are just mostly false and which ones are mostly true. and recognize that that's a process. It's a process that will forever be going through as a species and it can be fun.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Like I genuinely enjoy having discussions like this or discussions with people who completely disagree with me. Like I talk to my friends who are, you know, friends I really respect, really smart and are like very staunchly liberal and like voted for Kamala. It's like, why did you do that? Then I get to share my views and then we might not walk away agreeing, but we walk away understanding.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And I think that's even better.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Yeah. Thanks for asking. This is a good time to figure out what have I learned this last week. I definitely want to continue using my voice to spread messages and help people make sense of what's going on. I've realized that it's weird. Like someone asked me, who else is doing what you're doing?
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And I couldn't name someone, which I guess is good for me because it means I'm doing something that's unique to me. But
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
would like to see more people just engaging in nuance and thinking out loud and not being so attached to the conclusions and just being a stand for curiosity so i plan on dropping even more content along those lines um i also feel passionate about not just talking about politics but cultural events too so hence the kanye thing that i mentioned that wasn't a political thing that was a cultural issue
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
COVID. That was a big wake-up call for a lot of people. Unfortunately, it actually wasn't a big wake-up call for me. But in hindsight, it was really useful. So... Back in 2020, again, I mentioned my background, default Democrat. I worked in tech, so I was an employee, right? And at that time, I didn't actually feel afraid of getting COVID.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And I think there's important sense making that needs to happen with these touchy issues that can help us breed understanding and get to the right solutions. So I want to talk more about cultural commentary and who knows, even pop culture, maybe. And I also want to influence Gen Z more. You familiar with Charlie Kirk?
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Yeah. And you know, I don't think he even need to agree with his views to recognize the value of him talking directly to people who disagree with him of the younger generation and trying to influence the youth. And, um, I would like to do that too. So that's something on the agenda. Not sure what form it will take.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Maybe it's college campuses, having conversations with people, but just helping people think more clearly and be comfortable in disagreement. And I think at least in the medium term, if I accomplish that, that's a really good use of my gifts.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Yeah. So on all socials, um, that's Kaizen and there's a link in my bio if you're interested in working with me. And as you said, um, I like to help people be courageous. Because I think until people are courageous enough to say out loud what they believe, then we're not going to get quality beliefs. So I just want to empower more leaders to use their own voice.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And it doesn't need to be about politics, just things that they actually care about. It's interesting. I've been on this healing journey for the last several years. And you mentioned the content that I used to do, which is more about personal empowerment. And I actually view what I'm doing right now as the continuation of my inner work.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Like talking about these sensitive topics in public is helping me to know myself and trust myself even more. And I care about helping other people do the same.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
This was really fun. So thank you. I really appreciate the depth and the intentionality and the level of research that you did going through this conversation. It's been one of my favorite conversations. So thanks for having me. Thank you.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And I saw this dissonance between the headlines and all the fear that was in the headlines versus my day-to-day experience just walking around. I was like, I just don't actually feel like this is a pandemic. This is not like the bubonic plague with people dying in the streets. This is something that I'm being told is coming and we need to prepare for it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
What I did feel fear around was the amount of tribalism and social propaganda around what it meant to be a vaccinated person. Because essentially the battle lines were drawn at either you're vaccinated and you're a good person or you're unvaccinated and you're a bad person.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
And when there's sort of like moral importance attached to a decision that people are making about their own personal health, it distorts the conversation and it's no longer about health, it's about morality. It's not a conversation about, hey, do I need the vaccine because it's good for me and I have risk factors that make me susceptible to COVID.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
It's instead a conversation about, hey, am I going to be respected by my family and friends and part of the tribe if I choose to not get the vaccine? So for me, there wasn't much of a questioning process. I just got the vaccine out of default because all of my friend groups were doing it.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
I worked at a company and like to even not get the vaccine at the company was to risk getting unemployed as well. And I think many people there in similar environments where there's so much social reinforcement that the decision is pretty much predetermined for them.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
So when we think about manipulation, usually with manipulation, there's some sort of element of fear like, oh, if you don't follow the narrative, then you're going to be excommunicated from the tribe and you're going to have all sorts of other problems. And Especially in complicated topics like health, where we're learning new things every day.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
I mean, we used to be told the food pyramid is eat a bunch of carbohydrates, and now we're updating our view of what actually real health is. People just default to who they trust. Most people don't actually have the capacity to do the science themselves, so they say things like, trust the science. But even the term, like, the science is kind of incoherent. Like, what is the science?
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
The science is not an institution. The science is not a body of knowledge. Science is a process of inquiry, right? So it's dynamic. It's always changing. But the way that we were approaching the vaccines was dogmatic and actually unscientific. Not saying that there weren't scientists doing real research on COVID, but the social propaganda was very much Don't do your research. Don't ask questions.
Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Don't seek to understand. Just do this thing. Otherwise, you're a bad person. And that's one of the most acute examples of manipulation when it comes to people's personal health.