Secret Kata #1 Harsh Truths About India’s Social Pressure and Depression

Andutate's definition of an alpha is completely wrong by the way and I wish Andutate read some books. India is a high rank pressure environment. Everything in our society is a rank game, right? We look at somebody saying no to us for anything for an appraisal for funding as a threat to ourselves because we're socially unsafe. There are too many harsh realities of the world. Like truths, scientific truths that if you say in public, you'll get belted. It's very easy to offend Indians because they know that Indians will respond. A company that operates on social defeat principles is biologically destined for toxicity. It's not bad thoughts that lead to bad mood. It's bad mood that leads to bad thoughts. A point of a manager in any pod at any part of our company is the serotonin balancer. There were periods in my life where if you had hired me and I worked in a company, I would have been disastrous for the company. Awesome. I wasn't planning to do these online because these are secret cutters. The reason I don't want to do secret cutters online is because there are too many harsh realities of the world like truths, scientific truths that if you say in public, you'll get belted, right? And literally like people would get offended and stuff like that. Uh so I made this deck for the internal team for some of our core members. It's called the lightning core in our company which is about 60 70 people. And um I really didn't want to make a video about this but Saga and Shans from my team said you should do it. you should just do just the first one. Uh and see what happens. So if I get belted, it's their fault. Um but I think it is valuable because I think the only way to become very good at leadership is to control the your own neurotransmitter and hormone profile and also manage that of other people. Serotonin is the first episode on this. And uh for the other four, I might not ever put them online. We'll see how many of you have had depression. Okay, it's like five six people. Cool. Today I want to learn the biochemical basis of depression. Okay, lessons from anti-depressant research work and there's lot of lessons for us here and takeaways for business because I think it's important for everybody to understand what's going on in your own bodies, right? Next slide. Disclaimer, I am not a doctor. Okay. But everything in this deck is doctor and licensed therapist validated. I wouldn't say anything online that's not validated. Any research that I put out is peer-reviewed studies or highquality research and I've cited them. I'll put them in I'll put the links in the description for the people on YouTube as well. Uh but again we we're looking at more business insights from this. Right. Next slide.

How many of you have heard of the theory that low serotonin leads to depression? A lot of people have putting their hands up. Um, how many of you have heard of the fact that serotonin is the happiness chemical? Lot more people have put their hands up. Firstly, if you read the actual science, the low serotonin equal to depression model is too simple. Of course, serotonin plays a role in depression, but it's far too simple and often wrong. Okay? Uh, and there's like I'll link you to this, but there's a nice little meta review of all the studies on how serotonin and its impact on depression, what serotonin's impact on depression is, and it's more complicated than you think it is. Next slide. Serotonin is more accurately described, the best way to think about it is actually the social safety chemical. When you're high serotonin, you feel socially safe. Okay. And some people instinctively know this. When you're low serotin, you feel socially unsafe. Next slide. Okay. In neuroscience, if you want to give an animal depression, there's a very easy way to do it which is called social defeat stress. Okay. It's a widely used animal model because it reliably produces depression-l like patterns. Put an animal in a hopeless situation. Put a rat keep putting it under there's something called water restraint stress you just put animal under a lot of stress right or a hopeless situation more than stress if the animal is even allowed to crawl out a little bit it doesn't get depression but the animal feels it's hopeless it goes into depression okay chronic stress can reshape your serotonin circuits and stress has a very specific definition here is something that you cannot overcome it's not hard work Indians have equated stress to hard work oh it's making me work hard that's not stress is something you cannot reliably overcome or a social situation where you cannot reliably get any status in that social situation. Okay, next slide. Depression is a biocschosocial disease. What I mean by that is it is something that happens to humans especially susceptible humans who where your genes of course your genes play a part in how quickly you get depression and how much quickly you bounce back. But it's biocschosocial because it's a response to the environment. If your environment sucks and is very against you, you will reliably get depression. Okay? But if you have great genes, maybe it'll take longer. Maybe you tank that impact a little more. Okay? And we all know this instinctively. When you see good food after some time, don't some of you salivate, mouth starts watering a little bit. So our so the environment often influences our hormones and neurotransmitters. It's the same with our mood. Your environment affects your mood. Okay. So you absolutely can have depression as a response to the environment. Okay. Remember I'm not a doctor but this is like basic science. Next slide.

Translating to humans very carefully. When your brain learns I'm losing in a status game. Okay. It starts scanning for danger. So I told you serotonin is a social safety molecule. When you don't have serotonin and serotonin is one of the parts of the system that affect this you feel socially unsafe. Start you know ambiguous messages start feeling insulting. What I mean by that is uh your shoes are dirty. You start thinking this person is making a judgment about me. Whereas if you had high certainty be like yeah whatever and you move on. Feedback feels like humiliation, right? Silence feels like rejection. Somebody's not talking to me. And some of you have faced this in your relationships, right? Person is not talking to me. Are they rejecting me? Somebody else winning hurts worse than it should. This is the brain under chronic rank pressure. So in a social situation, we have a sense of whether we feel safe or not with the people around us. If we don't feel safe, if societyy's pushing you down, right? And sometimes we have this. If society suppresses you, pushes you down, that's chronic rank pressure, the brain starts changing and you start losing your serotonin systems in the brain start shutting down. Next slide. Chronic social defeat induces sustained changes in the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. The PFC, which is a prefrontal cortex, is responsible for impulse control. Executive control. You're less emotional when the PFC is active. Okay? And emotional regulation. You don't do stupid things, right? You're controlled about your emotions. While the amygdala, which is a different part of the brain, serves as the brain's threat detection center. It's highly emotional. Okay? Under conditions of social defeat, the PFC atrophies. It becomes smaller. It physically becomes smaller. Okay? It loses volume. It loses connectivity. While the amygdala becomes hyperactive and engaged. Next slide and enlarge. Sorry.

Sorry. India in my opinion and the opinion of a lot of scholars is a high rank pressure environment. Do you agree? Everything in our society is a rank game. Right? Competitive exams. In a competitive exam, one person wins, few people win, lots of people lose. Yes or no? There's an order. There's a stack order. Constant comparisons. Sharma beta. social media algorithm-driven comparisons in your feed. You're always seeing billionaires and trillionaires and whatnot and you're like you're only seeing successful people on your feed, right? Limited seats for everything. Everything has limited seats, correct? From the competitive exams to the concert, everything has limited seats. Next slide. So therefore the big problem with India and something we learned when creating content a long time ago because they're under chronic rank pressure and the serotonin systems are not working as expected it this manifests as I told you they're not socially safe. Most people are not socially safe. They're not feeling socially safe. They get offended. Every message is an insulting message. Oh you used a picture of you know some person very important in my community. I'm going to get offended. I'm going to attack you. Oh, you you put a picture of this, I'll attack you. And you see this online a lot, right? It's very easy to offend Indians, right? On Twitter, you can see this a lot of literal people across the world are just racist to Indians and making a lot of ad money because they know that Indians will respond. But there lots of other countries where if you're racist to them, they just don't even respond online, right? Then no one's going to debate it. But Indians will be like, "Oh, talking about me. " And go in. It's called rejection sensitivity dysphoria. RSD involves an extreme emotional sensitivity to perceived rejection or criticism. The down reggulation of the serotonin transporter in the prefrontal serotonin system has been linked to anxiety-like behaviors that mirror RSD. We don't like Indians don't like rejection. And the difference between Indians and people in the US is in the US if you reject somebody they are less likely to take offense. In India anyone you reject they will take offense. Best example of this is in venture capital. You know what VC's job is? Is to say no all the time though please I want to raise 1 million. VC says no. And 99% of why they're saying no is because they don't believe in you. They don't believe you are a superstar who will end up making them 10x their money. But you know how VCs in India deliver it. Sorry. You know we are wrong sometimes. Don't feel bad. Don't feel offended. And that's because the founders in India get offended cuz we look at somebody saying no to us for anything for an appraisal for funding for anything. We take somebody saying no to us as a threat to ourselves because we're socially unsafe. We feel socially unsafe. And I always tell this in in aos right like one of the expectations I want everyone to have when you're doing appraisal conversations is to always start with this which is saying a no to you for this appraisal doesn't mean your value is not that much. It is it has nothing to do with you. Don't take it to your own selfworth and start judging yourself about this. This is a business decision. We have a budget for this. Does this fit inside the budget? Okay, then we make it work. Otherwise, no. But you don't take it personally because Indians take everything personally. Okay. And that's why you know one of the things that the reasons I'm doing this for our company so that everyone gets immune to this knows what the body is doing, knows what the brain is doing. Rejection is never personal. Next slide. Sometimes it is but not here. Social defeat stress is infectious. You all instinctively know this, right? If you hang out with five people with bad mood and who are constantly criticizing everything, you'll become like them. You know this instinctively. It's pretty obvious, right? If everyone's like if the environment you're entering is toxic, you are going to end up becoming toxic if you stay there long enough. Right? It's a very good example of this. A lot of people who come in who are mildly dissatisfied with society feeling a little bit of suppression will go there and then because Reddit like everybody who sat there for a very long period of time is all feeling socially suppressed. You become like that. So you're not clearly thinking anymore, right? You have entered a society where just to feel social safety in that society, you're saying the rest of society is not socially safe for you. You're changing the way your brain works. And it's like a mind. It's like a mental it's like going down the toilet for your brain. Whatever the equivalent of that is next slide.

Now coming to SSRIs there's do you guys know what SSRIs are? SSRIs are a type of drug that in nutshell they increase they jam serotonin in your sinapsis right they make sure that uh you feel happier over time. They change the way your brain works. And if you see the minute you start giving people SSRIs their threat reactivity and negative bias reduce. Many years ago maybe six or seven years ago because I had some health issues, physical health issues, my mental health started tanking because of that and I was given anti-depressants for a period of time and I just started noticing all sorts of random things which is that any situation should that should have irritated me no longer irritated me. I was just calmer. It's not that I was happier or sad. I thought I'll be very happy and giggling and dancing around. That never happened. And that's the that's what people say about SSRIs, right? Oh, that you become like a this thing. But actually, I felt more like a zombie, less reactive to anything. Someone tried to offend me, I wouldn't even it wouldn't even register in my brain that this person is trying to offend me. And a friend, I had a friend in college called Rial who once told me this that it's not bad thoughts that lead to bad mood. It's bad mood that leads to bad thoughts. It's a very profound thing that he told me in college and I was just sitting there. I was like that's actually true. Right? Actually it's birectional. Um but if you give people SSRI it normalizes the amydala's hyperactivity. I told you the amydala the threat center starts beating very hard right. It slows down when you give people SSRI. Next slide. Another example of this is MDMA and MDMA is a very good case study which is that the minute you give people MDMA they all feel socially safe. Now MDMMA works on multiple things. It works on serotonin. It also works on oxidtoin. So it's multiple effects. It's too simplistic to say it's the serotonin part of it is what creates social safety. But you'll see a bunch of people on MDMA like we've seen videos of it where people are just very nice to each other for that short period of time. They're okay with being vulnerable. The word is vulnerable. Most of us are afraid of being vulnerable with each other. But these people are okay with being vulnerable with each other. They're not worried about judgment anymore. being offended anymore. Next slide. But 3 days after, and it's called the 3-day blues or the Tuesday blues, right? Which is that suddenly they start feeling this temporary depression. Everything starts offending them. They just feel cruddy, right? Everything they just feel irritable. You can, it's very easy to get them to shout. Next slide.

Now, I told you that depression is a bio social disease. I didn't tell you this. I'm not a doctor, but medicine tells us this. But let's study how serotonin works in animals. And this you really can't replicate in human beings because it would violate all sorts of ethics. And that's why the secret cutters are secret cutters. But there are studies done on vervet monkeys. It's a type of monkey where when a male vervet monkey ascends to the alpha position, you all know what an alpha is, right? You've all watched and's definition of an alpha is completely wrong by the way. But when a male vervet monkey ascends to the alpha position, and I wish Andrew Tate read some red books, but the minute the male vervet monkey ascends to the alpha position, [clears throat] his whole blood serotonin levels increase by approximately 50%. I told you our neurotransmitters and our hormones react to our environment. We all think, "Oh, why don't I have this? that? " Maybe your environment sucks. Maybe you're not in the right environment. If the alpha loses this position, his serotonin levels drop back to baseline. So when you become alpha in some monkey environment, your serotonin goes up. You're less irritable. Generally your mood is better. And when you lose that position again, it goes back to baseline. Very interesting statistic. No, because what they did was they literally took the monkey, put them out, put him out of an alpha position, a different alpha rose, this person's position dropped, put the person back, put the monkey back. Very the way they did the result was very cool. And you know I wish I could read out the entire thing for you because there's a drug called cyproepadine which reduces blood serotonin levels. The minute you give that they lose alpha position. It's a very interesting u uh you know kind of study. The alpha position signified by less aggressive behavior but more collaborative and assertive behavior. Here's the thing I want to tell you. In monkeys all sorts of studies on serotonin the more you increase serotonin function of a monkey the more likely they are to collaborate. It's not aggression. The alpha male that you think in your heads or the alpha of anything is unaggressive. It's not that. They all become extraordinarily collaborative. They start affiliating. Okay? And it's also a little bit of an assertive behavior. And this is study by Magguire and really I'll link it in the description to people watching it online so you can read the entire thing. I want you to read the entire thing, not just the abstract but the rest as well. Next slide. Low serotonin on the other hand is associated with impulsive aggression, risk-taking, hyper reactivity and negative risk takingaking not the kind of calculated risk takingaking right just you know I will go do adventure sports that type subordinates which is not the alpha but like below the alpha who try to fight their way up display this profile sometimes to try to get to the alpha position you try to fight your way up right if they don't have the blood serotonin levels that match They become volatile and violent. While they might win in a physical fight because physical fights will I pick up something randomly and might go in the other one's eye and maybe might win by luck. They often fail to hold stable power because they cannot build the necessary alliances to rule. There are lots of people for example who leave our company and say I will build my own company. But the classic mistake they do is they try they pick up fight with everybody. Whereas success comes from collaboration. It's almost like they missed the memo of why most companies are successful. Look at Sam Alman, right? He's made literally every company in the US, US in some way collaborate with him, right? So the best out there are collaborating all the time. They are these rogues are the tyrants or the rogues who rule by fear and eventually overthrown by a coalition of calmer, more cooperative males. Again this is Meguire and really with this study. Next slide. Sapolski which is a very different researcher had a opinion of something called tip a baboons. Typa baboons are those that saw threats everywhere. Even the small things they thought this is a threat. Okay. Couldn't distinguish between a major rival and a minor annoyance and lacked social outlets. They had the worst psychological profiles regardless of their rank. In contrast, the alphas ignored minor provocations, right? People say something bad about you small things. Alpha like I don't care unless it's a serious threat. They stopped caring about these small things and focused on real threats. Next slide. Now what we saw with this is a very different study. Okay. What we see with juvenile rees monkeys is a very different type of monkey. Now I just want to be very clear that monkey studies don't always translate one is to1 to humans but it's a reasonably good pattern. The minute you give juvenile reuses monkeys fluetine which is a type of anti-depressant they started grooming each other more. You know what grooming is a monkey going to another monkeykey's hair and scratch like just you know affiliative collaborative behaviors. It's so repeatable. Next slide.

Now why do we care about any? We don't care about any of this. We care about what we can take away for leadership. Okay. The entire idea with what we want to do is we want to build an ecosystem that is in general you know high serotonin and most you know services companies especially in India are always the quite the opposite. They're ruled by fear and what we want to create is an environment where you're safe and respected here. And to do that, first what we're trying to do is we're trying to reduce social threat, lower defensiveness, increase collaboration. We want everyone to collaborate, not to fight. And companies eventually get to places where people start fighting with each other a little bit. This hasn't happened in AOS, but it will happen as we scale unless we solve it today. I'll tell you the golden rules here. Praise and public, correct? And private, right? And what I mean by private and public are private is public is this. Private as small groups, two or three people, ideally one person. Critique the work, not the identity. I'm very famous for looking at something and saying, "This is trash. " But I'm never attacking the person. I'm never saying you are trash. So, this work is garbage. This video sucks. That's okay. Critique the work, not the identity of the person. Lead with alignment before disagreeing. Even if I disagree with you, I won't say that's stupid. It's a trash idea. Instead, I'll be like, "You're right. I agree with your line of thinking, but here's the three things that you're missing. So, I'm taking what you have in account. So, basically taking the extra time to explain why you're making a decision. Make evaluation criteria defined. There's something in companies called secret evaluation. Sometimes I don't like when people randomly get promoted. Oh, you did well this week. I'm going to promote you. We should never do that. We should be very clear how a person can work towards a promotion in everything that we do, right? Especially on the services side of what we do, right? Smaller teams maybe promotions might not be a thing yet. Blameless postmotms. I told you we can't look at each other and say you it's because of you we failed. Why did we fail at a specific project? What can we take away from it? What can we learn? How can we get better without blaming any specific person? Now if a person is to blame, horrible at it, let the person go. Fire the person. But there's no point blaming a person after it's failed. Just let the person go and protect status while changing behavior. Right? We try not to pull each other down. Try not to make it a rank environment. Right? To avoid our best to make it a competitive exam inside the company while still running the company. Well, next slide. Okay. High serotonin levels are associated with reduced fear and increased confidence in calculated risk takingaking. The low serotonin ones still take risk, but it's like, you know, jumping off a cliff type of risk. Resilience, the ability to bounce back from failure is actually very dependent on your serotonin level. So it's essentially the ability of the serotonin system to reeregulate the amydala after a setback. Stop overthinking why you failed. Stop thinking, "Oh, I'm a failure. This that get into that mode. " But get out and say, "Okay, I'll do it again. I'll try again. " Next slide. Okay. And I want to tell you how I do

this. And I try to generalize it for entrepreneurs. I do something called simulation which is I vividly imagine the worst case scenario for everything that we're doing here going bankrupt everything getting automated public humiliation whatever it is I visualize all of it then there's something called amigdala habituation by voluntarily exposing the brain to this simulated threat in controlled environment the amydala's response is dampened habituation the monster becomes known I'll give you a very good example of this happening a lot of for a lot of successful people this happens okay and in India especially because of legal threats. You know the first time you ever got a legal threat, you're like your pants. Oh no, whatever. And imagine the worst case scenario, imagine yourself in jail and all that. But the more it happens, the more you get habituated with it, right? For you right now, it's like, oh, I have to go to court to for summons or whatever. But like if you meet a lot of experienced entrepreneurs, they'll have hundreds of cases on them. They're just habituated to it. They don't they already know what the worst case is and they're willing to live with that worst case. Reframing the entrepreneur realizes that they would survive the defeat. This reduces the fear of defeat which is often more paralyzing than the defeat itself. What's the worst that can happen? Next is serotonin preservation. When the actual crisis hits, the brain is less likely to spiral into full-blown social defeat. Right? We in YAS especially, we do a lot of simulation on what's the worst thing that can happen. whether it be automation this that I do it on purpose sometimes to a point where I know when it if it actually happens we were ready for it and of course this mirrors the CBD technique of de catastrophy like you basically knock down a few points the worst case scenario in your head you don't take it as seriously as other people do for some for a lot of people a lot of kids they commit suicide after you know they don't get into a specific college or they don't pass a specific test you can decatastri decatastrophize it which is okay so what this Reframe in your head, right? I'll figure it out anyway. Next slide. The inner critic is essentially the internalized voice of social defeat. The Sharmaga beta mechanism running inside the entrepreneurs's own head. Negative selft talk activates the same stress pathways as external verbal abuse. When you attack yourself in your own head, it's just as good as somebody else abusing you from outside. It keeps cortisol high and serotonin low. Entrepreneurs and even you know the top talent here must consciously separate from this voice techniques like referring to oneself in third person during stress which is distance selft talk like oh von you didn't do a very good job of this you could have done this better creating that distance have been shown to reduce amydala activation this allows your prefrontal cortex to regain control shifting the brain back to a challenge state rather than a threat state is fight or flight challenge state is okay control fight environment control boxing match where I'm prepared or trained for it. Next slide.

The goal here is to build a positive sum ecosystem. The problem with the competitive exam mindset is one person can be rank one, the next will be rank two and so on and so forth all the way till last rank. We've done this since we were in school, right? Rank system. Did your school marks ever matter with your rank in school? You had a class rank, right? Did has it mattered? No. The goal here is to build a positive some ecosystem by validating employees which is constantly grooming them. Uh creating psychological safety which is reducing social defeat trying to make sure people don't get into too many situations of social defeat here and aligning incentives which is coalition building making sure that groups are very tight with each other. We do some activities that some of you might find it silly some of the activities we end up doing at sometimes we do some of the activities uh actually you know even when somebody hosts a birthday party we do the cake cutting and stuff like that. small things that we do. Some of you might find it silly but it's actually very important for team bonding. Okay. And the point of a leader in any group, a point of a manager in any pod at any part of our company is the serotonergic balancer. Your job is to make sure that everyone has reasonably good mood enough to collaborate. A company that operates on social defeat principles, okay? Stack ranking, fear-based management is biologically destined for toxicity. you know 99% of Indian companies right because the managers have no official training on anything don't even understand how they're not they don't even have enough awareness of how their mood works and these companies also very poor innovation because they don't have the risk taking calculated risk takingaking ability because their neurotransmitter profiles are in the a company that operates on these good serotonin principles which is trust safety shared wins while removing zero sum players can win now by the way this is the ideal state this is a dream state This also requires you to have good talent that actually cares. Right? If somebody comes in and by the way one of the rules I really believe in is if somebody has depression in the company like active depression typically they're not a very good fit for the company. They need to go out get treatment and come back because like I said they will make it worse for everybody else. Collaboration takes a hit. I told you the higher serotonin the more likely you collaborate. The lower serotonin the more you feel all messages coming in are insulting. I won't collaborate. You create a less collaborative environment. It's not their fault. There were periods in my life where if you had hired me and I worked in a company I would have been disastrous for the company right so better for them to take care of themselves treated like you know sick time off finish come back and I think helping extremely low serotonin players the rogues like I told you right we told you about the rogues who fight their way up helping them move out from the company or seek treatment is key yeah so helping some of these lower serotonin players you know move out of the environment or seek treatment is key and look if there's a if it gets to a point with somebody that you can't work with them, they're not collaborative or they don't have the skill or whatever it is, it's better to move them out. Okay? If they have potential, keep them. If they have the right attitude, learning ability, keep them. But if they don't have any of that, it's better to move them out, right? Because they're just going to make the environment more and more toxic because the minute a person becomes non-olaborative, they're already exhibiting the symptoms of what we are talking about. Next slide.

— That's all. — Awesome. Thanks, guys. Bye. And you know I've let's see how the this first one you know what the response is. Um because you know I' I've been trying my best to try to improve my understanding of how I make decisions, how people make decisions. Actually Jordan Peterson has this thing about the underlying current. He's like in any conversation it's not about the thing especially in relationships right couples relationships. It's never about the thing that's being discussed. The fight is never about the thing. The fight is always about the underlying emotion, attention, this that some it's a different need that's being disguised in the fight for something else. But sometimes boredom two people are fighting because they're bored. Could be because of many different things. But it's important for you to find the underlying current. So this came from there which is that I want to understand what are the underlying currents of running a company and it's a lot more emotional than people think it is and if I learn more about it, it makes me a more efficient leader. Right? Being aware is the first key to being um you know a better leader. And this is work I did for myself and I'm just sharing with everybody. If it offends people online then uh we might not do more of this. Uh but if it's useful then you know we'll find a gated way to do it with people who really care about learning this information. That's it for me. Bye.