Dhru Purohit Show
Step Out of Fear and Hive Mindset and Into Nuanced, Free Thinking with Kaizen Asiedu
Wed, 26 Feb 2025
This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth, Manukora Honey, and Aqua Tru. Political and social discussions have become increasingly divisive today, often leaving little room for nuance or open dialogue. Differing viewpoints are frequently shut down, met with hostility, or dismissed outright, despite the fact that real growth comes from curiosity and engaging with opposing perspectives. Today’s guest joins us to explore the courage it takes to question our beliefs, understand where they come from, and embrace complexity in a world that often demands rigid certainty. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with cultural commentator Kaizen Asiedu to explore the importance of understanding our beliefs, where they come from, and the courage it takes to question them. Kaizen shares his personal journey of challenging lifelong beliefs and embracing alternative perspectives. He also discusses how this willingness to question ideas is often missing in today’s political climate, where fear of dissent has led to tribalism and dehumanization. Additionally, he shares his insights on the MAHA movement, health and wellness discussions, and the concept of antifragility. Kaizen Asiedu is a cultural commentator dedicated to empowering people by simplifying complex political and social issues into messages that leave listeners informed and appreciative of nuance. After earning a philosophy degree from Harvard, he entered the gaming industry, ultimately becoming Head of Global Esports Events at Riot Games. While leading the League of Legends World Championship and winning an Emmy, he felt a growing restlessness—a desire for a deeper, more personal purpose. Today, he helps high achievers who feel burnt out or lost transition from unfulfilling careers to meaningful work, whether as entrepreneurs or in roles that excite them as much as playing their favorite game or reading a beloved book. In this episode, Dhru and Kaizen dive into: Recognizing that you are in the “Matrix” of living a life expected of you (00:00:25) The ideas Kaizen was called to question (2:50) Fear-based conditioning and morality (7:40) RFK’s confirmation hearing and steelmanning concerns about his positions (20:20) The discouragement of open conversations and the rise of cancel culture (30:10) The rejection of humanity and the divisions it has caused (40:36) Red flags that indicate we are stuck in tribalism (44:36) Kaizen’s views that diverge from the current administration (47:46) Kaizen’s personal journey and the significance of "kaizen" in Japanese culture (54:16) The role of psychedelics, mindfulness, and shifting belief systems (58:56) Engaging with people as they are in the present moment (01:07:46) The intersection of lifestyle choices and systemic issues (01:14:46) Respecting alternative viewpoints, embracing different perspectives, and the concept of antifragility (01:19:16) Final thoughts (01:34:46) For more on Kaizen, follow him on Instagram, X/Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube. This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth, Manukora Honey, and Aqua Tru. Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com/dhru and use code DHRUP. Upgrade to the creamiest honey, packed with antioxidants and prebiotics. Just go to manukora.com/dhru to get $25 off the Starter Kit and boost your energy, immunity, and digestive health today! AquaTru is a countertop reverse osmosis purifier with a four-stage filtration system that removes 15x more contaminants than the bestselling water filters out there. Go to dhrupurohit.com/filter/ and get $100 off when you try AquaTru for yourself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Hi everyone, Drew Proat here. Today's guest is thought leader and life coach Kaizen Asiedu. And he's here today on the podcast to talk about making nuance cool again, breaking free of tribalism, and escaping the thought matrix that many of us will find ourselves in at some point in time in our lives.
I came across Kaizen's videos on x.com, formerly known as Twitter, and I was deeply impressed at how he approached the topics of very complicated health, political, and social issues. And on today's podcast, we discuss many of these topics and his layered views.
From my conversation and emails with many of you, I know that even though this podcast isn't a political podcast, naturally, this podcast has followers across the political spectrum. That includes Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.
And I know I have a good chunk of people who listen to this podcast who don't really care for politics much at all and would prefer that I really don't bring the topic up. I acknowledge that because in today's interview, we talk about the current political landscape and how Kaizen's views on many topics changed over time. But we don't discuss politics just for politics' sake.
We discuss politics in the context of important themes that can be applied to all aspects of life. Kaizen's key theme around his content is making nuance cool again. How can we discuss... all sides of an issue. How can we declare our own personal biases on something?
How can we still land on our views about a particular topic without having to always feel like we're a melting pot of ideas with everyone else? And most importantly, still respect other people when they have different viewpoints than we do. That's the theme and that's the focus of today's podcast. And I encourage you
regardless of your views on any of the topics we discussed today, to please listen to the full end of the podcast with Kaizen, because I think you'll be surprised about Kaizen's approach and come to the conclusion that there are many people that are out there that have different beliefs than you might have that are well-respected, good people who want to make the world a better place.
With that being said, let's jump into my interview with thought leader and life coach, Kaizen Asiadu. Kaizen, welcome to the podcast. A pleasure to have you here. You know, you once said, People talk about the matrix. What the matrix actually is, is being in a web of expectations and conditioning that feed on your fear and cause you to do the safe thing rather than the real thing.
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Chapter 2: How can we recognize if we are in the 'Matrix' of societal expectations?
So I'd love to ask you, how does someone begin to recognize that they're in the matrix? And more importantly, how do they escape?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: What ideas did Kaizen Asiedu challenge in his life?
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
When you look at the world today, politically, socially, and especially a lot of the conversations that are going on in the space of what health means. Yeah. Where do you see these forms of manipulation or people having the strongest sense of maybe this fear-based conditioning that's running the conversation?
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.
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.
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Chapter 4: How has fear-based conditioning influenced our beliefs?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
When you were going through that period of time, what gave you the confidence that I'm not gonna be worried? I'll just share from my own perspective is that even being in the health space, there was maybe like a few week window in the beginning where even people that I felt that I looked up to
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Chapter 5: What are the dangers of tribalism in today’s society?
individuals like peter attia ronald patrick in the health space i was even feeling like some of those people were saying this thing is going to be really bad so you start questioning your own self and there's a little bit of uncertainty that's there what gave you the sense of confidence that hey this isn't the bubonic plague i think we're going to be okay
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Chapter 6: How do we engage in open conversations in a divisive world?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 7: What role do psychedelics and mindfulness play in shifting belief systems?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Yeah, it felt like that was a time, that was a big period for a lot of people to go through this experience of, hey, my personal experience and literally what I'm seeing with my own eyes is different than what I'm hearing. Maybe there's something else going on to the story.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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Chapter 8: How do we respect alternative viewpoints while embracing different perspectives?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, you are a black male for anybody who's listening and not watching on YouTube or on X. You have been a lifelong Democrat. If you had to, let's say in the case of specifically Bobby Kennedy, Secretary Kennedy now, if you had to steel man the Democrat side of what they were looking at and where their fears came from,
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