The ZDoggMD Show

By Dr. Zubin DamaniaMedicine Health & Fitness Religion & Spirituality Spirituality

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The ZDoggMD Show episodes

October 25ZPupp's Home From College! (LIVE)
I sent a kid off to college and a some sort of crazy adult came back 🫣😂 WARNING: contains spiritual ego collateral damage and one ANGRY cat named The Mitch! From our YouTube Live conversation.
Nina (Z-Pupp) is home from Vassar for fall break, and the live is for Nai Nai to see her

Why Nina left California for a school where she knew no one

Double majoring in music and econ, and why she didn’t go to NYU for the music business

Chamber music, her professor, and live-streamed orchestra concerts watched at home on the big TV

Mendelssohn, and the screen photo texted to her mid-concert

Making friends, her surprise roommate, and the case for a small liberal arts college

Poughkeepsie versus New York City, and the train into the city

A violin lesson in San Francisco, playing a Sarasate duet, and favorite composers

The one dining hall, the bagel place, and the acai bowl shop where strangers pitched Vassar to her on the college visit

Winning a concerto competition, and Nina’s opinion of Vivaldi

The campus petting zoo and its ferret, chinchilla, and baby kangaroo

The Mitch the cat: escape attempts, getting caught, and Nina the cat whisperer

Professors’ outfits, music theory capes, and the jean jacket comeback

The Cocteau Twins, and whether they count as emo

Whether the Mitch is fat or just fluffy, and “you can’t win with women who know everything”

What Nina misses most about home (her car), and feeling stuck in Poughkeepsie

San Francisco tech bros, cappuccino art, and the vocal fry of Pacific Heights

Dining hall slop, the freshman 15 in reverse, and joining a squash class and biking

How Stanford benefits help pay for tuition

Drop-off night, hotel bourbon, and a musician tip from the chat

Professor Navega’s threat to “snap her neck” for being late

Affluent classmates, generational wealth, and debutante parties

Parties, Halloween weekend, and Zubin’s freshman 15 at Berkeley

Nina’s take on the awakening stuff: “we just gotta live in the here and now, even though that doesn’t exist”

Zubin agrees that awakening talk is nonsense, and why he keeps talking about it

Vermont hippie colleges and the leg hair debate

Crying (or laughing) at drop-off, and doom scrolling in the rental Volvo

Halloween costumes: a chicken onesie and a Love Island robe with dollar store snakes

Is college worth it in the age of AI: connections, Swiffers, and learning to be an adult

Side hustles, and “what is a Zubin” showing up in Shorts feeds

Donald Hoffman, conscious agents, and the homunculus

Whether the kids had an awakening: telling Nina “nothing is real” during COVID and her existential crisis at 10

Spiritual ego, and why a “me” with a new insight wants to inflict it on its kids

Watching Nina grow up on the channel, the Big Pharma video, and Dr. House of Cards

“Gaffes” and “C’s get degrees” versus “P equals MD”

The stumbling block of teaching what you just learned

Amenemope, the Bhagavad Gita, and Nina’s plan to take it next semester

Using AI, just not for art or music

Zubin’s Zoroastrian upbringing and chanting from the Avesta at 11

Zubin’s “it’s all just this” take on oneness and consciousness

Arjuna, Krishna, and killing your brother’s army

AI flattery, and Zubin’s British lady Claude voice in the car

Nina’s cognitive science class, “Chat with Pat,” and why the chatbot folds under pushback

Whether Claude is conscious, and who is having the experience

Saying please and thank you to AI, and older people finding company in chatbots

Waymos, who is liable when AI goes wrong, and the doomer argument

Dallas hospitality, a midnight hotel check-in, and an Uber ride into the MAHA conspiracy

Chatty Ubers in Poughkeepsie and New York

Whether Dallas counts as the South

Wrap-up, solfege, and sending Nina back to school (she’ll be back in December)

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1 hr 3 min
October 13 Ex-Hindu monk on the utter failure of spiritual seeking (w/ Tobias Ricardo)
Tobias Ricardo spent 15 years as a Hindu monk and had pretty much every spiritual experience on the menu: kundalini fireworks, blissed-out “I am” states, retreats, the works. The real freedom turned out to be seeing that all of it was happening to and for a “me” who was never actually there. If you’ve had glimpses that never seem to stick, and you keep thinking you just need one more retreat, maybe check this conversation out 😉

Click here for all my usual links, music, videos, podcast, Supporter Tribe and more.

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1 hr 28 min
October 02 The Only True Compassion (w/ Tim Cliss)
I sat down with Tim Cliss to talk about how nobody's home, how there's no prize at the end of the "spiritual" search, and how compassion works a lot better once there's no "you" left to get in its way. Also featured: psychedelics, ego death, and the surprisingly good news that hope is doomed 🥳

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1 hr 5 min
September 28The end of seeking is NOT what you think
I got an email this morning with the subject: "I died and you helped. Thanks." 😳

Here's the resulting YouTube LIVE discussion!
Topics covered:
Reading an email from a longtime viewer describing two years of awakening, contraction, and finally the realization there was never anyone on the journey

Why the end of seeking is surprising precisely because it's so ordinary, not some mystical attainment

Why "unconditional love" and other spiritual language are imperfect pointers, and what they're actually gesturing at

A follow-up phone call with email author, and what it's like when nothing lands or sticks between two people who've been through this

Losing the impulse to fix or save other people once agency is seen through

Compassion as natural, unforced acceptance of everything, including one's own conditioning

The nuclear reactor analogy for how unworthiness gets walled off in childhood, and what happens when it melts down

Processing anger and grief, including a viewer whose son is becoming homeless, and why there's no such thing as spiritual bypassing

Revisiting the fury felt at the Hiroshima museum and how it naturally resolved

Money, financial fear, and how the drive to "keep hustling" has changed

Why the VPZD show and other seemingly contradictory activities still arise and make sense

How the self attaches itself to actions after the fact to preserve the illusion of free will and agency

The self described as a verb ("selfing") rather than a fixed thing

Heaven, hell, and why eternity of any single experience, even pleasure, becomes hell

Marriage, kids, and whether family changes how someone relates to death

Closing reflections on watching a daughter start college, liberal arts education, and the peace out

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1 hr 24 min
September 23 Beliefs are tricky...
The sense of self may die, but these termites eating my house are still VERY much alive 😉

My recent livestream on TikTok. Some of the topics touched on:
Beliefs as an endless, dissolving process.
The VPZD show as a dance of conditioning between hosts and audience.
Fighting for a cause as really fighting for identity.
Communicating needs with a partner.
Book recommendations for exploring non-duality.
A partner's neediness as a mirror for one's own conditioning.
Doctor as just another fallen-away identity.
Finding meaning in a meaningless existence.
Why human consciousness defaults to negativity.
Letting go of the belief that you should be positive.
Getting contradictory antivax and pro-vax accusations back to back. Substituting one identity paradigm for another.
Reflecting on the 30s, 40s, and 50s as different flavors of seeking.
Flu shot risk tolerance and personal choice.
The shingles vaccine decision.
Nothing is happening, yet the characters keep playing their story out. Political yard signs causing friction with a spouse.
Sitting with the shock of losing a friend badly.
What is the point of any of this.
Termites, relative and ultimate reality.
Letting go of tribal fighting.
The Macklemore and Ed Sheeran controversy revisited.
Viewers sharing Macklemore songs and other political art.
Richard Wagner as beauty coexisting with bigotry.
Working with insects as a way to understand fear.
Closing thoughts on why this TikTok live feels accepting.

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48 min
September 02 There's no bypassing life, like, EVER
A live YouTube conversation about dropping our oldest child off for college, ending with an overpriced bottle of hotel Jim Beam drunk out of plastic cups by a Homewood Suites firepit. Yeah, enlightenment ain't what the gurus have been selling us 😭😅

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56 min
August 08 Alone, Together
Back from Japan to talk about being "alone together," why the "loneliness epidemic" is something engineered by the "me", and how bliss, grief, Fauci, and a three-dollar vintage shirt all fit into the same perfect unfolding.

Video show archive, audio podcasts, music parodies, Supporter Tribe membership options, merch, social media, and email contact form: ⁠https://lnk.bio/zdoggmd

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1 hr 14 min
July 02 Moral Injury, Health 4.0, and the End of "You"
A live Q+A wandering through our Sunday zoom meeting with the awakening group, to Jesus Christ Superstar, to the death of "ZDoggMD" as an identity, through moral injury, openness as the prerequisite for everything, why spirituality is a beautiful farce, and what it's like when worry about the future just stops sticking. Health 4.0 son!

Contact me, watch all the videos, and join the Supporter Tribe for future zoom meetings here.

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1 hr 33 min
June 22 Liberation Is The End Of The Need For Liberation | From TikTok LIVE
I tell ya, there's something about these ephemeral TikTok live conversations that just gets this Zubin character all lit up 🔥 Here's a recording just for y'all who listen to the podcast (these live shows normally go POOF immediately after airing on TikTok).

As always, you can hit me up hello at zdoggmd.com, and check out all the things here.

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1 hr 47 min
June 16 Separation is Suffering, But THIS is What's Longed For (w/Zabi)
A two-hour conversation with a fellow "Z" that's for no one and goes exactly nowhere. Perfect! 😅

We talk about addiction as hole-filling, and the hole that can never be filled; the seeking energy and what it actually wants; the dying process of identity deconstructing in reverse order; why the sense of a separate self is not a thought but an embodied energetic misunderstanding; why there's no practice because the person can't get rid of itself; what's actually longed for (not what the mind thinks); hopelessness as freedom... the real kind; the solidity trap and why making things real is the suffering; the sense of separation as the literal root of all suffering; what happens when you die; compassion as simply this communication; the end of the comparing mind; all the struggle of me for nothing; patterns falling away spontaneously; grief and loss and awe; and liberation as the end of the need for liberation.

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2 hr 7 min

About The ZDoggMD Show

From the publisher's feed

Interviews and live rants on healthcare, depolarizing our divided society, and the non-dual nature of reality. Hosted by UCSF/Stanford-trained physician Dr. Zubin Damania (AKA ZDoggMD).