One phone call with cardiologist and recovering alcoholic Rishi Menon and BOOM: we’re instant Stepbrothers 😂 We dive into failing med school, 20 years of proving worthiness, recovery, suicidal ideation, burnout, the Enneagram as software, body changes after letting go, and why practice probably isn’t causative but shows up anyway.
Timecodes and topics:
00:00 Welcome — Spiritual Porn and the Only One Channel
1:31 What Spiritual Porn Actually Is (And Why It Feels Like Progress)
3:10 Two Brown Doctors, One Resonance — How We Connected
5:57 Failed Med School → 20 Years of Proving Worthiness 7:05
The Nuclear Reactor of Unworthiness
10:25 What Alcohol Did — Breaking the Mask
15:45 Recovery as Real Spiritual Practice
18:46 Burnout, Rock Bottom, and the Darkest Hour
22:45 The Reactor Metaphor — Chernobyl, Fallout, and What Stopped the Plan
31:11 Cannabis and Staring Into the Furnace
37:35 India, the Ashram, and Finding the Right Path
41:18 Surrendering the Whole Story
45:10 This Unraveled While I Was a Full-Time Cardiologist
55:19 The Enneagram as Software Running on Separation
1:12:02 Body Changes After Letting Go
1:18:42 The 2012 Las Vegas Awakening — and Why It Needed to Wait
1:27:05 The Strange Absence — Where Did the Seeking Go?
1:37:26 Practice Isn’t Causative — Correlation vs. Causation
1:40:14 Mindfulness Made Me More Neurotic, Not Less
1:45:28 Love as the Baseline, Not the Peak
1:54:54 The Bahiya Sutta, Mu, and Death Row Records
2:01:28 No Sunk Costs — Letting Go of the Medical Identity
2:06:52 Communalizing the Bliss — Two Doctors, One Resonance
