 here. So on Friday we got the announcement of a special prosecutor for the Hunter Biden matter. Can't imagine that this is good news for the Democrats or for President Joe Biden. So what, two months ago it looked like there was going to be some plea deal where Hunter Biden would just cop to a couple of misdemeanors and the whole thing would go away. Right, doesn't look like that anymore. Let's get some commentary here from Robert Wright and Mickey Kowals. Good morning to Duvud Duvud. How are you this morning? I'm good. Okay, great. So while I just figure a little round with a couple of technical things here on my end, talk to me about what's been going on with you since I spoke to you last. I mean personally not that much. I was actually recognized by the city of Detroit for 10 years of chess coaching. So I guess that was nice. On Thursday there was a 20th year anniversary of the Detroit City Chess Club of which I've been a chess coach now for 10 years. And besides that, you're still doing my research selling books, but not much advancement in my own personal streaming or life. Okay. You there, Luke? You have a microphone issues. I asked, have you gone back to Shul? No, I didn't go back. In fact, I went, I told you I went for those two medical events. There was another medical event in like a week for now. And you know, Michael came to my house Friday night and we did the Friday prayers and he like, he was feeling really inspired. He was like wanting to move to Israel and make aliyah. And I was thinking like, okay, like maybe I could bring him to the local young Israel. But honestly, like, I didn't even know. I mean, like I probably have to contact somebody or if I could just show up Saturday morning. I know they have security or it made me feel kind of weird about it because I mean, it's the nature of synagogue where I'm not actually sure I could bring my friend who's like trying to convert. Yeah, I understand that we've got much tighter security measures in place. So you're touching on something that I've often reflected on. When people embrace Orthodox Judaism as adults, either as converts or as ballet truva, I've noticed that they are often seeking in Orthodox Judaism things that Orthodox Judaism is not necessarily suited to primarily providing. They're usually seeking, if they're not doing it for pragmatic reasons, they're doing it to try to get a sense of meaning in their life, a sense of God in their life, but really they want to get a life where they like and respect themselves. And usually people who already like and respect themselves don't make a dramatic change like joining Orthodox Judaism. Do you have any thoughts on this? Yeah, Mika, I lived in New York for a long time. Have you seen the Frida Vizel YouTube page yet? The Satmare Tours of Williamsburg? I'm not sure. I haven't paid attention. It's not super interesting, but I'd say it's extremely different in New York than probably anywhere, maybe LA, but probably not LA because New York and in Israel when you become Jewish, you're looking at a community that you're going to become a part of and that community is large and powerful. So like here in Metro Detroit, there's a few thousand Orthodox Jews, but they live in the poorest part of at least the Oakland County of where the Jews live. And if you joined the Jews, you wouldn't necessarily be looking forward to becoming an integrating part of the Orthodox community. So if you talk like someone like Michael who lives like 45 minutes out into the suburb doesn't have too much connection with Jews at all in almost zero connection with Orthodox Jews. It's more him like you're like you were talking like a personal identity thing that is connecting to Judaism and then a feel possibly towards Orthodoxy as opposed to if you were actually in New York City where you saw Hasidim, you saw Orthodox Jews or Lakewood, or you had some sort of connection to Israel where you would have been thinking about it from the beginning of integration within some sort of culture community. Yeah, yeah. Touching there on something that I noticed also that I noticed a lot of people want to be part of Orthodox Judaism, but they're simply not prepared to make the sacrifices that are necessary to be a normal part of Orthodox Judaism. And so they often try to do it on the cheap by trying to get around the required sacrifices such as moving to within walking distance of a synagogue and then they are concerned that they don't fit in because they're not making the sacrifices necessary to fit in, but there is a substantial sacrifice required to pull off a conversion to Orthodox Judaism, not just a conversion in form, not just passing through the process but actually making it real in your life after you've passed through the process. Any thoughts on the relatively large number of people? I think you would love to be a part of Orthodox Judaism but simply not willing or not able to make the sacrifices necessary to be a part of Orthodox Judaism. Yeah, I mean the vast majority of people don't even realize the sacrifices involved and even like, you know, me saying who successfully did it for many years, picked up, you know, multiple languages, lived a different life. You, for periods of my life, you basically completely cut ties with my family, all my former friends and connections. And, you know, then I still largely failed. And, you know, then if you did successfully find a marriage partner and have children of trying to raise your kids. So I mean, if you find it interesting, I think this dichotomy of if you look, maybe me or Michael where I more just enjoy being an Orthodox Jew and interacting and as a life outlook of how I do things and the community part is more difficult. Because I don't necessarily really feel like I fit in with the community or more representative of a community. However, I like interacting with Gentiles and secular Jews and even fellow Orthodox Jews as an Orthodox Jew. But I never really integrated into the community as opposed to integrating in the community. Like I know when I went into Israel, I was an Orsamac and you have the cure of rabbis and versus what they tell you versus my own perception. You know, I saw like, I got to fit in with these Orthodox Jews, these specific Jews and like the gatekeeper approach where the Orthodox Jews are like the gatekeeper who are going to say whether you're really Jewish or not. And Michael maybe from his background, he's not really concerned with that. He knows that almost no one has even heard of these rabbis, has met any of these rabbis. And he just enjoys interacting with his old family, his old friends, new people he meets as a Jew. Kind of like you, when you were streaming, I watched you be like, I'm an Orthodox Jew. And I would have watched you like, you're not an Orthodox Jew, no way. If you were an Orthodox Jew, you're doing all this wrong. But, you know, from your perspective, you're like, well, you know, go back to the ghetto, you know, saying like, I'm an Orthodox Jew and I'm going to keep on doing this versus trying to actually fit into the ghetto. And, you know, sort of say I've tried to fit in the ghetto and I saw it as like, okay, I mean, you got these rabbis, you got these rabbis, and you got to do whatever they tell you, you got to do all this stuff. You got to, and I wouldn't say it's impossible because there are many people who succeed, but it's borderline impossible to, so to say, to convert and fit into Orthodox Judaism. But, you know, even here in Oak Park, Michigan, there's converts that, you may be a better way to express it. Those who shun the outside world, so they shed their former identity and then take on a new identity within the confines of the Orthodox world. Or there's those who convert and then use that as a new way to approach the outside world. And maybe you're the latter where you didn't shed your old identity to hide within the confines of Orthodox Judaism. You put on like a new suit and now you're approaching the outside world with that new suit, that new identity on. So many topics you bring up there. So the most stable transition to Orthodox Judaism, of which I've seen is the transition to Orthodox Judaism that seems to be primarily motivated by marriage, by you've already established a relationship with someone who's Orthodox Jew and so to get married and to build a family together, you convert to Orthodox Judaism. In your experience, is this the most stable form of, most stable basis for entry into Orthodox Judaism? I mean, you must be talking LA because like, I think that's extremely rare. I mean, even here in like Metro Detroit, there might only be a handful of examples because they're going to frown on that. So like, if you're outside Orthodox Judaism, like, you know, you perform or conservative, you're not going to bother converting Orthodox for marriage. And if you're Orthodox, the chance that you actually, that's my phone. Okay, go ahead. It's not important. So ring the chance that you're actually going to be in a situation like that where you're going to be engaged to marry an Orthodox person in the last hurdle is converting. It's almost non-existent. So I mean, maybe in LA it's a different ballpark where you have all sorts of your Orthodoxy is on much lower level, where you have your Orthodox Jews in relations with non-Jews. And then they would, you know, convert to make the family happy. But I would say like, you know, you got a really weak Orthodox community in LA if that's the case. There's something to what you say in that the level of commitment to Judaism, like the level of commitment to Christianity is considerably attenuated on the West Coast compared to the East Coast. So I noticed on the East Coast, people have much stronger, meaning the Northeast, not so much Florida. But I noticed in the Northeast people have much stronger ethnic ties. They have much stronger ties in general to their families. They have much stronger ties in general to their religion, to their schools, to traditional forms of identity seem to be much, much stronger. And so Judaism is much more rigorous, much more demanding from my experience on the Northeast of the United States compared to the West Coast. What are the major patterns or genres that you've seen among people who convert to Orthodox Judaism and pass through the process and seemingly pull it off? Well, just to go back before we, if you wanted to dwell on this, like, because to me it's unfathomable what you're saying, like how is it possible that people convert to Orthodox Judaism for marriage? Like I can't even like pad them the pathway of like, what does that look like? How is it possible you're saying like there was an Orthodox Jew who was like dating a, dating a Shiksa and then like the only thing he needed was her to convert so they converted her? Yeah, I mean, it's almost unfathomable. Like, like how does that even happen? Well, it happens hundreds of times a year in the United States. It's the prime mover behind conversion to Orthodox Judaism because people primarily meet each other at work or if they're in a similar profession. And so particularly modern Orthodox Jews are almost always in the professions such as lawyer, doctor, dentist, accountant. And so if you haven't, you know, married by the time you're 22, 24, which is kind of normal in Orthodox Judaism, but get into your late 20s and you meet someone at work. All right, the odds are pretty high that that person won't be Jewish. And so people fall in love and Orthodox Jews are affected by the culture around them. And so falling in love is largely seen in the culture that surrounds us as the basis for getting married and forming a family. So yeah, I see this happening a lot with Orthodox Jews. I'm surprised that you consider it, you know, virtually impossible. Yeah, I mean, certainly in New York City, I don't think that's ever happened like that because, I mean, the community is so large and there would be so many eyes upon a person that I'm saying, like there's hundreds of thousands of Jewish girls that you could always be set up with that. And you know, the delineation of Orthodoxy usually, you know, it's not modern Orthodox where you know, people would be, you're having beards or Hasidish or clearly dressed as Jewish where it wouldn't, you couldn't have like a relationship with the, maybe if you're like in a modern Orthodox area or LA where very few people where there's a larger constituency of modern Orthodox than Orthodox, where the person's in the work world and, you know, their romantic partner doesn't know that they're Jewish or how seriously they take their Jewishness and the relationship carries on for a while to the point where they'd consider getting married and they would need to convert. Like in Brooklyn or New York, the differentiation would just be too strong. You know, so if you're Orthodox, it would be obvious, you're Orthodox, it would be obvious from the beginning that it's not gonna work, that you'd have to, you know, convert. And so, you know, the likelihood that you fall in love and then find out that like, oh, you have to convert and that you wouldn't know that upfront or that other people wouldn't know about it, you know, right away that, you know, so if you're, I mean, even in Metro Detroit, but, you know, so if you're in a romantic relationship with like a coworker, your fellow Orthodox Jews would almost definitely know about that at the beginning and put a stop to it, you know, to not allow it to reach that level. So I'm guessing it's more something like an LA that just culturally would not be practical in New York. And that's why I say like, I can think of almost no cases like that in my experience in New York. And then if you want to respond or you want to see the pathways I saw. Okay, I'll just respond. So also what you often get is that someone falls in love with someone who he or she believes is Jewish and then finds out that they're not Jewish according to Orthodox law, even though the persons believe they're Jewish or they're live because they grew up reform or conservative. So that happens. Also many Balay Tuva, all right, people who are not Orthodox fall in love with someone who's not Jewish. And then along the way, the Jewish partner decides to become Orthodox and the non-Jewish partner decides to come along for the ride. So feel free to respond to that. Otherwise, talk to me about the differences. The communities are too strong in Brooklyn for that to happen because like the differentiation between Jewish and Baltuva or you think you might be Jewish, like in Brooklyn, like you got the rabbis, like everybody's cousins or went to school. So it's like you're Orthodox, you went to an Orthodox school and it's obvious. I mean, that's like there's a rare case of somehow like a person from one of these questionable backgrounds somehow got into and went to one of these Orthodox schools. So like your marriage pool would be from fellow people who went to these schools. And if you're like a Baltuva or someone thinks you might be Jewish, there's so many rabbis all over the place that would have put you through the ringer. I mean, because I know that's what they went through with me. Like, you know, they wanted to know my family records. They wanted to know my family ancestry. And I was put into a questionable category. And one of the reasons I was never applicable for marriage because I was never able to conclusively demonstrate my Jewishness for marriage standards within the Orthodox. So, you know, so I see an LA where it's completely different than Brooklyn where you have, you know, just like a subculture of Orthodox Jews that run their own thing in, you know, an LA I could imagine that it's that much different. I'm not sure if you could imagine Brooklyn being that much different where there is no path to what you're talking about. There is no path to a romantic relationship between a Jew and a non-Jew that could end in conversion except for a person who went off the Derrick. So if like a person went off the Derrick, left the community, was living in a non-Jewish area and then fell in love, maybe like in terms of like trying to make their family happy to convert or, but almost in none of those cases would the person return to, you know, the mainstream Brooklyn Orthodox community. So, you know, like there are plenty of cases like that where people have a cousin or a brother who left the community and married and maybe they went through, now they're modern Orthodox and went through a conversion. But like if they came back into Brooklyn, they would be questioned on their Judaism permanently. And I remember like in in Bubba in various specific Yeshivas, even Baluchuva generally have to marry, the children of Baluchuva generally marry the children of other Baluchuva because lineage is that important to people that even like two or three generations later, you're like, oh, my granddad was a Baluchuva. And, you know, like his, his lineage was questionable that the general community still does not want to intermarry or date with their children. So like in LA, I could picture that it's that different. I'm not sure if you could picture in Brooklyn it being that different to the other extent. Yeah, I think we're probably both speaking out of our own experiences. So I doubt that 50% of Orthodox Jews on the East Coast live lives that are as closely regulated and scrutinized by the rabbis as you describe. I think you're talking about more traditional, emerging on Haredi communities of which you're more aware. I am mostly aware of West Coast forms of Orthodox Judaism which are considered considerably watered down compared to what you describe on the East Coast. Most, well, not most, but a large number of Orthodox Jews on the East Coast do not lead lives as regulated and scrutinized and as under the thumb of the rabbis as you describe most, but not most. Many Orthodox Jews on the East Coast are considerable number approximating 50%. Do not lead lives like this. Do you think I'm wrong? No, I think you're right. So I thought it was interesting just to highlight that and I said that when I was in Hasidic Brooklyn where you actually have a Jewish neighborhood where basically, I mean, we also talked about this in relation to the difference in New York and multiculturalism because it's not Jews among whites. There's almost no whites there. And the Jews are largely representative of the whites, but there's Hebrew letters on the signs and maybe half the people speak Yiddish as the first language and a lot of these schools are Yiddish schools and maybe on the Upper West Side, you could be right. Like even on the Upper West Side where you have hundreds of thousands of Jews, still it's very common for them to take their Yomikov to use Anglo-sized names. And it could be even on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that it's closer to what Luke is saying than what I'm saying. But like I live in Hasidic Brooklyn and maybe it gets back to your next question about what are the pathways to conversion? Wait, hang on before we go there. So to fill in date, I think that's probably largely a modern Orthodox thing. So to fill in date is when you're going out with someone you take your to fill in along because you expect to spend the night with the woman. And so when you get up in the morning, you're going to want to put on your to fill in. So obviously there weren't a lot of to fill in dates in the Orthodox communities that you knew in New York. Yeah, when we talked about this many times, I was saying that the difference from like Orthodox, modern Orthodox to Kharedi is when you reach the Kharedi level, you have no personal autonomy. Like if you miss Marev, like someone's going to be like, where was he? And in almost everybody you know, everybody you associate, you're going to already have to be off the Derek to have a level of personal autonomy. I hope that makes sense to you. Like in sense like, oh, like, you know, like if you were in the Kharedi community, everybody would know all of your friends. You would not be able to conceal a single like friend that the community doesn't know about. And if you disappeared for a day or two, everybody would know it. It was like, oh, Luke wasn't in shul, you know, or the three times a day is expected to be in shul. And it would be like, you know, topic every single person that, you know, followed you or cared about you or your haters would like, you know, where was he? And it's meant to protect about, protect from the things that you're mentioning. And I mean, we've discussed that level of personal autonomy and the level of completely giving up any personal autonomy. Yeah. And the other rejoinder I'd have any one who's spending time around non-Jews is going to be far more susceptible for falling in love with one just like any woman who works is going to be much more vulnerable to having an affair than women who just stay home with the kids. So there are Kharedi Jews who spend a great deal of their professional life around non-Jews. And so they're much more vulnerable to falling in love with a non-Jewish woman than those who don't spend a great deal of time around non-Jews. Is that fair? Well, no, no. I mean, because like in the Hasidic community, only adult male businessmen spend time around non-Jews and generally that would only be the case after they're married with children. So there would be basically no possibility for fraternization except for adult married men who already have children. And like generally in the Hasidic community, you don't enter the business world until you're married with children. Okay. So what are the different types of conversions to Orthodox Judaism that you have seen that appear to be somewhat successful? So I would give three general paths. One is the incremental path, maybe like yours, where it moves from reform to conservative to Orthodox even like Hasidic. And that could happen very rapidly or over a long period of time. You know, in a person within a few months of going to a reform temple could come on to ultra-Orthodoxy or it could take many years or decades for that incremental process. The other is possibly people, maybe Michael is a case of that like independent spiritual seekers for whatever reason. And maybe you're also somewhat a case like that before your incrementalism through like Dennis Prager or something. But just people from whatever personal development largely outside of any connection to Jews or the Jewish community start to affiliate as a Jew, start to study Judaism. And then it could move on to the incremental process. But saying that it's a personal discovery process as opposed to a communal like, you know, you're in university and you start going to the Hillel House and then you start going to the reform Friday night prayers or things like that and get more into it versus a person who makes their own personal discovery and think I'm a Jew even before they meet Jews. And then the third case would be more like you're saying and there'd be a whole bunch of various pathways where it'd be direct connection with the Orthodox community where the however it came to be that a Gentile has reached into the social circles of basically all Orthodox Jewish circles. So, you know, whatever reason, you know, it could be party circuits, it could be business, but where you have or it could be a Gentile who just happens to live in an Orthodox area but where the Gentiles a minority among a majority of Orthodox Jews and decides to culturally make the switch to the other side. So I would say those are the three major pathways and I think you have a reasonable amount of all three of those. And I would just add those people who have led stable lives prior to conversion, the most likely to continue on with Orthodox Judaism after their conversion. These people have led chaotic lives prior to conversion and the most likely to not be after sustain a conversion to Orthodox Judaism. People who have experienced life within community and are pleased to live within the confines of any community are going to be much better suited to converting to Orthodox Judaism than those who don't, those with a generally pro-social orientation are going to be much more suited to conversion to Orthodox Judaism. They're going to earn an above average amount of money and so those people who were leading a professional life where they were earning above average money prior to conversion, they're much more likely to be successful in a conversion to Orthodox Judaism than those who struggled to even earn an average amount of money. So people with better life skills, people who are more competent, people who are more at ease with themselves and people who earn money, who handle money responsibly, who handle alcohol responsibly, who handle the natural passions of life responsibly prior to conversion, much more likely to be after continue on with a conversion to Orthodox Judaism after they've passed through the formal stages. So what happens when you convert to Orthodox Judaism is that whatever's going on with you internally prior to the conversion or whatever your habits were with money, with the natural passions, with other people, with yourself prior to conversion, those habits are just going to continue. They just may express themselves in different language and in different circumstances, but if you had a problem with the opposite sex prior to conversion, if you had a problem with anger or depression prior to conversion, those problems are going to continue after your conversion. Any thoughts? Yeah, definitely. Although, you know, a Hasidic friend you say like normal in America is being able to hide your problems and it depends how normal you are. So like they said, like if you're here in Metro Detroit and you come from the more higher social economic places, converting to Orthodox Judaism, joining their community might be a downgrade. And I would probably guess it's like that in LA. So I'm guessing like where you are in LA, it might be modern Orthodox, it might be relatively quite wealthy. And most of the people you know have college education and secular careers that include respect from non-Jews. However, certainly today, I would almost guarantee that the actual rabbis who oversee Orthodox conversion, none of those people have a college degree and they're probably in the more ghettoized part of Los Angeles that you might be able to convert in your area of being Orthodox Jew, but you have to go to the ghettoized part of Orthodox Judaism, pass a bunch of rabbis that have no university education and is in a lower social economic place than where you currently are residing and integrating with your Jewish community. Yeah, I've never seen anyone convert to Orthodox Judaism and have a lifestyle downgrade. So what you've seen, I have not seen. Now in Los Angeles, if you're converting to Orthodox... In Hollywood, can you convert in Hollywood or you have to go, I don't know where the Orthodox community is, but I would assume that the rabbinic court that converts you is not in Hollywood. It's in the mainstream black hat area of town. So if you're from Hollywood and you convert and you decide to move to the black hat area of town, that's a downgrade. Well, the areas of town where the Jews live are not downgrades. There's Hancock Park and there's Beverly Hills basically and those areas surrounding that and then the Valley Village in the San Fernando Valley. So these are all relatively upscale. Where's the rabbinic court headquartered? There's not one rabbinic court. It's not like Detroit. We've got at least 12 conversion to Orthodox Judaism, but they did Jewish law courts in Los Angeles. Okay, so it may be different there, but also your socioeconomic. Relatively like, okay, in Metro Detroit, Oak Park is upper middle class neighborhood, but it borders Detroit and relative to the Jewish community, Oak Park is the poorest Jewish neighborhood. If you looked at home values, maybe home values in Oak Park are like 150,000 on average. In my neighborhood, now if inflation, let's say 200, 250,000 on average and further out in the suburbs, you may be like half a million on average. And the Orthodox community is confined to the areas you're up to about $200,000 in home value. So if you're coming from Detroit where the average home value might be $30,000 or outside of the suburbs, but if you're coming from the better parts, socioeconomic parts of the suburbs, a conversion to, and I've seen it a handful of times that if you're from a nicer area of Metro Detroit and convert in order to live with the Orthodox Jewish community, you're gonna have to make a socioeconomic downgrade and then say in the black part of town, college education is not necessarily respected. So like your part of town, maybe all the Jews are college educated. However, in Oak Park, maybe less than 10% of the Jews are college educated. And then certainly in Brooklyn, it'll be a huge differential. You know, like I lived in the five towns and like, yeah, so in New York, like the Long Island of the five towns where the average home value may be even a million dollars, they have an Orthodox section, they have their own conversion court. But like, you know, if you're from the five towns and you know, grew up going to elite high schools and you had your own car at 16 and were expected to go to good universities, the cultural transition to the Orthodox part of town would be huge because you know, almost none of those people would go to university. Most of those people would be relatively poor. You know, like maybe even a third of them would be on government aid and welfare programs. You know, like we've talked about this many times where you said in your part of town, you don't have beggars coming to shul. But like in the Orthodox thing. I never, I never, ever, ever in a million years said we don't have beggars coming to shul. Of course we have beggars coming to shul. But they don't come directly up and hit you up. Yes, they come directly up and hit you up while you're dubbing. Okay, and that's even in... That's even in Bentley Hills. Yes, but by saying like the comparison to like the Yashiva part of town is probably tenfold. I don't know about that because the beggars are smart. They go where the money is. Well, it could be, but I mean, they try to make it less welcome. Even at the young Israel near my house, you know, they worked out a system where they're expected to go to the rabbi and the rabbi will give them a donation on behalf of the congregation, as opposed to individually going up to people. And at least here they've been able to maintain that system. And you know, various places, like in the five towns or something like that, they'll have some sort of system where that, like a guy by Sudaka and so that... And I know my parents were, you know, the cultural shock, but even at that level, like the security, like I had an old friend from Borough Park call me a few, like a month ago, and he was telling me like, yeah, like I was telling him about security and like, you know, all the schools, like security guards. And he said like in the Hasidic parts of Brooklyn, the synagogue still have open doors, you know, like you just walk in open doors to any synagogue. And so that, you know, it makes it... But I mean, we were making the point about a downgrade in... So most converts who convert to Judaism is an upgrade in their social economic status. But there are cases where conversion to Judaism would be, would be a downgrade in their social economic status. Yeah, in my experience, most conversions to Orthodox Judaism in Los Angeles is not a downgrade because most people who live in Los Angeles who are middle class are upwardly mobile. Those who are downwardly mobile move, move from California because it's so competitive and expensive. But let me move on to a slightly different topic. What are the least stable bases that I've noticed that these people to convert to Orthodox Judaism is an experience with the light or an experience with God, some kind of transcendental experience such as through meditation or drugs or some other gift where people are given an experience of the infinite. And this is, I think, a very common basis for conversion to Christianity. It's not usually a stable basis for a conversion to Orthodox Judaism. Any thoughts on this? Yeah, I was meaning to mention that before we got to... often that, you know, side tangent of... And maybe Michael would be a case of someone that feels like, I'm Jewish, I don't need these rabbis to convert me. Like, I know I'm a Jew and that's their own personal identity. They've adapted. And I don't know if you felt like that where, you know, at some point, when people watch you know your story with your chronic fatigue syndrome and you woke up one day and just like, I'm a Jew. And you didn't feel like you needed gatekeepers within the Jewish community to affirm it. Or that wasn't your case. But you do have a strong element of people that they're just like, I'm a Jew. I don't need any Jews or rabbinic court to affirm it. And those people probably have a harder time succeeding, although it might be the majority of people who attempt to convert to Orthodox Judaism are these people who feel like that where they just whatever reason determine that they're Jewish. And it bothers them, the authority structure that they have to go through as a person who, you know, I want to be a Jew and I'm willing to do whatever these rabbis tell me it takes to become a Jew. Right. So I never thought that becoming Jewish was just something that I could do autonomously. So I've always understood that my identity is something that is, I would like to think I always understood this. It's something that's jointly created. It's virtually impossible to sustain a personal identity that everybody around you denies in degrades and denigrates. So anyone who tries to pull that off, it verges on the impossible if you're not getting any support for it. We can really only sustain identities, including Jewish, if they are supported by a community, by people. We need other people. Let me... When you hear about the majority of converts are probably of the A type that think that they're Jewish and don't need to convert. And that's why they don't make it or you don't think that that's the majority of converts. Well, if we hang on, hang on, hang on. If we're just talking about converts to Orthodox Judaism, then by definition, if they don't make it, they're not converts in this conversation. So those people... Yes, those are the attempting converts that maybe even half of the attempting converts are people that have just decided that they're Jewish and really want to respect the conversion process, but that's actually the majority and that's why the majority fail. Yeah, I think there are a lot of people like that and they don't really matter to the Orthodox Jewish community because they get weeded out fairly ruthlessly. They're not able to sustain their illusion for very long. Yeah, but from a Chabad perspective, they get weeded out of the Orthodox community, but usually those people stick around and usually those people will loosely befriend Jews on the exterior of the community and will still possibly the rest of their life or for large periods of time present themselves as Jewish to non-Jews. And I mean, it's an identity. So it could be there'd be a crashing identity where the person's like, I'm Jewish, I woke up, I'm Jewish, and they might go with that for like 10 years and they just changed their mind. Or sometimes they'll die like that, but they might get weeded out of the Orthodox community, but they don't disappear. Yeah, I think that's fair. And there's a tremendous amount of fluidity in identity in America today, which even affects both Orthodox Jews and those who wish to be Orthodox Jews. So I've known Orthodox Jews. I think one in particular I'm thinking of right now, I think she was born Jewish, became Orthodox for marriage. Then when her marriage ended, she went off and married a Mormon and lived in Utah. Another woman converted to Orthodox Judaism, got married to a Jewish man. They had Jewish kids, but then they got a divorce when the kids became adults and then she completely left everything behind. So there's a tremendous fluidity in identity, particularly those who are more modern and more associated with the general American society compared to those in Haredi forms of Judaism. When you said that made me think of an interesting point and I would say that I would guess that very few people want to become Orthodox Jews. They just see Orthodox Judaism as the gatekeeping legitimate conversion and they might go through it for seeking legitimacy of the conversion and then see that they've passed the level, they're a Jew now according to Orthodox standards, but they don't necessarily, and I'm not sure in LA, certainly now I would guess less likely, maybe when you converted modern Orthodox Jews had more power, but I think in the last few years, you really hollowed out the modern Orthodox conversion process and if you did want to convert, you would have to get through the Yeshivish Orthodox conversion process and then you could become modern Orthodox, but the actual rabbis who would convert you would not be modern Orthodox. Certainly Metro Detroit, maybe in LA, they still have a few, do they have like a modern Orthodox bet that can do conversions? Yes, but you're right that the Haredi are steadily taking over Jewish life in America and in Israel, that they are increasingly effective at flexing their power and getting what they want. So I mean, you could still be like, you could still, you know, so to say like, I think you were more Orthodox, like you did Black Hat Judaism for a few years. Yeah, but as I've told you many times, I'm not going to get into the weeds and the details of much of my Orthodox experience. So to say you had to pass those gatekeepers in order to get into the modern Orthodox community. So it wasn't, you didn't want to be, maybe you did at the time, but like you wanted to so to say be a modern Orthodox Jew, but you had to pass the gatekeepers of Black Hat Orthodox Jews. Right, you keep wanting to bring it back to me. Every time we have a discussion, keep wanting to bring it back to personal life and I'm not going to go there. So I put my personal welfare. Very few people want to be Black Hat Orthodox Jews. It's just that they're the gatekeepers for conversion. So when the person's goal is to pass the gatekeepers and then be Jewish at their own level. And they just see like whatever reason, maybe they distaste it even after their conversion or not that you see these guys are the gatekeepers. They have to pass through the gatekeepers and then they could be Jewish at their own level like most Jews. And so I would say very few people who convert actually want to be part of the ultra Orthodox community. They just want to pass those gatekeepers. There's something to that, but I think there's even more to, there's a large number of Orthodox Jews who would love to be modern Orthodox, but they simply can't afford it. And so they choose other forms of Orthodox Judaism simply because they cannot afford the expense of modern Orthodox life. It costs about half as much to send your kids to a traditional Orthodox Jewish school than to a modern Orthodox Jewish school. So you send your kids to a modern Orthodox Jewish high school tuition without financial aid is going to run you over $40,000 a year. But you can often send your kids to a traditional Orthodox high school for $20,000 a year. Yeah, when we discussed this in the past, I mentioned I did food stamps and when I first got to Burl Park and it was integrating into the Hasidic community, a lot of the people advising me told me I should apply for minimally food stamps and maybe like welfare or Medicaid. And I had too much pride. I didn't want to do that. But even the rabbis at the time, they was like, okay, like you got to get on food stamps and whatever government programs you're eligible for. And I ended up working and ended up, I didn't need to do that, but I ended up working for the person that filled out the forms to do that. And so, yeah, so if you're in the, if you make it into the Orthodox community, you could live on charity and government programs in the schools. So even if you have no money and your kids are going to be able to go to the Orthodox school, the modern Orthodox in Metro Detroit is small enough that I think actually a lot of the converts do end up going to the modern Orthodox school. But it could be a unique situation where there's such a small modern Orthodox community compared to the Orthodox community that there's excess funding in scholarship programs to allow the handful of kids of converts from the black hat community to go to the modern Orthodox school. But like in New York or LA where you probably have modern Orthodox schools that cost like $20, $30,000 a year, it would be a completely different ballpark and they're not necessarily going to have sympathy on you because you converted to Judaism to give your kid a scholarship. And then also, you're probably among elites that they went to good universities and have professional careers and just allowing somebody to get a scholarship to their school because they successfully converted to Orthodox Judaism would not be conducive to their children's success. Yeah, so here's another maladaptive thing that I see going on by many people who want to convert to Orthodox Judaism is that they have delusions about the nature of Orthodox Jews. They frequently assume that most Orthodox Jews are close to God and the reality is that Orthodox Jews are about as susceptible to many of the problems that plague people outside of Orthodox Judaism. So just knowing that someone's an Orthodox Jew doesn't mean that they're more likely to be nice, that they're more likely to be honest in business. Doesn't mean that they're less likely to try to sexually take advantage of you or to financially take advantage of you. So here's a very common trajectory I see. People become attracted to Orthodox Judaism because they have all sorts of delusions about the nature of Orthodox Jews than when they encounter the reality of Orthodox Jews and my experience of Orthodox Jews is not universal, but my experience of Orthodox Jews is that they're no more likely to be honest, decent, trustworthy and non-predatory as people who are not Orthodox Jews. So when they finally start repeatedly getting humiliated and taking advantage of because of their naivete about Orthodox Jews, they then lose their enthusiasm, lose their faith in Orthodox Judaism. They become disillusioned and either drop out of the pursuit of Orthodox Judaism or completely drop out of Judaism altogether. Any thoughts on this phenomenon? Yeah, I mean, definitely. And we've talked about that many times. Yeah, I mean, it's unfortunate. And I was somewhat naive in Brooklyn, although I'm from Detroit to the little streets heavy too, you know, you certainly may not expect your people to scam you, scam you, steal you, or even you've got forbidden sexual molestation or anything. People are people and if you have an idealistic view of Jews, they're still just people and you will be susceptible to that. But maybe bring it back because we've talked about this in the past about modern Orthodoxy is really like somewhat like an elite status largely due to the social economic structure of America because generally modern Orthodox Jews exist in upper middle class neighborhoods and on both levels like modern Orthodoxy is the best of both worlds hypothesis and just on like a secular non-Jewish level, the ability to be modern Orthodoxy basically have to be upper middle class, successful, professional, earning like near $100,000 a year, which let alone generally modern Orthodox Jews on a Jewish level need to be able to be to subsist and live in a black cat Orthodox community should they need to that like, okay, modern Orthodox Jews might not agree with it but like almost all modern Orthodox Jews, if they needed to could go into the black cat section of town and participate and live that lifestyle also. So it's really near like maybe you want to use the word elite but it's a very difficult status to reach because you have to achieve excellence in two realms and especially the excellence in the secular realm that is beyond the reach of most Orthodox Jews and certainly most converts that you're going to be expected to convert the Orthodox duties and pick up all this stuff and also to become a successful professional in the secular world as near impossible. Well, it's certainly challenging and it winnows out the numbers of people who can keep up such a challenging way of life. So we've often spoken on this show about the book Virtually You, the Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality so just to recap those basic points that there is a compulsive nature of a lot of people's internet use that can be compared to possessive compulsive disorder there's often a euphoric high to going online and we often develop exaggerated personality traits from our online performances so we often tend to become grandiose we often tend to become more impulsive in our online personas we often tend to develop an exaggerated sense of our own abilities we often share dark things that we wouldn't share if we were getting visual cues from the people we talk to and so often this new somewhat pathological E-Personality then feeds back into our regular self and damages our real life relationships. Would you agree, duvid, that for the live streamers we've known a large number of them have seemed to have developed increasingly negative character traits that can be probably ascribed in part to their live streaming? Yeah, I was thinking Adam Green messaged me he was like, who's this guy like Ultra T and I said, I don't know he's been trolling me for like five years now and then thinking like my own chat I was even joking to another streamer he was like, you're imaginary friends these are not people in your chat are really just your imaginary friends they exist to some extent but to some extent they don't really exist because I also stream chess there's a certain element of you being really good at chess and people might watch and play chess a lot of people are anonymous too they're just imaginary friends and that's why I let my viewership go down because do I really want to have long-term relationship with imaginary friends and then I could see well if I'm going to say you got to tell me who you are you got to dox yourself to me then people don't want to do that because I got a wide variety of people that don't necessarily like the other type people but I don't want other people it actually goes back to when I was in Hasidic Brooklyn I had a lot of Hasidic friends and they didn't mind being friends with me but they didn't want their other Hasidic friends to know that they were friends with me or they didn't want to be my other Hasidic friends for me like you know mention them to them because it wouldn't have fit their overall self-perception of their identity so like on the streaming level it's a fake personality that most people have developed and you know think okay like I mean you know God forbid you got Gunnar in the chat or something like that you're like five years now like I mean he's got identity issues I'm not you know like a psychoanalyzing same thing good or bad but you know think like God forbid like do I really want to be in a non-in-chats for like you know decades and do I really want to have long-term relationships with the imaginary friends okay I want to get back to this topic but I just suddenly flash back to something that you said at the beginning of today's stream that you've often brought up and just ask you a question about you mentioned how the rabbis and the traditional Jewish communities that you're a part of looked at you with a great deal of skepticism due to you having one non-Jewish parent and that made it more difficult for you to find a shittik a match a marriage in traditional Orthodox Judaism so here's my open-ended question is there is it easier for you to blame your bachelorhood in particular and other life problems in general on the status of having a non-Jewish parent and the power structures reactions to that as opposed to not having something like that to blame problems on I don't necessarily blame it but I mean certainly it was an important factor and I because you know we've been talking about a lot the difference between modern Orthodoxy and curatism so like among the curatee it was just kind of accepted that I would marry someone like myself that it was just like a non-issue like of course you're not going to marry within our community it's just not going to happen like it doesn't happen we don't do that and you know even like my local modern Orthodox community you know generally they're like your mother's Jewish you're 100% Jewish but the difference in curatee culture it was just like given that I would not be able to marry within their community and at best I would marry someone else that you know tried to integrate in their community like myself and they had people like that so like in the large you know specific community Wait wait this wasn't my question I was just asking do you get a psychic payoff to having a ready-made narrative that explains your problems and difficulties and failures in life No, no I don't consider it like excuse or reason I think my status of with Judaism is one of the you know the larger reasons I haven't been able to successfully marry and that would go across the board like you know saying like you know if I'm going to marry a non-Jew then you know what's with my Jewish status and I never you know kind of like a failed baltruva so I mean some like if I just jumped in and wanted to get married it might have been a good excuse for me to avoid dating and avoid getting married was my kind of like failed Jewish status that but I don't necessarily it probably on the other end that I've used it as an excuse to not date and not get married as opposed to a personal excuse I give myself for blaming Judaism for being single So I'll give you I've got my own you know ready handy narratives about failures so if someone's asked me hey you know Luke you're 57 you have some abilities why have you never married I got a ready-made narrative I'll just say unfortunately I've been vegetarian my whole life and until two years ago I've had horrible health so there's my like ready-made narrative that explains my failures it's much easier for me to have that ready-made narrative just ready to go ready to hand off to anyone who asks rather than say it's a result of you know who I am and my own poor choices and my own poor character so you've sent me links about I think narrative therapy do you have any thoughts that you want to share on the relief that you may get or other people may get from having a ready-made narrative ready to go that explains you know most or all of one's failures in life Yeah well with narrative identity is a psychological theory of identity and then based on that there's a specific type of psychotherapy that's narrative therapy so like narrative identity is I don't think it's controversial it's one of the main theories of identity in psychology and if you prescribe to that school of identity then there would be a specific therapy based on that and yeah I guess I'm like you so people ask me like why you're not married generally you know a lot of people even assume I'm married or you ask me about my children and you know so I never found the right woman and I'm kind of eccentric and it is very difficult for me to find the right woman and if they ask me more about that my relationship to Judaism would just be one of the reasons that I'm eccentric but I'm not sure if you want to go Well do you get relief from having like a ready-made explanation a ready-made narrative to offer people who ask you know embarrassing personal questions like this Well I don't know if it's relief I'm like I put like narrative is not like an excuse narrative is a factual part of identity my identity is my narrative and saying like I am the person who went to Israel at 18 and became ultra orthodox and you know all these various things that's the factual that you there as opposed to I mean there's role identity theory and then there might be trait identity theory to say that my identity is a set of characteristics that are defining of me as opposed to my identity is based off of my life story and you keep wanting to abstract away from the more personal question if you don't want to answer the personal question that's fine but what do you do when people ask you embarrassing questions bringing to light things that you're not thrilled about I usually use self-deprecating humor I mean maybe that's kind of what you're doing also but you know someone does press me I'll just say something self-deprecating and if they respond on it I might go you know like you know if I see that they're they kind of you're taking the attitude that what's wrong with you like there's obviously something wrong with you and then you know they're just trying to figure out what's wrong with me then I'll just use some sort of your self-deprecating form of humor to try to give them some bit of embarrassing personal information about myself or that could make them understand like oh there is something wrong with you and that explains why you are who you are yeah yeah yeah so let me just keep drilling here kind of like a dentist on a sawtooth but would you agree with me that one of the greatest resources you can have is to have a valid basis for liking and respecting yourself yeah I mean there's healthy realism and you know that's part of narrative identity and the dissonance between the false narrative that I feed myself or it could be a distorted negative narrative versus you know so to say the actual true narrative of who you are and why you became the way you are and you know so narrative therapy would try to work out something like that like who is the real you what are the false narratives you've built up versus the objective life experience you have what is the narrative that you portrayed other people and why does that cause us to get into problems and in terms of like if you know you want to you maybe mean you you know the the biggest fault anyone would you basically say like well you're both old bachelors like there must obviously be something wrong with you that you both you know that we've both failed in you know one of the most fundamental things of what it means to be a man and in some sort of like narrative therapy you have to say well what's your narrative what's your story that leads to you being here today and if it's like you know we're focusing on this failure that we both admit that we both have failed to build up families I've never seen a narrative therapist I don't know how they would deal deal with it like I showed you that McAdams book just to show you that there was a thing and I thought you'd find it interesting I don't know if I don't even know of any like local people who do narrative therapy or how they go about it yeah so for me one of the advantages of live streaming and having to interact with strangers is that you know strangers will find it easier to give you honest feedback or to ask you know honest questions than than people you know face to face and also one of the advantages of getting older is that we can get better at writing or having in our head some kind of narrative for our life that enables us to feel some kind of valid self-respect and self-regard do you agree that getting older makes it easier to form a narrative I mean what you do in your own head when painful things come up for you and you're kind of wrestling or uncomfortable with you know some part of your life if you found as you've aged you become better at developing some kind of coping narrative about why you are where you are in life or if you found benefit from the sometimes brutal exchange with strangers online about the state of your life and any impetus that that may have provided for developing a narrative of your life that works for you look I have definitely over analyzed this and researched it and thought about it you're probably more than most people so I largely accept that it's beyond my knowledge level that you know like the multiple truth hypothesis that there's some theoretically like objective narrative or who I am and then I have multiple possible narratives that explain me and then there's other people including you know my family and loved ones people have known me how people perceive me that have alternative narratives in the correspondence view of truth so you know theoretically there's one truth one narrative that truly corresponds to who I am first thing there's elements of truth in all the various narratives and like a role identity that depending on the situation I might fall into a role and you know we've been talking long enough that I'm more on the depressive side maybe you're on the more happy side self-deprecating situations of you know just like okay maybe I'm messed up maybe no one does like me and you know so I might even dwell too much on narratives like that and you might have the opposite issue where you're you're focusing on overly positive narratives yeah I can't live stream really effectively unless I am in the middle of some kind of coherent at least for me anyway narrative of my life that enables me to like and respect myself so often when you don't see me live streaming or hardly live streaming for weeks on end it's because my narrative of myself has blown up and so there were years where I hardly made any YouTube videos between 2012 and 2014 because I couldn't sustain a positive sufficiently positive and respect worthy narrative of my life that would enable me to come online and to bear my soul so to speak so does any of that ring true for you? Yeah definitely I mean live streaming definitely blew up my narrative and you just mentioned like you know Gunnar in the chat or something like that you know just to have like kind of like consistent negative feedback or trolling and you know like for years you just like anything I do like that's a lie that's not true is much more in your face than reality like you could people might be thinking that like I was saying like you know I went to the local school is like well you know I might have a fear factor that's what people are thinking but no one said that no one treated me you know poorly but you know streaming like people are definitely you know critical you know I'm in Gunnar like even Halsey you know like rejecting that I'm Jewish like I lied I made up going to Israel I made up studying Yeshiva and I could see that like I could see like you know probably I walk around and think you're not a real Jew you didn't really study in Israel or something like that and there's probably people thinking that but you know I've never been confronted on that but like the internet I would say it's almost like always every time I present myself like it's always like you're not really Jewish you didn't really you know do these things and that's what led me to my research and so you're different because you're streaming you're similar to me in some ways but your streaming is also a lot about you and you tell a lot of personal stories as opposed to my streaming is much less about me and I'm just the guy who's like doing research sharing some interesting things that you know I'm thinking about and saying like I mean certainly a large part of your streaming is that also but you know generally when I stream it's not about me at all and just like I'll be talking about this topic and then occasionally like I'll throw in like a personal story a little information about myself and then it's more a question of like establishing expertise and you know for the audience and that's still difficult I still don't have a narrative where like half the people who watch my own stuff is like you don't know what you're talking about and I'm watching you and then we'll then stop watching and that's why I'm down to just like a handful of viewers because I wasn't able to really come up with a narrative that made sense to myself and and the viewers so you know like maybe constantly trying to reinvent myself but like you know God forbid I'm an old man you know can't really constantly be reinventing myself so okay let me jump in so I was just reading an essay in the London review of books it's a book review by Lauren Belant the late Lauren Belant on the inconvenience of other people and talks about the dangers of attaching or getting to know or introducing other people into your life but it's it always comes with it frictions and frustrations and inconvenience so why is it so hard to live with other people and this is talking about real life interactions and here's the challenge knowing someone and being known by somebody brings a threatened inconvenience it means the eruption so an eruption is something that comes out like a volcano is an eruption an eruption is when something comes in so when you are known by somebody when you bring someone into your life it's an eruption of someone else comes into your fantasy of having a coherent self that they can reveal things to you that can blow up your own fantasy of having a coherent self your own fantasy of a coherent narrative for your life is there anything there that you want to comment on I think that's the point I was making that I've accepted that I don't have a coherent self and maybe before I started streaming I did think I had a coherent self and that's why I started my research or came up with my multiple truth hypothesis I'm constantly studying psychology I mentioned like narrative identity, role identity I think that's in line with the best knowledge of experts on the topic is that this concept of coherent self does not correspond to reality okay so let me read to you some notes I made on how live streaming can make you a better man frequently it makes people worse but here are some ways it can make you better it can teach you the importance of taking responsibility for your words because if you say things about people online or frequently get back to them so you either have to stand behind your words or you need to apologize for them so this accountability that should accompany honorable live streaming is a method of becoming a better man any thoughts yeah I would definitely say like something that was never part of my life but now I feel competent like public speaking I think I could do public speaking now and I learned that from streaming and you're the ability to get the negative feedback that you're unlikely to actually get out of your life you know certainly part of streaming could make you a better man and then also you know why I first started streaming was topically that I just wanted to have conversations about the type topics that very rarely can I find a setting or a space of time where a group of people would discuss this topic but online I was able to find people interested in the same topic and then have hours and hours of conversation just on the given area of interest okay great go ahead finish your thought yeah that also would relate to the negative feedback because once you're you know so like you just mean you are talking about Judaism you know people are gonna you know you're out there and you might get positive feedback and that works to the negative feedback to like you don't know what you're talking about okay and doesn't always have to be like egoistic you know sometimes you could gather expertise like you know we're just saying you're just talking about a topic and then all of a sudden you have the ability to talk to some of the biggest experts in the world on the topic due to the power of the internet and due to you know the fact that most people in real life don't talk about you know don't get together just to discuss these narrow topics and that the big experts on the field who specialize in talking about these narrow topics are likely to be much more likely to be willing to join your internet circle especially if it's dedicated to you know their narrow topic of expertise so I often say that people should normally get most of their meaning and purpose in life from their family extended family friends community profession and hobbies but there are people like me and like you who will just go out of our minds with two extended conversation on like normal things like food and drink and raising kids and like the mundane topics that seem to dominate most conversations I think would drive people like you and me crazy at least they'd drive me crazy after time I know in Orthodox Judaism but frequently Orthodox Jews can spend hours talking about food and drink and that just drives me out of my mind so for me to feel that I have a life filled with meaning after constantly be seeking truth about the wider world I assume that's the same for you. Yeah and I hate repetitive conversations so even like you know say most people like if you're talking like Orthodox people like you know they're talking about their circles where they're talking about that not only do they talk about for hours but they're actually repetitive conversations and like if you have Sabbath with the same people over years you know in like you know you say like objectively we've had basically this exact same conversation ten times that's why sometimes I'll pop in the chat on the stream and I'll joke like is this a repeat you know like if you had like babs or conversation where there's a comfortability to just repeat conversations and maybe the people don't realize they're repeating the conversation but I think on some level they do and there's just a comfortability factor in doing that so I want new information and I think the other day you were talking about you're just a heuristic like you assume like your mom your best friend your worst enemy is watching and I quit back like no my mom does has no interest in these topics and you know if you're talking about a given topic your best friend your family members just aren't interested they're not going to watch like you know if you did as you know like I gave the example like chess playing and you know like maybe someone like okay like you're going to learn how to play chess just for me because it's really important to me and then maybe you'd become a chess player but like don't mean generally you could have a long-term friendship and just like oh he really enjoys this and I've never done it and so whenever he does it like I just tune out it's not interesting to me and so I think that's also your part of streaming my dad plays internet chess sometimes and my mom still doesn't even know how to play the game so I think that's could be normal and healthy in the internet you know the internet just as a tool like chat GPT it's just a tool that could be positive or negative and that could be one of the positive aspects of it. Another possible positive aspect of live streaming is that I find it's the most demanding thing that I typically do I get more drained from live streaming than almost anything else except for the most intense cognitive labor but overall I find live streaming with its multiple cognitive loads such as checking sound quality visual quality preparing topics to discuss queuing up things to play interacting with the chat and noticing how the stream is flowing over multiple platforms at once that it's a real cognitive and emotional work out do you find it such an intense work out how would you place it compared to other tests in your life. Yeah definitely although I would like what I mentioned public speaking and I'm not sure if you ever were able to move into public speaking but I would assume public speaking is more demanding and really it's only happened at the Hare Krishna temple but I remember a few times where I spoke in front of everybody even just briefly and they had the microphone and the sound system there might have been a pretty big crowd like 50 to 100 people and even if it was open mic or topical where people were just introducing themselves and when you speak into the microphone and you hear your voice echoing through the whole hall and you know it's loud so I'm not sure if you have any experience in public speaking but like or if you would agree with me that presumably public speaking is even more demanding. Yeah I've had my share of public speaking experience have even been the scholar in residence that won synagogue in Los Angeles let me go back to my blog post here on ways that live. It's very intense but I find this is similar to public speaking so I wouldn't say that public speaking is more demanding than this I'd say it's equally demanding because this is a form of public speaking. So here's my next point on how live streaming can make you a better man you get a regular test for prioritizing your own well-being or the well-being of your online production so do you put the priority on your real self or on your internet self? So the more priority you put on your e-personality usually the more off track you get in life so there's a constant stimulus that then immediately spits out feedback about your direction in life so any thoughts on live streaming as a test for your ability to conduct self-care or to disregard your self-care in your pursuit of a virtual personality? Yeah it might be like a caveat of actually having an audience because like thank God you were able to build up a reasonable audience or become somewhat of a public figure at least a e-figure where there's maybe even hundreds of thousands of people who know who you are or hundreds of people who check out almost everything that you say as opposed to most people have no audience or you maybe tic-tac is that way and you don't know your imaginary friends if they're just part of a tic-tac algorithm or random people in China so I think you'd have to differentiate to being in front of an actual legitimate audience and then how did you get that audience to now you're interacting in front of an audience that I think most people have never necessarily experienced that they've never interacted in front of an audience so I don't know if you're making that differentiation to actually having an audience and then you'd have the narrative factor of well how do you have an audience how did it come to be that you have an audience and now you're talking about the capacity to interact in front of an audience as opposed to most people who've never had an audience. Well I'm just talking about those who have an audience so the typical thing that I will produce will be out on five or six platforms like cumulative views combined with podcasts lessons so typical video will have anywhere from 400 to a thousand or more views or lessons so that's an audience I'm just taking the audience for granted in my point let me go on to my next point here until I streamed or like I had that even now I have a smaller imprint but a few hundred views and I remember when I first started streaming it was really after I met you I was putting up videos and some of my videos even got a few thousand views and some comments but they weren't streaming so when you were saying that it's like your position of privilege to be talking about just the presumed like when I talk I have an audience. Okay next point you by doing a regular live stream you have to learn to make peace with making mistakes not doing as well as you hope I mean you're always going to be somewhat frustrated by things that you forgot to say by things you didn't phrase as eloquently as you wish I know when I started show there are many topics I want to explore many ideas and things narratives that I want to develop but as soon as I press the live stream button to go live the technical and social demands of the show is either way much of my cognitive power my conversational palette immediately narrows you know it becomes much more compressed than what I anticipated I have to lean much more on my notes as the ideas and narratives leave my head I tend to not write down as many notes as would be optimal I consistently overestimate my ability to retain ideas in my head without writing things down so there are so many things to look after with a live show with sound quality being number one paying attention to what aspect of your show takes you away from other things for example I always try to write down time stamps on every show but when I'm doing that I'm not paying attention to anything else I'm not paying as much attention to listening I can't be speaking while I'm writing down time stamps so one way that doing a live stream can make you a better man is that you have to make peace with your imperfection and the imperfection of creating something like a live stream with its multiple demands any thoughts? just as you were saying that I was remembering I lived in Manhattan and I had my rapper friend roommate and that was towards the advent like Facebook just came out during that period in fact it was even before Facebook came out and maybe there was a MySpace or something but he would spend an inordinate amount of time practicing his rhymes and we also had like a big mirror and like he would spend like hours just staring at himself in the mirror and sometimes we would both be there and we would both just kind of like stare at ourselves in front of the mirror and I was more doing like self reflection like who am I although you know he was you had rhymes he was trying to become famous he was doing pickup artistry you know maybe I forbid even some drug dealing and but he was constantly rehearsing and testing things and then he would go out and try it he would go to the clubs and he would use a musician and had rhymes and he'd have to he worked at the perfected it and also his pickup artistry game that he was always working on his pickup artistry game and you know so that was before the advent of this technology and you know presumably in Hollywood you know that's everyone did that and but now the application of this technology maybe superior to just practicing in front of a mirror and I don't know if you know you obviously you're old enough to you know whether you did it yourself to you practice in front of a mirror and so even in your Shiva like you know as people start becoming rabbis you know you got to practice your sermon and many times like I've sat there for people when they practice their sermon you were saying that it was making me go back to the old days where people did that kind of things for you know in front of a mirror Yeah it's a mirror it's a mirror to your soul it's a mirror to your mind in addition to the physical mirror that happens when you're live stream and people notice when you're looking you know overweight when you've lost weight when you're looking more buff less buff when you're looking healthier or sicker so you're getting immediate feedback you're getting the kind of brutal feedback that you don't get from people face to face another way that you can grow through live streaming is to you have to recognize the reality is most people are better off you know without your show that other people most people have you know more important priorities than your show and that many people who are once key parts of your show such as my show have moved on for very good reasons so if you accept these realities it better you know the reality and you are much better off in life when you're at ease with reality as opposed to denying reality so any thoughts on these points Yeah I always stress you know church of entropy or other the value proposition and you know I saw the guy Ben Thorpe you know he's making his rounds his daughter's getting bigger she's like you know almost co-host on the kill stream somewhat in the alt-right but you know even different the spears of the internet and he had this like list of like you know supposedly people that were scared to debate him and you know I didn't have a chance to speak with him I don't even know if he would accept the feedback but it's saying like well those guys are professionally like the value proposition most of those people have moved into the period where this is what they do for a living and like you got to pay them I always stress the people like the best way to get people to stream a few is to pay them and almost no one wanted to do that and you know it's like most of these people that they do this they do it for a living and if you want them to appear in your program the single best way to get them is just to offer them money and but any form of the value proposition the value to you as the streamer the value to the listeners the value to the people in the chat the value to your co-host and the guests and you know should always have that in mind and sometimes people will do it when there's a negative value proposition and if the value maybe that's somehow kind of like the negative Judaic attitude where you're always thinking like it's in your best interest like I know what's best for you go a type you know value propositioning but I don't know if you think in terms like value proposition like that or if you think there's a Judaic characteristic to you know thinking in terms of value proposition well I do think in terms of value proposition that's recognizing that checking out a live stream is not in most people's best interest that they should have other priorities aside from one's own production haven't thought about the Jewish dimension to that we move on to my we'll just push back when you're saying like well I mean God forbid like you we got bad programming it's not there but it's saying that if the program we were making wasn't their best interest to watch then they would watch so that's like the self improvement level so like why is our viewership down because the value proposition has shifted and were we able to come up with a way to move the value proposition back in favor of the viewer that would be how you would gain viewership and saying like that's how I came on to your program the value proposition was there I wanted to hear from I wanted to hear from you know these people then on the alt right and I wanted to hear them talking to a Jew and you were the one putting that together and that's how I ended up in your audience because the value proposition was there and you know something you know like it is show business so it could be impossible to always have the value proposition in your favor well also it's a value proposition for whom so if I do a show that requires a minimum IQ of 120 to benefit from or to enjoy that's a much smaller potential audience that's about 5% of the potential audience as opposed to doing a show where you only need a minimum IQ of 100 to enjoy but there is also a good incentive for personal growth through live streaming here in that do you put the interest of the viewer at the forefront of your head so is it just that I want to get something off my chest or do I take the time to empathize with what the viewer wants and I may want to produce a show that's that has a minimum IQ of 120 to be able to access it but even then I can do a show that displays considerable empathy for the viewer even the high IQ viewer or I can do a show that demonstrates you know empathy for the viewer is just simply what I want to get off my chest anything you want to comment on yeah I mean you do a lot of things to make it more easy for the viewer like you time stamp a table of contents although you don't necessarily you predate your programs and tell people you know like what to expect or you know something you put a title in although it's not necessarily always what you're talking about but you do considerable amount of effort to make it easier for the viewer and I think the general model for live streaming is a business model maybe you are successful for a small period of time and I call it like the destiny model of live streaming is you get on a big platform you get enough people from that big platform over to your platform and then you just review other people's content and count the super chats and you know when you were in war ski that was probably what you were somewhat capable of doing like you know you had a lot of people knew you are tuned into your channel and then you could kind of just review other people's content and I call it the destiny model because he's one of the few streamers out there where you're just getting on his program could put you in an opportunity where you have a few hundred people watching and then what are you going to do for those few hundred people you're just going to review what they pay you to review and count the super chats hopefully and if you take off you continue and if your audience you know dwindle so I don't know if you agree that that's kind of the you know the generic streamer model right now of getting on a bigger platform getting those people to migrate to you and then just reviewing content right that's that's a business model that's effective and it's also a model that's reasonably effective to get views but intellectual work almost never pays for itself and so when you produce intellectual content it would be unrealistic to ever expect that it will pay for itself it's just not going to happen so I decided to primarily produce intellectual content on my live stream so I don't expect them to pay for themselves and I don't use like a destiny model or a Nick Fuentes model or any of these other models for people who are just you know pouring out moronic content and then you know almost the benevolence goes like if you're so smart that you could reduce intellectual content you're probably so smart to realize that like it's not a good way to make money and then kind of like well like you're rich right like you're an old man and you're intellectual so you're probably rich you're not doing this to make money and which is somewhat of a reasonable presumption to you know so a lot of the streamers like if you're a professor that's based a lot of the guys like you just got to pay them because they're professors and they need the money and you want them to appear on your channel you got to pay them or a lot you know a lot you know God forbid most intellectuals never actually financially became wealthy some of them upper middle class and they make their money by getting paid to appear on shows like I'm even some like Paul Gottfried or something I don't know I think we discussed I don't know if you ever paid guests or something like that I've almost never paid a guest so professors almost never get paid they get paid by the state or private institutions financing their professorships right they very rarely get paid for appearing on a live stream yeah I mean I don't think live stream would be the type thing but I give the I don't know like Paul Gottfried or something like that if he would be an example maybe he would be the type guy who if you paid him he would appear on your show and he might you know like I mean there are a lot of small time intellectuals who are super chat model of but saying the people are are trying to make money at it but then it's you know the paradox of you know like the chess players paradox like oh you're so smart how come you're broke and like you're smart there's no paradox there intellectual life does not pay for itself that's something that's just 99.99% true those who are intellectuals and they found a way to make money it's usually because they are running some kind of con scheme where they are pretending to present you know profundity that they're not really doing given the Andrew Tate model where you know I thought the following him I think the one thing that I've speculated that very few people have backed up is that he is not actually that rich and that you know maybe at most he's a small time millionaire and he may not even have that much money at all but for his business model he portrays it like he's extremely wealthy and he's doing this because he wants to give back and share the information well meanwhile you know actually he's doing it because that's the main source of his money but you know that level of intellectual content like if you're saying like I'm doing this to give back I'm doing to share some of my research verse the alternative motivation like you're doing it for gain and then it turns into credibility you know like I mean I think it's a reasonable thing to ask him you just kind of I mean you gave a reasonable answer I don't necessarily disagree with it but I think the question if you're so smart how come you're not rich is actually a very reasonable question to ask yeah I don't think it is because intellectual life does not pay for itself that's just a fact of life and so I don't do live streams primarily to create credibility for myself or I forgot the other alternative I do it because this is who I am and that's what I enjoy so for me this is primarily a hobby I'm doing something I enjoy equivalent to those who paint because they like to paint or those who garden who like to garden well if your credibility and okay you have a little I mean you're an author you have some accomplishments you're a known man and you know some level of Hollywood but you said that your credibility is established outside of streaming and then there are people who want to know about you whether it's self available or put off a certain message through streaming as opposed to your credibility needing to be established within the venue of streaming and you know both are possible and maybe when you you know you're as a blogger or streamer you know you're saying your credibility is established through your real life and then the streaming is just the way you make yourself publicly available as opposed to actually trying to get your credibility through streaming. No I didn't say anything like that I said I live stream because it's something I enjoy and that was my point but anyway you made your point there repeatedly so let me move on to another way that you also when I said you I didn't I mean like a generic you like anybody who was streaming not necessarily you. Right good point so another way that you can become a better man through live streaming is you can learn to stand on your own two feet so often on these live streams I will say things that every single person in the chat will strongly disagree with and you also constantly having to face choices of risking and possibly losing relationships for the sake of saying what you believe to be true this is a good test in life you can always cuck to save your relationships or you can make the other mistake and just heedlessly burn your relationships or you can try to steer a middle path you know valuing both your relationships and the pursuit of truth and make considered careful individual choices so learning to stand on your own two feet is one of the possible benefits to gain from live streaming avoiding audience capture and staying in integrity with what you believe to be true any thoughts on this do it. Yeah I agree although it goes back to what I was just saying before that it's from a point of privilege where you actually have an audience because most people if they stream no one's going to listen to them and you know to the point where I have an audience and even if I don't cater to my audience I still have an audience which is a state of privilege and it's like generic you as a person who has credibility outside and makes himself publicly available and you're saying well I want to make myself publicly available to do what I want not what the audience wants and the audience just in appreciation of me making myself publicly available will tune in for what I want as opposed to what they want so you have to know your power level you know it takes a certain power level to be able to do that and you could test your power level because if you your power level is not there your audience will abandon you. Okay I'm going to move on any final words for today David. Yeah you know just before you messaged me I was reading that tablet article in like the history of the alt-right and you know if you want to set aside a stream it was a pretty long article because it was disappointed because it didn't mention like the role the prominent role that like right wing Jews specific Jews and Orthodox Jews played in it and it had you know kind of like the the anti-Semitism or the racism level but if you did look at that tablet role and wanted to go through like a I mean either a memory lane or you know an intellectual analysis of what that article got wrong by ignoring the role that Jews played in the formation of the alt-right I've found that interesting. Okay great to be continued thanks thanks David. Yeah great day thanks take care. Okay let me go to Robert right here talking with Mickey Kouse about the special prosecutor appointed in the Joe Biden Hunter Biden story. Well the key with impeachment it doesn't have to be a crime. Well neither is not voting the reason to not vote for someone. So anyway okay so that's heating up incredibly quickly and you have like there should be some word for like you know Peggy Noon this sort of set has now pronounced it's a it's a real scandal okay you need like two or three more figures I was trying to argue with somebody was trying to figure out why did people take Watergate so seriously I mean it obsessed the nation for months it eventually led to Nixon's impeachment it was not as corrupt as this okay as this potentially is and nobody cares about this but they cared intensely about Nixon and why wasn't I think it's because the press had more credibility people you know people who they trusted to be neutral said this is a real scandal Nixon lied but Biden's lied I don't understand it so if four or five two or three more four or five more people like