 it's wonderful that this is a safe space in which I can be vulnerable. I just want you to hold me right now. So 40, why are you feeling so vulnerable? It's the abundance of love that I have in my life. So why am I feeling all the quiver and nervous inside about the amount of love that I have in my life? If I was a no more mature person, all right, it would be just like another Sunday morning. I think the majority of the population could handle the amount of love that I have in my life and not be all quiver or nervous about me about it. But for me, it's a little daunting, a little scary. I feel like I have an intimation of what it's like to be a father for the first time and like holding your baby in your hands for the first time, the newborn in your hands and just feeling how vulnerable you are how vulnerable the newborn is, how your life will forever change and then all the responsibilities and complications that come with being a father. And that's what it's like when you often start new relationships that become absolutely intoxicating to you or you renew old relationships and they just fill you up inside and you just, you feel, I don't know, you feel amazing, you feel excited, you feel anxious, you feel quiver. It's a little bit like being in love, but it could be with blokes or business relationships or being part of a religious community or being a devoted follower of a particularly charismatic and brilliant rabbi, all these things can just, depending on the level of maturity. So it's really hard to grow up, it's really hard to raise your level of differentiation and to whatever extent I've had some success in my life over the last few years, I think a lot of it's simply not so much all the internal work I'm doing, it's not necessarily all the prayer and meditation and the work that I'm doing, I think that's some of it, but a lot of it is I'm just putting myself in better situations, all right? When I put myself in a situation that's conducive to my thriving, guess what, I'm much more likely to thrive than when I put myself in a situation that's conducive to me being a jerk, me being cynical, me being selfish, me being histrionic, hyperbolic, attention-seeking, all right? So if you're in a dull environment, if you're in an environment that's not bringing out the best in you, then it seems to me you have to change that environment somehow, see if you can find more fulfilling, stimulating environments because I don't know about you, but I become pretty much like the people I hang out with, right? The people that I love have such a profound effect on me, but then there's always a complication with that. So I have a lot of friends who love Tony Robbins. I had one friend who was fairly close to Tony Robbins. So if I'm going to maintain those friendships in good working order, I can't come out with the cynical, biting, cutting, demeaning, ridiculing remarks about Tony Robbins that are just right there at the tip of my tongue. But I'm just very tempted to come out with some Tony Robbins put down. But if I'm at a Shabbat dinner with Tony Robbins devotees, that's really not in my best interest, and yet I've done it hundreds of times in my life. Or I fell in love with Kundalini yoga in 2009. I spent $1,000 for a year-long membership to a Kundalini yoga studio. Unlimited yoga for a year, bro, it was a great deal. And I went something like 212 times that first year. But what I do, whenever I get really enthusiastic about something, I then try to read what the biggest critics of what I'm enthusiastic, I have to say. And so I read some critiques of 3-H-O, happy, healthy, holy, Kundalini yoga. And apparently hundreds of people had a really bad experience with this type of yoga. And I did have some setbacks. I suffered some irreparable injuries as I tried to keep up with the ridiculous poses that the rest of the class was doing. So for Westerners who don't grow up with yoga, are particularly flexible, like taking up yoga in middle age can be quite dangerous, right? A lot of people get substantially injured by doing yoga. There's a great New York Times magazine article on the vast numbers of yoga-induced injuries. And so much so that various devotees of yoga say, unless you grow up with this, I don't recommend you take a yoga class. Some people can do it, but I would try to keep up with the class and I would just stretch tendons that apparently couldn't be repaired. I mean, those tendons are gonna be loose for life, right? I spent thousands of dollars. I had a physical therapy trying to undo the damage that I did to myself through my $1,000 unlimited yoga. And I did it all in the first few weeks before I kind of realized what was happening and then started opting out. Also, another thing that happened was that many of the procedures in this yoga, such as dog's breath, you can't do that without tightening and restricting your neck, which was going against my Alexander Technique training, my Alexander Technique teacher training. They noticed when I do various of these breath manipulation exercises, which are at the very core of Kundalini yoga, that I would tighten and restrict my neck, which would then send layers of tightness and restriction all through my body because there are more joints in your neck than anywhere else in your body. So if your neck is tight, if your neck is restricted, if your head's tipping back onto your neck, you're sending those layers of tightness and restriction throughout your body. So your back's gonna be tight, even may feel excess tightness and restriction in your ankles, in your voice, in your thinking, in your emotions, in your shoulders, all sorts of things are gonna be negatively affected. And I couldn't do a lot of these Kundalini voice exercises without tightening and restricting my neck. So I learned to give them up, but that's what happens when you love, bro. That's what happens when you fall in love. You start being put on a crucible where you have to choose between competing allegiances. And so I read all these devastating critiques of Kundalini yoga. And I thought, oh, now, should I write about these? I don't wanna damage my relationship with this Kundalini yoga studio. Now, I really love it there, right? I have a happy, healthy, holy community there, Kundalini. And I loved it so much that I even got up at 2 a.m. to go to the studio on Yogi Bajon's birthday. Hey, it was Yogi Bajon's birthday. Now, I never did go to the teacher training, which costs thousands of dollars, but I was kind of impaled on the horns of dilemma. Now, I wanna write about the people who've had negative experiences with Kundalini yoga at the same time, say that, you know, I've had a wonderful experience, but all sorts of things can be wonderful for you and terrible for somebody else. And I didn't wanna put my relationships at the yoga studio with the studio, with the 3-H-O community or the Kundalini yoga community. I didn't wanna put them at risk, but I opted to publish some blog posts about the downsides of Kundalini yoga. And I'm not sure how much significantly it damaged my relationships within the Kundalini yoga community, but it's like that with Orthodox Judaism too. You convert to Orthodox Judaism. You wanna be very careful about writing anything critical of Orthodox Jews. Ah, man, because whatever you say publicly, whether it's on a live stream or on a blog post, it always gets back to people that you're talking about and there are frequently repercussions and that's, you know, that relationships, I build these communities and then there are always restrictions that come with falling in love. It's so intoxicating having a community, having a teacher, having your own Rebbe, all right? It's, you know, a wonderful thing. It fills you up inside, but with community, relationship, love, Rebbe, right? There are always then restrictions on you. So how I've learned to navigate that is that I'm willing to give up some love, some relationships, some community, some attachments for more freedom and I'm willing to give up some freedom in exchange for some love, relationships, community and freedom. So I'm not speaking to you right now from a completely disconnected place. Like I feel like with many live streamers, they don't really have many, you know, real-life friends, real-life relationships, real-life communities that they could put in danger by what they're doing online. They're just willing to burn up everything in their real life to, you know, to build a virtual world for themselves online and, you know, what kind of damaged person is willing to blow up everything that they've got going on in their real life, all right? Just to become a prince online, at least in their own imagination. I recently reconnected with a friend of mine and we hadn't spoken for about 14 years and this was largely, this was his decision and it came out of an intense situation where I played a really big role. So once I did a fourth step on it and saw the big role that I played in the disillusion of this friendship, I was able to drop any resentment I had there. But when we fell out, my friend said to me, here's the feeling in this house. I don't trust you, my kids fear you, my wife hates you. Wow. But that was the situation that I had placed us in and it wasn't so much that I was wasn't a mensch, like I wasn't truly righteous. But, you know, I wasn't heinous either. I was just me, I was just a flawed human being. But then, you know, I have the chance to repair and reconnect with that very good friend and it just, oh, reconnected and it feels so good. That reconnected and you're understated. Is there anything more intoxicating? So as part of my devotion to Orthodox Judaism, I've gone to meet and to know so many, you know, fantastic rabbis. And one of the rabbis that I've met is just brilliant character guy named Rabbi Shlomo Einhorn and here he is. Okay, let's begin. So what is this sheafest thing? And this is, you guys are like a test lamb over here in the, in the shear as we're gonna do our first run. And we're not stuck into this to oblivion. We're going till Rosh Hashanah, see if we can get the goal. Ultimately is real mastery over that, what you learned that you should be able to be sitting in online at Mench. And while you're there, you can review the entire Gamar in your head back and forth, Shaka Levitaria. Someone brings up a comment in a shear that you're at, you're sitting there. You could say to yourself, wait a second, Kligiga dafzayan on the bottom, three lines in the bottom, actually says a little bit differently than what this person is saying up there. And so why does this robust goal to have a Masekhta at your fingertips to have true mastery over Masekhta. So the idea behind sheafest is ultimately to say to yourself, it's 2022. We know so much about how the brain works nowadays. We really, Baruch Hashem are a generation where we really understand the ins and outs of current brain research. There's so many great learning methods and each of them seem to miss a little something, meaning dafyomi was never intended for mastery. It was never intended for mastery. It was intended for people to take a journey, a consistent journey through shahs together. So the myla of dafyomi is that it's consistent. It's every day. The deficiency of dafyomi is that you really don't have true mastery on any section of shahs because of it. And at times it could leave you a little frustrating because you learned something 10 days ago and someone talks to you about it. Though you never heard it before. And unless you're doing a triple dafyomi, it's not really gonna stay in your head. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to mitigate sort of the handicaps of each one of the learning systems and take the best of each and to put something together that could perhaps give us an extra advantage in terms of mastery over any content. So I'd like to introduce you to and walk you through a few of the various learning systems that we're gonna be using to help us enhance our learning. I spent over five years of my life in dafyomi and then finish off the rest of shahs, meaning the Talmud on my own, but it's obviously very superficial learning that I did, right? I don't have deep learning in Talmud. Learning, okay? So number one is the dafyomi. What I mean by the dafyomi is we're gonna take the element of consistency from the dafyomi itself. That's number one. Consistency is key. The way it's gonna work, the sheif is here, is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Shabbos morning and Sunday is gonna be used for your review, okay? We'll get into how it works, but that's for your khazarah to be able to really review everything. Number two, there's a system called Karim Yoshua. That's the second system I wanna deal with. Karim Yoshua is someone by the name of Shas Cohen. Shas Cohen, I'll call him from time to time. For example, if I needed to discuss every gamara that has a commentary or something to say about foods they used to eat. I'll call him Shas Cohen and I'll quickly rattle off for you 16 different dappin or pages of where they discuss food, every detail. Shas Cohen is really a brilliant individual. We could buy his safer. It's called Karim Yoshua. So what's his methodology? I spoke to him a lot about his system and his method. His method is if you truly seek to understand the machlokas, it stays in your mind. If you analyze the machlokas, you have a better shot of retaining the gamara. So for example, if you have a machlokas, a bayan rava on this or that, you ask yourself, why would a baye say what he says? Why would rava say what he says? Now, sometimes the gamara will clarify their reasons. Sometimes they'll be shown him. For Shas Cohen, it's less about being 100% accurate in you knowing why they said what they said, but rather it's the exercise of trying to think, why, what would the other opinions say back to that? That very exercise promotes a greater knowledge of the gamara. So I love Rabbi Einhorn. There are many rabbis that I love, but let's just talk about sociological reality. If I went to his class every day, all right, that would bring with it, you know, all sorts of restrictions upon me because, or if I frequently played, right, every day I could play some, you know, brilliant excerpt from Rabbi Shalamo Einhorn presentation. But then what would inevitably happen is, if I did anything wrong or edgy, you know, people would go to Rabbi Einhorn and say, hey, this guy who admires you so much, did you know that he said this or that he did that when I was a big Talmud, a follower of Dennis Prager, whenever I'd do anything edgy or wrong, just plain out ugly and disgusting, people would run to Dennis Prager or writing God forbid on the pornography industry. I just get bombarded with questions like, you know, what does Dennis Prager think about what you're doing? And so if I was playing, you know, Shalamo Einhorn, you know, every day that I'd have to confront every day people, oh, well, what does Rabbi Einhorn think about what you just said? And it's a pain. And as soon as I started blogging some, sometimes critically about Dennis Prager and we, you know, see it's being acquaintances, you know, Los Angeles friends, then nobody ever bothered me about that again. So you form a connection, you form a bond, right? You form a relationship that's important to you. And then people always go for your vulnerabilities. They know how to work you. So I have the pleasure of knowing, you know, many brilliant Orthodox rabbis and it's wonderful. It's intoxicating. It fills me up inside. It always comes with a price, right? They in turn have favors to ask, ah, you know, Levi, do you mind taking down this blog post? Or you just can't say, you know, these sorts of things that you're saying on your blog or on your live stream anymore. And so I sometimes have to choose between my relationship with the rabbi and saying what I believe to be true. Now, sometimes the rabbi is helping me out. Sometimes it's good and right and proper and it's in my own best interests and it's in the community's best interests and it's in the world's best interests if I take down or modify a certain blog post. But other times I have chosen to let the relationship wither on the vine because I want to say what I believe to be true. I've had attractive women who essentially said to me, you know, I want to be your girlfriend but you can't talk about human biodiversity on your show. And I chose HPD rather than them. And I have wonderful women in my life who are feminists. All right, and so obviously I can't talk. So they have the way that, you know, I talk to you on the show, I'm going to offend them. And if they haven't entered into my show they are going to be offended and they may very well give me, you know, an ultimatum. All right, it's like, Luke, I can't see you anymore or I can't be friends with you anymore. If you stick to these outdated notions that there are fundamental differences between men and women. So if I started saying on the show, oh, you know, women shouldn't have the right to vote. And I mean, I would understand a whole bunch of women in my life would say, I just can't be friends with you anymore. And so doing a show or just doing life, all right, you're constantly facing incentives to sell yourself out, to compromise on what you believe to be true, to shut up at times when you want to speak up to preserve relationships that are most important to you. And I don't side with either extreme. I don't side with always selling out to preserve your relationships. I don't side with always speaking your truth at the cost of the most important relationships in your life. But here's just a little bit more from Rabbi Einhorn. And you can find a lot of his Torah on waayutora.org. And another element to Shaskoen is that he's very into you reviewing the give and take. It's not about word for word. None of these systems, by the way, are really gonna emphasize word for word memory. I don't believe for a minute that when the Amorayim or the Tanayim were sitting together in the base Medrish, they made sure that people memorized the exact language of the way that they argued. The Mishnah you could say was meant to be remembered for its syntax, but even the Mishnah it seems was meant to be remembered for its context and ideas. So Kerem Yeshua analyzes a Machlokas and then you review the back and forth. So we have consistency, analysis of Machlokas. Then you have Zichruch. Zichruch has become very popular lately. It's a lot of fun. If you look in page three of your Shifas packet is a image from Zichruch a Gigadaph base. What Zichruch does is he uses also modern memory techniques which we're gonna get into. I've been studying memory techniques since I was 10 years old. So we're talking with Rabbi Einhorn. Someone's got an IQ in the 150s, all right? When I was back into him, I'm talking to someone with two standard deviations of IQ above me and think about how hard it is. It verges on the impossible to effectively communicate with people who are either two standard deviations of IQ above you or below you. So just imagine for him like he must feel like his brain slowing down when he talks to me. But this is one of the great things about modern Orthodox Judaism is that there is sometimes a genuine attempt to seek out the best of modern secular learning and often apply it or combine it with traditional Torah learning. But Zichruch uses a lot of them. It incorporates it. So for example, Daph base, base, the letter base is a bayet, it's a house. So he always has a picture of a house and then he keeps three main ideas from Daph base in the image. It's already there embedded in the image. So you now have a visual. So worst case scenario, if somebody says to you a Gigadaph Zion, you have the image for Zion. Zion's always is gone. You have an image of a gun and then three pictures that are associated with it. So you have three topics from Gigadaph Zion right away. At least that. You may not have, now the deficiency of Zichruch is you don't need to know much more than that. You could just rattle off three things from every single Daph and Shas and sound like you know everything, but you can't go into any of the back and forth whatsoever and you can't really explain what you mean. But you have a picture of, you know, for example, you have on, you know, you have a person going through a narrow entryway. So you have a picture of a rabbi entering into a what do you do with that? So unless you learned that you don't know what to do with it, but you memorized something. So that's another component, having a visual aid because the words every Gamar looks very similar to us and begins to get monotonous after a while. But if you have a visual, it's very powerful. Master Torah, which I think actually ironically came down this week. Master Torah's unique contribution to the learning world was the creator of it actually created a review system that makes sense based on modern brain research. How frequent, when, and at what intervals should you be reviewing something to maximize your retention of the information? Okay, so some more content like this from Rabbi Shlomo Einhorn on Why You Tauga, Torah, or elsewhere on the web. So think about how hard it's been for people to be friends with a personality like Richard Spencer, who's been all over the place ideologically and controversial and obviously said and done a lot of really stupid and destructive things. But he also in all of his nonsense says some thoughtful, interesting things. So here he's talking about a Russian operative who is working in the United States earning what approximately 600,000 to 1,300,000 from a social media activities over the past two years, right? She continues her channels as though nothing has happened. Her supporters engaged in the same way. Last five winners, the Iowa GOP caucus with Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, and George W. Bush. So Richard says, this leads me to make the prediction that Mike Pence, Mike Pence will win the 2024 Iowa caucus. A bold picture of Spencer's being platformed. Not just platformed, Richard Spencer, also Nick Spencer. One former co-host says, morale of the no jumper podcast plummeted, especially among black and Jewish employees when Adam 22 began platforming hate figures, right? You could, there are just so many ways to diminish and dismiss people. And one of the easiest is just to call someone a hate figure rather than engaging and debunking and what someone has to say and pointing out where it's dangerous. So let's have a look at this thread. Adam denies the allegations. The idea that I repeatedly asked to do porn made me feel uncomfortable. His force never put any pressure on her to shoot with us any time. No jumper podcast, Adam 22 has been accused of oppression, women, to have sex with him. Nick Spencer. And also platformed Destiny. Popular podcast host has platformed hate figures, guys allegedly pressured women to have sex with him. Former staff and guests alleged a culture of exploitation and coercion. So what kind of man pressures a woman to have sex with him? Kind of man who's around women who allow themselves to be pressured to have sex, right? Do you think if he tried to pressure your normal traditional Mormon or Christian or Orthodox Jewish woman that these women would have felt constrained? So I'm thinking about this one creepy guy who's always creeping on women, but he never does it with traditional women, right? He never does it with Orthodox Jews. He, people choose their prey, right? Predators choose their prey. I mean, even hyenas, right? Or predators in nature, they go for the easiest prey, generally speaking. So somebody wants to go shoot up a synagogue. The two examples that we have from a few years ago, they chose synagogues without any security guard outside. So the more formidable your security arrangement and the more formidable the vibe that you give out, right? The less likely you are to be the prey for some predator. Instagram influencer, Lisa Jane appeared on NoJumper, the massively popular podcast whose content bounces from hip hop to current events to odd appearances by alt-right polemicists. She discussed her alleged sexual encounters with multiple members of the Phoenix Suns basketball team and a particular R&B singer held her in a hotel apparently against her will and engaged in water sports. And so comments weren't viral causing Jane, she says to lose her job and they get kicked out of her parents' home. So yeah, you start something up with other people, all right? You damage other people, they will find ways of hurting you. So this led to her NoJumper's appearance. She got her own show, but the joy of a new gear quickly turned to disgust as Adam sought her out to film a sex scene with his then-fiance Lena. You'd notice that when she refused, he began to mistreat her and noticed the second I didn't wanna do a scene with him. He started trying to make me look horrible on his platform, so I started going on after that. So he didn't just choose her out of the blue, right? He felt like he could pressure her into doing things, right? She gave off a vibe. So when I would go to a party, I would inevitably find the women whose fathers were sex addicts. And there was something about my damage and their damage that just made us incredibly attracted to each other. So morale among this guy's black and Jewish employees created when he began platforming hate figures like Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes. So Destiny and Richard Spencer debate race, religion, and rotate Joe Biden on the NoJumper podcast. All right, what else here is on Richard's? The Trump is at his best when he's at war with conservatives. He's at his worst when the two are at peace. It's gone sick. And I don't like the term woke because I hear woke, woke, woke. You know, it's like just a term that use half the people can't even define it. They don't know what it is. It's gone sick. And I don't like the term woke because I hear woke, woke, woke. You know, it's like just a term that you... Decades ago, some might defect to the USSR because they discovered Marxism. Now they just defect to Russia on the basis of current Republican talking points. So Tara Reid, the woman who accused Joe Biden of rape. For the first time in a very long time. She's moved to Russia. And I felt heard and I felt respected. And that has not happened in my own country. I did talk to US Congressman Matt Gates. I have not concealed anything. I told him I was in Moscow, Russia. So Matt Gates is friends with Chuck Johnson. The VC capitalist and entrepreneur and prolific Twitter, sub-stack writer. There's many Twitter spaces. And Chuck Johnson introduced Matt Gates to his wife. I told him why? And he said something very stunning. I am considered a whistleblower, as you know, in the United States. One of the cases I will be testifying is about how the DOJ and the FBI has weaponized by the Biden administration against its own citizens. So he said, Tara, you know, I'm worried about your physical safety in the United States. As a US citizen to hear a US Congressman basically say they couldn't protect me in a whistleblower case is stunning. And it makes me angry. And I want to say to my fellow American citizens that as these cases... Why would you think a US Congressman would have the power to protect you? Right, there's only so much protection that anyone can extend. We live in a flawed and frequently dangerous world. Against all of us are coming forward that speak out. I want you to remember, the US Congress works for the US... Okay, get back here. Jason Hinkelhoff, the fall of the Soviet Union CIA, protected Bandera, hid him, encouraged his violent clashes with Soviet officials, USSR fell in 1991. Bandera died in 1959. After the fall of the Soviet Union, directly after CIA protected Bandera, hid him and encouraged him to pursue his bloody violent clashes against Soviet officials. Yeah, the guy died in 1959. Elon Musk had a dream one day, homosexuals too could perish in a fiery technological death cage after opting in to self-driving AI and ironically willing their own demise. Geopolitical triangles coming into view. Trump had top-secret information about a war against Israel's enemy, Iran, which he might have shared with Israel's crypto ally, Saudi Arabia, which was funding Trump's go-course and sudden laws hedge fund. The federal prosecutors have Donald Trump on tape in 2021, acknowledging he kept a class-wide Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran. Populous pundit says Trump betrayed the multi-racial working-class base by failing to enact tough immigration policies. So this is Rhonda Santa's spokeswoman saying that immigration has been a positive thing for America because illegal aliens work hard and pay taxes. She defends Dreamers, claims that if illegal aliens have kids here, then the kids are Americanized. On balance, immigration has been a net positive thing for our country. I think it needs to be better, not better enforced or regulated. Just the law needs to be better. Who is Tara Reid? She's the woman who accused Joe Biden of raping her. Because right now it's extremely difficult to immigrate legally, even for qualified people, even for people who are working hard, which many undocumented immigrants do, by the way, they work and they pay taxes even if they're not legal in the country. I think, though, we need to streamline the system so that it's... Yeah, what about the American citizens? What about the repercussions of allowing people who came here illegally to then profit from their illegal action? What about the effects that this has on other people? Bay's populism is stacking up winds around the world. They'll come after those fake dinosaurs next. So India cuts periodic tables and evolution from school textbooks. So Israel now has a majority Hindu nationalist government. And there's Tara Reid. Wow, who's your Vladdy? And let's have a look at this for a dispenser thread from late May. So it began with a thread by Nathan Coffness. So it says, in 2017, Stephen Pinko could refute with a straight face of the often highly literate, semi-intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right. How did it go from a semi-genuine intellectual movement to gruyperism in just under three years? Good question. So Coffness says, instead of creating institutions to elevate smart and effective people, the alt-right developed a culture of appealing the lowest common denominator centered around memes and trawling with no mechanism to expel the psychologically disturbed. 2018, I would have said the worst reason is a vegans with works does an alt-right is tied for second place. Now I'd say that dissident writers are even worse than vegans. Their arguments consist entirely of ad hominem attacks through refute stuff they couldn't read or understand. Coffness says, I'm not mourning the demise of the alt-right, which was never my thing, but it's interesting that similar trajectories are followed in most conservative movements. And let's have a look at this Richard Spencer tweet in reply. Yes, the institutions in the alt-right are focused on the Southern strategy of race-beating. The youth desperately want to red pill the normies, which means they are hostile to intellectual activity, probably not capable of it. The boomers and the grope deserve one. My sense of the alt-right or the dissident right is that they flip back and forth between advocating for voting Republican and engaging in pre-shootings. Okay, that's a dramatic overstatement, right? Just like with Muslim terrorists, they'd never been more than 0.0001% of Muslims. So to alt-rights or terrorists have never been more than 0.0001% of the alt-right. But still they do, both groups have people doing enough horrible, terroristic things that they have substantially damaged the overall reputation of their group. And Coffness is remarking on something that Colin Liddell explained in Greater Death when the alt-right was primarily a medium of the written word, right? It was a much higher IQ movement. But then when it became primarily about live-streaming and podcasts, then it became a much lower IQ movement. So what people devote themselves to extreme politics? What type of people devote themselves to extreme religion? What type of people devote themselves to a pundit or a guru? Like what accounts for followers, right? Some people can listen to Dennis Prager or some other guru and pundit and not devote their life to him like I did, right? When I was basically bedridden, right? I was, oh, so it's so embarrassing. My God, let's send it over to Stephen J. James. Watch too much of Luke Ford lately. I haven't watched any of it. Have you not? If he's a disconnected, I mean, I know I have a mobile but I don't really check it. So I haven't been watching anybody. So let's see this thing. Assessing Dennis Prager the guru. What's that about? So what I'm gonna say is the other day, essentially, I think he did what was like it's, this might be overstating it, but like his solo magnum opus. Okay, I might be overstating it, but this is essentially what I would put as a candidate for that. Okay, he's assessing Dennis Prager the guru. Now, for anybody who doesn't know, Luke Ford is a convert to Judaism. He's, as Mikey not called it, he's a guy who contributed so much pornography, he became Jewish. But the real backstory is that Luke Ford had a very strict upbringing as a seventh day Adventist in a Christian religious fundamentalist sect, effectively, and rebelled from that. As is often the case, so you get with people who were born Joe as witnesses or Mormons or seventh day Adventists and that, and you either go fully deep into the cult and further it or you rebelled against it, really. And like Luke did that and went search of his own path and he was broken character in many ways, daddy issues and things like that. And he looked looking for something else. And he ended up in Los Angeles in his youth, in the state. And he latched on to Dennis Prager. Who is this? Jewish talking head is a new player. How would you describe Dennis Prager? Well, he's reform and yesterday I saw a video clip of him and he mispronounced Habad, he said Habad. Yeah, I mean, I just thought like, no. Anyway, Prager, Dennis Prager of, you might have heard of his, whatever it is, news organization or however they pitch. Prager University. PragerU, yes. They're an American setup to like put out content, entertainment and shows and things, mainly to an American Christian audience. But under the guys I think I'm not talking like overly Jewish but certainly Dennis Prager is Jewish and so it's founding his Jewish and everything. And anyway, it's not like Dennis Prager hides being a Jew. That's not what I'm on about. But they pitch it to a wider audience, don't they? Like there's some kind of Judeo-Christian value system and things like that. And that's all get together and keep the Jews at the top base of it. But anyway, Dennis Prager was Luke's guru effectively. And this has kind of been a long time coming in him really like pulling the rug from out under that and kind of do like a critical expose of Dennis Prager. But not in a, it's not done in a nasty way. It's really the only person who could ever really do this is Luke. Luke is like the perfect character to do this because he was like a devotee of Dennis Prager for years and then he became obsessed with him. And then I think he had like falling out with him probably when he probably like started to stalk him or something and then there was a blow up between them or whatever. But it's taken many, many years for Luke to really address the topic I think. And I think he did it in a great way. So just while I run and get a drink, let's just listen to it a couple of minutes of this and see if you've got any thoughts on it. I just thought he'd be interested in it. I guess you haven't probably watched it. Hopefully we can hear it. So what type of person falls hard for a guru and God forbid that there may be someone out there for whom I play a guru role. So what type of people are looking for gurus? So let me tell you about my situation when I first heard Dennis Prager. It was August of 1988. I was 21, 21 and I was at UCLA a month before the dormitories opened up because I'd been hobbled by chronic fatigue syndrome for the previous seven months. And my family had suggested doctors that I could see in Southern California. They didn't want to pay for a hotel. So I was just living out of my car sleeping in the bushes outside of golf's softball field. And so I was feeling pretty desperate, pretty lonely. It's pretty much on my own for a month before school started. And so my primary companion was my radio. And so I listened to a lot of talk radio. And then on Saturday and Sunday nights, on KBC radio, I started listening to Dennis Prager. And it's this voice, this commanding manner, this charisma, this confidence that spoke to me. It sounded like this was God speaking at Mount Sinai. And so I was in desperate need for a virtual friend. And I was in desperate need for a virtual father figure. So I didn't have much of a relationship with my own father. So I needed comfort, security. I needed something, all right? And so I was in a state of pretty high anxiety. I was in a state of depression. My life had just fallen apart due to my ill health. All my plans amounted to nothing. I was looking for a way to try to make sense out of life. Then Dennis Prager came along and I embraced his approach. It's like, oh yeah, God, Judaism, ethical monotheism. I want to enroll in the fight for good values. And so it was absolutely intoxicating for me. And it gave me meaning and purpose and transcendence. I had something to live for. And I felt like I had someone Dennis Prager understood me and who was a good role model. And I preferred my virtual father to my real father. And I preferred my virtual friend, Dennis Prager, to many of the people that I was interacting with in real life, particularly when I went home to Northern California. I was living in an isolated part of Northern California and how desperately I tuned my radio to KABC when the sun went down. Let me just address a controversial statement in the chat that Damien thinks that Luke's gay. One thing Luke is not is gay. We know, let's just get this out of the way. He's not a gay man. He's very the opposite actually. I can confirm that. He talks about it all the time. Yeah, okay. Luke's history is a difficult one with women, basically. So you don't have to worry about that. It's something that I've always respected before. So that I could try to pick up Dennis Prager's voice from Los Angeles all the way into Sacramento. It's like a lifeline for me. And so whatever the criticisms that I have of Dennis Prager today, I mean, I may very well not be here without the kindness that he showed me. And without him enlisting me in the battle for good values and feeling like I was important, I had a role to play. I first met Dennis Prager in person on a Friday night, January 28th, 1994, in Tampa Bay. And then after he spoke Saturday morning, so that would have been January 29th, 1994. So I would have been, I think, 27 at this time. He kind of motioned me over. He was driving away in his car and then he saw me and just like motioned me over. We got to talk privately for about 10 minutes. And he said, Luke, it gives me inner peace. It gives me a source of comfort that if something happens to me, that you'll be around to fight for good values. I mean, can you imagine what that meant to me? That I was a source of comfort and peace to Dennis Prager because I was around to fight for good values. Now, in retrospect, in 2020, I realized that Dennis Prager told this to dozens of people, probably hundreds of people. One of his favorite lines, he says to his YouTube co-host, Julie Hartman, when she says, oh, your book changed my life in Dennis as well. If it changed your life, then it would have been worth it. And I'm sure he's used that very line to thousands of people. And the people who have high anxiety, like Julie and like me, those kind of lines are a lifeline. They're intoxicating, they are soothing and calming. This is a virtual friend. This is a, well, in Julie's case, it's a real life friend. But for most people who listen to Dennis Prager, it's a parasocial relationship that provides a sense of meaning purpose, transcendence and comfort in life. And so when I was basically bedridden from 1989 to 1994, I was spending my money, all right? I spent almost all the money I had, not seeking cures to my chronic fatigue syndrome, I spent almost all the money I had sending Dennis Prager tapes out to my friend who frequently didn't listen to them, who laughed at them, who said that I must be mad. And I realized, yeah, they were right. I was mad. I was getting much of my meaning of purpose in life from my imaginary or virtual friend, Dennis Prager. And because I became convinced that Dennis Prager was such a great man, that simultaneously buoyed up my own sense of self because I had some slim slender connection to Dennis Prager. And so I was connected to the great man. So the greater Dennis Prager was, the more important Dennis Prager was, the more prescient Dennis Prager was, the greater I was, because I recognized his greatness and that I had a slender personal connection to Dennis Prager. I was connected to this source of greatness and life and love and it was embarrassing. Look back and see how eagerly I jumped into the Dennis Prager court. But I did it from a place like maybe you. Do you have above average levels of anxiety, above average levels of depression? Do you feel disconnected from people in your life? Are you unsatisfied with your real world alternatives? Then you'll find a virtual guru, a parasocial relationship with a YouTube personality or a talk show host. It might fill you up. You might very well prefer it to flawed people that you know in real life because when you're getting it from a YouTube host or a podcaster or a radio talk show host, right? You're getting a performance. So Dennis Prager always says, if you listen to me on the radio, that's who I am, that's me, but it's not. It's a performance. What I'm doing now is a performance, right? Just because you hear me on YouTube or on a podcast doesn't know, you know me, you're just getting one aspect of me. This is a performance. I have to use five to 10 times the amount of energy talking here to my cam, all right, speaking across. We're live on YouTube. We are going out live. So in spite of what Luke's like saying right now, in many ways, in this episode, which I'm labeling his solo magnum opus, effectively, this stream, assessing Dennis Prager the guru, he's very, very revealing about himself and open and it's a great listen as well. And it's funny and any thoughts on that? Well, I suppose I have heard the story quite a few times already. So, I mean, Luke is certainly prepared to share, you know, embarrassing parts of his life with us. What he does, he goes through here and he watches various clips. And I mean, it took a long time for him to put this thing together. And I can imagine that something like this, would it get back to Dennis Prager and would he ever see it and feel, I know it's not the first time Luke's criticized Dennis, but it's often difficult to criticize somebody that you lack up to or that you used to lack up to. Yeah, because you're kind of criticizing your own choice for having once admired them. Yeah. You're always worried about, worried about it, like in many ways, I'm worried about it when it starts criticizing the academic agent, for instance. People are learning that and kind of blew up in my face a bit, but let's just jump into a bit here. So this idea that the criticism doesn't bother him at all. In fact, he wishes he had more of that, but good faith criticism, like intellectually honest criticism, that's what he longs for. Tell me about them. It doesn't tell me about you if you disagree with me, but if you hate me, it doesn't tell me anything about me. It tells me everything about you. Okay, so if you hate the pollution of the public discourse, you're gonna hate Dennis Prager. It's not gonna be the only emotion you have to him. You'll appreciate his humor. You'll appreciate his wisdom when he is wise. You'll appreciate the good things that he does, but you'll hate him for polluting public discourse for damaging lives, for encouraging all sorts of self-destructive, anti-social behavior. So it doesn't mean you're a bad person if you hate how Dennis Prager pollutes public discourse. I know that I aim to do good and do good. There are very many people who have better marriages because of my male-female hour. There are many happier people because of my happiness, both happiness lectures and happiness hour. There are many people who have reconciled with their parents because they heard me. Okay, how many leftists who hate my guts can say that? Zero, zero. How many people are kinder because they were influenced by a leftist? Zero. Not only. Really, really, most social workers are leftists. You don't think anyone has been improved from interacting with a social worker? Most psychologists, most therapists are leftists. I would expect many doctors are on the left. Most teachers are on the left. You don't think anyone has been improved, made kinder by having a kind teacher? I think absolute nonsense when he was just saying. Let's keep it classy here, guys. I mean, this is a show of radical love and inclusion. Right, just because of 70. Poor people. So, you're thinking of, just, politics had nothing to do with your crime while you were charged. Yes, who would you trust more? Do you, do you... Well, I have... And the same thing with woke people, would you rather have 12 non-woke people? So, what do I need to do to get your mother on this show? There's this point in it where Dennis Prager says, there's this point where Dennis Prager proudly says that he had this realization in his life, his entire moral system was identical to the Torah. And he had this realization. He really like the bizarre and Luke points this out. That's a good laugh. He's denying me. I can't find it. The disciples of Jesus who denied him three times before the cock crew. LaFenia says, in Prager's defense, I had a friend put his knee on my neck. I was fine. I could breathe normally. I would do speeches for $1,000. Library of Alexandria, European colonialism. Anyway, anyway, I just thought I'd share that with you. I can't find the bit. Yeah, thank you. And so, I'll put the link in the chat if anybody wants to watch it. Yeah, he never appealed to me. You know, he never impressed me that much. And I know... Who, Prager, what do you mean? Yeah, him. He just seems a bit brash and vulgar to me. Yeah, he's weird, isn't he? But... It's like a creepy... I mean, yeah. I mean, it would have been easier to be influenced by him, I guess, when he was just like a voice on the radio. But since the internet, you have to look at him, don't you? Which I suppose this is bad. Yeah. As a voice on the radio, as a radio voice, I suppose, Dennis Prager. Yes. There was, though. You know, Luke did a follow-up video. Oh, really? I was writing something. Waiting for... Yeah, after doing that stream, Luke did this very short one-and-a-half-minute follow-up video, which I'll share with you. And I made 40 here, hanging out on the radio drive, just doing a little shopping, and I just had a really exciting revelation. I just realized that my instincts are God's instincts. And I am aligned with God, and it's like such a great feeling to be aligned with God. And that's why I'm right so often on my YouTube show, and that's why you should send me super chats, and like and subscribe, because my instincts are just identical to the Torah's instincts, which are just identical God's instincts, because God read the Torah, and whether I'm on Rodea Drive or in Compton, or on the Santa Monica beach, it's just amazing. So he's mocking Dennis Prager, obviously. You get it, don't you? Yes. I think he has to be absolutely aligned with God, just to be one with God, just to have the same instincts. And that accounts for my oppressions, and that accounts for why you should listen to my Cassandra-like warnings, and that's why I'm able to be so profound. That's why I'm able to share with you so much truth, and that's why I am enrolling you in the battle for good values, and that's why we have to take back this country from the communist guys, from the satanic democrat pedophiles, right? And what can I say? Just feeling aligned with the universe right now. Blessings. Blessings. Anyway. Anyway. So. Alrighty. Yeah, so just an amazing moment on the Dennis and Julie show a few months ago. This is Dennis. How they've influenced me. I don't think I've ever said this publicly. That's one of the beauties of our podcast. It forces me to say things I don't normally say. At a certain point, I don't remember when, but it was early on, I said to myself, wow, you, your instincts are identical to the Torah's. And it blew my mind. My natural mode of thinking was the Torah's mode of thinking. And that's why I feel it's a moral obligation to get it in print. Because if you take those five books seriously, you will think morally clearly. You will think clearly about everything. And you'll be so much happier. Yeah, well, you could testify. Oh my God. I mean, your life will society will run better. Your life will run better. Personally, you will feel enriched and fulfilled and happier. It's. So at a certain point in this show in the series, not necessarily this episode, Dennis remarks to Julie, you're sleeping better now, right? Because now you've taken my advice. You've gone public. You've embraced a religious perspective. But religion really doesn't cure, generally speaking, underlying psychological issues like high anxiety and sleeplessness that Julie suffers from. So her sleeplessness returns, right? Her high anxiety returns. So as far as this is the answer to everything, I'm afraid that they're going to find out that that's not true. There are a couple of million Orthodox Jews in the world who take Torah seriously and they suffer from high anxiety. They suffer with sleeplessness. They suffer from anger. They suffer from all the human foibles. If you meet an Orthodox Jew, you're not likely to meet someone who is more honest than a completely secular Jew or a secular Christian. You're not necessarily going to meet someone who's more no-holy. You're not going to meet someone who's kinder or nicer. You're just going to meet someone who's got a very high in-group identity. Thank you. And that's why I feel such a moral obligation to get it in print. Because if you take those five books seriously, you will think morally clearly. You will think clearly about everything. Yeah, guess what? If you take those five books of Torah seriously, it may very well have some clarifying effect, but you're not going to think clearly about everything. There's no one solution. There's no magic key to life. The Torah is not a magic key to life. Orthodox Jews do not think clearly about everything. They struggle with unhappiness, alcoholism, porn addiction, dishonesty. All the normal human foibles are just as present among Orthodox Jews as among people who aren't Orthodox Jews. They may manifest themselves somewhat differently and in different degrees. He's so much happier. Yeah, well, you can test it. Oh, my God. Yes, that's the one thing we know about Orthodox Jews. They just vibrate happiness. I mean, what kind of world is this in? There are plenty of Orthodox Jews, such as Habad Jews, who are happy, who do most, you know, Lubavitches I've known do seem to be pretty happy people. But overall, but anyone seriously argues that Orthodox Jews just seem happier than the average person. That's not what I've seen. Your life will society will run better. Your life will run better personally. There are all sorts of problems that come with a devotion to Torah. The most devoted to Torah segment of Israel do everything they can to live of public assistance to not hold down real jobs and who are the least likely to contribute to wider society who frequently act at times in a parasitic fashion. Lee, you will feel enriched and fulfilled and happier. I really think, and I know it sounds sort of extreme, or perhaps like I'm hyperbolizing to say it, I think it's the answer to everything. Oh, I know it's the answer to everything. That's why it's frustrating. No, I don't believe that all groups are equal in kindness and honesty and decency. But the achievements and the decency of a group will basically correlate with its average IQ. So Orthodox Jews have an above average level of IQ. And with other higher IQ groups, they are going to commit substantially fewer violent crimes. You are much less likely to be the victim of a violent crime from Orthodox Jews than from your average person. Orthodox Jews commit very few acts of murder or violent crime. As do high IQ non-Orthodox Jews that commit very few rates of murder and violent crime. It's great that it isn't out there more. I know. As much as it's out there, my biggest frustration is it's not out there more. This is the answer to evil or even unhappiness. You know, is the Torah the answer to evil and unhappiness? So let's define evil as Dennis Prager does, needless human cruelty. So for some people, the application of Torah to their lives does reduce their propensity to be needlessly cruel. But for plenty of other Orthodox Jews, it does not seem to have any effect on their propensity to be needlessly cruel. So I would argue that the best solution to needless cruelty is human connection. People who are connected to their family and to their community and to their friends, they are much less likely, in general, to be cruel, particularly to their in-group. I said this. I know I said the first part on our podcast, but I said the second part in the Prager You video I just filmed, and I think it's worth mentioning here. You know that I think it's incredibly creepy that people my age fight against things that most of them have never seen before. Racism, climate change. Oppression. Oppression, you know, what are their words? Homophobia, transphobia, etc. So yeah, I believe that kindness essentially equates with IQ levels. And so half of the lesion says, I think there is variated kindness found among equal IQ people assorting by ethnic group. So it would depend on certain types of kindness. So for example, Jews are very warm. Jews tend to be very hospitable. You're not, you know, likely to go hungry if you're invited to a Jewish home as, say, compared to a wasp home. All right, Jews are much more emotional where they're feeling on their sleeve. They're much more likely to treat you like a member of the family to be hospitable, you know, bring you food and drink as compared to, say, a Northern European home. They're more likely to be physically and emotionally demonstrative towards you compared to, say, Northern Europeans. On the other hand, people of Northern European heritage are more likely to obey the law. I wish that wasn't true. They're less likely to conduct inside a trading, right? They're much less likely to make pornography to promote rap music. Now Orthodox Jews wouldn't be, you know, promoting rap music or pornography either. But different people have different gifts. So I'm open. I'm sure different different groups at the same level of IQ. I'm sure there's something to Half-Galician's point. They have different propensities to various manifestations of kindness, right? There are many types of kindness. And I'm sure some groups, even at the same IQ level, have a high demonstration of certain forms of kindness than other groups. So what type of person falls hard for a guru? Like, what the hell was up with me that makes me so vulnerable to courts and to gurus? So as you already said, I think, like, you know, interest, conspiratorial reasoning and that kind of thing make you more vulnerable. I don't think, though, it's like, I think that the vulnerabilities are all very different from what makes someone want to be a guru because the people that follow, apart from the ones who become minor gurus, right? Like your Alexandros Meijer Norse or those kind of type of people. I think the follower people tend to be, you know, the kind of things that would make people vulnerable to joining any kind of group for better or worse. Like people that are dealing with something difficult in their own lives or people who feel a little, like that something is missing or that kind of thing. Those are all risk factors because the kind of message that guru types give you is that they're helping you to, you know, see something special about the world that other people can't. And that you have these unique characteristics that mean you're willing to listen to the message and to, like, look deeper. So I think having low self-esteem or dealing with traumas or that kind of thing, it makes you more susceptible to that. And I was watching this Matthew McConaughey content, right? Which is much more like that's your kind of Tony Robbins self-help stuff. And you just see them really, really praying on people's insecurities and giving them this like false allure of community. But I think the gurus are doing that. But maybe for people who more would like to be, think of themselves as intellectual and maybe it's also a risk factor if you say you wanted to go to university or you feel like, you know, you, you, that your kind of insight isn't recognized enough. So I think like holding a grudge at the educated elites looking down on people, that kind of thing seems to be a common thing. So yeah, but I don't know, because I'm not saying that, you know, you go to university and that would inoculate you against that. A good example, although this is a bit tangential, is that the, you know, the Tokyo subway attack in the 90s by the Omshin-Nikkyo cult in Japan. They, maybe you, it's like a big leak, remember that that happened. It was a long time ago, I guess. Yeah. So that group primarily recruited from like elite universities in Japan and people at elite universities tend to be from wealthy families and, you know, they are also likely to go into good companies and that kind of thing. And people were like, why would those people want to join a, you know, bizarre, like weird cult around this, like, crazy, not even by many as charismatic, but just weird cult leader. And I think the thing is like, if you are successful and you feel dissatisfied or, you know, if you say you've got your degree or you're in the company, but, you know, like Fight Club and all those things where people feel like NRE and then they want something more. And there's various ways that you can get that, but like Jordan Peterson and Ko, they really are telling people like, here's the way to live your life. You know, I can make you feel better. And yeah. So I think it's kind of a lot of the risk factors around the same kind of risk factors that would make you likely to fall prey to like self-help cults or multi-level marketing, but maybe with a like slightly more intellectual political bent. Like maybe people that wouldn't fall for a multi-level marketing scheme would buy into, you know, like political polemicist kind of IDW type because they're not doing multi-level marketing. They're just giving you a podcast. Yeah. That's a very long one. Yeah. Who do you think is more dangerous to their followers? A guru or a funder? Or I should say, or who's maybe dangerous is too strong of a word? I think the, like, I think, like say Jordan Peterson, right? For the majority of people that follow him, I don't think, you know, I understand why people regard him the way that they do, but I think for the vast majority of his followers, he's just someone that they kind of admire and, you know, listen to his lectures and maybe they tell people some stupid things that he has said, like that they applied to their life. But I think that it's, there's a subset of people for whom people like Jordan Peterson are dangerous. Whereas on the other hand, I don't think that there are many people who go to like multi-level marketing type scams that, you know, just take it lightly and don't really get involved in it. So I think there's a lot, because there's lower commitment to following, like online gurus, I think that makes a difference. But I do think that like their impact on the, like the, you know, the culture can be pretty huge. Like I think Jordan Peterson has led a lot of males towards being more misogynistic. Or what about someone like Andrew Tate, who's even worse? Yeah, he's even worse, but that's the kind of thing where I feel like people that are in, like, so I do the continuum, right? And I think that Andrew Tate is too extreme for some people who otherwise would, but Jordan Peterson would be okay for them, right? So like, but I think that the direction of flow is towards like more misogynistic content and that kind of thing. But you will get people who maybe move from like consuming Andrew Tate content to consuming Jordan Peterson content. But I kind of, you know, Andrew Tate is compared to Peterson. Like he's much worse because he's openly misogynistic and like Peterson is misogynistic, but like you're away. So yeah, that's the thing. I think it depends on the guru, but like Dick Scott Adams, I think Scott Adams is like feeding his followers right wing conspiratorial rhetoric constantly. And that's bad for them. But I also think a lot of people that follow Scott Adams probably are already right wing partisans and they just listen to him and they listen to Rush Limbaugh and, you know, they listen to Tucker and, you know, like it's not, if he wasn't there, they'll just go and listen to someone else tell them the same thing. So I'm a bit more concerned about the people who can't be kind of replaced like Jordan Peterson, I think does something that only he can and he has emitters and stuff now, but it's in that sense, he might not be more outright damaging, but I think he can recruit people to follow him that other guru types couldn't. So yeah, and when he said a whole play, like he's kind of responsible for the sense meeting ecosystem. So he deserves some condemnation for that. Double click on that Amber, just double click. Okay, so what is it about Jordan Peterson? Everybody, when I never met in person, I never met Jordan Peterson in person. But I said to him when we met right before lunch, something that is said to me by so many people who meet me for the first time, I feel like I know you. And so what we're talking about here is a parasocial relationship. When you encourage people to think that they know you, you're encouraging a delusion. That is the highest compliment in effect. When you encourage people to think that they know you, based on your public performances, you're encouraging people in a delusion. I now understand what a compliment it is when I receive it because I never gave it to somebody before you. It's not a compliment. When someone says, I feel like I know you, all right. And that's a statement of a parasocial relationship. It's a statement of a delusion. And I have watched you for hours and listened to you and read your book. And in fact, I didn't just read your book, I heard your book from you. So I want to tell you something without embarrassing you. But I think I like to... You open your heart and your mind, and so do I. And gurus love it when you open your heart and your mind to them and even your legs so that they can teach you Torah through the tip of their penis. When I was very young, I realized that God or nature had given me what I have called a goodness detector. And I knew... I always knew when I was in the presence of a good person because that's all I really care about. I think brains are wildly overrated, wildly. So do you really think that goodness is all Dennis Prager really cares about? Do you think status, hanging out with high status people, do you think that's something he cares about even a little bit? That's why I think you're not bright if you join Mensa. Why you would want to announce to the world your IQ is so bizarre to me that I'm sure there are nice people there but I don't understand it. But I always picked up that and I've always been right. So do you really think that Dennis Prager has always been right? Do you think he is right when he befriended me and said I can die in peace knowing that you'll be around to carry on the fight for good values? Do you think he was right? I'm batting a thousand essentially. And when I heard you read your book, the passion comes from, I just want to help people lead a better life. And it's really, it's quite... Yeah, pretty much every guru has that passion. I just want to help people lead a better life and if you'll just subscribe to my sub-stack, just join my online club if you're just by my book. I really think I can help you lead a better life. And what type of people are vulnerable to this? People like me with low self-esteem, with anxiety, tendencies towards self-hatred, depression, a sense of failure, discontent. People like me are really vulnerable to this kind of message. Overwhelming. You didn't just read that book. I won't say you sang it, but I like that you use music. I'm very much into music, too. So this is the man that I'm honored to have this dialogue with because everybody knows you're bright, but I know you're good. So I want you to state that at the outset. And this is another thing that gurus would do. And I'll say to you, wow, if you're just watching this show, that you must be a good person. You must be a smarter person. You must be a finer and kinder person than average. If you're watching this show, because I'm devoted to goodness, therefore, you must also be a person who's devoted to goodness and refinement. And I can just tell from the quality of your comments in the chat that you, too, care about leading a refined and elevated life. See, I have something to say about that. Good. That's good. See, I don't think it's true. So one reason that Jordan Peterson is on the edge of tears throughout this conversation is that he'd recently found out that his wife had been diagnosed with cancer. I mean, this is why. I got motivated to do what I've been doing, and I've been doing what I've been doing for, I would say, since about 1979, in one form or another, because things take a long time to generate. And one of the things I learned in the early 80s was that people have a great capacity for evil. And I didn't really understand that of myself until the early 80s, something like that, after meditating on it for a long time. And so I would say, it's not that I would never claim to be good. I think it's dangerous. But I did become terrified of how terrible I could be. And I mean, I became terrified about how terrible human beings could be, and that's one thing. But it's easy to confuse that with other human beings. It's a different thing to understand that it's true of yourself. I often recommend to my students that they read history as a perpetrator and not as a victim or a hero. And people very seldom do that, and it's no wonder. But I would say, perhaps, that I became terrified enough from learning what I learned that I tried to avoid the pathways that lead people to the dark places that they go. That's the best way to avoid the pathways that lead you to a dark place. Avoid situations that lead you to a dark place. Yeah, that's the important of the situation. So why do you almost never hear gurus repent? Why do you almost never hear pundits repent for their bad epistemics? This is Australian psychologist Matthew Brown, Irish anthropologist Christopher Cavanaugh, who lives in Japan. Conspiracy mongering? No? No, no. I mean, technically, that stuff with the Hispanic abuse, whatever. They're talking about Oprah here. Spiritorial elements there, but really, that's just so platforming stuff she really shouldn't have. She's just credulous. And a lot of people did, like you said, in the 90s and stuff. It's not really her brand. It's just rather, in hindsight, highly irresponsible. But that's 20-21. So that's a wonderful thing. You know, I was noticing, and I'll just mention everyone, I gave her one too on this. In passing that the, there's very few examples I can think of where somebody was conspiratorial or like promoting pseudoscience, saw the error of their ways and has developed better epistemics. It's really rare, really, really rare for a public figure. And then now, not something like when you were a teenager, you believe them well and you're interested in millions. And, you know, that you, like debunk the funk, right? Who we spoke to, not like that, but like, you're a public figure. You're promoting something like anti-vaccine or whatever. And you go the other way. You don't see the area of your ways and go, yeah, I used to go into that stuff and I looked into it more and I realized, no, it's sad, isn't it? It's sad. And the people that were previously examples of that, like you could kind of say, you know, Majid Nawaz or something like that, but Islam and extremism or that kind of thing, they often just fall into another bucket. Right, yeah. So it's just depressing. I was thinking about it and was like, there's many, many examples I can think of the inverse. But I cannot, for the life of me, think of like more than a handful of cases going the other way. So one of the chances that Dennis Prager repents for his bad epistemics and promoting bad epistemics, epistemics first to epistemology, which is how do we know what we know? So Dennis Prager in various areas of life is really bad at figuring out what is true from what is false because he is innumerate, but rather than simply noting that he is innumerate and therefore doesn't have the skills to assess the quality of academic studies. He just says, oh, if academic studies, you know, differ from my understanding of what is common sense, then I just automatically dismiss them. It's like that's very depressing because it means it's very rare for people to... It's like a one-way street. It's like becoming a conspiracist, you know, getting into university theories. You see people become conspiracists, but you don't see many people coming back. I give that. No, you know, it's a problem. No, profiteering. She freaking profits. She profits like a... So this is a grometer edition here on Oprah. What kind of a guru is Oprah? A motherfucker. So she screwed at it. She could teach Jordan Peterson how to profit better. So she's definitely a five on that. Yeah, I'm going to give her a five, too. I mean, I kind of disagree with herself with the way she characterised her career. I mean, I characterised her career as very candidly being amazingly successful in the entertainment is giving people what's sold well. And I think that actually might have added her to justify it, to retcon it a bit in those kind of interviews and recast it as part of her journey towards being more responsible or whatever, but actually no. I mean, it's not to say she's not generous in doing some good things now. Good honor, but, you know, that was not the thing that propelled her towards wealth and fabulous popularity. OK, now we have our little binary on-off switches. So, monominia? Does she have a single thing? No. No, I don't... Best in a candid set, but I think that's not really what it means. No. Shilling supplements? I don't know if she does that. She would. So, pretty much every right-wing radio talk show host has to show supplements because regular brands won't advertise so much on nationally syndicated right-wing talk radio. So, they have to show ridiculous supplements all the time. I feel like... She doesn't need to. Yeah. She doesn't need to. No. So, we can't take that. Provisity, no. No. There's the opposite of it. Opposite of Provisity. Feminicity? Feminicity? Yeah. Neologisms? No. Like inventing her own... No. No. Strategic disclaimers? No. No. Like she does them, but it's not like a feature of what she's up to. No. Rebranding theories as her own? No. No, because she kind of gives credit. She's like... Eckhart-Poll said blah, blah, blah. And you know... Yeah. Yeah. Laquacious? Sure. Yeah. She's just a polished presenter, really. Yeah. Never admitting an error. No. Does she admit error? Yes, she admits error. Yeah. She's like that of significance, but she admits... She can... She has like... You know, I did tons of things wrong, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. So look, here's the deal with Oprah. She is absolutely like a... Like a... I think a secular guru. A guru for the modern age. Secular. Secular. Yeah. In our definition of secular, like... Like these people, they're not... They're not like the old religious prophets, right? But she kind of... Having this fuzzy abstract spirituality in there. Yes, it's not... It is still secular, Chris, right? Is it? Yeah. It's a kind of magical thinking that's been smuggled into what is on the face of it, a secular worldview, right? Small gel pack. It's not the anti-secular. Look, it's like homoeopathy, right? Homoeopathy is absolutely a secular belief system, right? I don't... But I... No. I feel homoeopathy is a magical belief system with just having... Okay. So Dennis Prager makes a big deal about how he even changes advertising copy because he is so devoted to the truth. I'm thinking Dennis Prager would have an easier time and it'd probably be the more moral thing to not make those proclamations to just simply say that you're reading what the advertising copy says because otherwise you end up in a ridiculous situation. Same with grammar. Maybe twice. Yeah. You rarely curse. Right, but when I do... But when you do it's hilarious. Yes, exactly. That's the point. Yes. 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Love it or your money back guaranteed. HealthyCell.com code Prager. HealthyCell.com code Prager. Okay, back to contentment and happiness. So I asked. This is Matt Brown talking to Chris Cavanaugh. That's the thing, they smuggle it in. I can see your argument, but I think. Let it be, what I wanted to say was that she's definitely guru is what I wanted to say. I agree with that. She's a modern guru, regarded as such by her fans, thinks of herself as someone with a special message for people, make the world a better place. She has done a lot of things, made a lot of ill-considered decisions, shall we say, in her long and storied career. But she does not fit the toxic guru mold that the gurometer is designed to identify. Yeah, toxic secular guru mold that the gurometer covers. So yes, I agree on the. And you know, one of the main reasons, Chris, and we struck this before with other characters with COVID is that when they, when their job or they present themselves is primarily as a kind of a journalist or an entertainer, not as being, you know, like a special intellectual genius. She doesn't present herself as that, right? She presents herself as, as your friendly lady in the media sphere that you can sit down with until she'll introduce you to some interesting things. Except for the comments about the, like, I think that might just be seeping in the kind of, I was a childhood prodigy who skipped years and blah, blah, blah, like. She said prodigy. She's very smart. She's smart, but that's just, I suspect she's just saying the facts there. Maybe, maybe, but I just, I think that they're, I think it's that thing of that the gurus imagine themselves as special people because they're known. And in some cases they are very famous and they're like, they're known for doing some stuff, right? In some regard. And it feels like there's kind of more validity to their claim to be like significant at least because like Oprah did something, Elon did something, whereas, you know, Brett and Eric and Jordan Hall, you know, whatever they did is much less notable. But, but I think that's still the survivorship bias thing coming in where, you know, are they that special? I don't, I certainly not as special as they imagine themselves to be. So, yeah, I just, I think there's a bit that's difficult because it's hard to detach the fact that they have done something, right, which is, which in some respects is remarkable or notable, but they, that doesn't mean it's because of their characteristics. Yeah. I mean, I think she's special, but in a very normal way, you know, you find the people that are that rich and famous that don't think that that's the characteristic that are that rich and famous and don't think that they are special in some way. And that's why they're rich and famous. Right. Here's an interesting tweet by the account Meersheimer fan. I despise work, work isn't with a seething passion. I went to end cultural Marxism, Joe McCarthy style, but this has to start work is a slogan on a platform looks so unserious if constantly parroted in this many manner, especially when Ron DeSantis doesn't discuss issues people actually care about. So, Santa says, as president, I recognize the work mind virus represents a war on truth. So we will wage a war on the woke. We will fight the woke in education. We will fight the woke in the corporations. We will fight the woke in the halls of Congress. We will never ever surrender to the woke mob. We will make woke ideology. Leave it to the dustbin of history. It's gone. I'm proud. As president, I recognize that the woke mind virus represents a war on the truth. I'm proud. As president, I recognize that. On the other hand, I mean, Ron DeSantis tends to follow through on these things. I mean, he's been a formidable legislator, whether you love him or hate him, you can't deny the vast amount of legislation that he's passed the way that he has consistently followed through on his campaign rhetoric and turned it into legislation. It's hard to think of, I mean, it's hard to think of anything, you know, akin to that. I mean, who else is, you know, what other politician follows through on his rhetoric as much as Ron DeSantis? This was drawing mostly positive coverage as the man who might knock Donald Trump out of the race. Now, having plummeted in the national polls, he's getting kicked around by the pundits, both right and left. The New York Times on his use of private jets from undisclosed pals to Politico likening his wife to Lady Macbeth, DeSantis is getting hammered by a media establishment that he openly disdains. What happened? The answer revolves around Trump. Most of the media saw DeSantis as the man who could prevent their future national nightmare of returned Trump trip to the White House. But now the media consensus is that Trump should be the nominee because he'd be the easiest candidate for Joe Biden to be. Well, hold on. That assumption is increasingly open to question given democratic doubts about the president's age and fitness perhaps reinforced by the nasty spill he took at the Air Force Academy. So the MSM's hostility toward DeSantis has quite unfairly turned him from media favorite to media pinata. I'm Howard Kurtz and this is media buzz. So my friend Ricardo is back. Ricardo is back, bro. Let's go on. Ricardo says, just imagine caring about the Republican nomination in 2024. It doesn't matter who has nominated Joe Biden is going to win because elections are fair and absolutely not rigged. Well, for the first time, YouTube has recently reversed its policies. You can now talk about election fraud and rigged elections and they're not going to take down the video on that basis. So they just made that change. Now, as far as right now, yeah, it looks to me 80% likely that Joe Biden is going to win. But what will determine whether Joe Biden or the Democrats win in 2024 presidential election? Events, my dear boy, events. If America is in a high threat environment where the threat comes from outgroups such as Islamic terrorists, right? If America is under attack, then the Republicans are much more likely to do well. If on the other hand, America is living in a relatively low threat environment in 2024 and the election is largely fought on issues of social welfare spending, then Democrats are going to win. So in a high threat environment, right, it makes more evolutionary sense. It makes more practical and adaptive sense to be more racist, to have a stronger in-group identity, to be more interested in an effective, even if it's hierarchical way of operating in your community. If you're in a high threat environment, generally speaking, I would expect it makes sense to stick to tried and true methods for organizing families and communities and countries. On the other hand, if you're in a low threat environment, then maybe trying some new things will work better. If you're in a low threat environment, a more egalitarian and democratic approach might be more adaptive. If you're in a low threat environment, then having more openness to strangers, to outsiders, to outgroups will probably be more adaptive. So in a low threat environment, a left-wing approach to life of innovation, let's organize the family community in new ways, let's try different things, let's just throw things against the wall, see what sticks, let's be more open to outsiders, let's embrace outgroups, let's try to operate in an egalitarian democratic manner. These left-wing tendencies may very well be more adaptive in a low threat environment. On the other hand, in a high threat environment, you want to be devoted to your in-group, you want to be devoted to your people, you want to be devoted to your family, you're going to be more interested in competence than in philosophies and practices of democracy. You're going to probably have a preference for a more hierarchical response because in many situations a more hierarchical response is going to be more effective in a high threat environment. So we don't know what the environment is going to be like in 2024. There are a lot of demographic trends going against Republicans and there is some reason to believe that younger voters, even as they age, may very well tend to stay on the left rather than becoming more conservative as they age. So those demographic trends are real. On the other hand, in a high threat environment, people will often vote for right-wing solutions where New York was filled with crime. New York elected Rudy Giuliani twice to be mayor of New York, even though there were five times as many Democrats as Republicans. But New York became a high threat environment, so New Yorkers became more willing to vote for Republicans. Ricardo says, oh, okay. In that case, January 6th was totally justified and didn't go far enough. Well, was there ever a chance that the January 6th participants could pull off what they were aiming for? I don't think there was ever a chance. So even if they'd escalated by 10 times, I don't think they ever had a chance of pulling off. They had no ideas about the real levers of power. The real levers of power, not necessarily what's playing out on TV and they're not necessarily what's going on in the sacred buildings and the sacred institutions. Has anyone else noticed fewer rainbow flags around? Last three years, number of flags in my neighborhood was growing exponentially this year, only one. I think people in general are kind of tired of the work thing. Even the actual gays in my neighborhood aren't flying the flag. So in some circumstances, when they feel particularly under threat, I think people who are pro-gay are going to be much more likely to fly pride flags. On the other hand, when gay pride is used to diminish speech and is used to oppress people from what are widely regarded as legitimate forms of discourse, then people will be less likely. They'll be less incentivized to fly the flag. Interesting question. Let's go back to media buzz here with Howard Kurtz. Look at why Kevin McCarthy dominated the debt ceiling coverage over Biden and how it's being spun. Ron DeSantis, hitting the campaign trail, is finally taking some swings at Donald Trump while much of the media is pumbling the Florida governor. If you say Cuomo did a better job with COVID than Florida did, first of all, that's not what he used to say. The whole family moved to Florida under my governorship. Are you kidding me? You don't think they're going to play dirty with Ron DeSantis? They're going to get Disney, they're going to get BlackRock, and they're going to get these defense contractors, and they're going to burn this man to the ground. This analysis that somehow DeSantis would be harder to beat, I find lacking, preposterous. Ron DeSantis coming off as a spoiled brat and running around Iowa acting spoiled and talking the terms he is... Joining us now to analyze the coverage in New York, Rich Lowry, editor-in-chief of National Review. And here on set, Amisha Cross, political analyst for SiriusXM and WVON. Rich, you wrote the now-famous New York Times column with the headline, He's Not Dead Yet, which you acknowledge is not exactly what Ron DeSantis would want to read when launching this campaign. What's your take on the sharp shift toward negative reporting and negative punditry about DeSantis? Well, first of all, it's bizarre because the media hates Donald Trump, considers him a monster and a threat to democracy. And here's this guy, at least based on current indications, has the best chance to stop Donald Trump in the primaries. And they hate him, too. And a lot of his herd mentality, reporting and commentary where the polls have shifted over the last several months where Donald Trump has jumped to a big lead overwhelmingly because of this bragging indictment, which gave him such a big boost. Then DeSantis, he's very aggressive on the cultural issues, calling card, media can't stand that stuff. And then, as you alluded to, he disdains the media, makes it clear he wants to go above and around the media, and the media doesn't like that either. So it all adds up to he's going to get negative coverage here on out. Yeah, I think you make some good points. All right, Jack Schaffer at Politico had an interesting column, not just about Ron DeSantis, but I think it can be applied quite widely, including to myself. The media has got Ron DeSantis' nail. The press has him in an unflattering straight jacket that will be nearly impossible to escape. So I've been the subject of, I don't know, 20 plus news media profiles, and they haven't all been flattering. And even if you haven't been the subject of a media profile, you've experienced what it's like to have a straight jacket of opinion that you have been stuck in by the people around you. And so Jack Schaffer noticed Ron DeSantis as a man of many straight jackets by choosing Twitter Spaces as his former presidential launchpad. The Florida governor is trying to inject a little informality into his stiff neck image that he could make the announcement from inside a kidney-shaped pool filled with wine coolers and still not obscure his straight-jacketed personality. Not to mock the governor, but he exudes more coldness than coolness. He gives every appearance of not particularly liking people. That feeling has been reciprocated in the recent national polls, his numbers have peaked and tumbled down. There's the physical straight jacket he dons when he takes the podium or mingles with voters who walks through the crowd protected by his ultra-protective retinue. Dead-eyed and dour, Ron DeSantis speaks a body language that always seems to be looking for an exit. So I think Ron DeSantis really needs the Alexander technique. All right, so he's gotten through life by trying really hard. But in trying and trying and trying, all right, he has become really stiff. And it shows, right? He has all sorts of unnecessary muscular tension going on. So let's have a look at... These elites in D.C. could learn a thing or two about what IA was done and the common sense and the conservative values. But instead, Biden and his... So notice how there's not much room in his neck, right? His neck's kind of tight and constricted. His whole body is tight. His speech is tight. His thinking seems to be tight. His emotion seems to be blocked. So some Alexander technique lessons would really help this guy loosen up to be a much more effective communicator. I mean, he could even have, like, Luke Ford-like numbers on YouTube. Like, I've got 11 live viewers on YouTube right now. And it's all thanks to the Alexander technique. I'm just feeling so light in my loafers. Crew, our intent to plunge this country into the abyss. We are going in the wrong direction as a country now. Are you happy with having an open border where millions of illegals are pouring in? No! Are you happy having an economy where inflation has reduced our standard of living? Okay, you don't want these kind of weak hand gestures, right? If you're gonna make a gesture, you wanna keep it in here, right? And only do it infrequently. And that makes it more powerful. Are you happy that Biden is trying to stop us from being energy-independent? So, notice all the muscular tension and compression this guy has. He would so benefit. Riccardo says, hopefully Ron DeSantis sees this clip. He gets the healthy knees from a certified Alexander technique consultant like Luke Ford live streams. Yeah, Ron needs to work on his flex bar in the circle of power. And not even producing our own? Are you upset that we have a bureaucracy that is totally out of control? I mean, just think about how this has been weaponized. They will go after people who don't think like them. If Hunter were a Republican, he would have been in jail a long time ago. And we all know that. We can gestures, not a lot of vocal variety. He is just stuck in a straight jacket of his own habits. We all are, to varying degrees. We develop these coping mechanisms that usually involve some degree of tightening and compression to get through difficult, painful things. Let's say you were spanked a lot as a kid. You tightened up in response to the threat of being hit. Let's say you asked various girls out and they said, no, and humiliated you. As a result, you tightened and compressed and pulled down to get through that humiliation. So we steadily lived lives in ever tightening straight jacket of our own maladaptive responses to reality, our own unhelpful patterns of tightness and compression so that life becomes less and less joyful. We feel less and less free in our bodies, in our thinking, in our emotions. And so it helps to step back, notice which of your responses to stimuli are not serving you, inhibit those unhelpful responses to create freedom to move and speak and think and feel in a new direction. Are you happy with seeing cities across this country overwhelmed with crime? No. Are you happy to see institution after institution be infected with the woke mind virus? Are you happy that the federal government used its authority to try to impose a bio... So there's very little spontaneity that ever ripples across his face. So whenever I have a thought, it is rippling across my face. I cannot think without some element of tension and compression. Every thought I have is rippling across my face. When you learn the Alexander technique, you learn to let go of habitual levels of compression and tightness that don't serve you and to reduce the tightness and compression that still inevitably still comes with thinking, but you can reduce the severity of this tightness and compression and that allows you to be more alive to the moment and allows people to look into your soul more. So it may not necessarily be a great technique for people who want to thrive playing poker, but if you want to communicate with people, words are only about 10% of communication. The most important forms of communication radiate from your face, from how you hold yourself, from your body language, from whatever is going on with you emotionally, intellectually, socially. Medical security state on this country with mandates and lockdowns. And if it wasn't for states like Florida and Iowa, they would have gotten away with it, but we had the gall to say no, not on our watch. Okay, this is Alexander technique, help Luke unlock all the extra mental processing power stored in his facial muscles. Well, what it did is it helped me unlock many of my unhelpful habits. So when I was getting up out of a chair before I studied the Alexander technique, I would kind of throw myself forward and then push myself up, right? Because I was that locked and loaded in my body. But when I started studying the Alexander technique, I was able to start letting go of that unnecessary tightening, that unnecessary compression, that unnecessary tipping of the head back to compress the neck, that unnecessary tension in my shoulders. My shoulders used to be just so tight. It was just uncomfortable. I remember I took some acupuncture and this guy would do this technique. It wasn't really acupuncture, but he just released my shoulder muscles. And so I just get an intimation briefly of what it was like to have free shoulders. And then when I took my first Alexander technique lessons by the Alexander technique teacher, Julia Culder would scoot my shoulders and it just felt amazing until my habits of tension and compression return just to operate with free shoulders. But when your shoulders are free, your thinking is more free. Your emotions are more free. Your choices in life are more free. So I remember I was about halfway through my three-year Alexander technique teacher training. This was every day for three hours from 9.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m., five days a week, about 36 weeks a year. And about halfway through this, I remember on a Friday afternoon, I said, I'm just going to go home and be kind to myself. I'd never spoken or even probably thought that way in my entire life, but by letting go of kind of the punitive tendencies that I have towards myself. And I struggle with some self-hatred. When I let go of my punitive unnecessary muscular compression and tension that reduced the intensity of my self-hatred and opened up room where I could be kinder to myself. When I'm kinder to myself, I tend to be kinder to other people. Another thing that happened when I let go of the straight jacket of my own habits is that I became open to something I'd been hearing about for 14 years, a 12-step program for sex and love addiction. And so I think it was in something like April of either 2010, 2011. I went to my first 12-step meeting and I'd previously just made fun of 12-step meetings. But I became willing to try something that had previously I thought ridiculous and stupid and unmanly and bogus. I became willing to try something new and it really helped me and I found community and friends there. Do I use a foam roller to loosen my muscles? I own one, but I almost never use it anymore. Like I would use it 10 years ago. Do you know what I felt? Much more helpful to loosen my muscles. Even more helpful than the Alexander technique. The Alexander technique is good for when you're in action. But when muscles are in spasm, Alexander technique is what's much more effective. I have found for listing type muscles is strain counter strain therapy, otherwise known as positional release. So I've never used the foam roller anymore, but I've got it here. And are we all, especially on the heels of Memorial Day, are we all revolted by how we lost 13 service members in Afghanistan due to the ineptitude of Joe Biden as Commander-in-Chief? Yes. So we have a situation where the political elite in this country are detached from the wishes of everyday hardworking Americans. Listen to this stat. Five of the seven... Okay, let's learn a little bit about strain counter strain therapy. Great way for letting go of... Let's go over the osteopathic technique of strain counter strain. So with the counter strain CCS, strain counter strain. What the technique is, is it's going to utilize passive forces, meaning the patient is going to relax. They're not going to do anything. You're going to tell the patient, can I please have you relax? It's going to be an indirect technique, meaning you're not going to go into the barrier. You're going to go away from the barrier. And then tender points. A tender point is going to be a location on the body. There's going to be a whole bunch of tender points related to a lot of different levels of the body. You're going to find a tender point. One of the key points about these tender points are going to be there's no pain and radiation. I poke this tender point. It's going to be tender at the level of palpation, yet that tenderness will not radiate distally to any other area. So that's one differentiation between a tender point and a trigger point, for example. The technique that we're going to use for strain counter strain. Now, for strain counter strain, what you're going to be doing is you're going to be finding these tender points. So first, you're going to find a tender point. That's going to be the very first time. You're going to help it. You're going to place your finger on it. It will be painful to the patient, so don't push too hard, but you do want to palpate. So place your finger on that tender point. Next, what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to place that patient into a position of ease. This is where the passiveness comes in. You're going to tell the patient, relax for me, position of ease. Typically, you're going to be shortening the muscle. So let's say I had a bicep's tender point. What I would do is I would flex the bicep because I'm going to shorten the origin and insertion distance. I'd be shortening that muscle. So for example, position of ease, depending on the tender point, there are some nuances. However, the general principle is you want to shorten whatever muscle the tender point is located within. You want to shorten the distance. So the position of ease. Next, you want to do is this position should diminish the pain. Now, the target goal is 70 to 100%, and 75 to 100%. So pretty much three quarters. So before I did the show today, I did the basics about four different positions. I located the unnecessary tension in my body and released it using this technique. Let's see if we can find... And we'll talk how to actually administrate it into different areas in the body. So what we're looking for, we're looking for a muscle or an area that is tight, spasm or tension. And we're trying to position that area in a released position. So let's say we have the scalings here, okay? So the scalings... I'll help you in how to find the position release. What the scalings does is side bend. So when you find and locate and release these muscle spasms, you are happier, you are freer. Your thinking is freer. Everything works better. Exactly the position you put ahead. So actually it's the muscle action that you put ahead there. Then when the... Neck crunch videos. No, no, no. There is no crunching out bell. And up bell, how do I get your mother on this show? You've got to tell me. Because I feel like if I can just convince your mother of the great things that we're talking about on this show, then... I mean, is your mother married to your father? I'm just curious. Because I could be like a father to you out bell and that's what I really want. I mean, nothing creepy about that. No crunching going on here. No snapping. This is tenderness personified. This is positional release. The muscle is relaxed. Then you're massaging that area. Here. Here. And then once in a while. So actually it's a finger kneading. And it's a lot easier to go into that scaling muscles when they're relaxed. Then once in a while you can stretch the scalings. Again, be aware that I'm dragging the head. I'm not lifting the head. Yeah. And then again you're... And it's interesting because when I do that I feel the muscle is still not relaxed. Why? It's almost contracting but letting go. It's nothing that the client would be aware of it. It's just the state of the tone of the muscle. So you want to locate those muscles that are in spasm and by following the techniques, particularly in the first video, you can let go of that unnecessary strain. So let's... Muscles or other structures that are attached to muscles like ligaments, tendons, things like that. In order to know or anticipate where those tendons points are going to be we need to know the structure of that muscle. Where it originates and where it inserts. So we're thinking about its connection points at the ischial tuberosity and then distally at the lateral condyle, lateral collateral ligaments, febular head area. And that's where we expect that point. It reflects the knee and remind my patient not to help. It reflects the knee and externally rotate the tibia and AB duct the ankle. Now that I've reached this expected treatment position, I'm going to ask my patient to compare the tenderness to its original state. So this particular procedure you can't do obviously on your own, but a lot of them you can do on your own. Today called counter strain technique. But if you've got a strain counter strain so what happens is that some of the students they're a little bit confused with this technique comparing it to trigger points. The reason is that we use tender points when we're performing counter strain techniques and everyone thinks that they're very similar or the same thing as a trigger point. There's a little bit of difference here. For trigger points that we have, normally the pain will radiate. So when you compress the point, it's going to radiate to another area. But for tender points there's no radiation. There's a couple of key things you want to remember here for a technique. So the key points are going to be the following. The first thing is that this is a passive technique. If that means that the client is not going to be doing anything you with the therapist is going to be performing all the movements for the client. And then the other thing we need to keep in mind is that this technique is going to be an indirect technique. When we say the word indirect, it kind of sounds opposite to what we should be thinking. Indirect means we go and we take the muscle and we shorten it. So we bring the muscle into an approximation type of position. So for instance, if we're talking about the bite So Alexander technique is also an indirect technique because you're not so much doing something but you're noticing the things and habits and patterns that you employ that are not helping you such as usually unnecessary strain compression and pulling down and learning to let go of your habitual reactions to stimuli that don't serve you. We're going to be bringing the origin and the insertion closer to each other. And my philosophy on goodness is also an indirect technique. If you have people who love you and who you love, if you have a family and friends and community that you don't want to let down, you're going to be much less likely to engage in gratuitous human cruelty. So it's an indirect technique. If you have love in your life, you grow, develop, maintain love in your life, you're going to be less likely to act out in a needlessly cruel fashion because you don't want to bring pain and humiliation to those people who love you. You don't want to endanger all the love that you've got going on in your life. Indirect technique, but I find that in my experience it's far more effective at promoting goodness and efficiency and ethics and trust and a good, coherent community than a direct technique of trying to morally instruct people. We're kind of contracting the muscle but as I mentioned, it's going to be done passively so the client is not doing the contraction. You as the therapist are going to be performing the movement for them. Then the last thing that we need to do, we need to make sure that we find the correct tender point and we compress the tender points to make sure that the pain scale can be determined by the client. So we're looking at the pain scale, maybe something like around the seven. So that's what I do on this show. I find your tender points and then I place you in a spiritual position where you can let go of your unnecessary pain and then you can feel the release and the relief and glory hallelujah. I can walk again. I can dance again. I can sing like nobody's listening. I can dance like nobody's watching. That's all about on this show. Okay, Politico. Jack Schaefer. So noting both is rigid demeanor. So Guy badly needs Alexander technique and is a deliberate avoidance of the press. The reporters gathering Ron DeSantis have gathered these behavioral cues. We're always sending out cues about who we are. We're always transmitting. You're transmitting God or you're transmitting the disease, bro. So reporters have thrown the candidate into a straitjacket. They portray him as a locked up, frozen and vengeful character whose veins pump bile, not blood. So there was this kid who played football and he took some Alexander technique lessons and then after a few lessons he said to the teacher if I keep having these lessons I'm not going to want to play football anymore. He, by letting go of his unnecessary muscular tension and getting into a better head neck relationship he became more free and at ease with himself as he became more free and at ease with himself he was less inclined to try to wreak pain and vengeance and violence on other people ago. He didn't want to play tackle football anymore. So when we become aligned and let go of these unhelpful muscular contraction pulling down patterns where we get locked into that fight and fight reflex where our shoulders rise up and our head rotates forward, our head moves forward and also rotates back into our neck compressing us. We're walking around this fight or flight pattern there's not a lot of love that's going to be flowing into your life or out of your life there's not going to be a lot of flexibility in your thinking, in your emotions you're going to interact with people from a very tight compressed and fight and flight perspective. But when you let go of these unhelpful compression and tension patterns a lot of beautiful things can flow in. But right now Uncle Ron is just absolutely stuck in all these unnecessary tension patterns. Wealthiest counties in the United States of America are suburbs of Washington DC. I can tell you they're not producing very much in Washington DC besides mountains of dead and loads of hot air. So why they are wealthy in that part of the country is because our political system rewards people who are connected to the ruling class. Notice how it doesn't pop you want to pop when you're communicating. I remember when I was taking audition classes as an actor. My teacher would tell me to just tilt the head down a little bit. Notice how the eyes pop when you bring your head down and then as you allow different thoughts to flow through you that's going to come through your eyes and you move around a little bit so that you're always providing people with something interesting to look at and the essence of acting is reacting and so you're going to see that reaction more. You just bring the chin down just a little bit without compressing the neck. Just let the chin drop a little bit then the eyes pop. You want to be popping when you're communicating. So what the hell can Ron do? He's in this media straight jacket so once the press typecast a politician or once your friends and community typecast you, everything you do get interpreted through this straight jacket so Ron DeSantis right now is pigeon-holed as Mr. Uptight. He can barely yawn or say hello to voters without being accused of being a gloomy gust so anything you directly try to counteract your image at this point tell jokes, wear funny hats, go on late night talk show hosts that would just do more to amplify the picture than to dilute it. So Ron DeSantis could stage a media event in which he bottle feeds a litter of newborn kittens and the press would still find a way to find evidence of cruelty in the performance. So is there any way out for Ron DeSantis? So there's another recent candidate who is dressed by the press in unfluttering garb who did successfully overcome this representation and won the presidency Donald Trump. So according to a thousand news bulletins Donald Trump was a narcissistic bully he was a misogynist a racist a xenophobic a Putin toady an authoritarian a con man a cheat a liar an egomaniac a fraud in a sexist but instead of contesting these labels Donald Trump just shrugged them off he was you know relatively at ease with who he is right so by and large he slept soundly in the bed that the press made for him he wore their insults like a toga and he wore their descriptions of him like a wreath so could Ron DeSantis make a similar bounty out of his straight jacket personality could he pretend his straight jacket was a royal robe and welcome the abuse right so if the straight jacket fits wear it proudly and you know Ron DeSantis shows how to do that I really like Michael McGee just discovered him in the last few years sat with the feedback and looked deeply into my own my own experience of being here with you all and what I got in touch with in terms of my presenting here was a sense of an underlying fear actually about whether I would be good enough or whether I would be considered worthy enough and so I really noticed that my own love was really coming out in terms of in a way that as I look deeply into my this is a safe space guys for you to discuss your your love wounds right but love wounds you want to share with us experience of this group being here with you all the part of my preparing it in the way that I've done was not only to provide something that would be a value to everybody but I really became aware of there was still that part of me that wanted to be considered if you will level or you know valued by you all and so I saw my own love wound in action and that was really powerful and it really recommitted me and this is sort of foreshadowing of my thoughts today but you know we really really looking at my own intentions and really for part of the work that I'm going to be talking about is about really sort of a purification of love wound we all have love wounds we all have and erotic template we all have love maps there are certain things that tell us that we're on the road to love we have things that turn us on that make our heart go pitter-pitter-pitter-patter-patter-pitter right and they usually have to do with childhood wounds and out love maps our erotic template has to do with acknowledging and embracing those wounds and then healing them And that's the journey that we're all invited to go on. I think it was Dr. Money, was it John Money who came up with the term love maps? I think it's brilliant. Okay, let me find my place, hang on. Refinement, if you will, of intention and really trying to offer this to you all today, my thoughts in terms of the spirit of really just wanting to give to you all and to benefit you all as best as I can. So I'm gonna be talking from a very personal perspective about step six, as I understand it. And in a way, I'm really lucky, I'm really glad that Alan has done it this way because I get to listen to Alan and Tom and Glenn and other people, you all sort of talk about step six and really absorb and digest everything that you say. And it's just great to be able to finish up and so thank you, Alan, for making it be that way for me. It's great. So I guess in terms of step six and reflecting on this for me from a very sort of personal point of view, I think of step six as really almost a dedication, like a dedication, a step to dedicate my life to loving. That's really what it means for me. When I was in my 20s, early 20s, I took some Buddhist precepts, but I didn't really follow through on all of those precepts in terms of really living them. And really, I think the problem was is that I really hadn't really made that step of truly deeply dedicating myself to a life of love. So I think that step six, as Alan just said, is a real growth step. It's a step from moving away from feeling on. Okay, will you join me today in rededicating your life, right? To a life of love and radical inclusion. All right, Janan Ganesh has a terrific weekly column. He is the most prestigious pundit and columnist around today. He writes for the Financial Times. I spent, what is it, about $200 a year subscribing for the Financial Times in large part so I can read Janan Ganesh, I think his family's from Sri Lanka. And he writes twice a week for the Financial Times. Let me show you a picture of him. Here we go. Whoops. Ha ha ha ha. There we go. The Vibe Theory of Politics. But first, I was from 2022. This week he wrote, why Rhonda Santis is losing Republicans to Trump. He mistakenly thinks populist voters want to win power and do something with it. So I don't agree with him here, but I find it stimulating. Consider for a moment what Donald Trump gives to his average follower, membership in a vast and nationwide communion of like-minded people, a paternal figure in a confusing world, the prison of transgression, in middle-aged whites don't often in life get to play the rebel. So next to all of this, what is the marginal benefit of seeing him win an actual election? What after that is the marginal benefit of watching his policies come into force? No doubt, Trump fans would rather have these bonus items than not, but he has done them a profound emotional and almost spiritual service before it ever gets to that. I think that is true. It's not clear that Rhonda Santis understands this about populism. So Rhonda Santis is not a natural populist, right? He has to be MAGA enough to get Republican voters, but with the assurance to his donors that he's not really MAGA. So he, another thing that makes him stiff is that he's playing a false game, but he is not a populist. He is not MAGA, but he has to sound populist and he has to sound MAGA enough to win the Republican primary. But in reality, he can't behave in a populist or a MAGA fashion like Donald Trump or he'll lose his donors. So the governor of Florida trades on his electability and administrative competence. I mean, is there any doubt that Rhonda Santis is vastly more competent than Donald Trump? But if either of these things were paramount for voters in the Republican primaries, the contest would already be over. Like Donald Trump lost the midterm elections in 2018. He lost the presidential election in 2020. He's the only president in the 80 odd year history of the Gallup approval rating poll never to score even 50%, right? Republican candidates who bear his stamp, stamp have a mixed electoral record at best. I mean, a lot of Donald Trump fans know deep down that almost anyone else would do better with the national electorate in 2024, but that doesn't seem to matter because supporting other Republicans doesn't bring the sense of tribal belonging, the supporting Donald Trump brings, right? No other Republican upsets the liberals as much. So Rhonda Santis boasts about his executive grip, but that doesn't really seem to resonate with the voters, right? Just because liberals fear the emergence of a competent demagogue doesn't mean that populist voters yearn for it to the same degree. I mean, how much of Trump's base did he lose when he failed to build that wall on the Mexican border? How much of it has gone over to Joe Biden is thanks for passing the biggest protectionist bill in memory. So Ron DeSantis is a logical man. He thinks that politics is about accomplishing things. Like Donald Trump doesn't think politics is about accomplishing things. Donald Trump thinks politics is about self-aggrandizement. Rhonda Santis doesn't realize that politics is largely about group identity, the type of identity that people once got from a church or a trade union, but this is kind of lost on Rhonda Santis's rational thinking. So Rhonda Santis thinks like liberal. So the left tries to answer populist concerns by reshoring industrial jobs and devolving power. And yeah, populism does have tangible grievances, but beyond the tangible grievances, populism brings group membership, a tribal identity that starts to mean more and more to people as opposed to tangible benefits. And Donald Trump sees this more clearly than his rivals. So Rhonda Santis, please, politics is downstream of culture, the culture shape of the institutions, the conservatives have seated these institutions to the organized left and he is right. But the Gramsci of Tallahassee doesn't just diagnose the problem. He is creative, he is dogged, he is installed a right-wing counter hegemony. Just ask Disney and the educational bureaucracies of Florida, right? This is more thought and more work than Donald Trump has ever put into the cause. But it seems to be right now for Republican voters beside the point. I mean, is it even clear that populist voters want to win the cultural war? Maybe just being in the cultural war gives them meaning. Right, maybe there's more group identity in losing. Maybe there's more solidarity under siege than in triumph. So maybe none of the governor's arguments against Trump, such as his electoral repellence, his boredom with detail, his incompetence, maybe none of these arguments are as wounding as he hopes. So Rhonda Santis is a case study in the vibes theory of politics, right? Doesn't matter that he is effective, right, doesn't matter that he is competent, the matter that he is sincere, right? He seems like a creature of the establishment, right? From his neat hair, his sober tailoring, right? No populist worth the name would be reading Rhonda Santis' briefs and enacting ideas with such bureaucratic patience. I mean, you can just imagine Donald Trump shouting nerd at him. So a strident right-winger from a far humbler background than Donald Trump is framed as though he's the latest scion of the Bush clan. Now, what's the vibe theory of politics? This is a Renan Ganesh column in the Financial Times from July 22, 2022. He says our beliefs are often just unexamined tribal loyalties. That politics is mainly about vibes, right? Most people's ideological commitments are soft. That's right, most people, 90% plus people don't have a coherent political ideology, right? For most people, politics is a form of in-group identity, right? What they think of as a political belief is usually a post hoc rationalization of a group loyalty. And this is even more true, not less true, of the highly educated, high-information voters. So what education does is exchange people from their parents and from their hometown. It leaves them casting around for an alternative identity and a political tribe is as good as any in our increasingly secular age. And Renan Ganesh says, I am alive to this habit because I possess it. Why do I side with Rishi Sunak over Liz Truss or with Emmanuel Macron? A protectionist with the weird thing for Russia going back years, right? There are reasons of substance, but in all candor, it's a matter of vibes and tribes. At a base level, these are my people. They dress and they act like the average of my 10 best friends. That's how we usually operate in politics and religion. And in life, we tend to act like the average of our best friends. If there are awkward things that come up, we just reinterpret them. So imagine if at the start of COVID, Donald Trump had shut his country down and Angela Merkel had kept hers open. Donald Trump could have justified his action as a protector of the homeland while she stressed liberal ideals. As a girl in East Germany, I saw the human cost of draconian government intervention. So the pandemic culture war that we have seen since 2020 would have been inverted. It would have become a badge of right-wing pride the world over to mask up and to stay in. Would have been a progressive statement to bear your face and your party. People don't work out what they think and then join the corresponding tribe. People join a tribe and then they infer from their tribe what they think. That's the team sport of politics today. It is fiercer and fiercer and it is about less and less. Right? That's Janan Ganesh in Financial Times. Being in that state of unlovable and disconnected it's really a dedication to a realization of our loveability and our connectedness and our interdependence. So it's really a dedication to really a life of the practice of love. And as Alan says, I really see that as what Alan calls our true self, a sort of self realization. So I think of step six as a decision to enter into a daily life of a devotional practice and even worshipful, even worshipful to think of each day as a day of worship. For me anyway, that's what it is. And it's really worshiping and loving the we that contains the me. And I'm aware, Tom's probably gonna be aware that I'm writing again, but it really is living for the one that we are a part of. And I think the more that we awaken my experience personally and is that we realized that really we are part of something that is greater than us. We've had that experience of oneness. And so it's sort of living in the absolute. If you don't have community in your life, you may be missing out on something that most people find incredibly powerful. Like feeling yourself a part of something greater than yourself. But also the same time living the relative of our separateness from each other and that both are happening at the same time. I think the other thing is, Glenn mentioned last time about us sort of dedicating our lives to sort of a practice of working on our character defects. And yet the way that step six is written, it's really about sort of asking God to remove our defective character or being ready, step six is being ready to ask God to remove our defective character, which sounds in a way kind of passive. It's like we're sort of surrendering and we're just asking God to change us. And I've been thinking about, that's always sort of... So I just wanted to run down the 12 steps we admit we're powerless over fluid alcohol, sex, porn, second part that our lives have become unmanageable. So if your life is unmanageable, let's say it's unmanageable in your finances or in your love life or with your weight or with your relationships, right? You may very well have an addiction going on. And so emotional sobriety is about the path towards a manageable life even after you abstain from whatever is the practice, the process or the substance over which you realize that you're not fully in control of. So step one, admit you're powerless and that your life would become unmanageable. Two, come to believe that a power greater than yourself can restore you to sanity. And so this doesn't have to be God, it can be the group, it can be reality, it can be the universe. Make a decision to turn our well and our lives over to the care of God as we understand him. Step four, make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Step five, admit to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. So when I did a fourth step and it listed off my resentments and then listed off where I was to blame, it was so much more powerful that when I read it aloud to people, really hit home. Step six, we were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. So for example, I get highly triggered by any threat to my status. Even as low as my status might be anything that threatens to lower my status, right? I get triggered, I couldn't sleep the other night because there'd been a very minor threat to my status that in all likelihood would not have affected you. You would have slept just fine, but I woke up at 11 p.m. just filled with rage. I tried to just watch Seinfeld and I still couldn't fall back to sleep. And so I just got up and just started working on my blog till about 2 a.m. Because I was just so filled with rage with what I experienced as a threat to my status. Step seven, humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings. Step eight, make a list of persons we have harmed, become willing to make amends to them all unless it would hurt them or ourselves. Now make direct amends to people wherever possible. 10, continue to take personal inventory. And when we are wrong, promptly admit it. So that's a pretty good measure of maturity and someone who's morally responsible. When they're wrong, how quickly can they admit it? 11, seek to improve our conscious contact with God as we understand him, praying only for knowledge of his will for us, the power to carry that out. 12, having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we try to carry this message to those who are suffering and to practice these principles in all of our affairs. Trouble me a little bit, not trouble me, but sort of confused me in a way about that active role versus the passive. I realized that actually there's a tremendous wisdom in step six, that we really don't change ourselves. We don't, and I really wanna focus on that today with you all, but there are things. Yeah, that's one thing I talk about with my sponsors. We don't overcome our character defects by deliberately directly attacking them. So I have a character defect that when I'm late, I tend to be inconsiderate. I tend to be dismissive of everyone, everything that gets in my way. I just tend to treat people purely on an instrumental basis. I'm not a very nice person when I'm late. I'm not a very nice person when my status is threatened or my, I feel like my financial survival is under threat. Like, the beast comes out of me. So to whatever extent I have become a better person over the past 10, 12 years, maybe there's been some internal change I like to think so, primarily it's about placing myself in better situations. So I'm not running late. You know, I got money in the bank. I've, you know, I spend my time with people who are good for me by placing myself in better situations. You know, my life has gone better. So character defects. Okay, I tend to say a lot of inappropriate things and directly working on this tendency which has socially sabotaged me again and interpersonally sabotaged me again and again and again. I've missed out on so many opportunities for love, for sex, for connection, for community, like for money and power and all the good things in life because I would say inappropriate things and inappropriate times to inappropriate people. I have had virtually zero success directly trying to overcome my tendency to make inappropriate jokes. Directly trying to work on that has not worked for me. On the other hand, to whatever extent I can feel like I'm here to help God's kids. To other every extent, I can implement this kind of helping 12 step attitude that I'm here to be of service. Then my tendency to say inappropriate things at inappropriate times, inappropriate people just considerably diminishes if not entirely goes away. So when I'm in the mindset of I just wanna be helpful, just wanna help, I didn't struggle with saying inappropriate things. I struggle with saying inappropriate things when I become attention seeking, when I want to show off, when I wanna have control or influence over people and I wanna make them laugh so that I feel better about myself. So when I've moved from a other-centered, hopeful mindset to a selfish, acknowledge me mindset that I just get into trouble in so many ways, I say inappropriate things. I hit on women inappropriately. I'm not always honest and forthcoming. I'm not always responsible. I'm not considerate of other people and their needs when I'm placing myself first and I try to place a higher goal, some transcendent goal of just being helpful than all the character defects that have tripped me up and embarrassed and humiliated me and defeated me over the course of my life. It just seemed to drop out. And that's without working on them directly. But if I can increase my constant contact with reality, with God, with other people, work on building my relationships, then my desire to act out and shock all people and offend people just diminishes. When I've got friends, when I've got community, when I've got love in my life, when I see people on a regular daily basis, face to face who I love and who love me, I don't have much of a desire to hurt and wound and shock and bother them. Things that we can do consciously that we have some conscious control over, but it's kind of the way I see it. It's kind of like taking care of trees so that they would bear fruit. We can water the trees and we can provide the trees with fertilizer and make sure they get sun and protect them if it gets too cold, but we can't make a tree bear fruit. And in that same way, I don't think we make ourselves really change, but I'm gonna talk about sort of the three things that I think that we can do. And as I think very carefully about what are the three things that we can do to sort of cultivate the fruit of love in our lives, and what is it that we can do that is acts of worship, acts of dedication of our lives to the... And that's what I need more in my life. I've implemented something in my life the last few weeks after suffering some social humiliation where I made an inappropriate joke that really shocked and hurt people and made them feel unsafe around me. Here's something I've implemented. I've tried doverning with Kavanaugh, right? I've tried praying with intention. Like I pick up the Jewish prayer book and I try to say at least like one word like I mean it. And then if I can say a sentence like I mean it, and sometimes I translate God to reality just because sometimes that resonates with me better. But I just try to say a word or two or a sentence as though I mean it. And I also do it because I hate it. I'm not really into doverning. I'm not really into prayer. And so by doing it, I recognize that what I want to do is not necessarily good for me. And it's a good idea for me to do some things that I don't like to do like doverning prayer. I really don't like doverning, but I've been implementing that on a regular basis just even if I'm just trying to say one word from a genuine place. And as I've been doing this, there's a beautiful morning prayer in Judaism where we bless and acknowledge God who restores strength to the weary. Now I love that. I mean, most of my life I struggle with fatigue and chronic fatigue so badly. I was bedridden through most of my 20s. Fatigue has held my life in a straight jacket. Like I haven't gotten to lead a normal life and have the things that normal people with my abilities have. I have not gotten to marry or have kids, buy a home, I've not flourished, large part because my life has been knee capped by just debilitating amounts of fatigue which largely went away when I started taking people organs two years ago. But I still struggle at times with fatigue and so this idea that God restores strength to the weary is like, oh, I was forclamped. It's like, wow. But what do you find restores strength to you? Like what recharges you when you're weary? So I can't sit here and tell you, oh, it's a religious ritual that consistently restores my strength. Sometimes it does display an important role. Can't tell you that it's prayer. It's the most effective way for me to refine strength so sometimes it plays a role. The most effective way that I replenish my energy and my strength is love, right? Loving people and being grateful for the love that people show me, having a sense of gratitude, the kindness people show me and being around with people and then getting on the same page with someone. So I'm acknowledging where they're at and what they wanna talk about in addition to where I'm at and what I wanna talk about. When we create that shared reality, like when we bond even if it's just a good morning, good morning, but if it's real, then I get energy from that. So establishing a common ground with other people face to face, having real life interactions, creating a shared reality with other people and then developing some sort of rhythm in my interactions with that person in our shared reality. More than anything else that tends to replenish my strength and my energy. Now there are other things that help a little bit called showers and the Daphnel, the occasional use of coffee, inspiring talks. I love these 12 step talks from Optimal Recovery and Emotional Sobriety Institute, like I'm playing now, 12 step meetings, sponsoring people, being sponsored, music I love, right? You can, I find I can essentially set my mood by the type of music that I listen to. Going for a walk, right? These also help me replenish my strength, but what helps you replenish your strength? Practice of love. I really come back to what I teach in my writing and what I work on with my patients in which I find very effective clinically and also personally for me is what I call the three As of awakening. And I like this method because it's simple enough for me to remember and simple enough for other people to remember. And there's a lot that's packed into these three As and the three As are attending, appreciating and acting with love. And the reason why I see our practice. Wow, attending. Like that's so hard for me. I realized that not everybody appreciates jokes that make fun of different groups. I mean, it's shocking. I mean, I thought everyone would enjoy ethnic jokes or jokes about women or jokes about men or jokes about Jews or jokes about Christians or jokes about Muslims. Like I thought everyone just loved ethnic humor or jokes that, but some like really, really smoking heart, intelligent, capable, amazing women hate, hate jokes that make fun of anyone let alone ethnic humor or misogynistic humor. They hate it. And so if I want to attend to my relationships with women like that, I don't make those kind of jokes, right? I just hold back on that part of myself. I God, they're women who are so smoking heart and they so don't like jokes that make fun of anyone. It's like such a dilemma. It's like smoking heart. And yet they just hold so many seemingly to me like completely irrational beliefs. You know, they're into feminism. They're into course of miracles with Marion Williamson. They're into just such nourish kite, kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, astrology. And if I want to attend to my relationship at any level with these smoking heart, brilliant accomplished women, right? I have to take their hero system into account when I interact with them. Practice of a worshipful devotion to living a life of love is those three As is because the three things that we really have control over to some degree is what we can pay attention to. And then we have some control over our attitude. Alan has talked a lot about attitude about having a wholesome attitude. And the other thing is we have some degree of control over our action. So an attitude for a philosophy, a principle that I found is really helping me is to try to have the best possible relations with everyone that I possibly can. And that usually means extending empathy to people. So when people are upset, sending empathy to them generally tends to calm them down and allow space for much more meaningful interaction. So there was a woman outside of the synagogue I was attending, it was just screaming all these, you know, epithets that Jews and I went outside and I said, hey, I'm really interested in what you have to say. And so I listened to her, I empathized with her and we ended up having a great conversation for over an hour, you know, gotten together socially since then. A lot of good things seem to come into my life when I adapt this practice of wanting the best possible relations with everyone that's in my life, you know, even if they're left wing feminists, even if they're gay or they're transgendered or they're, you know, whatever they are, commies, right? I want the best possible relations with communists. It's maybe less than we think that we do, but through some consideration and reflection at least some control of our actions as well. So we control our attitude, we get to control what we pay attention to and we can control our actions. So I'd like to just go through a very... Yeah, I find I can control what I pay attention to. So I limit the amount of misogynistic, you know, misanthropic content that I consume, right? I monitor what I consume because what I listen to, what I read has an influence on me. Very quickly, these three and how we practice this devotional practice of love in our lives that I see that we make this decision to practice. What are we deciding to practice? So I think the first thing in terms of attending is I like to combine the idea of attending with appreciation and I talk about appreciation. Yeah, so when I cultivate appreciation for people, for opportunities and beauty in my life, my life just seems to go so much better and I'm much less likely to say inappropriate things that are inappropriate times for inappropriate people. Should have attending. That is attending with a kind, kind eye. When we attend with appreciation, but we're really... I'll talk a little bit more about appreciation. So one of the Alexander techniques that I use is to let go of everything that I think I know and just look at the world from a place of observing rather than judging. So there's a time for judgment, right? Absolutely times that you have to make judgments, but whenever you make judgments, there's some extra tension and compression that comes with it. So letting go of everything I think I know and just look outside my window and look at the trees and the flowers and the plants and like open up my visual field. So right now I can see both sides of the room simultaneously. When you can see both sides of the room simultaneously, you will automatically move up in your musculature. It verges on the impossible to be compressed, intense and pulled down when you're expanding your field of awareness so that you can see both sides of the room simultaneously as well as everything right in front of you. So the soft kind eye, the observing eye as opposed to the judging self, I find unlocks unnecessary tension in my neck, back, shoulders. But what we're doing is we're ultimately cultivating what Ron Downs calls loving presence or loving awareness. And you see that. I mean, you see that in people who are realized. You see that in Tom, you see that in Alan, you see that in Glenn, you see that in a lot of you who are presenting here that cultivation of this loving awareness. One of the things I love about 12Set programs, 12Set meetings is just how raw, how vulnerable, how honest people are. I just consistently find level of honesty and vulnerability in 12Set meetings that I don't find elsewhere. Someone described 12Set meetings as, you know, God with skin. Right. You know, I hear what God has done in people's lives and it moves me. And that's, and really it's that. That's what we want to try and cultivate. And attending is about being a kind, curious investigator and really looking very, very closely, asking yourself, what is this? What is this? What is this? And really attending from a presence perspective or a mindfulness perspective to our thoughts and our sensations and our emotions, our urges, our understandings, and also our beliefs. I mean, our beliefs, but also our intentions as I attend. And Pige says, you can say anything to a good woman, if you're honest. And I would strongly, strongly, strongly disagree because everyone's coming from a place of hurt and pain and they have a history. They have a love map. They have an erotic template. They have a life situation. And they're going to be all sorts of things that you're, you or I would consider true that, you know, a good loving woman is not going to be after here. Now, if a woman loves you and you have excellent rapport with her, then you're going to be after share more things than with someone who doesn't. So often in a workplace, like there'll be men who are very popular with the women in the workplace and they have a wider variety of things that they can say that if an ordinary person said that the women would just get offended. So I would sigh, you know, 50% with what Pige is saying, but everybody hurts. Everybody's vulnerable. Everybody is unable to hear certain basic truths at time because of their own vulnerability. And the two, as I was reflecting on my last presentation, attending to our intentions is such an important thing. So in terms of the two things that I think are the most important to attend to, there's many things that are important to attend to, but the two that are most important I think is to pain. And I've heard Alan talk about this too as well. In a way, if there's one thing that we could do, it would be to sort of be vigilant to our pain as we go through our day and to really, really be careful because it goes against our reflex, our reflex is to sort of avoid our pain and to react impulsively. Yeah, that's my tendency. I just want to focus on what's good in my life, what I'm grateful for, what's working. So large part of me just wants to distract myself from the pain. So the other day, I saw some friends going off together to social gathering and I wasn't invited. And I thought, oh my God, did I say something inappropriate last time I was at this person's house? You know, am I no longer in the circle of trust? I was incredibly painful. And I don't want to run from that pain. I don't live in it either, but just, you know, recognize that, yeah, that was painful or I could be out on a hike and I could see some acquaintances and suddenly be such a stake in my heart realizing that they would never ask me to accompany them. That the outrageous things I say here are going to rub a lot of people the wrong way. So they're not going to want to include me in their life because they don't think I'm safe. That's painful. They want to sit in the pain forever, but I don't want to avoid it either. But this practice of loving is really reversing that and it's really attending very carefully to whatever pain arises. Because when you look deeply into the pain, I was just rereading a cartilage book, The Power of Knowledge is a very good book. And in his second chapter, he talks about this in different language, but it's sort of the same thing. When you look very... And Pigger says, I have been married for 20 years. I've got a whole rank on this, fair enough. Very, very deeply into this interview pain. You see that at the bottom of it is really oftentimes just an illusion, the illusion of ego, the delusion of ego, the delusion of our unloved ability, the delusion of an excessive fear about our safety. The attachment to a need, as Alan has talked about so much for people, to treat as a certain way to be okay. And really, if you attend very deeply to your pain, oftentimes the pain will dissolve. It just doesn't pay. I find that happens over and over and over again. The second thing to attend to is our intentions, as I mentioned. And our intentions can be unwholesome or wholesome. There can be intentions, for example, again, driven by pain to harm, to manipulate others, driven by this delusion of our unloved ability to get others. Yeah, I often have the intention, I want to command attention. Like, look at me, talk about me, admire me. I mean, that's like, you know, one of the strongest drives in my life, but gets me into quite a lot of trouble. If I instead, you know, attend to my relationships and recognize the people who've been kind and good to me and I'm not nearly as needy for strangers to admire me. Just to love us, which is really, I think part of the awakening of step four and five and six is to realize that it's really our job to love ourselves. I'm reading Ellen's new book, which is just incredible. And he has a chapter in there about... Yeah, so because most of my life, I have not loved myself, right? Because most of my life has been characterized by extreme amounts of self-hatred, self-loathing, self-disgust. You stupid mother-effer. I'm so effed. Like just the other day, I went into the bathroom after I made a significant mistake and I just like cursed at myself for two minutes. And then I said, I'm going to give myself two minutes and just swear at myself, and then I'm going to let it go and move on. But because I had so much self-loathing, self-hatred, I was just driven to try to get acknowledgement and recognition and admiration or at least attention from other people, which led me to doing really extreme things like writing about the pornography industry because that was a very easy way to get attention because thousands of people wanted to know about the inner lives of porn stars. Nobody's coming to rescue us. And it really is that idea that really, in attending to our intentions, to really let go of the intention to try and get somebody else to fix us or love us or make us better. Yeah, various girlfriends have picked that up in me. They would leave my place feeling sore. I just hammered them into the floor. They'd feel exhausted because I was just so emotionally needy. The time together had been all about me and my needs. And they would pick up that I wanted someone to rescue me from my own self-hatred. No one can do that. And at the same time, to really attend and to really nurture and honor wholesome intentions. And for me, my experience is that I start my day in silent solitude and stillness as much as I can. I have a very busy ADD kind of mind, but to the best I can, when I find myself surrounded in stillness, what arises? Now, I don't always get to start my day in silence and stillness, though it's a goal. I usually don't attend to my email often for the first two hours, don't attend to the news for the first two hours of the day. But even if I can't achieve that, at least set aside some time, even if it's only two minutes for meditation in the morning, just two minutes of meditation I find calms me down and makes me more effective. Advises for me is the experience of love. The experience of love. And if we can attend deeply to our peer awareness, our bare awareness, the quality is the miracle. The amazing mystery of it all is that the quality of our bare awareness is loving. And so if we can really attend to that and attend to the intentions that arise out of that, then we find that we have there are intentions to love ourselves and to love others and to love all of life. So that's a very brief overview of this attending. I really see attending as the foundation of love. And I like that. All right. Here is a piece of satire coming from anybody and their three-legged dog. No, say you cannot bring back Ezra Miller. You can't bring back Ezra Miller. I mean, you'll never be flash again. I do believe Ezra is going to get some jail time, though. Probably six months to a year or a year and a half. We got to get this movie out. There's going to be no press junket. You're an absolute rock star. Thank you for taking the time. I appreciate it. Hi, Jay. There's going to be no premiere. No, they're just going to put out trailers and they're going to put the movie out. They're going to rake in a couple hundred million dollars for it. And then they're going to move on from Ezra and Ezra and never be this thing again. Yeah. People tend to get frustrated when bad people do. That's the real reason that Tucker Why was Tucker Carlson really fired from Fox News? The writer Chadwick Moore, who has written a new biography of Tucker Carlson, thinks he knows the reason and had this to say in a video he made today. Let's watch. I've also seen the monologue that Tucker planned to deliver on Monday, April 24th before his show was abruptly taken off the air. That monologue dealt with, among other things, investigations around January 6th and particularly Ray Epps, the only person captured on video inciting people to violence at the Capitol that day and allegedly an FBI informant who still has not been arrested or charged. Ironically, a good part of the monologue also dealt with the people and forces that are trying to silence him, like AOC and others in government. It has now been reported that his firing was a condition demanded by Dominion as part of the settlement with Fox. Although Dominion has denied this, my sources have intimate knowledge of the situation and they have assured me, even before this news leaked, that that is in fact the truth. So Tucker Carlson retweeted that. He quote-tweeted it with those eyes, you know, the two eyes people do when they look intently at this. So what's the implication here? Well, I think it's, the implication is because Tucker retweeted it, I think that's giving some additional credence to the claim that this might have been having something to do with the Dominion lawsuit. Right. But what are you talking about? And then also that Tucker was planning to do even more coverage of January 6th of the theory, very popular on the right, has not been really, I mean, the theory that that individual Ray Epps, we've talked about this on the show, was an FBI agent that no evidence has come forward to verify that. You can see him on video before the day before the Capitol, urging illegal action, in fact, actually other protesters say, Fed, no, no, no, no, because they know, person urging illegal action in other cases has turned out to be a federal informant. And Ray Epps also that, you know, made statements, perhaps exaggerating, but claiming to have had a really important role in organizing the whole thing. He was then, he was on, well, he was on 60 Minutes, I think. You talk about, oh, you know, this, I've been turned into the scapegoat, et cetera, you know, four for me. So, Tucker was gonna do more reporting on that. So, Tucker Carlson obviously has talked at length about Ray Epps in the past. It didn't seem to be an issue for Fox News at that time. I completely get how Tucker retweeting this clip corroborates the theory that it was a dominion lawsuit condition. I'm just a little confused about what we're supposed to read into the content of his Monday remarks, because it did seem like he was making the argument, kind of tacitly, that he was both, both canceled because of the dominion lawsuit, but also because of the content going forward with this taste of Fox News. Telling more to suggesting that I think they were trying to get him off. Yeah, I don't know. I'm just trying to work out what argument is being made. I mean, AOC has to be clear. Multiple times said that letting Tucker be on the air is like a chance of violence. For sure, but if it is the argument that Fox News encodes with AOC, like an agreement, locked arms with AOC, ever being influenced by AOC in any way, and getting rid of Tucker Carlson, or is it that they were afraid of being exposed to additional liability because of taking... Yeah, I think what I'm... Again, what this person's view is, and I don't know whether this is accurate, but it's news, I think that Tucker quote tweeted it. This person is saying that they had to get rid of him because of some handshake from the Dominion lawsuit and then wanted to get rid of him before he was going to deliver this monologue. It'd be interesting to see if he actually does go ahead and deliver the monologue. I mean, just that the fact... Now we can do whatever he wants. Sure. I mean, the fact that he has given so many monologues that I would argue are much more controversial than this one seems to be based on the description and what we know here. Again, who knows? We haven't heard it. Does make me a little skeptical that it's about the particular Monday content as opposed to the Dominion lawsuit because, again, over and over again, what we see is that money talks. The decisions that are being made in terms of how Twitter administers, it's content. The decisions that are being made by other social media companies, the decisions that are being made politically, you know, when you've been the need to mow ears of other authoritarian government. And that... So Twitter was going to go all in with Daily Wire, Daily Wire showing that documentary they released on What is a Woman? And by Matt Walsh. And then Twitter said it went against their standards, that it was hate speech, and that they would, you know, try to throttle its distribution. So Daily Wire seems to be all in bed, had a great deal going with Twitter. Now there are complications. So advertisers, right? Advertisers determine certain standards for what kind of speech is encouraged on a platform. Matt, you know, is cutting against your free speech advocacy, all of these decisions that are being made for financial reasons. And that's not necessarily an indictment. It's just that when we're constantly talking about things in free speech terms or substance terms, and it's really about other kind of decision making, I think it can obscure the story. So I do think there's a world in which Fox News could stand behind everything that Tucker Carlson says, could obviously appreciate it how a remunerative his presence on Fox News has been for years. But at the end of the day, the how many billion dollars again of that they had to pay to Dominion just wasn't worth the squeeze of what Tucker was bringing in until they had to cut ties. Yeah, 787 million, right? That's what the lawsuit was. Yeah, so obviously, right now, Tucker is in dispute with the company. He wants his freedom. He wants to speak. It's been about a month since the firing. I think it's been exactly a month, actually, which also raises that. So in Tucker, there's Chadwick Moore, again, the person who did that video who just watched, has a biography of Tucker coming out. He suggests, and again, I can't verify what his level of access to Tucker was, but the fact that, again, the Tucker account tweeted this suggests to me that there is some level of cooperation or coordination between them. He says he had a lot of access to Tucker and to Tucker staff prior to that. And then as it was happening, as the ouster was taking place, Tucker right now obviously is, you know, he has retained the attorney. He wants a break with Fox. He wants to be able to speak his mind. He said he's launching a show on Twitter. And we should say Fox and Dominion had both denied that the lawsuit required them to ax Tucker. They said that has nothing to do with it. They've not offered a reason beyond that. It's a real interesting time period. So this could be, you know, we've reported previously that Tucker signaled to his allies that they can start speaking out more loudly on his behalf. It's a really interesting time. Yeah, I'm curious from a kind of optics perspective, what does it mean to people? What does it mean to conservatives if Tucker was let go because of Dominion lawsuit versus because of his, because of a difference of... Okay, John Mirsheimer, political science professor says it's not going to make much difference for the Ukraine situation or America's policy towards Ukraine if Donald Trump wins the presidency. The fact is involved. If anything, his polling has declined since he made that statement. But Trump can say, I'll resolve it in 24 hours and he gets away with it because nobody sort of asks him the further questions. And even on CNN, a hostile interviewer only wanted to ask him, do you want Ukraine to win? And he said, I just want people to stop dying and the crowd in New Hampshire broke into innovation. The more central question I think to ask him would be how exactly are you going to do that? Right, indeed. We'll come back to Florida's governor. He's had a big week. But John, I want to bring you in. You're of course known for saying that NATO should take some of the blame for what's happening in Ukraine, but let's pivot specifically to the Republican Party position here. What is the mainstream Republican opinion about Ukraine and how big is this issue going to be the issue of the war in the 2024 election? I think you have to distinguish between the elites and the public. And it's very important to understand that what the public thinks here in the United States just doesn't matter very much. The elites just do what they please. There's no question that there are a lot of doubters in the public, both on the Republican side and on the Democratic side. And it's likely that the number of doubters will grow with time. But the question is, how is that going to affect the elite? And the argument that's being made is that the Republicans are beginning to go soft on Ukraine at the elite level. And that if Donald Trump gets elected, there's a really good chance that he'll pull the plug on the Ukrainians. This is not going to happen, in my opinion. The United States is backing Ukraine to the hilt. And if the United States withdraws its support for Ukraine, its material support, Ukraine is going to collapse. It can't stand up to the Russians. The Russians would win a big victory. It's hard for me to imagine that any American leader, whether it's Donald Trump or Joe Biden, is going to allow that to happen. It's just not going to happen. We are too deeply committed to this war. There's too much Russophobia in the United States. There's too much talk about the fact that this is an existential threat that we're facing with Russia for us to cut and run and allow Ukraine to go under. Furthermore, just think about what the consequences will be for China. My call. Our credibility, people will argue, will be destroyed if we allow Ukraine to lose. So I think Trump talks a good game. All right. So Meersheimer is making the point that personalities don't matter nearly as much in world power politics compared to structural situations. So this is why Meersheimer is much more of a structuralist than someone who pays a great deal of attention to personalities. It really doesn't matter that much. Who's the next president of the United States? Because it's the structure of the U.S. economy and structure of U.S. power politics that's going to run things as opposed to personalities which will usually just have a minor effect. Now, there'd be no Adolf Hitler running Germany in the 1930s and 40s. There would have been no Holocaust. So personalities do sometimes have a dramatic effect. But what he actually does when he's in office, assuming he gets reelected in 2024, is another matter. And I would note here, this is the final point, that Donald Trump, when he ran for president and in his initial few months in the White House, said that he wanted to improve relations with Russia. He viewed Putin as a friend. He wanted to put an end to NATO and get out of Europe. None of that happened. And in fact, what did happen is that in 2017, it was Trump who started arming the Ukrainians. Obama, much to his credit, had the good sense not to harm the Ukrainians. But Trump decided to arm the Ukrainians and we were as tough on the Russians during the Trump administration as we were in any other administration. So Donald Trump can talk all he wants about how he's going to do a 180-degree turn regarding American policy on Ukraine. Yeah, what people say is not necessarily what's important. All right. What people say is not necessarily what's going to happen. Here's more from Misha. Freddie said, I think he's exactly right that Trump views himself as a dealmaker and he thinks that he can move in here and he can talk to Putin, he can talk to Zelensky, he can use pressure on Zelensky and he can cut a deal. The problem that Trump faces is not simply that there would be resistance from the rest of the establishment to be tried to do that. The real problem is there's no deal to be had here. Nobody can figure out what the solution is to shutting this conflict down and there are two reasons for that. One is the territorial issue. The Russians are not going to give back the territory they've conquered and the Ukrainians want that territory back and you can't square that circle. Furthermore, the Russians want Ukraine to be a neutral state and Ukraine wants a security guarantee and that can only come from the West and you can't square that circle. So there is no deal to be had. So there's all this talk these days about using the Chinese as a force or as a moderator to work out some sort of deal. That's not a viable argument because again, it has nothing to do with the Chinese. It's the fact that there's no deal to be had. So Trump can talk to these blue in the face about cutting the deal but there's no deal to be had. But he would and John obviously you're the great expert on international relations so I defer to you on this but he would have leverage. I mean, Americans' power is unrivaled. He would have significant leverage over Ukraine because of the support that America has provided Ukraine and he would have significant leverage over Russia because of the threat that America can pose to Russia and the fact that the war has not been going according to Russia's plan so far. I think you're absolutely right that he would have significant leverage over the Ukrainians. Not total leverage but significant leverage. But I don't believe he'd have any leverage over the Russians. The Russians don't trust the Americans whether it's Trump or Biden as far as they can throw them. And the Russians have a deep-seated interest in taking as much of Ukraine as they can and turning the remaining part of Ukraine into a dysfunctional rump state and promises from Donald Trump that they'll work out some sort of meaningful deal and therefore the Russians can make concessions. It's not going to wash. The Russians no longer trust us and they shouldn't trust us. There's also a question about... So, Misha also makes another point that popular opinion doesn't really control foreign policy. Foreign policy is decided by the elites. So, the elites have universally gone in with supporting Ukraine against Russia even though that's dramatically against America's best interests and Americans don't really care that much about what happens in Ukraine. And he uses the analogy of World War I where Woodrow Wilson decided he very much wanted to take America to war but he was concerned that Americans were not particularly interested in entering the war and he was also concerned that the biggest ethnic groups in America were Germans who would obviously not be in favor of going to war with Germany and the Irish who were not fighting in World War I. So, the elites in America had to gin up all these stories of German outrages to try to make a case for going to war in World War I. It was never a particularly popular decision. Now, all these false stories about German outrages in World War I led many people to not trust stories about Germans committing the Holocaust in World War II because they'd been lied to and fooled once. They weren't going to buy it the second time round. Also, Misha makes the point that Japan launched Pearl Harbor because they were being slowly strangled by the U.S. oil sanctions and because Japan could not get the oil and the natural resources that they needed to continue as a viable country, they were being pushed into a hard place. And so, if Russia starts losing in the war against Ukraine, you can't underestimate what they might do including the use of nuclear weapons. Now, Misha says it looks very likely that Russia's going to overwhelmingly take what it wants from Ukraine. It's going to annex the Russian speaking parts of Ukraine and just make them part of Russia that then Ukrainian sympathizers in Russian parts of Ukraine will move to the western part of Ukraine that Russian speakers in the western part of Ukraine will move to the Russian areas of Ukraine and thanks to intense nationalism on both sides, there will be tremendous loathing between Russia and Western Ukrainians and the West for many, many years to come. There's no solution to be had here. Now, it's good news that Russia's winning in the sense that it's not going to make nuclear war more likely. But if Russia gets pushed into a corner, like Japan was pushed into a corner by American sanctions in 1941, then everything including a nuclear war is on the table. Let's get some commentary here from J.F. Gardner. They're always including a link. Click here or go to WhatsApp or do this. When somebody's attempting to direct you off-site to communicate with them, no matter how good it might look, because at some point you'll get one of these and it won't be just like an obvious porn star, bimbo, big tits avatar. It'll be something that is a convincing attempt at social engineering. It might look like one of your friends or something like that. Yeah, I sent someone in Amazon gift card the other day and she was just sure it was some kind of malevolent phishing attempt. That's phishing, P-H-I-S-H-I-N-G. It won't be in broken English. It'll be something that makes you think to respond with them, but they'll be directing you off-site and say, that's the red flag. Be careful of what links you're clicking away with. That's Stephen J.J. who's talking with Clayclaw. Yeah, yeah. And what information you're giving them. Yes, yes, and some of them can be quite convincing. Let's just find out what J.F. had to say here. Hello everyone and welcome to J.F.G tonight, reviving J.J.J. as J.F. I had a nice niece born recently. Very nice, very nice. That is so fun. Young girls are great. They are a lot of work. They are sometimes capricious. They take a lot of effort. You need to show them a lot of things, but in the end you can be very proud of them once they are. The fascinating thing about J.F. is his hairline is receding further and further and further back every single week here. That's just disappearing. All right, educated and raised. So absolutely wonderful that you're going to have a niece, that you have a niece. Also met a lady whose husband had a vasectomy and they tried to reverse it, but couldn't. She was devastated. Oh yeah, vasectomy can have its use, but when you want it to be permanent, don't do vasectomy. Don't do vasectomies for that you intend to own with life. I thought he was going to talk about Twitter. Because it is blown. Is the background noise somehow even frightened the place so that it doesn't pass in the mic? Reviving J.J. as does it get hot in the North Pole? No background noise. Wonderful. Jesus Christ, I thought he was going to talk about Twitter. Oh yeah, if you want this technology, it's the Berenger Composer. It has both an extender and a workforce. Come on guys. And within the 20% left, there are still these fucking sensor agents. Unbelievable, unbelievable that we still had someone who wanted to mess up things in defiance of Elon Musk. Unbelievable. This is all related to the what is a woman documentary. Of course, personally, I had reviewed it here and I had seen it many months ago when it came out. But the normies may not have had access to it. And there was a whole story where the Daily Wire tried, they contacted Twitter and they set up with the Twitter status team which was very open to this. They set up that they would do a kind of premiere, a free premiere of the movie where you don't have to buy it. It's free on Twitter for a given amount of time. And they had set up that not only would it be on Twitter, there would be a dedicated special page. Daily Wire would pay Twitter and Twitter would give full exposure to the documentary for 10 hours. Everyone visiting Twitter would have an ad or something. They would see the video and they would click on it. So that was a big deal. And it's, I mean, I'm sure that they were willing to do it at low cost for Daily Wire because it's entertaining and it provides an attraction to Twitter. But eventually, if Twitter was to sell such packages to corporations or political parties, that would be millions of dollars. Because, I mean, in terms of exposure, having millions of viewers to something is a miracle. I mean, people are willing to pay a lot for this. But I'm sure that they had offered a very, very good price to Daily Wire because it kind of sets up the whole Twitter thing. You know, it sells a new product that perhaps will attract corporate buyers eventually. But at the last minute, they asked to review the video. They asked to review the video. And they concluded that in the video, there are two instances of misgendering. And those misgendering instances are basically a father talking about his daughter and saying, you know, I refuse to call her E because I believe she's my daughter. That is the harassment that this documentary does. So the trust and safety team cut the grass under the feet of the sales team. The sales team was all Elon-minded and they had made the sale. Basically, this would have been awesome. But they messed it up. Ella Erwin of the trust and safety says, uh-uh. This is not happening. We're not letting misgendering happening in a promoted video on Twitter. And the sales team has told Daily Wire, look, we loved working with you. They had set up, apparently, the whole special page that would host the video. So they had put in some work on it. But they say, sorry, but it's the trust and safety team. They're telling us that would be it. Now, apparently, Elon Musk was not informed of any of this because they started talking about it publicly. And Elon Musk says, well, this was an error of a lot of people at Twitter. Sorry. And he says something very bizarre. He says it will be marked as potentially violating content and will not be associated with ads because advertisers have the right to choose what they are displayed beside. Now, that's a very word worth phrasing. I think Elon is lying here about what is the truth. Anyway, I think we get the gist of it, though. There is difficult. Okay. Paul Kersey had a point here in the chat. Says, why is Eric Adams the current mayor of New York if people move to the right when they're placed in a high crime environment? So this is just one tendency. It doesn't account for everything that's going on in politics. There are just so many random parts of existence. No one theory is going to account for everything. So I'm just talking about generalizable tendencies. Not that these tendencies have a veto over every other possibility and variation in life. Second point is that Eric Adams was the most right-wing alternative of the possible mares of New York City. So people did vote for the most right-wing pro law enforcement of all the possible mares for New York. I mean, the primary opponent to Eric Adams was considerably on his left. Most of his opponents for mayor were far to his left. All right, that's going to do it for me.