 What exactly does it mean to be a Christian? All right, we've got Kenneth Brown, young Christian, but What exactly does it mean? When when you've got these these trads who say that they're Christians like Godwood podcast is so world view apparently revolves around being a Christian, so What exactly does it mean? Is there anything that? that accompanies that And what got me thinking is a tweet by your arm has only today Some of my favorite crusading whip smart Millennials are on a mission to revive religion for their generation I'm full of love and admiration for all of you. God bless but why are your mouths so full of obscenity and blueness do you think this draws people to God and and What I think is going on here is That Just knowing that someone identifies as Christian or identifies as Jewish it doesn't mean anything. There's nothing that you can then Associate to son or expect right there's nothing about someone identifying as a Christian Nowadays or identifying as Jewish, which means they're going to be less likely to swear for example Or less likely to be crude or rude or cruel so for many trads right being a Christian is It simply means that they hate Jews but if it's socially unacceptable to say what you really believe then you have to You have to use code So for many people on the distant right Identifying as Christians him you means you hate Jews you hate Muslims You hate black people you hate homosexuals you hate transgender that that's going to be the sum total of your Christianity I give it socially unacceptable to say that you hate various groups Then you can just say oh, I'm tried, you know, I'm Christian So if you watch Godward podcast his videos or his Twitter feed. There's nothing in there about his Personal relationship with Jesus Christ of which I'm aware, right? There's nothing like inherently Christian there What it seems like he's done is that he sees minority groups enjoying strong in-group identity and he's like, oh, I want that so I'm going to identify As Christians so that I can enjoy the benefits of the homogeneous society the works he wants I would assume a coherent cohesive society and he sees that Adopting Christianity is the best path or most plausible way to advocate for a coherent and cohesive society Like Kenneth Brown. I mean, there's nothing that vibrates Christian from him in the way that I understood Christian growing up as an evangelical And I think Kenneth Brown talks about his personal relationship with Jesus Christ or talks about being born again or Really just Christian is a way is a socially acceptable way to say, you know, I hate Jews I don't want Muslims in my country, you know, I stand for the traditional values, but there's nothing like particularly Christian In what has traditionally been understood as Christian in the thought of Godward podcast or Kenneth Brown or Nick Fuentes so Who are you to say everyone hates well first of all everyone does hate if you love Anything you're going to hate that which opposes it Now if if it's socially unacceptable to say that you are for voter repression All right socially unacceptable in the United States to say that you're for voter suppression so instead You're going to want to use rhetoric that doesn't advocate explicitly for voter suppression But instead advocates for voter integrity or restoring confidence in the electoral system now You're using dishonest rhetoric to support voter suppression And I'm not taking any moral stand here for against voter suppression So I'm quite happy to have have voting made more difficult So the United States is the only industrialized country with with over 10% of its population is black blacks vote 90 to 95 percent for Democrats of course Republicans In their own self-interest will want to reduce the black vote, but they can't explicitly say we are for reducing the black vote so Who was that political operative? who worked for Reagan and Leigh at water, okay, remember Leigh at water so He gave an interview and he talked about his Perspective he said you start out in 1954 by saying n-word n-word n-word by 1968 you can't say n-word that hurts you that that backfires So he stays say stuff like uh, we're against force busing where force states rides and all that stuff and you make Instead of saying n-word n-word n-word you just make things more abstract to make them more socially acceptable So you start talking about cutting taxes, but really what you're saying is get the n-word All these things you're talking about all these totally economic things abstract things marginal tax rates But the byproduct of them is lacks get hurt worse than whites So when we want to cut this we want to cut this social welfare program That that's much more abstract than even talking about busing and it's a heck of a lot more abstract than saying n-word n-word n-word When it's socially unacceptable to say n-word n-word n-word you talk about marginal tax rates and cutting social welfare spending and States rides, but it's the same thing as saying n-word n-word n-word so So a lot of people on the distant right. There's nothing like genuinely Christian about them But they seize the label. Oh, I'm Christian as as a way to socially acceptable say I want a coherent cohesive society and Putatively I see Christianity is the most valid path for going there But because they can't come right out and say, you know, I hate black people. I hate Jews. I hate Muslims. I hate homosexuals I hate trannies. I hate the the degradation of everything that I accepted as normal and healthy growing up So you have to use more abstract language and so a lot of people say, oh, I'm a traditional Christian Really, there's nothing particularly vibrantly Christian going on in their lives. It's just a rhetorical device and same with Jewish So for many people who say I'm Jewish, that means nothing except I hate Christians. I hate goyim I hate Muslims that that's all that being Jewish means to some people who say, oh, I'm Jewish All it means is I hate Christians. I'm not saying that's true for most Jews, but a fair number of Jews I don't know maybe 5% of Jews in America maybe up to 10% you know saying I'm Jewish It doesn't mean anything but antipathy for our groups doesn't mean Jewish observance Jewish learning Or anything like that. So when you're not allowed to say what you really believe you're gonna have to learn to speak in code So when what you want to say is not socially acceptable, you have to cloak your true feelings So conservatives in Hollywood in social gatherings where there's a lot of political talk They tend to say I'm not political to get out of awkward confrontations when I don't want to have a conversation about politics. I Just say I'm not political. I live in Los Angeles. Most people are liberal So I'm in a social setting where everyone's going on about their left-wing agenda. I don't want to feel like fighting I just say I'm not political. Is that true. Am I really not political? No But sometimes lying is the easiest way to deal with it. What would be otherwise an awkward social situation. So You have to you have to read the the code Right, we often can't tell the truth. So we have to speak in code So if you're a woman and a guy's telling you, oh, I'm working on myself right now I'm not really dating anyone. All that means is he just he does not want to date you But he doesn't want to tell you I don't want to date you just can say oh, I'm working on myself right now And the guy says I'm working on myself right now. It means he's interested in banging other women than you All right, when I don't want to talk politics in a social setting. I just say I'm not political That's what many of my conservative friends say in Los Angeles The Christianity or Jewish identity is often just a socially acceptable cover the socially stigmatized ideas regarding see race or Religion or Jews or homosexuality or Islam. So it's like, oh, I'm not anti-Semitic. I'm not homophobic. I'm just a Christian All right, so Republicans push for voter suppression, but they call it restoring vote integrity Okay, so I'm reading this Terrific Janet Malcolm book Psychoanalysis the impossible profession. So Freud came up with this idea of Transference that we don't encounter people as they are but we see them through the prism of our genetics and our early childhood experience and the imprinting that we got growing up and so until Freud's discovery that often the Person who's being analyzed falls in love with her analyst And there was one Hollywood actress who married her psychiatrist. I'm blanking on the name But until Freud's discovery of transference So I can't psychotherapists have been haunted by the possibility of erotic complications in their psychoanalytic work But now they could feel reassured that they could just tell the patient that she's suffering from transference So some psychiatrists used to take this transference personally, but Freud discovered transference as a result of the importanities of his importuning patient and So Freud's discovery according to Janet Malcolm is the difference between honorary intellect and genius So Freud likens the feet of the patient who just suspends all his critical facilities and says everything and anything that comes to his mind Regardless of his triviality Relevance or unpleasantness to that of the poet during the act of creation. So what the heck are we doing here? We got a relationship. This isn't primarily about information. This isn't primarily about entertainment But just like some people like to play basketball and some people like to pray in a minion and other people like to play computer games So I could be playing an online game of chess right now or some computer game And you could be watching right there are a lot of live streams where people just play video games, but My live streams I like to bring you the best of my values Combined with the best sources of information and then you come into the chat and you bring the best of your values And the best sources of your information and I allege certain facts you allege certain facts Then we provide sources then we try to analyze the facts We tried to make some sense out of the buzzing, you know incoherent messiness of reality by sharing theories that that make Reality which is otherwise confusing make it manageable Right and so if we were kids We'd be throwing a ball back and forth right now or we'd be pushing each other or punching each other or or competing You know on a playing field now We're we're competing on a different playing field on the internet So we bring our values and our best sources of information the most startling facts and Then we try to compete who can come up with the best models of reality that are most true to reality and provide the most interesting Analysis the most interesting theories that they provide you know something to to ponder the theories that that explain what is otherwise unexplainable, so Freud was quite fond of this letter that Schiller wrote in 1788 to a friend Who was complaining of me get literary productions. So one of the best sources? Inspiration for me for these shows is I just do a lot of free writing I just grab a journal grab paper, and I just start writing anything and everything that comes into my mind out of that I often get the beginnings of a show or I start developing a blog post So this is Schiller the ground for your complaint about writer's block seems to lie in the constraint Imposed by your reason upon your imagination, so you can't create an edit at the same time There's a very two different modes of thinking I Will make my idea more concrete by assembly seems a bad thing and detrimental to the creative work of the mind if reason Makes too close an examination of the ideas as they come pouring in for the very gateway as it were right So when you create you can't be editing Looked at in isolation a thought may seem trivial or fantastic But it may be made important by another thought that comes after it and in conjunction with other thoughts That may seem equally absurd may turn out to form a most effective link So in a way this live stream is just like 40 here free associating and you free asserting Associating and out of that we might get some clarity Reason cannot form any opinion upon all this unless it retains the thought long enough to look at it in connection with others When there is a creative mind reason relaxes its watch upon the gates and the ideas rush in Palmel and only then does it look them through and examine them in a mass You critics are ashamed or frightened the momentary and transient extravagances Which should to be found in all truly creative minds and whose longer or shorter duration Distinguishes the thinking artists from the dreamer you complain of your unfruitfulness because you reject too soon and discriminate too severely So you do not want to be editing why you're creating All right, so just free associate just write everything that comes to your mind And then out of that you you may get material for a good live stream or a good book or a good essay or a good blog post Now there are very few people who can write poems like Shiller And there are a few analytic patients who can free associate easily So analysts today don't expect the free association process to take hold until well into the analysis and Many analysts regard the appearance of true free association as a signal to terminate the analysis So you can free associate means that you start putting blocks on the different parts of yourself There's no one true self, right? I am different when I'm talking to Joe as opposed to when I'm talking to Clara as opposed to when I'm talking to Sarah as opposed to when I'm talking to a group of people at my synagogue as Opposed to when I'm talking to an Alexander technique client I have all these subjective souls that are brought out by these different people in different situations and Healthy person wants to be after oscillate between subjective sense of self like I subjectively think of myself as the most important person in the world Objectively, there's absolutely no reason to believe that but if we live too much in reality We're likely to get crushed by our own insignificance But if we don't take into account reality, we're likely to just be grandiose absurd, you know Narcissistic and impossible to deal with so we want to be after oscillate between Reality out there is trying to see things from an objective point of view having our subjective experience Does Alexander technique work better on Jews or Christians? Well about a third of Alexander technique teachers in the world are Jewish so there are about 5,000 Alexander technique teachers in the world about a third of them are Jewish So there are more Alexander technique teachers per capita in Israel than any other country So for some Alexander technique teachers Alexander technique is a substitute religion So I've noticed Alexander technique teachers Generally speaking don't tend to be religious There are some orthodox Jewish Alexander technique teachers, but they're very much the minority maybe 2% of total number of Jewish Alexander technique profession teachers so Freud Developed three ways into the human psyche free association Dreams and the Freudian slip so the various small 40 actions or Parapraxist slips of the tongues misreadings for getting your names losing and breaking of objects by which we daily betray ourselves So just a few excerpts there from this terrific 1982 book by Janet Malcolm psychoanalysis the impossible profession so I've been listening to terrific book on World War two called Pacific crucible war at sea in the Pacific 1941 to 1942 it is a trilogy And it's on audible Whenever I need to take a break Mahan believed himself to be utterly unqualified for the job Profoundly ignorant as he put it but he had a voracious appetite for knowledge and a monastic temperament that suited him to long hours of solitary study He pillaged bookshops haunted libraries and board through hundreds of years of history Ancient Greeks and Romans the colonial rivalries of Britain Holland France and Spain the rise and fall of Napoleon I Tackled the job much as I presume an immigrant begins a clearing in the wilderness not troubling greatly which tree He takes first he later wrote I laid my hands on whatever came along reading with the profound attention of one who is looking for something One afternoon in the fall of 1885 while working in the library of the English Club in Lima, Peru where his ship had put in Mahan was engrossed in a history of the Punic Wars of Roman Carthage in the second and third centuries BC a Question entered his mind arriving with the force of a revelation What if Hannibal had invaded Italy by sea rather than by the long overland route through Spain and the Alps Would Rome have fallen and the entire course of Western history been diverted The light dawned first on my inner consciousness He wrote the control of the sea was an historic factor, which had never been systematically appreciated and expounded His mind took hold of the idea and did not let go and soon afterward he began to write The press of time required that he complete his naval war college lectures in time for the fall of 1886 And the trial of putting his ideas into words forced him to clarify his essential thesis As the pages flew he recalled every faculty I possessed was alive and jumping The lectures were committed to paper by September of 1886 and subsequently published by little Brown under the famously stilted title The influence of sea power upon history The timing was propitious Industrialization and technological change had prompted many nations to begin overhauling their fleets National rivalry's and imperial ambitions, especially among the great powers of Europe threatened to provoke the mother of all naval arms races The world was grasping toward a better understanding okay so I don't know if you ever read Stuart Schneiderman's blog. He's a retired psychiatrist so What's he calling his blog these days? Had enough therapy that's the name of his blog. Uh, that's pretty awesome So he's got a blog post here Nearly april why while why mental health treatment often fails So every time you hear someone say that somebody else should go into counseling You should understand that most mental health treatment on offer in america today is largely Ineffective. So this is my next topic of sea power. What was it? What was its value? How was it attained? How should it be used? Mahan was not the first to ask those questions But he framed them cogently and delicately and set out to answer them in a methodical way with examples taken from the naval wars of the past Above all, Mahan preached the importance of capital ships or heavily armed battleships of the largest class Frigates cruisers and destroyers might provide useful supporting roles such as scouting or protecting convoys But a nation lacking big ships armed with big guns could never be more than a second-rate naval power Mahan was adamant that this fleet of battleships must act at all times as a single concentrated unit To divide or disperse the fleet was the classic and recurring error of naval strategy Okay, so this uh stewart schneiderman blog post from his blog had enough therapy And he knows that most of what's on offer in the mental health industry is just ineffective And he links to an essay by a new york times science writer benedict carry And he notes i've been reporting on mental health issues for 20 years Can't help wonder why researchers have played subtle emphasis on helping people in distress today The field attracts people with enormous scientific talent But science has done little to improve the lives of millions of people living with persistent mental distress So by virtually every measure of our collective mental health rates of suicide anxiety depression addiction addiction death psychiatric prescription use have gone in the wrong direction even as mental health services have expanded greatly So what the heck has happened? So in his job as a new york times science writer is being deluged by calls From patients asking for advice my son is suicidal. We tried everything. What do we do? My daughter is cutting herself. She's out of control. Can you recommend a therapist? And so As a science writer for the new york times he tries to decode the psychiatric jargon You know, he tries to try to do his best, but there are a few systematic standards in the mental health profession There are vast and hidden differences in quality of care And good luck finding an authoritative guide navigating the full range of options So what the heck does diagnosis of bipolar really mean particularly say for a young child? Are drugs really necessary and how trustworthy is the evidence that drugs are the best solution? so Around 2005 the FDA held a series of hearings on whether antidepressant drugs like paxil prozac zoloft Backfired and caused suicidal thinking and behavior and the hearings were absolutely hair-raising. So you had hundreds Hundreds of family members who lost a loved one All right who committed suicide after being prescribed these drugs And so in 2006 the FDA Concluded that a black box warning on antidepressant drug labels was warranted Because there appeared to be for some people Incredibly raised suicide risk particularly for children adolescents and young adults And so this led to the antidepressant wars Many psychiatrists were dismayed by the decision because they thought it would discourage the use of valuable medications And we learned about the influence of pharmaceutical money on academic psychiatry that essentially the pharmaceutical industry Subsidizes academic psychiatry it pays researchers at the big brand name universities To talk up drugs at seminars and conferences at pays for expert panels to promote Pharmaceuticals it has outside firms write up studies to massage the data And we don't really have much evidence that the benefit of psychiatric medication is is considerably beyond a placebo level So we have all these drug ads that essentially dressed up as research You know those infomercials And most mental health research is not really useful to anyone with problems right now So there's a book recovery healing the crisis of care in american mental health That knows the scientific progress in our field is stunning But while we studied the risk factors for suicide the death rate has climbed 33 While we identified the neuroanatomy of addiction overdose deaths have increased threefold While we map the genes to schizophrenia people with this disease are still chronically unemployed and dying 20 years earlier So we've got all these enormous sums of taxpayer money going into biological research Aimed at someday finding a neural signature or a blood test for psychiatric diagnosis. So virtually no psychiatric diagnosis has a blood test or a laboratory finding it's incredibly subjective and doctors are not You know doing this this vast scientific research to try to match the right, you know anti-depressant medication to you It's it's guesswork right and so we got millions of people in crisis right now and uh all this money these big money brain research projects are essentially fishing expeditions or hail marries Now people are drowning And they're not particularly interested in the genetics of respiration right they want a life preserver so Research grants are usually gravy trains for favored scientists So maybe some scientists will recognize the urgency to speak more candidly about how money public and private is warping research priorities Maybe they can come up with some treatment support and innovations that can be implemented in the near future There's a reason that so many people use binge drinking playing the lotto Runaway eating to support their mental health because these effects are reliable. They don't require a prescription They're available right now so Stuart Schneiderman the retired psychiatrist Notes that most mental care in the united states revolves around trying to get people to ingest Pharmaceuticals for which there's not much evidence that they work Talk therapy is being touted But not a lot of strong evidence that it works any better than ingesting pharmaceuticals exercise seems to work about as well as Pharmaceuticals and talk therapy So cognitive behavioral therapy probably the most effective So we've got all this scientific research into brain function, but treatment is inconsistent and of you know, very very quality So overall the mental health industry is handing out huge quantities of unadulterated BS The surprise is that any of this is working So prozac and SSRIs have helped some people. They've driven other people to suicide And what they do with everyone who's on these for a long term is they shrink the brain So the most effective Treatment for addiction says Stuart Schneiderman Involves 12-step programs. They derive from spirituality and religion and not from science So regularly attending religious services does tend to be beneficial for your mental health You become part of a community. We need other people So if you have fewer than six friends in a church or a synagogue, you're quite likely to leave But if you have a half a dozen friends, you're unlikely to leave whatever the doctrines You know, whatever the thing said from the pulpit, what it boils down to the quality of your friendships So aerobic exercise yoga beneficial for your mental health We need other people socializing is good for our mental health Thinking that your goal in life should be individual, autonomous, independent Self-actualization is a formula for trouble One love is back. Cognitive behavioral therapy seems to be beneficial. Yes So I don't know a great deal about Stuart Schneiderman, but it certainly seems like an interesting bloke So Reading an article here by Marsha Engel what constitutes the good life In the new york reviewer box for ten dollars. I bought a year Subscription and I get access to like 20 000 articles that they've published over the past 50 years So she read in 2010 As they age women tend to become more psychologically independent While men as they age tend to become more psychologically Dependent particularly when they retire and spend more time at home That's interesting. So hormonal changes tend to feminize husbands and tend to masculinize wives And apparently the empty nest for couples tends to be more of a blessing than a burden So it seems that old age tends to take men by surprise It sneaks up on them By contrast women are all too aware of aging starting with their first gray hair or wrinkle. So usually On average a 20 year old woman is not as attractive as she was when she was 17 And 22 year old woman is rarely as attractive as she was when she was 20 So by age 18 women become keenly aware of aging, but it usually only hits men in their 50s So By the time women are in their 50s, they're well accustomed to the losses that come with age So perhaps make them better able to help and support their husbands Is the man find that having been a master of the universe is no protection against old age So I got more to say on these topics. I just need a quick break Again and again throughout the pages of history a united fleet had hunted down and destroyed the scattered elements of a divided fleet To those Mahan added a third precept an emphasis on the offensive The battle fleet should not be deployed as a kind of coast guard to be kept close to one's harbors A navy's supreme purpose. He declared must be to range across the oceans Relying upon secure overseas bases if necessary to hunt down and destroy the enemy fleet Or once declared must be waged offensively aggressively The enemy must not be fended off, but smitten down The enemy must be met and destroyed in a decisive battle like those of Salamis, Sactium, Lepanto, Linyle or Trafalgar Okay, so is this from an audible book Based on a trilogy Pacific Crucible War at sea in the Pacific 1941 to 42 When I need to gather my thoughts. Anyway, I want to talk about a 2006 article in the New York Times An analyst questions the self-perpetuating side of therapy And Daniel says in the chart Men are more likely to be content as they age while women are usually not content with life in old age Well, I do think that pretty clear that aging is more difficult for men That women start coming to terms with aging by about age 18 Well, it doesn't really hit men until they're 50s. So as men age, they tend to become more dependent As women age, they tend to become more independent In general though, women are much more expressive of their feelings and so Women will feel more more free to complain than will men Okay, so here's an analyst Who published a book practical psychoanalysis for therapists and patients And his name is Benedict Oh, this article is by Benedict Kerry who wrote the the previous New York Times article I saw it in the analyst's name Owen Renwick So he says that psychoanalysis is in great decline Psychoanalysis began as open-ended inquiry, but has become a self-perpetuating guild mentality that is it's ruin so Owen Renwick says that therapy should usually be primarily about symptom relief He says there's a tendency among psychoanalysts to pursue self-awareness as a goal in itself rather than as a means to an end So originally the idea that was through self-understanding You would then get relief from your symptoms that would otherwise be impossible to treat But if you don't require that self-awareness be validated by symptom relief There are two destructive consequences the first is scientific. You have no independent variables to track See whether you're doing anything You just set up a circular situation in which the analyst theory determines what's found in analysis Then there's another consequence the process can just go on forever With all the temptations that go for that the the analyst just wanting to make money The analyst wanting to feel powerful important feeding his narcissism. He can't admit failure Just feeding his vanity. So the therapy becomes an esoteric practice of proselytizing rather than a discipline That's why fewer and fewer people are going to analysis like alexander technique. So I teach the alexander technique probably the most common question that alexander technique teaches get for From prospective students is how many lessons will I need? So there are three basic reasons why people take alexander technique lessons So alexander technique Is a method developed by an australian actor The method's about 120 years old And it's a technique for noticing your Reactions to stimuli and letting go of the reactions that don't serve you So it's a technique of subtraction of subtracting unnecessary responses to stimuli So people take alexander technique lessons for three reasons on average One for relief of pain. They've got these interfering tension patterns and causing them physical pain Two to achieve a higher level of performance, whether it's in public speaking or in sports any level of higher performance and then three for personal growth to to grow as you notice your subjective I'm thought through inherent reactions to stimuli that are getting in your way and aren't serving you So how many lessons will you need? It depends on what the goal is And then it depends on how much you implement what you'll learn. So alexander technique Is an educational process. It's not something that's done to you So it's up to you to implement what you learn So some people may need 30 lessons to learn things that other people grasp in three lessons generally speaking I have found that women grasp the alexander technique more quickly than men because women are more embodied Like men are more likely to live in an abstract world women Much more embodied. They they are much more at home and at ease in the body So in almost every area of life men are better informed than women But there's one area where consistently women are better informed than men that has to do with the body and with health so So how many alexander technique lessons do you know? Well, it's going to depend on how readily you assimilate The lessons how readily you're able to practice them and then what your goals are if you If you have a goal of being a better person Then it's hard to say the number of lessons that you might need now you might have One interfering tension pattern that's making it impossible for you to wear high heels so half a dozen alexander technique lessons may Very well give you the information you need to Wear high heels without causing yourself a great deal of pain and injury. You may be losing your voice and You may get what you need in half a dozen or might take 20 or 30 or 40 lessons. So it's really hard to tell How many alexander technique lessons you will need because it will vary with people older people usually take longer to To get the educational technique than younger people women seem to take to it more quickly and effectively than than men so how many psychotherapeutic Sessions do you need? But you should start progressing right away. So normally you enter a 12 step program Normally you will quickly start making progress because by entering a 12 step program you're admitting that the way that you've been doing things it's not quite up to snuff and so Just by making a little bit of room for other people to have some input whether it's guard The program the room Friends you're making the program something you heard from a speaker Just by opening yourself up to a little bit of input on how you go about living Your life should immediately start to improve Upon entering a 12 step program and it should also be the same way with psychotherapy and with alexander technique lessons You should start getting some immediate concrete improvement from the first lesson on So if you don't see Progress quickly then you may want to move on maybe go to someone else So there is a traditional approach in psychoanalysis that the psychoanalyst should always be neutral That should never have a personal opinion on any issue a patient is discussed discussing So this just encourages the analyst and the patient to create a fiction of impersonal contribution Which makes the influence of the analyst personal assumptions all the more powerful because they are exempted from review They just go underground Now psychoanalysis also holds that many patients deliberately sabotage themselves because consciously or not they don't want to get better So this is a species of patient blaming means the analyst has not understood what the patient's misguided motivations are So everybody is trying to cut himself the best deal possible And if it looks like someone's trying to do himself in maybe just trying to escape greater harm by doing so So psychoanalysis is not a science doesn't necessarily mean coming in five days a week doesn't mean free association It means getting to know yourself better So You may want to know about how the national football league works or how vitamins work or How your back works now, why wouldn't you want to know how your soul works? And that's why like free writing morning pages The artist's way by julia cameron. That's a great book by writing. We get a mirror to our mind So I spent about 10 years in psychotherapy and in part was to get a mirror to my mind get inspiration for my writing Let me gather my thoughts here An engagement in which the victors sink or capture all or substantially all the enemy's ships Putting an end to his ability to wage naval war Big ships with big guns concentrated into a single undivided battle fleet and infused with an Overriding purpose to wipe the enemy off the face of the sea That was mahans formula for sea power Recognition came quickly and globally reviews were agilatory and admiring letters poured in from around the world Influence and his subsequent works were swiftly translated into french german japanese russian and spanish Okay, so i'm reading the new york reviewer box archives at nybooks.com I'm reading a lot of the essays by frederick c cruise. He's written a lot of deconstruction of psychoanalysis deconstruction of freud So in 2007 Publishes an essay here talking back to prozac and he reviews three books one The loss of sadness how psychiatry transformed normal sorrow into depressive disorder Second book shyness how normal behavior became a sickness and the third book let them eat prozac The unhealthy relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and depression So he begins his essay noting in summer of 2002 the oprah windfree show was graced by a visit from ricky williams the Heisman trophy hoarder and running back extraordinary than miami dolphins. He was there to confess on national television that he suffered from painful and chronic shyness Oprah and her audience were sympathetic If ricky williams who's been anything but shy on the football field was in private a wilting violet How many anonymous citizens would say the same if they could only overcome their inhibition long enough to do so so to expose one shyness to what through once called the broad flapping american ear But itself count one might think as disproof of its actual sway over oneself But football fairs do that ricky williams was no valuable joe neymeth There he was before the cameras risking an anxiety attack for the greater good The case of encouraging fellow sufferers from shyness To come out of the closet to seek one another's support and to muster hope that a cure for their disability might soon be found But little what we see on tv is quite what it seems ricky williams had an incentive He was being paid vast sums of money for over mastering his bashfulness the pharmaceutical corporation Glaxo smith kline gsk through its public relations firm was paying him Not to tout its anti-depressant paxil, but simply to declare on opera and other shows. I've always been a shy person Now why would it be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay someone like Ricky williams to go on opera and say I've always been a really shy person Well, because drug makers earn enormous profits And they always need to find new markets new applications for their products So if these uses don't turn up through experimentation or serendipity or scientific research that they fund Then they can be conjured up by condition branding That is coaching the masses to believe That one of their normal stressful states is actually a mental health disorder requiring medication So you can also call this astroturfing that the priming of a faux grassroots movement from which a spontaneous looking demand for the company's miracle drug cure will emanate Two years after he had broken into print. Mahan was acclaimed as the most influential scholar of seapower ever to have picked up a pen And a foreign policy say chews statements were parsed and pondered and brooded over as if they had been handed down from Mount Olympus From 1892 on everyone quoted him wrote an admiring Frenchman And those who debated the subject endeavored to show their views were in agreement with his In britain it was said that every officer in the royal navy had either read the book or was pretending that he had Prime minister william bladston labeled influence the book of the age And in the houses of parliament. Mahan's name was thrown around in such a way as to cut off all debate In 1894. Mahan received honorary degrees from both oxford and cambridge And at a royal navy club bank what the toast was offered We owe to captain. Mahan the three million pounds sterling just voted for the increase of the navy The audio book doesn't help me focus what it does do is allow me to take a break I like to write timestamps to my videos. So when people listen to this back as an mp3 on my soundcloud or On itunes they can get Timestamps so they can go to the sections that interest them. So unless I write down timestamps as I go I'm not going to be able to capture them accurately also by playing some random audio book. It allows me to throw down The links that I'm talking about to the articles essays books that I'm discussing And it just allows me to just kick back take a break You know gather myself. This is very tiring And it's easy to say something incredibly stupid that could you know ruin the rest of my life So I need to periodically take breaks. I did a two hour stream earlier I am pretty much at the end of my tether. I am I'm all out of energy and so This is like a crotch that helps me to transition from one story to the other While throwing down the correct links and the correct timestamps and also to read the chat And and then just take a break have a drink gather myself In Germany Kaiser Wilhelm II reported to a friend I'm just now not reading but devouring captain Mahan's book and i'm trying to learn it by heart It is a first-class book and classical in all points The valuable Kaiser ordered his naval minister Albert von Tirpitz to place translated copies of influence Abort every ship in the German Navy and to let it be known that every officer was expected to read it so Frederick Cruz continues most of us naively regard mental disturbances like physical ones as timeless realities that our doctors address according to up-to-date scientific research Employing medicines whose appropriateness and safety have been well tested and approved by a benignly vigilant government and through its FDA but it's not quite that way so big pharma spends about 30 to 40 billion dollars a year on marketing right they essentially buy doctors psychiatrists academics They employ more washington lobbyists Right, then there are legislators Right, their power in relation to all the forces that oppose them is so disproportionately huge The big pharma dictates How they are to be regulated very lightly They shape much of medical research agenda. They spin findings in their favor. They conceal incriminating data They co-opt potential critics and they insidiously colonize both our doctors minds and our own through their domination in the news media so if we hear that there is an unprecedented epidemic of depression and anxiety sweeping the world We don't tend to ask ourselves whose interest is served by that impression So according to the WHO this article is from 2007 by 2020 Depression will become the second leading cause of worldwide disability behind only heart disease so many poor people they are on disability payments pleading mental illness but to maintain that money and government benefits coming in they have to take pharmacological drugs for their mental illness Okay, depression is the single leading cause of disability for people in midlife It's the single leading cause of disability for women of all ages All right, they have to take and to get that disability money income support they have to take pharmacological drugs So the WHO the world health organization ranks depression ahead of Down syndrome ahead of deafness below the knee amputation and angina But these arguments rest on a failure to distinguish between major depression which can be devastating and episodic issues of sadness which can be completely appropriate to your life situation So there are also all sorts of normal human states that big pharma wants us to regard as chemically repairable So are you too excited? You're not excited enough? Do you suffer from a lack of concentration? Do you have menstrual cramps? Do you have female sexual dysfunction? Do you experience frustration in bed? All right. Well, there's a drug to fix it Big pharma to the rescue Man himself believed that to be the case. He remarked that more of my words have been done into Japanese than into any other tongue Okay, so from the 1950s until the 2000s Okay, Americans were were told essentially that Medications like Valium can essentially neutralize their social handicaps supplied them with a better personality than the one They've been dealt by their genes or by their fate now Hopes for Valium have been dash dash, you know, these drugs do temporarily calm you But they produce mental fogginess and dependence. So 1990s we got the SSRIs like Prozac, Zolok, Paxil Lovix, Selexa and Efexor supposedly these are different. They enhance alertness They make users feel as if a better self self was servicing So Peter Kramer Psychiatrists wrote about cosmetic psychopharmacology and his best seller listening to Prozac 1993 Swallowed a utopian wave that was racing ahead of the drug company's most optimistic projections But all these drugs come with very significant side effects such as diminished mental capacity and increased suicidal ideation particularly for young people There are also uncontrollable tremors diminish sexual capacity growing tolerance leads to potentially noxious high doses and suicidality And Kramer's readers were weighing the risk not against a discrete medical benefit But against the prospect of becoming self-assured and gregarious at last So these cautions tend to be disregarded So Peter Kramer's 2005 book against depression Talks about as a galloping plague the most disabling illness the costliest And it probably has some medications that will help you with that So the same bullying methods likely to come from big pharma through the media As we get new glamour drugs to make everything awesome So we've got a book here by David Healy Let Them Eat Prozac So he talks about big farmers power to bring about a closing of ranks against troublemakers So he believes that SSRIs can be effective against mood disorders. He has prescribed them But he sees that drug firms are simply simply pushing a simplistic Biobabble myth where depression supposedly results straightforwardly from a short fall of neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain that such causation has been established It's no more reasonable to state that and claim that headaches arise from aspirin deprivation So big pharma wants you to believe I feel bad. I must lack serotonin in my brain These serotonin boosting pills will surely do the trick So millions of people who might have only needed some counseling or some exercise or some sunshine Have been exposed to significant risks Said no other country had showed closer or more interested attention to the general subject In 1894 influence was translated and distributed through the association of imperial japanese navy officers Both the navy and army staff colleges adopted it as a textbook Copies were presented to the magie emperor and the crown prince So the risks from SSRIs include, you know, suicidality horrific withdrawal symptoms dizziness anxiety nightmare nausea constant agitation The key proclaimed advantage of the new SSRIs over the early tranquilizers were freedom from dependency turned out to be completely false And big pharma had been gambling wildly with public health So Eli Lilly Had been pronounced by germany's ministry of health in 1984 Denying a license to sell prozac Considering the benefit and the risk we think this preparation totally unsuitable for the treatment of depression. Okay, that was germany's ministry of health to Eli Lilly and The forerunner to prozac considering the benefits and the risk According to germany's Ministry of health, we think this preparation totally unsuitable for the treatment of depression So we did not only have a rise in suicides That accompanied the use of these SSRIs. We also had a rise in homicides And big pharma distanced themselves from these tragedies by blaming depression for these side effects So handouts for doctors and patients urged them to persist in the face of early emotional turmoil That just proved how vigorously the medicine was tackling the ailment. So dependency symptoms during termination of the SSRI This was just evidence that the long stifled depression was now re-emerging So the most gripping portions of this book let them eat prozac narrate courtroom battles in which big pharma's lawyers parry negligence suits by the bereaved Okay, you've got all these SSRI induced stabbings shootings self hangings by formerly peaceable individuals And the big pharma argues. Oh, these are just manifestations of not yet subdued depression So Healy Dr. Healy was an expert witness for plaintiffs against big pharma in cases involving violent behavior So he found drugs that showed How frequently grave disturbance This is a result after taking Zoloft With many negative long-term consequences So he suspected that big pharma had hidden away their own awkward findings about drug-provoked derangement in healthy subjects eventually Through discovery was able to find the evidence Now just when he began learning academic audiences to his inquiry, he was denied a professorship In a distinguished University of Toronto research institute because it was supported by grants from big pharma from Pfizer Company had not directly intervened yet academics themselves decided there was no place on their team for a skeptic of Zoloft So Dr. Healy, however, was not discouraged. He kept exposing drug attorneys leading sophistry Which was that there was a causal link to destructive behavior Could only be established through extensive double-blind randomized trials which cynically big pharma had no interest in conducting So Healy's own study isolated Zoloft as a direct source of his underpressed subjects ominous obsessions So juries in these negligent suits gradually learned to be suspicious of big pharma eventually Eli Lilly bought out the marketing rights to a near relative of prozac So they were just able to shift to a new drug So the full truth about any drug It only emerges when the income it produces has fallen and its defects can be advantageously Contrasted with the virtues of this new successor product Who now will be sufficiently strong and uncorrupted to keep the drug makers honest The FDA is timid, underfunded and infiltrated by friends of the industry Most respected medical journals hesitate to offend their pharmaceutical advertisers Leading professors accept huge sums Serving big pharma in various venal ways their research papers are ghost written often by company hired hacks Big pharma does not just bend the rules big pharma buys the rule book to be continued