 Good day. May 40 here. Never really paid much attention to Russell Brand as a thinker, as a pundit, as an intellectual, but now he's dominating the news because of these rape allegations. So I decided to do a little bit of a deeper dive into Russell Brand. And this is the one thing that jumps out to me about Russell Brand, because it is so common with so many pundits on the right. Now, I wouldn't classify Russell Brand as right wing, but with a lot of pundits on the right, such as Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh, Nick Fuentes, Mike Enoch, particularly Eric Stryker, much of the right stuff crew, right? They just pour out an avalanche of words. It's not so much specific arguments usually that they're making. It's just pouring out an avalanche of words to try to overwhelm and mesmerize and take control of their audience. And I noticed that Russell Brand behaves much the same way. It's not the specific quality of what he says. It's not the words and the arguments that he makes. It's the emotional experience that he gives people. And I think that accounts for his influence and following. It's not the shiny, sterling intellectual caliber of his arguments. This is from Conspirituality, the podcast. And the voices of real people. The Mirror World is a place that allows narcissists to co-opt the language of solidarity. Oligarchs to pretend they're rooting for the working class. Manic comedians to pretend that they can. So you'll be shocked to learn that Conspirituality is a left-wing podcast that critiques non-normative approaches to wellness, health, medicine and the like. Teach meditation and aggressive misogynists to pretend that they are interested in empowering women. Now, Klein's formulation of the Mirror World is really perfect for Brand, because it allows us to consider the theater of a highly visible conspiracy theorist who has invented a counter-cultural truth-telling persona. That's usually what it takes to become successful as a podcast host, a pundit, a live streamer, is that you put on a theatrical quality. You give across the feeling that you are imparting something very wise. I mean, Brett Weinstein and his wife, Heather Heier, are very good at this. Eric Weinstein is very good at this. You feel, when you listen to them, Barack Obama is very good at this, you feel like you're getting something profound. But upon examination, the profundity falls apart. That extemporizes on everything, while investigating nothing beyond what the algorithms tell him will go viral. It allows us to consider what happens when such a person who pretends to research is actually investigated by those who do not live in the Mirror World. First, I should review the headlines coming to us through a harrowing channel. So why do so many successful podcasters at live stream hosts go in this particular direction? Well, they do it optimize for audience, right? You have a choice as a podcaster and a live streamer. Do you optimize for truth? Or do you optimize for audience, for profit, for clicks, for status? They're so confident in everything they're saying. They believe it is so strongly. They're willing to do anything. I need to become best. I think it's an unconscious thing. Humans want to be revered. Right. This is from a YouTube channel called the rewired soul. It's an atheist in 12 step recovery from alcoholism. Someone who revered Russell Brand's book, An Approach to Recovery, but made a video about a year ago talking about how Russell Brand became the new Alex Jones. Weird. They want to be on top of the group. Let's take a look at this in the context of Russell Brand. As you can see, he was getting 100,000 views and sometimes hundreds of thousands of views or it was as low as 60,000. Then look what happened whenever he pushed the great reset conspiracy theory. He got 2.6 million views pushing the great reset. And then after that, his video about being a vegan dropped to 173,000. After that, having a balanced discussion about the culture war only got him 60,000 views. Fast forward to the COVID vaccine rollout and you start seeing that much like Miranda, he's being rewarded for videos about the vaccine and Fauci. Not only that, but he was getting a lot of views from pro Trump people and people who don't like CNN will store rights in the status game that there are three types of these games, the dominance game, the success game and the virtue game. Russell Brand is playing the virtue game store defines virtue games as when status is rewarded to players who are conspicuously dutiful, obedient and moralistic. He writes, most of the time we don't check for ourselves what's true. We check with our elites. We believe what we're supposed to this even counts for the most precious of our beliefs. The ones we categorize as quote unquote moral, the moral reality we live in is a virtue game. We use our displays of morality to manufacture status. So we'll store argues that we treat moral beliefs as though there were moral absolute don't use extreme polarized crimes. These moral beliefs have completely, completely trunked science and actual evidence. Like think about how many people just have to do so many mental backflips and they experience this cognitive dissonance. Right. So a great understated reason for why so many people hold the political cultural religious views that they do is because that is high status. All right. We want to feel cool. We want to look cool. After we get our basic needs met, most of us are primarily striving for status. At the same time, we don't like other people who are striving for status. So obvious drivers, right? We dislike them even though striving will empower much of what we do. So I just subscribed to the Patreon for the podcast If Box Could Kill Us. A couple of lefties who are investigating airport bestsellers and from their first episode, it basically went to number one on the iTunes chart. So if you want to know how to do a successful podcast, right, you do worse than looking at what If Box Could Kill, what they produced. And here they are on a famous seminal essay by philosopher Harry Frankfurt on bullshit. Three times. I read it once in, I think, undergrad and then once in my thirties. And I remembered it being really good. And I was like, Peter, we should talk about something that's like good for once. We should like actually dive into like some ideas. We want this to be like an ideas podcast. Yeah. And then I reread it for this and it sucks. I was really mad. Yeah. So we both read it, making this a unique episode. Breaking the format. And that was my experience too. The central thesis is really good. Yes. And the actual essay sucks, dude. Interminable. Sucks. Yeah. This is kind of why we wanted to do this. Like originally we thought this was going to be like a deep dive into the book and talk about his examples and kind of apply those to real life. But in the book, he doesn't really do any of that. It's like super conceptual. Yeah. And so we are going to talk about the book a little bit, but then we're mostly going to provide like our own examples. Right. There's famous book, there's famous essay on bullshit. It doesn't provide any examples except the essay itself is really an example of BS. Of like the 2023 bullshit that we are surrounded by because he's weirdly bad at making the case for his own idea. Yeah. Like he basically spends the first, I did it, I did it on audio book this time. So I don't know the pages, but he spends the first like hour and a half saying what it isn't. Yeah. And then he says what it is in the last like five minutes and then he's like, peace out. Right. It doesn't give any examples. He does a thing where you are genuinely 85% of the way into the essay before he lays his thesis out clearly. And he tells a long story about Wittgenstein, which I did not. Dude. Like I did not see the relevance of. And he talks about some fucking book. He's like, this other guy defined the seven kinds of lies, but that's not what we're talking about. So there's the Augustine book. There's the humbug concept that he examines. Okay. So these these co-hosts. All right. You got Michael Hobbs and Peter Shamshree. And the one who sounds like a woman is the gay guy. Right. Trying to remember which one that is. I think that's Michael Hobbs. All right. So if books could kill is the name of the podcast. There's a lot of good stuff in here, even if you're not a left of which there to some degree ignorant, closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country's affairs. The lack of any significant connection between a person's opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it is his responsibility as a conscientious moral agent to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world. This was the part that I like really related to where it's like, sometimes you just have to talk and you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. This was like a lot of my experience in like high school and college was just like, I need to produce words on this thing that I'm really not qualified to speak about. This is also a lot of, especially in our political discourse and like Jesus fucking Christ, how many topics that we covered on the show that perfectly encapsulates this, right? It's like someone who doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about. But like, if you're reasonably intelligent and you're an okay writer, you can write around the fact that you have no clue what you are. Right. Most of what pundits produce, they really don't know what they're talking about. Most of what, you know, Russian brand says doesn't stand up to any intellectual scrutiny. Most of what Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh and right wing talk show hosts produce doesn't stand up to intellectual scrutiny. We're talking about, and you have not spoken to any experts. Right. The amount of fucking words that we are surrounded by that are not. That is right. I mean, that just nails a problem as we try to make sense of the world. And it's so much easier to make sense of the world if you've got, you know, a handful of people that you can kind of rely on to make sense of the buzzing, complicated reality around us. Produced by someone with any actual knowledge is like really staggering to think about. Yeah, I think that's right. And that's why I think it was Thomas Friedman that made us think about this essay because that is a man who writes an enormous amount about circumstances of which he knows very little. You can see a certain dynamic playing out in almost all of his writings and all of like similar writings, David Brooks writings. Right. So what's going on with Russell Brand is not unique as far as his rhetorical avalanche style. You see the same thing in writing with Thomas Friedman, New York Times Foreign Affairs correspondent. You see it with New York Times columnist Pamela Paul, New York Times columnist David Brooks. Right. This is the dominant mode of discourse in punditry. Yeah. Where you can say a couple things that you know, speculate about a couple of things that you don't know and then imply that you have like reached a conclusion of some sort. Yeah. Right. And that I think is like a very common form of bullshit. This is the thing that kind of bugs me is I think what he's saying here is in an educated society with mass literacy where we have roughly 35% of the population is now college graduates. You're kind of expected to have opinions and have knowledge on like a preposterously wide range of topics. Right. You're supposed to know about climate change and welfare and like a huge range of issues. And of course, you're not going to be an expert on any of them. And like, yeah, some of the stuff you're just going to translate into cocktail party chatter. And like, you're just going to have one fucking fun fact about like, should we use nuclear power or not? Right. And like that's kind of fine on a civilian level. I don't really mind the fact that most people are not super well informed about these technical issues. What does bug me, though, is that there's an entire class of journalists who doesn't think it's their job to go any deeper. What you've basically done is misinformed the public because they're relying on you to do fucking work. Like what do you think journalism is? It's not engaging in the debate. Anyone can fucking do that. It should be trying to separate fact from fiction. Right. So when I spoke to people on this show who had passed opinions on on books on essays on papers that they hadn't even read, I just knew that this person was reckless and was, you know, cruising for a bruising. It's not a good sign if you do this. And I think the sort of central trueness of Harry Frankfurt's essay is that like we're surrounded by a bunch of people who just aren't interested in fucking doing that. And to a degree, can't. You know, we've talked about how widespread the idea of like the general journalist is like the journalist who believes that their job is to know stuff about everything and whose publication, generally speaking, believes that their job is to know stuff about everything. And no one can have expertise that broad. No. And if you try to. What you can do at your best as a reporter is to have some idea about, you know, who are reliable sources and in what ways are they reliable and what ways are they unreliable? You will be talking out of your ass. Yes. And so Matt Iglesias believes that he can weigh in on nearly anything. Yeah. And the result is that he is very consistently talking out of his ass and experts who actually do know stuff about the stuff that he's talking about will step in and be like, hey, you're dumb as shit, dude. You have no idea what you're talking about. Right. And then he can dig in his heels because he believes that he is smart enough to grasp this stuff. And the idea that other people are like considerably more knowledgeable about something, it doesn't compute in his brain. Well, I actually am like somewhat a defender of generalists partly because I am one and like I want to be able to defend my own career. But also there are journalists that manage to do this. Like David Wallace Wells, who's also a columnist at The New York Times, spends like a week or two digging into a topic before he writes about it, right? He just wrote about long COVID and like he did a bunch of work. He interviewed people. He read the relevant literature. Yeah, David Wallace Wells is an excellent example of someone who does the work. Christopher Cordwell on the right, I think is a pretty good example of someone who does the work before he starts dispensing his opinions. And he's like, here is the consensus among experts. I actually think that that's fine. And like part of what journalists do, it's not necessarily that they're engaging in a debate or like delivering takes or whatever. It's just like they have more time than you do. Right. So anyone is immediately passing off strong opinions on either side of this latest Russell Brand rape controversy. I mean, it's absolutely reckless. The accusations do seem pretty strong against him. On the other hand, what were these women doing placing themselves in harm's way? I mean, how often do you hear women who are a part of the Me Too movement taking responsibility for their own choices for, you know, why, despite all advice to the contrary, even people pleading with them, you know, don't, you know, go over there alone to a predator's house. They insist on doing it anyway, because they just feel so compelled because the guys are just so charismatic and so powerful and they just can't help themselves. But now they want government laws against, you know, what they consented to do in this phase. It's like, I'm going to spend two weeks looking into like the history of mad cow disease. Most people don't have that kind of time. This is my job. Right. It's not that the generalist is a faulty or bad category of journalist. It's that there's a slippery slope element, right? Yeah. Where someone who doesn't really have a beat can just start spouting off, right? Yeah. Especially if they find themselves in a position of great discretion. Right. Well, these right wing influences are just spouting off and support a Russell brand without knowing anything about the truth or falsity of these accusations against him. So much of what passes for punditry and commentary is just people choosing sides and just choosing to support their side despite all evidence to the contrary. There's no check on a lot of these folks. And I think that is the sort of dangerous side of having general. So this Russell brand investigation, right? It's not easy to find online. You have to download it through the sharing sites, but it was the work of years, right? They didn't just concoct this in a couple of weeks because they didn't like Russell Brand's anti-COVID vaccine stance, right? They had one woman who was working on this for four years. She spoke to dozens of people. You had a whole team of investigative reporters producing something that is pretty sharp and convincing. This journalist. Yeah. If you're not staying on the grind, then you will eventually become a David Brooks. Well, speaking of which, should we do our examples? Yeah. So after we read this book and we realized that it wasn't as like meaty as it could have been, we thought that since the book itself does not provide very many examples of the concept, okay, talking here about the book on bullshit. All right. So here's a summary of the accusations against Russell Brand before dispatches documentary based on a times and Sunday times investigation by Rosamund Irwin, Charlotte Wase and Paul Morgan Bentley. Irwin was on the story. So it is a good sign for the integrity of investigation if it is multiple organizations teaming up because it's easy to fool yourself and it's easy to fool one person. But when you have multiple organizations working together on a project, right? Whatever you end up publishing, it has to pass muster with all of these organizations, right? All of these organizations are effectively putting their head on the chopping block to publish something controversial. For four years, and her colleagues signed on about three years in, and their investigation platforms the stories of numerous women who variously allege that brand raped sexually assaulted or sexually abused them. And the stories are uncanny in their similarity. The women describe brands very direct and intentional targeting periods of boundary testing and how at the peak of the alleged aggression, his eyes would go black and unresponsive. I know from days of my social life that I could go to a party and I would just tune in to the one woman who I just sense would not be a lot of effort to get into bed. So I think many men in particular have led promiscuous lives. They kind of have this sixth sense for the female weakness. In the dispatches documentary, the broader context for these incidents is filled in by a former personal assistant and other sources. Why do multiple organizations team up against a podcast? Because Russell Brand is much more than a podcaster, particularly in England. He worked with the BBC for years producing documentaries, producing radio shows. He's been a star in major motion pictures. He's been on the telly for more than two decades in Great Britain. So he's not just a podcast bro. Who described Brand's daily schedule being dictated by his insatiable predation. Now, I think Russell Brand would admit to this. He admits to being a sex addict and at various sex addiction programs that I've gone to, 12-step programs, you find various celebrities often ones who've gotten in trouble in the Me Too movement for their out-of-control sexual predation. Runners and production staff were enlisted to provide Brand with an endless supply of new sexual partners recruited on the fly from studio audiences. The story that has received the most attention so far comes from a woman speaking under the pseudonym of Alice who will let Russell Brand is the one who did a hit piece on Mark Collette for the BBC. But remember, you know, Mark Collette conspired in his own destruction. He, you know, willingly offered himself up as a sacrifice, which is that Brand grievously assaulted her during their three month relationship 18 years ago when he was 30 and she was 16. Yeah, but she carried on in this relationship for three months, right? She chose him, right? The taxi driver who drove her to Russell Brand's home, led with her not to go in, but she knew better. She described how a car hired by the BBC, where Brand was working at the time, came to pick her up from high school and deliver her to Brand's flat. The journalists discovered that Brand's management at the time took measures to keep the relationship secret. In the UK, where this took place, Alice had technically attained the age of consent under a law passed in 1885. And in follow-up interviews, Alice has stated that she hopes her story helps to change that law. Okay, technically, well, technically, as in if you drive 34 miles an hour in a 35-hour-hour zone, you're abiding by the speed limit, right? Russell Brand was abiding by the speed limit here, right? It's no more technical than anyone else obeying the law. Now, what kills me is these women seem to take their responsibility for their own choices. They want government to change laws to restrict their choices and other people's choices because they don't have the capability of moral agency. They are not capable of taking responsibility for their own choices. They are not capable of making adult decisions on their own. They are essentially saying, I am a child, allow the government to serve as a guardian for me. The story of Nadia, another pseudonym, is also crucial because she was able to provide the medical report from her visit to a rape crisis center shortly after Brand allegedly raped her. And she was able to provide a string of text messages dated within hours of the incident between her number and a number confirmed to be Brand's. In that thread, Brand apologized profusely for harming her in response to her clear description of an attack. The Metropolitan Police in London have said they have opened an investigation into... So the greater context is that all sex contains an element of violence, right? It is not a particularly loving act in general, particularly when it is sporting sex, all right? This is not sex in the context of marriage, right? Not many people are hurt in the context, I would assume, of marital sex, but from someone who enjoyed a great deal of recreational and sporting sex, people tend to be a lot more adventurous pushing boundaries and experimenting and treating the whole thing in a more sporting manner than you would find in the context of a long-term relationship. And so, yeah, people are more likely to get hurt in that particular context. You choose to play tackle football, you're much more likely to get hurt than if you perform on the drama team, all right? You step onto the playing field to play tackle football, right? There's a very high likelihood you'll get hurt. If you step into the playing field of recreational sex outside of the context of a long-term relationship, you're very likely to get hurt. The allegations against Brand. And what has Brand himself said? The Times notes that they gave him eight days to respond to their reporting. The day before the story... And Elliot Blatt says if Luke's livestream became popular because his different people have different gifts, views, he would be investigated and declared to be a monster. I have been investigated many times. And, yeah, maybe not quite a monster, but many of the portrayals were not positive. Dropped. Brand issued a preemptive denial of all of the allegations. Here's a minute of that. That's all you need of his last-ditch effort to dodge this train. These allegations pertain to the time when I was working in the mainstream, when I was in the newspapers all the time, when I was in the movies. And as I've written about extensively in my books, I was very, very promiscuous. Now, during that time of promiscuity, the relationships I had were absolutely always consensual. I was always transparent about that then. Almost too transparent. And I'm being transparent about it now as well. And to see that transparency metastasized into something criminal that I absolutely deny makes me question, is there another agenda at play? Particularly when we've seen coordinated media attacks before, like with Joe Rogan when he dared to take a medicine that the mainstream needed in approval. And we saw a spate of headlines from media outlets across the world using the same. Okay, the reason that Joe Rogan gets attacked is not because he took a medicine that the media did not approve of. The reason that Joe Rogan gets attacked is because he promotes all sorts of wacky, possibly dangerous at times, ill-informed points of view that he has guests on. And he doesn't have the intelligence or the background to ask them the important questions, right? Joe Rogan is the intellectual equivalent of Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop website, right? He's not very smart. He has no ability to distinguish what's right from what's false. And he is just easily seduced, right? Every bit is easily seduced as, say, the women in this Russell Brand investigation. Language. I'm aware that you guys have been saying in the comments for a while, watch out Russell. They're coming for you. You're getting too close to the truth. Russell Brand did not kill himself. So you get the gist. Now, this video was instantly endorsed or boosted by, among many others, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, Ian Miles Chong, and Canadian self-help and women's empowerment guru, Danielle LaPorte, who shared the video to Instagram with the caption, steadfast, unwavering compassion to you. Now, I should note that Fred... Wedding Motor Pull organizations team up to investigate Monk misconduct. He's already confessed to it because he didn't confess to raping women, right? He confessed to promiscuity. And society has a very different attitude towards promiscuity than it does towards rape. End of the pod, Dr. Lisa Rankin, who also has a large following in the alternative. Do I consider traditional Chinese medicine acupuncture herbs wacky? I used it myself. I found it pretty effective for some of the ailments that I was using it for. So I'd have to look at it on a case-by-case basis. So I'll give you an example. I went to Kaiser for some elbow pain or hip pain that I was having. And I remember I got an affirmative action doctor who's not very competent and was like, just made my pain worse by the careless way that they moved me around and declared, I'll probably need to have a hip replacement in five or 10 years. Then I went to a practitioner of acupuncture and the elbow pain that had afflicted me for about a year was just cured in about four sessions. So for many things, traditional Chinese medicine is highly effective. Then when the elbow pain came back, I went to a physical therapist who was great and he cured my elbow pain in one session. He was even more effective than the acupuncturist. But any physical therapist who is worth this salt will not take your health insurance, will not work on a lean basis, right? So you have to pay more money for someone who's competent, but a great physical therapist will usually be more effective at curing various aches and pains than someone practicing traditional Chinese medicine. And in the medicine world, clapped back at La Porte and others by name asking, why are spiritual white women reflexively defending an accused predator? And that's a question I think will be with us for a long time. Now, there were more intellectual or... So why do affluent white women protect an accused predator? I mean, why do we do anything? Because we see it as in our interest because it is considered cool by the people whose opinions are most important to us. It's not that complicated. Or maybe pseudo-intellectual defenses. Psychedelics author Daniel Pinschbeck published a sub-stack article in which he largely ignored the published allegations in favor of using the theories of René Girard to argue that Brand had become a ritual scape note for a conflicted and hypocritical culture. All of the cruder endorsements alluded to the deep state having no choice but to silence Brand's dangerous views. He was over the target, as they say in QAnon, and the elites had no choice but to pull the Me Too lever. They all suggested that the timing of the article was suspicious. Why now, they asked, just as Brand is questioning vaccines and supportive Ukraine? And nowhere do these pundits indicate any understanding that it can take four years to nail down adequate sourcing and corroboration for an extremely important story which could have fallen apart and been killed by the editorial or legal departments at any moment. On the other side of the aisle, critics of Brand have made a lot of his preemption video and its endorsements, saying that his immediate appeal to the specter of a conspiracy against him indicates that he knows what his audience expects or can be led to believe and that he knows who his friends are. But some of this commentary strayed further into blue pill territory to settle on an appealing, but I think flawed idea that Brand's most recent pivot during the Covid era into rightward leaning conspiracy theory land was a strategic move designed to raise a digital army that would defend him against anything. He knew it was coming, they say, and he plotted out his path to exoneration years in advance. This is really implausible to me given everything we know about online opportunism and the speed of audience capture. I think it's also implausible given how short-term Brand's planning seems to be and how much he clearly depends on in the moment improvisation and a kind of vaudeville porno style of physical theater. I understand why folks would want a mastermind type story. The attraction is that it sidesteps the scarier problem that our media instruments are basically set up to magnify people like Brand and that's not a mustache twirling villain problem. That's a social architecture problem. Naomi Klein offered the non-conspiratorial, non-paranoid version of this idea by tweeting out the following. Of course, Russell Brand's followers deny the allegations. He has groomed an audience to deny disbelieve everything they see in here, which is very different from healthy skepticism. This knee-jerk denial. Look, do you believe that Russell Brand would have been investigated so vigorously if he espoused more mainstream opinions? Yes, because obviously, I saw the big names in the Me Too movement were on the left. Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, etc., and they were all investigated vigorously and their careers were destroyed. So I don't believe that Russell Brand's opinions had that much to do with him being investigated. His popularity, which you can link to his opinions, but plenty of people on the left have been investigated and exposed. How is my Russia Shana? It was blessed. All the women making the accusations are anonymous. I believe so. Let's get back to conspirituality. This is precisely why people with plenty of skeletons in the closet love conspiracy culture. They have a built-in defense against accountability. It's all a conspiracy, always. I appreciate that Klein uses the term groomed here in a way that merges the meanings of sexual and epistemological violence, but she doesn't directly connect the two by speculating on Brand's intentionality. Now, with Brand did have some big plan in the cooker. It's not working out so far. He hasn't shown his face online since the story dropped. His management company has cut ties with him. He's canceled an entire comedy tour in the UK. YouTube has demonetized his channel, and the UK Minister for Culture, Media and Sport has sent a kind of strange, maybe ill-advised letter to the CEO of Rumble inquiring as to whether the video platform has allowed Brand to monetize his preemptive strike against the investigation. So now, apparently, many Brands are removing their advertising from Rumble. Because they haven't demonetized Russell Brand just based on accusations. Now, these accusations do sound incredible. They do sound very solid. Move on to the background and context I mentioned. There is one other preemptive move that Brand made against this story, and he posted it on TikTok two days before his blanket denial uploaded to YouTube. Christ's final words. Forgive them, Father. They know not what they do. Of course, in this moment, Christ is referring to his own execution at the hands of the Roman judiciary and pilot famously washing his hands of our Lord and Savior. But its relevance in that moment is very particular. Of course, the sacrifice of a living God is a massive, seismic, apocal and defining human event. But is it not more relevant right now because as Joseph Campbell says, what does it matter if Christ dies on the cross 2000 years ago if we are not continually dying and reborn unto ourselves that we may experience each moment anew? Is this not exactly what Lord Buddha is referring to? Remain awake. Remain in the present. Perhaps what- Yes, this was my first coffee. You're watching the 1995 movie I made that never saw an apricot sky and it was right here at Venice Beach on this shoot that I had my first coffee. Right, probably my first hit of caffeine. It was 1995 and now I've fallen into the devil's grip. I am now drinking coffee probably three times a week. In fact, I had one at three o'clock this morning. I'm proud I was able to sleep in until 2.30 this morning. Then about 3.30 I had my cup of coffee. I've been assembling my greatest blog posts from the what I've gone back to 2012 right now and it's interesting. Like back in the day 2012, 2013, 2014, sometimes I could produce like four thoughtful blog posts a day. But there is this tremendous heavy depression that kind of underlies almost all of my blogging in from about late 2007 until the fall of 2015. So you don't detect depression in my blog post after about the fall of 2015 and perhaps intermittently when I really frustrated about something but overall very little depression. So in what was it? Something like June of 2013, I began taking Madaphnil and I began using the Fisher Wallace device around the same time and those two in combination significantly reduced my depression. Then as I was taking Madaphnil, I went through all the archives of Steve Saylor's website and that launched me and my different groups have obviously different gifts kick which I've been on pretty solidly since 2014 that got me intellectually engaged. So 2012, 2013, I'm primarily writing about myself. I'm listening to my favorite pop songs from the 1970s and 80s and just writing out my memories and my feelings and then I get on Madaphnil and I get on a much more intellectual kick. So let's go back here to the Conspirituality He's meant by an interpretation that I might offer you of Christ's words, forgive them father, they know not what they do, is that most people most of the time are unconscious, forgive them, they know not what they do, they don't know why they're saying that, they don't know why they're doing that, they don't know why they're driving that way, they don't know why they're treating the planet that way, they don't know why they're talking about one another in that way. Isn't it our duty to like Christ awaken from the flesh body and into the transcendent being of light, the elevated escalating transcending individual? Let me know in the comments if you agree with this interpretation that what we truly must become is conscious in this moment now. Okay, so with these two clips on board, I can get into the first core theme that we here on the podcast have focused on in previous coverage and that's that brand is a consummate bullshitter and I mean that in the sense put forward by American philosopher Harry Frankfurt. On any given subject, brand might be lying, brand might not be lying, you can't really tell and it doesn't really matter because he doesn't seem to care. He's not working his jaws in relation to any respect for what is true or useful. He speaks to seize attention, create an impression and weave a spell. Here's what Frankfurt says about the difference between lies, truth, and bullshit. Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth as the liar does and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. Now, in his ninth-hour YouTube preemptive defense, we hear one valence of Brand's bullshit, the gish-gallop patter of urgent pivots, illusions, vagaries, and non-sequiturs. This is Brand's manic mode. It's pressurized and claustrophobic, a wall of words that can feel physically overpowering. In the show notes, I'm going to link to my colleague Derek's close reading of one such Brand scenario in which he pretends to debate journalist John Heilman on the Bill Marshall. The topic is the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News for knowingly implicating their company in electoral fraud and whether CNBC and other centrist platforms have ever been found to be likewise lying about what they know to be true. Brand is claiming that all media institutions are equally corrupt and untrustworthy, but he cannot substantiate his point with any examples when Heilman asks for the receipts. And Derek emphasizes how in the absence of having evidence, Brand gets physically aggressive, manspreading, leaning in, making intrusive eye contact, constant touching, and never shutting up. And then if you roll the tape back to his earlier television and radio work on shows like... How is Russell Brand different from Jonathan Greenblatt? Jonathan Greenblatt for all his faults does choose his words much more carefully than Russell Brand. Jonathan Greenblatt takes care to construct particular arguments while Russell Brand is just all over the map rhetorically. Like Big Brother, all of that boundarylessness of speech and body is there. That's his brand, so to speak. In prior episodes, we've also talked about the neurotic speech that so many of the male influencers we cover seemed to get locked into through a process of self-entrancement. This is true. This is a great point. It's coming from a leftie, but I think he's 100% correct here. In their different ways, Russell Brand, Alex Jones, Jordan Peterson, Tim Pool, Matt Walsh, Andrew Tate, Ben Shapiro, they all have it. These are all men who cannot bear to pause, let alone be interrupted. And given the nature of digital space, they never have to stop. They throw off this sense that if they closed their fire hoses, that their fragile selves would burn to the ground. Now in Brand, this improvisational tic can ascend into something that sounds like spiritual ecstasy. But the thing about the fire hose of charismatic speech is that it can't just be water or sounds. It really does have to be made up of words and phrases and ideas, but the quantity is so high that the quality and coherence cannot possibly keep up. So that brings me to the second main observation we've made about Brand and everyone who works this particular kind of shtick, that the content is never the point. Sometimes it's compelling, as when Brand goes on an anti-corporatist. Okay, Elliot Blatt says, once a man uses the phrase man spreading, he's dead to me or man explaining. Elliot, you like to declare much of humanity dead to you. The complexity, the multiplicity, the vulnerability of life, I think annoys you. And so you want to boil down all the variables and try to reduce them to some manageable size. So if I simply stop interacting in a meaningful way with people who use various phrases, then I'll feel more secure about my place in the world. I'll be less vulnerable. I won't have to deal with as much BS. And so I think we all have this same desire to try to economize. And so whenever we get certain signals, such as people use man spreading or man explaining or anything else that we take particular offense to, we just dismiss their humanity. We just dismiss them from allies. We just dismiss the opportunity for a genuine conversation with them because that feels like it reduces our vulnerability to life. We have to engage with fewer people. We can calm down. We can economize. We can direct our efforts more efficiently. I know I do this too. Just rant. Sometimes it's revealing as in the endless partially told stories and illusions to his own behavior, but it will never stay on the same topic. Now, the principle of the content is never the point is also something we've tracked in relation to our work on cults, where a leader's point of view is nearly always impossible to clearly define. If it changes, if he reverses himself, if he jumps the shark altogether, it makes little difference because what he's really doing is holding attention through affect and behavior modification and relational manipulation, not through ideas. Why do you suppose people are so confused about brands politics? Is he blackpilled and apathetic as he sits with Pac-Man admitting that he never votes? Is he an anarchist trying to push Ed Miliband further to the left? Is he a Trump apologist? What exactly does he believe about vaccines? Did he really cut a whole video about the trucker convoy in Ottawa being all about some kind of peaceful protest of the authoritarianism of public health? People are confused about brand because none of his ideas are coherent, and that's because the content is not the point. That's a great point with all sorts of people, and I primarily listen to people on the right, and so I'm thinking of Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Dennis Prager, Jordan Peterson. The content is not the point. The ideas is not the point. It is this emotional entranced, this emotional trance that they want to cast over an audience. That's the point, and the words are just to communicate a feeling, to create an emotional state, particularly a state of agreement. Almost all punditry, all successful live streamers depend upon tapping into the same thing that marketers tap into, and that is that your problems are due to people outside of you. Your problems are due to an outgroup, whether it's the liberals, the Democrats, the Jews, the capitalists. The problem that you have, the reason that you're a victim, where your life sucks, has nothing to do with you and your poor choices. I can show you who to blame. That's the path for a successful right wing live streaming and punditry and for much of politics. This is Fred Laskin. That's where religious coping can be invaluable, and where they found that so strongly was with the Amish people who, what a decade or more ago, that guy came in and shot up all these young kids, and they offered forgiveness to that person was because their religion so believed in forgiveness that their stories were about forgiveness, their heroes were people who had forgiven, and their families instructed them in direct forgiveness. They had this prelaid schema for how to do it. Most of us live in cultures. Right. So if you're filled with anger and resentment, you don't have to look at your own role in creating misery. You don't have to look at your own choices, your own maladaptive responses to stimuli. Well, that's not true. Where we have prelaid schemas for taking offense, for fighting people who don't do what we want. Right. I mean, isn't that true? Most people have these prelaid schemas that they're not even conscious of for taking offense, for writing people up for tickets essentially in their mind because other people have broken their unenforceable rules. And for holding on to our grievances like that. Those are the cultural imprints that most of us are surrounded by. And that makes forgiveness way more difficult. I have run, got since the mid 90s, something called the Stanford University Forgiveness Project. And we have gone to many parts of the world and taught people how to forgive even from really difficult things. You know, we did work in Northern Ireland where we taught Catholics and Protestants who had family members killed in their violence to forgive. And we've gone to- Right. And this would apply to many women as well. Dennis Prager's current wife, wife number three, relays that when she was a waitress, her manager grabbed her breasts and she simply removed the guy's hands from her breasts, told him not to do it anymore and just went on with her life. Now she could have carried on her life with the self-identity as a victim of sexual violence and many women do, right? For incidents as trivial as that, right? They go through life then with a chip on their shoulder that they've been a victim of sexual violence and they are afraid of men, they hate men. They just carry this resentment and hatred with them, plotting for revenge all their life over something relatively trivial that many other women who endured the exact same thing would shrug it off and get on with it. We went to the United Nations after the attack on the World Trade Center and taught people how to forgive and have gone to Sierra Leone and Columbia after their violence and stuff and taught people to forgive as well as all the normal stuff like, you know, grandma didn't do something or you screwed up. And we found that the very, the basics of forgiveness are generally the same. So I think I've generally taken a stoic attitude in life. I've never made a report to HR in my life, right? I've never made a criminal complaint in my life. You know, I either deal with a situation or I remove myself from a situation. Even though the intensity of offense can be different, the pathway to forgiveness is not that different. But the intensity leads to different issues requiring more effort or more time to involve forgiveness. So my work is I've written a couple very successful books on forgiveness. I do coaching for people who need help with forgiveness, you know, like on Zoom. But most of my work is giving talks to remind people that if you forgive yourself or others, you will be a happier and healthier person. At that level, it's not complicated. If you let go of grievances and grudges, you will on the whole be a happier and healthier human being, physically healthier. Grievances are one of our, like one of humans main mechanism for limiting our happiness. Right. I know women who file sexual harassment lawsuits and lost and it's just destroyed them. Right. It's consumed their life for years and years and years and it ends up with them losing their job, losing their looks, losing their happiness, losing their dignity. Because often when you file a tort lawsuit where you say, hey, you harmed me, you then become obsessed with the harm that other people did to you. And that almost never has a good effect on you. You just become thoroughly incentivized to try to build as strong a case as possible about how other parties have harmed you. And sometimes it's absolutely legitimate. It's the best choice to make, but many times, probably most times it has a bad effect on the people launching such lawsuits. Like we use our grudges and grievances as reasons not to be happy in this life. And you see it socially. Right. You see that with so many of my viewers and people who comment on my videos that they feel like they're living under communist tyranny. And for whatever problems the United States, Canada, Australia, England have right now, if you live in one of these countries, you still have a better than 95% plus of humanity. You live in safer, more prosperous conditions than most people on earth. You have many opportunities to make something good of your life. You have freedom of worship. You can go out, you know, get a job, build a family. But people are strongly incentivized somehow. They've got this schema in their head that they are victims living under communist tyranny. Now, why is it that we are so optimized for grievance? Right. Because we're optimized for survival. And having a grievance probably helps with your survival. It helps you to pass down your genes, but we are not optimized for happiness. So being optimized for survival, for passing on your genes, but through the evolutionary process, it's not the same as being optimized for happiness. All over the place. My group was badly treated and my parents were badly treated. I was badly treated. Therefore, I'm not going to walk outside, open my arms to the sun and say how unbelievably lucky I am to spend this modest amount of time on this beautiful planet. We use our grievances as eclipses. Right. So many of the women with complaints about Russell Brand, right, they could instead introspect and think about what role did I play in putting myself in this dangerous, unhealthy situation? How much advice did I ignore? If I didn't get any advice to ignore predators like Russell Brand, how come I was in such a vulnerable position that I wasn't sharing what was going on in with my life or I developed a life where nobody cared about me? So they may be 100% actually true in things that they say, and yet it may not be in their best interest to allow this resentment against Russell Brand to consume them. On the other hand, it may be in their best interest, and maybe they have not allowed their resentment against Russell Brand to consume them, and maybe they've gone on to lead happy, productive lives. So some women can, I think, testify fairly and accurately about male sexual predators and not allow this to take over their life. I could go on to, you know, an honorable and good and thriving life, and other women just become absolutely consumed and would probably have been better off with trying to just learn a lesson from it, just trying to squeeze all the meaning that they could from these interactions to learn where they went wrong and then go on with their lives rather than trying to mount a case against people like Russell Brand. That's how we use them. We put them between us and the sun. And then we say the sun doesn't exist. We all do this, no matter big or small, you know, whatever group you belong to, we all do this. We all say at some level, I can't be really happy now. I can't, I can't embrace this delicious opportunity to be here for a modest period of time because of X, Y, and Z. Because this person didn't do right because I screwed up because my group was treated. I mean, do you think men are really happy, you know, having so much testosterone that they feel this imperious urge to try to have, you know, as many sexual interactions as possible? Right? This, this sucks for men in many ways. I'm much happier now at a 50, 70 year old man. I didn't have the same imperious sex urges that I did at 1727 or 37. You're done fairly. We all use that as some kind of an excuse to not open to now, to not just recognize. People are so invested in not being open to the now, to not being open to the possibilities and pleasures and rewards of the world around them, to try to ward off pain, try to reduce possible discomfort, hurt, disappointment. People have these schemas to ward themselves off from reality, to ward themselves off from the opportunities and pleasures and possibilities of right now. They are so invested in their victimhood schema. So that now, and we don't know how many more nows we're going to have, it's a gift and it's a precious gift. And on planet Earth, that gift involves suffering as well as beauty, but it's a gift. And many of us use our like grudges and grievances, even worse than that. We use it to harm other people. We say to our partners or lovers, you didn't do this. Therefore, I'm right. So many people just carry on this chip on their shoulder after disappointment in dating. Dating seems to be the one dominant activity in life that I can think of where people become less good at it the more they do with it. Like normally, the more you do something, the better you get. But it seems like the more people date, the more of a shell they develop, the more of a sense of victimhood they develop. The more hard and cynical they get. And I mean, that's true for me. I naturally tend to carry a hard, cynical shell with me into the world. And it kind of keeps people at bay, keeps people at distance, as opposed to when I can be vulnerable and to open myself up to loving and being loved by people, caring about people, open myself up to being no hurt, open myself up to feeling empathy. Much of my life, I've been afraid to feel empathy because I just get flooded by so much empathy that I find it disabling and I lose any sense of myself. But as I grow older, I can maintain a sense of myself of what I stand for and also have an appropriate empathy for other people and where appropriate we're safe to let down my hard, cynical exterior to allow other people to get closer to me. I'm going to treat you badly right now. And we feel perfectly justified doing that. You were bad then, I'm going to be bad now, we're even. We actually make believe that our grievances give us an excuse to not do the right thing. I mean, and this is true for many of the people in the Me Too movement. It's an opportunity to live a life of grievance. And I think some of the women who came forward were absolutely heroic, but others just jumped on the bandwagon to live out the possibilities of a life of grievance and revenge. So not only does unforgiveness make us less happy, but it makes us less happy producing around us. So let's say your manager or your rabbi or your boss reached out and fondled your breasts when you were 17. You can live as a victim of sexual violence and carry that chip on your shoulder and drop out of school because you're so traumatized. Or you can shrug it off, set boundaries, say, hey, that's not okay, and get on and create a good life. And it's really sad. It's very sad. And so I understand why at the heart of all the wisdom traditions of this world is forgiveness, is let it go. Is let it go. Do the best you can. Be here now as best you can. And if you've harmed people, ask for absolution. It's the obstacle to kindness that we all struggle with. You know, when the Dalai Lama... I remember in therapy, my therapist would often say, hey, if you're more like you are right now with me, if you're more open and vulnerable and sensitive and soft, I think, you know, a lot more people would feel comfortable getting close to you. But it's your hard cynical cold exterior that keeps people at bay, right? Back to Conspirituality podcast on Russell Brand. The fickleness is a winning strategy for the chaos of the COVID era conspiracism that we've covered. One week, 5G tech will control your glands, then vaccines will be microchip carriers, then it's all about depopulation, then saving the children, and then the evil trans agenda, and finally Jewish space lasers. The content doesn't matter. But it's actually more than that. Brand's ideological instability works in his favor because it pushes the relational dynamic more squarely into the spotlight. There's nothing there but him. On the podcast, we've also noted that one aspect of this transitory attitude to content shows up in the fact that cold leaders are often chronic plagiarizers. They need a steady supply of material, and they don't really care where it comes from. And if you scroll through Brand's YouTube thumbnails, it quickly becomes apparent that the topic could be literally anything, tracking increasingly right word and paranoia over time, while the affect jokes and gesticulation stay the same. And more importantly, so does the emotional urgency, the sense that everything is always on the line, the feeling that you should never not be around this intense crackle of panic and discovery. There's something really elegant and just about Brand's relationship to truth and reality being exposed by a disciplined journalism that does the exact opposite. As I mentioned, Irwin worked for four years speaking to hundreds of sources, keeping everything locked down until everything was water tight and bled dry of any speculation. And if you just think... Glenn Medley says, nice mic that this guy's got. He's probably got the same mic that I do. He just has more precise settings on it. But how much data a journey like that would render? How many asides, comments, colorful details? It would be enough for a 300 page book with a thousand footnotes. But instead, Irwin and her team run their findings through a distillation process that boils down to 6,800 words and none of them wasted. And the result is a super clear subject-centered report showing enough detail to render a crystalline picture, but not so much as to cross over the line into the salacious. Right. So, not all media is stupid. Not all news reports and investigations are bogus. It sounds like Channel 4 in the times of London did a pretty solid job here in their Russell Brand investigation. It is a direct, economical, almost mundane form of devastating reporting. And it's the perfect mirror image of what Russell Brand does every time he opens his mouth. OK, so those are some notes from our archive, from our collaboration here on the podcast, and they're all about Brand's general presentation, his charisma and affect. The more concrete area of our study involves how he pivoted in the mid-2010s towards the world of wellness influencing via 12-step discourse and his fascination with kundalini yoga. That career shift followed his resignation from his... Wow, that's like me. I blogged on the point industry, wrote about it from 1995 to 2007. And then I left, took up Alexander Technique, took up 12-step programs, and took up kundalini yoga. I was really into kundalini yoga for two years, 2009 and 2010. I spent $1,000 each year from all the yoga I wanted passed to a kundalini yoga center. And I really enjoyed it. I just have a weakness for cults because when you go to a cult, they go, yay, look, we celebrate you, we like you, we love you. And there's just so much love around and it just makes me feel a little warm and toasty inside. But then I have a part of myself that always wants to go investigate whatever it is that I'm enthused about. And so within a month of going to kundalini yoga, within a month of doing thousands of dollars of damage to myself trying to perform kundalini yoga poses, needing thousands of dollars of physical therapy to try to ameliorate the harm, I was investigating it. And yes, many of the poses and procedures were dangerous. And Yogi Bajan did have a very dark side with the grooming and raping women. And participating in 3.8 Joe, Happy Healthy Holy and the kundalini yoga movement, I think, you know, helped some people, but also devastated thousands of lives. Popular BBC Radio 2 program after a disgusting series of comments about his sexual exploits. His redemption arc landed in California, where his movie career began to take off and where he became very enmeshed in the kundalini yoga scene. Right. So we're both in the same scene 2010 2011. A lot of hot women in that scene. I mean, I got a got a girlfriend there for a year. She was Jewish. I just liked it. It was just elevating. I even got up at 2am one morning to go to the yoga center to celebrate Yogi Bajan's birthday. But I did draw the line at teacher training. Right. That's how they make their money by getting you to sign up for teacher training, which, you know, usually runs like $3,000. So I never did sign up for the teacher training, even though attractive women asked me to. And my ex-girlfriend, she did go whole hog, and she became a kundalini yoga teacher. Attending public classes, unlike most celebrity yoga students and men. And so what stopped me from going to kundalini yoga was eventually I was going to a daily Talmud class at the same time. And the rabbi said, mamesh, you know, this particular yoga studio has got idols up, you know, a Jew cannot go there. I thought, oh, I don't need the surus. I don't need the trouble. I'm not going to defy the rabbi. I'm just getting to abandon this type of yoga. Toured by senior figures in the group and getting the Sanskrit symbols for the chakras tattooed on his arm. In 2012, he was often seen at red carpet and social events with his main teacher, Tej Karkhalsa. He soon became an outspoken advocate for the ecstatic breathing and postural exercises. I love the ecstatic breathing and some of the postural exercises. I very quickly stopped doing many of the breath and postural exercises because I found, for example, with dog's breath, I couldn't do it without tightening my neck. And I couldn't do many of the postures without tightening and constricting my neck. So I simply did not do them. So some of the breath exercises as well, I found that they would cause me to tighten and constrict my neck. So I wouldn't do them. So I became much more selective about what I did there. So I steadily, I guess, became out of touch with what was going on there. And I never did get my Kundalini yoga name. So here he is in that incarnation in 2018 in a selfie video. Hello. Many of you enjoy doing Kundalini yoga with an unqualified yoga teacher. That's good. And the chat says, yoga and Talmud just like Doovid. Well, you should read my depressed blog post from between 2007 and 2013. All right. I sound very much like Doovid. Of course, that's exactly what I am. This Kundalini meditation is fantastic. It says here in my teacher's training manual that this one is going to make us feel really healthy. And like we're smothered in radiant light and beauty. Do you feel smothered in radiant light and beauty when you tune into this show? So how many months of the annual yoga pass went unused after the rabbi's comments? Zero. All right. I used my pass up to the end, but I took the rabbi's remarks into account. I wasn't going to let the yoga pass go unused and effectively throw away money. But once I continued on for about two or three more months, and then I just let it go. So that's the advantage of maintaining a somewhat attenuated relationship with orthodox Judaism is that people that make the same demands on you as they would if you had a much closer and more integrated relationship with orthodox Judaism. So I love orthodox Jewish community, but I also love my freedom. So I give up some freedom for some community and I give up some freedom for some community for some freedom. You have to cut me out of the equation. You have to do it for 11 minutes in. Did I ever eat with a Hare Krishna? Is that their vegan buffets? I would like to say no. I think that would be the correct thing to say your life. And will you do it while holding your? Well, yes, I guess I did. Once or twice. I might have. God forbid. And I said all the chance, you know, Waheguru, Waheguru, Waheguru, Waheguru, Waheguru, Waheguru, Waheguru, Waheguru. Wow, I'm probably spouting idolatry right now. I should probably quit. Pull that in a little bit and have the elbows tucked comfortably against the ribs, extend the forearms out a 45 degree angle from the body, thusly, right. And while we're doing it, we chant Ramadatta sa Sase Siohang. In fact, we don't prolong the hung. We cut it off. Ramadatta sa Sa Sase Siohang. So I mean, God forbid, at the time, I kind of thought that the Sanskrit prayers were more powerful. See, I'm a very religious person. I'm wearing a Yamaka about a beard, and so therefore you know that every word I'm telling you now is absolute divine truth. So you can trust me, I'm obviously a very strong moral figure. And people gather around the world to watch these videos with family and friends and to discuss the profound issues that I raise and to apply some of my teachings to their lives so that they can lead lives of more godliness, holiness, goodness and death. So I want to talk to you tonight about prayer. And which types of prayers are the most powerful? Now I was raised in 7th Adventist, so for about 20 years I prayed to Jesus Christ. Frankly it did jack for me. Jack! After 20 years of praying I didn't get nothing of what I most wanted. I didn't get a Dallas Cowboys victory after 1978. I was still a virgin, most important of all. I was lonely. I was depressed. I was deformed morally and psychologically. I didn't have enough friends. I was going nowhere with my life. So I switched and I got into Judaism. So for approximately 20 years now I've been saying my prayers in Hebrew as Judaism instructs. Frankly it's done jack for me. Look at me. I live in a hovel. Look. Look at this. I live in a hovel. I wear a mouth guard to bed. I have to strap on my leg splints at night. This is where I live. Look. Look at this. Look at this and weep. So it's doing jack for me. I ain't married. I ain't got a mortgage. I ain't got a 401k. All I've got is debts and hopelessness. I've had 21 years of illness. I haven't had a healthy day in my life since early February 1988. So the last 21 years of my life I've been sick. So I'm just talking efficacy here. Like, you know, what does prayer do for me? Like, what does God do for me? Okay? I mean, you can go to my website, yourmoralleader.com. You can see the formidable contributions that I make for God, the Jewish people, and for humanity and for the doctrines of ethical monotheism. But what's in it for me? Okay? I want to know. What's in it for me? I've always voted Republican enough. Eight years of Republican rule. Look where I'm living. I'm willing to give Barack Obama a chance because I ain't going nowhere. I've got checks who don't call me back. I've got no pull with the ladies. I'm a mess. So all the prayers I've been saying in Hebrew ain't ain't nothing for me. Okay? I still got my chronic fatigue syndrome. I'm still a rack. So three weeks ago I started going to yoga where you see prayers in Sanskrit. They make absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. I mean, Sanskrit terms, sattnaam, that's how you greet people. And you start off tooting in chanting on namo guru dev namo. And this refers to the infinite creative energy, reverent greetings, implying humility, the giver of the technology divine. This mantra calls upon the creator, establishes a strong and clear connection to the divine teacher within. Okay? Yoga makes no sense to me. These Sanskrit prayers make no sense to me. All the little hum and hum and hum and hum and hum makes no sense to me. But guess what? What I've been doing ain't been working. So I'm willing to try things that make no sense to me. And why am I willing to try things that make no sense to me? Because tens of thousands of hot checks and spandex can't be wrong. You go to yoga class. There are three times as many women as guys and about half the checks are hot, hot, hot, hot, hot. So I'm willing to give it a chance. Also, I've got to tell you this. I was in yoga about two weeks ago and sitting next to this beautiful woman I'd never met before. She was incredibly flexible. She could touch her toes. She could do the splits. She could do things that I can't even describe on this family friendly video channel. And without my saying anything about her knowing anything about me, she she intuited and said that I had a very strong sexual energy. Now I've been praying in churches for 20 years and then praying in synagogues for 20 years. Ain't nobody come up to me said I can tell from your prayers that you've got a strong sexual energy. Yeah, and then I dated this fine Jewish woman for a year. I mean, yoga is a beautiful thing. So anyway, I'm giving yoga a chance and I've got to tell you, I'm feeling happy. Like, after years of misery. No, I didn't know in the 1979 Dustin Session Wagon at this time. In 1995, I bought a Dodge B350 one ton van. So I was still driving that monstrosity at this time. I'm feeling happy. Like, and it's making me wonder and question to these Sanskrit prayers. Are they more effective? I mean, they make zero sense to me, but somehow when I go bro, this is way before my sex addiction. All right, I made this video in late January of 2009. So I didn't start going to sex addiction 12 step meetings until May of 2011. So let's keep our chronology straight. All right, I know I'm always into this and I'm into that and I'm all enthused about this solution for my ills and that solution for the world's ills. All right, but this, this is three weeks into my Alexander technique teacher training two years and four months prior to going to my first 12 step program for sex addiction. Ni, ni, niu, ni, no, ni, do, ni, no, ni, ah, un. Are they doing something? Because something's happening to me and it ain't from my thrilling Jewish prayer services. There's something new and changed in my life. It's yoga and it's working and I'm happy and I'm aligned and somehow I really feel like I'm giving my chronic fatigue syndrome to waheguru which is just a Sanskrit Sikh terminology for God. So I'm still that is my my shoulders and everything's a lot more compressed right. I still like much more pulled down and compressed than I am today. Praying to the same God there's one God who controls the universe who demands moral behavior from us so that ain't changed but the way that I'm reaching up to that God is changing a bit in that I'm trying some of the Sikh stuff and it's working. So why a Sikh prayer is more powerful? I mean your mileage may vary that's just how it's working for me I don't understand this none of this makes any sense to me you know I find it I don't understand prayer makes no rational sense to me like God's going to change his mind is like I pray to him every day and say God please lessen my chronic fatigue syndrome he's going to change his mind or I say God please don't let my mother die of cancer and oh he's going to save him from cancer because I prayed for her okay it makes no sense to me God please don't let rockets rain down on strut and kill innocent people you know how effective were prayers in the Holocaust okay I mean that's the bottom line my prayers to Hashem through Judaism have been every bit as effective as the prayers of all the Jews who went through Treblinka and Auschwitz through the gas chambers okay didn't do them any good ain't doing me any good so I'm trying the Sanskrit stuff this yoga stuff the Sikh stuff makes no sense to me stay tuned I'll let you know how it works so far I got it okay that's from January 2009 God forbid okay so hung and we pull that hum we pull that bander right in hum we chop it roll like that with a little bit of lairiness before we start though you might want to pop a blanket on your head you might not want to you might be wearing a make America great again baseball cap you can put whatever you like on your head I'm not going to judge you don't mind what do I care we'll all be dead soon we start with the old chant they say this is the tune in frequency oh more good a day of no more repeat three times hasn't changed much has he the jokes the sexual innuendo the strategic self-deprecation but then also something that the majority of his six million plus subscribers on youtube will have no clue about which is that he's providing free marketing for an extremely abusive group if you're not familiar with so my friend rabbi good all is just coming to the chat room and he accuses me of being filled with goi joy I don't know do I seem particularly happy maybe it has something to do with this music it's the music that I listen to in more energetic parts of yoga now my friend rabbi good all says whoa whoa whoa we we can't play anything can't play anything copyright all right let's see we've got some other videos here on yoga and the alexander technique reading constructive awareness alexander technique and the spiritual class by daniel mcgowan and on page 41 he talks about yoga and it's so right because often in yoga you're told to sit with your back straight most people react to this request by drawing themselves upwards pushing themselves upward as high as possible and they try to do something to make the back straight this doesn't last long because our habitual misuse of our body leads to postural reflexes that are not functioning properly so you cannot escape old ingrained habits of bad use and poor posture simply by will the old habit is too strong no amount of doing will achieve a straight back for any like the time or more correctly a balanced easy posture so when you're meditating a balanced easy posture is highly desirable you want the body to become full so that the body does not affect the mind most people however they don't have a back strong enough to support the torso easily even if they're doing a lot of weight training etc they need to be reeducated in constructive awareness to you have to keep a straight back without undue effort so this is not macho strength developed through brute force there's a quiet endurance which is gradually built up so the postural reflexes are released allowed to perform in their proper coordinated function and this is a great thought says that we often think that gravity is a heavy burden that we have to carry it's the enemy we fight till it lowers us into the grave says it's not true only when gravity is restored does a space travel return to an erect position an erect posture so if you remove gravity such as with astronauts in space in contrary to your expectation the body does not lengthen and expand it shortens and narrows gravity actually allows the body to expand in all directions people often think that we will inevitably must become stooped and bent in old age this is unnecessary if you learn good use and good ways to think about how you use yourself and constructive awareness you can have good use as you get older and older okay not exactly particularly uh dynamic dynamic video there i apologize i call the new york time sunday magazine on the risks and the rewards of yoga we hear a lot about the rewards of yoga but we don't hear so much in the news media about the risks of yoga yet yoga is probably the biggest source of uh injuries for for many people uh a big source of income for physical therapists so new york times reports indian practitioners of yoga typically squatted and sat cross-legged in daily life yoga poses are what are called asanas were an outgrowth of these postures now people in the western world tend to sit in chairs all day and they work into a yoga studio a couple times a week and stretch and strain to twist themselves to ever more difficult postures despite their lack of flexibility and other physical problems and uh supposedly wow just don't have the energy and the charisma this is from 2012 but when i when i didn't have the the beard anymore okay alexander technique and yoga maybe if i like to be helpful and kind i like to do just random acts of kindness as many times a day as i can so when i was checking myself into yoga the other day i i just took out my key chain and just ran up past the scanner to help the woman behind the the desk and she responded you just check yourself into the pregnancy class that's okay i responded half of them are mine anyway and the other girl behind the desk said just what we need off-color humor at yoga so a lot of people asking you how i can reconcile my yoga with my orthodox Judaism i died is my favorite response