 So, I don't mean to take you away from the T20 World Series of Cricket that's going on right now. So, this is a cricket match that lasts only about three hours, so a traditional cricket match lasts five days. But there's one day cricket which developed in the late 1970s and now there's T20 cricket. Cricket, so it's the men's T20 World Cup going on in Abu Dhabi and India is playing Pakistan. So, a billion people are probably paying attention to this match, hundreds of millions are watching it live. And India is the world's best cricket team. I can't think of any other sport that India dominates or has ever dominated. But they do have the world's biggest cricket team and they also have the world's biggest economy vis-a-vis cricket, so they are the dominant world power. But Pakistan battling back, so they just need 104 runs from 76 balls, which is very doable. Pakistan just 48 for zero. I'll keep you up to date on the latest World Series T20 cricket. A heterosexual is allowed to play cricket in India. You're playing into very dangerous homophobic troops, my friend. So, just because a game has rules and tradition and elegance does not mean it is somehow gay. But anyway, how should we then live? This was a series of ten films. It has tea breaks and they play in pajamas. So, How Should We Then Live? was a series of ten films released by Francis Shaper, an evangelical Christian theologian. And it came out in the 1970s and it was really big in particular in the evangelical Christian world. And I saw them when I was at Avondale College. I would have been about eight, nine, ten years of age when I saw the films. And I grew up the son of a man who was an evangelical Christian theologian and preacher in evangelist. And it was kind of his life's work to teach people how to live. So, it's a little bit of weird upbringing when you're the son of a man who is teaching people how to live. Why the hate on Curtis Yavin versus Manchester Smallbug? Right, that's an interesting question like why do we despise people? And what brings out hatred? I think that one thing that brings out hatred that Curtis Yavin embodies is that he has very strong opinions and asserts himself on all sorts of things that he doesn't know much about. So I was listening to that podcast with Curtis Yavin and he talks about, oh, I never understood Pompey until I read X Book as though you read one book and then you understand Pompey, this figure in ancient Roman history. No, it's because he's making all these sweeping proclamations about things that are not verifiable that he doesn't know very much about. So my father would also do the same thing and I've also inherited the same tendency. And people really hate it when you make very strong proclamations on things you don't know much about. So I think that's part of it. So there may be more about why people hate Curtis Yavin, but that's what runs me the wrong way is that he is making all these sweeping proclamations and essentially he wants a thuggish dictatorship. He would like to see Trump supporters bully and use violence to take power and to give Trump the power of a monarch in the United States. He essentially wants a violent revolution. And so understandably, that's going to arouse an enormous reaction. So people often act, where does he say that? Just look at the links to my last videos. So it's, man, I should just find that for you. But yeah, he and Michael Anton are talking about the need for a violent revolution. And it's the Michael Anton interview put out by the Claremont Institute, which is probably the most influential pro-Trump institution. So I will find that for you. Let's listen to a little Mark Shapiro. Part two of the class is on Shaw Lieberman. Just a few things. Well, first I want to thank one of the listeners who sent me two nice pictures. I shared one a second ago, but I'll share it again in a second one. So this is Mark Shapiro on Shaw Lieberman. Okay, so the intellectual right contemplates the American Caesar. So January 6 was a badly planned rehearsal for the real deal. This is Damon Linker. Traditionally, a right winger is now moved towards more of a centrist position. And he starts off in this column talking about the movement of the Overton window. And Trump actively courting the right-wing fringe, the militia movement, quasi-military groups like the Proud Boys, Neo-Nazis, Avert, Racist, Outright Xenophobes. These voters are a tiny portion of the party, but they punch above their weight as we learned on January 6. Did you guys see the four hours, the HBO documentary? I thought it was pretty good. HBO documentary four hours in the capital. So that just came out. Yeah, four hours at the capital. Great documentary. Whatever position you have on the January 6 riots, check out four hours at the capital that's on all the sharing sites. Have I talked about Dennis Prager getting COVID? Yeah, I talked about that last week and how being a pundit, someone who tells people how then should we live, it leads you into crazy conspiracy theories because if all you're doing is relating information from the New York Times and the mainstream media and say the latest academic research, then why do people need you? There's nothing special about you. So when you become a pundit, particularly if you're outside of the mainstream, the only way that you can maintain an audience is by consistently delivering something that people can't get elsewhere. So where do you go to get perspectives on life that can't be found in the mainstream? You have to go to the fringe. And you have to, generally speaking, get increasingly tugged towards bogus conspiracy theories to try to maintain your USP unique selling point. That's what happens as a pundit, that you need to be providing something special. And so where do you get something special? You don't get it in the New York Times. You get it from fringe theorists and you assert that these fringe theorists, they're right. And all the mainstream evidence-based studies debunking the fringe that this is all part of some globalist conspiracy. So Dennis Prager has absolutely gone down the rabbit hole on COVID. He had Michael Femento on many, many times, about four times during the early part of COVID in March and April of 2020, saying that COVID was nothing. It was not a big deal. It was overhyped. So Prager initially started off as a nihilist, and then he's just gone into all these really fringe theories about some sort of protocol where you take hydroxychloroquine. Yeah, globalists are a thing, but that doesn't mean that everything that you attribute to them is real. That doesn't mean that they're behind everything nefarious and evil in the world. So, yeah, Prager went down the rabbit hole. He said that the lockdowns were the greatest mistake in human history. And there simply isn't the evidence for that. Now, you can say that this aspect of the lockdown was ill-advised, or maybe the lockdowns were an overreaction at this time and this place, but there's no evidence, there's no strong evidence right now to say that the lockdowns in response to COVID were the greatest mistake in human history. They seem to be part of a millennia-old approach to infectious disease, social distancing. It's there in the Torah, right? Prager loves the Torah. Prager believes the Torah comes from God. Well, God commands social distancing with regard to certain infectious diseases. So, social distancing in reaction to a widespread, deadly infectious disease that's raging all around you seems like a fairly prudent policy. So, what was the greatest mistake in human history? I don't know. I don't know. I'll have to think about that. George Soros is a globalist. He has funded all the DAs who refuse to prosecute extreme leftist violence. Right. So, George Soros seems to be extremely effective. So, I am curious, like, what makes George Soros so effective? That's what I want to know about. Like, how has he been so influential? How has he gotten so much bang for his buck in influencing social, cultural, political events in directions that he favors? I think that's fascinating to me and I want to know more about it. So, yeah, George Soros and his foundations were kicked out of Hungary and so there have been many reactions to George Soros but overall it sure seems to me like George Soros has been far more effective than the reactions to him. So, contrast, George Soros with the alt-right. So, I think it's clear George Soros has been far more effective than his opponents. Overwhelmingly so. And Soros is not just effective because of green energy dollars. I mean, he's been effective for a long time. So, why is George Soros so effective? Then why were the alt-right so ineffective? The alt-right aroused an opposition that absolutely crushed it. George Soros has aroused tremendous opposition but yet Soros still manages to be more effective than his opposition. So, when you have a conflict, why is one side more effective than the other side? To me, that's of prime importance. That's what I want to know about. I don't see the world in terms of monsters and devils. George Soros is not a monster and a devil. George Soros is a human being. He's made some Kenny financial decisions. I'm sure that there are many wonderful qualities to George Soros and he also pushes a political approach that has a complete anathema to me. But he's a human being. He's been very effective in the world. So, I want to know about what makes people effective and what makes people ineffective. Which political, social, cultural, religious movements are effective? Versus which movements are not? And the effectiveness of a movement or an ideology is often unrelated to the truth of the movement or the ideology. So, trying to figure out whether something is true and good is not sufficient. You also have to figure out why it's effective or not effective. So, Glib Medley says, World War I gets my vote. That's the biggest mistake in human history. Yeah, that sounds like a strong argument. And I think the most influential book of the past 200 years is Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, which I just finished and was not an easy read. And it has some literary moments, but it was quite the slog getting through The Origin of Species. But when you look at the consequences of The Origin of Species, it seems to me far and away the most influential book of the past 200 years. Curtis Yavin endorsed Joe Biden because he's thought his winning would cool down the worksters. Yeah, I don't know what value Curtis Yavin brings to the table. So, from the overwhelming majority of what I've read and heard, I just don't see the value proposition in Curtis Yavin. I would find him fun to talk to. I'd find it fun to hang out with Curtis Yavin and chat with him. I'm not sure if you have to get a word in edgewise, but I just don't see the value. He has so many ideas and theories, and I'm sure some of them work, but some of them seem so bogus. So, Michael Anton had Curtis Yavin on for a two-hour discussion on the Claremont Institute podcast. And Anton and Yavin eager to shift the Overture window far beyond anything resembling democracy. They want to substitute an elaborate and sophisticated justification for tyranny. So, Anton doesn't explicitly endorse Curtis Yavin's most outlandish ideas, the idea of having a king rule over us. But at the same time, Anton never offers a substantive critique of Curtis Yavin's arguments and assertions. He merely expresses pragmatic or tactical objection as if the primary fault in Curtis Yavin's ideas is that they are unrealistic. So, they agree early on in the podcast around minute 24 that the current American regime is most accurately described as a theocratic oligarchy which can leap cast a progressive priest and sconce to inhabit the New York Times and other leading institutions and force their own version of reality. So, when people talk about a regime, they don't mean it in the denotative sense of the word, just the system of government. They mean that we're living under a dictatorship. So, to say that we're living under a dictatorship with Joe Biden is absurd. Joe Biden can't get most of his agenda passed. Most of the things that Joe Biden most wants to do, he cannot do. So, what kind of regime is this? What kind of dictatorship is this when the dictator can't accomplish almost anything of what he wants to accomplish? So, I think it's absurd for Curtis Yavin and Michael Anton to claim that we're living in a dictatorship where Harvard and the New York Times enforce their own version of reality. I'm unaware of anything that I want to do that I can't do. I can get married, I can have kids, I can worship, I can go to synagogue, I can share my ideas. I feel like a free man. So, this idea that we're living in some kind of tyranny in the United States is absolutely absurd. But Curtis Yavin and Michael Anton, they take it for granted that we're living under a dictatorial tyranny right now. The equivalent of what life was like under the Soviet Union. And that's absurd. Now, Curtis Yavin's got this theory that every 75 years a Caesar takes dictatorial power in the United States. So, he says George Washington was the first one, then Abraham Lincoln, then FDR, and now America's overdue for a new political Caesar. And this is just mildly interesting theorizing by Curtis Yavin that bears no resemblance to reality. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR were not Caesars and they were not dictators. Did they go outside the rules at times? Yeah, but they were far from dictators. So, Curtis Yavin's top choice to become America's next Caesar is Elon Musk. All right, great. So, Elon Musk is obviously not eligible for the role because he was born in South Africa. And they joke that Elon Musk could become president anyway. The Constitution is just a big joke. They say that Trump should declare himself the personal embodiment of the living Constitution. So, what is it that Curtis Yavin and Michael Anton are proposing here? Is it something just like the New Deal but from the right? Well, they have something far more radical in mind. So, particularly Curtis Yavin and Anton doesn't provide much opposition to this. He wants a dictator from day one. So, he wants Trump to announce a national emergency in an inaugural address and encourage every state government to do the same and then federalize the national guide around the country and welcome back up from sympathetic members of the police. And when federal agencies refuse to go along, Curtis Yavin suggests that Trump use a Trump app to communicate directly with his 80 million supporters on their smartphones using notifications to tell them this agency isn't following my instructions. So, the supporters will then rally at the proper building with the crowd, steered around by a joystick by Trump himself forming a human barricade around every federal building supporting Trump's authority. So, whereas maybe 20,000 people stormed the Capitol on January 6, Curtis Yavin has in mind millions responding to the Trump app, a modern day version of the paramilitary groups that insured Lincoln's safety during the Civil War, during the 1860 campaign for president. And so, how should Trump, as a dictator, then respond to Harvard in the New York Times? And Yavin says it's essential to smash these oppositional institutions with one blow. So, Trump should not have to deal with someone else's reality. So, the podcast concludes that Trump dropped the leadership of the deplorables, which is waiting to be picked out by someone who will make Trump seem moderate. And then Curtis Yavin responds with a quote from the Soviet dictator, Slavodan Milosevic, the goal should be, no one will dare to beat you anymore. Now, defenders of Michael Anton, Curtis Yavin, the Claremont Institute will say that this fantasy discussion about Trump dictatorship, it's just fantasies disconnected from reality. Yet fantasies are outgrossed of our hopes and imaginations. They help to set our expectations. And now, the leading conservative institute in the United States that supports Donald Trump hosts a podcast by someone who served as a senior official in two presidential administrations, Michael Anton, and he hosts an invited guest, Curtis Yavin, delivering arguments about why a future president should become a tyrant and a dictator and how he could go about accomplishing that task. So, there's going to be blowback for this type of thinking. You don't think that the left would be ready to engage with at least equal amounts of violence. So, once you suggest that, hey, we should move outside of the legal system and start enforcing our will by violence. Well, the left will respond to that with at least equal amounts of violence. Luke, you called the Constitution a joke before if I remember correctly. I, yeah, I call it the Constitution a joke if you worship it, all right? So, within certain times of some context, the Constitution provides a valuable basis for a government, but the Constitution's not in and of itself. So, I don't believe in worshiping the Constitution. I respect the Constitution as a document that helped shape the history of the United States, but it should not be worshiped in and of itself. So, if the Constitution can simply be superseded by all the civil rights legislation that we've had since the 1960s, if the United States Supreme Court can supersede it, then that places our understanding of the Constitution in its proper place. It's a document that had a substantial effect on the founding of the United States, but now we've got Supreme Courts and political legislation that frequently supersedes the Constitution. So, it has limited value. Also, there's a difference between what is true and what is advisable to say. So, yeah, the Constitution is flawed, and however wonderful the Constitution is, it can be superseded by events. So, we should not depend upon a Constitution to save us. It's much better to have power, rely on power to save you. But if you're going to speak out loud about your side committing mass violence to take power, then there are consequences for that. And the consequences are that your opposition will be inspired to act violently to oppose you, and they will feel morally off the hook to do absolutely anything that they can to oppose you. So, you are dramatically upping the stakes. No, I don't think he's a glowy. I just think he's someone who likes to think out loud. And sometimes he says things that are interesting, but much of the time I think it's kind of useless. So, I inherit, I grew up with a father who was always talking about, how then shall we live? And so, I think that's affected me here. I'm doing countless shows, how then should we live? But it's an unusual upbringing. I mean, my father published books on how to overcome anxiety. Yet my father was among the most anxious people I ever knew. My father published books on how to overcome fear. My father was among the most fearful people I knew. My father published books on how to be happy. And my father was among the most unhappy people I ever knew. And none of this is to discredit my father. I think he was able to develop such a substantial following because he had at least some understanding of his own vulnerability and his own struggle, struggles in these areas. And so, he was very much coming from the place of the wounded healer, someone who struggled with fear, anxiety and unhappiness and tried to create a good life. And he used religion for it. So, traditionally, the answer to how should we then live was to get cues from your religious community. Like traditionally, we lived in a small area where our grandparents had lived, our parents lived, and where we know people, you know, all our lives. That's the traditional way of life. And religion in that context where we're living in the same area generation after generation after generation, religion would affect how people behaved. And because you were so well known, people were able to kind of keep tabs on you and there was not the modern amount of anonymity. So, traditionally, I said how should we then live was religion. But over the past 150 years, religion has assumed less and less power in people's lives. So then, we've had the rise of secular gurus and secular religion, among them say Freudian analysis. And so, psychoanalysis reached its heights of influence in the United States probably in the 1950s and 1960s. And so, for many secular people, they would go to their psychoanalyst to learn how to live. And around the same time, we had the tremendous explosion of 12-step programs, starting with alcoholics anonymous, then going to Al-Anon, debtors anonymous, sex and love addicts anonymous. And many people found a way to live from that. So, I grew up the son of a man who was always teaching people how to live and I couldn't help but take many of my cues from my father. And I couldn't help but take many of my cues from my religion. So, I still find it somewhat difficult to swear profusely because in the religion I grew up in, except the adventism like swearing was a big sin. I grew up a vegetarian. And even though I've come to realize that the vegetarian diet is very unhealthy for many people, I have not been able to overcome that early imprinting and eat meat, even though I believe that eating meat is far healthier. So, there are all sorts of habits that I developed from my family, from my father, from my seventh-day Adventist upbringing that even when I became an atheist at age 18 I couldn't help but continue those habits. Then my life fell apart with chronic fatigue syndrome and I started looking around to medical doctors trying to figure out how do I overcome this problem, this overwhelming fatigue. I can't figure out away my religion, my family can't figure out away. Will medical doctors provide a way out? Will medical science provide a way out? And the answer is not so much. So, then I turned to the mental health profession and I had consultations with psychiatrists and psychologists and therapists and I had 10 years of psychotherapy. I had from 1993 until 2007, most of that time I was medicated. So, I started off with Nardil, an MAO inhibitor which was an antidepressant developed in the 1950s. And then starting around 2002, 2003, I got on lithium, clonidine, clonopam. So, I experienced some moderate benefit from all this mental health treatment but my life still didn't fully work. So, it really wasn't until I got into 12-step programs that my life worked. So, for some people religion provides the fundamental guidance that they need. For other people, they get it from their family, right? You come from a healthy, happy, loving, productive family, most of your guidance you're gonna get right there. Other people, you know, turn to doctors and to mental health professionals and then, if none of those work, other people will turn to 12-step programs. Yeah, now more and more people travel to live around various nations around the world for better taxes, healthcare and freedom, go where you are treated best. Those are horrible drugs. Well, they helped me at the time, mildly, moderately but I was able to get off them in 2009 when I started going to daily Alexander Technique teacher training. That kind of reprogrammed my responses to stimuli so I was able to get off all those medications fairly quickly. So, lithium is the absolute gold standard for bipolar tendencies, which I have. And it's funny, we've developed so many more drugs since the 1950s but they don't have any more efficacy than the 1950s drugs. Like lithium and Valium, all right? We had these in the 1950s and the patterns ran out on all these medications. So, pharmaceutical companies had to come up with new medications so that they could make money. But the new medications, there's no evidence that they're more effective than the old medications. There's no evidence that the new bipolar meds are more effective than lithium. But they make pharmaceutical companies money. So, I've really been enjoying reading a series of books by Alan V Horwitz, he's a sociologist of medicine. Just putting the mental health profession into a context. Let me look at the chat. Rodney says, Luke, the fact that you got off them with Alexander Technique would tell me you didn't really need them. Well, really need, maybe need. Did they help me out at the time? Yeah, they helped me out at the time. They balanced me. So, who knows what I would have been like. Why would you say no, no, no, to lithium? Lithium is the absolute gold standard. It evens you out. So, who knows how much trouble I would have gotten into if I had to be seriously monitored for what? All right? It's been around for 70 years. It's highly effective. It's highly safe. There are some side effects you gain weight. Benzodiazepines, the new ones they have are no more effective than the ones they had in the 1950s. And the new meds for bipolar are no more effective than the ones that they had in the 1950s, but they do make the pharmaceutical companies more money. A question, what makes 12 Step programs the best for me? It was they provide you with community. So, other people, they provide you with stories that you can relate to. They provide you with an opportunity to share your story. They provide you with mentorship and sponsorship. And they provide you with steps and tools and a living, breathing community that you can be a part of, that you can join. It doesn't cost you any money. And you can make friends with people who have similar struggles and you can have close contact with people who have overcome the problems that are bedeviling you. I have not tried saltpeter. I'm reading this, another book by Alan B. Horwitz between sanity and madness, mental illness from ancient Greece to the neuroscientific era. And so he notes that Charles Darwin, origin of species, has exerted a towering influence over the scientific zeitgeist, including psychiatry. So, Charles Darwin viewed mental phenomena as organically grounded traits that evolved from earlier forms of life. Sadness, happiness, despair, contempt. These all radiate from our features and our facial features radiating these emotions. The physical demonstration of all our basic emotions are virtually universal, right? Universal around the world, all peoples, all races. And they're also equally true with the primates that are most like us, such as gorillas and other apes. They also have similar expressions of sadness, joy, hatred, contempt to what we do. So Darwin developed the principle of natural selection and he showed how various mental qualities, psychic qualities have different survival values in diverse environments and how that guides the process. So in a certain environment, it will pay you to be incredibly anxious and on guard, right? So that will help you and your offspring to survive. But in a different environment, a lower level of anxiety will be more adaptive. So almost all mental health phenomena are adaptive in some situations and maladaptive in other situations. So my desire for attention and admiration is adaptive for me doing this video, right? But if I was at work and I had the same level of, hey, look at me, pay attention to me, listen to me, that would not work in a work context. It would not work in a most social context. So what looks like narcissism in what I'm doing right now, that level of narcissism would not work equally well in other contexts. But if I had absolutely no narcissism, like no desire for you to look at me or listen to me, I wouldn't be making this video. So it's adaptive for me to have some level of, hey, listen to me, look at me, that desire, it's adaptive to making this video. But in a different context, that would be maladaptive. Being highly anxious in a dangerous situation is adaptive. In a non-dangerous situation, it's maladaptive. Not being able to sleep would be adaptive in certain situations because you're alert and it'd be maladaptive in other situations. Feeling very sad would be adaptive in certain situations like you suffered significant losses, you need time to grieve, you need time to think about what your next step will be, how are you going to spend your energy, you run through various scenarios in your head. So you just look sad, depressed and passive, but it's actually adaptive for the particular circumstance that you're in. So almost all mental illness has demonstrations that are adaptive in some circumstances and maladaptive in other circumstances. So all our different psychic qualities, being outgoing or introverted, being agreeable or being disagreeable, being conscientious or not being conscientious, they have various degrees of adaptiveness to a situational maladaptiveness. Like in some situations, you're better served by being more assertive and by being more outgoing. In other situations, you're better served by being quiet and retiring. In some circumstances, you are very served by being highly conscientious. In other circumstances, being highly conscientious will be maladaptive because you won't be able to rest and relax. So those mental health characteristics that help you to survive and to propagate your apps offspring, those are adaptive and you spread those to future generations. So during the early part of the 20th century or much of the 20th century, these biological theories became linked to reactionary political thought and the Nazi movement and they were stigmatized and so associating eugenic thought with the Nazi movement and the Holocaust destroyed the cultural viability of biological thinking about human behavior essentially from the 1930s to the 1960s. This is what Alan V Horowitz writes. So during the 1930s to the 60s, organic genetic explanations largely dropped out of the intellectual landscape for accounting for how should we then live. And there was this one other point I wanted to make about this philosophy of how should we then live? So it's a worthy question and I'm certainly interested in it but there's another question which is equally important, more important than how should we then live and that is the question, how do we live? How do people operate? It's great to talk about how people should live and should operate and should behave and should speak but first you have to start with how do people actually work? What are the facts on the ground? What's the reality of human nature? How much are we genetically predisposed? How much does environment affect us? How do people tend to react to cues and to stimuli? So first we have to understand reality before we can make any substantial difference with trying to adapt or shape reality in a more pleasing direction. It's akin to let's say you've got a roommate who's an alcoholic, and you want to be helpful to your alcoholic roommate. So all your direct efforts to wean him away from alcoholism and get him recovery are only going to backfire. There's nothing you can do to prod him towards recovery that is assertive on your end. You can't say, hey, take a look at this. But one thing you can do is to look at yourself and ask yourself why am I interested in putting so much energy into helping someone who has no desire to help himself? Why am I so invested in his recovery? Why don't I get invested in my recovery? And how am I being served by being obsessed with someone else's recovery rather than being obsessed with my own recovery? Now we can't control other people and we can't always even control ourselves but we do have some influence over us and we do have some influence over other people. So the better choices we make would tend to have a positive influence over other people. We also have the opportunity to extend empathy to others. So if someone's got a hangover demonstrating some amount of empathy may go a long way. Someone's having trouble extending some empathy to someone you're living with is going to help out. But trying to give someone directions trying to tell someone what to do that usually doesn't work out very well. So we tend to get into these relationships where the more conscientious we become and the more we try to look after the other person then the more irresponsible they become or the more sloppy we become the more conscientious they become because there's something about relationships that likes homeostasis, likes things staying the same. That's why it's so hard to change dynamics in a family. So when you become harder working someone else will start slacking off. When you become more conscientious someone else will become more sloppy because we have this inherent innate desire to keep things just the way they are. So in the 19th century we had the rise of the social sciences we didn't have the social sciences in the 19th century. And the social sciences looked at society as the primary prism through which they viewed their academic discipline. And so sociologists, anthropologists, economists, psychologists they all promoted extreme environmental approaches. They generally speaking ignore genetic explanations. So all the social sciences have had a long history of minimizing biological influences on behavior. So how then should we live from the social science perspective is always like how do we rejigger incentives within society to show people better ways of living. And why do people lack the way they do from the social science perspective it was always to look at society. That was the unit that was analyzed in the social sciences. And there was a great minimizing of biological and genetic factors. So from the social science perspective human nature is just infinitely malleable and simply responds to different cultural conditions. But then in the 1970s we had this major counterreaction against this social and cultural emphasis. So the organic biological outlook that dominated the 19th century slowly returned to prominence in beginning in the 1970s and the landmark book Leo Wilson's time socio-biology. So he synthesized scholarship on how genes determine most animal behaviors and then he concludes with a controversial chapter on how human behaviors also have natural genetic underpinnings. So Wilson claimed that all phenomena from the birth of stars, the working out of social institutions are based on material processes that are governed by the laws of physics. And so there are similar minded works from authors like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennard, Stephen Pinker and they have led the biologically based views of human nature back to cultural respectability. And so the field of psychology has sharply reacted against behaviorism which says the environment of culture is everything and turned once again towards the study of cognitive and brain processes such as neuroscience. What's my take on evolutionary psychology? I find it absolutely fascinating but I'm not like bowing down to it and say this is the answer. Evolutionary psychology is also affected by culture. So I'm not saying that the culture and society makes no difference. So genes play a role, culture plays a role. When you are having issues take interest in other people's problems melt away. Yes, that's true. So if you feel no empathy for others you are not seeing the world accurately. As soon as you start seeing the world accurately, as soon as you start seeing other people accurately, as soon as you start recognizing the humanity and other people you can't help but feel varying degrees of empathy. So if you're not feeling empathy for people then you're not seeing them accurately. You have a distorted view of reality. I always look for danger but I can sleep for short times with loud noises like trains, trucks, gunfires, as I would. Wonder why I grew up on a farm. Yeah, you you like we all have stimulus that excites us and produce a maladaptive reaction, right? So none of us react appropriately to every stimulus that comes our way. Now, some people are anxious personalities and they develop a tendency to overreact to stimuli and other people have tried to shut down themselves and so they typically underreact to stimuli. In reality, some Nazi policies were disgenic. The Nazis did not like IQ and the Soviet Communists did not like IQ. Why does your opinion on all these collapse grifters? They predict the worst collapse in human history and pitch their products or courses. I'm not a fan. American life is full of anxiety. Life in what country is not filled with anxiety? Because anxiety is simply energy that's access to the situation that you're in. So there's nothing wrong with anxiety. You just want to be using the energy that anxiety releases appropriately. Americans have become pill poppers who seek relief at the legal drug dealers. Yes, but why? And there are social explanations for that. Define empathy. Empathy means putting yourself in someone else's shoes. So between the 1920s and 1960s there were a few researchers in mental health who looked at the brain or looked at the biological underpinnings for mental disorders. But twin and adoption studies were the exception. So twin studies showed that twins who are raised in separate environments had very similar life outcomes. Now media coverage of mental illness has been profoundly affected by the academic research and the turn in academic research from looking at social explanations for mental illness to biological explanations. So now media coverage is far more focused on new findings about biological roots and mental disorder than any other perspective on mental health. So this is the current zeitgeist among the news media. It doesn't mean that it's accurate, but this is what's hip. So since 1980 popular magazines increasingly use genetic and biological portrayals and they endorse medications as treatments of choice for mental illness. So in the 1970s you had this explosion of media coverage of the downsides of things like value. The media got on board with the new SSRIs and other meds. So the media goes in stages for a while. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we've got these wonderful new psychiatric medications and then it's like, oh no, these psychiatric medications are doing so much harm, more harm than good and usually there's an overreaction. There's overreaction in praising these medications and then an overreaction in condemning them. So late people now use terms like chemical imbalance to explain mental illness and we have no evidence that chemical imbalance causes mental illness. There are no objective tests for mental illness. People talk about Katrina Brain to describe their responses to natural disaster. They talk about a dopamine hit to refer to pleasurable experiences. So people love now the biological explanations for mental illness. So you had Christine Blasey Ford in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings in 2018. She asserted that 30-year-old memories of his sexual assault were indelible in the hippocampus and genes have become consumer commodities. Millions of individuals use 23andMe and the like to sequence their genomes and to assess their chances of developing various diseases including mental disorders. So this information becomes an integral part of the way they understand themselves and their experiences. So for the past 40 years, the road to salvation in the dominant zeitgeist is through biological psychiatry, through neuroscience and through genetics. So supposedly neuroscience is going to show us the way to salvation. We're going to be able to image and sequence what's going on in the brain and we're going to have unprecedented new understandings about mental disorders. And most mental illness research is based on the DSM classifications that these diagnostics and statistical manual from the Psychiatric Association which dominates all mental health classifications is being taken for granted by researchers that these DSM classifications accurately reflect underlying brain and genetic states. But the DSM revolution and its symptom-based diagnoses so there are no objective tests of mental health. So diagnoses since DSM 3 have been based on symptoms and these things DSM and symptom-based diagnosis turned out to be Milstone for the neurobiological study of mental illness because DSM categories like narcissistic personality disorder or bipolar disorder turns out to have no actual reality. It's just a billing system for dealing with insurance. So if we want to understand the biological underpinnings of mental disorders we not only need to know about genes about neurotransmitters and neurochemicals but we also need a clear idea of what condition embedded in the brain is being genetically transmitted. So the part played by heredity in the development of mental illness continues to be completely unsolved. We don't know which genes exactly cause mental illness. And the chief difficulty to figure this out is to define the condition the heredity of which one is attempting to trace. So all our DSM diagnoses they're simply a way to get insurance billing for insurance billing purposes and to prescribe medication. They're not particularly helpful in working with reality. So I remember when I'd have therapy my therapist says, look I have to I have to diagnose you and you have to bill insurance for what we're doing. So these DSM classifications of mental disorders that have played this huge role in studies of mental disorders completely contrary to other medical conditions because other medical conditions are objective tests but there are no objective tests for mental disorders. It's just based on the clinician's observation opinions and your own self-reporting. So the patients self-description and the doctor's observation these are the only tools available for confirming the existence of some mental illness. So the DSM is essentially being the sole resource that neuroscientists have possessed to define the condition that they're studying. So genetic researchers in the 1980s 1990s they expected to find the gene or the genes that predicted the emergence of various DSM disorders. But DSM diagnoses don't correspond to any particular genotype. So neurobiological researchers have been on a fruitless search for underlying causal processes that simply don't exist in nature. So we have no reason to believe after 40 plus years of research that DSM categories have discreet underlying biological causes. Instead they indicate the very opposite. The DSM diagnoses are extraordinarily heterogeneous meaning they're highly overlapping with other entities. They are more continuous than categorical. So categorical means either or. Continuous means varying levels and they share common rather specific vulnerabilities. So there are no genetic associations at all with major depressive disorder or anorexia that have yet been discovered. So to the extent the mental disorders are inheritable they arise from complex interactions among many genes with very weak cumulative influences. So we do not have and are not likely to ever discover genes for psychiatric illnesses. This is the most important and the most discouraging discovery in the history of psychiatry according to one psychiatrist Randolph Ness. So major depressive disorder which is the most popular diagnostic category in psychiatry is not a single entity. So what the DSM calls major depressive disorder is an unknown number of diverse conditions. So people with the diagnosis of major depression have all these different disease states mediated by very different underlying pathos physiological mechanisms. We have no variable that defines a more heritable or genetically homogenous subtype of depression. There is no clinician, no researcher believes that major depressive disorder is a single illness. Despite more than two decades of sustained investment in psychiatric neuroscience, the fundamental pathology underlying depression remains elusive and the diagnostic criteria for depression remains descriptive in nature. Meaning depression is an absolutely adaptive and appropriate response to certain circumstances. Depression the shift since DSM 3 since 1980 is to look at these diagnostic categories, these diagnosing of pathology outside the context of the person's life which is insane. In certain contexts you'd be crazy not to be depressed. In other contexts you'd be crazy not to be anxious. In other contexts you'd be crazy not to be ecstatic. In other contexts you'd be crazy not to feel low. But the way psychiatry has worked since 1980 in the DSM 3 is to make these diagnoses without reference to your context. There's one major exception to this and that's PTSD. So PTSD is entirely culturally derived diagnosis. It doesn't relate to any particular symptoms. It can't be diagnosed based on certain symptoms. Luke's got the audience he deserves. I'd like Luke to speak about live stream chat. When you see some of us is there an eye roll of contempt, a sigh, a prayer for a better crowd. I get the crowd I deserve. Now obviously some, I like some people better than others. But that also varies by the day. Mr. Whitemail says there's a funny moment on Dr. Katz where a patient says he needs a diagnosis or insurance won't pay. And Laura asks how about borderline personality. I wonder if we could trace common money sources between the committees of experts that write and update the DSM and Big Pharma. Yes, virtually everyone who contributes to the DSM is on Big Pharma's payroll. Everyone meaning two thirds. And in some categories it's like 80%. So obviously the DSM and our whole mental health system is based around a way to build insurance companies and for pharmaceutical companies to make money. Mental health issues have become quite the status symbol, not just among team girls, but there are all sorts of mental health diagnoses that people are glad to have like PTSD. It's like back pain. You can get out of work saying you got back pain because there's no objective test that shows you don't have back pain. You can go on disability claiming back pain because there's no objective test that says you don't have back pain. The MRI results for people who have back pain and people who don't have back pain are basically the same. There's no objective test for back pain. Look, with PTSD there are symptoms but you can't diagnose PTSD just from the symptoms. So let's say sleeplessness. That's a symptom of PTSD but it's also a symptom of many other things. Jumping when you hear a loud noise. That's a symptom of PTSD but it's also a symptom of other things. There are no unique PTSD symptoms that are not also symptoms of other illnesses. How come really only Americans have PTSD? So the author here that I'm reading from Alan B. Horowitz, he wrote a whole book on PTSD. So maybe I'll do a show on that right now. So we're hoping for the road to salvation to come through biological psychiatry and neuroscience and genetics but we're no closer to that now than we were 140 years ago. So genes for virtually all psychiatric disorders are nonspecific. So each disorder does not correspond to a distinct gene or to a group of genes but shares a large amount of genetic vulnerability with other conditions. So any given genetic variant tied to one diagnosis is also associated with multiple other diagnoses. So when you study families and their most common mental illnesses, depression and anxiety. So depression is associated with anxiety. Alcoholism is associated with depression and anxiety. So families with depressed members have elevated rates of bipolar disorders, drug addiction, alcohol abuse, eating disorders. The DSM-3 categorizes anxiety into nine distinct conditions but it seems more related to just one common process. So generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder are the same thing genetically. This is according to behavioral geneticists Robert Pleinman. High levels of anxiety often just simply reflect a particular personality type. And these personality types are not in and of themselves pathological. They're appropriate for certain circumstances. They're adaptive for certain circumstances. They're going to do better than average in certain circumstances and do worse than others in other circumstances. If you track people closely enough over the course of a lifetime, they will consistently move in and out of different mental health diagnostic categories. So today's patient with schizophrenia was yesterday's boy with conduct disorder or girl with social phobia and tomorrow's elderly person with severe depression. So the DSM artificially divides a few general underlying vulnerabilities into dozens of specific diagnoses and you can't advertise a drug, a pharmaceutical drug according to the FDA according to this 1962 ruling unless you're applying it to a specific diagnosis. So that's why the DSM has all these different diagnoses to allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise for this specific diagnosis. But for example drugs for depression SRIs for depression, they work even better for anxiety but you can't advertise them for anxiety. You can only advertise them for depression. So we had no genetic evidence for the inheritance of specific mental health disorders over and above the inheritance of general liabilities to broad tendencies towards neuroticism psychosis externalization. So we have these broad susceptibilities to a whole host of mental disorders and then certain cultural and personal contacts will have a huge role whether or not these predispositions become evident or state latent. So the DSM has tried to map a landscape of mental disorders by drawing lines around clusters of specific symptoms as if they are islands. But mental disorders are more like ecosystems. They are areas of arctic, tundra, boreal forest and swamp blending into one another, defined crisp boundaries. That's one psychiatrist. So the initial pharmaceutical drugs we developed in the 1950s Chloropromazine for Schizophrenia, lithium for bipolar, Imopromine and the MAOIs for depression. They still form the biological template for the most commonly prescribed pharmaceutical drugs today such as Ablifidae, Symbolo, Zeprexa, Rispedola and Cerroquel. And despite all the hyperbole that surrounds the promotion of these new medications we have no evidence that they work any better than these 1950s medications. My life was changed by taking an MAOI inhibitor. The MAO inhibitor. Nardil in 1993. I was bedridden. I got on Nardil. I started getting better immediately. So Nardil essentially been around since the 1950s. And it worked great for me. It got me out of a bedridden state to two-thirds of a normal life. So all these new pharmaceuticals that we have such as Ablifidae, Symbolo, Zeprexa, Rispedola and Cerroquel. There's no evidence that they're any better than the 1950s drugs because the patterns expired on the 1950s drugs, pharmaceutical companies have to rejigger them a little bit so that they can patent and then promote them so that doctors will prescribe them. Our current drugs for the treatment of psychosis, they're no better than the drugs we had in the 1950s. So we've had 60 years after the discovery of antidepressant medications. We don't know how they work and the medications we have now are no more effective than the ones we had 50, 60 years ago. So we've had more than 60 different types of antipsychotic drugs and to the marketplace since the 1950s, none show greater efficacy than the initial antipsychotics. Lithium has been widely employed since the 1950s. It's now less likely to be prescribed than recent, far more costly medications but lithium is still the best. It is the unsurpassed, mood-stabilizing drug for treating bipolar conditions. So current antipsychotic meds have different side effects than the initial drugs but it's not at all clear that they have more benign consequences overall than the original 1950s drugs like lithium. The effectiveness of SSRIs and SSNIs no evidence that they're more effective than the 1950s drugs. The improvement that occurs with antidepressant medications can be overwhelmingly accounted for by the placebo effect. So only about 1 in 10 patients given antidepressant is likely responding to the drug in a favorable way. The other 9 favorable results if you have 10 favorable results, the other 9 are likely the placebo effect. And even these findings are likely to be inflated because only studies with positive results for pharmaceutical drugs are going to be submitted to the FDA. So if you take into account published research as well as unpublished research then there's virtually no difference in outcomes between those who receive an antidepressant and those who receive a placebo. So the DSM categories themselves are responsible for the stagnation in progressing drug development. We've had no new efficacious psychodrugs entering the market in the past 30 years. And pharmaceutical companies are not enamored with the revival of psychedelic drugs. Because these psychedelics are used a handful of times and not taken in daily doses. Let's find that. All right, so one trend is we've got a revival of psychedelic substances as treatments for mental disorders. So we've got these drugs associated with the 1960s counterculture and the recreational club scene. They're now heralded as groundbreaking responses to various mental illnesses such as ketamine. So ketamine used to be known as a date-rape drug. Now it's being hailed as the most important advance in depression research in the last half century. Another psychiatrist says CBD is the most promising drug that has come out for neuropsychiatric disease in the last 50 years. MDMA, ecstasy is now a prominent new treatment for PTSD as is psilocybin. The active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms for depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder. Ayahuasca many mental health professionals see it as an effective treatment for anxiety and addiction and then you've got LSD. It's now undergoing a revival as a treatment for anorexia addiction and depression. So pharmaceutical companies cannot be happy with the revival of non-proprietary drugs that are used a handful of times rather than taken in daily doses across lifetimes. There's a huge pharmaceutical boom and its headquarters is in Los Angeles. There's a great article about that in Los Angeles magazine that was highlighted on the drug report. This is LA on Acid. Shrooms, shamans, Kosher LSD while Los Angeles are out. Housewives in the Hollywood Hills are doing it hipsters in Los Feliz too. LA has become ground zero for new hallucinogenic boom. The ayahuasca ceremony is now as common as barbecues. There's micro dosing shrooms, really the answer to what ails us. Terrific article here in Los Angeles magazine. Now you're probably thinking what the heck's going on with Pakistan versus India. Pakistan, they don't have a lot of wickets. They need 83 runs from 63 balls. So right now Pakistan looks like it's on pace to defeat India in the T-20 cricket World Cup. Marco Kitta says poor nations lock people up without meds. Brain heals itself but it takes 6 to 10 years. Also if you change the situation that led to the ostensible mental illness, often the mental illness goes away. So many New Yorkers had PTSD right after 9-11, but six months later, for 95% plus of them, they had no PTSD symptoms. What about stimulants like Adderall, Rithland or Concerta and their relationship to sleep aids like Ambien? I don't have anything on that right now. So I know that there have been quite a few drug addicts who blame their addiction on an early Rithland prescription that they got hooked on taking a pill to author their chemistry and then they carry that over to more destructive illegal drugs. A study by the Luke Ford Institute finds that Luke Ford Livestream is the number one best podcast. Why is electric shock treatment being used again after having been condemned in the 1950s as evil and ineffective? Well, article in The New York Times today notes that 40% of common medical practices once they're reviewed, they turn out to be useless or harmful. So all sorts of back surgeries, knee surgeries, more harm than good. So a lot of tonsillectomies are useless. Uvorectomies taking out people's ovaries tends to lead to a reduced lifespan and loss of sexual pleasure. So medicine is constantly reversing itself about menopause hormones, knee surgeries, vitamins. For 30 years people would take, you know, an aspirin to take daily aspirin to reduce the odds of a heart attack. Now that's been revised. So people are taking aspirin like a vitamin. Now the US Preventive Services Task Force has reversed that decade. So it's like with COVID. At first we were told, you know, don't wear a mask, then we told wear a mask. If you don't wear a mask, you know, you're spreading a deadly disease. So medical and scientific advice changes. Ideally it changes when the evidence changes. But often the advice does not change for decades because of built-in incentives to keep doing something and keep making money. So obviously surgeons make money from doing surgery. So surgeons are very likely to prescribe more surgeries than is in the patient's best interest. So when we learn more, we should change. So for a couple of decades women were told about the benefits of hormone replacement therapy and then the evidence shifted away from that. The FDA approved Vioxx as a pain reliever. But then by 2004, Merck withdrew the drug because studies showed it significantly raised the risk of a heart attack. We've had thousands of torn meniscus tissue arthroscopic surgery on aging knees. United States about 700,000 of these surgeries have performed a year. And a researcher in Finland compared the operation to a sham procedure found there was no benefit to these essentially 700,000 surgeries a year. Doctors now recommend physical therapy instead. Many doctors recommended vitamin megadosus to lower cancer and heart risk. Now shown not to be effective. Doctors used to insert stents in millions of otherwise stable patients with heart disease. And now we know that that surgical procedure is not useful. So 40% of common medical practices turn out to be useless or harmless. And many of these failed treatments were initially embraced because they were based on logical reasoning. Sound logical didn't work out so well. Bye bye.