 all about ADHD. And so I'm recognizing the importance of meditation. I need to meditate more. And so the deepest, the most spiritual, the most cleansing, the most uplifting, the most centering meditation that I've done in months. Like I did it like a good 40 minutes from Daniel Siegel's Wheel of Awareness meditation exercise. So just Google Daniel Siegel Wheel of Awareness. There are all sorts of varieties, but I did the Fed Dinkum full on hardcore, like 30 minute meditation. This was, this was no cheapo. This was no California meditation. All right. So a California stuff is where you kind of roll through a stop sign and a California hello is where you give someone a blow job so that they know that you really mean good morning. Well, this was no California meditation. This was a Fed Dinkum full on hardcore 30 minute dense Siegel Wheel of Awareness meditation. I got centered. Right. I got in touch with my introception, what was going on inside of me. I got in touch with my desire for love and joy and blessing for myself for other people, just extending the love of the joy first towards myself and then towards family and their friends and the people closest to me and then towards my, all of Tatham Sands and then all of central Queensland and then all of Queensland, all of Australia just kept extending the love like all through the, through the world coming, coming from my heart. All right. Very, very powerful meditation because I've been, I've been learning about ADHD and I'm convinced I've got ADHD and ADHD guys is the magic key that explains, you know, the, the metaphor failures in my life. Like, why can't I sustain romantic relationships? ADHD that why have I been sexually obsessive? ADHD. Why have I had some trouble in the employment realm? ADHD. Why have I often been emotionally out of control? ADHD. Why am I like overly spontaneous? Oh, impulsive. Oh, ADHD. What else is it? Oh, why did I struggle with my education? Oh, ADHD. Yeah, what did I have a lack of success in earning money? Oh, ADHD. Why have I had fairly troubled relations with other people, sometimes with family, with friends, with, with community. All right. Oh, ADHD. Like, oh, the magic key, this guys, this explains everything. Now I know why, why I am the way I am. And so I'm getting centered, I'm getting spiritual, I'm getting connected, getting my introception and all that, proprioception, getting all that sorted out. And I didn't get to say goodbye to a family member because I was just so in tune with the one and the all. I didn't get to say goodbye to someone because I was ignoring my phone, like my phone is almost always on do not disturb. So like, my name was shouted out, saying goodbye and getting texts. I just completely missed it because I was so intent on getting spiritual. Bloody hell. So it's like it's really hard to both like love God and love your fellow man. So I was like all about loving God and getting spiritual, getting spiritually connected. And I just completely missed out on saying goodbye to a family member. Yeah, ADHD is not just a diagnosis to self pharmaceuticals. It's a way of life, guys. Yeah, in and out. God forbid, God forbid, God forbid. Okay, so I've just finished reading Stephen Turner's memoir. And we all know Stephen Turner, right? Because he's been a guest on this show a couple of times. And just just published a memoir, Mad Hazard, A Life in Social Theory. So Mad Hazard is the name that Max Weber, the German sociologist and political scientist gave to the academic career. So Stephen Turner has spent his whole life in the academy. What the hell? Let's see what Tucker has to say. Speaker. And it's funny how we're supposed to feel about this. We're all supposed to be highly upset, outraged appalled on the verge of tears, about the fact that some of his colleagues are trying to make it hard for Kevin McCarthy to become the Speaker of the House. Very upset. But why exactly is it so upsetting? It should be hard to become Speaker of the House in this country. Very hard. It's a big job. It's one of those powerful jobs in the world. It's not one of those positions you give to elderly men who have campaigned from their basement. If you want to be the guy who's second in line from the presidency in America, you've got to work for it. And Kevin McCarthy certainly has worked for it this week, whatever you think of him. You get the feeling McCarthy would crawl naked through a sewer to get this gig. And that's not necessarily an insult, by the way. It's what it takes, obviously. Maybe it's what it should take. So if you take a deep breath and you think about it for a second, nothing we have seen in Washington recently, the supposedly apocalyptic world-ending drama of politicians arguing with each other, none of it qualifies as especially unusual or even bad. This is what democracy looks like when you get up close. I want one thing. You want another thing. We schedule a vote to see who gets it, or in this case, 11 votes. But whatever, how is that a disaster? Well, it's not a disaster. It's how the system is supposed to work. But don't tell the moron community that. They're too overwrought to hear you watch. And stunning humiliation for Kevin McCarthy, who took the knee for Donald Trump, then gave away the store to the cuckoo fringe of his party. You couldn't construct a narrative that combines the elements of extremism, election denialism and incompetence more perfectly than the last 12 hours on the Republican side in the House. It's embarrassing. I do. And now there's a lot of hard feelings on both sides. Again, you have 90% of the caucus, 90% of the caucus standing firmly behind Kevin McCarthy. They looked petty. I mean, they're putting on a show. I'll call it political form. He's decided instead to pull the pin on the grenade and toss it among themselves. What an extraordinary moment of political failure by a political party. It's either personal against Kevin or remember that this is the same brain trust that brought you almost two years ago, January 6th. The way that they've gone about trying to achieve these demands has resulted in essentially this terrorist standoff between them and the overwhelming majority of people in their conference. They're so excitable. Are you following this? The failure to make it super easy and simple for Kevin McCarthy is extremism, declares Nicole Walls. It's just embarrassing, says Ryan Zinke. It's pornography, says another. Poor old Charlie Sykes got so upset watching the proceedings that he compared a vote in Congress to an exploding hand grenade. There was smoke and fire and shrapnel and the shrieking of the dying calling out for their mothers because some people would not vote for Kevin McCarthy. That's what it was like in there, ladies and gentlemen. Some of us will never recover. Then another one of the buffoons in the clip you just saw went further and called the whole thing terrorism, which is the remorseless use of violence against a civilian population to affect a political goal. So Chip Roy is Osama bin Laden now. Hunt him down in his cave. Dan Cranshaw of Texas, filling the role recently vacated by his friend Adam Kinzinger, said virtually the same thing yesterday. Anyone who doesn't support Kevin McCarthy for speaker is a terrorist and Cranshaw's voice seemed to crack with emotions. He said he meant it. What's going on here exactly? Why are these people so upset? Well part of it of course is political. Dan Cranshaw is a committed neoliberal. He's a tool of his donors. He's hawkish on Ukraine's borders but in different two hours and Dan Cranshaw knows that Kevin McCarthy is the least conservative speaker he is likely to get ever and they all think that. Watch one of them make the case. There is this widespread myth among many of my conservative brethren that being electable makes you more moderate. That being electable makes you part of the establishment. There is no fricking establishment. If there was an establishment this wouldn't be happening. Kevin McCarthy would be by almost any objective measure one of the two or three most conservative Republican speakers in U.S. history at least for the last 100 years. Paul Ryan was the most conservative speaker. This idea that being part of the establishment makes you a rhino-squish loser is this fantasy that these guys are getting high on on their own farts and like Fox Greenroom's on and it's none serious. You know what? Scolds the moron. Kevin McCarthy is conservative enough for you. So shut up and accept him or else we're gonna call you names. Okay tough guy. Settle down. So again what you're seeing here is the usual left-right ideological politics at work but that is not all that is going on because actually most politicians are not very ideological even the ones who claim to be. They wouldn't know an idea if they got in the shower with them. In fact a lot of them are agnostic about ideas but the one thing that every politician has in common every one of them is every one of them wants to win elections. That's the goal and honestly by that measure Kevin McCarthy has underwhelmed. The red wave that we are all promised remember that? It didn't materialize last fall. The midterms were a crushing disappointment. Now that is not all Kevin McCarthy's fault if you want to blame a single person blame Mitch McConnell who deserves it but Kevin McCarthy was the head republican in the house when that happened that debacle happened and he shares responsibility for it. That's true but you'd never know that from listening to republican leaders in Washington. They don't talk about it. They've never atoned. They have no plan to change. They'd like to ignore what happened in November and move on as if everything is fine. That means McConnell continuing to be minority leader. That means McCarthy as speaker. That means Rana Romney McDaniels still running the RNC the same team that was in place two months ago. How does that work exactly? If I'm a valet parker and I crash your car you don't give me another car to park until I take a driving lesson, right? Oh not in Washington. Have another car. I'm more expensive when this time because if there's one thing that Washington hates on a bipartisan basis it's accountability and unfortunately the republican party is no different in that. No one is ever punished for failure or ever forced to explain how those failures happen and as a result of that lack of accountability no one ever improves. Everybody just keeps getting rewarded for producing the same disasters. Think about that. If you raised your kids like that they'd be in prison. So maybe the main thing that's making people mad is that Republican voters see the same people in charge producing the same mediocre results paying a lot more attention to lobbyists than to them. That's not democracy actually. It's the opposite of democracy and watching this drives them insane. It's a fair bet that most people don't hate Kevin McCarthy as a man. He's no Mitch McConnell. Pretty nice guy actually but most normal people do hate the system that keeps promoting Kevin McCarthy for turning in a subpar performance. So say what you will about the effort to prevent McCarthy for becoming speaker. The terrorism as we're calling it and Washington terrorism. That effort has one upside. That effort has challenged the current system in a meaningful way. Kevin McCarthy may in the end become speaker of the House. He likely will because no one seems man enough to challenge him directly so he'll get it by default that he's trying really hard. So maybe he does deserve it. But here's the critical thing to know. If he does become speaker by the time he becomes speaker Kevin McCarthy will have learned a lot. Kevin McCarthy will have publicly acknowledged his failures. He will have been forced to face the people he has disappointed both within the Congress and outside of it and he will have promised to change. So here we will have suffering, accountability and repentance. Those are not bad things. No those are the best things. Those are the wrenching life experiences that turn the mediocre into decent people. And Kevin McCarthy never would have done any of that unless he was forced to. None of us will ever do any of that unless we're forced to. So 20 of Kevin McCarthy's colleagues have forced him to become better and the rest of us ought to be very grateful to them for doing it because no one else was going to. Victor Davis Hansen is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the first person we turn to when things get confusing and weird because he makes sense of a world gone crazy. Professor thank you for coming on tonight. I'm going to pass on the old Victor Davis Hansen. Let's let's get back to you know high quality live streaming about charisma. All right so I just finished reading Stephen Turner's book. Excellent book. His memoir on 2022. Mad Hazard, a life in social theory based on Max Weber's quip about a life in academic academia is a mad hazard. And so back in 1995 Stephen Turner wrote a political paper on charisma and I thought this this applies to live streamers and why the typical trajectory of a live stream is fairly short. All right so how do you become charismatic? So this is this is Stephen Turner's theory. All right so take an example Madana right by her own action she empowered her fans to do the same kind of edgy things that she was doing such as wearing a bra on the outside right. Powerful. You want to become a charismatic set wearing a bra on the outside. And her public acts reduced the risk of this behavior. Without her example it would have been merely ridiculous. But Madana was not a political leader. The secret was that charismatic leaders also did something that involved risk right to be a great live streamer, a great political leader, a great cultural leader right. You usually have to do something that involves risk. And so you present through your body the promise is something that has previously been thought impossible or never even thought of because it was too risky. So there were years between say 2002 and 2007 where the most news broke on both the pornography industry and on orthodox Judaism perhaps on my website. So how on earth could someone you know be writing a blog about orthodox Judaism and about the pornography industry at the same time two different blogs. I mean that's impossible right. Well at least someone who can do the impossible right that person that person must have charisma. You know who also seemed to do the impossible? You know Martin Luther, Martin Luther King, Jesus, Napoleon Hitler right. They all did something risky. And with their risk taking there was the implication that this new thing could only be achieved through them. Think about the arrival of JFKRP a live stream. Wow this is someone who did a postdoctoral research fellow at Duke University in Neuroscience. Now they're doing live streams on edgy you know alt-right topics. Impossible. All right so this is the charismatic cycle right. You have to begin by performing have to be you have to begin by performing a miracle. I am not mute. I am charismatic bro. You have to begin by performing a miracle and then you get people's attention right when you perform a miracle right when you do something previously thought impossible right. You perform a miracle, you perform a victory. That constitutes proof of your special abilities to do things that people did not think could be done right. And then you gain followers and then the existence of followers right enables you to do even more things right. And so with followers you get new information, new possibilities, new ways to connect, new ways to create in this world right. And so you've got this virtuous cycle. You do things thought impossible. You then generate new followers with new followers. You get new powers. You keep repeating the cycle until your luck runs out right until the water reaches your throat. And that is the charismatic cycle. I thought that was a really good description of charisma right. So it does what looks like the impossible you know produces a very unlikely victory. So Scott Morrison the leader of the Conservative Coalition in Australia won a highly unlikely most unprecedented election victory in 2019 and he had all power right. He was charismatic. He'd done the impossible but then he went on a vacation to Hawaii while Australia was burning and you know his power devolved and he lost that that brief hold of charisma. So that's Stephen Turner's theory. Now someone else had a theory on charisma and this is Randall Collins. So Randall Collins Stephen Turner two sociologists who may not be the biggest fans of each other and Randall Collins his magnum opus was interaction ritual change. I don't think Stephen Turner has a magnum opus and Randall Collins writes in his magnum opus interaction ritual change. I mean what a catchy, what a sexy, what an attention-grabbing title. I mean it's hard to not pick up a book called interaction ritual change and he comments every dog will have its day is more accurately every day will have its dog. So this is like Harold McMillan the British Prime Minister in the 1950s asked what will shape the success of your administration. He said events my dear boy events the unexpected and how you react to them that will shape whether or not you will be successful in politics and many other spheres of life. So incidents shape people momentary they may be encounters make encounters it is games that make sports heroes it is politics that makes politicians into charismatic leaders. So let's get a little bit more here from Randall Collins he says there is no privileged reality standing outside of situations right only a chain of situations and the preparation for more chains of situations. So there is nothing beyond the situation in a particular point in time. Okay now that meaning a sacred of charismatic is when you become sacred right when you become the object of attention. Right now I am enjoying the completely undivided attention of nine viewers on YouTube two viewers on Rumble but there was a day this week when I had more viewers on Rumble I had like 28 viewers and I was doing the live stream on that NFL player who had the cardiac arrest and 22 on YouTube. So the days are already here where I get more viewers on Rumble live than on YouTube and I have one viewer on Odyssey and we are currently going out live on Twitter and what is the viewership like on Twitter right now it's off the hook it is zero viewers okay I need to I need to up my charisma and uh Elliot Blatt speaking of charisma what's going on with my bro uh Shalom bro so uh you had a little meditation experience that's good I had one too today well recently it's this new thing I might write a book on it I'm not sure if it's well maybe just a blog post but it's for driving like I had this giant epiphany while driving and it was like there was a bit of traffic and normally the traffic sort of sends me into a rage and then I just felt it and then I said no I'm just not going to do this I'm not going to do this I'm not going to go through this rage cycle I'm just going to cut it off and just deal with reality in the present and I did it it was possible like I had some control have you ever had that experience uh yes yes I only started coughing when I called in this is the place of radical love and inclusion so um I don't know maybe it was profound to me like I could like it's like it's one thing to not express your foul emotions but you could actually make the choice to not even feel them uh sometimes right like this wonderful experience may not replicate 100 of the time no no you're right I mean but it did emphasize that you know you do have more control you have more choice right as you if you get you know if you pay attention to your emotions on a regular pace you can have some control over them yeah such as like whether you cough when you're on a live stream yeah I wish that were the case oh no um this this rain here in California has been ridiculous I can't get a break loop I need just a couple of dry days and then everything will be fine but we're getting deluge to every single day it's ridiculous you're hearing about this yeah yeah it's like dominates the news on apple news news plus but but what do you think of the chances of your being able to replicate this breakthrough experience um I think they're pretty high because I'm going to make it like um I'm going to make it a practice a discipline I'm going to work on this and deepen this and sort of apply this all the time I mean also I'm going to fall off the horse but I'm just going to get back on the horse if I fall off the horse so how do you plan to do that how to get back on horse how do you plan to replicate this experience well I'm going to be just a vigilant custodian of my thoughts and feelings at all times I'm going to make that be my primary occupation while I'm doing regular leading my regular life I'm just going to be really attentive to my own internal state and work on refining it and being aware of it and I mean this is nothing new I mean this is I'm not breaking any ground here this is like what any meditation teacher will teach you right um it's just the resolve to practice it you come from within it has to be a decision that you make on your part on your own out of your own volition yeah do you have a meditative practice I have in the past I'm trying to rekindle it uh but with this goddamn cough for one thing it's uh makes it hard because breathing is such a central uh excuse me it's such a central piece to living but most importantly of meditation so if you can't breathe consistently yeah it's been hard so it's been a rough month Luke so do you think that you suffer from ADHD no no I don't and I don't even believe it's a real thing I believe it's um I think it's a medicalization of I think a lot of people yeah I think people are forced into things that they've not interested in um okay it's too full it's too exciting one part of it is people have a low attention span because they're bombarded but with easy access to entertainment this if they just if you if you're used to having passive entertainment be your primary uh time your primary means of passing the time you're not going to develop it's like concentration is a muscle it needs to be it needs to be developed and if needs to be developed through practice and repetition like anything else and if you don't do it if you don't concentrate um you're going to have what they call ADHD you're just you're it's like it's like having a weak bicep all right I don't think I think it's anything more than that but that part two is I think a lot of people are forced into things of forced interactions that don't suit their natural inclination so you have to be intrinsically interested in things if you're going to concentrate on them and I think a lot of people are forced into mismatches between their natural and collate inclinations and uh what they're actually forced to do so I don't know but I I think it does come to the individual to um find their way and make make developing concentration be like a cornerstone of their sort of day-to-day life you're a big believer in individual responsibility individuals you know taking charge of their life whether it comes to health or psychological health you're a big believer in individual agency individuals like taking responsibility absolutely yeah absolutely Luke I who else if not you who Luke do you feel like you have chosen the life that you have today do you feel like you've built the life you have today that it was a result of your volitional choices or do you feel like you're in the power of forces greater than yourself I would say I'm 70 30 I think I'm 70 responsible for my circumstances and 30 I'm a slave to events I've taken a lot of risks I've taken a lot of silly risks I've done I've made bad decisions you've been impulsive yeah I've been impulsive yeah yeah that's true like I guess ultimately I'm a hundred percent responsible for right my lot in life but but you didn't choose to be where you're at today right you would never have chosen this yeah that's true I mean no I don't think that's true I mean what is that expression what do you want what do you want what you want is what you've got like you've chosen to put yourself there but it may not have been a conscious choice it may have been an unconscious choice so um does that make sense like yeah that's the theory but I mean is that is that what you feel I mean is that true to your heart Elliot I feel so I feel it feels true I don't think I'm trying I'm trying to take your question seriously so um I mean like has life panned out exactly the way I wanted it to no of course not so but who else is that the fault of what other people circumstances events or you know I could have I could have sought guidance I could have listened to advice I could have done a lot of things differently right and so the result of me not having done that has you know landed me where I am so you're you're sort of making a case for determinism in a way that makes me uncomfortable I don't want to make you uncomfortable but I do want to offer you this gift no one no one ever is to blame yeah I know I can't accept that that's you can't accept that's gift that I'm giving you I accept the gift I accept all of your gifts the the message that you're trying that's conveyed that song I don't like that like I think the individual matters Luke right like you you make a lot you make you make a lot of decisions right you make a lot of decisions about how you conduct your life right yeah and there's still aspects of your life that you're not satisfied with right but you're not living randomly right you're living you were living with a certain degree of attention right yeah so you're really you're you're piloting your own ship but the ocean doesn't necessarily cooperate with your intentions all the time right sometimes the winds that you're back sometimes the winds in your face and so but I would say that's 20 percent right I think the 80 percent is the intentionality that you bring to your life okay so you would go with like 80 percent your typical individual in the United States of America today is responsible for where he is at and 20 out of his control I think I would maybe 70 30 in the opposite direction but I keep going back we have to act we have to speak we have to make public policy as though people are overwhelmingly responsible for their actions right there's no other way to to conduct public policy I think and criminal proceedings and legal proceedings but the idea that people are responsible for their actions but I know that when I look at my life right now see I was torn before this live stream should I live stream or should I get to the beach and I felt like I had free will but when I look back on my life I see much smaller scope for free will when I understand my life it seems much more determined by all sorts of things outside of my free will yes I I know I know what you're saying and it's it's there's like this is the free will conversation like do we have free will right you saw a groundhog day right yes right and so so you remember the plot like basically the secrets events would happen and he would react certain certain ways and that the ways he'd react would sort of direct sort of the outcome of that that little subplot you know that kept getting replayed and replayed I think there's always a moment like in the present if you were aware enough you'd make the right choice right but what happens is this you sort of go to sleep and then your your your automatic reactions take over that are not considered but I think there's always there's always a moment in the present where you can make the correct decision wow but yeah don't you think now I've got a much more skeptical view of I mean yeah one sense you're absolutely right and that's how we have to talk to people talk to ourselves make public policy make laws run a run a legal system yeah it has to be that way but I I have a skeptical view of human nature I don't think people are basically evil but I think for for most people it's much easier to be selfish and self-serving than to do the right and the moral thing so I also think that our our reasoning is heavily affected by what's going on in our body our emotions our early childhood imprinting society around us all sorts of cues that we're getting so in in theory we have to talk like we have a warming free choice in in reality given the the fallen nature of man to use Christian talk or the human desire towards you know wickedness and evil and the poverty and selfishness using more more Jewish conversation I also recognize you know free will is is fairly limited I don't have a great deal of faith in the individual's ability to rationally change what is right I have more faith in say an individual belonging to a community where the community incentivizes the individual to do what is right well that the community puts up guardrails and just just doesn't let you cross certain lines yeah yeah there is definitely a role for that and that is that is the value of tradition right sometimes you don't understand why the rules are there right it's only looking back that understood the value of the rules later on because it prevented you from making a really bad mistake um yeah I mean a person a person living alone being alone having no other external influences is going to make bad decisions so they have no source of wisdom to connect to right yeah they have no and so in that sense I agree with you yes um but whether or not you okay um I guess I'm just resistant to this idea that oh well yeah that's just you know you you're sort of like being I just don't like the idea of like surrendering to the surrender yourself to the wind like well I guess that just happened things just happened here we are stuff's just happening um that just seems like too passive passive approach to life right the French the French have a saying to understand all is to forgive all and I do have the point of view that everybody does what they think is right not that they're right about being right but that that's you know how people act they they they try to further what what they believe is the right thing all right do you believe in ADHD I guess I do you believe it's real yeah but I've only believed this for like 24 hours or so it's new so you used to be on my side of the fence on this one no I didn't have an opinion I just don't know anything but now I've watched the couple of YouTube videos yeah I don't know I I get hit I get hit with this like oh I've got HD ADHD right I get hit with this all the time and this is a way of sort of putting a band-aid over some bad behavior right they just say oh I have this condition right and therefore I fucked up but therefore you have to pay the consequences okay let's say you met a woman you arranged to meet at a theater for Friday night for an 8 p.m. day and she doesn't show up and and she says she has ADHD and let's say she's been diagnosed by a medical professional that's having ADHD so for me that would be less wounding to my ego if I had made a date for a woman she doesn't show up if I was able to believe that she really did have ADHD and that she meant me no harm that would be easier for me to deal with how would you react in that situation that woman would be dead to me I would I would see her situation being so far gone that she was utterly unselfageable I would I would have I would curse myself for not have seen seen this pattern sooner and act and just stay away and and one of the characteristics of ADHD is that you easily uh get dopamine deflated right you don't have any dopamine and and the Monday is just unbearable I particularly so I was just listening to a lecture it says ADHD shows itself primarily in education because education is all about the third gratification and then it secondarily shows itself in the workplace because you're you know you're emotionally volatile you can't deal you can't handle the Monday uh you you start talking to people longer than they want to talk to you because you're not reading social cues and then the the third way it manifests itself is in relationships such as you know you don't show up for scheduled appointments such as to to a movie and when I kind of heard this it just rang really true to me but how do you deal when you're pretty much empty with dopamine you're just facing mundane tasks and you just feel empty inside like I will tend to deal with that by you know unhealthy ways would be to eat something or to drink something or to listen to music or to get some attention you know attention seeking behavior how do you deal when you're feeling absolutely depleted and you have nothing but mundane tasks at hand funny you should ask that today Luke Luke today I was at Costco and I was standing in front of the nicotine gum uh display that they had there and I was contemplating like deep deeply contemplating whether or not to buy a pack of nicotine gum this is pretty expensive stuff you know it's like 60 bucks for two boxes you know and I knew that Tucker Carlson was really into nicotine gum yes and I thought because I do have those moments where I need to just plow through some stuff that I don't want to do and I thought well maybe this would help me get me through those moments you know and I kept thinking but is it really healthy to do you know is it good for your heart isn't nicotine like bad for your heart increases blood pressure so I'm going through I'm going back and forth and it took me like 10 minutes to decide and I finally decided against it um but I haven't ruled it out what are your thoughts about nicotine gum I think it'd be an excellent idea to have in the bullpen presumably you don't get addicted to using it excessively yeah so you've never tried this no no I would not want to try it because like there's a um there's an asian massage parlor up the street and it seems like a very nice girl but I've never done this and I don't want to because I can't trust what will be the consequences if I if I just once taste the delight of you know paying for a for a lingon massage I just I don't like the consequences what will follow from that and I also don't like the consequences of what would follow from if I got you know got into nicotine gum yeah so you think there are negative consequences for nicotine gum I don't know whatever the whatever the massage experts say yeah I mean it's available over the counter but I guess so are cigarettes um I don't know I'll do I'll do some more research and get back to you so I got my crystal light I I I filled I filled a bottle that formerly contained soy milk with my orange crystal light and my father got up in the morning couldn't find any of his coconut milk so it takes my bottle of soy milk in the fridge that's pouring it onto his weakness and then what the hell is this ah soy milk is the worst well it was now crystal light orange classic orange oh okay but you you drink soy milk occasionally oh god that stuff is terrible um what about almond milk I can I can tolerate almond milk no I probably drink 20 times as much almond milk as soy milk okay but you know I'll do anything once and that kind of guy so it's not even really immoral thanks uh so I had one more thing to bring up um but it's alluding me um so what are your thoughts on charisma oh charisma yeah charisma is like people with charisma it's sort of like they they have like a higher energy level and they they're and it's like if they can do it I can do it right there's that sort of the reason they're attractive is because they make it seem like it's within your reach you know um so I mean yeah and they sort of there's a sort of hypnotic quality because you sort of forget your own cares and woes when you get caught up in someone else's charisma there's a certain escape from reality at the same time I don't know it's an interesting topic okay great you remember the other point that you wanted to no I don't I don't like I think I have to hang up okay my friend I'm uh I'm coughing all right bro I'll listen well so take care bro okay bye bye okay back to Randall Collins another sociologist here says a sacred object is the object upon which the attention of the group is focused and so it becomes a repository of the group's emotional energies when someone feels oneself in this position they then have an added store of emotional energy for their own use I remember the tremendous charge in emotional energy I got when I went on waski live and they're like 2,700 live viewers and the chat was flowing like a mighty river and when I have a hundred live viewers as opposed to nine live viewers I have a lot more emotional energy have a lot more energy period when there are 900 live viewers when there are a thousand two thousand live viewers I feel a lot more energetic and so when you are the focus of a lot of people's attention that imbues you with a store of tremendous energy for your own use that makes you charismatic right you compel attention other people become spectators to you and they are you know channeling attention which which carries with it energy right it's like the the flow of sacred emotional energy this is Randall Collins perspective so Randall Collins says the upsurge of the gay and lesbian movements have been affected by the increasingly focused eroticization of youth culture for the heterosexual elite in the youth scene they did not entirely dominate a ranking of erotic non-elites emulating them deferring to them or retiring unashamedly before them was the motivated social movements rebellion against the civil hierarchy the erotic party culture so there's a fair amount of idealization what what went on in the hippie scenes of the 1960s but the techniques that gave us the hippie movement gave it its charisma and identity right then you know took over youth culture right and then became the mainstream of youth culture this uh Randall Collins he says sexual passion is not prime primordial but a form of emotional energy it is specialized for its particular symbolic objects because of the way they become charged up with attention in particular types of interaction rituals all right i just finished reading Stephen Turner's memoir called mad hazard a life in social theory so he's like a philosopher the social sciences and he started off in sociology and he said a great illusion i subscribed to there was that theory mattered right conventional picture was that science requires theory and methods which in effect are two different poles but they need to be integrated into research projects so theory provides the hypothesis of the methods used to test but sociology didn't really have this it wanted to be like physics but really couldn't pull it off so sociology doesn't have any real theories in the sense that physics has theories such as the theory of relativity what sociology has is paradigms and from the point of view of the elite if there are only one paradigm it should be theirs so the historicist and the situationer sees that our ideas are shaped by our time our social circumstances and the conflicts they produce one of steven turner's great books is liberal democracy 3.0 so he makes the point that liberal democracy 1.0 2.0 means government by discussion right requires but the willingness and the ability to be persuaded that that which is political is a political decision and what is expert is also a political decision so claims of expertise are assertions that you have opinions that go above and beyond politics you are in a special realm but this itself is a claim in the realm of the political so the boundaries between the realm of expertise and the realm of politics are constantly moving organizations including the state employ the strategy of using experts and they are then faced with counterclaims of other experts so politics in the 3.0 stage of liberalism is in large part about expert power and how do people who can't understand what the experts are talking about decide to follow or not follow the experts then he talks about famous sociologist James Coleman started researching and writing about white flight which was a topic that the left was anxious to deny and so James Coleman got essentially ostracized from the field of academic sociology but talking about what the left wanted to deny white flight so if you object to Carl Schmidt states of exceptions what would you put in their place perhaps a state that cannot resolve its issues within the law deserves to be dissolved he gives a saying from the 1960s the student about the 60s student resolved the students in the faculty fought in the administration won oh so Steven Turner recognized the dramatic growth what's the most number of viewers I've had I've had viewers pretty close to a thousand on at least two occasions live viewers one was the Jim Goh Saturday night thing and another time was when I think I was covering live writing in Kenosha, Wisconsin so Steven Turner academic recognized the rise of political correctness on campuses and there was this incident in the 1990s when Dr. Fernando 30 Pacheco who'd been the ringside physician of Muhammad Ali gave a talk to this campus University of Southern Florida and he was accused by two women faculty members of sexism he was violently denounced because his book mentions the large bosoms of some of the women in his book and then he went to a department meeting and the topic was an invitation to speak that had been extended to Condoleezza rise by the young Republicans so at the time she was a provost of Stanford and she'd not yet been appointed National Security Advisor by George W. Bush and this meeting was a rare show of consensus nobody thought that she should be allowed to speak no one spoke up for freedom of speech and Steven Turner thought my situation is precarious if I am accused of something it's all going to end in tears I'm going to keep my opinions of Judith Butler much else to myself and Steven Turner's been a prolific academic he's published many books many papers and even the most obscure papers he's he's published have often gotten very vicious takedowns and it made him realize that whatever one writes and you can say whatever one livestreams there is the student in a garret in Berlin ready to take you down so Steven Turner stumbled into becoming an international relations theorist so he wanted to do a paper on Hans Morgenthau and international relations theorists to both the United States I think around the time of World War II so Hans Morgenthau essentially a realist and he had a theory an idealization of the responsible leader and any string from the behavior that conformed to his idea of a responsible leader caught in danger everything derived from this so Steven Turner wrote a paper on this sent it to American political science review and he got back a comment since NATO has not absorbed Ukraine realism as an international relations theory is dead so why publish on Hans Morgenthau but Steven Turner did begin teaching international relations and he found that American students generally speaking knew nothing about political history they knew nothing about international relations they were typically sentimental they thought everyone should get along by being nice the ex-military and the foreign students by contrast were intensely engaged knowledgeable and open minded so Steven Turner also took down democratic theory that's the idea that a system should be made to be more democratic by the right reforms but these reforms aren't about giving the voters more power to be progressive is to be a head of the people right you need to change the constitution change the rules of the game to be quote-unquote more democratic to produce the right outcomes president assumption the assumption is the present system is undemocratic insufficiently democratic and the strategy though is not to appeal to the people but to the courts we change the rules of the game on grounds of equity and equality and access so one basic function of voting which Tucker Carlson was just talking about is to tell the state or a particular politician that it or he has failed so democracy is a system according to max vapor where you select the leader and then you shut up and obey but if the leader fails to the gallows with him so during the trump administration there was a great deal of talk about democratic values but no one said what they were supposed to be so Steven Turner argued democratic values mean accountability that's the core value of democracy without accountability there can be meaningful rule of the people those are some of the good bits there from Steven Turner okay here is the talk on ADHD that has really got me thinking and then at the end of that I will talk specifically about recommendations that we often convey to adults and their families on how one might try to address these difficulties I can't guarantee that you'll be able to address all of them but here are the things at least in the states anyway that people are implementing in order to help adults with ADHD by the way I should have showed you this earlier using my sources of incomes you can see if I have any conflict of interest I have a ton of conflicts so I'm conflicted with everybody at this point but I do work for all the pharmaceutical companies in the US and Canada okay the prevalence of adult ADHD very quickly is about four and a half percent three and a half percent worldwide it's actually more common in developed and undeveloped countries but that has to do with survival rates of children and we see ADHD varying across age sex social class and so on so it's not spread evenly across the population but by adulthood the normal three to one ratio seen in children of boys to girls has begun to become much closer suggesting that there may be something about female ADHD that's a little bit later to manifest itself or at least to begin to produce impairments then we see in male ADHD eventually by adulthood they're equally severe and by the way our studies of women with ADHD show that there are very few differences between men and women with ADHD that are not due to the normal differences between men and women in general so any differences we find we find across all of our control groups not just specific to the ADHD group there's very little that is specific to ADHD in women and I say that because there are books on the subject in the trade literature that have made claims to the contrary but which are not based on any scientific studies female ADHD is not a qualitatively different disorder from male ADHD but it does have as we will see so with most live streamers be kind of ADHD so one common career trajectory for people with ADHD is that they become self-employed because people apparently with ADHD they need immediate results and so if you're self-employed right you're going to pay the bills or not pay the bills you know based on your own efforts well if you're an employee you can often get away with not producing for a longer time period some differences in impairments that are likely to be due to the ADHD and that has to do with role divisions in society now we do know that only one in ten adults with ADHD in the US is currently diagnosed and treated whereas it's six in ten children are diagnosed and treated so we've done a much better job with public mental health in the child psychiatry area whereas only recently as all of you know has adult ADHD actually even been put on the radar screen of adult public mental health and still there are many adult psychiatrists and psychologists who still do not understand that adult ADHD is in fact so this is Dr. Russell Barclay a valid disorder that needs to be diagnosed and treated now over the next hour i'm going to show you a variety of impairments as they stack up in adult ADHD and we're going to look at each of these specifically and then we're going to talk about how best that these might be managed i don't know why that middle one hasn't come in yet there it is ah it was in order to be salacious that's why nevertheless notice what's happening here there as the child moves on to become the adolescent to be okay unhealthy lifestyle tick yeah i had that a lot of risk taking uh loneliness financial problems yeah for 10 years i carried over $50,000 in credit card debt occupational problems yeah i've never earned over six figures accidental injuries and driving yeah i had got into a lot of car accidents risky sexual behavior yes i've never gotten std but i was a little risky early parent to it no smoking no caffeine not really legal difficulties where i sued five times for liable relationship and family issues yes limited educational success and never graduated from college i was a mediocre student in primary middle and high school become the adult there is this piling on of deficits that we see and that's simply because the more domains in which you have access to the more likely you are to become impaired in that domain five year olds don't drive so driving can't be an impairment for them but it can be once you get to at least in the u.s 16 years of age now i'm going to be sharing with you the results of my own research specifically a very large study one of the largest ever done to date on adults with adhd this was published last year in my textbook on adult adhd that you see here kevin murphy was my colleague on this study and it took us seven years to do this study because this is a very thorough in fact it is the most thorough evaluation of impairments related to adult adhd ever published we looked at 146 adults so part of my adhd is that i'm a serial enthusiast i'm always enthusiastic about some new magic key to explain life the reason i i derive magic key thinking is precisely because i'm so susceptible to it so i just started listening to this guy talking today and i think my god this explains the trajectory of my life i wish i'd known this earlier diagnosed in our clinic with adhd most importantly we compared them to a psychiatric control group it's easy to compare adults with adhd to normal adults and get massive differences but what we want to know is what's specific to adhd what is it that adhd does that other disorders that we see in outpatient clinics anxiety disorders depression relationship problems personality disorders drug use problems what is adhd doing that's specific that's not necessarily seen in those other disorders so this was a groundbreaking study because it's one of the few studies that has a control group with other disorders and for the sake of science that becomes extraordinarily important so here's our control group these were adults who came to the same adult outpatient psychiatry clinic at our medical school this was an adhd adult clinic and these people came because they thought they were adhd but they weren't turns out that they had other disorders and you can see that the vast majority of them had anxiety or mood disorders doesn't mean those two can't go together by the way many adults with adhd have them so this guy said about 20 things in a 80 minute talk i found absolutely fascinating one of them was that psychiatry can do far more for adhd than for depression and for anxiety and this is like the number one mental health issue problem that we face it means that we found adhd not to be present in the lives of these individuals their problems were entirely accounted for simply by the other disorder now when we interviewed these patients and from here on out you will see three bars on every graph you will see the adults with adhd that will always be the first bar you will see the clinical control group and then the general population control group of adult volunteers in our study and what you see here is that both of our clinical groups were quite impaired as they should be i mean after all they're being referred for assistance there better be some so yeah if you took an objective look at my life you'd have to say you know 40 is being massively impaired 40 never got married never had a relationship longer than a year they never earned six figures that was blessed with all these talents you know what the hell did he do with them and so that's where it's it's so tempting to you know find this this one variable which seems to explain so much of how you know i didn't live up to expectations but i didn't fulfill people's hopes and dreams for me no i let a lot of people down you know why why did i become the great underachiever on problem in life work home relationship school whatever because no impairment no disorder in case you're wondering where does adhd begin and a sparkling personality leave off it's where impairment begins and impairment is in a major life activity now i want you right that's where addiction begins and you know other you know heavy drinking there's a separation like you can be a heavy drinker not be an alcoholic you're an alcoholic when your life is being impaired by your drinking if you're heavy drinker but you never get arrested you don't suffer impairment from it then it's not an addiction if you like to gamble that you're not suffering impairment from it it's not an addiction if you sometimes look at pornography but you don't suffer impairment from it it's not an addiction if you sometimes eat massive quantities of you know sugary foods that you don't suffer impairment from it on an ongoing basis and once you do suffer impairment from it you can't stop doing this destructive activity or taking in this destructive substance right you're not addicted that's the classical 12-step approach i believe do you notice something here although there's a couple of areas where these two groups are close in most of these areas adult adhd is a more impairing disorder now this is based on self-report we also interviewed them and others who knew them well about their childhood years and the differences become even more startling here because you can see that even as children these people are self-reporting much greater impairment across these various life activities then it's the case for other psychiatric disorders what you're going to see is the same pattern in fact why the hell was i a mediocre student going through primary school middle school and and high school you know i was blessed with an above average brain i was born with an academic father but any anything that i find mundane right i find challenging or difficult i just kind of drains me of all energy and drive to take care of the mundane set up like just kind of wired to be endlessly seeking stimulation and attention and risk and in every slide which is going to allow us to conclude that adhd is one of the most impairing adult outpatient disorders seen in mental health clinics today more impairing than anxiety disorders depression relationship problems and other difficulties for which people seek outpatient treatment not as that fascinated me and from the tiny tiny tiny little bit that i know about this it also makes sense hearing an inpatient disorders such as bipolar disorder psychosis schizophrenia and so on or even adult autism those are very severe disorders but certainly more impairing than the traditional outpatient disorders that most people in primary care in particular would feel comfortable managing adhd impairments at school and work this description we looked at the educational histories of these individuals in fact we even got their transcripts through high school and those who attempted college we got their college transcripts with their permission and although i can't go over every little tidbit that we found i remember in second grade on my report card the teacher said Luke is always very willing to share his opinions with the class uh 50 48 years later i'm still doing this he needs to learn to be more considerate of the slower thinker right poor social skills not reading social cues which would cost me friendships relationships in a piece and you know basic normal functioning in life because i refused or didn't notice social cues in the histories of these individuals you can read my book on adult adhd for all of those findings you can see here what we found education was the most impaired domain if you had adhd and although adhd is going to interfere with other major life activities this is the big one and there's a good reason for that if you just hark back to this morning lecture education more than any other aspect of life requires deferred gratification and deferred gratification i could never get myself to do anything that i wasn't interested in right i just didn't have the strength i just didn't have the drive just didn't have the energy i just didn't have the thing is called executive function to do anything that didn't absorb me and not many things absorb me right the mundane right i've not done very well in the mundane right in some of the more exciting areas of life i've been extraordinary but most of life is not exciting most of life is mundane and it's in this most of life that i have come up you know way below normal average functioning is what adhd can destroy so no surprise it would be the area of life that most taxes delay of gratification that people with adhd would find themselves to be the most impaired i took geometry like twice in high school i said bollock stumped my my scheduling that as a junior or a senior i was taking like freshman composition like i've got it to see in an english literature class in college like there's no way i should have gotten these low grades but something was off one of my resolutions in dating was to never date anyone who was worse than me at reading social cues because i knew how bad i was and i think i mean on one or two occasions can i ever recall dating someone who was even worse than me reading social cues and and she would comment on how i always needed stimulation like i always needed to be like listening to a book or reading a book or you know always needed stimulation other kinds of stimulation too and you can see here that it was a substantial percentage of patients had experienced these various outcomes we found that a third of our adults with adhd never finished high school which is three times the us average of failing to complete compulsory education so that alone is a very telling statistic because the cost to a community if an adolescent doesn't complete high school is three hundred and seventy five thousand to five hundred thousand dollars us that is what the community will lose in extra wages extra taxes paid extra value to the community and increased dependence on social and other services and i think many live streams also have adhd i know i just very easily fall into a mindset where i don't take you know sensible precautions i just feel like nothing will happen to me or i don't care and and i start you know engaging in risky reckless behavior whether it's on a live stream in vlogging or in other areas of life i've not been the greatest driver i've had more of my average share of accidents speeding tickets parking tickets all from failing to pay attention meaning lousy executive functioning i think that's right terminal services that are provided by the community i dare say the cost would be higher up here because you provide more services than we do now when we look at the school as well as the work domain specifically and we interviewed our adults we found that in the work and school environments the inattentive executive deficits were far more impairing in those domains than was the impulsive and the hyperactive deficits we did find however that the emotional impulsiveness however was quite specific in predicting how many jobs you would be fired from in your life so that your executive deficits are determined i've been fired from like 15 jobs in my life like i was fired from like the first three jobs i held in my life from age 11 on like the responsible normal people i know around me have never been fired so why the hell did i get fired some of it was lack of attention to detail some of it lack of lack of drive you know other times it was a natural volatility now i've experienced a lot of improvement from these symptoms from taking up the alexander techniques so adhd is not nearly as much of a problem for me today as it was more than 15 years ago remaining how poorly you might be doing your job but your emotional impulsiveness is going to predict whether you get fired so the two symptom dimensions of adhd have somewhat different correlates over time and predict different risks and outcomes but mainly in school and in work it's the executive deficits as you see here that are resulting in a number of complaints that our adults with adhd voiced to us about how they were suffering in the workplace and especially the impulsive decision making now there were additional concerns as well difficulties following directions frequently changing jobs out of boredom usually with no other job to go to they just up and quit right i just didn't feel like working today yeah for much of my life i was particularly interested in following directions i was just so cocksure that i do better than everyone else right and the more i was failing in reality the more i was failing with the mundane tasks of life the more i retreated to a fantasy world which then made me even less adapted to dealing with reality so i told my boss to shove it and now i'm home all right now what do i do okay it's very very common to see this inability to bridge this okay i don't like this job but maybe i should have another one lined up before i finally tell my boss what i think of them several studies my own included now but especially the new york longitudinal studies are showing a massive drift to self-employment by age 30 and up now this could be explained by two possible reasons and they're not mutually exclusive it could be an adverse outcome individuals at adhd find it difficult to sustain employment when they work for other people so what's left they self-select into self-employment on the other hand it may be that self-employment is a positive niche because you can be your own boss you can set your own schedule you can work with during your peak levels of attention and arousal we know that adult adhd delays the normal diurnal rhythm by about three to four hours so adults with adhd are more likely to report afternoon and night times as their most productive time whereas normal individuals that is the general population i use the word normal loosely but the general population usually finds that the morning to early afternoon hours are their peak hours of activation so whatever the reason may be self-employment may allow a flexibility a forgiveness a latitude that is not provided when you work for other people and you have to adhere to their demand so one of the great things about 12-step programs and why they're not as cold as you might imagine is that they do not discourage getting outside help and so a lot of people in 12-step programs they don't make much progress in their recovery through working the 12-step supplying the 12 tools going to meetings you know prayer meditation they don't make much progress until they deal with their adhd but for some people until you deal with your adhd then the spiritual path and the path of 12-step recovery this sort of that it's not going to work for you right sometimes you have to deal with something you know crippling like adhd before you can then get traction in a 12-step program or with a mentor or a sponsor a good therapist some other way of improving your life like i didn't get traction with my energy my strength and my health unless i'm taking b-fung and capsules from an ancestral supplement about 18 months ago i got my strength and my energy back i'm about to go to the beach and go for a good swim and have a jog and they're scheduled their hours and so on and also let's not forget that in self-employment the consequences are very near and as we explained in the last lecture the closer the consequences are the better you do if you're self-employed and you don't work yeah that's me right i the closer consequences are the better i do the more renewed i am from consequences the worse i do the worse i behave the more risk-taking i do the more sloppy and antisocial i get immediate consequences are really good for me like lots of feedback is really good for me it's putting a live stream getting that that immediate feedback it's really good for me you don't eat if you work for other people you can slack off a little bit and still get that check at the end of the week so there may be something about the way consequences occur in these forms of employment that may be beneficial to the adult with ADHD we just don't know but certainly we are beginning to see a rise in the area of self-employed activity and about a third of our adults with ADHD and of course we've mentioned the problems with organization and self-discipline and pardon me emotional impulsiveness but now research in europe and here has begun to put specific consequences or costs on adult ADHD in the workplace for instance in manheim germany at the university a study was just done that shows that if you have adult ADHD you are less likely to be productive in the workplace about 22 days a year more than other people you can put a cost on that that actually produces a detrimental effect on the workplace and your employer our adults with ADHD were interviewed about problems they might be having in the workplace and you can see what we found here adults with ADHD complain much more across most of these areas of workplace difficulties than did adults in either of our control groups particularly look at them what about quitting a job out of boredom i just don't care for this job anymore it's not very interesting about the door you know two to two and a half times more likelihood of changing jobs and changing more jobs that was a percentage not a frequency measure the frequency measure is even greater and so if we start to put costs on this you will see here that there's at least a four to five percent reduction or more in overall productivity two times the rate of sick leave two times the rate of accidental injuries in the workplace and the cost of the employer per year is going to be about four to five thousand u.s. dollars of decreased productivity in the workplace you add that up that gets to be a lot of money that is billions of dollars so okay that's uh dr russell barkley talking about ADHD something i'm just starting learning about really the last 24 hours i'm off to the beach i'll talk to you later it's now 5 11 p.m in tenem sands january 6 so i'm probably living 15 16 hours in the future compared to where you might