 You know, I made 40 here, so a lot of the beliefs that service are not actually based in science, they're not actually based in reality. In fact, many of the beliefs that most service are anti-rational. For example, most people have a positive outlook on life. I'm not sure that I have had one over the course of my life, so when I got a bad grade in a class, I would start thinking it's useless. There's no point in studying which would then lead to less study going forward and then more bad grades and then that would come out. There's just no point in me trying. So that's kind of been an instinct of mine over the course of my life that one thing goes wrong and then it's like, I might as well give up. There's no point in going forward and that would lead me to not take the actions that I needed to take to be successful and it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most people, however, have the opposite perspective. Most people have a positive outlook on life. I think about two-thirds of the population has a positive outlook on life so that when one thing goes wrong, it's like, oh, that's okay. I just need to learn from it and press forward and if I work hard then I will succeed. So most people basically want to develop relationships with others and they want to bond with other people and if other people treat them badly, then they leave and get away. So there are these styles of connection with other people and there are those with the positive style who enjoy a positive connection with other people and then there are those who are avoidant and then there are those who are anxious and insecure. So these are the various attachment styles and so the attachment style basically parallels a positive or a negative or an anxious outlook on life. So the secure attachment probably accounts for about two-thirds of the population that these people who basically have a positive outlook on life, something goes wrong and their reaction is, oh, that's all right, I'm just going to learn from the experience and things will get better and it's kind of stunning to me because that's not how I've gone through my life. When one thing would go wrong, I've tended to go, oh, I might as well give up whether it's with relationships or with school or with work. One thing would go wrong and I'd be tempted to give up but most people have an optimistic perspective on life. They believe that they have good prospects in the future. They believe that they are masters of their own fate and this involves considerable exaggeration and spin. They are looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. Now, it's not accurate, it's not scientific, it's not peer-reviewed but it makes people happier and it motivates them to try harder when they encounter obstacles in their way. On the other hand, there are people such as many of the characters in this episode on The Catalyst of Suicide, this podcast on Teal Swan. Many of the people attracted to her had a negative outlook on life. Died by Suicide directly because of Teal's teachings but I do know that at least two people took their lives shortly after posting about Suicide on the Teal Tribe group. There was a 22-year-old man, I'll call him Max. He was an active member from October 2014 until he died by Suicide April 2015. Hours before he died, he posted on Teal Tribe about all the sadness he was feeling. At the end of the post, he wrote that he thought he wanted to take his life that day. I saw that his sister was also in the group. I reached out to her. Hi, is this Kara? She told me her brother struggled throughout his life. He had eczema, skin disease, and he had trouble making friends. Then, when he was around 20, he got involved in the Teal Tribe. There was a point where he was really into it and watching all of our videos and stuff and even my dad was concerned about it so he started watching our videos to make sure it wasn't some dumb cult or anything. He posted about how much he loved the community and how much he connected with Teal. He encouraged his sister to join. She did, but she wasn't very active. It seems like a cult to me and I don't need that in my life. What about it strikes you as a cult? I see how people respond to her or react to her and the way they react. I converted to Orthodox Judaism. I've largely lived my life within Orthodox Judaism for more than two decades. I recognize that many outsiders would view my life as life within a cult. I don't have this knee-jerk negative reaction to quote-unquote cults. I do think we were born with a need to live tribally, to be connected to a certain in-group that looks after each other. I think that in our modern, deracinated world, courts are often a substitute for tribe. It seems like a cult. She's a god to them or something. Regardless, she thinks he made a lot of friends there and they helped him through tough times. It doesn't particularly upset me if people have false beliefs. I think most people have a positive outlook on life and I'm not sure life justifies that, but a positive outlook on life, that serves you. Athletes have all sorts of rituals that they go through and they psych themselves up through various mental tricks that are not true to reality. It's like, oh, they'll never take this away from us after they win a big match. They win the Super Bowl. They'll never be able to take this away. Well, who's trying to take it away? Nobody wanted to see me succeed or the bigger the chip that they can get on their back, then the more anger and energy they can release. So all sorts of people in high-powered positions tell themselves nonsense. I mean, look at Donald Trump. I mean, if you were to take what he says seriously and literally, then you'd have to cringe. He's kind of the power of positive thinking personified. So I was just reading an article. I subscribed to Apple Plus about six weeks ago and I feel like I'm getting a really good deal. And I just got the iPhone 13. So I just upgraded the iPhone 13 Max. So I upgraded from the iPhone 12 and I like Apple. Apple News Plus is just $10 a month and it gives you access to about 300 different subscriptions and one of them is to Entrepreneur Magazine. And I just stumbled on this article. Why are so many entrepreneurs and very spiritual mystical and straight up woo-woo ideas? Because when you're doing something hard, you need all the help you can get. And just because it's all in your head doesn't mean it's not real. Remember when I was trying to pursue an acting career, one reason that I wanted both an agent who was Debbie Durkin and she later got disbarred from being an agent. And I also had a manager, David Payne, and one reason that I had both a manager and an agent is that I thought the more people I have in my corner, this is hard, the more people who want me to succeed, the more people who are guiding me and invested in me than the best that is for my career. So the harder the thing is that you want to do, the more tempted and more incentivized you are to believe in all sorts of things that are not true. So entrepreneurship will change you, right? And entrepreneurs, generally speaking, tend to have far more energy than regular people. To succeed in life, you need energy. You don't tend to succeed with low levels of energy. So the focus of this essay in Entrepreneur Magazine is someone named Kat Norton. She's best known as Miss Excel. So she's all about Excel and she's all about the power of energy transmission. So entrepreneurs are drawn to magical thinking at a much higher rate than the general population. So they're into energy transmission and the quantum field to transform themselves from ordinary morals into smiling, confident, rich. So what are these energy transmissions? So the positive energy you put into the world is what you get back compounded. If you project positive energy, then people are attracted to it. They move closer to you when you truly believe in that positive energy because you act on it. You stand taller because you feel taller. You smile wider because you're happier. You go confidently in the direction of your dreams instead of following your fears. And so if you put yourself in this highly aligned state where your thoughts and your actions are one, you're just going to be buzzing with optimistic energy and you can live in your future. You can live as large a life as you want and you can watch as reality catches up. And so she talks about how I've got my energy frequency tuned incredibly high. I mean, think about anonymous professor here. This is someone whose energy frequency is just tuned at a very high vibrational place. Anonymous Professor Elliot Blatt. I mean, come on guys. Is your energy frequency not tuned? Is your vibration not at a very high place right now? So she read some books that turned her into thinking this way. The first is Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. And I read a few chapters because I love the title. I love the idea of this Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself because I do believe that we have many stories that we tell ourselves that are not true or forget being true or false. It just don't serve us. So I like the theory of the book. But then I found it was written by Joe Dispenza, who's a chiropractor. Anybody run some like quantum healing clinic? So I'm not a big fan of chiropractors. So anyway, the book argues that your thoughts have consequences so great that they can change your reality. And I read a book on Steve Jobs and it talked about he had this like reality distortion field around him. Like he had such a strong belief in the things that he wanted to achieve that he did not accept normal restrictions on reality. Wow. Yeah. Elliot Blatt says his vibration has turned to the max. My heart hurts. Look, there's a professor. I came here to try to get some laughs from the chat. I am so sorry. Okay. And she then says she's reading this book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. But if you can change your thoughts, you can change your reality in your future. We've all heard this a million times, right? You need to rewire your brain at a subconscious level. And she not only loved this book and recommended it to a friend. She created a study guide for it. Then she bought the self-hypnosis course to be magnetic. Well, back in 2009, I think I spent like $300 buying a hypnosis course. I'm not aware of like doing anything with it. I mean, I spent probably two dozen, three dozen hours with it. But I mean, it made all these wonderful promises, but I probably didn't really follow through as I should. But she got the self-hypnosis course to be magnetic from Lacey Phillips, the millennial manifesting guru who believes in unblocking subconscious beliefs of unworthiness. So are you ready to unblock your subconscious beliefs of unworthiness tonight? So to be magnetic, that helps you to supposedly rewire your brain circuitry. You get these visions of life that come from your childhood and they come up and you essentially show your subconscious that there could have been another way from the triggering downbeat memory. So this new path neutralizes the electromagnetic, magnetic charge of the memory so it's no longer triggering for you. Are you ready to neutralize the electromagnetic charges of your negative thinking? Then she got serious about Kundalini yoga. Okay, I was into Kundalini yoga for two years. So Kundalini means coiled snake energy. It's the divine energy that lives at the base of the spine. So Kundalini yoga tries to uncoil the snake and free the energy within us. So these three things, the book, the course, yoga or deal with turning your positive thoughts into positive outcomes, right? So which is a pedestrian insight. I think we're all aware of the link between thoughts and emotions and then the links go the other way. Your body affects your thoughts and your emotions affect your body and your body and your emotions affect your thinking and your thinking affects your body and your emotions, right? We're one entity that comprises the physical form, the body and the mind, but the mind resides in the body. The emotions take place in the body. So not a big believer in mind-bodied dualism. So the more you're aware of the link between your thoughts and your emotions, the more you can distance yourself from your thoughts and treat them objectively, allowing you to redirect negative thoughts and engage with more positive ones, which then influences the emotions because emotions at the subatomic quantum field have no idea what that means. I can't take that seriously. But anyway, waves of energy come up and we thrum. No, you're heading to thrum with positivity and we can get others to respond in positive ways towards us. So I like Wu stuff. I'm simultaneously highly skeptical of it, but I have no doubt that this book and this course and this yoga that this woman is doing, Miss Excel, that it worked for her. So I think there are all sorts of things that can work for us that are not necessarily true. And Josh Randall says, I will not sleep until I've rescued Coach Redpill from Nazi Abduction. Press F for Gonzalo Lira. Yeah, hopefully he was just picked up by the Ukrainian security and asked to go home. So I don't really know much about Coach Redpill. So Kat Norton sounds pretty similar to a common entrepreneurial quest to transcend your inadequate self, to level up, right? So this is similar to the neurolinguistic programming of Tony Robbins and NLP is just bunk. But it doesn't really stand up to analysis. But I'm sure all sorts of things from Scientology to Religion to different types of yoga can unleash the giant within for certain people. I'm sure that Scientology genuinely helps some people. But entrepreneurs 50% of new businesses fail within five years, 75% fail within 10. So yeah, I think the tougher your task, the more likely you are to seek energy from the world of unreality. So entrepreneurs are more likely to report a lifetime history of depression, 30%, about the same rate of ADHD, substance use problems and bipolar analysis, 11%. Because entrepreneurs work long hours, they have problems with vendors, employees, stress, stress, stress, not sleeping very much. Entrepreneurship is like staring into the abyss and eating glass, says Elon Musk. So the level of courage and energy that it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, it may not be available for most people on a purely rational basis. Probably for most successful entrepreneurs, you have to believe all sorts of things that are not true. And breaking the habit of being yourself was all about quantum physics and Einstein's theory of relativity. Okay, speaking of quantum healing, here's Elliot Blatt. What's going on, bro? What's up, bro? Shalom. Blessings. Blessings. Luke, I've been waylaid by allergies for the past week. It's really eating. It's really killing me, Luke. I can't enjoy life. And are these coming from some undoubt with trauma from your childhood? I wish you were that simple, but... I just think you need to manifest the giant within, bro. I'm doing whatever I can. I'll take anything at this point. But this has never happened to me before. I used to always just laugh at people when they complained about allergies. And now I'm reaping the rewards of my hubris. Any ideas, Luke? Any remedies, any magical potions you could recommend? I did a couple of pull-ups today for the first time since I was 21. So 34 years, I did some pull-ups. You did? Wow. I walked by a pull-up bar and I just looked at that. And I said, I wonder if I could still do that. And I didn't want to find out. You should find out, bro. You should hang on it. Just hanging on it. Just holding your own weight, I think, is really good for you. My arms might fall out of my sockets. It felt good. I'll admit the only way I successfully pulled off the pull-up was to jump up to the tree branch. So I kind of had that upward cheating quantum energy. And then I just pulled myself up the final two feet. Well, you know, like last year I was doing sit-ups, but I found a way to cheat at sit-ups. Yeah, you do that. No. You get some hand weights, you know, like little mini barbells, five pounds, seven pound barbells. And you kind of throw them up as you go up. So it gives you like this. This gives a little boost, you know, and you can sort of imagine that you're doing it the hard way. In fact, you're doing it the easy way. I would think sit-ups would be really bad for you, that they'd lead to curvature of the spine. Are they bad for you? No, I didn't hear that. Yeah, I think it kind of deforms and shortens your spine. I mean, planks, I think are good for you. I do planks. I could do like two minutes of planks a day. Oh, I want to get that six-pack back, bro. You know what I mean? So you can't help me with my allergies, man. What's going on? No, no, but Ricardo is back, man. Wow, a member for 15 months. How Luke, how Elliot, how the doof, how our people. You gotta see for yourself. I'm out in the park right now, believe it or not, trying to like take the bull by the horns. Why don't I just expose myself to as much pollen as possible and see if I can stimulate my body to get used to it. Oh, God. I never had allergies until February of 1988, which was just like a week or two or three before I descended into chronic fatigue syndrome. I got the first allergies of my life. Yeah. So maybe you've got a whole lot more hell ahead of you. Yeah, like a nice lost decade. Yeah, maybe you've got a lost decade ahead, bro. No, it's terrible. It's like my eyes, it feels like they're on fire. Like somebody just dumped a bunch of salt into my eyes. It's just, I can't work. Like they come on like around after lunchtime and then I can't, I can't do any work. Bitcoin solves this. Hopefully. Hopefully. Yeah. I'm going to be one of those guys on the street with a little slime cardboard. Spelled by pollen. Anyway, so it's an interesting topic though. Yeah. Yeah. Like the cult of positivity, the Silicon Valley ultra optimism, you know, I wonder about it. I go back to fourth on it. What consciously, what non-rational or even anti-rational and false beliefs have you used to your benefit or do you currently employ? I don't know. I mean, okay. You call this irrational or call it not a, you call it a rational call. Don't call it a rational, but I couldn't, I couldn't live if like, I didn't think there were a purpose to all of this. I don't know how I could live. I don't know how to get to the day. Yes. You know, like this basic fundamental positive assumption. I couldn't rationalize doing anything. You know? Yeah. So is that, you know, Yeah. It's not rational. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why get out of bed? Why do you, you know, like if you aren't on some sort of mission or playing a game, you have to be able to contextualize all this meaningless nonsense that you go through day in, day out, you know. So what's the meaning of your life? Just a small question. Just, just a little softball question. No. I just, I just see myself on this journey of deeper understanding. That's the only thing I could say, you know, like I can't, I can't point to one thing and say, you know, it's sort of like this, you know, it's corny kind of new age language, but yeah, it's like this journey of discovery. You know, because there are these incredible synchronicities that happen. It's sort of, occasionally they really reify your, this view of mine. Like you ever have an incredible coincidence or a synchronicity. You think about somebody and then you turn the corner and bam, there they are and that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Right. Now, do you, do you, no, there's two ways to look at this, you know, you could say, well, this was just a mathematical coincidence, right? It means absolutely nothing. Or you take the other view that you're sort of, it was all destiny, you know, it was part of the story. You needed to see that person and they, they revealed some sort of truth and therefore this happened. And this was just proves that we're all sort of sewn together in this great overarching unity. Right. Which camper you in? Oh, I prefer to see, see, see meaning in it, ultimate meaning. Yeah. Meaning, your meaning seeking creatures, you know. Yeah. So, but like, okay. So I don't know. I mean, I'm really not coherent right now, Luke. I probably shouldn't have called in because my mind is all fuzzy with allergies and things. But I was talking, I was thinking about like the Silicon Valley thing like, like Elon Musk, take Elon Musk, for example, you know, he's had some very sparking successes, but he's also had some pretty dramatic failures, you know, failures that are borderline psychotic, like this, this hyper loop thing. Do you know the details on this? Like it was promised to be this, you know, incredibly high efficient means of community transportation. And just, just, just it doesn't even pass the common sense test if you really think about it. And then, you know, it's, I think it's basically in the process of folding up after, you know, a billion dollars being flushed down the toilet. And yet he has this, this almost magical aura that he, he, he that surrounds him. So which goes to your Steve Jobs, Jobs point that some people are just sort of ordained by heaven to have this magnetic charisma that people believe and are, are, are happy to follow. How do we, how do we turn you into that magnetic charisma inside of you that's just waiting to be tapped? Like that Kundalini at the base of your spine, bro. Well, I wish it that simple. You know, I used to think of those terms, you know, I just had to sort of develop myself at a certain level. But maybe it just takes multiple lifetimes. Maybe this is just, because if it were super easy, you know, everyone would just do this, they would do the magic exercises and presto. They'd be, they'd be Elon, you know, we'd all be our own little Elon, but the world can really only harness, there's only so many elons that can be in one world system at any given time. So how do you, what about magic mushrooms? Well, yeah, no, no, that's a good, that's a good question because, see, we're on this wavelength, Luke, you're always saying these things. It just so happens that I've been pondering these things. So, so you know about my little dabbling with mushrooms, right, but now there's this thing within the mushroom community called high dose mushrooms. So, you know, the whole mushroom thing was appealing to me because, or didn't scare me off because there was a sort of thing called micro dosage, small dose mushrooms, where you just dabble in and this little dabbling would sort of enhance your creativity and so forth and making more effective and all this stuff. But on the other end of the spectrum is like high dose and high dose. So just give you a sense of the numbers here. A micro dose is basically one gram or less, right? And, but a high dose, so after five grams, you get into real, real psychedelic tripping. But then you go to like 20 and 30 grams and you just, you basically get teleported off into new dimensions with, you know, astral beings and gods and demigods and, you know, just, you get taken to a world that's completely outside of this world, right? So I'm listening to people described there. So there's these videos of people describing their experiences with high dose mushrooms. And I've been listening to these a lot and contemplating whether or not I should try this. How many cigarettes do you smoke a day? I don't smoke. I don't smoke. I was smoking. You sound like you smoke two packs a day. Because I have like, I have like, whatever, congenital asthma, like low-grade asthma, or what it's called, or bronchitis. My lungs are my Achilles heel loop. I don't smoke. I don't smoke. I wish, I wish I did. Then I could have, I could blame it on. I could blame it on cigarettes. Like I knew a woman that died of lung cancer and she knew was a non-smoker. Can you imagine that? Oh yeah, no. I knew, I was good friends with Kathy Seype, a writer, and she died of lung cancer. I didn't smoke. Yeah. Yeah. So everyone has an ailment or something, you know? They have like their sort of Achilles heel. Mine just happens to be my lungs, or my upper bronchioles. Got any tips? You got any sort of beef organ supplements or something like to try? Beef organ supplements, bro. I've tried everything. I've tried everything. I think the solution is for me to move to the desert. Yeah. It'd be one of those gods that moves to Arizona, walks around in a Hawaiian shirt. I've been re-watching Better Call Saul, because they just started up after a two-year hiatus with season six. Yeah. And so that takes place in Albuquerque, which is about 5,000 feet high, or it's quite high in New Mexico. Yeah, I've been there. I've been there. I went there, I don't know, 2013 or so. And I was a little bit disappointed, because I was expecting it to be like this kind of, kind of Western saloon kind of town, you know? I had like, I was really sort of gearing up. I thought it'd be this sort of Old West thing going on there. But it wasn't. It was just strip mall, suburbia, you know, very LA. And it was very, very, very disappointed. But I did enjoy the air. I did notice like, it would get really thirsty. Like the air is so dry that you're just, it just sucks the water out of you. It's different than kind of East Coast humid heat. It's comfortable, but you're always being dehydrated. So anyway, that's fine. So I was just watching a great video. It was about finding the right distance. And I think that's so true that when you're overwhelmed or triggered, obviously you're too close to whatever's going on. So if you're triggered over the election, you're too close to it. On the other hand, if you're apathetic, then you're too far. Yeah, I started watching that. I started watching that. What do you think? I get interrupted. He was onto something. I remember it, but it was very subtle stuff. And so I was sort of passively listening. So I didn't really, I don't think I really internalized the entire import of it, but it sounded very interesting and thoughtful. But yeah, I can reflect and think about times that I was too close to a situation and it was not allowing me to think clearly or put it, put the experience into perspective. And so it's an, I never, you know, it's a concept I'd never even heard about and thought about until he started talking about it. So yeah, definitely maybe you should play that in your show. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it's applicable to politics and to personal wellbeing. I mean, if one feels overwhelmed, then you're too close and you need to back off. If you're triggered, you're too close to whatever it is. If you're in too much emotional pain over say a girlfriend leaving you or a wife leaving you, then you're too close to the experience. On the other hand, probably more people suffer from lack of engagement from unwee. Yes. That way you have to, you have to get closer to life to try to, you know, capture the energy. There's energy that comes from getting closer and then there's a loss of perspective when you get too close. So finding the right distance. I think it's a great concept. Yeah. Like Ethan Ralph is way too close to his own situation. But yeah, you're right. But there's two ways like, you know, like everything in life, you know, it's such a cliche, but balance, right? The right, you know, most happiness is from a right. It's just the balanced approach to life. That's that, you know, it's not neither too warm to cool, you know, and you're always being thrown off balance and you have to bring yourself back into balance. And I don't know. Oh, hey, I found, I found like these, these hand strengtheners that I use. I was just walking down the street and I found one on the sidewalk and so I picked it up and used it and took it home with the moral thing of being to just leave it there. Moral. I mean, like one of those hand exercises. Yeah. A $10 hand exerciser. Yeah. Should I have just left it there? Well, if you already had one. I've got two, but now I've got three. Yeah. Yeah, you probably didn't need it. They break all the time though. So. Well, all right then. That's fine. I don't, I don't think you're in any sort of big moral. I don't think it's a big moral failing. What would you have done? Um, well, the old me who was, you know, kind of a quarter, you know, I would have snapped that up in a heartbeat, but now I'm basically on the opposite sides. Like I was too close to like hoarding now. I'm too far. I stew anything, any possessions. So, um, yeah. So. I think, uh, I think you're overthinking. Okay. So, yeah. I had a question I was going to ask you, but I guess I'll come. Oh, you're looking for Nick Fuentes, Nick Fuentes versus Mr. Maddox Friday night. Is that really happening? I believe so. Oh, that's great. I got enough good dilemma for you. So I'm at the park right now. I'm calling you from the park. It's a lovely day, by the way. There's certain sections of the park. They say no dogs. That aren't on leashes. Right. It was kind of reserved it for like the. The humans who want to have a nice, you know, peaceful contemplative dog free experience, right? I mean, it's clearly posted. But, you know, I'm looking around here. There's probably 20 dogs swarming around here, all of them off leashes. Right. Completely, you know, flagrantly disregarding the posted rules here. Now, I wouldn't mind some, but every now and then one of them will come up and just start licking me, you know, and it's just very, very disconcerting and very annoying. And so I go through this cycle of, you know, shock and disappointment and then thinking, maybe I should just call the park and, you know, full of Karen, you know? Yeah. But ultimately I just sit here and I take it. I've been doing it because I don't want to be called a Karen. Can you enjoy it? I mean, it sounds like a good way to connect with people. If you seem to enjoy it and then you talk to the owner. Yeah, I know. I guess that would be the far better man, Luke. I would probably do that. So I was walking down Pico Boulevard on the second day of Passover and there was this homeless guy who was walking up towards me and then passed me and there was a loud sound soon after he passed me and he was knocking over trash cans into the street. So as I look at the direction he's gone, he's knocked over all sorts of trash cans. So he's a homeless guy? Yeah. Looked mentally ill or something. Something was off. Looked homeless and he was just going around knocking over trash cans. And I did not say anything. Like why risk, you know, something awful going on. But he'd left this long trail of destruction. Well, yeah. See, I'm getting attacked by a dog right now. See, too bad this was on a video. You could have watched me getting attacked by dogs. I can hear it. Yeah. It's annoying. So all right, it's called nuisance advantage. A guy like that, he's going to win any confrontation with you because if you win, let's say it came to an altercation, right? Yeah. And you knock him out or you know, you beat him up. Yeah. You know, you're probably going to smell or something. There's going to be legal repercussions. There's going to be cops. Your day is going to be completely trashed and dominated by that confrontation. Yeah. Right. And if he wins, well, of course he wins. It's literally a no win situation. So, uh, this is why we love our cops and our law enforcement. Yes. Military too, because they're important. Yeah. Yeah. That's why civilization is great. You can, you can, you can, you can outsource those problems to someone else. Oh, here's another, another thing that made me think of you. So I was hanging out with a guy, uh, on, on Saturday night or Saturday night, and he was, he was planning at the end of his shift at one a.m. To drive two hours home, uh, get four hours of sleep and then drive two hours back to work at starting at nine 30 in the morning. And this was someone in an organization I know. So I know this is like a reputable person. And I'm thinking, that's crazy. You know, I should let him stay at home. You know, I should let him stay with me or I should, you know, try to set him up somewhere. And I thought, it's not really my place. He's in an organization where he should be able to know people all around us that he could stay with. And if he hasn't cared enough to take, to take action to look after himself, it's not really on me. I'm curious, how would you have approached something like that? So someone who's somewhat within the community. All right. It's not a random, random. So, all right. So, I mean, a two hour drive each way. That's probably what 50 bucks in gas each way. Right. Something. So it's a hundred bucks. Right there. So why wouldn't he just do a hotel room or a motel room and nearby. And at least save himself the aggravation of those road miles. So. Would you be tempted to take him home? I would have been tempted. Yeah. I was tempted. Maybe. But it all would depend on the rapport or lack of rapport I had with the guy, I suppose. But. Yeah. You don't just bring any guy home. I mean, you have to have something special. Right. No, I. No. You got to bring a guy home for the night. It has to be like a special connection. I would have chewed him out there. I mean, he was obviously making a pretty boneheaded move. All right. So why can't he tell him commute? You those options are probably not there. Right. Yeah. I need to. All right. I would have. Okay. I would ask some questions and. Help him clarify his thinking on this behavior, but I wouldn't have actually made that step. To. To. You know, allow him into my place. I don't think I could have done that. No, I didn't. I didn't bring him home. Okay. I didn't think about it. So one minute, two minutes, five minutes. How long did you think about it? I thought about it. I thought about it for 10 minutes. But I thought about it longer. I actually talked about. About it with other people the next day, just trying to see how other people would relate to that situation. Because hospitality is not one of my strong points. So on a one to 10, where 10 is. Highly. Espitable. And one is. Not at all hospitable. I'd estimate myself at something like a three or a four. Yeah. Yeah. That's basically where I put myself too. Yeah. The older me that would have been, you know, probably a seven or eight. You would have had that guy. Sure. I mean, you would have shared your bed with him. Well, you know, desert cultures, Luke, you know, if you remember like a desert tribe. You know, that's a big part of their culture as being hospitable, you know, hospitable, but you're supposed to basically take in the stranger and feed them if they show up in your door. You know about this. Yes. Like this desert hospitality. Yeah. The Afghans, the Afghans are very hospitable. I mean, they, they didn't want to send bin Laden away because. It would have violated their culture of being hospitable. Yeah. There's a code to it. There's like that. But you're sort of, you're just duty bound to take someone like that. But was this a one time only thing? There's something he does. You know, five days a week drives two hours. I think it's something he does five days a week. That's ridiculous. Well, I didn't move or get a different job. Well, because you can have a more beautiful home two hours away. You can have a big, beautiful home. Yeah. I don't know. That's red pill. What kind of role has he played in your life? Thoughts and prayers. Not a big role, but I did definitely know of him. And I think I was way back when I was subscribed to him for a little while there, but I got sick of him very quickly. But he was also part of the sort of Andy warsky Ralph. IBS world for a while there. So that's why it's kind of interesting. Like there's video out there of like Ralph. Warsky. You know, all of the Ralph warsky coach, red pill and some other people. You, were you part of this chapter of IBS or he had you tuned out by then? I was, I was, mildly aware of it. There's going to be a fight in Memphis. Don't Tonga. Yeah. And Andy, we're going to fight in Memphis. So they all converged in Memphis. And coach red pill flew over from the Ukraine. To be part of this. Somehow you'd sort of insinuated his way into. This scene. Like he's a very, and he'd sort of. Created some big drama with himself and Sargon. And he was very manipulative guy. And he has a very checkered past. And. It's a very, very. I was. I don't want to. I don't say funny, but it's very interesting story. It's good that way. And you know, it's very, it's very, it's very, it's very, it's very, it's very, it's very, it's very, it's very, it's very, it's very car. It's very very, it's very, it's very, it's very, it's very, it's very, it's very, it's very. It's very, it's very. It's very interesting. Good that way. He could very well be you know, tortured, you know, in captivity now. So one, one, one year you're like. Sighting with Andy worsky about who gets to sleep on the couch and then. Two, three years later you're in captivity in Ukraine. in Ukraine too, he had a little journey to the east, but I was just thinking about that. He seems to have dropped completely off the scene. I haven't heard a peep out of him in like two years now. And he was a regular caller on the Luke Ford show. But he's never come back once I split from Kevin Michael Grace. He was appalled by by how I did it. Um, how do we call you having done it to be poorly? Is the fact that you did it at all or that the method in which you've done it? I guess I didn't explain it and I didn't give notice. And it just just became overwhelming to me that I need to cut that move on. Um, well, I don't know. OK, I don't know. I think that's a pretty thin rationale on his part, but he's more of like, I don't know. I mean, Kevin is just much more politically driven than you are. You you you have sort of a part time interest in politics. Yeah. Or Kevin's interest seems to be full time. And he doesn't like to disclose much personal details about himself. The way that you do, Luke, I don't really like to talk about myself. Oh, yeah, lovely day here, Luke. Turn the camera on, but I'm so puffy. OK, great job. All right, well, I think I'm going to, yeah, I'll probably drop now. But put on that balance, that distance talk that was very interesting. OK, OK, thanks, Brian. He's out there. So we're going to be talking about a subject that's dear to your heart, finding the right distance from experience. Yeah, it's been a thing that I have explored for decades. I believe its origin for me was in Jean Genlein's comment about it, in which he said he said to somebody, if you want to know how the soup smells, don't stick your nose in it. And that stuck with me. I understood it. I watched it regularly in my work and in my practice, how people were so close to their experience that they had no space to really stop and consider things. And so I began to explore it. And as I explored it, I found several really interesting pieces of it that in general, in how people teach focusing, there's a great deal of exploration of right relationship to experience. But the truth is, once after you've learned about right relationship, it's hard to institute because if you're too close to that experience, you can't you can't access the part of your you can't access easily. The part of yourself knows about right relationship. And so I began to find that the more I work with people about right distance from the experience, the more easily they could access right right relationship. And that began to be a focus in my practice. And so I began to really help people see that they had a natural relationship to distance if they stopped and paid attention to it. So for somebody who doesn't know what you mean about distance from experience, in practical term, what does it feel like to be too close, to be too far, to be at the right distance? Wonderful question. I take as an example, because it's more extreme. And I think when we all relate to is the example of when somebody says something to you that really catches you off guard. And we get kind of flustered and and kind of off center. And, you know, we kind of just tend to go unconscious and disappear. So the experience is too intense. And if you want to really do something alive and creative with it, you have to back away from it far enough that you're not so overwhelmed. So that's an example of being too close, being way too close to experience. So in in practical terms, in this case, is we're talking about reactivity and a sense of, you know, there's a feeling of threat, feeling like knee-jerk reaction of immediately responding to it, not having that little space inside to to assess the situation and find a more mindful response. I think that's a fair way to say it. What I have noticed, though, by dealing with it in terms of distance that people began to be able to observe themselves or they began to get a sense of that, because you can have a bodily sense of being too close. There's a feeling of pressure and a feeling of being pushed or rushed that comes with being too close. And so I really try to help people say, wait, slow down, pay attention, move away from it far enough that you can observe what. Right. So if you're experiencing great loss, the loss of a marriage, loss of a friendship, loss of a job, loss of a dream, loss of a physical or emotional or spiritual ability, loss of a community, then getting some distance from the loss would be helpful. On the other hand, so many people are just apathetic, and I think they need to zoom into life and closer you get. Like with a close-up, a close-up tends to be more compelling when you're watching a movie or a TV show. And the long shot tends to just provide more of a break and more of a perspective and same with writing. So I know with writing, who make it most energetic and to grab the reader's attention, you want to get as close as possible to the action while you can't maintain that breakneck, intense pace the whole time through your writing. So then sometimes you zoom out and get the 10,000-foot level. And back to this essay in Entrepreneur Magazine. So talks about the thoughts that we entertain, become the stories that we tell and the lives that we lead. So we can choose to vary the extent to what channel we want to tune into in our brain. So I'm a 55-year-old bachelor, and so I could tune into a channel of, oh, why have I never gotten married? Why have I never had kids? Why have I never sustained a relationship longer than a year? Now, why have I never made more than $100,000 in a year? I could just go through my failures and I could tune into the channel of failure. But I don't choose to do that. I choose to tune into a channel where I'm happy and grateful for what I have in my life and for what I've accomplished because that makes me feel happier. So as a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, Timothy Wilson, and I'm reading his book, Redirect, and it contains 10 chapters of examples of how changing the story about yourself, story editing, changes your circumstances in profound, quantitative and peer-reviewed ways. So after a single half-hour editing session, the college freshmen at risk of flunking out, not only remain in school, but carry B averages or even make the deans less. So I know how much a little bit of failure has sent me into negative spirals in the past. And just a little bit of encouragement has started me on positive spirals. So I think one of the main differences between me at 55 and me, say, prior to 45, is that I am more resilient. I'm not as needy for someone to give me a pep talk that I'm more likely to pull myself out of some kind of negative spiral. So these changes came from single story editing session. So these internal narratives become external actions where the changes of life are compounded. So for example, two people get a D result on a calculus assignment. One person who's predisposed negative thinking feels, okay, I don't belong in calculus class. I don't belong in university. It doesn't really matter how much effort I put in. I'm never going to get it. All right. And that's kind of been my lifelong predisposition until recently. And that person will tend not to put much effort into future calculus assignments and therefore will tend not to do well. Another person who's got a more normal positive attitude says, oh, I just need to apply myself more. The type of study and the amount of study that I did in high school is not going to cut it now that I'm at university. And so that person that applies to self more. She gets good grades and good grades lead to feeling better about yourself and positive spiral. So a bad grade can lead to a negative spiral where you feel worse about yourself because you feel worse about yourself. You do fewer of the things that you need to do. So redirect. That's the name of this book. So change the story that you tell yourself addresses a wide array of personal and social problems. So smarter people, they're more likely to live in the future. They're more likely to see the future clearly. So there's a burgeoning field of psychological study called your future self. So the more you imagine your future self, the more you visualize the person you are evolving into, the better that you'll live right now and the greater the likelihood that you'll become that future self. So this is how Hirschfield at UCLA specializes in future self. So people are concerned about their health. Those who write letters to their future selves exercise more than the control group. So the more people envision their future selves, the happier, more satisfied they are. So it's about envisioning the future self so completely that you take action now to become it. And the future self is viewed in vivid and realistic terms when it is seen in a positive light. People are more willing to make choices today that will likely benefit them in the years to come. So what happens when you choose to believe that you're worthy of your dreams? That's what gets entrepreneurs happy and energized. That's actually happening inside of yourself. So talking about something that's built in a way to assess it is to pay attention to the felt sense. And if there's a felt sense of some kind of pressure, then it corresponds to something that's too close. And so it's it's it's it's you following that felt sense to see, am I feeling a little less of that pressure? Therefore, I'm feeling I'm a little farther. When does it feel right? That's right. Yeah. I want to go back to an earlier version of this conversation, because there is actually two variables in in terms of our relationship to our experience. One is right distance and the other is right relationship. And it was originally that how much I observed that other people who talk focusing talk right relationship quite thoroughly, but they didn't pay attention as much to right distance. And as a result, people get the right idea of finding right relationship, being friendly towards experience, being open towards experience. But that's hard to do if you're too close to it. Or if you're too far away from it, the opposite end of that spectrum, is somebody says something really important and impactful, but you're so far disconnected from your experience that you don't really hear it and give yourself a chance to move towards something that might. Right. So you don't just want to distance yourself. You also want to sometimes get much closer to the action in your mind. So there's a very powerful essay on the ringer about a young father who's got terminal cancer and he went to join a life group. So he joined the church, he met one of the pastors who had invited him. And it was a small group of people who met at the pastor's house every week. And he didn't know what to expect going to this group. There are a dozen people talking to each other. He didn't know any of them aside from the pastor and he barely even knew the pastor. And so it says, I didn't know what to do. So I headed over to the table with snacks. And eventually the chattered doubts died down. Everyone sat in a circle. They all introduced themselves and I'm thinking, wow, am I supposed to say I'm an alcoholic or is this some kind of court? And nothing exciting happened. They sang a few songs. They talked about the Bible. Then at the end of the meeting, everyone peered off to pray for each other. And the pastor asked me, what do I think of this group? And when I come back and I said, I guess I'll come back. I wasn't sure. So this was seven years ago. And some of the strangers from the house on that first night, but now some of his closest friends. So it didn't happen overnight. It took him a long time to feel comfortable. And this was he joined life group after it already started. But I know people are similar programs in churches or synagogues. You see the same people every week, tell them about your problems. You hear their problems. Do that for long enough. You become friends, right? You get to know people that way. It's intense life group goes from being an obligation to something that you look forward to making the commitment to come every week is still hard. There are always other things to do. Sometimes you're tired. It's even harder when you're married and you have kids. The people are not always easy to deal with. We don't necessarily have a lot in common. Sometimes you have to search for things to talk about. You can be vulnerable with people. They don't always respond to how you would like. And you don't agree with how they see the world. And for the past two years of COVID, the life group met over Zoom for a while. And people ask me whether I have to be more careful because of my terminal condition and the pandemic, but it's really the opposite. I don't have the luxury of waiting for life to get back to normal. This might be the only time that I have. So as I can't imagine not being in a life group at this point, human beings aren't supposed to go through life as just faces in a crowd. It's like that song from Cheers. Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name. So a life group is a kind of insurance. People talk about medical insurance and life insurance when they get sick, but relationship insurance is far more important. And this author reflects, I didn't need my dad's money, but I could have used some of his friends. And the author notes, I wish I could have said that getting diagnosed with cancer has brought me closer to God, that my faith is stronger than ever. That's not how it worked for me. I wanted to believe in a miracle. Now, I wanted to believe in a God who heals people. But what the healing that he got was not from abstract faith or from theology, it came from the weekly life group that he joined. Even back to be quite important. So the beginning of right relationship to experience is finding right distance. For me, it is. It's my experience that for most people, that in order to find right relationship, they have to first find right. In order to find right relationship, they have to find right distance. They have to find right distance to experience. And from there, they're much more open and able to respond rather than just react to what's happening around them. So taking the hypothetical case that you mentioned, something being upset about an interaction and being very reactive that way. So how do you actually handle it? In my view, in my view that it requires some learning and the learning is to notice the impact of whatever's happening around you is like, if you are so over impacted by what's happening, you can't respond very well. It's like you're, it's like you become just overwhelmed, I guess is as good a word as any, but noticing that you're overwhelmed gives you a distinct advantage because you can then learn to back up, to make more distance from your experience. So that you can find a way to go back into some kind of centeredness and some kind of groundedness in which you can move towards something closer to right distance from your experience. So I'm going to say it in a different way to see if we're on the same wavelength. Okay, okay. What I'm hearing is, say you notice how agitated you are, a flustered you are, and you have a felt sense of that intensity and that intensity you notice wants to strike back. Right. And react. And because you have paid attention to that before, excuse me, or run away, or run away from the other alternative. Okay, go ahead. You're going to fight flight reactivity. Right. And because you have given some thought to it before, you've learned it, you're able to recognize at least a little part of you that's able to recognize the agitation that felt sense of agitation. And so at that moment, you know enough to say, ah, it feels like it would be right to strike back or to run away. But this is a moment where I probably have more time than I think I do. And I remember this guy was driving me crazy in the Orthodox Jewish community. Like every time we'd run into each other, he'd say things that would embarrass me in front of other Orthodox Jews. He'd want to talk about my first book, you know, History of X, 100 Years of Sex and Film. And this guy was just driving me, you know, crazy. And so I said to my therapist, what should I do? Should I take him aside and, you know, really tell him that this is unacceptable behavior. Should I just fight back and humiliate him in front of other people? And my therapist says, where do you need to do anything? So ended up not doing anything. And this guy ended up getting me a job becoming quite a good friend. So the therapist was right. Sometimes it's best to do nothing. Excellent op-ed in the New York Times. One part of your life you shouldn't optimize. So this is by a performance coach, an author of the practice of groundedness. And he says the one part of your life that you shouldn't optimize is friendships and being social. So when I was hanging out with people over Passover, right? It had from Friday night to Sunday night, it wasn't highly optimized time. There was a lot of just like hanging out with people and not every minute of just hanging out with people was scintillating. So socializing and friendship is probably one area where we shouldn't optimize efficiency. Maybe efficiency should not be the main goal when it comes to friendship because intimate relationships will take time to build and their benefits are not immediately measurable and quantifiable. And we're definitely in the middle of a loneliness epidemic. And part of it's probably to do with our collective obsession with optimization and efficiency. So we're saying no to social invitations to protect our time, to protect our mental and physical health. We've cut people out of our lives. We've hurt us and bring us down. And there are sometimes advantages to shrinking our social circles and culling certain relationships. Certainly you don't wanna say yes to everyone and everything, you don't wanna overextend yourself. There are plenty of solitary joys. But sometimes we say no to that coffee or birthday party invitation because we're addicted to optimization and efficiency. All right, so early on in the pandemic we got to streamline our lives. We got to work from home, we got everything delivered and there were many benefits. But now there are more opportunities for socializing and it's tempting to retain many of those social efficiencies, right? You've got this crushing to do list. You've got wonderful Netflix catalog and there's this inertia that builds up. I know that the way I'm optimized is to live in lockdown. Like my soul tends to live in lockdown, right? The natural trajectory of my inclinations is to become isolated, right? Lockdown was quite amenable to me because my soul is locked down. So I think the way I reacted to the trauma and drama of my early childhood and living in foster homes is that my soul essentially locked down. And I've met wonderful people through the course of my life who have brought me out of hiding and I've had the benefit of borrowed functioning of their higher social functioning for a while. But then I'd always go back to my baseline which was a little much towards isolation. And so now we're coming out of COVID and I still feel many of those isolation lockdown tendencies still taking over and having much stronger role in my life that would be good for me. So my soul needs to come out of lockdown. And as we get older, it becomes harder to make and to maintain friendships. And then as we start streamlining and optimizing our life, it becomes even harder. Because making new friends, maintaining friends is highly inefficient. You have to hang out for hours at an end. You have to buy or prepare food and drink for people you may or may not click with. You travel to unfamiliar places or homes at appointed times, even when you're not in the mood. You're commuting instead of doing things at home and maintaining existing friendships takes considerable work and emotional investment without any guarantee of return. So if your goal is optimization, makes sense to push friendship building and maintenance down the list of priorities. But if your goal is to be happy and fulfill, there's nothing more important than nurturing our essential bonds. So building a community of friends, even if it starts with obligation, border, more irritation, it's part of how we protect ourselves and our families from the vagaries of human existence. So Jonathan Charks, he wrote in that essay that I just referred to about facing his own cancer diagnosis and thinking about who would be there for his young son if he dies. And I've got friends who are looking at very serious illness where the outlook is bad and they've got children. So Jonathan invests time in life group that he attends weekly at his church. Life group is a different kind of insurance. People talk about medical insurance and life insurance when you get sick, but relational insurance is even more important. So even if our relationship building muscles of atrophy, they can regain their strength. So loneliness and isolation build on themselves, but so do friendship and community. As you meet and connect with a greater number of people, you expend your social circles skills and confidence. I remember I just was introduced to this one woman at synagogue and suddenly she started schlepping me around the community. She was taking me to meals. She was taking me to parties. Like certainly my life just like vastly expanded just from one additional connection. So the key is pushing through the resistance making the first step. Asking your neighbor to go for a walk agreeing to an after-work drink even if you're tired making a dinner date with a friend you haven't spoken to for a while. You'll be glad when you're there and you'll be glad afterwards that you did it. Whoa, anonymous professor, thank you so much. Super chat, $20 for the greater good of free speech and interesting ideas. Look, what's going on with the Roticized Rage? It's not a huge part of my life anymore. I think when I was younger and had more testosterone and more anxiety. So Roticized Rage was a way that I dealt with my anxiety. So anxiety and confidence are opposites. So the more confident you are, the less anxiety you have. So if you have great anxiety about playing tennis, the more depth you become at playing tennis, the less anxious you will feel because you will feel more confident. Now that I got a new XLR code, my sound isn't cutting out all the time. So I feel less anxious, more confident. When I went and got voice lessons, I diminished anxiety about my voice as I built confidence. When I learned how to do Streamlabs OBS, it took a couple of hours of work and I had to call Kyle and ask Kyle to help me about four years ago, three years ago. And so I had some anxiety, but for probably a year or two prior to learning, knowing that one day I'd have to knock her down and learn Streamlabs OBS. But once I learned Streamlabs OBS and then became increasingly competent with it, then as my confidence grew by anxiety reduced, I did not know how to properly kiss a woman. And then something like January 1st of 1983, it was that sugar bowl where Georgia Bulldogs and Herschel Walker lost to Penn State. And then I went up into a loft and a friend introduced me to this girl who was a freshman. I was a junior and this girl, this freshman taught me how to kiss. Like she gave me a lip workout and a tongue workout. She gave me a tongue lashing I'll never forget. And I became a confident kisser in about an hour's worth of a lesson. And so prior to that, I had anxiety about kissing a girl. After that it's like, oh, I can be really, really good at this and it's fun. So as my confidence about my kissing ability grew, my anxiety diminished. I remember when I was in ninth grade, I was over at a friend's house and his like seventh grade younger sister had a book called How to Be a Confident Kisser. And I read it, but that didn't really do the trick. I mean, I read about kind of Lingus, but I was highly anxious about it for quite some time before, you know, I learned the joys of kind of Lingus. So there was a long period where I didn't work for anyone else, I just worked for myself. Then when I went out and got a job, I had great anxiety. But as I became increasingly confident in my abilities at that job, the anxiety dropped away. When I was converting to Judaism, I had great anxiety about making my way with Jews. And so my anxiety made interactions more challenging. But as I built relationships with Jews, as I built confidence in my Jewish life, then the anxiety diminished. I did not get a driver's license until about a week before my 18th birthday. So I was about two years behind my peers. I failed my initial driver's license, my driver training tests at school. We had like four hours of driver training at my high school. And that was terrible. I'd never driven before and I failed tests and I had to take them over again. And when I was learning to drive, I was pulled out in front of an oncoming motorcycle. And then I stopped like right in the middle of the road and this old guy skidded to the ground, came off his bike, and my father like put $100 in his pocket. The guy was okay and the guy said, oh, you need, the guy fell off his bike so you need to teach him how to drive properly. And then my mother insisted that I get back in the driver's seat and drive off. So I was a terrible driver. I had great anxiety about driving. Finally got my driver's license and then as my confidence in my driving ability grew, then my anxiety about driving diminished. I went back to Australia for a year to high school, live with my brother. And so I got a job. I, my brother helped me get nice clothes so that I could work in Kmart. And so all sorts of adult responsibilities I was taking on living with my brother in a new area of Tannum Sands Australia, central Queensland by the coast. And so as I became more and more competent at my adult responsibilities, my anxiety diminished. So one hand you have confidence, one hand you have anxiety. As you grow in confidence, the anxiety will diminish. And life is a spiral staircase. I heard one psychiatrist describe this. We're always in one or four states. We're in dependence, helplessness. We are in loneliness, feeling small in a big world. We are in mastery where we're getting good at something or we are in overconfidence, grandiosity, right? And so we're always moving in and out of these four states. We never graduate from these states. But whatever state you're in, you can always work on mastery. You can always become more competent. You can always develop your mastery of things. And then as you develop or more mastery of various parts of life, you tend to have less and less anxiety. If you have a fear and you confront it, you emerge successfully, do it a hundred times, you'll get better and you'll have little fear of failure. Right, so, but if you have a fear and you don't do something, that fear gets stronger. If you have anxiety about doing your taxes and then that day you don't do your taxes, your anxiety grows because you get a dopamine hit from fleeing your fear or fleeing from your anxiety. And so anything that we put off that we should be doing, we are making that fear and anxiety stronger. And the distance between the impulse to strike or run away and actually taking a moment to consider it mindfully is already finding distance. It's moving in the right direction. It is my experience, Serge, that people who learn to think about it in terms of distance have an advantage over somebody who just is being mindful. It's actually a quite good distinction to make here. I hadn't thought of it, but I'm glad we're talking about it. That if you have had some training, and I hate that word, but it really is probably the right word. If you've had some training in noticing, being mindful of the distance rather than just mindful of the feeling, it offers you a step up over just. Okay, let's see what Tucker Carlson has to say. Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson tonight. Last year, unbeknownst to pretty much nobody, a woman in Brooklyn started a Twitter account that was comprised almost solely of videos of liberals talking about themselves. So the concept was very simple. Find interesting tape that had already been uploaded to the internet by the people who made it and then repost that tape. There was no editing of it, no special effects. There was very little editorial content. And the woman who does this is an orthodox Jew. The idea was to let activist types describe in their own words what they believe, unfiltered. The woman who created it called that account Libs of TikTok. Libs of TikTok now has more followers than the entire population of the state of Wyoming. Libs of TikTok's audience dwarfs the nightly viewership on CNN. So it was quite successful by definition. The question is why and here's why. It turns out that as repellent as academic lifestyle liberalism may seem to you as an observer, the reality of it, as described by the people who actually believe this stuff is even worse than you ever imagined. It's really beyond belief, both idiotic and disgusting. It's like watching someone eat roadkill. You feel nauseous, but you can't turn away. So Libs of TikTok found all kinds of tape on the internet, but they found a bunch of selfie-style videos from the publicly available social media accounts of teachers. They didn't snoop, they just pulled people to repost it. Here's some of what they found. Hi, my name's As and I'm a preschool teacher. Recently we started wearing pronoun pins and the kids get to pick a new pronoun pin every... We have some that pick like she or her every single day and we have some that change it up. So I'm a non-binary preschool teacher and my kids know I'm non-binary. They know I'm not a girl or a boy. I use they, them pronouns in the classroom. We work on it, not all the kids get it, that's okay. And I go by mixed gray in the classroom, not miss or mister. Man, y'all thought me teaching the children, me being Polly was crazy, but not only that, but they also know that I'm gender fluid. I'm gonna give you my explanation about what it means to be transgender as well. So when babies are born, the doctor looks at them and they make a guess about whether the baby is a boy or a girl. Kids as young as three and four are actually aware of their gender identity even if they don't have the language for it. Say that pre-K through third grade are not ready for such topics is actually internalized homophobia and transphobia. So those are the people in charge of tending to your small children's minds while you're at work. Now maybe you agree with the views you just heard. Maybe you think that doctors just guess at the sex of newborns. Maybe you don't agree. It almost doesn't matter. Either way, you have a right as a parent to know what these people are teaching to your children. And yet before Libs and TikTok, there was not an easy way to find out what they were teaching. So what's the answer to that? Well, it turns out there are an awful lot of videos like this out there. Libs and TikTok found a lot of them. Here, for example, is the scene at one private school in Washington, D.C. Okay, so let's say you're paying $45,000 a year to send your kids to some overrated mediocre private school in the District of Columbia. You think everything's fine. You pull up Libs and TikTok and you find out what's actually happening in your kid's classroom. What's wrong with that? This is journalism. No news organization in America has done more to reveal the reality within American schools than Libs and TikTok. We heard a number of their videos on the show and we are grateful for their reporting. Far more straightforward than anything you're gonna find in the New York Times or the Washington Post because it wasn't accompanied by a lot of bloviating that just showed you the tape and you could decide. That's journalism. Here's another piece of tape that Libs and TikTok unearthed that amazed and horrified us. This is a teacher screaming at a student for refusing to wear a mask. Are you playing? Are you playing? No, not. Otherwise I will call the police. I'm serious. I'm serious. Are you serious? Yeah, I am serious, man. I had enough of it. I knew you were gonna take off your mask the moment I turned the corner. So enjoy BIA. That's a hidden tool suspension where you have to sit in wrong with the military guy all day because you're a piece of shit. I'm gonna call the police. He screeches because the kid has the mask beneath his nose. Now again, maybe you're okay with your kids being taught by emotionally incontinent, not cases like that, maybe you're not, but you probably ought to know either way. So you can see why Libs and TikTok quickly became so very popular. You didn't have to wait through some long editorial to find out what was actually happening. You could see the raw video and again, you could assess it for yourself. Millions of parents were grateful for that. So was Christina Pusha, who's the press secretary for the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis. It was partly in response to videos that she saw on Libs of TikTok that Florida ultimately banned public school teachers from lecturing kindergartners about sex. That's no law. It's one of the most popular laws in the state. A majority of Democrats support it. So Libs of TikTok was getting results as good journalism does. Not bad for a Twitter feed. So of course that Twitter feed had to be shut down. The Biden administration and its many servants in the news media set to work. The neoliberal slander machine Media Matters published four separate hit pieces on Libs of TikTok in just the past three weeks. It was trafficking hate for allowing liberals to talk about themselves. It was anti-gay. As if the site wasn't attacking anyone. Certainly it was not attacking gays. It was just plain tape of people talking about themselves in their own words video that they uploaded. Well, Twitter could not stand this. They shut down the account entirely twice. They suspended it. One of the suspensions came after a complaint from a Harvard Law instructor called Alejandra Carlbalo, quote, my report on Libs of TikTok violating Twitter rules got them suspended, he bragged. Yet the woman who keeps runs Libs of TikTok kept going. So ultimately Jeff Bezos weighed in. Bezos's personal newspaper, The Washington Post, decided to harass the family of the woman who operates Libs of TikTok. They couldn't find her. So they went after her family. The Post sent what it calls its tech columnist Taylor Lorenz to show up outside a home that belongs to one of the woman's relatives. And then Lorenz said about trying to find the woman herself. She couldn't. She sent a direct message on Twitter to someone who turned out to be not that woman who had nothing to do with the account whatsoever. But because she did that we know what Taylor Lorenz was saying. Here's what she said, quote, you're being implicated in starting a hate campaign against LGBTQ people. Right, a hate campaign. So here you have Taylor Lorenz who's effectively acting as the stasi for the deep state trying to intimidate a private citizen into silence. And this morning she gave it her best shot. The Washington Post published a piece by Lorenz linking to the name, the physical address and the real estate licensing information of the woman who runs Libs of TikTok. After the Post published the article the woman behind Libs of TikTok went into hiding. That was of course the whole point of the exercise. People know where she lives because the Washington Post linked to it so she had to leave. Now Taylor Lorenz of all people knew this would happen. She knew what she was doing when she wrote the story. She was trying to shut this woman up. It was just a couple of months ago you might remember that Lorenz herself complained on television that she was being harassed and that no one under any circumstances would be allowed to show up at her home. Here she is. Trolls live everywhere. Can you just explain, it was like can you draw a picture of what it is like when a surge of harassment hits? It's horrifying and it's not just me either. You know, they immediately dox you and go after your family members. They try and look up everyone who's ever, you know, been associated with you and it's just completely overwhelming and terrifying. Oh, they go after your family members. Can we put that picture back up? Can you just do that? This is Taylor Lorenz outside the family members of the woman who runs Libs of TikTok. The other day harassing the family members. Now the tape you just saw comes from January. Then in April, just eight days ago, Taylor Lorenz who cannot stop talking about herself, drowning in Lake Me, cried on television because she'd been criticized online. Watch. I've had to remove every single social tie. I had severe PTSD from this. I contemplated suicide. It got really bad. You feel like any little piece of information that gets out on you will be used by the worst people on the internet to destroy your life. And it's so isolating and terrifying. It's horrifying. I'm so sorry. It's overwhelming. It's really hard. It's really hard to be from Greenwich and work for the Washington Post. It's hard. No power. But if you really think it's hard, if you're really against that kind of behavior, why are you engaging in it at scale? So a few weeks later, after shooting that performance, Taylor Lorenz shows up at the door, and there's the picture right there, of a relative of the private citizen who posts videos that Taylor Lorenz's bosses don't like. And then she posts that person's identity online. So this is obviously an intimidation campaign designed to shut down a highly effective Twitter feed. But take one step deeper into the story and ask yourself, did Taylor Lorenz, the woman you just saw crying on TV, because she has PTSD, did she really do the reporting here? Did she really track down the personal information of the woman who runs the Libs of TikTok? Police. Of course not. She couldn't. Taylor Lorenz is not a reporter. Apart from whining about herself on television, she has no skills. She couldn't do a weather forecast in a rainstorm. She's not a journalist. She's merely a receptacle for information that other people gather for their own ends, a willing receptacle. So where did she get this information? Who gave her the identity of the woman who runs Libs of TikTok? Well, actually we don't have to guess because today's Washington Post story answers that question. The post piece tells us that information came from a man called Travis Brown. Travis Brown runs the quote, Travis Brown hates speech tracker, which uses a variety of proprietary methods to reveal personally identifying information of private citizens who stray from the approved storyline. Now, who pays for all this? That's the question. Well, the Travis Brown hates speech tracker is funded by something called the Prototype Fund. Here's how the Prototype Fund describes the point of Travis Brown's project quote, prominent right-wing extremist accounts on Twitter and Facebook have developed a well-documented pattern to distribute controversial extremist content to their followers and then delete it before moderators have the opportunity to react to it, notice before it can be censored. Archiving is an important element in counteracting this behavior and has in many cases led to prominent victories in the fight against the supreme extreme right. Extreme right, so not all hate speech is the same. The hate speech tracker does not target the hate speech of BLM writers or Antifa, no, only enemies of the Biden administration and the guys at Davos. How do they do it? Travis Brown's methods, according to him, included using automated software to save user account names and social media posts long after they have been deleted. So there's no hiding from these people. Now that appears to be a violation of Twitter's terms of service, not that we care because they don't care. We used to have to Twitter about this. Isn't this a violation? They ignored us, they suspended our account. What's interesting though is that Travis Brown himself appears to be a former Twitter employee. So again, who's paying for this? Well, the foreign government is paying for it. The Prototype Fund gets its money, not from private donors, but from the government of Germany. Germany's Federal Ministry of Education. It says so right on the website. In other words, what happened to the woman who runs Libs of TikTok, her life being destroyed, was not the work of Taylor Lorenz, the fearless journalist who cries on TV from a PTSD, no. It was a foreign intelligence operation designed to silence and intimidate an American citizen. Wait, is that legal? Did the Biden administration have any role in this particular intel op? Why is the German government trying to shut down an American Twitter account posting about American teachers? And since she was the recipient, the willing recipient of this information from a foreign government designed to destroy an American citizen, why hasn't Taylor Lorenz at the very least registered under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, fair up? We seem to remember quite a bit of talk about this over the last few years. We think there was an impeachment trial of her. Someone went to prison because of it. But Taylor Lorenz can take information from a foreign government to crush an American citizen, clearly as part of an intel operation. And she's a journalist in good standing at the Jeff Bezos' newspaper? Lots of questions here. We hope we can get the bottom of all of them. We're gonna start tonight by talking to the creator of Libs of TikTok, who joins us right now by phone. We appreciate your coming on. So I just have to ask, because I'm really interested, why do you suppose the German government wanted to shut down your Twitter feed? Well, I think that what I'm doing is very effective. And I think that a lot of people wanted to send me down. They wanted to intimidate me into silence. And unfortunately for them, that's just never gonna happen. Well, I'm grateful to hear that you're not intimidated. Were you a little surprised to see of all people Taylor Lorenz, who complained bitterly when we used her name on the air several months ago, who whined and cried on television because she had PTSD because people were criticizing her online? Were you surprised that it was her who came after you personally and tried to destroy your life? Yeah, I thought that was really humorous. It added a really nice layer of humor on top of the whole story. And I think that the fact that it was Taylor Lorenz, who is a known hypocrite and she is known to talk to people. The fact that it was her that was doing all this, I think it just helped people rally with support for me. Have you noticed, I mean, I know you're not a psychiatrist or perhaps you are. I don't know who you are. But are you surprised that the people who are the most deeply enmeshed in narcissism, who talk about themselves the most, are also capable of the greatest cruelty? Have you noticed that trend? Yes, I've noticed that a lot. I've noticed it with a lot of TikToks as well. I think it's a little bit of a trend on the last. Yeah, I obsess over myself, so I'm willing to hurt you. So what's your status as since we have you on the phone? How are you doing tonight? We're, I mean, you don't need to tell us where you are, but how has this affected your life, this Jeff Bezos piece? Well, the past two days have been very chaotic and overwhelming. I had to make some travel plans really fast, but I was not planning on earlier. So there was a little bit of coordination that had to happen and I'm now in a location where I don't think anyone would find me, not in any of the locations that Taylor Lorenz leaked or that anyone can find. But it's been a little bit tough, but I'm not gonna let this get me down. Well, I hope we see you in our studio someday. Thanks so much for joining us tonight, we appreciate it. Glenn Greenwald is an actual journalist who has done actual reporting over many years. He's been following this very closely, you can find him of course on Substack. Glenn, I have to ask you too, why would the government of Germany be funding the doxing of an American Twitter account? What are we looking at here? Do you think? Look, if there were really a principal talker that everyone was willing to agree with, that anybody who obtained any influence on social media, even if they wanted to remain anonymous to protect their family or their workplace or their community, now it's fair game to be investigated on a mass, no matter their political ideology, everybody was subjected to that. I wouldn't agree with that, but at least I could swallow it. The idea that she knew someone gained influence their fair game for reporting, but you know that's not the case. If imagine for example, if I tomorrow go to Tucker to Taylor Lorenz's home and bang on her door or Fox sends a camera crew to her parent's house or some right wing independent journalist goes to her sibling's workplace and says, we're here to find out information about Taylor Lorenz an extremely powerful and influential journalist. Or imagine if you unmask the identity of say a trans activist who was popular on Facebook or a Black Lives Matter activist who had a big Twitter following. You think these people who are defending Taylor Lorenz would say, oh, this is fair game reporting. This is shoe leather journalism. They would declare like some sort of crisis of national mental health and press freedom. They would like lower the flags to half mass. It's clearly a huge double standard punctuated by the fact that Taylor Lorenz was just on national TV sobbing, claiming that she was the victim of exactly this kind of behavior less than three weeks ago. It's just beyond belief. I've asked you this many times but I still don't really know the answer. Why would these big forces, these big powerful forces Washington Post, German government, media matters be so intent on crushing like a little Twitter account that reposts videos? What is that? This is the way journalism changed in the Trump era. You know, when I grew up, the reason I admired journalism the reason I went into it was I studied things like the Pentagon Papers where documents were released showing the Pentagon was lying to the American public about the Vietnam War or people confronted the Nixon administration with Watergate or people who exposed power centers. What has happened is in the Trump era, the media convinced itself, the corporate media that the real threats to the United States were no longer the CIA and the Pentagon and the NSA and Wall Street and Silicon Valley, all of whom are on their side and trying to undermine Trump. It's the Trump movement and people who are conservative. Those are criminals in their eyes and they moved their media lens from the people who used to be the target of it, people in power centers to individual citizens whose only crime is that they have the wrong ideology and they're using their vast resources. The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos not to challenge actual power centers but to destroy and wreck the lives and reputations of people who they regard as having the wrong politics. That's all this is about. Stussy for the deep state, that's exactly right. So nicely put. As always, Glenn Greenwell, thank you. Thanks, Tucker. So the country is a little freer. We don't often report that. We're grateful to tonight. Mask mandates are being lifted all across the country. Okay, that's Tucker Carlson doing some good work there on Taylor Lorenz and Libs of TikTok. So I was listening to a terrific podcast on the catalyst of suicide, Teal Swan. I want to play a little bit more from this podcast from Gizmodo. And started dating someone he met in the group. I believe that's how they met though. Just because she posted something about her wanting to commit suicide. Kara says Max commented on the woman's post trying to help her get through it and a romance butted from that. But she says that relationship was tumultuous and only made things worse. I wondered what is the effect of bringing together all these raw nerves rubbing against each other, people with suicidal ideation? Studies show that suicidal behavior can be contagious. But there's a whole lot about suicide we still don't know. We know that folks at risk of suicide might connect with other people who are also feeling badly. They might connect with other people who are also considering a death by suicide and they might support each other in that. April Foreman studies suicidal behavior and she focuses on the intersection of suicide prevention and social media. She's a suicidologist. What do we do with them? What interventions work? People are still guessing and speculating on that. So we just don't know. We don't know because of how little research we've done on suicide, like shockingly little. Suicide research gets funded at the same rate of research on smallpox. Do you know how many Americans have died by smallpox in the last 20 years? I don't. Zero. Suicide is a 10th leading cause of death. The 10th leading cause. And with internet forums like Teal Tribe, people can post their suicide notes and thoughts online. Can that inspire more suicidal behavior? I hoped April could weigh in on whether it's dangerous for people to talk about suicide in an internet forum without any moderation. Everyone is always nervous about the dangers of people talking about suicide without a grown-up in the room or whatever. Without a trained professional, without someone being responsible. I think that we don't know that that's necessary. I thought she would be a little more concerned. And I think this just shows that there are major misconceptions about suicide. Misconceptions that make suicide this taboo subject that create this void in helping people with suicidal thoughts. A void that Teal is filling with her teachings. I also thought that April would recommend that these people see licensed professionals. But she said there's a good chance that even they may not be properly trained. Let's say that these folks who were in this internet group all left tomorrow and all went to see a licensed mental healthcare provider. Jennings, what are the chances that they're going to see a licensed provider who is as sympathetic and who is well-trained? Research is really, really consistent. That nine out of 10, nine out of 10, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, could not pass a basic competency exam on how to assess risk, do a safety plan, do an intervention. Okay, that's from the Gizmodo podcast on Teal Swan. Here's Richard Spencer talking about cancer red pill. So real name Gonzalo Lira. Got to know Gonzalo Lira a little back in the post-Rampore days. He was a libertarian writer. We lost touch. I wasn't aware until this past month so he becomes a kind of menosphere, he's a lab pro-com Russian agitator. Our brief interactions. I remember Lira as a fun, good-natured guy. So I have no unkind words to say about him personally. We haven't spoken at least five years. That being said, you simply can't travel to a foreign land and then agitate on behalf of an invading army, not expect to be jailed or worse. The online right largely alienated from the nations of which they reside seems to exist in a hyper-reality in which politics of war are basically a video game to be played for clicks, cash and clout with no real-world consequences. It's one thing to join a foreign legion. But everyone might think about such a choice. You're putting your chips on the table and risking it all. I don't think Lira was ever aware that there might be consequences to his actions. Yeah, I've interacted with low-achieving people who wanted to go off and join wars even though they didn't really have any training in doing that. Blum Musk says under population-low birth rates, what are the biggest threats to civilization? Hold the camera back and just think you're a father of seven surviving kids. Well, I mean, I'm trying to say a good example because the birth rate on Earth is so low that we're facing civilizational collapse unless the birth rate returns to a sustainable level. Yeah, you've talked about this a lot. The depopulation is a big problem. Yes. People don't understand how big of a collapse. Population collapse is one of the biggest threats to the future of human civilization. And that is what is going on right now. What drives you on a day? Okay, based on Musk. There's a little bit more from the Gismeter podcast on suicide catalysts, too, as well. Irration, however you want to look at it. She has a sacrament. It's not as CP, completion process. And she has a clergy. She has a priesthood. And those are those who are initiated into the CP. The completion process practitioners. Those are the people who teal trains in her signature process. Where does the teal tribe Facebook group fit in? The church. Yeah, congregation. It's a cyber congregation, yeah. With so many people making the comparison, I decided to reach out to someone who understands cults. Steven Hasson. The mind is very influenceable. And so the information and experiences that we're getting in person or virtually through the internet have a dramatic impact on our brain and on our emotions and on our beliefs. Hasson is a mental health counselor and an expert in mind control and, well, cults. I'm not saying that teal is a cult leader. And teal told me she's not a cult leader. But I thought maybe Hasson could help me understand her influence. So my producer Jessica and I drove up to meet him at his office in Massachusetts. So we go on. Shoes off? Huh? Just wipe your shoes. Hasson spent years in the controversial unification church. He pulls from his experience as a leader in the group and his own research on the psychology of destructive cults. He understands the potential dangers of following a charismatic spiritual leader. So I was getting a new iPhone this afternoon and people would periodically come into the store to presumably buy phones and this young woman about 18 years of age came in and then asked me, oh, may I talk to you about the fundraiser I'm doing? So I said, okay. Who's the... Okay. And then she told me and she showed me some pictures that I wasn't interested in. It was fundraising for gap year kids. And so she was taking year off between high school and college. And so I said, no, thank you. I'm not interested. But she seemed amenable to carrying on conversation. And so she was young. She was pleasant. She was cute. And so we just kept talking. And I asked her, who's the recipient of this fundraising? She says it's the unification church. And I thought, oh, the boonies. And so I told her about the last two episodes of the podcast decoding the gurus, which is all about the unification church. And she told me about her father. Her father was an atheist. So I didn't expect that. So I guess her parents were raised in the unification church, but she had a father who became an atheist. Mother was lukewarm. And she wasn't like burning with fervor for the unification church. And she made the point to me, at call we're all human beings. We all want to feel joy. And so she was a believer in the Reverend and in that version of Christianity. But she wasn't, she didn't seem, you know, crazy or particularly intense about it. You don't meet that many members of the unification church in the circles that I run in. But at a perfectly pleasant fun, like 10, 15 minute conversation with this young woman part of the unification church. And then she said, I have to, I have to go off and fundraise. And why did she need to fundraise? Wasn't there better things for her to be doing on a gap year? I mean, I wouldn't wish anyone a membership in the unification church. On the other hand, I'm sure it provides some community and meaning for people. So if you can find meaning in your life, you're going to be happier. You can find purpose in your life. If you're going to think that there's, you know, transcendent purpose to life, it's exactly to be happier and therefore to be better adjusted. When there's an authority figure who says I can read minds, I can, you know, I know the ancient wisdoms. I've lived many lifetimes, et cetera. If you accept that presupposition, you give over your ability to challenge that. Teal does claim to be an authority figure. She says she was born with extrasensory abilities like clairvoyance and clair sentience. She can see auras. She can see into your past and claims to have shared previous lives with several followers, including Todd and Leslie's husband, John. And she can access the Akashic Records, which according to some New Age communities, are the records of every thought and event that has ever happened or will happen. In her videos, she's in front of a trippy, calming background. Feeling of hopelessness. And speaking in a soothing, almost monotone voice. I sent a couple of Teal's videos to Hassan to watch before my visit. And even though she's talking about some pretty jarring things like suicide and abuse, he says the delivery itself is actually boring in its droniness. He says it can induce a trance. You zone out, but you don't realize you're still absorbing the information. I watched a couple of Teal Swan's videos and she had a very hypnotizing backdrop of water that was just flowing. Some of Teal's videos have a digital background image of water behind her. Like her video on suicide titled, I Want to Kill Myself. She's in front of a lake and the sun is setting behind her. It can elicit hypnotic effects. So I recognize by virtue of existing in this parallel reality, this virtual world, and that people who tend to spend a lot of time on YouTube and a lot of time in live streams, generally speaking, are fairly isolated in real life. So ever since the gym goes, Saturday night massacre, I've taken much more responsibility to try to make sure that what I do doesn't have a negative effect on people. So even if that means like 120th the audience of the blood sports, I recognize that the odds are high that someone who's watching this show right now is in a fairly vulnerable and isolated state. And to be making the kind of content that Teal Swan makes is the opposite of what I want to do. Somebody is sitting there, especially if they're doing hour after hour, video after video. And what I look for with hypnotic videos is not just the visual stuff, but also the words and what... And the chat says, why is it okay to follow someone from thousands of years ago who claims to talk to God but not people today? Well, if you're following someone from thousands of years ago, you're not following that person directly. You're following their teachings as mediated by traditions that have lasted for thousands of years. So I am someone who's by inclination conservative. I am right-wing. I think time-tested ways of organizing human lives and communities are generally speaking better than untested relatively innovative ways of organizing lives and communities. So that's the advantage of, say, an organized religion over something that someone just developed in the past few years. What kind of linguistic formations are being used? So if I come across her videos on YouTube and I watch a lot of them, and they're this sort of like hypnotic and whatnot. So YouTube promotes the heck out of the suicide catalyst, Teal Swan, right? I looked for videos on psychology and containment. I wanted to learn more about containment. And YouTube serves me up a Teal Swan video. I could be affected. Yes. Yeah, the answer is yes. The thing is, is that it's not going to affect everybody. It's not going to affect everybody and make them a true believer. He said most people might see a Teal video and think it's strange and move on. Like Sarah Mooney, who didn't understand what her husband saw in those videos. But then there's people like Todd. Others who maybe have having an existential crisis or maybe some death of a loved one and they're struggling around what is life? What is death? What is the meaning of my life? Divorce. People are stressed out. People are wanting solutions. And confident individuals saying, I know what needs to happen are very powerful. Teal, I know what needs to happen. Teal told me she's in the business of helping people. But as a spiritual leader, there's no regulation over the information she puts out there or the potential consequences of her influence over her followers. Why would someone want to regulate spiritual information with regard to the consequences of her followers? Do you want regulation of this type of spiritual information that is out there? One of the more disturbing videos that I watched of Teal Swans had to do with imagining that you're dead. The video has and is referring to, it's a YouTube version of the death meditation I saw in Costa Rica. So I don't permit suicidal ideation in my life. So someone wants to engage in suicidal ideation while having a conversation with me. I'll put an end to it. If it's someone who's a friend or an acquaintance, I'll just let them know I won't go there. If it's someone in the chat, I will ban them. So there's some things that I don't want to promote or indulge. What you need to be doing for this little exercise is I want you to imagine that you're dead. So we're all going to get suicidal for a moment. And I want you to fully feel it and visualize any mental health professional that would advise a technique like that. Even on a one-on-one session, much less on a video that goes out to anybody because everybody's going to react differently. You don't know if somebody had a friend who committed suicide. There's so many variables. Okay. Looking at Twitter, Mark Andreessen of Netscape fame, tweets I predict, essentially identical censorship, de-platforming policies across all layers of the legacy internet stack, client-side and server-side internet service providers, cloud platforms, CDNs, payment networks, clients, operating systems, browsers, email clients with only rare exceptions. The pressure is intense. Elon Musk responds, extremely concerning. Who is pushing this censorship and de-platforming is very shadowy. Well, it's people like CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, ABC News, CBS News. Let's close this show on a happier note. This is a song from John Hinckley. Hello again. This is another original song of mine. There ain't nothing wrong with the rain. It is good to wash away the pain. Let the angels lead you to the light. Everything is gonna be yourself when you are all alone. A wonderful positive uplifting message there from John Hinckley. I don't agree with everything he's done. I'm quite opposed to when he shot the president and those other people back in 1981, but he's quite the singer-songwriter. Everything is gonna be all right. An original composition by John Hinckley has got a sold-out concert coming up in Brooklyn in a couple of months. Everything is gonna be all right, says John Hinckley. That's it. Bye-bye.