The WOKE TAKEOVER of Psychology & Medicine w/ Dr. Drew, Dr. Chloe Carmichael, Naomi Best
BUY CAST BREW COFFEE TO SUPPORT THE SHOW - https://castbrew.com/ Become A Member And Protect Our Work at http://www.timcast.com Host: Tim Pool @Timcast (everywhere) Guests: Dr. Chloe Carmichael | FreeSpeechToday.com Dr. Drew @drdrew (X) Naomi Best @naomieppsbest (X) Producers: Lisa Elizabeth @LisaElizabeth (X) Kellen Leeson @KellenPDL (X) My Second Channel - https://www.youtube.com/timcastnews Podcast Channel - https://www.youtube.com/TimcastIRL
You know, over the past several years, there have been many instances in medicine, of which I'm sure you all know exactly what I'm talking about, where people felt that there was narrative control, there was anti-scientific behavior going on, people were getting bad advice from doctors.
It was some kind of weird woke takeover, in essence.
Now, I use woke to mean cult-like adherence to liberal social orthodoxy.
So it's not like they were going to people and saying, you got a cold, you should be gay or anything like that.
But there certainly was elements of that in some medicine, especially with the gender ideology stuff.
Now, there's a lot to break down in the manipulation, the corruption of medicine today.
So we've got a great panel that will be talking about all of this.
I'm a clinical psychologist, and I have a new book about the mental health benefits of free speech for this exact reason that even during graduate school, I felt like I had to keep everything inside.
I wasn't allowed to like ask questions about certain sacred cow topics.
And so finally during COVID, it was like a switch flipped and I started saying what I really thought.
And that's what got me interested in the mental health benefits of free speech.
I blew the whistle in Wall Street Journal about some crazy education on sexuality at Santa Clara University, Catholic School.
So yeah, it's been a whirlwind, but just here to talk about the woke critical theory takeover in therapy education and the impact it's having on the field.
Yeah, so I'm in my final year of a marriage and family therapy training program.
And one of the final classes I had to take is called human sexuality.
Great.
It's a requirement in California to have some education on that.
But I first enrolled in this course last summer, and I found sadomasochistic erotica in the required reading describing a woman being punished with gang sex for taking off her collar.
Her husband was upset by that.
So there was that.
There was just straight up pornography that we were to view in class, a pornographic illustration guide, all sorts of sex acts with however many number of people, and a sheep at one point, I will mention.
And this dude, this professor, openly talked about his kink proclivities and was talking with another student, like a side conversation in front of everybody about going to the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco.
Do you know what that is?
Essentially, a bunch of men get together in leather and walk each other around on leashes.
Well, there's a whole, I didn't expect to get into that story today, but yeah, living in California is a nightmare.
But I want to say something.
I do apologize to Naomi at breakfast this morning because I, as a time traveler, I was in the early 80s, I got involved on the radio because there was this thing that we just stopped calling grids and started calling AIDS.
And there was so much still residual Puritanism, I guess I'd call it, around sexuality.
You were not allowed to talk to young people about this thing.
And the prevailing attitude at the time was, why would young people need to know about that?
Don't even talk to them about it.
And I thought, this is crazy.
I got to get out and talk about it.
This is dangerous.
And we were also trying to demystify the biology of sexuality.
That was the whole goal, that there's STDs and there's function and there's reproductive health.
And you should understand it's simple.
You should understand it.
I did not intend this.
I did not intend anything like this.
And we're in this world right now.
What you need to know is this sort of this sex positive group took over sexual health where you are not allowed to say anything anywhere about anybody's sexuality that has any negativity associated with it ever.
And so the whole field, and particularly where I run amok with it, is in sexual addictions, which I have to deal with all the time.
It was actually with AIDS and HIV that I kind of ran into one of my first hard bumps like in my psychology training too.
So we were in, you know, like a cross-cultural breakout discussion and talking about how the U.S. is supplying, or at the time was, I don't know what's going on, this is a decade ago, but supplying medicine to pregnant women in Africa that had HIV to prevent them from passing HIV on to their baby, which is great.
But then I guess that the discussion was around the fact that at the time the technology was such that once the women gave birth, if they chose to breastfeed, they were still going to be passing HIV to their baby.
And we were spending a lot of money on this medication.
And I just made this passing comment.
I was like, hmm, I wonder if we should consider telling them, since the medication is limited, that maybe they're only eligible if they're going to practice a hygiene once they have the baby.
And this colleague student, she looks at me and she goes, careful, Chloe.
And there was like this edge in her voice.
And I said, careful of what?
And then the professor was like, okay, ladies, let's move it on, you know?
And it was just, it was my first time really bumping up against realizing what was unsayable, you know, like it was, and then I kept running into it.
But I mean, yeah, you're right, though.
I think there's something about the sex positive movement that just, it's one thing to encourage people to do what they want to do.
Why Free Speech Matters and How to Use It Fearlessly, which, by the way, I got dropped even from my agent and my big publisher wouldn't touch it.
So shout out to Skyhorse Publishing, RFKJ's publisher.
They took it on.
But so one of the things I talk about in the book is that psychologists are normally the first to say, okay, repression, suppression, denial, we don't want those things.
Like, let's put our feelings into words, let's talk things through.
But yet psychologists are also really seemingly against free speech.
I mean, but what's interesting too is like there's this major groupthink factor that's going on.
So the faculty ratio and psychology departments, and this is truly nothing against anyone on either side of the political aisle, because what I want is a diversity of thought.
But the psychology department faculty ratio, Republican, Democrat, is about 1 to 20.
These are people who think that they are our psychological betters and can tell other people, you know, how to live their life and give them advice.
And there is a move now from the psychologist and the therapist not to be the neutral observer facilitator of self-reflection and discovery, but actually as an activist.
It is truly a brain rot because I think what Naomi is referring to, at least I've certainly heard many times, is like, if you say, for example, a man cannot become a woman, then you're threatening the, quote, existence of trans people.
And in normal psychology world, you would not want to collude with what we call a maladaptive idea.
Or if a trans person says, if you don't acknowledge me as the sex I prefer to be, then I might commit suicide.
In a normal healthy world of psychology, you would never accommodate that.
You wouldn't want to reinforce the negative idea that they should kill themselves if they don't get their way.
You wouldn't want to reinforce the negative idea that they're actually not a male or not a female.
You would want to, with compassion, help them come to terms with it.
But now what psychology is doing is not only colluding with the illness, but it's pathologizing people that want to come forward and say like, well, can we just acknowledge reality?
And this is what you're talking about, the brain rot side of this, is we now know it's axiomatic in psychiatry particularly that exposure therapy is extremely important to mental health.
It builds resiliency.
It builds self-efficacy and competency.
Listen, when I was in training, I had to lean into horrible situations all the time in order to develop my competency.
If I had stood back and went, oh, this is unacceptable.
I'm scared.
This is threatening to me.
I couldn't even do my training.
I would be a horrible physician.
Leaning in to the things that make us uncomfortable is how you create mental health and resiliency.
20 years ago or in the 90s, if someone went to therapy and threatened to kill themselves over something like, you know, like just any reason, like, I'm so upset over this thing that I want that they threaten to do it.
What is the appropriate medical response to someone who threatens suicide?
So let me tell you, in the 90s, what would have happened?
They would, first of all, you'd go, do you have a plan?
And if the plan is yes, come with me.
We're going to have to do something with this.
In California, presently, you would say, do you have a plan?
And you'd have to keep asking them every 10 minutes, do you still feel like that?
Do you have a plan?
Even if you have firearms at home or if you live on the street, provided that you can pay and handle for food and you have a tent, if you say, oh, I was just kidding, you must let go immediately.
I can tell you in therapy training, I've received, I'm at the end of my program, I've received almost zero guidance on when to 5150 somebody.
We are to affirm the feelings primarily.
And like you're saying, it has to be like gun to the head or gun to somebody else before where, yes, and continue before we can do that without putting ourselves in a position of power over them.
Yes, because we have to We are totally in denial about that, except dementia.
If you don't treat dementia patients, you're guilty of patient abuse.
So if a patient is psychotic and disorganized and walking around the street without their clothes on from dementia and you do nothing, you are going to jail.
If you touch that person with schizophrenia or bipolar with the same symptoms or meth addiction, you're going to go to jail.
People keep asking me, like, oh, are you going to transfer to another university?
And universities have generously offered to take me.
But at this point, I don't feel that it is ethical for somebody who might come into my office with bipolar or schizophrenia or OCD because I have had to, all of my training has been focused on people with the blues and not people with severe psychopathology.
To Drew's point about this constant, you know, asking them every 10 minutes, of course, that almost reinforces and reawakens the idea.
But of course, what they're also doing now on some levels is even this MAID, the MAID program, and the assisted suicide.
Like it's practically at a point in some places now, you know, where you're like, wow, have we talked about responsible ways if that's something that you want to explore but i remember even when i was in training like 10 years ago 15 years ago i remember it was this weird thing where they would insist that everybody has thought about suicide at some time and that it's completely normal and i was like no no i actually never have like it would i would never do that and it i even there's interesting
stuff embedded in that observation because uh even asking questions about autism right when people wanted to go what why is autism going up you are uh biased against non-neuronormative people don't what's wrong with that what's wrong with it forget all the disability that results or the misery or what god knows what you're not allowed to ask the question a it might implicate vaccines can't ask that and b you're coming down on non-neuronormative neurodivergent people yeah so with with like the gender stuff
there's there's like we generally understand the attempt at logic they have but what about general body dysmorphia right what what is it called when people want to like amputate their own hand do you know the term for that is i forget the name for that general yeah it's so unusual but yes it exists okay but what about just that your average woman who you know i can speak to it your breasts change after childbirth and then you have body dysphoria about any anything like that and then you know if i went to a therapist and
i'm talking about how you know i really want a boob job because my breasts look different they wouldn't say okay great here's a referral to 10 plastic surgeons but that is what we're being taught to do in therapy in therapy training if a child comes to me with six months of gender dysphoria it is not my job to gatekeep they said don't be a gatekeeper of their health care but we are sending them into plastic surgeons office i don't offices i don't know if you've been into one recently i recently broke my hand and
had to go the walls are covered with all sorts of messages and pamphlets telling you that you know your face is needs to be tightened and your breasts breasts need to be lifted and your butt needs to be plumped seriously and these people are marketing it's called body integrity dysphoria or body integrity identity disorder and it feels a specific part of their body is not uh actually a part of their body they want it removed and there have been people who have tried to get amputations but been denied so
they stage accidents where uh one example was a guy had uh he put a jack under a car and then put his hand under it then pulled the jack out so it crushed his wrist so he get his hand removed see and we can all clearly see that for what it is right but yeah if somebody and i just want to say i mean about trans because i feel like it's kind of this elephant in the room um i don't have a problem like with people doing what what they want to do like if a man is like i want to have a body like a woman so
i want to get a boob job i fine with me but like as a psychologist i start asking questions if he displays what as a psychologist i would call um like concrete thinking where he says if i get a boob job that will make me a a woman right as if then he starts he's in my opinion then starting to really break from reality um and whereas you know you would never say to an anorexic like yeah sure let's get you that liposuction we're
going to collude with that disorder as opposed to like trying to bring the person into reality
colluding is actually explicitly part of what a psychologist should do according to tamma bryant our apa president she put out a ted talk called we need to decolonize psychology something like that she says um we need so she's a liberation psychologist and they view liberation psychology liberation psychologists what is that um so they view themselves as political activists um therapy is a political act this sounds like soviet era stuff and i was gonna say mangalus what quit i
was gonna say mangala mangala mao soviet they they all do the same thing they say that melba vasquez is another liberation psychologist she's a past apa president she says that it is our job as psychologists to awake the client to their own oppression and then help mobilize them into dismantling oppressive forces also like uh the dsm-5 has a whole range of disorders and one that i often use is either body integrity uh disorder or
dysphoria or pica which uh i guess you guys what what would happen if someone came in and they said no one will let me eat pennies and i just want to and i feel that i should be allowed to what do you what do you have to say to them i okay based well you're the doctor you're the psychologist but i'll say from a training perspective
i am trained to affirm how difficult that must be that you want to eat pennies and you're not able to and people are oppressing your ability to do what you want with your body then we might move into exploring like oh is that healthy or whatnot but what if they say yes like what if they're like yes it is and i can't eat it and it's fine see there's a teeny tiny green of of truth in in the very beginning there which is um yes it must be very difficult
for you that you want this thing you know that you cannot or should not do that used to be just alliance building that used to be just how you built an alliance with a patient that's all and then go to the truth but where you could as a therapist be like wow you're nuts you're crazy don't need pennies the colluding begins when you start saying
it's so oppressive that people won't let you do that because that's where you're breaking from reality the reality is it's not the problem isn't that quote people won't let you the reality is is that it's really you know bad for you and all these other things it's not
not a matter of oppression um we are trained as clinicians just to ask questions therapeutic wonderment how wonder what that's about wonder why you do that and let the patient come to their reality like get let them to kind of build the sense of what's going on here i know what we need i'm gonna open an unlicensed therapy clinic where it's just, look, you come in and you're, you know, and you're saying something like, I'm having trouble socializing and, you know, it's painful every day I wake up.
I'll say, well, for starters, you're morbidly obese and you smell bad.
So perhaps you could stop eating, exercise, and take a shower and maybe people will listen.
I actually got to that point at my practice in New York.
I think it's actually why people were coming to me.
Like I had this huge wait list.
I say, I talk about it in the past because I'm not practicing clinically right now.
But I think people were so hungry for a therapist to just actually be real with them, you know, to just say like, well, you know, again, like as you said, like, well, you're, you know, morbidly obese and you smell terrible to be able to say like, well, can we have real talk about what you think might be the barriers, you know, between you and your goals, as opposed to saying it's so oppressive that there's a lot of people.
Are you aware that people are afraid to come to therapists now because of these biases and that there are organizations developing amongst professionals to try to support each other and being open and unbiased?
And they're actually offering a training for me about the mental health benefits of free speech because therapists and clients can go there if they want, like basically just non-woke therapy.
So there is actually, if you're dealing with somebody that has a very severe delusion, like if somebody comes and says like, okay, so the little green men, you know, are talking to me and it's driving me nuts.
When they have a very severe psychotic disorder, it actually is helpful to avoid confronting it directly.
At first, you might say things like, well, what did the little green men say?
When did they first appear?
What was going on in your life?
So playing along for a deliberate, limited period of time for a therapeutic goal sometimes does matter, to your point.
Wasn't it like he's on his island investigating something, and then the big reveal at the end is he's actually a mental patient and they're allowing him to perform his delusion to see where it goes.
Yeah, I mean, so there is a value in that to a certain degree, but when it becomes the whole thing, and then to Naomi's point, you start saying, well, isn't it oppressive that the people around you don't see that as well?
You're making the patient worse.
Like you're cutting them off.
You're deepening.
You're colluding and reinforcing that delusion as opposed to just exploring and probing the delusion so that you can think about how to help the person.
Well, I mean, like, if someone comes to you and says, Donald Trump is Hitler, and I heard he just sent in a bunch of white supremacists to kidnap children from poor working families on a produce farm.
And this is, so, so, for example, there was literally an ice raid yesterday.
It was a pot farm.
They found child laborers, according to the CBP.
Maybe it's right, maybe it's wrong, but there were children there that are believed to be forced to work there.
And so there's an ICE raid to shut it down.
Falsehoods are spread by the left intentionally to create mass psychosis.
Yeah, I mean, but is it psychosis if their brain is of standard working order?
Well, I think that would just be a cognitive distortion, right?
Because we believe things that are false on a lower level all the time.
Oh, my husband doesn't really like me because he left the dishes in the sink or whatever.
But the problem is, is that in therapy, if I come to you and I say, my husband doesn't like me because X, Y, Z, the therapist would presumably challenge the client.
But when it is societal level conclusions, it is our job to then collude with the client in those delusions as evidenced by Children.
Well, when NBC is broadcasting and saying, you know, for example, allegedly, just not necessarily, but like if the patient is hearing things on TV and then extrapolating and saying, well, the newsman said that it was adult laborers, but he blinked a certain way so I knew it was really child laborers, then it's a psychosis on the patient's part.
But when the news is feeding people misinformation, then I think people are just the victims, actually.
If someone came to you and said, there are white supremacists currently occupying the White House and they do Nazi salutes on a regular basis, I know this is true because I've heard it.
And it's clearly not true.
Like, you know, there was a picture in But is there a, maybe I should use a Morkshream example, like little green men.
Yeah, like something that we can discernibly say at a societal level, we have reason, like it's not true, easily disproven, but they're adamant that it is true.
It's delusional, But it's not clinically relevant, delusional.
It's not something that you would necessarily treat in a therapist's office.
You could by just confronting it and talking about it and looking at it and examining it and allowing the patient to kind of try to get to reality testing, but it is on a mass formation level.
But I have a feeling that if a client went to a therapist with a delusion that was not politically convenient, like, oh, Joe Biden is actually wearing a mask and he, you know, he's dead or whatever have you.
I think that there would be more clinical curiosity, like, hmm, you have gone down a road that seems to be maladaptive now.
But on the other side, I don't see that.
And it's because of the political bias that Quint is speaking to.
Yeah, one of the big differences as far as like a rubric, Tim, that you're talking about is, you know, is what the patient is saying far outside of social norms, right?
And so then I suppose the issue then becomes what is the action taken by a therapist if you like, I suppose you put it well when you said it's political.
If someone came in and said Trump is a white supremacist, the presumption of the medical board or whatever California is probably they're correct.
Well, so but if somebody just comes in and has like a limited delusion, you actually have to also, as a psychologist, ask yourself for ethical reasons, is this delusion interfering with their daily life?
Is it causing them distress?
Like so if somebody comes to me for marital counseling and I discover that they also happen to be a flat earther, but it's not like related to anything else of why they're coming in, they're functioning fine.
I have no business trying to pull that string with them.
But if they come in and they're like staying up all night because the earth is flat, they believe and they are on a crusade and it's taking over their life, then I address it.
But if you're in California and you have a therapy practice, set up little speakers in random places of the room.
And then when anti-Trump people come in, have a button you can press that will make a random one have a Trump, like Trump speaks as like, I'm in the room with you.
But Tim, you're digging into something that really fascinates me, which is what is it about certain periods of history is that people are prone to mob behavior and hysterias and delusions.
There are books about it.
There's controversies around it.
But there clearly are trends in history where it's funny.
I was reading a book about 1935 Germany, and the Germans were talking about the hysteria that had captured Germany.
I thought, oh, even that was a hysteria.
And what is it about our personality construct, our family experiences, our childhood experiences that sets that up?
And humbly, I believe it is narcissism.
When there is a huge narcissistic trend, there's a tendency towards envy.
There's a tendency towards scapegoating.
There's a tendency to mob together and then collectively act out your aggression on somebody, one.
And it's a way of managing their own internal rage and aggression.
And it's highly dysfunctional.
It needs to be addressed for what it is.
You know, I, again, I'm a time traveler, Tim.
I watched the diagnostic codes change on the admitting sheets at the psychiatric hospital across 30 years.
And when I first got there in the 80s, it was all different kinds of personality spectrum.
Towards the end of the 80s, borderline took over.
And then by the 90s, it was only cluster B, which is the narcissistic disorder.
And the borderlines, when they came in, all had at least five lawsuits under their belt, at least.
At least.
The legal system caught on to the fact that they were using the courts to act out.
Then these same patients became lawyers and then judges and politicians.
Which is why it is so important for people to speak up.
I mean, I'll just share as well.
Like, it was hard for me.
I was telling these two at breakfast, like, the reason I wrote my book about the mental health benefits of free speech is because I used to just try to really toe the line in the media, not say anything that would, you know, get me blacklisted from media and journalists.
And then when it came to COVID and it came to masking kids, I couldn't keep it in.
And so I wrote this blog about the harms of masking kids.
And I shared it with a couple colleagues to just say, like, am I missing something here?
Like, what's going on?
And they wrote back and they were like, no, everything you're saying is correct, but you should not share the blog because it could keep people from masking their kids.
Well, the thing is, I think most people actually agree because there's the, you see the few people who speak out, who break from the tribe, and they get punished.
But I was punished to warn other people not to speak out.
That was what happened.
I mean, in my, so I went to this struggle session right before I got fired.
And after the meeting, the director was like, I'm not going to fire you.
You did a great job.
You balanced your personal experiences with your philosophical concerns.
All good.
He calls me two hours later and says, you know, it's not tenable for you to work at the organization because of the intolerance of my staff.
You got to, you know, I wish I was in that position as your boss because the moment someone came to me and said, if you fire her, or if you don't fire her, I quit, I'll be like, there's the door.
And, you know, Mark Chenkese is a cognitive psychologist, and he keeps wanting to emphasize that it's a lot of this stuff is not just top-down.
It's also bottom-up.
It's people during COVID reporting their neighbors for having barbecues, for not masking their kids, for being a prison guard and reporting when somebody's hiding somebody in the attic.
You're the people that would be the prison guard.
You who did that.
If you yelled at somebody, what was this somebody was sharing with me before I came in here?
A woman was committed for having shot somebody for not wearing his mask.
Did you hear about this?
Maybe you can bring it in the post.
But the point is that you would be the prison guards.
You think you'd fight the Nazis?
No, you would be the prison guards.
You have to understand that about yourselves.
And if, by the way, in the position of your boss, say, was listening to the bottom-up hysteria, if you didn't stand up to that, you would be a Nazi sympathizer.
There's a really fun video you guys probably have seen before where there's a person sitting in a chair and I forget how they frame it, but the subject is a single person who walks into the room.
It's a doctor's waiting room.
And there's one person sitting in a chair and they sit down.
After a few minutes, there's a loud beep on the PA and the person sitting down stands up for about five seconds and then sits down.
After like five or six more people start doing it, the subject begins just repeating the behavior, not knowing why.
The sad thing is, there's a good reason, and you guys are the experts, but correct me if I'm wrong, there's a good reason humans do this.
If you are standing in the middle of the woods and a person is screaming and running in a direction, you're going to go, okay, and run with them because turns out there's a boulder rolling down the hill or something.
But then it then turns into this mass formation psychosis where my buddy Luke was in Germany, in Hamburg, during the G20 protests.
And he's a journalist.
He's not, I mean, his politics is libertarian.
He was walking down the street with another German journalist, this guy named Max, and a random person pointed and yelled, Nazi Schreinhund.
Moral superiority is one of the other factors in groupthink.
So social justice warriors is kind of when you have that sense that, you know, you are morally superior, then that it speeds up the groupthink process.
Before you say that, I want to say, though, that the other thing about that experiment you talked about with the people standing and sitting, it's hypnotists use it as a way of determining who's the easiest to hypnotize.
If somebody starts standing up quickly, that's somebody who's going to be easily hypnotized.
So one thing I've been talking about quite a bit since the 4th of July is that I went back to Chicago, landed at Midway, which I'd never done before, but I grew up two blocks away.
So when we were leaving, we were like, we'll just drive to the neighborhood because it is, to go through the neighborhood is on the way to get to the highway.
And we drove past the old park a couple blocks from my house and Jimmy Dore's house, by the way.
Jimmy Doerr and I live next to each other.
It's kind of crazy.
Yeah, like two or three blocks away.
He's older than me.
So I was a small child when he left, but it's kind of crazy.
The baseball fields are overgrown and nobody was outside.
As an aside, I mentioned there were soccer nets there now.
Like the culture has changed.
But the important thing I'm bringing up now is that there was nobody there.
And I was shocked Because when I was a kid, on the 4th of July, when you walked outside, there were coolers everywhere, there were folding chairs, baseball games were happening.
Everyone was outside.
Now nobody's outside.
And I asked my friends, I was like, dude, what's going on?
Where is everybody?
And they all just said, inside on the internet, I guess.
That's all anyone does.
So, what I see is happening with mass formation psychosis is communities used to be localized around the regional work, the resources the region had, and their interests were based on where they were.
So the Rust Belt, they were very concerned about auto manufacturing and the election, and that's what they wanted to hear about.
But the farms in Nebraska were like, well, we have no idea what that is.
Now, I think there's a better way to describe this as a meme on 4chan where it said, 1994, some kid says, I'm sexually attracted to toasters.
And then his dad smacks him on the side of the head and says, stop being weird.
And he stops.
2024, he says he's attracted to toasters, goes on the internet and finds a toaster fetish community.
And now he's going to toaster conventions to bang toasters.
Collective rationalization is another one of those main ingredients of groupthink.
And you're totally right that the internet makes it a lot easier to find your tribe with that.
And Drew, like you were saying too about with the Ash Line experiment, I talk about that in the book too.
To me, it's super interesting where we go from consciously accommodating the group because in that experiment, most of the people afterwards said, yeah, I knew which line was longer, but I just didn't want to stand out.
And then you progress to where it's unconscious.
And there's some other experiments that I describe where the more often you do it, the more you start to stand up and sit down and raise your hand, the more you start, because of something called cognitive dissonance, start adapting your thoughts to accommodate your repetitive behaviors.
They want to keep people in the psychosis so that they can control the narrative of the psychosis and then have good little worker bees facilitate their systems.
And the left is, and I mean, this is just a fact, and it has strengths and weaknesses, but the left is a more collectivist mindset, and the right is a more individualist mindset.
So the left is just naturally set up for exactly what you're describing.
And it seems like now the psychological professions are, they're being mobilized to encourage it because the people at the very, very top encourage the groupthink by definition.
And so they are being ushered to positions of power.
And now these people who want to shut down free speech, who live in their collectivist mindsets, they are going to be in control of our psyches.
And go to free speechetoday.com because that's where I wrote my book, as well as free articles and stuff on the topic for people that want to learn more about it.
I talk about free speech, obviously, saying what you want, but the other side is important too.
It's called listening resiliently.
So we have to also be able to hear people say things.
Like, we had some disagreements this morning, right?
I mean, Tim, people have disagreements on your show all the time.
One thing that I think has been a common occurrence, but one thing I brought up quite a bit is there was this video I saw months ago.
It was probably seven months ago.
I was on YouTube and there was a video and it was Tim Poole debating Jenk Uger, which I'm like, when, when?
Like, because we did it here.
Someone took clips of me from a random show and clips of Jenk from a random show, put them together to make it sound like we were debating and got like 50,000 views.
And so that is one phenomenon where the question is, what happens to society when this is rewarded?
And it is, and what drives a person to do it?
What are the motivations?
I think we can infer those, but it's interesting to discuss.
And then after that is, what happens when someone can just AI generate the debate in two seconds that will get the desired reaction from the desired tribe?
So I suppose I bring it up is what I'm describing is obviously a micro, microscopic version of what Trump goes through every single day.
Not to be overtly political, but I'm a political guy.
But like when they showed him dumping the fish food, you know, eight years ago and it was edited.
Like, so if those don't know the story, Shinzo Abe dumped food into the koi pond.
Trump looked at him and then followed suit and did the same thing.
The video got edited, I think, by ABC to zoom in on Trump so you only saw him do it.
And then they insulted him for having done it because it's improper.
That creates a delusion.
And so where we are as a nation is we have 10 years now of this.
So what is this saying?
Every seven years, every cell in your body has been completely regenerated and you're an entirely new person, the ship of Theseus, I suppose, of people.
What happens when the core of someone's psyche is 10 years of manipulated delusional information?
And then today, the example I brought up of the guy who made a fake video of me debating Jenk, and there's a bunch of these videos where the title is completely false and then it will be a real clip from one of my shows and the comments are all like, okay, this is clickbait.
This is fake.
The title and the thumbnail are fake, but the video is real.
These people are doing this, in my opinion.
I believe their motivation is this is the only path towards monetization and recognition in an attention economy, and they don't care how they get it.
So, what we're now seeing is: have you guys seen the videos, the trend where people grab gallons of milk at Walmart and bash themselves with it?
But I gotta be honest, the reason why whenever we pull stuff up on Axe on TimCast IRL, I search for it on the private screen, not the main screen, is because I can search for like Trump speech, and then there'll be like seven videos of Trump and then like sex all over the platform, which is not your algorithm, Tim.
Well, to your point, though, Tim, about like the brain and just people regenerating themselves, essentially, and like building on top of building, I think as well, there's been this incredible decline of religiosity.
And what's interesting is that religiosity, even actually no matter what the religion, has been shown to be a protective factor in mental health.
Yet you will never see the American Psychological Association having a go-to-your house of worship month for mental health.
And that core of religion is what is supposed to kind of hold people in.
It's a trend where people will take jugs of milk, jump up on the counter and scream like, I'm a big boofy baby.
I'm a big, and then they'll splash the milk on them because it gets them views, it gets them attention.
I think the internet, the algorithms have basically trained humans.
This is how you get attention, fame, and money.
And so now you're getting all of this just absolutely psychotic behavior from humans who are desperate for this.
And kids are going to grow up watching it.
So I said before, I think we're cooked, and I'll add to this.
When kids were being masked in schools and schools were being shut down, we're now seeing the aftermath of this where teachers are saying the fifth graders can't read.
There was one person who was a high school teacher saying, these kids literally can't read.
You see the quality of academic work going down too.
And I mean, if you go on AI and use it to talk to it, you could see how a kid might actually develop a relationship with that.
And in fact, they're trying to do that already.
There's, I forget what it's called, but there's a company that is now selling AI companion bots to schools because the schools don't have enough funding for counselors.
And I tried some of these AI therapy bots for a while and two of them just straight up asked me if I wanted to be more than friends.
So with a headset on and a microphone, you can now speak to the companion and have a seemingly infinite number of interactions as if it's a real person.
It used to be when the game came out, you'd walk up to the person, press X or whatever, and then you'd get a dialogue option.
You could say one of five things and they would give you a handful of responses.
Now with ChatGPT plugged in, you would just say literally anything you want.
What do you feel like eating?
And then the AI companion says, I'm not quite sure.
People are, so my prediction was within a year or two, maybe less, it could happen literally now if someone wanted it to happen.
People are going to have server-based real-time relationships.
These apps that people have where you can sext with a robot, it's just a chat bot texting you and there's an avatar of a female on it, you know, whatever.
But they could, if they wanted right now, develop a video game or whatever program on your computer where you could actually have an app on your phone and call this this AI personality and it could store your relationship on the hard drive and you can say, hey, babe, what are you doing?
And this person, this woman, fake AI person, can exist in any reality.
What I saw from the Skyrim thing, I think the future of video gaming is going to be you're going to turn the game on.
The game could probably itself be AI generated rapidly, but that's another whole other point.
But the characters in the game will act like they know you, will share memories with you.
And even when you're not playing the game, you'll be at work and you'll be like, hold on, I got to text my girlfriend and tell her to harvest the cows.
And then you'll be like, hey, I think the cows are full grown, ready to go.
I got a notification.
Can you harvest them for the beef?
Okay.
And then when you get home, you turn the game on and all the beef is ready to go in your inventory and people are going to treat these like real people.
Naomi and I were actually talking at breakfast this morning, even about just even with TV, something as simple as TV, that when your brain sees the same friendly faces like that show friends over and over again, and you start having little laughs with those people and you feel like you know them, your brain actually starts to light up and respond in some sense the same way as if when you have an actual real friend.
And what you're describing is, of course, even deeper.
And then meanwhile, in real life, we're stripping away what it means to be a man or what it means to be a woman or people's roles in actual society.
And I think that's just making people even more vulnerable.
Not to mention, of course, there's a huge monetizing machine that is behind this AI robot stuff.
Like the more that they can get you hooked, like next thing to Naomi's point about the apps, you're paying $9.99 a month.
Exactly where we're going is that committing people or like labeling them as mentally ill or mentally incompetent is now coming to be seen as stigmatizing them.
And then, of course, when we also don't require them to be responsible to pay for their own housing, their own food, and we say like, well, there's got to be a basic income.
We're, you know, divorcing rights and responsibilities.
And we think we're doing something compassionate, but it's actually enabling, I think, you know, the unraveling.
In 2018, people started to notice a bunch of videos on YouTube.
First, it started with these, it's Elsa, Spider-Man and the Joker running around for a half an hour doing weird nonsensical slapstick and no dialogue.
And people noticed that they'd have millions of views and the comments would all be gibberish.
Nobody understood why that was happening.
It was very strange.
There were a bunch of wild theories about YouTube algorithm stuff.
People started to figure out, wait a minute, YouTube is auto-recommending these videos to babies because the parents would press play on an Elsa video singing, hand the tablet to the baby and leave, and the video would then autoplay anything with Elsa in it.
And the reason there was gibberish is because the babies were smacking the screen.
What happened, though, is there started to emerge these computer generated, automatic, procedurally generated videos that would, these companies would make tens of thousands of them, upload them, and then based on the reaction to the YouTube algorithm, the program would make more of those videos.
So let's say you made five videos and one was, it's red, blue, green, white, brown, or whatever.
And then the video of green gets 10,000 views and the rest get none.
The computer program would say, more green.
The next video is five shades of green.
And what ended up actually happening was it starts with Elsa and then it would make a bunch of videos.
It turned into thumbnails of children eating feces, drinking urine out of urinals, stabbing each other, procedurally generated videos of pepper pig being gutted and disemboweled.
And babies were watching this because parents just handed the tablet off and didn't know.
YouTube panicked when the story broke.
Eventually, I think the Wall Street Journal picked it up.
And then they said, we're going to, that's why now in all YouTube videos, you have to select whether it's made for children or not.
And if you say it is, it gets like heavily monitored, restricted, and demonetized and things like that.
In response to the viral trending videos that people were seeing, there were videos, Joker had a giant syringe and he would poke Elsa with it and then syringe her because for some reason, syringe in the algorithm was pre-promoted.
This resulted in real world videos where adult men would take their daughters and inject them with needles of saline and get tens of millions of views.
So you had real people, first it starts with Elsa, then it starts with people imitating Elsa.
Then it starts with children are watching whatever will be generated.
So these programs, one of the videos I like to show is Hitler, but he's got a female body with breasts doing Tai Chi as a family from India sings the Finger Family Nursery rhyme.
They were getting millions of views and making millions of dollars.
YouTube starts banning these things, but the computer-generated programs Resulted in humans seeing what was successful and replicating it in the real world.
And this created this delusional set of content that was derivative of this hodgepodge.
The after effect that I see now is: we talk about how COVID and the school shutdowns made it so kids can't read.
There are now going to be nine-year-olds today who spent months watching this diluted content of babies eating feces out of fire.
And so what's going to happen to them when they're getting older?
What proclivities will they have?
What rights will they demand?
What's going to happen when someone comes into therapy and says, this is what I want.
I want to stick syringes and drink urine from urinals and they won't let me.
How do we help people who are this wired improperly because of the machine?
Well, I mean, I think that to Dr. Drew's earlier point, you know, there's exposure therapy and, you know, wanting to kind of rewire, re-stimulus, you know, people.
But I mean, I think it's also we have to keep kids away from screens, to your point, and, you know, to the point of the corruption of all of these medical bodies, you know, that many of us have been wired and trained to trust.
I think it was the American Pediatric Association a few years ago that revised its guidelines for like two-year-olds to say a certain number of hours of screen time a week was okay for kids up to that age.
But then when pressed about it, they acknowledged that they understood there's really no good amount of screen time, but they just didn't think that it would be practical for parents to keep their kids away from screens.
Well, to your point though, Tim, when you have someone like that that comes into therapy 10 years later, there is a lot to unpack because you have to acknowledge the abuse that happened.
You have to acknowledge their feelings about their parents, you know, that maybe unwittingly even thought that they were doing something fine, allowing them to be around the computer screen.
They're going to have bigger issues than even just like what they like.
They would also come to have issues with trust in people that they thought would be there to take care of them.
One thing, we looked into these AI generated videos before.
There's a channel where it's just, it was like 50 videos of Spider-Man with hot dogs all around him and various instances where Spider-Man AI generated.
And the titles were like Frozen, Trump, Spider-Man, Marvel, Hot Dog.
And then the title always had that in it.
And then there would be something else.
So if you actually look here, you can see 63 million views.
It's just one that I simply Google searched right now.
And you can see they're getting tens of thousands of views as it is.
And here's superheroes eat super hot dog.
It's just AI generated slop targeting children.
And they use the titles to manipulate the algorithm and get attention.
Now, I've brought this up before.
We as adults, this is the point that I made during ElsaGate.
When we see Elsa injecting or Spider-Man injecting a pregnant Elsa with something, when we see Spider-Man eating a giant hot dog, we go, okay, this is deranged.
But what happens when we see Donald Trump and a fake headline?
We go, this is plausible.
The problem is it's identical in every way to the manufactured content.
So one great example is Brian Tyler Cohen.
He has a channel where I'd argue 90% of his thumbnails are a random screenshot of Trump.
And every title is almost the exact same emotional Trump content.
Trump humiliated for this reason.
Trump says disgusting thing.
Trump looks angry and none of it's actual news, but he gets hundreds of thousands of views.
He gets 200, I think he gets 200 million views per month on this.
The challenge is, again, as adults, we can see this is crazy and kids shouldn't watch it.
But as adults, when someone says, I'm just criticizing Trump and you recognize it's formulaic in the same exact way, but targeting adults instead of children, there's nothing we can do about it because they have a right to do it.
So I see all of this as we are cooked.
I do not see a legal, practical path towards ending it because humans are addicted to it.
When you take, I had one person tell me, but if I take the tablet away from the baby, they'll freak out and start screaming.
And so I just want to say that if you are around, to use your word, those boomer relatives that are like stuck in a CNN spiral, I think the thing is, is that it's people who are more libertarian or independent, they don't tend to want to impose their views on other people.
So they'll be around that, you know, wine aunt that's stuck in CNN, and they just won't challenge her because they're like, well, you know, don't tread on me, don't tread on her.
But I think what we need to do is learn how to compassionately but assertively just start offering our own facts and challenging people and speaking up, you know, bit by bit.
All hot dog dances compilation, Mickey Mouse Club at Disney Jr. with 24.4 million subs and 163 million views.
This is where this stuff kind of comes from.
This is psychotic, deranged, degenerate garbage that parents believe is good for their kids because it's Disney.
And as much as I agree, we will speak up, we will challenge this, we already have a generation, Gen alpha, raised on this psycho slop that has fried their brains.
It's bad enough that Gen Z had some of it and millennials had a little bit.
This is the worst it's ever been.
And I can only like when you look at how millennials have developed with the internet and you get gender ideology, this affirmation, I believe it all comes from people's brains are wired in deranged ways because largely of the internet.
And as the internet becomes more prolific in our lives and development, we're going to see more and more and more and more of that.
And what happens?
The example I love to use is I Am Legend.
Are you guys familiar with I Am Legend?
The book, not the movie.
The movie was garbage.
It made no sense.
In the book, the graphic novel, there's vampires.
He's a vampire hunter.
He says humans have to stop the vampires.
So he goes around killing the vampires.
He finds them when they're in their coffin, stakes them in the heart.
By the end of the book, he's the last human.
And he looks, he's in a jail cell.
And he looks out the window and he sees vampires all walking around.
And they look up at him in the tower and they're terrified.
And then he says, basically, that's the moment I realized it.
I am the monster of legend.
I lurk while they sleep.
I hunt them while they're at their weakest.
They are the people and I am the monster.
I am legend.
Basically, meaning how we view that vampire, they view him.
What happens when the entirety of Gen Alpha are going to hot dog parties and there's a bar called Hot Dog Club and there's just hot dogs everywhere being launched in the air and they're flopping on the ground and we are desperately saying, this is insane.
It must be stopped.
And they look at you like some weird bigot demon trying to take away what is normal for them.
Well, Tim, then we'd have to get into the issue, all kinds of other issues.
Like, why is a child watching this, right?
So traditionally, a mom would be with her children, and she'd have the emotional and mental bandwidth.
And I say this as a mom myself.
I was telling on the way over, I used to joke that my business was my baby, and then I had a real baby, and I'm currently in the process of closing the clinical wing of my business because I felt like all that, you know, mental energy and bandwidth of trying to shape and form other people, I wanted to be going into my child.
And so I think we'd have to look at the question of, you know, of whether it be men or whether it be women.
But the idea that babies are getting dropped off at daycare at six weeks old, kids are, why are they watching this?
Essentially, it's because mom and dad are unable to.
But as the time traveler, let me give us some wisdom.
The perspective of history, similar but not so desperate arguments were held about television in the 60s.
And having been raised as a kid that was plopped in front of the television to watch Captain Kangaroo and all the things that created Pee Wee Herman, which was a version of all that, the same, I remember, in fact, the argument was we're reinforcing primary narcissism.
At that time, also, there's been studies that have shown that not only was it black and white and fewer commercials, but the shows themselves were structured around moral themes.
I remember seeing the Kennedy funeral and things like that.
And there's stuff that, you know, and then people started.
I remember I was watching the Watts riots and I went to my cousin's house whose parents were vehemently in favor of those riots and they wouldn't let their kids watch it.
That was the beginning of the end for mainstream media because people started to realize, oh, I'm being manipulated.
And it's over once people feel that.
And I believe the same thing will happen with all of this.
And I am hearing, I don't know if this is statistically borne out yet, but the generations that's coming up now is coming in, understanding screens are damaging.
And the conversation we've been having quite a bit in the past couple of weeks is, again, the right is so scared of being called fascist that they're literally telling people, by all means, sterilize children.
My argument is Trump should use all federal authorities to the highest degree imaginable to stop the sterilization and sex change of children.
Just send in the DOJ, do whatever you got to do, start prosecuting these people.
Instead, there's this fear.
A great example is, have y'all seen the video that went viral from I Am Jazz?
Let me just say to those of us that are watching this show who are of sound mind, this is a woman who has taken her prebubescent son, surgically removed his genitals to create a cavity that she is demanding by threat of force and violence, he shove inside his wound to expand.
Now, of anyone of sound mind, you're going to say, what are humans doing?
My argument, and this was in Florida.
And at the time, this is 2021.
This video is going viral.
I said, why isn't Ron DeSantis at least sending in state troopers to question this family?
And the DeSantis people lost their minds.
No, no, you can't do that.
How dare it's not his fault, blah, blah, blah.
And I'm like, listen, if there was a video of a man and he said, I wake my wife up in the middle of the night and I grab the device and I say, stick it in or I will wring your neck.
Well, it's funny you say that because when I was watching that, you might find this interesting.
When it comes to the need for power or the need for dominance, which, you know, it's just a personality scale, women tend to express the need for power through excessive nurturance.
So it's like, have another bite of soup, dear.
No, you know, and in that case as well, she's like, oh, I'm such a good mom.
I wake him up in the middle of the night and I, you know, and so and the psychology field has been completely overtaken by women, to Naomi's point.
I just want, again, because I know the people who watch this are of sound mind.
I think it's important to recognize there's a large portion of the population of not just the United States, but the world that live in that reality of that woman.
But I just want to say this.
Imagine it's 1993 and a cop walked into a home and saw a mother holding down her son and demanding he insert a device lubricated into his body against his will, threatening to wring his neck.
That would have been a major headline.
That would have been like a shock to the community.
Now it's TV entertainment and accepted by a large portion of this country as normal.
If I was the attorney general in Florida, the first thing I would do is I would come on a press conference and say, there are a lot of crimes happening in our state that we seek to stop.
There are a lot of bad people.
There's illegal immigration.
There's murder.
There's drug dealing.
We are going to work on all of those things and make sure that there is a base level of actual enforcement to protect the community.
That being said, here is a video of a woman who lives in our state who has threatened to forcefully, medically rape her son.
I think that it's going to, I think the tide is shifting on this and it's going to change because there are so many young people now who went through the hysteria in, what was it, like 2016 to 2018 to 2020 who are now coming of age, finding their voice and making an impact.
And it unfortunately is going to need to be led by these young people because the older people in power, they act like cowards.
So I made the argument that sex education when I grew up was here's the reproductive function of a male and reproductive function of a female, and this is how babies are made.
What the left is arguing now is that sex ed is about gratification.
So the argument he made was you're homophobic because you're stopping young gay kids from learning how to pleasure each other.
And I pointed out inserting foreign objects into your rectum can kill you.
And he said, then you're arguing that gay people shouldn't be allowed to have sex.
Like you said, it was just about how, you know, in my program as a therap, now they want therapists to be sex educators, but not in, oh, you know, like there's this, this, this STD and you might want to use this type of birth control.
It's like, okay, so if you get this brand of vibrator and you spread your legs like this and then reach around like that, that is the curriculum at my therapy.
A guy on the show, but like it sounds as a psychologist, but we would almost call acting out, like where he has this idea in his mind that he wants heterosex to be the same as homosexual.
And they're just not, right?
I mean, I'm not even making a value judgment, And so it sounds like he had almost kind of a rigid insistence upon saying, well, you know, if we talk about one, therefore we have to talk about the other.
And in one, you put something in a hole, and so in the other you do, and so therefore we have to talk about it as if it's exactly the same, right?
And to me, that's not even actually like a true holistic acceptance of what even homosexuality is.
I almost think it's like degrading, you could say, to homosexuality to try to say, you know, that it's the same.
I feel like humans, for evolutionary psychological reasons, will be attracted to receiving a resource or a thing or something that is perceivably beneficial.
And does that create the political realities of human history in that any world leader, any tribal leader or governmental politician who promises to give you stuff is going to have an advantage over someone who tells you no?
Because I wonder, real quick, final point.
The reason why I think we're seeing a lot of this with pleasuring is that I wonder if people who are hearing this actually care.
Obviously, the people who watch the show and choose to do.
I'm saying, if YouTube were to recommend this video to a random person, are they going to hear this and think to themselves, yeah, he's not wrong, but they're going to take away from me what I want.
I absolutely agree that we have that tendency, but that is the lesser angels of our nature.
The reality is people need to be led and Leading needs to be done with a moral compass, and things that are very uncomfortable need to be people need to be led through it.
We won't necessarily do it on our own.
We need to be inspired to do things like leaning into exposure therapies and things.
That's why you need a therapist there to help you through it.
You have to have somebody bring you into things that are uncomfortable.
Well, look how they riled about even putting a age verification to access porn online in many places and in many states to the point where I think Pornhub like pulled out of soda stops showing in Utah or whatever because like they enforced like an age verification, you know?
I mean, but yeah, I mean, to the issue as well, again, about like sameness, you know, I mean, again, I'm not even putting a value judgment on it, but if we can just have open and honest talks about our true diversity, like the differences between.
And even people who are not religious, because I was saying earlier about like, oh, well, you know, there's this protective factor of mental health for religiosity.
So I just want to say, even for people who are not religious, like even if it's, you know, meditation or in fact, actually my husband, he's not religious, but like he goes to church anyway and like understands.
I mean, it's so interesting when you start learning about the Judeo-Christian foundation of our country and, you know, what our founders said about the importance of religion.
And even those who did not believe still embraced the tenets of it.
And so I just, I feel like there's this hostility to religion.
I don't know about you, Naomi, but when I was in school even, the way they would talk about evangelical Christians, you would think that they were talking about Nazis or straight white males, right?
Yeah, in my sexuality class, we were taught that the they call it Christianization is the root of all like sexual, not the root of all, but the root of a lot of sexual dysfunction and repression they blame on Christianity.
But now we're moving to a point where the sexual ethic that we're being taught is just consent.
As long as there is consent, it is wrong for us to moralize anything that other people do and where has it gotten us.
And that's not, there's plenty of other great religions as well.
So, I mean, to your point, Tim, like, where does this all go?
My hope is that although where this all goes to me, obviously, is despair, that when people do reach despair, that ultimately our spirit, our humanity, something inside of us will reach out, you know, for what's true, for what's real.
And then they'll get served a Tombcast video or, you know, they'll pick up, Can I Say That?
or they'll see a Dr. Dew show or whatever Naomi gets up to next.
But yeah, I mean, I just, I think that we have a survival mechanism that although we can go down deep into despair, there will be some light security.
But like anything else in mental health, they have to be highly motivated and getting people to want to participate and do the treatment or have the resources for it.
They'll be affirmed, but I think that once you go deeper and deeper into that affirmation spiral, there is an emptiness, there's a loneliness.
You realize at the end of the day, this is just me and my AI girlfriend, and there is a world out there.
I believe, even if it's just simply evolution, that there's a part of us that is going to seek to bond and connect and recreate, procreate, you know, with somebody else.
It's like a heat-seeking missile part of ourselves that I just think will get activated.
I mean, from a Christian perspective, I think that it is absolutely possible to come back from the first nine years of your life being programmed and your neuroplasticity because God, in my belief system, puts something on all of our hearts to seek good and self-actualize if we choose that.
But we have to choose it.
And there's sure not very many incentives to do that right now.
He was a skateboarder, punk rock kind of guy, and he was very Christian and no drugs, no anything like that.
And he told me his story was that he used to do a lot of drugs and drink a lot.
I asked him, like, how did you end up becoming a Christian?
And he said that he was in the woods after a party of just binge, drugs, and drinking.
In the morning, he woke up, went to take a leak, and when he walked, you know, 15, 20 feet away from the group, as he was pissing, he felt a booming voice within his chest say, why are you doing this?
And it caused him to have an anxiety attack.
And then he heard the voice again, why are you doing this?
You should stop.
And then he had this experience and immediately tried seeking answers, reading, what was this?
How did I feel and hear this voice?
And then I think naturally, because you have the majority of religion, the people he came to were priests and religious folk who explained to him divine intervention or whatever they thought it might have been.
And then from that point on, he never did another drug.
He cleaned up, opened a business and started living a healthy and productive life.
I mean, it happened for me before I was not raised Christian.
I was raised very secular.
My dad's an astrophysicist.
He thinks that it is just silly, what I believe.
But I came, it was almost a logical decision because I was looking at my life, looking at my psyche and thinking, what is my worldview?
Because whatever it is, which I should probably define, it is not working for me.
Living with no faith was actually making me very anxious, very depressed.
The idea that like, what is my meaning?
Actually, what is the meaning of all of this?
Having a religion, if not just Christianity, like another religion too, or just a sense of spirituality, connecting to the meaning is so beneficial and nurturing.
Well, that's an interesting point too about this whole thing that you're saying, Tim, about the algorithms, you know, that just take you down this like weird, deep, dark hole.
And in a sense, from a Christian perspective, I think that would be where you're essentially making an idol of yourself.
Right.
And of course, that leads to kind of a wasteland.
But again, the good news, I believe that our species has survived for, you know, goodness knows how long.
I think that there is some part of us that will snap back.
Well, and every great myth and great story, whether it's Gilgamesh or Candide, it's always at the very end that, you know, what did you learn from your great journey?
What I learned was to go back to my community and participate.
Or in Candide's case, it was tend your own garden.
Just get back to the people that you love and get back to your community, be of service, make a difference.
All the problems, all the crises, all the Elsa gate, whatever it might be.
Because certainly there are things that I think we should influence to improve.
But the worst case scenario that I see as being if we completely fail in every regard to preserve, the degenerates will die off and the smaller but stronger and more resilient people of strong will and mental fortitude will then start to procreate once again and reform and rebuild.
You know, I have some hypotheses, theories, and I guess, you know, what would you call it, imaginations on what may or may not happen with AI.
One thing that I actually pitched this, it's a short story that I came up with on the show or came up a long time ago, and it's that in 200, 300 years, all of humanity is seemingly wiped out.
There's only one city that remains.
It's a population of around 7 million people.
No one knows how humanity was wiped out or how they died.
And there are scouting missions that explore outside of the city, and every other city around the world is just lying in ruins.
They try booting up old servers and find that around 2080 or so, news just stopped getting written, and there's nothing there.
Newspapers ended way earlier than that.
No idea.
And then one day, a group of tall, slender humanoid beings in full white suits with chrome helmets appear and attack one of the scouting missions.
They try shooting at him.
The bullets don't seem to work.
They film it all.
Headquarters is like, what is this?
Eventually, are these the aliens or whatever creatures that destroyed humanity?
And then one day, at a fight in a junkyard, a car is knocked over and it falls crushing one of these things.
And then the rest of them flee and the humans pull the helmet off and it's a human with like no hair.
And the story is at some point, humans all went underground into pods and facilities where they were networked into the Matrix, essentially by choice.
The last humans that remain on Earth were the more tribal and rural folk who don't really pay attention to the internet, had kids, live a simple life.
Around, and this is all just, I'm imagining this idea.
Around 2077, the news stories that were being written were more and more being written in the neural web and less so on the internet most people could access.
So the servers you find will slowly stop.
If you took Benjamin Franklin and brought him here today and said, learn about the world, he'd say, get me a periodical.
And we'd be like, okay.
And he'd end up learning only tiny fractions of what's really going on because we now use the internet and he wouldn't know where to find it.
So that's one idea I have of what might happen.
There will be humans that resist getting plugged in, don't go underground, don't neural net themselves.
And I bonded with Bill Maher on this the other day because he and I were trained at a time when the pursuit of an approximation, because you can never get to the truth, but the pursuit of the truth was everything.
Now it is non-existent.
It begs no issue.
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See, I actually dropped out of high school, and I...
They get massive viewership when they do these surroundeds.
I'm assuming you guys have seen them.
The problem is, I was watching one where I think it was Eliezer Perez was trying to use a Socratic method, but everyone's bored by it.
So they flagged him off before he even got to his point.
And I'm like, well, he's trying to understand the position so that he could break them apart and then explain where the fallacies are, but they don't give you time for that.
Rudyard Lynch of What If Alt Hist has a viral post going around where he said, get off the internet now.
Literally everyone of all factions is going crazy and it's impossible to function.
Remove yourself from this.
He said something to the effect of that he stepped away for a few weeks, came back and realized just how insane everyone was and how it's going to lead to a great tumult and you need to get away from it, build your support and survival structures and how it makes sense for you and your life and where you live.
The challenge I take from that, he's correct.
Literally everyone's crazy to varying degrees.
Us, a little bit, probably too, but not as bad as most or many.
The issue I see though is if you're not observing the fray and what's going on in the conflict, you'll be consumed by it unknowingly, caught by surprise.
So while I agree, the problem is many people will walk up to the culture war on the internet and take a look at it and get sucked in like the Tasmanian devil pulling everybody into the whirlwind.
I think it's important to actually try and stand over it and understand what's happening so you can survive, protect yourself, and maybe succeed in some way.
Well, to that point, this conversation has actually inspired me.
I want to offer something to people for free that would be online for if they don't want to totally walk away yet.
I've been thinking about this.
I want to start like a book club about free speech where we can talk about like, I tried to express myself and I got scared and or I expressed myself and it went well or I heard somebody say something I disagreed with, but I engaged anyway or whatever.
So if people are interested, they can go to free speechetoday.com and just you'll find a way to contact me through there.
And I'm just going to start like a free way for people to gather and talk about it.
Yeah, building that support system, honestly, to inspire others and courage begets courage because I mean, so many people, even just me saying the most basic truths, they have come to me saying, exactly the same thing is going on in my program.
I think I'm going to say something.
Thank you.
And so just say the truth and then see what happens.
And we would play approved cartoons for the kids, educational, not psychotic, weird hot dog dancing, really basic stuff that, you know, maybe not even a side cartoons, but Mr. Rogers level teaching stuff.
And then the parents would socialize with each other.
So like I was mentioning with no one playing baseball in my neighborhood anymore.
This is what has me really worried is that people don't interact in any meaningful way.
So maybe as you mentioned the book club, I'm thinking, everybody out there who's listening to this looking for solutions, your community, your neighbors, where you live, you guys should be meeting up once a week.
I can say from a fact-based logical assessment, church is an excellent prescription to the social ails you are experiencing.
And it's not even about whether you truly believe in God or anything like that.
The communal function of being around your neighbors, understanding the needs of your neighbors and your community is what makes human civilization function.
And that's gone right now, largely, not completely.
And I mean, even if, I'm just saying, even if you're not Christian, go listen to the sermon, take what you want from the moral teaching, leave the rest, view it as allegory, whatever, whatever.
Just go and be in a group of people who are thinking about morality.
Unfortunately, so many churches, though, are like putting out, I hate to say this, but like a bunch of woke garbage.
So another thing that you can do Is you could have people over to your house and put on like some Pastor Alan Jackson sermons or, you know, watch like some Charlie Kirk talks or whatever.
Look, it came out of sort of religious, the clergy participate in the generation of the 12-step.
And this is all this stuff humans have known forever.
It's just we like get amnesia about it periodically, or we think we know better.
Whenever you hear a human saying, now we figured it out.
We know now the real, the real, run, run.
We've always known what works for humans.
We just know and we just move away from it periodically.
And that's what's been happening lately.
Recovery is faith, hope, connection, difference making, meaning making, looking at yourself and your flaws as a human being, sharing it with another human.
There was a video, a clip from Rogan's show that went viral that I'm sure is largely missing its context, but he said he was talking about the Big Bang.
And I could be getting this wrong, so just fact-check me.
But he said something like, if you're going to tell me that there's this great miracle in the Big Bang or a guy named Jesus, I'm going to go with Jesus.
So the way I explain it to people is that I don't know what this philosophy is called, but I read it a long time ago in the hacker community, social engineering.
To be aware of yourself, they said, at all times, be cognizant of how you feel, what you want, and what you are doing, and why you are doing it.
Then imagine the people you are interacting with.
Imagine you are sitting across from both you and that person, watching that interaction between the two of you.
How do you feel seeing these two people interact?
What do you think they want and why do you think they are doing this?
And then imagine these two people, but zoom out above the world and imagine all of the people in this area all doing similar things and try and imagine what they want and why they're doing what they are doing.
So first, second, and third person analysis on, and then bring it back to yourself and use that.
And it will greatly benefit you in understanding the world, getting what you want.
So I try to tell people to do something like that.
And they say the reason I think the second person is the most important is because you need to be critically analyzing the actions you're taking and imagine watching yourself take these actions.
