'Zen and the Art of Social Climbing' (5-31-26)

[music] Good day. So, normally I only pay attention [music] to a sport where my favorite team is doing well. And so normally I only pay attention to the NBA when the Lakers [music] are doing well. And the Lakers really only became my favorite team cuz my initial favorite team was the Washington Bullets and then once I chose them as my favorite team I think in 1978, they never won an NBA championship again. So they they just were not returning [music] what I needed from this kind of relationship. So when when the Lakers had some [music] crazy games, I think against the Portland Trailblazers circuit 1999 and I've been living in LA for 5 years. It's like, "Oh, what the heck? I think I'm going to become a uh [music] Laker fan." Anyway, here's the point. I started paying attention to the NBA again, [music] not just the Lakers who were knocked out in the second round of the playoffs, but I'm paying attention to the NBA now because of this amazing 7 foot5 French center, uh, Victor [music] Webeyama. is the center for the San Antonio Spurs. He just he just does things that I've never seen before and he's exciting to watch. So, I started paying attention to the series between San Antonio and Oklahoma City. It was the Western Conference Finals and I started watching started watching the highlights of of game one or no, I actually watched live the the final parts of of game one. It was it was a double overtime victory. I believe by the San Antonio Spurs and I I fell in love. I fell in love with the Spurs and no homo, just love is respect and and fascination with the Spurs and WBY. But this gets no coverage in the national media, but this team has caused me a great deal of pain, right? I just want my love to be pure love, pure return. But apparently there are a lot of negative emotions that go with love. And it it's been tense and painful to me to see Oklahoma City take a twoame to one lead and then a threeame to two lead. So the Spurs were right on the verge of elimination and I'm only about a week into my love here. Like normally you get a 90-day runway with love, mate. Right. The first 90 days are great. It's blissful. It's like a honeymoon. It's just it's just the best time. And my honeymoon with the San Antonio Spurs and WBY threatened to end after a week. And I was growing particularly frustrated because this guy just does amazing things and yet he's parked out at the three-point line when the Spurs go on offense. Like, what the heck? Why isn't he down near the paint, right? I want my big man down near the paint and and stuffing baskets through the rim and just dominating like Shaquille O'Neal. Luckily, I was able to find answers to my questions from AI. So, apparently there are very good reasons why WMBB sets up around the three-point arc instead of banging down near near the rim. And the answers, what the heck? Yes, we're streaming. A and the answers reflect something that's going on here on this live stream. So, more and more people are saying to me or just remarking in general all the the remarkable similarities between myself and Wemi, right? And many people are frustrated that I'm not down in the paint near the basket just banging out decodings of all all the leading thinkers. Like people just want me to meet certain needs. They just want me to decode Bronze Age Pervert and great thinkers like Mark Levvin and and Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, right? But I don't only do decodings, right? I'm best known for decoding, but I'm a complicated guy. I I I have hidden depths, right? I'm not just a master and commander and decoder. And I know you think 40, you just live your life the way you conduct your show with ease, with grace, with authority, with moral certainty. You you take decisive action. You don't put up with the But that is not reflective of the overall texture of my life. As I mentioned, I have hidden depths. And there are many advantages to playing out at the three-point line. Even when you possess the intellectual skills equivalent to a a WMBI, right? I don't always want to be banging and mastering and decoding. Sometimes I like to be passive. I I am never a bottom. I just want to but but I don't always have to be the top right. I I am content to just lie down on my back at times and allow my partner to do the work. And I go through these phases of apprenticeship before I turn to mastering and commanding and decoding. So I will often follow a teacher or an idea or a school of thought for years just passively taking it in just using the the Torah right as as my guide to life or using this particular teaching say on emotional soiety to to judge me and I am here to learn right I'm not here to interrogate I'm not here to situate I'm not here to decode food and I don't have to live down near the basket uh banging bodies with 250 lb 300lb players for the Oklahoma City uh Thunder all the time, right? I need breaks. I'm only human, right? I need to spend some time out of the three-point line. I need to spend time just as an apprentice, just as a student, right? I don't need to even ask questions. I don't need to be the center of attention. There there are parts of my life where I simply take orders, where I don't act like the smartest man in the room. I'm just here to to carry out a job, to carry out an assignment, to follow the code, to contribute, and to just follow orders. I don't have to be interrogating and dominating everybody everywhere all the time. So, think of me as like Webby, right? Not everyone plays best with their back turned to the basket like Shaquille O'Neal, right? There there are different ways to play basketball. You don't have to be the the bloke who's just sitting just outside the paint getting ready to inflict damage. Right? Victor Wyama, he's saying 7 foot4. He's got an 8 foot wingspan. So you think park him under the rim, feed him the ball, right? You you listen to some of my decodings and you think, "Wow, 40 Eastand 7 foot4 intellectually with an 8ft wingspan. Park him in the decoding, mastering, commanding rim. Just feed him the ball and let him go to it." And yet the San Antonio Spurs does the opposite. And much of my life is just the opposite of that. So like Webby, I spent much of every offensive possession out near the ark, right? I'm at the top of the key. I'm floating around the elbow of what's going on. I'm the student. I'm not always the teacher. Not always the master. Not always the commander. Often I just like to be the student. I just like to learn. I I don't have to be dominating. I can be passive. I can follow directions. Right? I can be the tallest man in the room and yet I will sit 25 feet away from the lect turn. And you're wondering what what the heck is going on? What what are the Spurs thinking? Well, the Spurs know what they're doing. Captain 40 knows what he's doing, right? Keeping 40 away from the paint. It creates more chances for for different creative bursts of inspiration and brilliant insights to flow because I'm not in that congested space. Sometimes I just want to be the student, just want to be the apprentice. I just want to hang out away from the the paint. So you put Wyama right on the block near the basket and the defender just leans on him and muscles him and the lane fills up and my intellectual circuits just clog up if all I do is like master and commander and decode, right? But move me out to the three-point line and then either the opposition has to follow me there or or you just free all sorts of things up to create. Right now, the lane sits empty when you got Webby out of the three-point line. You got De'ar and Fox and Stefon Castle who are just driving into open space. So, Webbyama, he's a force and the defense bends around him just like American intellectual life bends around me before I ever touch the ball, before ever I assume my customary position as master and commander. So, Shaquille O'Neal, right? I'm not Shaquille O'Neal. Many people are saying 40, you remind me of Shaquille O'Neal. You are the second coming of Shaquille O'Neal, the the great center for the Orlando Magic and Los Angeles. I am not Shaquille O'Neal, right? Shaquille O'Neal wanted the ball with his back to the basket and a smaller man behind him. Wyama prefers to face the rim. Sometimes I like to face the rim, bro. Right. My handle runs ahead of my size. Like I like to catch the ball 20 feet out, look at my man, and then take a drive off the bounce or just pull up for a three-pointer. Right? If I'm down to the basket, people are just going to muscle me, and it gets tiring, right? The the game has changed, right? We now live in the age of AI. There are far fewer people listening and making live streams anymore. You don't have as many people blogging. It's a different age. And so a post up is now among the weakest shots that a team can take. Like a Webbyama three, a Wembby drive, a lob to Weby on the roll, a kick out to the shooter in the corner. That beats a contested turnaround over a set defense. Right? Coaches now want movement and choices. They don't want one big man like the Shack backing down his man while four teammates watch. Also, think about my health, right? Think about Wembley's health. Think about the amazing similarities between us, right? The low post is a wrestling match. All right, I enjoy mastering, commanding, and decoding as much as the next guy, but it's tiring, right? Sometimes I just want to learn. Sometimes I just want to be a student. So every catch down there in the low post. It means trading shoulders and hips with men who weigh 250, 300 lb. Right? San Antonio guards WMBB's body with care, just like you need to guard my body with care. Right? Put me out in the perimeter. that that spares me the the nightly pounding and allows me to just keep adding muscle, right? We now have incredibly physical defenses, right? A strong man with a low base can just ride on WBY, right? Drive him off his preferred spot before the entry pass even arrives. The paint clogs up. His long arms work against him. The ball travels a great distance on each dribble. Quick guard can dart in there and swipe it loose. You see the obvious parallels to how I operate my live streams. But out on the floor when be night, we can face up. We can survey. We can move the ball before the traffic arrives. So when I'm out on the perimeter, I can be a passer, right? I can I can share the ball with you, right? You can be a key part of the show. I don't have to be just clogging up the paint, right? The Spurs set him at the top of the key as a screener and as a hub. He's got great vision. He finds cutters just like me. He runs pick and pop with his guards. He catches. He fires the ball, swings the ball. The offense flows instead of stalling. Just like this show at its best. It's flowing instead of stalling. And defenses, my opposition end up trap, right? Guard me with a center and I shoot over the top. Guard me with a forward and I shoot over that man or I drive past him. Right? Send two defenders and then I pass out of the double team for the open look. The farther from the rim I start, the more questions the defense has to answer on every trip. So whenyama grows more dangerous near the rim. precisely because he starts away from it. Right? I grow more dangerous as a thinker. Precisely because I don't start out necessarily decoding and mastering and commanding. I just start out as a humble student. I just start out in a passive role. I just start out by measuring myself up against this particular standard. Right? I don't start out as, oh, I'm the smartest man in the room. I am the standard. No, that's just not who I am. I'm just a simple Jew. So when is 25 feet out from the basket, right? I'm 25 out feet out from the idea that you want me to decode. Well, I can begin a drive from 25 feet out from the basket and still finish at the rim with a dunk, right? And you're just not going to be able to keep up with me. So just because Wii is not Hakee Malajuan, right? Just because he's not the Shark, right? Think of him more as a Kevin Durant or a Dirk Nitzky, right? He's a rim running big, right? He's a 7 foot4 man who handles the ball, dribbles the ball, shoots, passes, and attacks off the dribble, right? And he does more for his team than the great low post scorer, right? Even though I admit before I did my research, I thought, wy hell, just stand under the basket and just dunk the ball all night long. So, what am I talking about here? Well, of course, I'm naturally talking about the landscape of emotional sobriety. And the title of this video is live this moment as if you chose it from the optimal recovery and emotional sobriety institute which is provided presided over by psychologist PhD Alan Burgerer >> you that's relevant to your life today >> for me if I can't come to an answer or solution about something on my own I place immediate demands on other people >> so the dynamic in this show is so similar to what we have going on All right, you come here to this show, I give you maxims and in exchange you groom me. All right, we're all a bunch of primates and here I am the the alpha primate and so I I grunt and then you groom me and you and you clean the clean the the dirt out of my fur to supply that answer to supply that solution. Um, and it has always gotten me into a lot of trouble. Um, uh, as Allan knows. Um, >> and I think, um, what I have been forcing myself to do is rather like it's still okay to not have an answer solution on your own, >> but rather than being a demand over here, you sort of create curiosity. You can still lean on other people, you can still speak to other people, you can still reach out to other people, but if you do it with a sense of curiosity rather than a demand, um, you still might not get the answer you want, you still might not arrive at a conclusion that even like makes sense, but you've at least like given away some of your will and and some of like sort of how you think it should go because you're getting curious. about. >> No, I enjoy the audience treating Alan Ber as the great guru and there's nothing wrong with that. There's a lot of value and and that's how I treated him for years. I was just the student and I thought this man, he's got the real deal. He's got the the good stuff. I just want to learn from him. I'm not here to measure him. I'm not here to decode him. I just want to learn. And there are benefits to just learning from people. And there's a time and a place where you want to learn. And there's a time and a place where you want to master and and command. So I spent years just learning from his teachings on emotional sobriety for example and I took them very seriously and thought oh this is the new frontier in recovery from addiction and now count me as a little bit more skeptical. I still think there's tremendous value here and I also think there is about an equally large amount of BS and I am here to distinguish between the two >> what the other person is giving to you rather than forcing them into sort of a corner or a hole. Um, and I think that, um, you know, those urges that so many of us have for top approval, perfect security, and a perfect romance, which are appropriate when you're in high school at the age of 16, 17, and you have no idea what's up from down, prove to be an impossible way of life when we're at 47 or 57. Um and um you know I think that um uh like an unknown about the future can be very very very anxiety inducing. Um even if like your present still feels very secure. Um and I think that um security with the present doesn't necessarily mean that we like things can still happen, right? But that sort of disaster thinking about what might come gets me into trouble as well because I'm future tripping about a situation that doesn't exist yet and I'm letting it totally unmour me from the security that I have in my present. >> Yeah. Um, and I'm placing a dependency on. >> So, a lot of this is uh classic Los Angeles talk. I was writing blog posts this week examining and describing the different emotional pallets of San Diego versus Los Angeles versus San Francisco versus New York City, London, Paris, Tokyo, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide. I I find I feel different things in different places. It's in part the geography, in part it's the the different culture, in part it's different uh ways of uh constructing moral grammar. Right? There seems to be a different moral grammar in San Diego versus Los Angeles. For example, the LA moral grammar is much more Jewish. It is much more narrative focused. It's much more open. San Francisco is a much more closed town, much more institutional town. San Diego and Sacramento are much quieter cities have have a quieter more understated moral gam grammar. LA being much more Jewish is much more open, expressive, passionate and uh narrative driven. I I find when I go to Sydney, 90% of what was bothering me in LA I just leave behind in LA. I have entirely different concerns. I I'm a different man when I stand at and stand in Sydney or or Brisbane compared to when I stand in Beverly Hills. >> I'm figuring a situation out in the future that isn't even a problem on my plate at the moment. >> Yeah. >> Um and it always messes up how I'm living. It always messes up how I'm living in the moment. >> Yeah. And if I place a demand on somebody that I'm living with in my present, they're like, "What the hell?" Like things are great. What what what do you you know? And so yeah, a lot of it resonates. No, that's I think that what you're what you're saying is is is is very much an important thing to be aware of is the difference between making a request for support versus demanding it. And the way you're inching over there, I think, is through that curiosity that you're talking about. Is there you're leaving room for the other person? See, when I make a demand, I'm not really interested in how the other person feels about it. I want it my way, right? And then I get upset if I don't get it my way, try to guilt them or whatever I do to try to manipulate them to do what I want. And what you're moving towards is you're trying, you're working hard, leaving room for the Now, >> a lot of people have noticed that I have these sets that I just run on people without paying attention to my audience or to the situation. And that's humiliating. Right? Humiliation comes from when you're not in touch with the situation and what it requires. And maturity is adjusting yourself to the situation. Right? Who's the boss? The situation is the boss. >> The other person. And I really do think true security comes from see I think it's a false security. I call it a pseudo security that if our security comes from other people it it's it's going to be always going to be fragile because it depends on somebody other than oursel. But if my security comes from my confidence that I can deal with whatever >> okay I think this is largely BS right the the strongest basis for security is not ourselves because then that is one read right that's one foundation your strongest basis for security is your family and your friends and your community because if you fail someone in your family is going to pick you up or or your friends or your community. So obviously you don't want to fail to put yourself in an unnecessarily vulnerable position, but relying on other people in addition to your own resources is so much wiser. And Alen Ber's advice here is to add more self. And uh my advice is add add more intensity of commitment, connection with other people, right? Add more people or add more more depth to your relations with family, friends and community. That is a far sher foundation than adding more self because I do not believe us as primarily being individuals. We are primarily members of extended families >> I need to deal with and figure it out. Even if it's not exactly the way I want it or if it's nothing like I want I can still be okay. Then you've got a solid foundation. Then you can get to I'm okay even if right no matter what. I'm okay no matter what. And you'll get there, man. >> You'll get there. >> All right. Thank you for reading tonight. >> Yeah, no problem. >> So, emotional sobriety nutshell wisdom. This one's going to come to us from Tom Rutled. We talked about this one in our podcast the other >> I just don't buy it that you'll get there. The the ideal is this buffered self who can just handle whatever life throws at you. The most effective way of handling whatever life throws at you according to academic research. This isn't just opinion is to have good relations with your friends and family and community. Right? That's the single best way to deal with what life hands you as opposed to uh just having it all inside of you and and thinking that uh you're you're just going to have the resources to to deal with whatever life throws at you. So many people say bad things about AI, but look at this this beautiful picture that AI generated for me. Right? There's Brisbane on the left, then Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth for my post on the different emotional pallets of these capital cities in Australia today. And Tom, I took the liberty to add one more line to this. So Tom's nutshell wisdom was live this moment as if you chose it. Might as well. I this is Tom's sense of humor that comes in cuz maybe you did right says give yourself permission to doubt give yourself permission to disagree give yourself permission to decide and I add it give yourself permission to be bold and outrageous add more self you know for me I'll make a few comments on this and then I'll invite Tom and Carly and and Tom Padash to comment too see the once we get to a point where I accept complete responsibility for my life. It's not about blaming myself or blaming someone else. Blame is no longer a part of the subject when we get to that place. It's what I am saying is that I am responsible for the existence I am creating today. That is not discounting or dismissing the influences that have helped shape me into who I am today, including some of the things that have been traumatic. But it says I am responsible for how I process all of that, integrate those experiences, and then become the author of my life today, becoming the main character in my life today. And the more range I can give to myself to be who I am, the more peace and contentment I can feel within myself, the more security I'm going to feel. So, >> so I think what he's saying is dominantly not helpful and not true. And the value that he is giving people is not in what he's saying. It's not in the maxims. It's not in the teachings. It is in the community that he builds. Right? At at the end of the day, right, the whole point of what we're doing right now is the friends we made along the way. So I think this bloke Alan Burgerer and almost all contemporary thinking suffers from the great delusion to borrow a title of a book by John J. Marshimer, the great delusion. His book was on international relations. His book was called the great delusion liberal dreams and international realities. But I want to focus on his anthropology. I want to focus on his description of man. So M. Shimmer writes and this is my view. M Sha writes my view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance. I couldn't do this show if nobody showed up in the chat and posed questions and challenges or just said goodday. Right? A huge amount of what I am like virtually everything that I am is developed and realized in relation to other people. Now I can choose which persons I most value, which communities I most value. And so I can put a higher premium on certain feedback as opposed to others. But I cannot just do this show with complete obliviousness to the reaction of the audience. I can choose which part of the audience I most value. And so I have made several shifts in this show and lost viewers along the way. But I could never get to the point where I'm just completely oblivious to what anyone says about the show because the show only works if there is some audience. If I'm just speaking into the void, I run out of energy. And unless I connect with you and unless I connect with you, meaning someone I respect, there is no show, there is no energy, there is no enthusiasm, there is no fuel. This is something that I will give up because it doesn't pay. But I get paid for doing this show based on the quality of the commentary I receive, the emails that I receive, the people that I meet that I can then transfer from just knowing them online to meeting them in real life. That is the primary payout of this show. It's not uh financial. So this is my view of human beings. Our individual existence is of secondary importance to our group existence, our existence in an extended family. So liberalism focuses on the individual, right? Completely downplays the social nature of human beings to virtually totally ignoring it. Instead, in liberalism treats people as atomistic actors and that's not who we are, right? Political liberalism is an ideology that is individualist at its core. that assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. Even though inalienable rights is the philosophical foundation for the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, it's not something that uh I put much stock in. It's a useful fiction for constructing a society for certain persons. It seems to work pretty well for Englishmen and their descendants. Uh doesn't necessarily work as well for other people in other situations. So, Even though my instincts tend to be right-wing, I'm not so naive as to believe that there is one universalist type of governance that works for all people in all times. In certain circumstances, you want to be super open to outgroups and to trade and to immigration and to interactions with out groups because sometimes they have valuable things and valuable insights. they have great deal that they can bring to the table and you want to be as open to them as possible. Other times our group's going to be pure poison and your people, your nation, your state will be far better served by a xenophobic police state attitude. So concepts such as freedom and democracy and dignity, they have no meaning outside of a specific people in a specific place at a specific time. So I I don't place a great deal of stock on inalienable rights. I do not believe they exist. I think that like the buff itself, they are an occasionally useful fiction. So this concern for inalienable rights is the whole basis for universalism. Like everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights to to have a same-sex marriage and to explore their trans identity. And this motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies to remake the world in the vision of these inalienable rights. And again, I think these inalienable rights are a fiction. The public and scholarly discourse, right, not even com people, but scholars of liberalism since World War II place enormous emphasis on human rights. I don't believe there are any human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. So human rights have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities state and interstate. They evoke hope, provoke action. Now the whole human rights movement developed out of the utter failure of Marxism, socialism, communism. And so elites, very intelligent people, spend a lot more time thinking about abstract matters than regular people. And the rhetoric of Marxism was tremendously appealing, but the results were so dreary that eventually elites had to put their need for some kind of transcendent experience outside of Marxism because Marxism, communism, socialism just the real world results were jury. So instead, they transferred their emotional allegiance to human rights because they couldn't be debunked. And even if they didn't make any positive difference in the world, at least you could feel super righteous. And it just a concern for human rights just feels good. It just it gives people a way to gain status and to feel that they are good people even if what they're doing makes absolutely no difference in the world. But the whole anthropology upon which this concept rests is false. Now what attracts people to a human rights crusade or to liberalism or communism or socialism is not truth. Right? People don't seize on a political ideology on the basis of truth. Right? Ideology works because it serves human needs for status and belonging. Now, how do people work? We do not operate as lone wolves. We are born into families, communities, extended families, social groups, and societies. And these shape our identity far more than our own free will and use of reason and our own choices. In addition, our own genetics shape us far more than our own reason and choice. Right? We develop strong attachments to people, to groups, and to a particular hero system that we never rationally chose. Right? People take a long time to emerge into adulthood. They need a huge amount of care. We develop these strong attachments before our reason develops. And these attachments rule our lives. We are tribal to our core. Why? Because the best way to survive is to be embedded in the center of the tribe. Look at an animal that lives in the center of the tribe versus an animal that lives on the fringe of the tribe. Which is most likely to live longer, right? When you move to the edge of the tribe, right, your mortality is that much closer and more likely to occur. Right? Reason is about the least important in general the ways that we determine our preferences and we determine what's right and wrong. Instead, we are primarily shaped by our genetics and our imprinting and the incentives that govern our particular group. We take a long time to mature and to be able to make it on our own. And we need years and years of protection and nurturing and care by our families and by our communities. And during that time, we're intensely socialized to a particular way of doing things. So we only begin to develop our critical faculties around age 15 to 18. And they don't particularly sharpen until about age 25. By that time, we are largely set in place. Right? By the time we reach the point where our reasoning skills are developed, right? Our family and our society and our genetics have already shaped us. We are also we're born with these innate sentiments that shape how we think about the world around us. We have very limited choice in formulating our own hero system, our own moral code because what we think is right and wrong comes from our inborn attitudes and our socialization. I believe John Mishimer is absolutely right here. So the entire edifice of dominant elite liberal political theory, liberal journalism, liberal education, liberal psychology, liberal foreign policy, liberal institutional self-standing all rests on a fundamental mistake about what people are. It's not a minor technical error. It is categorical and it produces systematic failure across every domain where this mistake is institutionally operative. And Alan Berger is embodying the great delusion here. Let me stop sharing this right now and invite um Tom and Carly and Tom Podash in to come in and comment on that if if you guys have some thoughts about it. >> So what I like about this is it lines up with uh being in a line. >> So the value of an idea or of a movement usually has nothing to do with truth, right? It's all about the people that you get to hang out with. So the value of being part of this emotional sobriety group has very little to do with the truth of emotional sobriety. Everything to do with the type of people that you get to attune yourself to >> with reality, right? So live this moment as if I chose it means, you know, to not reject the moment, right? It it it's here anyway, so I might as well embrace it. You know, I'm not saying some some moments, you know, need to be changed because they're uncomfortable or dangerous or whatever, but you know, whatever the reality is that that is in front of me is the only one I get. So, what what am I going to do about it? >> Tom, what did you have in mind when you wrote it? >> All right. [clears throat] Tell me the workshop. I'm I'm conf I'm I didn't hear it. How about me for being really on on target? >> What was it? Was it the one we talked about on on in the podcast? >> I'll read it again. >> Okay. >> So, the nutshell wisdom for today is live this moment as if you chose it. >> And you and I said your your humor came in here. You said, "Might as well." Cuz maybe you did. >> And then then you go, "Give yourself permission to doubt. Give yourself permission to disagree. Give yourself permission to decide. I added, "Give yourself permission to be bold and outrageous." And then the last line you had in there is add more of yourself. >> Yes. >> All right. So much BS, right? Be bold and outrageous. It just has absolutely no meaning. Now, words are primarily coalition technologies, right? When we use words, right, we are primarily connecting ourselves to the people who matter to us. Which is why you almost never hear anything true and profound in a conversation. Instead, conversations, people say what is expected of them in that particular situation. >> Yeah, I love that one. It's it's um yeah I mean the first one the first one is is the first part of that is is I think the key the I mean one of the main keys of of emotional sobriety or just personal responsibility is is you know and I'll go back and repeat what you and I have been calling it for a while now which is you know try and really do your best to not be offended by reality you know and it's and it's like and it's it's funny since we've been talking about that is it's I'm I' I've lost count of how many times that I've I've I've realized that I was being you know if I look if I take a moment and pause when I'm when I'm uncomfortable is you know and it's like what Bill says in the in the letter that that >> Now that's a good point right you don't want to be at war with reality right when you make demands on other people you're at war with reality you're not placing yourself in a particular situation you're not sizing up and gauging what that person is uh seeking or needing or what his parameters are. If you start asking more from a friendship than it can deliver, that's the end of the friendship, right? You'll just unnecessarily alienate yourself and people usually won't give you many goes. Uh people will extend one sort of invitation to you for for some kind of opening for for some kind of conversation. You miss that. There's a 50% chance that they'll never try again. If they do try again and then you miss two bids for your attention, right, you're usually sunk. Very few people will then make three bids for your attention unless you're gorgeous or powerful. So we all hunger for approval, for security, for love, for romance. And obviously there are more or less efficient ways of uh getting it. But this idea that the self-sourced security is solid and other source security is fragile is a value judgment dressed up as a fact. Both sources are contingent, right? Your own resources rest on your situation, your health, your nervous system, your memory, your finances. You're not being in pain so that you can think things through. Right? All sorts of things can upset that, right? A man who builds his footing on I can handle anything, right? sits one set back away from disaster, right? Security from people is far less fragile than security from yourself. Because when you put your security on relationships, community, family, friends, belonging as well as your own resources, then you're spreading the weight across many different supports. Right? If your footing rests on several people plus your own capacities, no one single failure is likely to sink you. Right? The self-sufficiency model stacks everything on one pillar and then calls the rest weakness. Right? This is terrible. And all the research runs my way. All the research keeps landing on the same finding across eight decades. The quality of your relationships predicts your health and your contentment better than any other factor including money, fame, willpower. The quality of your attachments will do far more for the quality of your life than anything else. And attachment is all about attaching not just to yourself but primarily to other people. Right? Communal resources are far more important for your well-being than your internal resources. And you're going to get a story coming up from Alan Burgerer that will make this case in the most dramatic fashion. Now, as for the the idea, live this moment as if you chose it, right? that there's some use there, but this could also f you up in incredible ways, right? There are all sorts of things that happen to you that you don't just not choose, but they're against everything that would be aligned with your best interest. And it's not as though what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. No, a lot of things don't kill you and permanently weaken you. at you know when you're when you're in distress if you will look if you will look you will find some some unrealistic expectation. It's not it's not a maybe you might it really >> not true. Someone punches you in the stomach. There's no unrealistic expectation behind that distress. If there is a global financial crash and as a result you are placed in dire circumstances, right? That has nothing necessarily to do with your expectations. Though if you do have unrealistic expectations, that can make it more difficult to to deal with. If uh people you love die through no fault of your own, right? This will place you in distress. If you're a normal healthy person, if you love someone and they die, you should feel distressed. It really is. You know, I don't like I don't like certain things when people just say like it's always this way. I think this one may be one that that I'm with 100%. It's like that because um yeah, because what I have I in clients if I say that to clients sometimes they'll say no, it's not an unrealistic expectation. And what they're doing is absolutely what we've all done which is I was defending the fact that I think the the expectations should be reasonable. >> That's right. you know, and and I mean it sincerely, you know, but >> and your expectations and your moral grammar and your emotional pallet will vary depending on where you are. Right? London wants to know primarily, can you be trusted with responsibility? Paris asks whether you are distinctive. Sydney asks whether you can get things done. Melbourne asks whether you have a cultivated judgment. Tokyo asks whether other people can depend on you. Right? These are the five primary questions from five primary cities. LA is a wide open city compared to San Francisco. Not the personality that thrives in LA is not necessarily going to thrive in San Francisco. The personality that thrives in New York City may not do well in San Francisco or LA. So it it's not all about your own internal resources. You want to match your own talents and gifts with a particular group in a particular location. Uh it's but it's we think in terms of there's some sort of objective truth out there that we we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that that we we should be able to have that expectation. But no, I and I love the part that just that says and and the other thing in in the wording of that first part is not it not not not like it's the cards you've been dealt so deal with them. The it takes >> Okay, so let's say you move to London, right? Some Americans move to London and thrive, right? Other people move to London and they struggle. London has a different moral grammar from LA, New York, San Francisco, Vancouver, and Sydney. Right? London graves legitimacy through proper conduct within institutions rather than through inherited rank. Right? You don't have to arrive inside the establishment, but you must learn how to move within it. Right? The city's heroes build institutions rather than tear them down. So Americans are far more skeptical of their institutions compared to every other country in the industrialized world, right? The cardinal sin in London is appearing desperate, right? Nothing will lower your social standing than obvious striving as opposed to large swaths of Los Angeles. They have no problem with the obvious strivver, right? And there are benefits to the approach in London and there are costs, right? Stewardship becomes a measure of all value. So the city tends to protect its institutions at the expense of truth. Right? You have a great story, a great narrative, right? That's going to fly well in all likelihood in LA. It's not going to do nearly as well in any other major city. >> Takes it another step when it says act as if you have chosen it. You know, it's it's like it just takes it takes the all all of the um you're you're basically in a it's a it's a cognitive exper experiment with pretending you you have no resistance to this stuff. You're just you're just b >> So the quality of ideas will probably do more for your social status and the quality is not in terms of truth but in how they land with people, how they make them feel. Right? that the quality of your ideas and how they make people feel will shape your social status more in Paris than in any other city. Right? The quality of your narrative will probably shape your outcomes more in Los Angeles than in any other city. >> Busy doing it. >> And that's that's a very important nuance that you're talking about. I like that. I like that. That's a very important nuance that you're bringing up >> because it is an experiment. What happens if you if you just act as though that's what you're you are choosing this? What does that mean for you that you're choosing this? >> Well, and the other thing about put framing all of this stuff in in the terms of the language of experiment, it means everything is >> I haven't spent that much time on the east coast, but I was back in the upper west side of New York City for three weeks in August of 1994. I immediately noticed that uh ethnicity, tradition, uh peoplehood, institutions, and where you went to school matter far more on the east coast than on the west coast. Right? People moved to the west coast to get away from family, stifling institutions, stifling ethnic groups. People came here to follow their individual bliss. So if you are at ease with operating within close-knit community and with people who will judge you much more quickly on where you went to school, then you'll do far better on the east coast and in Europe than you will in say Australia or the west coast of America. >> Information you you know if if if I do something and the result is you you you say, "Hey Tommy, I know you were trying something new when you were we were talking the other day. How'd it go?" And I go like, it didn't go anywhere. I totally screwed it up. And so, but in this way with the experimental stuff, it's like, okay, what did you learn from the experiment? >> That's right. >> Because I mean, maybe it's something as simple as that ain't work. That ain't going to work. But usually usually it's more than that. It's more detailed >> that, you know, I kne I I don't have the solution yet, but I know I understand more about how I how I missed it here. So I I like experimentalmindedness stuff. Yeah. I >> think that's I think that's an important >> right. Who your dealer is matters more on the west coast than on the east coast >> attitude to bring into emotional sobriety. >> And I also noticed when you when you talked about you added the the >> So if emotional sobriety means reacting appropriately to the situation that's obviously adaptive. it uh makes sense in an evolutionary perspective, right? That's one of the shortest roads to reality trying to figure out whether some idea makes sense. Does it make evolutionary sense? Is there a reproductive advantage gained by pursuing this or that? And so if you react appropriately within a situation and that is what you call emotional sobriety obviously there is a benefit to that >> the to the thing of the permission to to be outrageous. I thought why don't why didn't I have that? Oh yeah I know I didn't have it. I just I I just assume the the permission to be outrageous. So >> Oh you you take that permission. You live that Tom. You live that. Most of us don't live it like you do. Right. [laughter] >> That's that's going to be your middle name from now on. You know how boxers they give them like Ben Venitas the monster, right? Mexican. That's a guy that's going to fight Saturday. You're gonna be Tom Rutled. >> Outrageous Tom Rutled. >> That's right. >> That's what I need a nickname. >> That's it. >> All right, Carly, what are your thoughts? Yeah, I just thought that when this uh live this moment as you choose it, this this when we talk about like accepting reality as it is is tr trusting life, trusting reality as it is and that on life's terms and that just to ask the question what is life teaching me? What is life giving? >> So when I move from apprentice and student to master, commander and decoder, right? That's with regard to one teaching, one teacher, one one school of thought and at the same time I'll be adding on in other parts of my life an apprenticeship. So I become an apprentice of David Pinsoff. He's a UCLA evolutionary psychologist and I love his blog. It's everything is is the name of the blog and he writes a monthly essay and in April of last year he wrote about advice such as be thankful know you are loved. Do you know you are loved? Pay with hugs and kisses. Try new things. Be happy. Show compassion. Be grateful. Dream big. Right? So the giving of advice is is a noble and selfless act. Right? It's humanity at its finest. David Pinsoff is a tad skeptical. Says here's a list of the problems with the idea that advice is purely about help. Now, I have a particularly strong negative reaction against unsolicited advice. I'm not sure if my negative reaction to unsolicited advice is stronger than average or if I'm just more open and blunt and impatient with regard to it. But, uh there are very few people with whom I would just put up with their unic unsolicited advice. So, main problem with unsolicited advice is that most of it is baseless. Because advice that is one-sizefits all may have absolutely nothing to do with the particular situation that you're in. Right? Be kind to yourself probably good advice for a perfectionist and bad advice for a narcissist. Right? Believe in yourself is good advice if you're talented. It's bad advice if you suck. Right? A lot of advice centers on goals that we don't really have, such as to be happy or express our authentic self or make the world a better place. Right? advice is rarely focused on the real goals that we have. Right? Here's what a self-help section would look like if it was focused on our real goals. You'd find books on Zen and the art of social climbing. Echofriendly 10 steps to ensconcing yourself in a cocoon of ideological conformity and motivated reasoning. The seven habits of highly effective virtue signalers. The lips to butt method. Take control of your life by psychopantically ingratiating yourself with high status people. Own it. Keep rival male sperm out of your mate's vagina. You can do it. How to harness harness the power of moral ambiguity and plausible deniability to rationalize your bad behavior. Eat, pray, confabulate. Now, much of advice is simply impossible to follow. Don't be afraid of failure. Be happy with who you are. Our emotions are not usually voluntary. Right? Advice tends to apply to all moments, but every individual moment is different. Right? Enjoy this moment. Right? What if the moment is 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001? A lot of advice is simple, but the world is complicated. Follow your passion. There are more important things in life than money. What if my passion is cocaine? What if I'm living in dire poverty? We tend to be quite uninterested in the effectiveness of advice. We rarely ask for the track records of how often the advice worked out for people like the situations we are in. Think about the popularity of stoicism. There's actually no evidence that stoicism helps. There's considerable evidence that stoicism harms, but stoicism is incredibly hip and popular. And like most ideas and schools, it has nothing to do with truth and effectiveness and replicability. Most of the time we don't even know what to do with the advice we're giving. We're given live life to the fullest. Keep moving forward. Right? What behaviors are entailed by these slogans? People never give advice like distrust your instincts or ignore what your heart is telling you. But frequently our hearts are foolish and our instincts are stupid. What does it mean to listen to your heart or to trust your instincts? Right? It's just a nicer way of saying do what you're probably going to do anyway. There are more problems with advice. When you give someone advice, you're effectively saying that you are superior to them, that you are more intelligent, you're more in the know, you're more realistic, you're more successful. It's also status theft, right? When you give someone advice, right? Let's say you're driving for Uber and you start giving someone advice about seeking a job, right? You don't really have any standing to give someone advice when you're driving for Uber. Driving for Uber is about the worst thing you can do financially because the risks of damage to to your vehicle. The the rewards are so pathetic, right? Driving for Uber is about the worst job possible. So if you drive for Uber, right? Don't give people advice about what's you know they should do to uh seek new forms of income. All right? Advice usually works in ways akin to a circle jerk, right? It's it's just a way that we all flatter each other. It's a way of rationalizing our own terrible choices, right? You drive for Uber and then you rationalize it by by giving out advice, right? Advice is like grooming, right? Primates groom each other. They remove bits of dirt and to treat us dead skin from the fur, right? And it's something that we do together, right? When we groom, we forge alliances. And group strategies out compete individualist strategies. So if listening to these emotional sobriety videos ingratiates you in a circle, right, helps you build real world connections, any kind of uh group strategy usually will be more successful than your individualist strategy. All right? Grooming is how the world works. I know grooming gets a bad word these days. I'm talking about the non-rapy type of grooming. me the opportunity to learn and what what lessons is life um yeah what lessons is life offering me to learn so that's what I was >> what an important part of emotional sobriety though isn't it is to that that focus about >> right so the value of this program has nothing to do with the truth of the program right you're not going to find any evidence that it replicates it's based on a fundament fundamentally false notion of anthropology that we're primarily individuals and that we can rationally uh choose autonomously strategically choose our truth choose our path in life that we can be uh buffered that we can possess sufficient uh internal resources to deal with whatever comes to us that that's all false but there's valuable stuff in here and it can also connect you to people who might overall be quite good for you >> what am I learning here. What? >> Right, think about this as grooming, right? This is the head primate and then everyone else is grooming him. He hands out the maxims and then people groom him. >> What can help me continue on this path of my growth and development to move forward. I was talking about that with someone earlier today. This movement forward is so important. >> I like I like Carly. I like your use of trust there to to trust that this you trust. What? I don't tell me your exact words, but I know it was about trusting what was happening. >> Well, it was trusting life as it trusting life as it is. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. If he that it's sort of like as if you chose it, to me it's the same it's in the same category. It's like it's like, you know, rather than spend time in that questioning >> that many things sound impressive until you examine them, right? emotional sobriety sounds impressive. Then you examine it and the validity of it just completely falls apart. I've been writing biographies which I just find tremendously exciting. I I get to be the master, the commander, and the decoder, and I find it thrilling to properly situate people. So Harold Bloom was a Yale literary critic, probably the most famous literary critic of of the past 40 years, but much of what he had to say was just absolute BS. So, out of all these fancy theories about literary theory, or out of all the different fancy literary theories, like how do we know if any of them are grounded in reality, right? How do we know they're not just BS? So, how do you tell if there's truth in some fancy theory? Right? So, one way to tell is does the claim survive paraphrase? Right? If you put it in plain words, the claim remains. You might have something if only the music and the ethos and the feeling remains. All you have is decoration. Second, can it be wrong? Is it falsifiable? Right? If it if it cannot fail, it cannot be tested. Third, does it fit one tradition all too well? Right? A law that presents itself as universal that just happens to fit only one tradition maybe not so valuable. Then ask who benefits, right? Bloom's theories raids Bloom in social status. It made the critic uh the creator. It it gave status to people like Harold Bloom, right? The theories served him. That doesn't make it false. means that you should read the theories as a move in a social status war rather than as a description of how poems get written. So there was a physicist Alan Circle who wrote a paper in 1996 of fashionable theoretical literary nonsense submitted it to a respected literary journal and it was published there. Right? You can publish and build careers on absolute nonsense. So literary theory, for example, it works when it helps you see things in a text that you missed before and other careful readers looking at the same text see the same things and keep using the lens. Uh emotional sobriety, right? If it improves the quality of your life, then it works for you. >> Is this is this good or bad or is this is this going to be beneficial to me or not? You're just it's here, so I'm I'm going to trust it. >> Yeah. >> And there's always something you can learn. >> Yeah. And then there's also that flavor, the spirit of curiosity, too. >> Yes. I like that. I I was uh reading this this fun little book called Winnie the Pooh and >> Dowists. >> And I don't know if you've read that before, but it's it's very cute. It's about how how Winnie the Pooh is really a Dowist. I mean >> and and one of the things that that really stands out in that book there. So what you'll find with the Alan Burgerer is he just stacks thinkers right he just invokes summarizes quotes often inaccurately various thinkers and because he brings a list of them for some people that reads is impressive but my father had a good memory and he could just recite scripture and recite Ellen White verses but because someone can cite a whole bunch of things it uh doesn't mean that they're saying anything profound or true right I could just cite five thinkers right now I could quote for you Aris Aristotle and Shelley and Montaigne and Harold Bloom and that says absolutely nothing about whether I am saying anything that is true >> that aligns itself so much with what we're talking about is how much the Dowists the people that are into that philosophy talk about the accepting the true nature of things. That's the phrase they use, the true nature of things. And that everything has a true nature to it. And that when we align ourselves with the true nature of it, then we can have an appropriate and honest, >> right? That's not falsifiable. It's just BS, but it may sound good. It's no foundation in empirical reality >> relationship with reality. >> There's no true essence. >> It's it's kind of an interesting way to say it. It's kind of in line with what you were saying, Carly. right about trusting reality. It's it's true nature. It's >> trusting reality. I mean what except in terms of feedback, right? Trust reality to to give you feedback, but to just uh trust reality that the universe will align with your best interests is silly. >> It's not going to be. It is what it is. I mean, it's maybe not what we want it to be, but boy, it is going to be what it is. That's for darn sure. >> Yeah. In the earlier group, I was talking about how [clears throat] um I want things to be okay, but in the version of my my version of okay, right? I want you to be okay, Alan. Only in the way that suits me. >> I [laughter] want you to Yeah. >> Instead of accepting the the way everything results. >> Well, we're always using qual qualitative language about it, too. That's one of the things that that that is getting to me more the more we do this is, you know, we we in we're trying to we don't well maybe we should think of it as as good instead of bad. It's like the bigger challenge over time and I and I don't think we can do it in our culture at this moment. But can I can I can I observe things describe things without qualitatively des >> Yeah, I completely agree here. It's annoying I find when I'm I'm talking to people who just immediately have to classify everything as good and bad. Why can't we just describe? If we just describe, then I can talk to people proTrump, people are anti-Trump, people of any political, religious or cultural stripe. And when we stay in the world of description, we will not need to enter the world of pamic >> describing them, you know, comparing them >> without evaluating them without evaluating. >> Yeah. Just can I just say what can I just describe what is? >> Yeah. >> Well, you know, see that that's that phenomenology cuz that's what I consider a phenomenological approach to life, right? It's just looking >> phenomenological fancy word word. It means what do I experience? Right? My lived experience is that God expresses himself through Torah and through the Jewish tradition. Right? If you're not an Orthodox Jew, that's probably not your experience. That's my phenomenological experience. I'm not going to argue uh that it's just some blinding obvious universal truth for everyone that they should bow down to. That is my phenomenological internal experience. I encounter God through Torah. >> Looking at the phenomena without putting in a value judgment on it is is it's a challenge because we we learn to put good and bad on things. >> So there are useful concepts here, useful vocabulary. The more sophisticated you can get about how the world works, right? The more sophisticated, more varated your thinking about how the world works from the outside in and how you work from the inside out, right? That that's useful >> so fast in life, don't we? >> Dr. mentor used to give a lecture about he he says, you know, it's really interesting if we put good on one side of a blackboard and bad on the other side. That's when we used to use blackboards. I don't think people many people use those anymore, but >> I still have one. >> You got one? Look at you, man. >> I have one in my office. Yes. [laughter] >> Well, I think they're great. But he used to do that. He says, you know, we could pretty much argue what emotions we would put on the good. >> So, I asked Claude, "How many times has this guy Alan Burgerer, psychologist, recovery expert, how many times has he been married?" And Claude didn't know. And so, I asked Grock, and Grock pulled it up immediately from his own website. He says, "I'm on my fourth marriage." So, in general, I find that Grock and Chat GBT dash out, push out, just the highest amount of slop. And if I were to cancel a couple of AI subscriptions, Grock would be the first one I'd cancel. ChatGBT would be the second one in particular because it's so obscurious. And yet there are still facts and there are still theories and there are still arguments and there's still contributions that Grock makes and the chat GBT makes that no other major AI chatbot makes. So different AI chatbots have different advantages. But yeah, this guy is on his fourth marriage. So his idea that we should be enough, that we should have the intern total resources to handle everything. His life is the very opposite of that, right? He keeps reaching for some external solution >> side and behavior and what behavior we'd put on and emotions we'd put on the bad side and also inanimate objects. He says, you know, milk, where would you put that? Everybody says good, right? Unless you're lactose intolerant, then it would be bad. But most people would say good. Where would you? >> So he is interesting because he he speaks the language of 12 steps because he's lived it and he speaks the clinical language of academic psychology because he trained in it. >> You put heroin on the bad side and he goes through different feelings like happy where would you? >> So early members of AA and other 12step programs held psychiatry and psychology at arms length and you still find that attitude today. Then there are people like Alan Burgerer who synthesized the two just like the early 7th day Adventists held the academy at arms length but then leading Adventist theologians started training at uh secular universities and synthesized the two. >> You put that good sad you know where might where you know and people pretty much will have a consensus. >> So I I found some benefit from his books. He published books such as 12 Stupid Things That Mess Up Recovery, 12 Smart Things to Do When the Booze and Drugs Are Gone, 12 Essential Insights for Emotional Sobriety. He translates complex emotional patterns into recognizable daily behavior. His pros is simple, direct, unscentimental, concrete. So where many therapeutic writers reach for abstraction, Alan Burgerer returns again and again to ordinary concerns, ordinary relationship failures, ordinary emotions such as resentment, expectations, manipulation, self-pity, grandiosity, withdrawal, passive aggression, dependence on outside approval. Right? He has a gift for naming the small emotional maneuvers that keep a man unnecessarily dependent even when he stopped drinking. ice and then he says this is all he says this is all nonsense. He says you can't just describe something as good. It depends on the context of it. So over the past few years Burger has become best known for his work on emotional sobriety. And that comes from a 1958 essay by Bill Wilson in the AI uh grapevine newsletter later known as the next frontier. Bill Wilson says that many sober alcoholics stay emotionally immature after years of abstinence and that emotional sobriety is the next frontier in recovery. And it sounds good and I'm sure some of the ideas and concepts and community can help you. >> Nothing stands separate from its context. Heroin can be an amazing drug for somebody that's in a lot of pain, >> you know, that just got shot or something like that. They need that opiate. Doesn't mean it's a bad thing. >> It's interesting. But why don't we just open up the people to comment tonight, Tom? So this idea of emotional sobriety builds on the thought of the late psychiatrist Murray Bowen who developed family systems therapy and the idea of the differentiation of the self that David Schnock then developed in his work such as passionate marriage. Right? This is the capacity to keep emotionally functioning and intellectually functioning and to hold a coherent sense of self even when other people are not uh doing what you want them to do. So this is an idealization and a holding up of the Buff itself as the ideal way to go. The Buff itself is a fiction, a useful fiction, but it is a fiction because we're all profoundly shaped by the world around us. Reality is porous. >> And then I'll just share my stuff next week. Alan, >> add more self. Yes. [snorts] >> When I am >> add more self. Does that does that make sense to you? Right. Everyone here treats it as some great profound insight. I I'm I'm sure that uh it has some value for some people. I don't see a value in it. And this poor person dressed in pink yet sounds like a man just seems so deeply sad and troubled. >> Really? Her >> now. What I love about these videos and about 12step programs in general is that I find more honesty in them than any other area of life consistently. People are raw. People are real. I I love it. I I respect it. I appreciate it. It just feels so good when people are this honest and raw. I want to go in the woods and die alone. So, not not regular hurt, not just everyday. >> The danger when you have very damaged, very desperate people turning to you is to then impose one framework on them and that what what they need may be quite outside of that framework. I I'm I'm not sure how much benefit this man could further receive from emotional sobriety. I'm going to grant that emotional sobriety may have served him up till now. I suspect that there are other frames that will serve him better. But you know when it's deep adding all I can >> the cut me to the bone hurt right the cuts down to your >> so I would be very interested in your view of in those instances when I I I can't even make myself call someone I trust deeply. >> Yeah. >> Right. So this man, this poor poor man is in agony. And I don't know this man. My feeling for this type of presentation is what would best serve such a person is not an additional serving of self, but an additional serving of connection to family, friends, and community, and possibly some cause greater than himself. So there is some wisdom to this Alen Ber emotional sobriety kick, right? when you see that you've been lying to yourself, right? That is an opportunity for growth and for personal reorganization. So where does his own teaching stop short of that same honesty, right? So in the idealization of the buff itself, right, that is an identity that is a fiction, right? The idea that we become the final arbittors of what's right and wrong for us, that's not how the world works. Our emotional center of gravity must be over our own feet. That is not how reality works, right? Reality is porous. We evolve to track how the people around us value. Our feelings of pride tend to fairly accurately track how much other people value us. Our feelings of shame fairly accurately track how other people have started to devalue us. Conscience, shame, pride. These are social senses. They are evolved mechanisms to help us deal with reality. Shame recognizes that we have a falling reputation. Pride recognizes that we have a rising reputation. Guilt prompts us that we need to repair a bond that is worth keeping. Right? A man who claims to certify right and wrong inside his own head has not reached autonomy. Right? He has forgotten how reality works. He is in war with reality. Right? Alan Ber's program taken at its mortorial edge does not free a man from dependence. He swaps one dependence for another and it it feels like growth, right? When you stop hanging on other people's approval and instead you embrace this court of self-sufficiency that you can just stand on your own two feet. Well, that's not reality. We need other people and we will always be shaped by other people, right? Our conscience evolved to track our reputation within our group. That doesn't mean that is onlogically universally correct. Means that it is appropriate for us and our relations with the people most important to us. >> How do you those moments rescue this concept and and and turn yourself inside out and add more self? That's that's what I want to know. Please. >> Well, I I think you know, look at I've been there in my life and I think everybody in this room has been in that place. I don't think that's um unique in for anybody's experience. And for me that Los Angeles probably is more influenced by 12step culture than any other major city. It has probably more 12step programs and meetings easily available than any other major city. One of the ways of adding more self when I'm in that place is just accepting that right now I'm hurting so bad that I don't want to open myself up to anybody. I'm just wanting to sit with that pain. Maybe even feel sorry for myself for a while or whatever I need to do. I don't pressure myself to be something I'm not. And >> so this is like that uh primate grooming circle where the host Alan Burgerer is the center of attention and the number one man because he is at the top of his particular professional tier, right? He is the older craftsman. He's not the celebrity like Gabbor Mate. He's not a crossover star. He's not the Malibu rehab to Netflix figure, right? He doesn't have a face that sells mass market trade hardbacks at the airport, but he's the man that other counselors read. So he is at the top of his field and he built his status and his fame and his program on fundamentally false premises. >> In many ways that's adding a lot more of myself to the scene. Instead of saying I should be feeling different is a total accepting right now I am so crushed I can't even pick up the phone to reach out. I'll just sit here and cry and feel bad for a while about it. So Burgerer has appointed himself and gotten thousands of people to buy in. But he's the man who finished Bill Wilson's essay on emotional sobriety, right? Bill Wilson named emotional sobriety. He called it the next frontier, but he didn't build on it. So now Alen Ber is stepping into that gap and he is building on what is the next frontier of recovery. It's a strong move because it's a humble one, right? He does not claim to replace Bill Wilson. Doesn't claim to have invented the idea. just aiming to complete an idea that's already out there. So, he gets to borrow the sacred authority of Bill Wilson, the founder of AA and make himself the indispensable heir, the custodian of the unfinished frontier of sobriety. Right? He gets to own a concept he did not coin by becoming the man who built the house on the founders's empty lot. So, he can then turn that custodianship into a franchise. He can brand himself the leading authority on emotional sobriety. He can run podcasts under that name. He can publish books through Hazeldon which is the prestige imprint of the field of recovery. Right? This is where a recovery author goes to be taken seriously. He can host the workshops, the talks. So he's making not just an intellectual but a proprietary bid for ownership. He's taken a shared inheritance phrase that belonged to the whole inheritance to the whole fellowship of AA and 12step programs and he has turned it into a personal estate with his name on the deed. Now, what my experience has been is when I've, you know, like when I went through this whole thing with with my ex-wife and about 3 years ago now, if you go back and even watch some of the um you know, the the the um our you know, workshops on Thursday night, I would show up and I I would end up crying in these workshops because I could not not cry. I was in that much pain and there were >> so Alan Burgerer built a one-man brand around the surrender of ego and self-will. Alen Burger monetizes a teaching about giving the self away. Calls himself essentially the leading authority on a discipline emotional sobriety whose first lesson is that you are not an authority over anything. Right? None of this makes him a fraud. He's doing some valuable work. Right? His standing that situate him correctly rests on a quiet trade. Right? Is the turning of humility into rank and money and status. Turning surrender into a vocation of turning a founder stray phrase into an estate. Right? He is the elder who tells you to lay yourself down from a stage with his name on it. times during the day where I was feeling that way and I did and >> I don't care how much money he makes. I don't begrudge him ascent. I don't care how successful and high in status he rises. My concern is accurately situating him and accurately assessing the truth and consequences of his work. >> Did not want to reach out to anyone. I just needed to lay in bed and just sobb for a while. Now where it got a little scary for me was when I first experienced that I was thinking of suicide right I was thinking I don't know if I can go and this is where I had to add more self and I'll tell you what happened to me Paula with that so I was laying in bed and this is right after she came to me after we had been moved out to Pennsylvania for about a year and a half and she said I want a divorce and I was blindsided completely and >> so this was his third marriage and I I believed he moved to Pennsylvania away from his friends community. Did he have any family friends community in Pennsylvania? Like what extreme steps did he go for romantic love? It seems like he's putting way too much weight and dependence on romantic love. His life is just the very opposite of his teaching with regard to emotional sobriety, which I do not begrudge him, right? He likely needs not just is using emotional sobriety for status and fame and income, but he likely needs the fiction of emotional sobriety to keep himself going. We all often need to believe in various fictions. And I don't begrudge him that. >> And I was going, I moved out to Pennsylvania. What am I doing here? I don't want to be here. You know, I'm at that point I'm 71. I'm going to be starting my life all over. Are you kidding me? You know, I went into that real heavy ne >> his real heavy negative feeling. I would warrant I would posit just I don't know him personally just on the basis of what he says is how painful it is to braid himself for the for making a stupid decision of isolating himself putting too much weight on a relationship than it could handle and looking for some kind of external validation in in romantic love that it's not designed or equipped to give. And then instead of hating himself for making a stupid decision, right, feeling like, oh, maybe maybe this other person is evil and then going, oh, I can't I can't hold that. So there's all this rage and it's got to go somewhere. So it comes up back at himself and then he does not have the internal resources to handle it because his own teaching does not hold up here. >> Negative spiral. And thank God that we I had not found the keys to my gun safe yet because had that been available, I don't know what would what the outcome would have been that night, but I couldn't. You know, m >> much of what separates the living from the dead is contingent, is luck. Much of what separates the successful from the unsuccessful is luck. Much of what separates the happy from the unhappy is luck. Much of what separates buried with kids from the bachelor is luck. >> Maybe that was God a shot or whatever. But I'm laying upstairs and it was really This is so interesting to me. I couldn't pull myself out of that one. I didn't reach out at that moment to anywhere. I did. There are all sorts of problems where you're not going to likely to be able to pull yourself out of and you shouldn't expect yourself to pull out of. And if you have more resources than your own internal resources, such as good relations with family and friends and community, right, you're on much sherer ground than if you're just depending on yourself to pull yourself out of everything that happens, right? I about once a year over the past 40 years until about 2018, my back would go out on me. When my back would go out on me, I would be unable to raise myself up. And we all will enter periods of absolute dependency. And if you have roommates, family, friends, connections, neighbors, people who who care, right, that is a much firm ground than relying on yourself. My poor uncle, Val, my dad's brother, he fell out of bed when he was old and alone. He was wrapped in his his sheets and blankets and he couldn't get out and he was there for three days until someone found him. And if you didn't show up for for three days, two days, one day, would anyone go looking for you to make sure you're okay? >> Start doing it the next day. But I'm upstairs really despondent in a very dark place. And it never happened before when I slept upstairs, which was Mattiey's room. So Maddie was 10 at that time. She was sleeping downstairs with Jess that night. And Cece, who was so this was 3 years ago, Cece was like five. Paula, she came upstairs and slept next to me. Never had done that before. And while I'm sitting there thinking of taking my life, this little girl crawls in bed next to me and I look at her and all of a sudden I added more self. Not because that >> he didn't add well maybe he added more salt. I think the the true part of the story is that he needed other people. For some people it's a dog, but ideally it'll be another person who cares and values you because you add value to their life. >> That I had it available. But when I looked at her, I said, I cannot leave her a legacy of me committing suicide. >> And at that moment, I decided I'm going to have to really find a way through this thing. And I said, you know, I've done it before. I think it's in me. It's going to take a lot more work being who I am now in this age, but you know, I'm going to put it out there and the next day I >> What a strange lesson to take from that, right? Oh, I just need to add more self when my own internal resources left me on the brink of suicide and it's the presence of a 5-year-old girl in my bed who saves me. I would think it would a recognition that reality is porous and I've been gaining status and fame and income pushing out into the world a fiction that is often going to be dangerous and do more harm than good that we are primarily individuals and that we construct a Buffett identity. >> Started reaching out and talking to people about what was going on. Reached out to the guy next door and I said, "If I find the key, can I give you my gun? He's a cop." He said, "Of course." you know, I don't want you to hurt yourself. I mean, >> so he preaches the Buffett identity, but his life exemplifies the poorest nature of reality. So, in the Buffett identity, what's most important about us is inside of us. Our own ability to decide right and wrong, our own ability to wield our reason, our own ability to strategically, autonomously plot our path through life. Right? That is the fiction of the Buffett identity. reality is that we respond as we are programmed to respond by incentives, by socialization, by our genetics, and that we are profoundly affected and swamped often by what's going on around us. >> And I really started to mobilize myself. But that took Cece walking upstairs. You met Cece, right? And and what a little joy she is. So that's how that happened for me. But in other times and there's been other dark times when I've just you know ex >> I am struck how there are some two three four five year olds who when I see them anyway they seem to primarily embody joy. I mean what a a beautiful quality to ha have a child like that in your life >> accepted that this is the best I can do at this moment and that's okay that's going to be good enough because I won't stay here if I if if I let let myself feel fully I will move to what's next and I have faith in that there's a reason to have faith in that right feeling fully probably serve some people some of the time doesn't serve other people uh other times. I mean, Alen Burger did not have the resources to deal with what happened. He needed other people, right? And his slogans and his maxims, right, they're just not going to cut it most of the time nearly as well as just simply having good relations with your family. >> So maybe that's adding more self, too. the faith that I have that there's always a next. Do you have a global a global latitude [laughter] to match this? >> So Alan Burgerer and other people like like my father and all sorts of preachers and teachers and gurus, right? They tend to preach loudest the thing that they most need and least have, right? The sealed off self, the self-sufficient self, right, is less a product he sells. It's a fiction that he needs to keep talking himself into. The doctrine may well be his defense much more than his particular con. >> Yes. If you stay in what is now and fully it you will move to next. >> And Bob says that spent the weekend with women. One blonde was good-looking, but she'd get blackout drunk. I do not like being around drunk people. I don't drink. I don't like being around drunks. >> That's the best thing I can say. If you stay fully with what is now, >> right? I I had a a friendly acquaintance for for years and years. And I did not allow myself to get close to this person because they just struck me as an alcoholic and they were just so frequently drunk. And and when the person's sobered up, right, then it's like, okay, I I'm willing to admit this person into my life in some capacity. >> It will move to what is next automatically. You won't even have to push yourself. You will flow to what's next cuz that's how we're wired. We are just wired. >> The idea if you just feel and then you'll flow to what's next. There's something to that. For example, when I receive particularly painful news, usually the first thing I like and need to do is to lie down on my own. Not call someone, just lie down on my own. Yeah. Let it kind of flow through me. And then I only get up when I want to. And sometimes I'll be 10 minutes, sometimes that'll be two hours. Yeah. That that's my process. It kind of resembles Allen's. But I need to have those people that I call when I'm ready to call or or meet up with to get things going >> to move to that if we fully experience what we need to experience right now. >> Yeah. The phrase that came up. >> There's a lot of the woman in me because I I find a lot of value in in either a good cry or getting close to that good cry. just just feeling the the humiliation and the sadness and the loss and just sitting with it and absorbing it for for a while before I I share it. >> And this is what um Paula put in the chat in the last group which was, you know, stay connected during trouble, right? Um and and and for me that >> now you have to use great discretion who you confide in because if you confide certain things with with uh even friends the end result may well be deletterious for your welfare. You may well lower yourself in the eyes of your friends who then lower you in the eyes of the community. And you may want to reserve your most charged revelations to people who either possess legal privilege such as a therapist or those rare persons who you trust to be discreet. >> That means like not necessarily like feeling better, but just being present in the trouble that's going on. And you know >> sometimes Tom what that might mean for me at times like I don't want to feel this right now. I hate what I'm feeling. See that might be what's present for me right now and I need to give word to that. >> It's >> I was once so distressed and humiliated by a setback that I didn't watch live Michigan's national college football championship game. I mean that's how low I was feeling. >> It's honest. >> Yes. I've got to declare what the truth is. I guess that would be it. Paula, maybe that is is declare my truth at this moment. And and just understand that that will move if I can be fully in that truth. That's the paradoxical theory of change that we talk about all the time. If I fully own what's going on right now, I will move to something different. >> I can do that. >> Oh, I know you are. You're you are much you are very good at this by the way is what I would say to you right now. I've seen you do it and I I >> I had a revelation yesterday right around Los Angeles yesterday there were hundreds of young men young boys right 8 10 12 14 year old boys orthodox boys who had one overwhelming preoccupation and that was getting the score of the champion league soccer final between PSG out of Paris and Arsenal which is an English Premier League soccer club with long ties to the Jewish community. And so in Orthodox Judaism, you're not allowed to scroll on your phone on Shabbat, but you you can ask the Gentile security guard for an update on the score. So I'm used to boys asking for the results of the Dodger game or the Laker game, but now there were dozens of boys around Los Angeles yesterday. And so probably over a thousand Orthodox Jewish boys in the United States yesterday during the Shabbat Sabbath morning services whose primary preoccupation was getting the score of the Champion League final. The Premier League and and European soccer has swept into American life. And I I don't think this was that way 10 years ago. Certainly not 20 or 30 years ago, right? You used to turn to the shabas to light the stove, to flip a switch, right? But now you turn to him to get the soccer score, right? That's new. Now, it's not surprising that a 12-year-old boy's hierarchy of needs runs to the Champions League final ahead of of praying the Amida, right? Their grandfathers cared about equally worldly things at their age, such as a cricket match or a horse race or a fight on the radio. So this is not some kind of spiritual decline in the generation. This is a permanent condition of 12-year-old boys. And Orthodox Judaism has the ability to absorb that energy rather than to crush it to to deal with the reality of human nature. So normally people don't embrace uh sports that they weren't raised in. But uh the Champions League has really blown into American cultural life in a way that was just kind would be unfathomable 30 years ago. It's become a fixture of American life. Right. In the early 1990s, English football sat at the margin of American attention. Now it often sits at the center even in Orthodox Judaism. And it's not that Americans woke up one day with a fresh appetite for soccer, right? Love for soccer in the United States has been socially constructed. It comes from a convergence of several forces because the reality is we are poorest. We're affected by the world around us. Right? Premier League was born in 1992. We had a transformation in global broadcasting. And then NBC in 2013 acquired the league's American rights and approached the game with a seriousness that no other American broadcaster had held. And it fit because the Premier League games would occur early, usually on Sunday morning or Saturday morning. They didn't preempt from American sports. So millions of Americans began getting up early to watch Arsenal and Liverpool and Chelsea and Premier League soccer and then they that would flow right into watching the NFL or a college game or the basketball game, the NBA or the Major League Baseball. So millions of Americans have become a participant in a sport that is global, right? They are part of a feeling that crosses borders, right? That which used to be foreign to millions of Americans now is intense. And so part of the reason is NBC. Uh part of the reason is a change in elite American culture looking much more outward and global. Then there's a change in American capital. Many of the premier English football clubs such as Arsenal and Liverpool and Manchester United and Chelsea are owned by Americans who then imported the habits of American sports franchises into English football. We have summer tours of the Premier League clubs in the United States. And we have sports media such as the Athletic taking Premier League very seriously. And probably the number one reason for the growth of Premier League is the FIFA video game franchise. So millions of kids play FIFA, EA Sports FC. So reality is porous. We are profoundly shaped by what's going on around us. >> Yeah, I applaud it because I think you go right into it. Well, thank you. I just the the phrase adding more self is scary and I I I I wanted to understand it because in those moments I I withdraw and there's you know there's I'm I'm not adding myself to anything because I you know in those moments I'm not useful and if useful if you're saying that the utility of this concept is to be present okay then that's fair enough. >> That's it. There you go. That's a nice nice simplification. Thank you. >> Yeah. Thank you, Paul. >> That's it. Because >> the uh National Football League is much more central to Australian life than it was. Now, it's still it doesn't outrank say the top four Australian sports. It's not more important to Australians than cricket, Aussie rules football, rugby league, rugby union or soccer or basketball. But it's kind of may maybe it's number five, particularly with the Taylor Swift. the Jason Kelsey thing. So that uh plenty of uh Taylor Swift fans in Australia and around the world are now paying attention to the NFL >> because what you are adding self to that instead of putting pressure to be something else. See, where I really mess myself up is as soon as I start to say I should be different than I am. That's where trouble is really going to come into big time for me. >> It's a great question. Thank you. >> Yeah. Um, I wanted to recognize Vir, you had your hand up earlier. Do you still want to share? >> Sure, I'll take a share. Um, yeah. So, I really loved kind of like everything we kind of talked over and live this moment as you choose it. And I love V and how you added like add more self to like the moment. And and I have to say like like emotional sobriety has really like saved my ass so much. Um, especially like in in in ways that I don't typically like show up for myself. Um, I I'm currently like doing like a very regimented bodybuilding protocol and I I've struggled with like eating disorders and stuff like that and and I'm in recovery for it. Uh but this week like I just I had to I did not want to recognize that my protocol was just too much for me like like it's wearing down my mental health like and and I just get to this place where I make up the story of like where I'm going to get and if I stop like I'm not going to get there and and I get so just angry and beating at myself and afraid that like my coach is going to be mad at me and all that and and I love when you said like adding more self to me like it's almost like telling on myself like like being honest with another human, my sponsor most of the time and like just putting it out there and like trusting that higher power is going to give me like an answer to find like relief when I'm really really like not liking my reality and I'm kind of like spun out in the story. And um yeah, and this week it just really like owning that like I'm not doing so well me like mental like health-wise and having to take a step back like that was like super hard to do and like tell like not only that but voice that to my coach and be like hey I can't do this >> and um I've had a really hard time like not just with coaches but like relationships being able to voice what I need. And um I have to say like implementing like emotional sobriety like principles like has really helped me grow um into recognizing like who I am and what I need. And um yeah, it's just it's really beautiful like just the things I never recognized that I actually needed. And um especially like just being I mean I spent so much time being just being being sober like raw dogging it like all the time and just pretending uh because I come from a very religious background where like that was just the normal for me like you know you pretend you're good you're you're a good girl and all that and >> um and it got really tiring and I have to say like I think it's been like I don't know maybe a year and a half since I started practicing emotions right and getting really curious about that and um I'm just surprised all the time. >> So people come with incredible levels of honesty and vulnerability and uh desperation th those two shares just uh I would be tender and respectful. Bob says I was asked yesterday what team I cheered for in the Champions League final by several people. Well, most people were surprised when I replied, "I didn't know the Champions League final was ongoing." Bro, people made all these bids for connection with you and you let them down because you refused to participate in a community of feeling and intensity that was there for you and you ignored it. Right. I'm a Liverpoolian, right? I I I'm a I'm a supporter of Liverpool and that comes with prices and it comes with benefits, but at the end of the day, right, I will never walk alone. Right? When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high and don't be afraid of the dark. At the end of a storm, there's a golden sky in the sweet silver song of a lock. Right? Reality is porous. And when you're a Liverpool supporter, you'll never walk alone. You can walk on through the wind. You can walk on through the rain. You can walk on though your dreams be tossed and blown. Wherever you are in the world, you can find community. People who will care about you. Walk on. I say, walk on with hope in your heart. and you'll never walk alone when you support Liverpool. So, let's learn how to be intimate with ourselves. >> Yeah. And you know that programs and what I was just thinking about is about 3 weeks ago, I had a total temper tantrum like a 14-year-old with my mother. And um that's why I continue to try to do the work is you know a lot of what was said in there is >> okay welcome to this grooming circle and Bob asked shouldn't we strive to be better than we are well sometimes striving works and sometimes it is self-destructive sometimes straining works sometimes it's self-destructive that's why advice is usually BS because it depends on the person and depends on the situation there is no universal good that comes out of striving and straining You know, I still have these unreasonable expectations of how things should be, how I think they should be, how I think others should act and show up. And when I'm in that mode, I'm, you know, emotionally unhealthy and not emotionally sober. >> Um, I don't think about drinking anymore. I don't I don't, you know, that's been removed, but my thinking is definitely still the problem. And sometimes I have I act out on it and I really did a a few weeks ago and um and so that's what made me think of it is the humility that it brought me to. >> Yeah, that's cool. What was it Casey? Can do you mind sharing with us what was this specific thing that >> Bob you are missing out on so many opportunities for human connection by denying that side of yourself that wants to passionately support a football club. When I get together with my fellow Liverpoolians, we just have the best time. We go wilding. Like we we just go around, we beat people up, we burn buildings down, we just set cities on fire. And it is such an amazing feeling, bro. Like, get in touch with your inner soccer hooligan and find a community that allows you to express that authentic side of yourself. Unless you're some kind of communist, a homosexual. >> You expected of her that she didn't do or how she >> Yeah. I expect her to be somebody that she's not and to show up um how I want her to show up instead of just exactly who she is. >> Yeah. >> Instead of just accepting It's really my lack of acceptance >> um for life on life's terms is what it is. And I let it I let it take I handed my serenity >> on a silver platter to her. >> Yeah. you know, and she didn't even ask for it. I just had a >> like emotional relapse. >> Yeah. Well, that's what it is. Well, it's we you could think of it this way. The way I think of it is a little different. I think of it as that see what this brought to your awareness is there are some things you wanted from her that you've never received. And there's a part of you that's still hoping that she's going to finally show up like you've wanted her to. And it's hard to let go of that stuff when it's so deeply right rooted in our soul and in our experience with that person in our life. So when I see these things show up, I I don't think of it as a relapsy. I think of it as an opportunity for you. So, a nutshell of emotional sobriety is intimacy with yourself, which sounds good, but I don't know about you, when I compare the joys and thrills and spills of intimacy with myself as compared to intimacy with somebody else, I much prefer when another person is in the mix. >> You to really start to look at what you wanted that you didn't get early on from her and to start deal with that cuz it's obviously still painful for you. And see, that's the thing about emotional sobriety. It's not that we reject, and I hope I'm not confusing people with this. It's not about rejecting the feelings we have. It's being able to embrace them and understand what they're telling us about what we need to do. >> Yeah. And you know what you just said, I feel I feel like the one of the lessons I learned from this is that those feelings and my experience are in this in in my my trauma or whatever you want to call it of the past, they are they it lives in the cells of my body. It lives in me and I think that it's going to be gone and it's not. And so it's not it goes back to when these things crop up, not if they crop up. It's when they do. they when they do and see when they do it's just telling you look some more attention needs to be given to addressing some of that pain and some of the disappointment we had you know I I I really believe this this guy Dr. Alexander Loan who was >> so after PSG won the Champions League final yesterday, there was mass looting and burning and destruction in Paris. Quite different from 1998 when France won the World Cup. And by the way, the quality of soccer according to many experts is higher in Champions League than e even the World Cup because in Champions League you have players who have been disciplined and integrated into a particular system and so the quality of the soccer surpasses that of the World Cup where you have national teams that have usually only trained together for a few weeks. Now probably the number one reason that uh football was once a unifying national celebration in France and now is an opportunity for rioting and destruction is because of mass immigration of many socially uh destructive high crime rate groups. So the native French have turned on mass toward rugby. So the old saw is that uh soccer is a gentleman's game played by ruffians and rugby is a ruffian's game played by a gentleman and now the people who are the most intense fans of soccer club in France uh tend to be immigrants is the father of bioenergetics which is a body of work right it's it's an emotional release therapy right it's helping people um free up their armoring so that they can experience feelings that they didn't want to experience. That's what it's called, bioenergetics. >> Yeah. One of the more frustrating parts of public life is uh dealing with people who don't use headphones. You you ride the bus or the train and people are just blasting their their phones instead of putting on headphones probably because they're not intelligent enough to figure out how to use Bluetooth. So Bob says, "When I saw Korean train conductors reprimanding people having too much volume on their headsets, not their phone, right? Headset volume. I wonder why I have to suffer from headphone dodges in public." And Bob also notes that there's much more intense communal feelings about English Premier League soccer, which is consistently the highest quality soccer in the world now in Norway. that it's at least as intense as the uh allegiance given to Norwegian soccer clubs. I I would think that we live in a more globalized world and you can have a top quality product of English Premier League. Why would you not primarily pay attention to that? >> And he's he's brilliant therapist. I mean brilliant. One of the things he said about trauma is that trauma leaves us um when we have a trauma that we experience as a threat to our emotional and physical safety, you know, as well as our self-acceptance, he says we will imagine a future that reverses the experience of the past because we're trying to heal it. And so that's what I mean when it come >> that was the theory of uh the late psychiatrist John Money who developed this idea of love maps that we develop a trajectory of erotic attraction that undoes the most intense trauma that we suffered as children >> comes up. It's just that there was this hope in you that at some point in time she would change. she would finally become what you wanted her to be. And that's understandable. That was way one way you got through your childhood is having that hope because if you take that away, that's why so many kids today are suicidal. They don't have a hope that the future's going to be different. It's pretty sad. >> Yeah. >> Thank God we had that, you know. >> Yeah. >> Thank God. Thank you, Casey. >> Yeah. Thank you. This is or these are the staff of the Central Nebraska Council on Alcoholism and Addiction. Next year, the council will be in existence for 60 years. They've done such some amazing work. This is, I think, the fourth time that I presented for them. Um, now this time, this visit was very, very special for me because I got a call. Connie has the red sweater on. She's the executive director. I got a call from Connie and said, "Look, the local AA." >> So, if you have no one, if you have no community, a 12step program may serve you better than anything else. group wanted to know if before you do your workshop on on today is Thursday. Before you do your workshop on Thursday, would you be willing on Wednesday night to come out and share about emotional sobriety at this AA meeting that they want to have? That's a special meeting to to meet you and talk about emotional sobriety. And I said, "Of course I would." So they put together this meeting and as they were introducing me to give my talk yesterday, they told me what happened about two and a half years ago. This fellow by the name of Chuck read 12 essential insights. He had 28 years of recovery and he said, "Oh my goodness, this is what's been missing in my recovery. We have to start. >> So the value of Alenburgger's teaching and Alenburgger's books and Alenburgger's programs does not lie in their truth, right? The value lies in does it enable you to build bonds with other people who are good for you? >> Some emotional sobriety AA meetings. So they start at one in Grand Island. They start at one in Kernney. There's three or four meetings either in exist. Much of the value of 12step programs has nothing to do with the onlogical truth or philosophy or the replicability of the programs. That the value lies in the ability of people to develop groups and to form bonds and to be honest with each other and to learn from each other's stories. >> Are coming into existence in this area and they are jazzed about what they're learning about emotional sobriety. So they invited me to come and speak at this meeting. There was over a hundred people at this meeting and the women's AA meeting that meets on Thursday night had a vote, a group consciousness and they were willing to give up the space for this meeting. I was so touched to see the excitement and to see these oldtimers getting a hold of this information and really using it to enhance their experience. No, if an idea gets you excited and improves the quality of your relationships with other people or brings new people into your life, then the benefits of that idea have nothing to do with whether it is true >> in recovery. And I ask the question I typically ask when I speak at a meeting. How many of you realize >> right the the power and the point of a political platform or a political philosophy is not whether or not it's true. It is does it enable a coalition that can then seize the coercive powers of government. Right? The the point of conservatism, the point of right-wing talk radio is not in sharing truth. It is in forming a coalition that is sufficient to seize power. What you want is for your group to hold the coercive powers of government. You don't want the opposition to hold that power over you. One thing that I love about uh Trump's $ 1.8 billion slush fund is that it lays bare the reality of politics, right? Serving one side and using the power of government to serve one side as against the enemy. >> That the goal for working the steps is the achievement of emotional sobriety. Not one person in that room raised their hand out of a hundred people. It's the best kept secret in our program that this program that we're in and if we're working >> now, as someone who's grown increasingly skeptical about emotional sobriety, I'd say that's the best kept secret because one, it is not based on truth and two, it's not going to work for most people. >> This 12step program is to achieve emotional sobriety. And hopefully those of you that are coming here and being participating in our workshop, you're learning a lot about it. So >> the ironic thing is that the teaching of emotional sobriety is all about developing a buffet identity, but the practice of promoting emotional sobriety creates porous identity. The theory is the opposite of what happens when you practice. >> Tonight it's emotional sobriety nutshell wisdom live from Grand Island, Nebraska. Emotional sobriety is about developing an intimacy with ourselves. That's our nutshell wisdom for the night. Emotional sobriety is about developing an intimacy with our >> So I think that's good, right? Developing intimacy with yourself. And let me just speak for myself. The best, easiest, most effective way that I have to develop this kind of intimacy with myself is to consistently act with regard to the people who are most important to me in a way that strengthens those relations. Right? If I build my bonds with my family, friends, and community, then it's much easier for me to be intimate with myself. If I'm burning bridges with other people, if I'm letting other people down, if I'm filled with shame and guilt and remorse due to my interactions with others, that destroys my ability to be intimate with myself. So, what I am seeking in this regard is self-respect. Self-respect that comes from acting in an upright way with those who are most important to messelves. Well, let's talk more about that. The effect and functioning of the yes no process is the essence of healthy responsiveness. It is the hallmark of the intimate self. So I just turned 60 on Thursday and one of the great things about growing older is that many decisions can now be made rapidly. I I don't have to agonize over them. I can just immediately tell whether or not I should say no, should say yes, should stay open, right? All sorts of things that were murky and unclear become increasingly clear as the years go by. So maybe I'm developing this yes no process. Maybe I'm developing the essence of healthy responsibness. Maybe I'm developing the the hallmark of the intimate self. You see, when you have intimacy with yourself, you pay attention to what you want. The best way to have intimacy with yourself is to act in a respectable fashion with those most important to you. If you conduct yourself in an upright manner with those most important to you, you will feel good about yourself and you will feel pride because that pride will accurately measure how much other people value you. If other people don't value you, right, you're not going to feel very good. And why would you want to have intimacy with someone who sucks? You don't. >> And who you are and what you're experiencing, >> right? You donate to your church, to your synagogue. You volunteer for your community. You keep your side of the street clean. When you go out in public, you dress well and act appropriately. You contribute to the lives of others. You give of yourself to others in an appropriate moderate way that provides value to other people. You will walk around strut around with pride because other people will value you. And defining yourself has to do with being able to say yes to things you really want to say yes to and saying no to things you don't. So, I don't usually hang out long in boring conversations because I'd rather be on my own reading a book. But I know I have a self-destructive tendency to towards too much isolation. And two, I now know at age 60 that you can't really optimize human relations in the way that you can optimize all sorts of solitary routines. So I choose the persons and communities that are of value to me and I increase the amount of boringness that I'm willing to put up with in those interactions so that I can then be open and in place to receive the gold. So I I will endure certain boring situations because they they increase the opportunity to really get to know people who I respect and value and who in turn respect and value me and who will go visit me in the hospital if I have a stroke or a heart attack or a broken leg. >> We talked about being right the author of our own story of our own narrative and how many times >> we are not the author of our own story. This could be a useful fiction, but we are primarily the product of our genes and our environment. Our scope for free will is rather limited. >> Many of us are minor characters in our story rather than main characters. If you are not saying yes, >> if you live a life of duty to your family, let's say you're the typical Orthodox Jewish man with five kids and a 50hour a week plus job, right? You will not be doing the things that you find most pleasurable and you most want to do most of the time. Instead, you'll be living a life overwhelmingly of dedication to others. And most people living such a life find it incredibly rewarding. Right? I see the Orthodox Jewish men in my life who give of themselves to other people and to their family in a way that seems foreign to me. Right? I need lots of time to read my books and to write my essays and to do my live streams. And uh I I would not give of myself nearly as much as these men do. But these men are much more successful and probably have a much firmer ground for happiness than I do. when you want to say yes or if you're not saying no when you want to say no you are not the main character in your story you're letting shoulds expectations >> so burger is presenting the buff itself who is the author of his own code of morality and his own code of responsibility so this is the classic liberal Buffett enlightened perspective the most important thing is what's inside a person and that their highest duty is to follow their bliss as opposed to the traditional tribal, national, right-wing perspective, which is the most important things are outside of you. Moral codes, standards, obligations, and your primary duty is to live up to these outside standards. >> The need to be loved and pleased. Compromise who you are. So saying no is absolutely essential if we are to be intimate, if we are to be on intimate terms with ourselves. Yeah. Saying no to anything that will lower yourself in the eyes of those you most value and love, right? Don't do anything unnecessarily to damage those relations unless you're embarked on a work of particular genius such as my biographies of people like Harold Bloom. Right? The these works will echo in history. Right? I can take some risks for them >> because it's the way that I protect myself in a situation. It's the way I don't let myself do something that's not good for me that's not healthy for me. That comp >> the greatest protection is to be embedded in a family, a friend, a tribe, a church, a synagogue, a community, right? that is good for you, that is aligned with you, that uh is is is suited to you and that you you flourish within. All right, you'll be much more protected with that sort of communal group strategy than all this emotional sobriety buff itself nonsense. >> Compromises my integrity. any act that compromise. >> Integrity should primarily be about loyalty to external standards shared by those you most value. >> Is your integrity is an act of self-hate. It's not good. It's toxic for you. It destroys you in your spirit. When I refuse to say yes, I lose self-initiating behavior I need in order to provide myself with emotional nourishment. Saying yes, right, Kie here is much more thoughtful and profound >> emotional sobriety. So, it's up to you two to discuss what I've shared tonight. You want to kick us off, Carly, and then Tom will go. >> Sure. I have a lot to say about this. >> Do it. [sighs and gasps] Um, so this yes versus no, I mean, okay, a couple things. One is that, you know, the yes and no was very much um conditioned when we were so young, right? So we learned how to say yes to get our needs met. How to say we or or feared to say no in the possibility of getting in trouble, getting yelled at, getting abused, getting um love withdrawn from us. So that yes, no is so deeply integrated and um uh and tangled in our nervous system that it can be really really confusing. And I've said before like we're learning and unlearning simultaneously as we're doing this work. >> True. >> Um and I do think and I I I think for as a woman um in on this panel I think it it there's like this different layer that we're taught to always we're taught more to say yes to be accommodating to be warm to be giving. And so then we actually adopt this kind of strategy as a is like this is who we're supposed to be and who we are. And then when we say no, then there there can often be consequences. It can be consequences in the family. There can be consequences in the workplace. There can be consequences with our children. And so I think a lot of times we our hands can get tied. And then when we try to do something different there's that state of anxiety or terror like what is going to happen? Um and for those of us who um you know who need to who have this desire to be loved or need to be loved I mean this is survival. This isn't even conscious. This is happening in our nervous system and we're responding in a way that like if I don't get the love that I could literally die. I could literally be cut off from the group that you know it activates the amig amydala. It activates the fightlight freeze fawn response. I mean, when we're talking about saying yes or no or being intimate with ourselves, we are talking about something that can really like derail us and put us in um in quite a like an inner crisis in some ways because the threat is so significant. So I think um you know that's one thing. So notice how she is describing the power of the world and how it presses on us which I think is a more accurate read of reality than Alan Ber's buffered identity right she is describing the reality of porousness >> thing that I always want to be sensitive about is that like we you know when we're in a clear state like most of us probably are right now or when our executive functioning is on it's like Yes, this all makes great perfect sense. But when we get hijacked or when there's something at >> right, you are given empirical reason to believe that you are no longer valued as highly by those around you. You feel pushed to the periphery of the tribe, right? You will naturally uh react with tremendous fear and you will not be in a clear state because of the reality of how much other people press on us. mistake, we can lose that executive functioning or we can lose the capacity to say yes or no. And so then that's always like a question that I'm asking. So how do we integrate that? How do we be with the terror of how do we just be with the terror? How do be with how do we be with the anxiety? How do we be with the uh the rejection? How do we hold on to ourselves? And this is just like it's ongoing and it doesn't happen overnight and it's take it happens in very small incremental steps and it's uncomfortable. But I will say that I that I think that every time we can hold on to ourselves every time that we can get shaky and stand in that shakiness, it builds our capacity to do it the next time. And we it's like we're always like, you know, taking a step, checking it out, being able to to feel it, and then doing it again and again and again. So, um, >> see what what what let me just respond to that because >> there there's a few ways that that I think are important to to look at that. >> See what you're describing. So you'll notice Allan wants to return the conversation to his framework and to judge everything according to his Buffett identity framework >> is a very good description of what I would call a stuckness. >> Yeah. >> See that what you just described is someone whose development has been stuck. So when our development is stuck, our consciousness looks at the world in a certain way. Like if you've seen me do those PGE videos of those children from 2 to 7 that their consciousness, their level of cognitive development determines what they see and how they interpret it. And see this is the important thing because when you start to challenge all those ideas that you just talked about like what your the prescriptive roles are of being a woman, you're supposed to say yes to life. Some people say that's biological because you say yes to a child in your body, right? So some people thought that that's biologically determined. It may be it may be socially determined. It may be an interaction of both. I don't know the answer to that. But I do know the idea that that's how I'm supposed to be is a concept that we swallow a hole. So Burgerer is preaching we should uh need other people as little as possible and that is simply not the reality of life. We will always profoundly need other people and be vulnerable to them. Right? This self-sufficient buffet ideal is a fiction. >> As we look at how men and women behave, men are on the other side. Men, a lot of men are afraid to say yes because they're more mas when I say no. I'm more of a man. So, if I give up my no, how can I be a man? I'll be a then. You see, we're we're stuck in the same kind of thing. It's just on the other side of the pole. But emotional sobriety, see, when it happens, I think when we really get up to this other place, instead of getting anxious, we get excited. See, that's one of the experiences because anxiety and excitement, they share a lot of similar physiological elements, right? an increased heart rate, right? All kinds of thing. Your blood pressure raises, all kinds of things that happen when you're >> He's a smooth talker. He says a lot of things that sound good, but what he's saying is is largely BS. And we see that with his own life, right? It wasn't his own theorizing and maxims and self-sufficiency that saved him when he was suicidal, right? It was another person >> also scared. So what happens as our consciousness changes as we learn about challenging some of these intrajections that we all have everybody else has them I even start to call those intrajects injunctions they're in >> they're injunctions of reality because we evolved for other people to press on us and for us to press on others because the sole individual self Living apart from the tribe is not long for this world. The healthiest, most successful lives lived in the center of the tribe. >> Injunctions against being yourself. >> Think about that. All these rules that you just talked about, they say don't be who you are. Try to live up to some idea of what you're supposed to be like as a woman. And if not, you're not going to be loved. >> Well, who gets to decide that? How is it that >> the people who are most important to you get to decide that, right? You live a life at war with the people you value most. That is not a winning formula. >> We let someone else determine that reality for ourselves because that's where we were at in our early development. We didn't have the ability to challenge this stuff. You do today. I do today. But we're going to have to claim that experience. It's not going to just happen to you. It will not just happen. You're going >> the idea that the individual should be the one to decide right and wrong to decide what is the strategic responsible thing to do going forward is is a ludicrous, ridiculous idea, right? One person having more wisdom than thousands of years of a particular tradition composed of people much smarter than him, right? that that the individual can just uh read the Bible and come to a clear realization of what God wants compared to tapping into the wisdom of a tradition that's developed over centuries by very smart people. Right. I I side with the superior wisdom of the group strategy here over the individual strategy. >> Going to need as you said and and one thing I do definitely agree with is that we have to take that risk but we have to take the risk and at the same time learn to support ourselves because if we're not supporting ourselves in that risk it's going to be a disaster and we're going to >> the best way to support yourself is to have friends, family, community, a a profession, right? to do things that add value to other people's lives. And when you add value to others, you will naturally accurately feel pride and you will swell. And few things feel as amazing as pride. It gives you so much strength and energy. It is so healthy when you feel the accurate pride of being valuable to those people you value. >> Feel bad about it and it's going to force us to go back to what we did before. So what I'm talking about is how do we learn and you said this what does it mean to hold on to yourself? That's what we're going to be talking about with the intimacy of one. >> What does it mean to hold on to yourself? It means to fit yourself appropriately so that you work harmoniously together with those people you most value. Not you strategically, autonomously, rationally from within your own fictional Buffett identity deciding the way that you should go. Because as I start to show up for myself, I create a consciousness that has more room for me than me complying with these ideas that somebody else gave me about how I'm supposed to be. >> Well, this is also though permission. I mean, emotional sobriety and what you're talking about is also permission for us to be who we are. Whether you're >> giving ourselves the permission, right? themselves and the support of being in >> this valuing of being who you are, right? It it it's great advice for some people, terrible advice for others as generic advice. It's it's useless BS >> community to be >> and that's where we have to learn how to do that ourselves. See, I don't want anybody to do that because I'm telling you to. I am >> right. His foundation, right? He's his presupposition is that the individual knows better than the community, the tradition, the tribe, the group, right? The accumulated wisdom of people far smarter than ourselves. Right? That accumulated wisdom will usually be superior to what we come up with on our own. >> Amst that I want you to discover if this is true for you or not because when it's something you own, you have a different experience. A lot of people will take this stuff and do the same thing with this, >> right? You can use this nonsense to go on your trans journey, right? You can use this absolute nonsense to devote your life as a woman to bodybuilding, which will then alienate you from most other people and mark you out in other people's eyes as a freak, which is a recipe for disaster and fast onrushing mortality. >> This that they've did before. They now accept this is a new concept. Don't try it on. See what your experience tells you. If this is >> Yeah. Try it on and and see what happens, right? Change your name. Add fancy accent marks to your name, right? See how that goes down. >> Something that is going to enhance your life. You will know it when you do it. I have taken risk and done things. You will know it when you do it. When it is reflected back to you in the eyes and psyches of the people you most value, right? This will be a much more profound and important source of wisdom than your own theorizing >> that I didn't think I could support. And when I do it and I have a new experience, now that self-support starts to grow as well. Sometimes I don't feel it. See, what we talk about in this work is creating a safe emergency within myself. So, I want to take the risk, but I also want to be there for myself as I'm doing it. >> It's a very interesting dynamic. But go ahead. You're going to >> My my therapist talked to me for a decade about becoming a good friend to myself, and I I didn't know what she was saying until after I finished therapy that I was able to absorb some of it. But uh the best way to be a good friend to yourself is to develop friendships with members of your family and extended family and community and profession. Right? The best way to be a friend to yourself is to develop friends outside of yourself. >> Say something else too. >> Um I don't know if Let me just look at my um >> So she disagrees with Allan. So, is she going to have the courage to speak up and speak out? >> I don't think I was going to say anything else about that. Um I guess I I I guess I well I was going to say something [laughter] is that is that in taking those risks and as we're learn >> she is a much more careful situational thinker and therapist than Alan Burgerer >> learning to do this is that I do think there is something about having about having support because it's a we often well I can just speak for myself is that there >> the more valuable you are to other people, the more you contribute to others, the more incentivized they will be to support you and other people will have all sorts of gifts and resources that you will never find on your own. wasn't support as a young person and as a young so part of the support is actually the heal is all >> and people try to support you on your trans journey or your female bodybuilding journey or your crossdressing journey and and then these journeys alienate you from the people you value the most that support may be a double-edged sword >> also healing and is also give is helping to strengthen the inner support. It is a form of reparing and like >> so Richard Spencer would talk about become who you are. That that was his thing. It's a very self-actualized way of of talking >> for me. I had to do everything on my own. I learned everything on my own. Well, that was from a protective >> That is so sad. And did she have people who valued her, for whom she was valuable, who could have supported and helped her? That's heartbreaking. Kind of defiance survival. So for some systems, having the support is part of the process in learning how to be self-supportive. And that's where I think the therapeutic relationship is so important. and like with sponsorship and fellows like that's >> right the the reality of of 12step program is an embrace of the porousness of life right you connect to a community to to a sponsor to your fellow members of your group >> what we're doing we're healing in relationship too >> it's a fine line though Carly see the support you gave yourself in protecting yourself is not the same kind of support I'm talking about right it's very different, right? It's very different. >> And ah, what are [clears throat] what are your thoughts over there? >> Oh, I'm still here. [laughter] >> Well, that's good, Tom. What does that mean for us this morning? Carly's taking her shirt off. Oh, god. Here we go. Her sweater. She's getting ready here. >> Couple couple things came up for me. What one of the things is when you talked about forcing the child into the car seat, right, and said like sometimes we have to move quickly or forcefully, but if there's an opportunity to uh slow down and encourage expression, I saw myself shoving myself into a car seat, right? like that as an an adult in emotional sobriety sometimes I can catch myself when I'm trying to push myself into a situation react a certain way for expediency right because you know and when I slow down enough to in inquire get curious get intimate with myself to examine what my reaction is and and why do I think I need to for you know force my way through this situation and behave a certain way, then I get to experience this opportunity to understand myself better and to have a different reaction. >> Um, so what uh happened to me this week is my daughter had a a major uh accident. She um was at the train station and fell down the escalator. Uh and and we got the call. She was um taken to the the hospital with a uh with face trauma. Um, and I spent the 45 minutes or so on the way to the hospital second-guessing myself because if she wasn't home to do the the pickup for the books that were needed to be delivered, >> right? Life is porous. What what happens to this man's daughter profoundly affects him. He he shouldn't even try to separate himself from that intense connection and anxiety that that he feels because of his love for his daughter. >> She might have gotten to the earlier train and not and not been rushing for the train when she got there. Likewise, she was guessing second guessing herself. Why did she rush for the train? She has a she has a rule, a should. You should never run for the train. There always be another train. Um and so and my wife was secondguessing herself because she that's what my wife does like everyone took their share of you know kind of uh guilt and responsibility of you know what happened here and um what the difference I think this time around for me was I allowed myself to second guessess myself right it's a natural process like the whatifs instead of just pushing that aside and being stuck stuck in this kind of like I'm just going to ignore this cuz you know if I go through these whatifs and and you know accept the blame and you know and try to you know do some revisionist you know series of events to you know make this all go away um then I'm cutting that out you know which is it's a natural response to to try to figure out what you know like you know if uh if I could have done things differently if it would have a better outcome Um, you know, luckily she um she got a very good surgeon and she's um she got um you know, the stitches and uh repairs that she needed. There was no major trauma, head, neck, bones or anything like that, but she's got some deep scars on her face. Um and we're there supporting her. Uh, and what again with some some ability to slow down and recognize, you know, um, my reaction is my reaction and allowing her to to kind of have her own to this, like she's going to feel bad about this. She's going to have second guesses. She's going to be worried about her appearance. Um but also in her and to let her um experience um this kind of way of dealing with it for herself which was she made a meme. She made jokes. She posted it to you know posted some socials. She talked about how uh you know like she was getting ready to you know watch the uh season finale of the pit but going to the emergency room was taking it too far. you like uh and and just that's her spirit and and to you know as much as my fears and you know my wanting to control the outcome and you know as a parent uh you know all the weight that comes down with that ju you know watching her you know have her own experience and and you know making decisions as a young woman um you know just helps me to you know to to realize that um that where I get stuck. >> So much of the the value of these shows is in the vulnerability and the honesty. >> I don't need to drag other people into the same spot with me. You know that um you know it's okay you that we're going to get through this and we're all going to get through it in different ways and you know and like yesterday was bad, today was in a way worse. you like I almost like had an emotional hangover as a result of just all the, you know, the the stuff that was going on. But again, giving myself time to kind of come out of it naturally versus trying to, you know, use emotional or spiritual bypass to get through it, you know, just be able to go like, "Yeah, this sucks, you know, and it's going to suck in different ways and it's going to get better in different ways." But um realizing that uh being intimate, being curious. >> So religious people often revert to some kind of religious narrative when times get tough and something horrible like this happens and it just for those who don't share the religion and the narrative, it just seems so fake and and phony allowing these, you know, these things to go through its natural paces. um is my is my best approach. You know, better results if I if I let that all fall into place as it is. >> Well, too, Tom, I think what you're experiencing, this is a real testimony to have in faith is that what your daughter showed you is she can handle this. >> She's coping, man. She's coping. I think that when I do the whatifs, it's I'm trying to, like you said, erase the experience because I don't have faith that I'm going to be able to cope with it and I don't think anybody else is going to be able to cope with it. I project it. And what your daughter is showing you in a wonderful, remarkable way, she's dealing with life as it is. She fell. She has to deal with that now. Regardless of what are the the things that led up to it, she's now facing having to deal with this experience in her life. And from what you're saying, she's doing a remarkable job, >> right? She's approaching it with some humility, with some humor, with some understanding. She's taking responsibility for where she is now. Not blaming herself. That's a false way of being responsible, but she's coping with what's happening and what is next for her. That's where she's going with this. And I think that it's a great it's a great example of the possibility we all have >> in terms of um see that's the kind of support having faith in somebody. So I go back to what Carly was saying. If you got somebody that has faith in you, that kind of support is quite valuable because that's [clears throat] >> Hey Diane. >> Hey Diane, please from San Diego >> and let me add you to this. >> Okay, because I want to share an experience that I had that is directly related to what Carly said after you gave your presentation. Um, I am interested in finding a significant other. So, um, anyway, I had an experience with a man and I really did have intimacy with myself and I had integrity because I I wanted to get to know him and and ascertain whether this person is really a match or not. And I just did not have enough experience with him since I just met him to know that. And so anyway, to make a long story short, he did not like my boundaries. You know, he thought having sex would be a really good idea. I didn't think so. Um, >> not at all. So, I didn't. In anyway, you guys, it did not work out. But I will tell you that, you know, when I was back in Minnesota and we connected and he knew I was coming back to San Diego, um, I just felt so much fear and anxiety and I don't really know, now I know listening to you, Carly, but I didn't really understand why I was experiencing such fear, such such fear. um you know I've gradually I got over that but it was real and um nevertheless I have stuck to my boundaries and I have not found my significant other and but hey I have my integrity and I'm happy so whatever wanted to share that it's real what you learned about him is when he doesn't respect that boundary and presses you to change your no into a guess that you're going to be getting a lot more of that as the relationship on. >> So Allan reframes her experience and places it within her frame. He keeps a thumb on the scale towards his own framework here. He renames the the anxiety as excitement and uh I think he kind of overwrites an accurate fear with some kind of a flattering story. So you can become so dedicated to your particular frame that you lose touch with the situation. I'll talk to you later, mate. Bye-bye.